24/7 news has removed us from live reality

Long before football was screwed up by Murdoch, there was little beyond recorded clips from the big games on telly in the late evening. This inspired the famous episode of The Likely Lads, in which the two archetypal 1970s blokes tried to avoid hearing the score of an England international game before the cut-down highlights were screened some time after 10 pm. Today, people would gape at this comedy in baffled disbelief.

Back then, the only match British footie fans could watch live was the FA Cup Final. 25 million viewers would tune in and feel genuinely part of this near-State occasion, as various levels of the Royal family dutifully turned up to shake hands with the 22 players – and then sit bored for ninety minutes as they watched  a game they clearly didn’t know anything about unfold. I attended my first Cup Final in 1963 (Manchester United beat Leicester City 3-1) and I can record that it was a pivotal experience in my life. I really couldn’t quite grasp at first just how all-embracing the experience was compared to sitting at home. Casual critics of football have obviously never been to a floodlit evening game in, say, the later stages of the Champions’ League, or an FA Cup replay. The atmosphere created by 65,000 fans in the man-made light and thin night air is like nothing else on Earth.

The massively watered-down experience of a life experienced through television is equally well understood the first time one experiences the reality of Safari. Almost everything that makes watching life in the wild unique is missing from the televisual version of it. The smells, the deathly quiet occasionally broken by yelling male apes or roaring lions, the harsh light of an African afternoon, the sharp cool of dusk in the bush: all of this is absent from otherwise audable TV wildlife programmes.

But nowhere is this more apparent than during the news.

Both reporters and artists have recognised this experiential sanitisation for years. There’s a great lyric from Don Maclean’s album Prime Time, in which – during the title track – we hear the following about Americans watching a news bulletin about the Vietnam War:

They shot him in the chest/pass the chicken breast

The General is saying that he’s still not impressed

Today, the same is true of news bulletins in the 24/7 age about economic madness. We are not in Greece experiencing the incomprehension of ordinary Greeks that they are being blamed and vilified for the sins of their leaders. We don’t live in Madrid listening to Prime Minister Rajoy denying the reality Spaniards see all around them. All we have to go on is white-collared news anchors telling us that Ollie Rehn has confidence in Spain’s recovery, and Christine Lagarde thinks the Greeks will emerge all the stronger for having starved to death.

The day may come in time – after all travel has been restricted, and all first-hand experience banned – when all of us will experience life at second or even third hand, as if present-day news might be instant history to be dismissed as something we cannot possible imagine. Our grandchilden will be told that today, aliens landed on the island of Madagascar and ate every form of life on it. But to them, it will seem like little more than a weather forecast.

This is why we must ignore all the controlling extremists telling us that our own empirical observations are in fact nothing more than illusions created by pre-formed bigotry. Hands-on and live-as-it-happened experience is invaluable….and the internet-based contrary view an alternative to lazy MSM coverage that parrots a triple-filtered reality. More than that, they are the key that will unlock the truth in a future where, quite possibly, all news will become universally accepted water maintained at the perfect temperature for having a relaxing soak at the end of a long and pointless day’s work.