That's News to me

One of the fringe benefits of reading broadcast news has to be working in an industry that’s so open to parody.  Like Ozzy Osborne’s insistence that he cannot watch This Is Spinal Tap because it’s simply too close to his own life, the figure of Ron Burgundy in Anchorman can be a disturbing mirror image to a broadcast journalist. Yes it’s a funny film, but sometimes it’s just too close to the bone.  News stories have the classic joke structure of set-up and punch line, starting with a conflict and ending in a resolution.  There’s also the necessary seriousness of tone and the entirely unnecessary insistent and shocked tone that invites, indeed demands, to be punctured.  In the Eighties I familiarised myself with British politics largely to get the terms of reference for the comedy of the time, I had to know who Tony Benn, Geoffrey Howe, David Steel and Michael Heseltine were to know why Spitting Image was making fun of them.  Parodies of news reading style were a firm fixture in the comedy of my childhood.  I knew Lenny Henry’s Trevor McDonut before I knew who Trevor MacDonald was (we didn’t watch the News at Ten).  Not the Nine O’clock News regularly took a quasi-punk aim at the Two Ronnies as representatives of the old order but they both did spoof news bulletins.  Perhaps Not the Nine O’clock News was being more ironic but it was essentially the same thing.  That particular comedy trend reached its zenith with The Day Today.  These are all British TV shows and I’ve often wondered whether Waterford’s lead in cable television take-up over most of the rest of the country during the Seventies and Eighties gave the city a slightly different personality.  Putting aside the taboo subject of whether it made us a more anglicised city, did exposure to British comedy mean we were more given to irony and more resistant to false emotion than elsewhere in the country? Or maybe other people just didn’t watch as much telly as me.  By the late Eighties most urban areas of the country had access to cable and the satellite dishes were beginning to announce the start of a Brave New World of men watching really too much football.  The dominance of state TV was beginning to be challenged by the nascent players in multi-channel television.  Sky TV was very different in the late Eighties, comprising of little more than cheap rubbish, a far cry from the expensive rubbish it shows today (not entirely fair, but I couldn’t resist).  One import that immediately grabbed my attention was NBC’s famous Saturday Night Live.  The show was known on this side of the Atlantic as the academy that produced the people who made most of the funny movies of the period; Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Chevy Chase etc.  None of those guys were on it by the early Nineties when Sky started to screen the show.  The cast members were people I didn’t know: Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, Chris Farley, Kevin Nealon, Phil Hartman.  The last two in particular I would come to love.  One of the unwelcome side effects of watching too much British TV is absorbing their prejudices (our forefathers fought the British for the right of the Irish to cultivate our own prejudices). And one of those prejudices at the time was that Americans weren’t funny, didn’t do irony and took everything literally. Watching SNL blew that assumption out of my head.  It’s the very fact that official American culture can so literal and sincere that allows so much interesting counter-culture barely beneath the surface.  In the Sixties the big American music acts like the Beach Boys, Motown and Elvis may have appeared achingly conformist to British and even Irish audiences, but nor were there any bands in Britain remotely as out there as The Fugs, The Velvet Underground or Captain Beefheart. You need white picket fence suburbia to get Philip Roth, John Cheever and David Lynch. So SNL got irony: The Sarcastic Clapping Family of Southampton, Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, Trivial Psychic.  Best of all was Kevin Nealon’s Weekend Update, the news parody to beat all news parodies, sending up as it did not just the seriousness of the news but the brash self-satisfaction that seems to be preserve of American newsreaders (I don’t strictly approve of it but sometimes I do wish I could be Geraldo Rivera for just one bulletin a week). The title of this blog is a tribute to his sign-off and how he said it, but unfortunately the good people at NBC seem to have a problem with people posting his stuff on You Tube.  I’m Mark Power, and that’s news to me.

