The BBC News at Ten
So I found this when I was looking through some old notepads. It’s not really an essay. It’s more creative writing meets blank verse rant. Take it with a pinch of salt of course, I wrote it a while ago, but I like some of the points it touches on so I thought I’d share it with you.
My grandmother strokes her cat and says “for once just be a part of the rest of the world,” with emphasis in all the important places that turn it the colour of a condescending plea, that I imagine as a sickly green. The little bar that indicates volume grows with the push of a button and the BBC News at Ten tears itself into my ears and eyes with such force that it drowns every other noise from the room- that is apart from my grandmother. Her voice, which I have decided is the optimum pitch for all hearing ranges and that minute degree below uncomfortable amplitude so that it can brave any competition from television or radio or traffic and ring true in any environment, continues unmolested and unforgiving.
So she sits with her finger bent into the volume control and lets these words roll from her tongue, “for once just be a part of the rest of the world”. They hum with discordance and crackling, desperate grief, that I could be so imposing in my aversion to the BBC News at Ten.
The television tells me that Obama is doing well. I know that already. The man is practically wearing the White House, and nothing new is to be said. I try to engage my company with an argument I had two nights earlier about Trotta’s blunder and public apology, about the controversy caused over the accidental mention of assassination, about such things being brought to light being part of the problem, about liberals clinging to causes as a crutch, unable to see two sides of a coin and blissful in their narrow-minded negativity about stupid political scapegoats. No more than four words escape my mouth over the buffeting wind of the BBC News at Ten. It plucks the eyes from the sockets in my family’s skulls. It clogs and protrudes from their ears in ugly solid lumps.
Next, the television tells me about knives, and how the government has spent three million pounds creating saturated media campaigns to raise awareness about sharp weapons. It says that the campaign is going to reach the young people with viral advertising on social networking sites- that available to see on every computer in the intelligent universe will be streaming video of actors emulating closed-circuit footage of brutal stabbings, that a shock tactic directed by a film post-graduate is set to lower violent crime by talking to the children on their own wavelength. I want to be there with my fist around the tie of whichever department head used his keen instinct and intuition to head up this brilliant scheme. To be the one to calmly tell him that he is patronising his target audience on their own turf, and nothing will come of this multi-million pound endeavor in futility.
After that, the television tells me that people living in one part of England are far healthier than those in another. It offers a hilariously warped representation of the two parties- one set of interviews taking place in a pub and the other in a gym. Some small shudder comes over me, a laugh too, that such unsophisticated bias can still exist so forefront in the journalistic world.
The whole experience doesn’t fill me with great confidence, so I lie on the floor. The intensity of unrequited desire bares down on my chest. I want to scream in the faces of people I know, family and friends. I want to spit sarcastic prose in the face of every imbecile watching the BBC News at Ten. ‘Look at this marvelous and wonderful thing, technology. What wonders it can perform, but what an unknown danger it is! These children know nothing but electronic noise from the moment they are born, never once lifting their eyes to the outside world or flicking through the pages of a novel. These poor, naive souls know not the real! They live in this distant, digital land that is so radically different from our own. What a great novelty it is to us when we see them at their play.’ I have this passionate will to set alight all the televisions in the world and create a flaming mountain- atop which I would boom a million verses. ‘You approach this as a novelty when it is a way of life. It is our way of life that you have created- these billion sad bastards asleep before a back-lit screen couldn’t possibly learn from it? You abandon us with this limitless connectivity, and now you see what we’ve done with it you want back in? You want to capitalise on this fantastic era of free speech that your generation gave birth to, and our generation grew up with?’
And still these words surface in my mind, “for once just be a part of rest of the world”. I’m screaming, ‘every day of my life I am a part of the rest of the world. Every day I make connections with every country under the sun. In truth, it’s almost impossible not to, and you have the gall and some narrow ignorance to insist that my world ends somewhere far before the BBC News at Ten?’
