PARAGRAPH: SIX

M’Night Shinyman

It’s an odd thing, local news on television. Nobody in “proper” broadcasting really acts as if it’s something they want to have it around, so many who work in it seem to regard it as being a “stepping stone” towards “going national” and yet whenever anyone threatens to cut its funding, all hell seems to break out. My local evening news programme, here in the frozen north, is known nowadays as “North West Tonight” although in previous years it was known as “Look NorthWest” and before that “Look North” and has been the breeding ground for very many fine broadcasters who have gone on to do great things. The late lamented Nick Clarke from “The World at One” was one, and footballing administrator David Davies is another. The broadcasting legend that is Stuart Hall, of “It’s a Knockout” and football reporting fame, spent many a long year fronting up our little local show, as did the marvellous Gordon Burns, once of “The Krypton Factor” who recently finished a fifteen year stint doing the same. The North West hasn’t quite got used yet to the bombshell of his leaving and the shiny man who has replaced him, Roger Johnson (yes, I had to look it up), still has a long way to go before he earns his place in the hearts of the viewing public hereabouts. I don’t know, he seems to be far too much of a “career broadcaster” to me, one of those who’ll up his profile and move on to what he feels are greater things instead of seeing it as a “proper job” (as that strange bloke from “Scrapheap Challenge” might have put it). Still, I suppose time will tell. He may yet make his way into the hearts and minds of us bluff northern folk, but he’s going to have to work at it if the last few months are anything to go by. In the mornings, however, local news is a very different kind of a beast. The madcap lunacy of those “London folk” on “BBC Breakfast” can be the single most irritating start to a day a chap can have. With their “family friendly” agenda that is predominantly made up of stories about babies and schools, and their strange ideas about what is “important” to their viewers seeming to be based solely upon what is going on in their own lives, or on what somebody in the office happens to “reckon” about something, it can be a very trying half hour before I have to head out in the morning, and please do not get me started about what those blessed presenters think of themselves. I’ve heard that many people are rather fond of that Sian and that Susanna, but I’m not convinced that they weren’t being held at gunpoint when they were being asked their opinions. Then there’s the numerous “surveys” they keep quoting which were obviously based on a headcount in the office that morning, and the bloody vox pops where they go outdoors from  their broadcasting headquarters for about as far as their camera leads will let them and ask the most bizarre questions of the most bizarre people. Usually ones carrying a baby, it seems, just in case we don’t get it. Sigh… We only watch to get the local travel reports and the local weather these days, but sometimes someone will press the wrong switch and we get London weather and Dartford tunnel reports, which aren’t a lot of use to us. Still, the whole bally lot of them will be moving up north fairly soon, a move that has been largely welcomed in the North West, but which might prove less than satisfactory when most of the government and the entertainment industry is still based in London, but I suppose we’ll just have to see how it turns out. Meanwhile, our morning news presenters remain lovely, taking us away from the metropolitan madnesses. “Welcome to my oasis of sanity” they appear to be saying when we go over to them, and they may very well be right.