TBV

I'm now referring to what ails me as TBV - This Bloody Virus - as in 'Will TBV ever go away?' and 'I'm sick of TBV!' I got up on Saturday after a day of alternately sweating buckets and shivering with cold and suddenly thought: 'I'll have a smoothie and watch the TV news. It's been a while since I checked what was happening in the world.'

I've long since given up on BBC news programmes. For a wee while I was watching the BBC lunchtime news while waiting for Doctors to come on (it's my only soap - don't begrudge me it) but the formula of something scary about health for the pensioners, something about education to worry the stay-at-home mums and a wee funny story to round things off was pretty boring and not really all that informative. Now I watch C4 news and occasionally ITN news.

ITN news at teatime on Saturday started with a tribute to Muhammad Ali. Fair enough. I got up at one point and put a washing on. When I came back, the presenter was still talking about Muhammad Ali. I went to the kitchen to put papers in the recycling bin and it was still Muhammad Ali she was talking about when I came back. Finally, I realised the entire 15 minutes was going to be about Muhammad Ali. Nothing about floods and lightning strikes across central and western Europe. Nothing about alleged Conservative election fraud in England. Nothing about civil unrest in France. Nothing about Trump (which is, incidentally, the word my nephew is teaching his weans to use when they fart). Nothing about the EU. Not that I missed that one - I've got a postal vote and I've used it, so no scare story can reach me now.

I think my previous blog post has made it clear that I thought Muhammad Ali was a working class hero, but does he really merit having an entire ITN news programme (headlined, you'll remember, 'national and international news') devoted to him?

It got me thinking about the change there has been in TV news recently. There was a time when newscasters delivered the news. It was a factual display of events round the world prepared by an editor (with a journalistic background, I imagine) and read out by a person behind a desk onscreen. We knew what the editor thought was important by what was left out. But there didn't seem to be much spin in individual items. There would be reports and video from other parts of the world by local correspondents, again fairly based on fact.

ITN seems to have gone over to what I can only call 'Tom Bradby's view of the news.' All the people who used to present the 10pm news on ITV have gone - most of them women - and although they are not jobless, they tend to appear now for the weekend, early morning and late night shifts. The number of topics dealt with in a programme is now much smaller and I notice 'correspondents' are usually interviewed in the studio opposite Bradby, so even less chance these days of getting journalists out of the studio, out of London and out of the UK to deal with issues in the rest of Europe, not to mention the world.

As I said, I don't watch BBC but I understand that Laura Kuenssberg has been getting pelters from both sides over her presentation of the EU referendum. I had a look at a couple of her presentations on BBC iplayer. She's playing the same game as Tom Bradby.

I'm not sure either of them is qualified to do this - or entitled to do this.

I'm also not sure it's a good idea for BBC and ITN news to parade members of the public onscreen spouting stuff that is factually inaccurate without at some point correcting them. But then, nobody has corrected the Boris Johnston/Michael Gove lie about 350 million quid a week going to the EU.

So now I'm reduced to watching C4 news, praying that the Tories don't get to privatise the channel and that John Snow doesn't decide to retire. And reminding myself of Humbert Wolfe's wee poem:

You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.
But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there's
no occasion to.


Or maybe TBV and I will just go back to bed and wait for it all to be over.