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News Values

News organisations are agenda led. No better example of the extent to which this is the case was the BBC television news bulletin tonight on the day of the first televised political debate in a British General Election.

The debate was without doubt a big news story, worthy of the lead item on most days of the year. But this was a day that not an aircraft in the UK could enter or leave the country because of a cloud of volcanic ash high in the atmosphere. The ash that is affecting most of northern Europe is a real threat to passenger flights due to the particle content that can cause aero-engines to seize catastrophically if clogged with ash.

Hundreds of thousands of passengers are stranded. As the news reporter announced "even after 9/11 flights weren't as severely disrupted."

This is a big story. I can imagine news editors, head in hands, irritated that something as serious as this could interrupt their carefully choreographed presentations. But that is the nature of news. It makes its own agenda and when it happens it demands that the people assessing the importance of news stand back from their best made plans and ask themselves just what story people will discuss among each other in the pubs and bars of the country? Three men debating in a studio, or nature cutting a country off from the rest of the world? Sometimes a slickly produced package has to move over for the real story. The TV news let us down.

A conspiracy of coincidental events

Yesterday was a good day. I designed an egg rack better than any I could find on the market. I expect it will stay in my notebook. Today, however, has been a long Good Friday.

The Chinese have auspicious days when all the planets are aligned together. Something like this must have occurred today for me, but in reverse. It worked like a conspiracy of coincidence.

All conspiracies need a starting point. This one probably began a few weeks ago when people came to fit a new kitchen. For three weeks we have been camping in the house but the new kitchen has been worth it. We have a shiny new floor that we’re trying our best to keep that way.

In what may seem an entirely unrelated event - stay with me - last week I went up to London to an evening of drinks and canapés hosted by the Malta Tourist Board. John, our eldest, was in town the same evening and we met at Waterloo on a late train home. Back at the house we didn’t want to wake anyone so John went in search of the emergency door keys in our secret garden hiding place.

The keys are in a plastic bag. I noticed them a few days later on a desk in the house, then forgot about them. There’s not much need for them as the house is occupied most of the time. But last night John went to London and stayed out while George went to Guildford and stayed with a friend. Late in the evening I went outside to wheel the dustbin to the front of the house for the morning collection. Then I stopped myself. Tomorrow was a bank holiday. Most likely there would be no bin collection.

When Gill got home from work after a late shift she checked on the internet but couldn’t find the schedule of council collections. The bins were forgotten.

I worked late, coming to bed about 3 am. Gill woke me at eight with a cup of tea and reminded me she was going swimming when the pool opened at 9 am, later than usual because of the Easter Break. Just after nine I heard the distinctive grinding of the dustbin lorry so slipped in to my dressing gown and slippers and went downstairs.

I opened the front door and took the newspaper out of the letter box. It was a cold, damp, breezy, morning. Normally I would access the bins through the side door but I didn’t want to mess up the kitchen floor so walked around the front, stopping briefly to chat with the bin man who was moaning about having to work on a bank holiday, even though he was being paid triple time.

Walking back to the front door I saw the wind blow it shut. There’s a Yale latch that ensures that when it closes it is always locked. It was one of those slow motion “oh no” moments, the culmination of all the aforementioned events coming together in perfect harmony so that it only took a brief intervention from the elements to flip the trap, leaving me well and truly scuppered.

It’s amazing the detail you notice in the garden when you have some time to spend with your plants. I went to the secret key stash, knowing it was bare. I thought about the electric garage switch in the car but the car was locked. I would have read the newspaper but that was in the house with the dog. It didn’t seem right that the dog was inside and I was out in the cold. Dogs are great at alerting you to intruders but useless at letting you in. When Gill arrived home an hour and a half later I was frozen to the bone.

I've been going over the question of blame. Was it the binmen who cannot be bothered to wheel the bin out themselves? Was it John for not replacing the key, Gill for giving up on the internet, George for staying out? Or was it the wind? The dog could be blamed for being a dog. Peripherally I could blame the kitchen people, even the Maltese Tourist Board. But I cannot blame myself. I am the victim of a conspiracy. No question about that. So Good Friday can only get better. There has to be something good about it, but I’m still waiting

Walk-in fridge

“The people I babysit for, the ones with the walk-in fridge, their dad is just the coolest person I know, he lets them watch gory films and stuff,” said George this morning in just one of his broadsides designed to disperse my daily attacks on his lassitude.

