Bohren - To Drill

If you’re wanting to drill the day’s most important news stories well and truly into your head, in a reasonably unbiased and professionally presented manner, just put the BBC News channel on for an hour or two. If, however, you’re seriously considering driving an actual drill into your face on suicidal or just cry-for-help grounds, and you need that final push, I suggest turning to Sky News. It always amazes me how they constantly seem to win News Channel of the Year, and then boastfully mention it between every advert break. They hire all the pretty blonde presenters who look as vacant as a public toilet with shit all over the seat, and their resident weatherman is shiftier than a man with a TV-shaped bulge under his coat in Dixons. He swaggers around the weather map, one hand in his pocket, the other vaguely gesturing while he mentions a few major cities that might be wet, might be dry, he just isn’t that sure. I’m certainly not saying BBC News is the greatest, it, like Sky has somehow thought it was a good idea to have a Your News, or Your Stories segment where members of the public send in their utterly dreary ’news’ issues in glorious shaky MiniDV. Their aim is something like to offer more news that’s relevant to you. Now, a two minute story about hooded youths vandalising the garden shed belonging to Mr Smith, 67, from a Birmingham council estate is very relevant to Mr Smith and maybe a few of his neighbours, but for the other sixty million of us, it couldn’t be more jarringly irrelevant. The fact the production values are so diminished just makes watching it even more of a chore. Until they develop the technology to know exactly what we want to know, when we want to know it, news is always going to be broadly irrelevant to most people. In the meantime, I’ll just stick with the BBC because somehow I trust receiving the headlines from a dumpy, middle-aged woman, over a pair of large, mindless tits.