Favourite Sons

The term ok has its roots in the endlessly fascinating world (for nerds like me) that is American politics.  Apparently it stood for Oll Korrect, a deliberate corruption by the Democrats to make the patrician Martin Van Buren appear more earthy to the voters of the young republic. It didn’t work.  American politics has provided many gifts to the English language. Where would newspaper sub-editors be without the suffix “-gate”? The Watergate scandal was so shocking that the very word itself seemed to carry enough gravitas and menace to sell papers. Its currency has of course been devalued over the years to the point where we now have Sachsgate, Garglegate and who-left-the-immersion-on-gate (a little remembered scandal in a certain house in Lisduggan in the 1980s). Another term I first came across in American politics is the Favourite Son. Favourite sons were in effect Presidential election chancers. Until the 1980’s presidential conventions weren’t the choreographed coronations of today but could be hard fought battles between ideological or geographical wings of the major parties for the presidential nomination.  It would often be unclear which of the front-runners would win the contest, with the nomination sometimes going instead to an obscure compromise candidate. In a deadlock, a favourite son could be that compromise candidate or simply give his delegate support to the highest bidder (more often the delegation would make that decision for themselves, deciding that the favourite son wasn't such a favourite after all).  The 1924 Democratic Convention lasted more than two weeks and went through one hundred and three ballots: there were so many favourite sons that front runners William McAdoo and Al Smith couldn’t secure an advantage.  By the time convention finally selected dark horse John Davis, the party’s credibility was shot. That credibility wasn’t helped when another awkward local issue emerged, namely an attempt by the convention to condemn the Ku Klux Klan.  As many of the Southern gentlemen attending were themselves members of the Klan, they took exception to the plank and it was defeated, prompting thousands of Klansman to lead a torch lit rally next to the convention hall, much to the horror of the local New Jersey yankees. Now comparing the supporters of North Tipperary’s favourite son Michael Lowery to the Klan would giving far too free a reign to the anger felt over the Moriarty conclusions.  More than the implications of how the second mobile phone license was secured, the real anger, irritation and confusion comes from the fact that voters keep electing Mister Lowery despite most people in the country coming to the same conclusions as Moriarty years ago and for free. We have some experience of this in Waterford, where similar sentiments were expressed in elements of the national media in relation to the enduring electoral popularity of Minister Martin Cullen despite voting-machinegate and the procurement-of-public-relations-contractsgate. However as was the case with the Klan in ‘24, the principled metropolitan condemnation of a locality’s political peculiarities usually has the effect of said locality closing ranks. Indeed there are those who view the election of Michael Lowry as a collective North Tipp two fingers to the rest of the country. There probably are practical considerations to his vote, like fending off the closure of Nenagh Hospital, but chiefly I think it’s the fact that he has now no other master but the electorate of North Tipperary who view him as someone who can, ahem, get things done. If Moriarty claims he breaks the rules from time to time, will that damage his reputation amongst his supporters? Of course we all want a country where the guiding hand of public office is rational republican virtue but more people need to see that work effectively and as that’s impossible we sometimes get a politician about whom Justice Moriarty said what he said retaining the support of the voters in a given constituency.  Four years before the Democratic Convention of 1924 the party selected Governor James Cox to run for President.  A clean and well respected reformer he had an equally capable running mate in Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  He was beaten by Warren Harding, a favourite son of Ohio who went on to lead the most corrupt administration of the 20^th Century. Cox suffered the biggest popular vote election defeat in history, largely because a traditional ethnic pillar of Democrat support refused to back the decent Cox over the weak and corruptible Harding. Yep, it was the Irish.