It’s not just verbal either. There are the training shoes kicked off at the foot of the stairs. Shoes go on the rack in the garage a few feet away, behind the connecting door. But George leaves them by the stairs. He does this because he knows it sets off my otherwise latent Asperger’s, or is it obsessive compulsiveness? Either way, the shoes must be removed.

I took to throwing them across the garage but it did no good. Childish, I know, but I began unfastening the laces every time I found his trainers in the hall. Unfastened shoe laces for a teenager represent the labours of Sisyphus. It might have worked had not his brother, Rob, come home from university and dumped his own trainers in the same place. His shoes received the same disciplinary treatment.

In what became a lace war, Rob escalated hostilities by taking some of my own shoes and removing the laces completely, then leaving before I discovered the reprisal attack. George thought this was brilliant. In such small ways are brotherly bonds established forever.

I suppose I must accept that I do not have what it is to be a cool dad. We cannot afford a walk in fridge, even if we had the space for one. I wouldn’t want one anyway. As it is the existing fridge is under-stocked according to the boys. Gill has never bought in bulk.

Sure there’s lettuce, tomatoes, always plenty of vegetables. But the boys want snacks – sausage rolls, mini-scotch eggs, crisps, things they can stuff between bread that can fuel their perpetual grazing. Their cooking extends to two-minute microwave warm-ups. George has an appetite worthy of a shire horse. A nose bag wouldn’t go far enough to meet his craving for carbohydrate. For cereal, four Weetabix just about do it for him.

When younger, the boys were manageable. Now, as grown men, they occupy our home like ever-growing cuckoo chicks, beaks agape, squeezing their desperate parents from the nest. They ridicule our taste in furnishings, our aspirations on their behalf, our musical antiquity and our guilty affection for the Antiques Roadshow and Lark Rise to Candleford. In fact I’m beginning to wonder whether our whole life is an antiques’ roadshow in the eyes of our children.

It’s odd, though, the way they suspend hostilities when they want to borrow the car or seek a lift from the train station. These intervals in the generation war provide a small measure of negotiating power to demand some help with the washing up, mowing a lawn or walking the dog. Given their reactions on these occasions you would think we were seeking to annexe Poland.

Of course there is a solution to their frustration: they can bugger off. And when they do, one of the greatest of life’s mysteries will reveal itself: we shall miss them.

Down the pan?

Well, who would have thought it, the UK arm of Reader's Digest has gone in to administration. Will anyone buy it? Does anyone care? As the BBC report here notes, its readership is "quite literally dying off".

We were "forced subscribers" for a while in the early 1980s. My in-laws bought the subscription for us one Christmas. It was the kind of thing they did to sort of gently indoctrinate us in to their world view furnished, as it was (and still is) with the philosophies of provincial conservatism that draw heavily on Samuel Smiles, Benjamin Franklin and US Republicanism.

There was something sinister, I always thought, about those easy-on-the-eye articles featuring life-or-death rescues and health issues that usually included some barely subliminal moralising. The section entitled "it pays to enrich your word power" would regularly feed my father-in-law with some obscure word that he would strive to inject in to the conversation over Sunday dinner.

You wouldn't have found articles by Hunter S Thompson in the Reader's Digest. Like many readers, my first encounter with the magazine was in a dental surgery. I remember before one check-up becoming engrossed in a feature headed: "I am John's testicle."

I wouldn't have like to have written for the magazine even though it paid well. Its fact checking was fastidious in the extreme. The fact checkers rang me once over an article on arms to Iraq, an area I covered as a journalist in the late 1980s. I don't think even Saddam Hussein himself could have satisfied their finicky demands for detail.

It filled a niche in its heyday but I fear its offerings have been overtaken by the world of blogging and instant everything. For size and length of article, these pocket magazines made ideal loo reading material. Lavatories throughout the land will never be the same again.

No cause for applause

If you were at Murrayfield at the weekend you would have been part of the minute's silence observed in memory of Bill McLaren, a man who did so much to preserve the spirit of Rugby Union in his popular TV commentaries.

When McLaren was at the microphone it was a commentary, not a conversation between commentator and pundit interspersed with pitch-side analysis and interviews. As spectators we indulged in our own analysis and argument. Today all that is done for us.

If, on the other hand, you, like me, were part of the crowd watching England play Wales at Twickenham on Saturday, you would have been invited by the DJ-style announcer who is so in love with his own voice, to show your appreciation of McLaren with applause. I did not applaud. I applaud a great sporting moment, a fine singer a funny comedian, a great speech, but I do not applaud in death.

