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Thrings
@ ThringsLaw
www . thrings . com
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Do you remember when the news was on the telly at 1.00pm , 6.00pm and 10.00pm ? Yes , it was interspersed with local news , but the afternoon , evening and night bulletins were the Big Three . The night time slot was the big dog . Most children had gone to sleep by then , leaving the adults to settle down on the settee and catch up on the happenings of the day , or in some cases , the day before .
When I was a child I can remember people waiting for the news to arrive : reports from the Falkland Islands 24 hours out of date ; films of striking miners across the country being played a long after Mr Scargill and Mrs Thatcher had left the scene . And while everyone was waiting for updates to be delivered by the likes of Kenneth Kendall , Richard Baker , Leonard Parkin and Sandy Gall , those at the heart of the stories were getting on with their lives .
Those days are gone . Long gone . We ’ re now subjected to 24-hour , multi-channel ,
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multi-jurisdictional coverage . News , news , news . News upon news too – it ’ s not enough that we have a newsreader on screen ; we now need a brightly-lit bar for rolling news underneath the talking head , and often a sidebar just in case we feel we ’ re missing out on something . Big red , yellow and blue news stories break like waves on a beach , and like waves breaking some are worthy of a look and a mention while others are barely waves at all . But it doesn ’ t matter . If it ’ s news , good , bad or irrelevant , it ’ s being reported .
To be honest , I ’ ve had a bellyful of news . It ’ s rarely good . It ’ s often so graphic that you need to be careful your children don ’ t walk in and grow up paranoid about the varying dangers of planet Earth . It ’ s also often unnecessary and unwanted fuel to dangerous fire - in many cases I sit there wondering whether or not certain things would happen or be planned if they were not so widely reported and given continual airtime . If you have a cause and you want
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to promote it , what better way than the power of an uninterrupted tabloid broadcast ?
I wonder what it would be like , just for a week , to switch off news websites , social media and the radio and go back to the Big Three . Do you think we ’ d survive without the constant need and desire to be kept updated ? I for one think we would . I ’ d give it a whirl , happily tuning in at 10.00pm to see a slowly and gently spinning blue and white planet informing me that the news , read by someone who sounded much posher and more important than anyone else in the world , was about to begin .
A return to the old days . Now that would be news .
John Davies e : jdavies @ thrings . com t : 01793 412634
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