War is not cool, repeat, war is not cool

The 49^th Parallel is a 1941 propaganda film, one of the first made by cinema’s greatest behind the camera partnership, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It’s not perfect. As a group of Nazi submariners try to escape from Canada, the episodic structure pits them against a variety of Canadian “types”. Raymond Massey is fine as the drafted tough, undisciplined but always ready to give a Nazi a good kicking. However Lawrence Olivier exhibits the most extraordinary French-Canadian accent which is part Pepe Le Pew, part onion and Leslie Howard’s foppish Brit leaves one cheering for the Nazis – not a sign that the film’s propaganda purpose is working effectively. The outstanding performance is from the incomparable Anton Walbrook, playing the first of his Good German roles with the Archers.  He’s the leader of a pacifist German religious settlement where the Nazis think they’ve found kindred spirits but the good Christians are horrified by the dastardly philosophy of the U-Boat crew.  Walbrook then gives a wonderful speech condemning the military indoctrination of children. Earlier today the news that an F15 crashed while operating over Libya genuinely pleased me. Not the crash itself, or what implications this may or may not have in the increasingly risky looking Libyan intervention. I was happy to hear the crew had been rescued, but neither was this what excited me about the story. No, when I heard an F15 went down over Libya, all I could think was “the American Air Force still flies F15s?! Cool!”. I didn’t grow up under the Nazis but I did grow up with a love of war; guns, tanks, heroics and especially airplanes. Military hardware excites many young boys and when I was a kid in the Seventies and Eighties the Second World War for some reason wasn’t taken as seriously as it is now; it was the setting for action movies and comic books rather documentaries and grim memorials. Of course history and the news teaches us as we get older how war really is. Genocide and murder is not the by-product of war but its standard stock in trade, there was no cool hardware on show when the Hutus murdered the Tutsi , just machetes and a ferocious combination of hatred and routine. And while much of the conflict around the world centres on primitively armed people killing unarmed people, on the other hand the technological dominance of the US has also served to remove the childish glamour of war. Instead of the Chuck Yeagars and Pappy Boyingtons of the past, US air power now is asserted by computer programmers using aircraft like the un-airplane like and boring Stealth bomber, an iPad with wings. I haven’t made my mind up about the RAF’s Typhoon or the French Rafale just yet but for a moment I was thrilled to see a good old-fashioned fourth generation F15 in the hands of the USAF, a real plane, flown by real men. And then it’s back to the guilt that all war, regardless of the arguments for or against, is horrible. An F15 dropping bombs is horrible, an F15 having to drop bombs is horrible. Thankfully my cultural horizons have broadened since my war-obsessed childhood to the point where I can list someone as sophisticated as Anton Walbrook as one of my favourite actors. He gave so many great performances.  Especially in war films.