Come Remembrance Day when the clock strikes eleven I do not feel the urge to applaud in memory of the millions who died in wartime. I would not want to stand in the street in Wootton Bassett and applaud the funeral corteges for fallen servicemen and women in Afghanistan. In fact sometimes people don't applaud and sometimes they do. In this clip people maintain silence until (3.15 minutes on the clip) a big chap with a white shirt, black tie and tattooed arms begins clapping robustly and others follow.

The problem is that as a society we no longer know how to handle death. Respect has become an issue and we are angered by those who fail to show it: a minority in football crowds, for example. One way of drowning out the disrespectful minority is to applaud. Applause is an example of flocking behaviour that can be set off by a single individual - the same one, perhaps, who would start a Mexican wave.

This may be a feature of soccer crowds; but it does not, or at least did not, affect rugby crowds. Rugby crowds are still capable of observing a minute's silence - just. I say "just" because the rugby union crowd is changing, manipulated by commercialism.

Rugby matches used to be great singing occasions, as did football cup finals. I can remember when the Twickenham crowd sang Jerusalem during the game. Today they manage a few lines of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. On the way to the England v Wales match, the England fans would sing a song, then call on the Welsh who never failed to do likewise. Not any more. As we made our way to the match on Saturday the only response from a Welshman came from one of our own group who sang a fine and and faultlessly delivered Land of My Fathers in his native tongue.

On Saturday a big choir came out on to the Twickenham pitch and sang Jerusalem before the game. But the crowd didn't sing along much. Perhaps some do not know the words but these could be displayed on the big screens.

Singing, sadly, seems to be on a decline on great sporting occasions - as opposed to abusive chanting which is something else. Some football fans may think it is amusing to compile a verse on the latest sexual adventures of John Terry, the captain of Chelsea. That is a reflection of the cruelty of people who don't know how to behave towards would-be role models who also don't know how to behave.

When England scored their last try that sealed victory in a closely fought match, a few of the crowd near me started up the mocking football chant: "You're not singing any more." That didn't use to happen. Traditionally there has been banter between fans at rugby matches but, for the most part, it is harmless stuff, not underpinned with the kind of tribalism you get in football.

Another thing - and I guess this is fairly harmless - there seems to be a growing fondness for declaring group identity at these matches in fancy dress. On Saturday I saw blokes dressed as bunnies, some in Elvis wigs and some with flame hair wigs. This trend seems to have been imported from cricket crowds. This eagerness to suppress our individuality behind such themed uniformity betrays a deep psychological need to belong (says this armchair psychologist).

More rugby old fart blogs on remarkably similar lines (I forget from match to match) can be found here, here, here and here.

Invoking Allah

I don't get too involved in the computer games played by my children. It seems to be the role of parents to disapprove. But it's not just disapproval. I simply don't have the reactions to aim and pull the trigger in time to kill rather than be killed in games such as Call of Duty and I can't be bothered to acquire this skill.

George, our 17-year-old, plays the game online on his X-Box 360 like thousands of others. We refused to buy him one of these machines so he saved up enough to buy one for himself. He plays other games besides Call of Duty. He knows I do not like Grand Theft Auto that has collected considerable bad publicity over the years and is thus highly popular among teenage boys. There is nothing like society's disapproval to stimulate youthful rebellion.

I work across the landing from George so I can hear him playing in his room. Just recently I have heard him shouting "Allah" quite frequently, followed by laughter. Keen to know what was going on, I asked him why he was saying this. It seems that George is copying an expression used by one of his friends when he explodes a bomb in his car.

Apparently the new GTA game comes with a virtual bomb that can be installed in to your car. There is a convention in the online game that, when you stop your car, another player might come and join you in the passenger seat. But some players think it is amusing either to blow themselves and their car up when this happens or to jump out of their car and let it blow up with the other player inside if they can time it right.

Some people will be appalled by this. I'm not too happy myself but I don't blame my son. Children have always played war games. When I was a kid we shot at imaginary Germans or played Japs and Commandos. We had plenty of role models in the comics of the day, not to mention our own fathers. Today it seems the suicide bomb has joined every other convention of warfare that can be turned in to role play. Some will say that is a bit sick. But it's not sick. Neither is it encouraging or breeding potential bombers. It is simply the way things are.

All the same, I wonder what the UK's Muslim community would think about this development - that, to my knowledge, the single influence from this, one of the world's great monotheistic religions, on my child and others like him, has been to invoke the Islamic name of God in the played out ritual of blowing themselves up. So much for multiculturalism. They might care to dwell on that over Friday prayers.