If You Don't Know It...It's News To You

Kaplinsky’s move to Five has been greeted as a success, netting a cool million viewers and biting the other big boys before 6 o’clock even rolls round. The fact that it worked out at a million is quite sweet, as it means that Nat Queen Cold could furnish each viewer with a quid from her brand-spanking new pay packet without leaving anyone out. That’s not to say she doesn’t deserve a celebrity salary but the whole thing feels so forced.

There is a dressed down feel to the new 5pm news feast that precedes the second of Five’s coups from BBC One in Gurning Antipode…Neighbours and it’s all capture in the trailer that is heart wrenchingly horrible.

Trailer


Kaplinsky, who is just ‘hanging out’ in her casual clothes like you do when you’re a bloody news reader, promising to give things a great big kick and give Five news a more ‘human feel’.

This ‘human feel’ element is somewhat ironic against a script more flaccid than a Blackpool flasher’s stick of rock and so many robotic gestures by the primped and preened newscaster you can’t help but feel like she’s popping and locking rather than telling viewers about ‘big important’ news before giving them a bloody pat on the head and a lollipop.

The importance being placed on getting people – let’s call them ‘civilians’ – to give their two cents is a murky debate about who should dictate the news but I think Five are the right people to be pushing it. Let’s face it, Five are the step-child of terrestrial TV, adopted (by those with aerials that could get Saturn TV if it existed) without much fanfare a decade ago and they have been tugging at the laces of the bigger channels for years now.

Amid the ‘documentaries’ about over-eaters, kids with three faces and enough porn ‘exposes’ to make Stringfellow blush, there isn’t much room for proper authoritative, fist-on-desk news and so open it up. More polls, more votes, less war and politics and all that malarkey that just gets in the way of sport anyway.

Have rotating hosts: Kaplinsky, Hangus the Monkey, Kilroy, David Dickinson, anyone who can read a telly prompter, all lounging about in their pants if we are going to make this thing as causal as possible. Have them fielding calls from all ends of the country on any sodding thing the person who paid the £1.50 to call in can be bothered to talk about. I don’t want a more ‘human feel’, I want my news to be a glorified Live & Kicking phone in.

I am sure that this will be a continued success – the existing news not my proposal – and so I am willing to admit that maybe people do have a place in news but if you greet me with ‘I’m Natasha’ when reading the news, all I am going to think is when ‘when’s the real news on?’

You’re Shit. But Apparently Not Aware of It

Football’s a funny old game. Requiring physical application that really doesn’t have a home in the job market, unless kicking microwaves down the aisles of Argos becomes common practice, which seems likely, and one that could make you richer than the King of Swaziland. All this and you don’t even need the mental capacity to know that melted’ isn’t a type of cheese.

However, I am not here to write a scathing polemic on the money in football or the plans to move a game abroad per season…mainly because I don’t really know what ‘polemic’ means and also because I aim to keep this brief.

What I am attacking is this; the fact that every bloody person you ever meet is, was or could have been a professional footballer. This is something that comes achingly obvious the more football circles you swim in and I know you’re thinking don’t fuck with fire and then complain when it burns you with its orangey-arrogance but why?

We are groomed and grown to think that we could do what those on the telly-box do week-in, week-out, if we just had half a chance. We stand and bellow near supremacist insults at our own players when they don’t perform because we can do fifty-two keep ups with a flat ball in our garden.

What this cognisance sense of skill does is inevitably lead to six-a-side matches being taken over by those with delusions of grandeur. The now sluggish or unfit but with a mental perception that they could somehow still figure in Fabio Capello’s plans for World Cup 2010. However, the chances of boarding that plane to South Africa stumble with hackneyed phrases such as ‘give-and-go son’ or ‘deliver!’ being bellowed across the astro-turf like a field marshal on the verge of a trench circa The Somme 1916.

The relative ease with which football can be played means that everyone can play. In a socialist ideal it is something of an ideal sport, where the prerequisite could be as crude as ‘have legs’. However, if six-a-sides are to remain footloose and fancy free then would the ultra-competitive types remember this isn’t a game of life and death….it’s an hour on a Thursday night.