Television
Our news bulletins are in self-induced turmoil. In March, out of pure greed, ITV moved its main ITN bulletin lock, stock and anchor from 10pm to 6.30pm and lost some 1.5 million viewers. Then, three weeks ago, BBC1 relaunched the Six o'Clock News and has seen 700,000 of its regular audience desert.
ITV Network Centre would no doubt be able to choke back its tears over the ITV Evening News if its grand scheme had succeeded and increased viewing later in the evening. Instead the reverse has happened and, after an initial leap, ITV's audience share has fallen to close to a record low. Against expectations, including my own gloomy prediction that the move would lead to an era of total ITV supremacy, the network's determination to hole its news carrier has resulted in its whole fleet taking on water.
The fate of the BBC's Six o'Clock News is more interesting, since it has been in place for 15 years, is Britain's most watched bulletin and now faces competition no fiercer than ITV's regional news magazines (not even Home and Away). Naturally such success could not go unpunished, and the bulletin has been sacked by the BBC's Time Lords: its presenters removed, its dark-blue set replaced by a beige and maroon studio reminiscent of 1970s Nationwide and its pace interrupted by headlines from, as Michael Barrett would say, our own neck of the woods.
It is a mess, the predictable result of £200,000-worth of ill-spent licence fee, years of audience research and months of rehearsals. Although he was genuinely off ill last week, having lost his voice, the finger of blame is already being pointed at the new presenter, Huw Edwards, always described in the prints as a Welshman and regularly mocked for a makeover that has had him dress in pink and crop his "prematurely grey" hair to a Caesar cut. On Have I Got News for You, Paul Merton joined in and accused him of inserting pauses between syllables in order to sound more Welsh.
Enough already. It is hardly a revelation that Tony Hall, the BBC's head of news, lacks all flair for casting. The Nine o'Clock News remains carved up between the competing pomposities of Michael Buerk and Peter Sissons, Anna Ford performs icily at 1pm and Martyn Lewis, the only one of the old team with a following outside news programming, is left with no choice but to quit.
Edwards is no less and no more charismatic than the rest of the team. He may even have an advantage over his colleagues, for his folksy regionalism matches ideally the homely new vernacular of BBC News.
The patronising new voice is heard most clearly at 1pm, when housewives and the unemployed are thought to need special help, but there are traces of it later in the day, too. Instead of saying, for example, that a missing toddler has been found safe and well, the new style book introduces the item with: "Two parents got the best possible news today . . ." Instead of "A luxury cruise ship sank this morning", we get: "They said it was like a scene from the Titanic." Correspondents, most of them pert young women, some days deliver their reports from as far away as the other side of the studio, showing maps and clips from interviews on an electronic blackboard. Known as the "deconstructed package", this infantile technique was pioneered by that most influential and least-watched of all news shows, Five News, three years ago, and has already been dropped by it.
The deconstruction of BBC News to an open-plan format of a visible if sepia newsroom, precocious regions, conversational gambits and chats with the weathergirl impresses no one. But the very fact of the messing about - messing about that will undoubtedly be reversed at fashion's whim in a few years - drains authority from the institution of BBC News itself.
The elevation of Edwards is a symptom of the executive fidgets, but it is the fidgeting that grates, not his brogue. After all, these days, chirpy Cockneys even announce the continuity links on BBC2. It is the "Oxford voice", as D H Lawrence called it, that has become unacceptable.
A little example of this is the reception accorded the first series of Channel 4's The Sundays (Saturday nights), in which Fleet Street journalists swapped jokes with Melvyn Bragg before an audience armed with the first editions of papers still undelivered to most of the kingdom. The complaint was that this was intolerably smug and "London". Now the show has returned, and although it is still half an hour too long and its format as unwieldy as ever, it is no longer quite the embarrassment it was.
What has changed? Simply the selfless decision by its executive producer, Lord Bragg, to replace himself with a young Scot called Alan Tyler. Tyler is the quick- talking, know-nothing mirror image of his ponderous, know-all predecessor, but his manner and accent immediately announce that he is one of us, not one of them. He has thus saved the programme from the deadly charge of metropolitan elitism, much in the way Tony Hall hoped Edwards would rescue the Six o'Clock News - except, of course, the Six was in no need of rescuing.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London "Evening Standard"
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