(Monday) Moan 48

 

The Perils of Live Broadcasting – part 1

There is an understandable desire amongst broadcasters for the live interview, particularly when they are covering breaking news stories.

 

But it doesn’t always work out well.

 

Radio 5 Live decided that last week’s story about a plane being diverted to Stansted under escort from RAF Typhoons warranted the ‘breaking news’ treatment.  Chris Warburton was the man charged with extracting some interesting information from the passenger selected for interview. 

 

It didn’t go well:-

 

CW “tell us exactly what you were able to see?” 

Passenger “Ah, well nothing much”

CW “and what did you hear?”

Passenger “ah, nothing because we were at the front of the plane and it must have been at the back”

CW “so what about the fighter plane escort. That must have been alarming?”

Passenger “well actually, I didn’t see anything because I was sitting in the middle seats and you can’t see out of the windows and in any case we were flying in the clouds”

 

So, not much of an eyewitness account. But it was good radio because of the discomfort of the interviewer - who ploughed on in an ultimately vain attempt to get his subject to say something interesting.

 

 

The Perils of Live Broadcasting – part 2

Worse than the live interview is the live broadcast whilst an event is taking place or just as it has finished.  If the event is going on we often see the reporter standing up with his back to whatever is happening, speaking in hushed tones because they know that they are disrupting the main event – for example, speeches at conferences or whilst some sporting event is in progress. So irritating for the viewer.

 

And then we have the broadcast at the end of an event, often a sporting event, as the crowd is dispersing. Now this ought to set alarm bells ringing, you would think.  Apparently not, if the report from Wembley Stadium after the Championship play-off game yesterday is any guide.  Reporter Chris Slegg was doing a piece to camera about how Crystal Palace had won the game and the Premiership jackpot, when a departing Watford fan took the opportunity to give this incisive comment on the game. 

 

Predictable?  Of course.  Will it happen again?  Inevitably.

 

 

German football resurgence?

So, Bayern Munich won the all-German Champions League Final against Borussia Dortmund on Saturday.  A close and very fast-paced game that was decided only at the very end. Dortmund fought hard to upset the odds, often making Bayern’s dominance in Germany this season seem questionable, but the right team won, both for their performance on the night and for their results over the whole season.  Watch the Bundesliga highlights show on ITV4 each week to see the quality of the German league.  

 

Just a couple of minor observations, rather than moans.  First, the British press went overboard (surely not?) before the game about how German football had reinvented itself following years of ‘under-achievement’ (i.e. not winning a major trophy at either club or international level for years) and how they had, in particular, focused on developing their own young players.   Sounds like a good point, except that the Munich team contained six non-German players and the Dortmund team four. It’s the same with all the top teams in every country – they scour the globe for the talent and then go for those they feel are the best mixture of skill and affordability.  Let’s not pretend the Germans are any different.

 

Second, there seemed to be an inconsistency in the Deutsche Bundesliga’s own website’s headline of “Arsenal, Juventus and Barcelona: just a handful of the seven sides to crumble under the might of Bayern Munich this season”, when set against their own summary of the game when Arsenal came so close to knocking Bayern out of the competition – “Bayern suffered an almighty scare when Arsenal won the second leg 2-0 to draw 3-3 on aggregate but lose on away goals”.

 

Not so much a crumble as elimination on a technicality.

 

 

 

The new Ice-Cream Wars?

It seems that more and more people are resorting to online shopping from the major supermarkets these days. 

 

Advocates talk about the time and effort saved in shopping online as against getting into the car, driving to the shops, walking round the aisles to choose the things they want, and then reversing the whole process to get home again. Why not have someone else do the hard work and leave you free to do other things?

 

Those against this trend argue that you can’t beat being able to choose which items will go into your basket – this apple rather than that one, this cake you wouldn’t have considered except that it looks so tempting as you are walking round the shop, etc.

 

I hope that those who are resisting the new way of shopping will continue to do so, or the roads around us will become even more clogged with supermarket delivery vans than they are at present.  They appear at all hours of the day, banging their crates as they unload their deliveries, revving their engines as they struggle to negotiate the narrow streets lined with parked cars.

 

Last week these two vehicles were delivering at the same time – not sure if they were going to the same address or not.  Or maybe, as my wife suggested, it’s the start of a supermarket equivalent of the ice-cream van ‘wars’ we used to see?