"Her blouse was unbuttoned well south of Watford… [her hair had] been sprayed more heavily than a Kray gang getaway car…. there's more pancake on that poor woman's face than at a Shrove Tuesday cook-in… as for that lip gloss, I haven't seen a slick that bad since the Exxon Valdez oil tanker broke up."
Who wrote this of whom? It's perhaps not too difficult to spot the characteristic charm of the Daily Mail. But the target may be harder to identify. It is, in fact, the news presenter Natasha Kaplinsky (pictured, below right), who has just launched a made-over Five News. I have been watching the programme and it's actually rather refreshing. It determinedly sets out to achieve a different agenda, in two half-hour bulletins at 5pm and 7pm. It is a sort of breakfast television in the evening, with the heavy news of the day leavened by human interest stories and vox pops. This is in the tradition of Nationwide or, for those of you in your eighties, Tonight. Kaplinsky, who was previously a BBC news anchor, adopts a soft, intimate tone from the comfort of a sofa—something you don't find elsewhere in the evening schedules.
News went macho in the 1970s, when Jack de Manio's gentle Today programme was put out to grass in favour of the testosterone-charged version we're now familiar with. I know, I was there. When I worked in BBC television news in 1978, there was a ferocious editor with an eye patch who would delay making a decision on the running order in the hope that the day's football would yield him a lead story of bloodshed in the terraces. Then there was the reporter who, when told by a commissionaire he could not park his car, simply drove over the official. This breed of newshound, then or now, would pooh-pooh Five News's agenda with a Paxmanesque quiver of the nostrils.
"Plurality" is a word you are going to hear a lot of in the coming weeks. It refers to the alleged need for competition in the supply of public service broadcasting (PSB), and Ofcom, the media regulator, will shortly issue some policy ideas about it. It is being used by Channel 4 to justify why, with what they insist is a failing model, they should receive public money in the future. It is also employed by ITV to get business regulations relaxed so that they can afford to continue investing in national news services (so they argue). But is this state-sponsored plurality inherently a good thing? I'm perplexed. I've been watching all the bulletins and their news agendas are remarkably similar. PSB seems to stand for publicly stifled broadcasting. How come plurality leads to conformity? And explain, please, how our finest news service—Radio 4—has no competition other than networks within the same organisation? It has taken little Five News, only nominally in the PSB fold, to break the mould.
Most of the major broadcasters would schedule news anyway because it is popular and lends authority and trust to their brand. That's why the big US networks invest heavily in such services; they don't need a regulator to order them to. Indeed, ITV has now voluntarily returned News at Ten to its time-honoured slot, with 68-year-old Trevor McDonald coaxed out of retirement. (He seems a little dazed at times, full of strange, involuntary smiles—bizarrely, even when he had to announce ITV's plunging profits.)
News services are a cornerstone of democracy, which is why there will be even more pressing reasons for renewing the BBC's charter in 2016 than there were in 2006. It will remain a legitimate use of public funds to invest in one trusted and reliable news service amid the burgeoning wild west that is the worldwide web—a rich soup of prejudice and paranoia. Although, with the possible exception of Channel 4 (a subject for another day), PSB will not extend any wider than that. Following the enterprising example of Five, plenty of others will serve up a broad variety of video news services. Our newspapers are already in on the act online, without a weighty structure of public regulation and funding around them. Now that's what I call plurality.
