Fasten your seat-belts!
A confession. This morning when I came to the computer I had originally considered apologising for returning to this subject again so soon but then I had second thoughts. Why on earth should I worry, if nobody else isn’t?
After all the bizarreness of the world news hit us in 2016, there’s practically nothing imaginable that could possibly surprise us in this crazy modern world, right?
Cue President-elect Donald Trump’s press conference in New York yesterday, shown ‘live’ in the UK from 4.00pm on the BBC News and Sky News channels.
Well, not quite from 4.00pm, because of course – as is the nature of such things – it was delayed for about 12 minutes for reasons that were never explained. In a rather reassuring manner it underlined one of the virtues of 24 hour dedicated news channels: the fact that in real life time and timings are a movable feast.
In another context you might have arrived at your nearest railway station to catch the 9.48am ‘slow’ (stopping) train to Waterloo only to find that it arrived either one minute early or indeed nine minutes later … and there was (and is) nothing you can do about it.
When it comes to our old-fashioned terrestrial TV channels in the UK, we’d get the news at 6.00pm and at 10.00pm, with headlines and sport trailed at the beginning, in convenient little bite-sized chunks that reassuringly neither frightened the horses, nor granny, nor even the kids.
Sanitised, safe, all over in twenty minutes – and then back to the soap operas as per usual.
I wonder how, perhaps one day this year towards the back end of May, in a package lasting exactly 120 seconds our premier BBC newscaster Fiona Bruce will cover the news that “… so far today Donald Trump has nuked Libya, Iran and North Korea and announced that he’s going to consider what to do about China at some point between lunch and the evening’s 7.00pm (Eastern Time) NBC’s live NFL match between the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys”.
Tempting as it is to say “You couldn’t make it up”, de facto (of course) it is quite easy to admit you could.
You’d just allow yourself to have a nightmare and then wake up and find that it is real. Or maybe that should read ‘… and then find that real life is worse than what you were dreaming about, only you cannot just go back to sleep again and pick up your nightmare from where you left off’.
As I sat in the upright chair in front of my father’ bridge table yesterday beholding Mr Trump’s performance in all its glory, I couldn’t help my mind from drifting back into history. I’d heard extraordinary echoes of it somewhere before … but where was it?
Suddenly it hit me between the eyes.
Trump’s bravura, ridiculous, free-wheeling stream-of-consciousness quasi-rant had a certain degree of Peter Finch’s epic and Oscar-winning performance in the 1976 movie Network (written by Paddy Chayefsky, directed by Sidney Lumet) about it – though of course it was not so brilliantly incisive, sharp or indeed well-written as that original.
For anyone who saw Network first time around, or even those who didn’t, who can ever forget that iconic “I’m as mad as hell” speech?
See here – YOUTUBE
Will the last person out please turn off the lights …
