Another fine mess you’ve got us into

I spent much of yesterday in my home bunker flicking between Sky News and the BBC’s coverage of the epic developments beginning with Mrs May’s statement to the House of Commons and ending with the picking over the entrails of its aftermath following her officially-announced 5.00pm Downing Street press conference that began some 22 minutes late.

It was the kind of career-defining episode of which political reporters dream when they first think of going into journalism and for which many of them subsequently live.

Ditto probably most embryonic politicians.

Even for we mere members of the British public there was a sense of peering through a giant metaphorical giant window pane at some world-affecting developments in the making.

Inevitably, by the nature of these things, it was dominated by a heightened atmosphere of mounting chaos, rumour and speculation as the day progressed with everyone involved running first on emptying tanks of fuel before switching to neat adrenalin mid-afternoon as events unfolded, apparently becoming weirder and more historically-important by the hour.

This soon afterwards it is still probably too soon to pick the winners and losers amongst the key reporters and journalists, many of whom had to simultaneously keep up with fast-moving developments whilst struggling to remain apparently calm on screen and also battling with the occasional technical production glitches that tend to accompany long sequences of coverage from different locations.

The BBC’s Six O’ Clock News on BBC1 was a case in point.

It opened with a shot of anchor Sophie Raworth greeting viewers from a vantage point opposite the shiny black door of Number 10 – as every news channel’s equivalent was also doing –  and beginning with an introductory sequence of ‘main headlines’ in which, in short order, the coverage went first to a sports reporter who only managed to utter the words “… And in the world of sport …” before the picture switched to a preview of the local London news headlines and back again to Raworth … who by now was disappearing beneath a ‘bleeding’ picture and a blaze of different pixelated colours and at one stage a blank green screen.

Somewhere back in the editing department at BBC News HQ somebody then finally got a grip and regained control of what was happening – no doubt a BBC News department post-mortem inquest into what the hell went wrong will surely follow today.

As for the rest of us, I guess we’ll be strapping ourselves in again this morning for another orgy of political how’s-your-father …