Watching the Ticking Clock

Eyes bleeding, legs bowed and skin two shades off ‘Oyster Taupe’, Daniel Smith offers a sofa-side perspective of rolling news

As you sit, hunched, unwashed, blearily counting the syllables of the words in the rolling news ticker at the bottom of the BBC News 24 screen, the voices start to sink in. Stories start to take shape. It's not a big news day. It's a slow news day. The news ticker hasn’t slowed to a crawl, reflecting that nothing warrants it's continual attention. No. The scrolling ticker scuttles by at the same rate as usual (approx. 114 syllables per minute) but with nothing good for it to really grasp with its many hands and bite with its many teeth. There are no child kidnappings/discoveries. No natural disasters. No opportune celebrity homicides to condense to haiku. It just trudges along, blissfully unaware of the gravity of its cargo of letters. Like a sluggish, yet reliable postman carrying a birthday card and a letter bomb in the same unquestioning sack.

One of the papers is even writing about itself on the front page. 'EXTRA! EXTRA! Read all about us' they seem to cry.

The presenters know different. They continue the vacant badinage as they review tomorrow's newspapers, like the most impotent, condescending and vainglorious episode of Early Edition ever to be poorly penned and inadequately acted. Grinning toothily, they casually dismiss each of the main headlines in turn. One of the papers is even writing about itself on the front page. 'EXTRA! EXTRA! Read all about us' they seem to cry as they inform the Labour Party that it has lost their vote. Like Icarus, flying too close to The Sun, so too the Labour Party has got its wings burnt and is falling to its soggy demise. Satire. The presenters seem to avoid picking up on the fact that one of the country's biggest selling newspapers is admitting its lack of impartiality and therefore further undermining what little credibility it should have as a news source. Instead they choose to concentrate on the fact that the BBC and The Sun's owners, NewsCorp, have had a bit of a spat recently, with James Murdoch calling the BBC's ambitions 'chilling', and the BBC responding by saying something like “chilling? No, he probably meant just chillin', without the 'g', our ambitions are just, k'now, chillin”. Probably.

Next up for dismissal by the flippant, fickle wags (not the appalling acronym for those betrothed to football players, the other type) on the future news conveyor belt is The Sun's sister paper, The News of The World. In a family where the brains and beauty were long ago left, ironically, to drown like an ugly cat in a bag at the bottom of a canal. The sister, herself a kitten sporting a gammy eye, fat whiskers and a butch meow, would seem to have escaped the undertow it deserves and instead landed a cushy place by the fire, mewling the family ethos in a desperate effort to please her father. In recent times however, with little natural gifts of its own, the paper has been reduced to selling itself for 20p or just giving itself away free whenever someone picks up her older sister or a Twix, the sluttiest of chocolate bars. Caramel covered fingers. All the while The Times, an altogether more supercilious relative, just sits back and does its own crossword like an incestuous hermit masturbating into its dinner while smoking a pipe and wearing a monocle. You would think the addition of pipe and monocle would make it better than its simpler siblings but that is not the case. A pipe and a monocle make you far more odious, as is proved by the fact that Hitler, Huntley and Shipman all wore monocles, smoked pipes and knew exactly what they were doing.

You would think the addition of pipe and monocle would make it better but that is not the case. Hitler, Huntley and Shipman all wore monocles, smoked pipes and knew exactly what they were doing.

The News of The World was recently accused of tapping voicemail messages to try and gather information about celebrities and sport, only to find out that most people's answerphones contain an average of three messages – one from your mother asking, yet again, what size pants you wear, despite it being nowhere near either your birthday or any form of religious festivity, one that you have left yourself, leaving carefully-timed gaps for yourself to reply back to yourself so you can converse with yourself and feel like you've actually got someone to talk to, proving your life is not just a cyclical vortex of Lovejoy repeats, LucasArts point and click adventure games and decisions over whether to wipe your arse with the tear-soaked, flaking, tissue in your pocket, the semen-encrusted sock in the linen bin or the hand towel... and another phone message from a vet. You own no pets. You drowned your only cat because it was not pretty enough. You weren't attracted to it sexually, or otherwise. The messages are meaningless. That information should not be on any legitimate news provider’s agenda. Having it present reeks of a crisis of priorities, like sewing buttons in place of a zip on your cardigan when you should be thinking of similes.

The news has now moved on to jockeys and motorcycles. You have seen these stories four times already tonight. You deride the newsreader for using the same script each time. You mockingly shout the next predictable turn of phrase at the helplessly bland night watchman of sports news. You have not considered chastising yourself for failing to change channel or leave the flat in three days. It is not you who is the problem. It is the news. It's never new. Oh hang on. The ticker's just mentioned something about Sumatra. This might be good. No.

Enough of the BBC News 24 ticker. Time for Sky News. Their ticker is 46 syllables a minute quicker. A victory for speed. This should keep me you busy for a while.

 

 

If something in this article struck a chord, then Digg us and help us to make the world a better place. Or alternatively, if you have your own view on this issue, please feel free to leave a comment below.

---

Resources:

Title Image:

TV Chair: an original photograph by Mike Seyfang. Modified image appears here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.