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!!
