Watching the return of ITV1’s news bomb, News At Ten, was a surreal experience indeed. One minute, we were being treated to an exclusive interview with the former potential husband of Princess Diana, who was featured wearing a pair of shades she gave him at her own funeral. Shocking. Even more shocking were the lack of words which came out of his mouth, exclusive or otherwise. Then, we dived into Jules Verne territory, as the intrepid Bill Neely reported live from a crevasse 60 ft beneath Antarctica. Why, we weren’t sure – but the razzmatazz was in full flow.
A well-lit Neely regaled us with tall tales of a lake that had been discovered two miles down. Such was the fevered suspension of belief, we suspected that ITV might, at any moment, show us said lake. (Or perhaps recreate how it might look with CGI?) Our minds cartwheeled with the possibilties, visions of lost civilisations lying undisturbed beneath the ice sheets. Was Sir Trevor McDonald about to reveal the existence of alien life on Earth? Quite the scoop, for launch night. Suddenly, the ice sheets couldn’t melt fast enough.
Plugs for Neely’s video blog brought us crashing back to reality, with footage of him shaking a water bottle that seemed to have frozen. Never! At the Antarctic? You’re kidding. Next you’ll be telling us it’s a bit lonely sometimes. Still, we could take flight once more with the strange sense of language employed in the bulletins. Hearing sensationalised journalese is always a much stranger experience than reading it, and it was at its height in the piece about new England manager Fabio Capello, who was observed to ‘walk with a straight back and a strong chin’ when working on ‘Her Majesty’s football service’ (a sign of his no-nonsense attitude toward player behaviour). Bewildering, and very much like The Day Today. The BBC countered with the first of a week of undercover reports from Zimbabwe, where a challenge is said to brewing against Robert Mugabe. Which is the more journalistically interesting? Viewers, possibly out of habit, voted for the BBC.
However, perhaps this brand of the fantastic is the answer to reviving TV news, much more the victim of the internet than its print-based predecessor. Escapist news, on-demand, could be the wave of the future for people who want the stimulation of news yet wish to receive virtually no information. Feature-lead news programmes can amount to little else, after all. In the future, perhaps viewers will select the age, ethnicity and gender of their newsreader before pairing them with a package of bolt-together, easy on the eye stories that excite and amuse. The line between news and entertainment is a fuzzy one already, so why not go the whole hog?
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 