Just Ronnie

 There’s a policy I’ve adopted since Leaving Cert never to study for an exam the night before. This is sound advice, given to many students these days, better to be fresh and rested for any test you face in life. More important in my view is avoiding the realisation you haven’t prepared properly when it’s far too late to do anything about it.  So when the good people who organise the Waterford Writers Festival asked me to present a talk with former Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald on his autobiography Just Garret today, there was no point on Saturday night thinking about whether my questions to the most intelligent man to have held the office were intelligent enough or just stupid. Instead I spent two hours ironing, the nearest thing I have to physical exercise and went to bed aching, bloated and sleep deprived. A big improvement on my usual aching, bloated, sleep deprived with a psoriatic flare up. I think the morning with Doctor Fitzgerald went well, I certainly enjoyed it. He held forth on the pervasive how-the-hell-did-we-get-here questions which naturally enough continue to dominate public discourse in modern Ireland: default (not possible), Seanad (reform yes, abolish no), politics (too local – except this year), Charlie McCreevy (bad, very bad), the banking crisis (quote: “I’ve not written about it because I don’t understand it, though that doesn’t stop other people”). Without the Known Unknown of the banks, Garret Fitzgerald would be confident of us getting out of this mess, but that’s a big Unknown, even though it’s Known. For my part though, it’s history I was after. The respect he had for the founding fathers of the state was striking, he clearly believes the retirement of men like Leamass and MacEntee in the mid-sixties had long term consequences for the state. He turned his back on Fine Gael after the 1948 election when they went into the government with a man who had been Chief of Staff of the IRA just ten years before. The young Garret Fitzgerald had campaigned in that election in the leafy suburbs of Dublin, urging people to vote for Fine Gael, the Commonwealth Party. One of the first things the first Fine Gael Taoiseach did after the election was to declare a republic.  It’s hard for a twenty two year old not to take that personally.  There was so much of interest to report from a thoroughly pleasant Sunday morning that I might just return to it in the future and hopefully will post up a recording of the event in due course. There was one other detail I wanted to relate, which was quite an odd anecdote about Ronald Reagan.  After the talk I was lucky enough to be invited along to lunch with the former Taoiseach. Among the subjects that came up was the visit of Ronald Reagan in 1984.  Now, Ronnie had a certain style, one that fed into the anti-intellectual narrative of modern conservatism wherein he portrayed himself as a regular straight-talking guy, not the smartest but principled and pure.  In Europe many flattered themselves to believe that he, and by extension his countrymen who voted for him, was stupid.  If you still think that have a look at his speech to the 1964 Republican Convention.  But there may have been something in the down home wisdom.  Just before the visit to Ireland to trace his roots, which his people unfortunately were unable to arrange outside an election year, President Reagan had dinner in the Irish Embassy.  There had been a storm the night before and a tree had fallen within the grounds of the Embassy.  On his way out the President asked what would be done with the tree, to which the Ambassador, not quite sure of the tenor of the question, replied that it would probably be removed in short order. “Don’t do that” the President said, “chopping trees is one of the best exercises you can do, especially for the pectoral muscles”.  For the next few months, Ronnie was regular visitor to the Embassy, putting in half an hour’s wood cutting to keep himself in shape.  America, it’s a whole different country. Still though, feeling aching, bloated and sleep deprived tonight, I’ve been looking at the ironing pile and next door’s tree and thinking to myself, what would Ronnie do?

Events, dear boy events

I had piece ready to go about a theory I have relating to Waterford and telly watching, when sitting in my house in Waterford watching the telly I decided against it.  Even before someone sprayed green dye in my hair on Main Street in Tramore, Paddy’s Day 2011 was a big news day.  Still trying to come to terms with whatever it is that’s happened in Japan, we have the decision of the UN to intervene in the internal affairs of a sovereign state and that followed by Gaddafi’s ceasefire.  In the middle of that, we had a very different Saint Patrick’s Day in Washington.  I’m not going to pretend to have a handle on what’s going on in Japan, there’s quite enough people pretending to have a handle on that.  We were told at the start of the week that it wasn’t another Chernobyl and everything should be okay.  Now that reassurance has been downgraded to it’s not another Chernobyl and we don’t know what’s going to happen next. I wish the brave men and women tackling Fukushima well.  It has opened up the whole debate on nuclear power again, just a time when a strange self-styled pragmatic environmentalism has seen a number of states re-engage with nuclear power as an attractive alternative to oil. The polemicists have rushed in to pass judgement, with environmentalists declaring the nuclear argument to be dead.  I noticed Kelvin MacKenzie on Question Time last night dismissing this contention (he reckons British Nuclear facilities are much better than Japanese ones, true to form the former editor of the Sun thinks Britain is the best at everything except when it’s the worst) and Kevin Myers in today’s Independent, and many others I’m sure. We do need energy and in the absence of a comprehensive Green solution, if we don’t go nuclear then we have to turn to that more stable, reliable energy source: oil.  Which brings us to Libya.  That a UN Security Council which includes the People’s Republic of (“don’t mention  It not as though we built a nuclear plant on a fault line and mowed down a peaceful protest. Tiananmen Square”) China voted a resolution calling for military action against a dictator engaged in very public, bloody and perhaps crucially only partially successful repression of his people is genuinely astonishing.  Of course Libya’s oil and gas wealth is a factor in this intervention, Britain and France may have an often unhappy history of jointly policing the Middle East but they may believe that having backed the rebels when success seemed a good bet they now have to get rid of Gaddafi to ensure they will remain doing business in the country.  That’s the cynical view, but it’s also true that the West has to support these spontaneous secular movements or pay the consequences in terms of revitalised dictatorships and new, more radical opposition movements.  Gaddafi’s response, to declare a ceasefire – whatever he considers that to be – opens up a whole other dilemma for the west as set out here by former RAF pilot John Nicol before the ceasefire was actually declared. It again demonstrates that while Gaddafi may be mad, he’s not stupid.  While all this was going at the UN yesterday, I wonder was the US President cursing another series world crises ruining a perfectly good party.  Relations with Ireland may not figure in this Libyan discussion – scratch that, they definitely don’t – but successive holders of the most powerful office in the world genuinely seem to enjoy our saint’s day, and having us around for the craic.  There are worse relationships you could have with the US.  And Enda Kenny came home with the big prize, a visit from the most popular US President (outside the US) since JFK. All the coverage focused on Obama of course but in an extraordinary news day, what struck me the most was the Taoiseach’s speech. It was good. It was very good. It was also confidently delivered. It was a big opportunity for the new Taoiseach and he didn’t fluff his lines. He has a long way to go of course and it won’t be pretty but while he might not be Barack Obama, it wasn’t the speech of a man half of whose frontbench didn’t trust to lead them less than a year ago. Plenty can go wrong yet though. He finished his speech with a claim – which he has to make a reality of course – that Ireland will be great again.  Sometimes you have to start saying it before you can believe it and I thought of the hands trained in Waterford that made the bowl presented to the President yesterday. We’re not completely useless are we?

