OH BROTHER!

I deplored in my book Common Sense (see right sidebar for free download) the increasing tendency of BBC television news bulletins to be used to trail BBC programmes. You can bet that the near-fatal spill last summer by a reckless presenter of the car-lad show Top Gear would not have occupied such a succession of reports or such repetition of footage if the programme were made for ITV. At the weekend, the miraculously restored delinquent was to give his spin-by-spin account of the accident on the first edition of the new series (cue Radio Times cover) so, needless to say, “never before seen footage” was previewed repeatedly on BBC news bulletins.

At the same time, the whipped-up furore over Celebrity Big Brother was reaching its apparently unmissable climax. You sensed the reluctance with which BBC News knuckled down, embraced the agenda of the tabloids and reported the progress of this particular spectacle on a rival channel. The reluctance was carefully tempered with the emphasised subtext that Channel 4 had done itself no good by playing host to a meretricious abomination. Evidently someone called, I think, Jaded Ghastly, had been turfed out of the “house” for making remarks of a racist tone and, since then, has taken the well-travelled path to The Priory, a mansion wherein the staff rake in the lolly but otherwise walk around in white coats looking grave and studiously avoiding wealthy, untalented and thick-as-planks people who want to feel martyred.

By the by, isn’t it odd that two notions from Orwell’s 1984, ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Room 101’, have been purloined by television production companies and had their meanings surgically removed in order to make a vacuous entertainment sound somehow weighty and significant? Perhaps television itself should check in to The Priory.

The news bandwagon has moved on to Birmingham, gathering equally empty-headed observations from passers-by about the “dramatic” police raids on supposed Muslim terrorists. Meanwhile the rent-a-prepared-to-do-anything-for-attention-crowd movement has moved to an even more ludicrous proposition, that people you can’t quite put a name to (obvious exception: Janet Screech-Talker) can learn to be nurses in the NHS. I so look forward to the first court case in which an insufficiently briefed “celebrity” is sued for infecting a patient with MRSA.

In The Guardian on Monday, that most authoritative of media commentators, Mark Lawson, was given a whole page upon which to ruminate on the climax of Big Brother. I only read the quote extracted and enlarged: “Viewers who wished to show themselves to be liberals had to switch over to watch Top Gear”. It’s quite surprising that Mr Lawson, given the authoritative nature of his commentary, has access to only two channels. But he lives in a world in which the only existence possible is watching television (though today, bemusingly, he writes about theatre, which I guess he must channel by osmosis). In our house, we watched neither Big Brother nor Top Gear. But that’s what you get with old-fashioned socialists.