It's two in the morning and I'm sitting in Fort Knox, sorry, Television Centre. I don't have a pass so I have to be accompanied by a colleague every time I go to the loo. It's a bit like prison but without the hideous conditions, risk of murder, curtailing of liberty, free drugs... in fact it's nothing like prison.
Another straight in there and away you go for this week at Five Live - "you write cues?", right off you go, then. I may not be reading them but I get a little buzz from having my scripts read out. Or that might be the coffee. Probably the coffee, actually. I'm working 9-1pm at Editorial Intelligence and then 5pm-5am at Up All Night.
I'm thinking of next week's television project with a mixture of excitement and dread. Excitement for getting my mitts on some nice equipment and all the geeky vices that will involve. Dread for the inevitable presenter cliches I'm sure will crop up. There's a style of presenting and newsreading fashionable in TV at the moment that I've come to loathe. It's FRESH, it's FUNKY and it's FULL of RANDOM! emphaSIS! and redundant EXCLAMATION marks! It also assumes that the viewer has an attention span of a goldfish, the memory of a fruitfly and a need to be WOKEN UP every two seconds with a flashing graphic or naff sound effect.
Here's my new IDEA- a new MYPODBLOG MULTI-360 INTERACTIVE HIT called NewsSLAP!
NewsSLAP - a five minute vomit of the week's news edited by an online collective consisting of a four year old child, an epilectic and an ADD sufferer.
It's presented by a thirty-five year old ex-children's presenter with spikey blonde hair who knows how to have fun with the NEWS. Lots of different camera angles, edits to cut out the space between words (who has time for THAT?) and enough whip-pans to make an astronaut vom.
Delivery is in-your-face, full of jokes to liven up the boring old news and every sentence ends with a long drawn out word with a downwards caaaadeeeence. One hundred different shots are crammed into five minutes with lots of flashing graphics, text and ironically amateurish stop-camera animation to make Jeremy Paxman dance to techno music. It's sooooo YouTube, so UCG, so now!
Baby surfs on cat! Wacky students dress up as ovaries! Suicide bomber kittens! 65% of pensioners eat own legs!
Some serious stuff is happening in the Miiiidle Eaaaast. It's veeeeery saaaaad so presenter pulls a saaaad face.
Of course it's completely downloadable-interactive-wiki-editable and has an online poll at the end of the show to decide whether the presenter should read the news next week in the style of James Brown or dressed as a kumquat.
Should be a hit.
2 comments:
Ha ha, very true re. TV news presentation. There was a column in the Times on sat on this that you'd probably like - can't remember who by but it was called something like 'TV news for the hard of thinking'.
"NewsSLAP - a five minute vomit of the week's news edited by an online collective consisting of a four year old child, an epilectic and an ADD sufferer."
I'm not quite sure why you find the prospect of "an epilectic [sic] and an ADD sufferer" so amusing.
Y'know, when people have to try too hard to be funny, the result usually turns out not to be funny at all.
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