Tuesday 19 February 2008

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?’

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