News Overload

Unlike every bloody z-list celebrity the TV news can dredge up, I'm not going to use the occasion of the great man's passing as an excuse to trot out my Nelson Mandela story again.  I've related it here before, so in the unlikely event that you are interested, you can search the blog for it.  Whilst Mandela's death has, rightly, taken up much time on TV and space in the newspapers, I'm afraid that I've been bogged down by more mundane matters.  There have finally been some developments in the ongoing eBay issues I mentioned yesterday - one of the items has finally turned up, two days later than expected, but at least it is here.  The other item is still missing and I've now been forced to raise the issue with eBay.  I'm currently awaiting the seller's response, although I doubt any will be forthcoming - I've found he has a bit of form for this sort of thing.  Not that I'm saying he's dodgy or anything, but he doesn't seem to have a lot of luck with the mail as they are forever losing stuff he posts. 

But getting back to the news, what a difference a week makes.  Last weekend, desperate to fill up the twenty four hour news services in the absence of any international crises, royal births or political assassinations, the media gleefully descended on Glasgow to give us continuous coverage of the helicopter crash there.  Of course, they didn't have any footage of the crash itself, which they would have loved and played on a loop, so instead they devoted hour after hour of footage of their reporters interviewing the same shell-shocked witnesses and victims over and over again.  Which seemed pointless as all they could tell us was that they were drinking in the pub, then a helicopter fell on it.  Which is what happened.  This is the sort of tragedy which is straightforward, with very few angles for the news to explore, so blanket coverage quickly becomes repetitive and pointless.  By contrast, this weekend they have two major stories - the death of Mandela and the storms battering parts of the UK.  The latter, which they were clearly gearing up to lead with and try to turn into a national crisis, have been pushed down the running order by the former.  All that rather tasteless footage of the reactions of homeowners to seeing their houses sliding into the sea has had to be relegated from Newsnight to the One Show.  If only a third big story had broken, these sad, intrusive and exploitative scenes might have been pushed off our screens altogether.