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.