Glob-a-log

Columnists are weird. Most of the time, they only seem to be happy when they can find fault with something. They love to be angry & disgusted with stuff and at times it looks as if they only live for the moment that they can honestly say that they are truly saddened by this, that or the other.

The really strange thing is that while some columnists are paid rather handsomely to be the paper or online version of the office or party bore, most are quite willing to do it for free. Hence the millions of blogs that now blossom on the WWW - like flies, after a particularly bloody battle on the largest and messiest battlefield imaginable.

Anyway, not everybody has it in him or herself to become a full-blown columnist. Some people just have one or two pet peeves and they will do their swarming only when provoked by these collector’s item issues. They are the specialists of this particular insect world - dung beetles, you could say.

These are the people who write letters to newspapers - or call in or write to the BBC to complain about the programmes:

Kirsty Wark, the BBC’s Newsnight presenter, has prompted complaints to the corporation saying that she showed too much of her legs on screen. Wark, 53, who is married with two children, wore a black dress with a hem that was several inches above her knee, while she was seated. One viewer wrote to the show to complain: “The dress which Kirsty Wark is wearing is far too short for a lady of her age.

It’s sad, isn’t it? Not just the incredible stupidity of the ‘lady of her age’ remark. I know that most of these letter writers would love to turn back the clock to the early fifties, preferably the early fifties of the nineteenth century, when ‘ladies’ of whatever age weren’t even allowed to show a bit of ankle but really - and to use their kind of tired language - in this day and age, when even serious newspapers and news programmes comment upon and at times show the lack of clothes and underwear our celebs aren’t wearing… Well, let’s just be happy the Newsnight presenters don’t flash their lack of knickers at the unsuspecting viewer.

More to the point really, just think about the things on offer on your average news programme, from floods to quakes, from war to famine, from Bush to Putin to Ahmadinejad: each night, in other words, this deluge of bad news and even worse news stories - and in the midst of this, or in between a story about an Austrian cellar and another suicide bombing in Iraq, there are these people who find time to be shocked, angered and/or saddened by a news presenter who shows a bit of leg.

There really are some very sad people on this planet.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 14:42 and is filed under Columns, Satire. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.