Partially Impartial Liner Notes

This being a blog rather than a broadcast I’m not technically bound by the provisions of the Broadcasting Act to be impartial. I could, if the mood grabbed me, use the forum to embrace a particular political party (so many to choose from, what’s a guy to do?), or champion a political philosophy, either the one that says there’s too much government interference in the economy, or the other one. I could become a single issue blogger; a university for the South East, the reintroduction of public hanging, the legalization of drugs (provisional wing), tax exemptions for pleated pants.  However for the purposes of this blog, I think it wise to stick to the spirit of the legislation governing people in the broadcast industry, which made me think I’d better take a second look at it.

I was always under the impression that editorialising was handled differently in Europe and the US.  European broadcasters are restrained from offering opinions, as the sector had a history of regulation in the continent that got an early and brutal lesson in the effects of broadcast propaganda.  In the US, the honourable First Amendment tradition dictates that the government has no business regulating the airwaves any more than an individual’s speech. A happy result of which was the proliferation of radio stations in the twenties and thirties which helped to bring country, blues and jazz music to huge audiences paving the way for civilisation’s greatest achievement, the glory of Rock’n’Roll (is that an opinion?).  It also allowed for editorialising on news broadcasts, although my understanding is that journalistic tradition meant this was generally considered and used sparingly. Inevitably perhaps, what started as this, went to become this and we now have the entity that is Fox News and its companions such as Keith Olberman latterly of MSNBC.  There are those who think this trend is a legitimate addition to the broadcast milieu and certainly there’s an honesty to a broadcaster telling us what they think instead smuggling in an agenda under the cover of impartiality – although the famous liberal bias of the media gives it more credit for deceit that it is truly capable of.  If the media has biases the first must be in favour of the sensational. But most broadcast journalists – myself included – would I think hate to undermine themselves by the profession of a particular, controversial belief.

