113. Yawn....

In July 2012 I wrote about some changes I have noticed in my life since Caroline and I moved from the suburbs of north London to rural Buckinghamshire (Rural Stress). In that post I wrote about the difficulties I find in obtaining the services of local tradesmen. 

I have stopped worrying about all that now.   I’ve either lowered my expectations or maybe I have adjusted my pace of life to that of the people I come into contact with around here.

My life is not stress free, however.  There is something else about living here, 45 miles north of central London, that irritates me daily and it is something that I can do nothing about.  The thing that irritates and is driving me mad is the BBC regional news.

When we lived in London, the BBC “London News” followed the BBC “News at Six” and every story in that local news programme was interesting and significant, not just to me but I am sure to everyone in London. 

Even a story about the opening of a new shopping centre in Streatham, which is on the far side of London, diametrically opposite from where we lived in Winchmore Hill, seemed relevant and germane.

Most evenings when I watch the east of England local news programme,  “Look East”, I usually feel that it is really nothing to do with me at all.  

Why we are classified as being in the Eastern region and not the Midlands, when we are only forty miles from the geographic centre of England is beyond me.

The first time I realised that “Look East” is a programme that had very little to offer, was the evening when the lead story was about an argument in Wellingborough to do with the Christmas lights.  I didn’t even know where Wellingborough was and I, along with probably 99% of the programme’s viewers, was completely uninterested in what sort of bloody lights were hanging in their High Street that Christmas.

Last week, the first story one day was about an upgrade of the railway line from Norwich to London and the main thrust of the story was that it wouldn’t be completed for ten years.  A topical story?

The next story was about the new Northampton railway station.  I’m sure that may have been of some interest to people living in Northampton but not to anybody else in the huge region that is the BBC’s definition of the East of England.

Another feature recently was about a doctor who had treated sufferers from Ebola in West Africa.  The only relevance it had to us in the East of England was that the doctor came from Norfolk.  I expect his friends were interested.

A series of stories was titled “Unsung Sporting Heroes”.  The first ‘hero’ was a diving coach from Letchworth in Hertfordshire.  He and other people in the series are ‘unsung’ because they are not very important or interesting and probably not particularly good at what they do.

Another story in our local news was about a stunt involving a racing car that drove underneath a lorry and out the other side.  Its only relevance to viewers in the East of England was that it was filmed at a disused airfield in Suffolk. 

If a story in the national news has any connection whatsoever with Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire or Northamptonshire, it will be repeated within half an hour on the local news.  Usually it is just a repeat of everything, including the same film and interviews that we have already seen in the main news.

Anything that Greg Rutherford, the Olympic gold medallist, achieves that is worth a mention on the national news, is blown up for all its worth on “Look East” because Greg Rutherford is from Bletchley in Buckinghamshire.

Sometimes, the producers at “Look East” are so desperate to fill 30 minutes every evening that what they tell us is risible. 

When John Hurt was knighted, it was a lead story for us because he owned a holiday home somewhere in the region.

The death of Roger Lloyd-Pack was newsworthy apparently, because some years previously he had owned a house in Norfolk.

The lead item one day in March 2014 in the East of England news was about the funeral in Newry, Northern Ireland, of Lord Ballyedmond, a Northern Irish peer.  It was the most important story for us in the east because he had been killed in a helicopter crash near Beccles in Suffolk ten days earlier.

You may wonder, as I did in January 2014, why “Look East” featured a story about a couple who were murdered on their yacht in St Lucia, 4200 miles away in the West Indies.  Perhaps they were from one of the region’s counties? 

No, they were from Cannock in Staffordshire, in the west of the country. The somewhat tenuous link the story had to the east of England and therefore to us in Buckinghamshire, was that when they had started on their yearlong voyage, they had set sail from Lowestoft in Suffolk.

That association was both absurd and ridiculous!

The lead stories in “Look East” tend to fall into one of three categories.  The headline story is always either about transport, schools, or health and hospitals.   It is so dull.  The “London News” programme has its own Arts Correspondent!  

A new low point came when the entire “Look East” programme came live from a sheep farm near Ipswich.  All afternoon the trails told us that we would be seeing lambs being born.  You may imagine what happened – absolutely nothing!  Thirty minutes of tedious anticlimax, listening to an overawed, inarticulate farmer telling us what we could be seeing if we were there at another time.

If the BBC needs to save money, one of the first things they could do is terminate “Look East” and all other local programmes around the country that have to scrape the barrel in order to find content.  I’ve had enough of it.  I feel sorry for the hotel owner in Overstrand, Norfolk whose hotel is at risk of slipping over the edge of the cliff, but Overstrand is as far from me as Wrexham in Wales. 

I am not bleedin' interested!!