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This is an archive article published on April 30, 2011
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Opinion Till Deadline Do Them Part

A week of couples on news TV

indianexpress

Mihir S. Sharma

April 30, 2011 03:03 AM IST First published on: Apr 30, 2011 at 03:03 AM IST

It’s so nice to see two people declare their interest in each other before a rapt world. Television gave us that last week: and Times Now’s Arnab Goswami and Purulia arms-dropper Peter Bleach made such a pleasant couple. Though,unlike Wills and Waity-Katie,their interest in each other was something of a surprise; the Purulia arms drop case isn’t precisely something that has transfixed us of late. And Goswami hasn’t been a model of fidelity either. His weakness for shady Scandinavian-looking types was visible a few days earlier in his soft-focus interview with Julian Assange,and also in his later interview with the Danish arms-drop mastermind. (Peter Bleach,the Brit who quite literally took the fall for the Dane,made his opinion of his rival quite clear by calling his erstwhile paymaster “Nils Christian Nielsen or Kim Davy or Nils Holck or whatever his true name is.”)

So Times Now discovered a fifteen-year old case — they preferred to call it a “scandal” since that sounds close enough to “scam” to excite people — and got people on Skype to talk to them about it,and expected us to go all “oooh”. (The single great moment: when Goswami responded to some flight of fancy by saying “let me pose a counter-rhetorical question” and the smooth-talking Bleach broke into helpless giggles.) The only thing keeping it from being completely ho-hum was the claim that it was completely new information,which Goswami kept on repeating: “… This business of Indian politicians asking Kim Davy to do the job is a new angle because what I have known so far and what has been published so far,is that there were two other people…”

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Pity,then,that this claim to have broken the story was completely and shockingly untrue. A solid,much-read article,available online,was written a few short weeks ago by a veteran foreign correspondent for the British newspaper,The Independent,in which all the same people said all the same things. That well-written,comprehensive piece took a far more sceptical and investigative approach. But,you know,a story isn’t a story if it doesn’t actually feature grainy Skype video.

From one venerable British institution,owned by Russians (The Independent),to another,owned by Germans (the royals). Something that was rather painfully obvious as we goggled at the horses and hats was that we wouldn’t quite manage the same level of spectacle as the declining British. Or,of course,as the rising Chinese,though fortunately the Party doesn’t celebrate the weddings of its princelings.

And,even if we did,TV news would muck it up. The BBC covered the wedding with Simon Schama in the commentary team and cameras everywhere,including in the belfry of Westminster Abbey,where they were presumably installed when Henry III redid the front façade in 1380. I had an internal what-if-DD-did-it soundtrack playing,a dead,morose voice saying things in Hindi like “and now the Duke of Tolkienshire. He is 47th in line to the throne. He enjoys playing croquet and immigrant-spearing. Behind him there are lots of common people,and they all look happy.”

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Not that the BBC’s commentators said a lot that was different from that,and said a lot that was wincingly classist besides. But at least they shut up at the good parts,and didn’t sound like they were covering a funeral,and got somebody smart in to point out the significance of minor royals being ferried around in ugly white minivans like a second-division football team. On DD,they would have told us the make of minivan and the name and rank of the driver. Or more probably,the name and rank of the driver of the minivan that had passed the camera two minutes earlier.

And in a particularly devilish twist,the BBC’s cameras focused on Prime Minister David Cameron just as he sang Blake’s lines on building a Jerusalem “among these dark satanic mills”,sardonically reminding us that the cost-cutting PM would probably shut the mills down,and most of the BBC with them. Even on days when the “British” in B is being trumpeted at us like an RAF fanfare,their news coverage has layers to it. Why can’t ours?