Bomb Repeat Bomb

So I’m sitting in the flat tinkering with some new YOMG scripts. I have Talk Sport on in the background. The news comes through of the incident at Glasgow Airport. After a while it becomes obvious this is a major news story. Now for some reason my freeview box wouldn’t work when I moved the TV into my room, so I’m reduced to 3 channels that the external aerial picks up. Even then only STV has a decent picture.

So after phoning my Mum to get her to put News 24 on I switch on my TV expecting STV to go to a newsflash any minute. Any minute now. Any minute. But naw. Despite a major incident taking place in Glasgow a day after a major incident took place in London, STV bravely continued with Britain’s Worst Auditions.

Not even in the commercials did they think of dropping in a newsflash. No, because to break away from a collection of bams who failed on Pop Idol, Pop Stars and X Factor would be letting the terrorists win eh?

When they eventually went to a scheduled news bulletin the announcer breezily announced over those horrible idents that show folk sitting taking tea and laughing, “Now the news from Scotland, including the latest on a major incident happening at Glasgow Airport.”

We then had 4 minutes of news on it, before going on about the opening of the Scottish Parliament. The national news had more, but then we were straight on to You’ve Been Framed.

Should this kind of thing not be what news reporters turn up to work for? I remember the time coverage of the world snooker final was halted to cover the SAS storming the Iranian Embassy. But now, if World’s Craziest Donkeys was on you’d have to wait for it to wrap up before you got 3 minutes of ‘eyewitness’ (or as it turned out on Saturday “My mate was there and he telt me…”) reports at teatime.

Talk Sport at least cancelled their regular programming to cover events as they happened. Although to be fair before news came through Talk Sport’s discussion was on who wore the number 10 for West Ham before Trevor Brooking. “Do you know? Can you remember? Call us.”

It’s perhaps understandable that they would stop their programming as Talk Sport do have a large proportion of right-wing bams desperate to phne. The call-ins had an alarming number of people who suggested ‘we should kill them all’. “They want to commit suicide yeah? So just kill them. That’s what they want.”