The Travel Diva

Bad like news, like

We, the sag-brained British public, take a special delight in wallowing in disaster. Baghdad, bomb, insurgents, helicopter, bomb, George Bush, bus overturns, flood, earthquake, bomb, fire, ravages, price increase, industrial action, superbug kills, Darfur, economic crisis, war crimes, judge wrong, cold front, Gaza, refugees, killer flu, police brutality, Rumsfeld, Home Office balls-up, bird flu, price slump, more Home Office cock-ups. Did you know it’s possible to record TV news on say Monday and play it back on Thursday without having to be aware that any time has passed? Any day you like, fully transferable news from Tuesday to Friday, or any other day. It’s all bad. Good news is non-views.

I’m not expecting nor would I especially care for a permanently grinning newscaster with endlessly joyful stories delivered through pursed lips, but a little more levelling out of the eternally sour news would make a pleasant change. But I suppose this is the job of the news editor: giving the viewing public what they want. Evidently, we have an insatiable appetite for all things bad.

In the five minutes of headline news I caught this morning I wanted to weep for democracy, which is slowly being strangled by our soft-centre British government who clearly have more gross national product that common sense. The news camera focused on parliamentarians – a snarling, scowling, bad-tempered, ungracious, vicious clutch of people, most of whom could curdle milk at a hundred yards. The subject under discussion was how the government could bend and twist the democracy under which we live.

Then the news switched to local county news.

Where did it come from? American hip-hop? Rap? Slough? Almost everyone is like-ing and yeah-ing away, well, like mad really. And with ‘I mean’, it has become an infuriating, almost-conjunctive inserted at very odd places in speech, meaning utterly bugger-all and making the like-er sound like some kind of agitated insect. I watched one such individual, admittedly a brain-challenged teenage witness to a train wreck, being interviewed on the BBC!

‘And I was like, standin’ there by the like crossing, like, with my like mate and the, like, train was, like comin’ down the, like line, too, like fast for the, like, driver of the, like car, to like move away, like.’ This twerp had no idea what he sounded like, and the interviewer stood there vigorously nodding his head in agreement. ‘So I was like, yeah, and he was like yeah, and I was like so, and he was like no, and I was like no way.’

I found myself watching the news the same way a hypnotised rat watches a snake, like.

Labels: British culture, democracy, government, slang

posted by Cindy-Lou Dale @ Wednesday, January 28, 2009