And this word controversial is a recurring theme in the Broadcasting guidelines in the English speaking world.  The Irish Broadcasting Act forbids any expression of the opinion of the broadcaster, which presumably goes from hot political debate, to preferences in sport and sock fabric.  Strict neutrality.  Not so in Britain, where fairness is required but opinions can be expressed in non-controversial areas, otherwise one might be expected to treat a racist or paedophile even-handedly.  In New Zealand again fairness is required but there is no bar on the expression of an opinion by the broadcaster.  The Irish blanket ban isn’t generally applied to non-controversial topics, although I have seen it referenced to a talent show where a listener took exception to WLR expressing support for a Waterford contestant.  In reality broadcasters here have for some time been comfortable crossing over to commentary, with many current affairs presenters making their name with trenchant opinion.  Of course I just read the news which is, or should be, a pretty straight presentation of facts.  Applying the Broadcast Act to this blog might reduce it to a pointless exercise of stating the obvious, where I cast the readers as the interviewer to my inscrutable Kenny Dalglish. So there must be some value added here, but not editorializing opinion which I feel unable to share publicly and to be honest have great difficulty arriving at privately.  So this will be…what? Observation? Too pretentious. Comment? Too contentious.  Explanation? Too ambitious. For the moment I think the best description is Liner Notes. I might come back to that.

First Day in a very different school for Waterford TDs

Four Waterford TDs sat down today in the 31st Dail with the broken mold of Irish politics swept away, and binned.  The mold was only broken by a bursting economy and Eamonn Gilmore said there'd be no honeymoon. He's right: if Barack Obama didn't get one, one can't hold out much hope for Enda Kenny and the Labour leader.  The scale of the Fine Gael/Labour victory was only achieved with the help of the worst crisis the state has ever faced. Fixing it with few new options beyond what Fianna Fail had at their disposal will be an epic of success or failure, hopefully the former. The new government is free of culpability in the bubble and has I think the good will of the population, though inevitably on a temporary lease.   It needs to give us good news and soon; nothing major, a small act of kindness or  a small measure of revenge will suffice.

But what of our four new TDs here in Waterford? As ever we reflected the national trend: big win for Fine Gael, good result for Labour, a Left independent and a drubbing for Fianna Fail. Of the four, only John Halligan will sit on the opposition benches where there's plenty of room for reputations to be made, or lost.  However radical a change this election was, the government is one we've had before, albeit never this big.  It is the opposition benches that look so strange to us and regardless of what the numbers dictate, the title leader of the opposition will be competed for between Michael Martin, Gerry Adams and Joe Higgins and such is the damage to the Fianna Fail brand that Michael Martin can't be assured of victory in that battle. In fact, it might be none of them.  Out of the amorphus independent benches could emerge a clearer voice of the country's aspirations and frustrations than party machines can provide.  Certainly there are figures of fun in waiting amoungst some of the fifteen independents, in Waterford most believe we've elected one of the better ones. Instead of potholes and bridges, the new independents have an oppurtunity, whether it's Shane Ross on the Right or John Halligan on the Left, to speak for a nation.

Our other three TDs will be occupying the benches of the biggest government majority in history. Most of the 110 TDs supporting this government will do so from the backbenches as all three of ours do, for now. The backbenches can be a thankless place for a government TD and we have two in Paudie Coffey and Ciara Conway who go straight into the job on their first day.  However the size of the majority and the array of talent on the backbenches means there may well be a greater turnaround in cabinet positions and junior ministeries than we've been used to in Ireland, throw in a now permanent crisis where anything can happen at any given time and oppurtunity may knock for our Freshman TDs this term.  In the meantime, the high profile accorded to Ciara Conway by Labour since her election, including seconding Enda Kenny's nomination today, is an encouraging sign from a Waterford perspective.  And then there's the one sitting TD John Deasy.  The inevitable and tedious (not least one would imagine to the deputy himself) question of whether John Deasy would find a place in cabinet under Enda Kenny got its inevitable answer today.  If he wasn't on the All-Fine Gael frontbench in opposition, he was hardly going to make the shared table with Labour. But he's made a curmudgeonly name for himself in his nine years in the Dail.  There is something of the outsider - and the straight talker - which I think invites comparison with the new independents on the opposition benches.  If Ireland is to have a "new politics" there could well be a place in government office, and there's the small matter of topping the poll; we'll see.

It must be a great time to be each of those four Waterford TDs, things certainly felt different today.