What Lurks Beneath

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday May 27, 2006

Ruth Ritchie

Celeb anchors go as low as a mine shaft to milk a news story for all it's worth.

The News

All networks, every day

The Great Escape

Nine

I HAD A dream. I became trapped in a 61cm wide-screen TV. My dedicated colleagues spent days trying to rescue me, digging with anything at hand - martini glass, emery board. When finally, after several reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond, I emerged, the dream became a nightmare. David Koch jumped into my ambulance and insinuated himself into my tragedy. Eddie McGuire came back out of retirement, again, after just one week; all the contestants of the first series of Australian Idol got together and released a tribute album; Bardot reformed; Britney Spears promised her second-born; Shane Warne sent motivational text messages; and then I woke up.

When did television news become such a circus? (No insult to circus folk intended.) Was it gradual? Perhaps the formality of 20th-century anchors only misled us into believing that the content of the news was more reliable, even respectable, than the split-screen, pull-through, celebrity-driven pap we consume today.

When Liz Hayes appeared on breakfast television I don't recall the news playing like school fete gossip. Journalists didn't give themselves nicknames or push themselves into the centre of every major news story. Brekky Central (Sunrise, Seven) was the only place in Australia on Monday morning not reverberating with opinion about the miners' performance on The Great Escape.

Suddenly, after weeks of saccharine inculcation in the Beaky community, Mel and Kochie had nothing to say. What miners? They chose instead to remind us how, months ago, Sunrise flew a plane full of tradies to help the victims of Cyclone Larry. No matter how many times the fine upstanding resident of Innisfail said the word "tradespeople", Kochie corrected with "tradies".

Does anyone at Seven actually believe a jovial bastardisation of the English language makes David Koch more likeable or credible? We aren't on a bus coming back from a pissy weekend at the snow with a million of our best mates. We're waking up to watch the news, preferably in English.

The evening news is no better. Now that Nine and Seven get in early with news-lite at 4.30pm Monday to Friday, the only reliable information to be found on air at that time arrives with The Bold and The Beautiful on Ten.

When Kochie and Eddie were gouging each other's eyes out in Beaky two weeks ago, nobody covered the search for and eventual rescue of three Murray Island fishermen who had survived at sea with little more than rainwater and one squid for 22 days. (Not wanting to take anything away from the miners with their iPods and egg sandwiches, but 22 days and a squid!) For those survivors there were no sponsors, no Footy Show, no concert, no future prime minister in attendance, just a freakishly narrow escape that should have been good news.

And so it was with almost boundless scepticism that I sat down on Sunday night to watch The Great Escape. An absolutely bumper edition of 60 Minutes had already gone a long way towards melting this hard heart. We got cannibals and the fabulous Finn brothers. Then Charles Wooley managed to find a new angle in Beaconsfield.

Perfect Sunday night fare of bygone days, and then came Tracy Grimshaw and the miners. Two hours of television that has fuelled talkback radio and coffee shop banter ever since. Everybody was a TV critic this week. On Wednesday morning three women at the gym were still debating Tracy's lipgloss. Brant Webb's diction was a cause for consternation. Without a consonant in his mouth he still managed to spin a good yarn.

What about production values? Webb and Russell struggled to paint a verbal picture of their "two star hotel". Couldn't Eddie have written another little cheque for some of that new-fangled computer animation? Failing that, couldn't they have convinced the guys to crawl into a cubby by way of demonstration? Where was the footage from inside the mine?

Perhaps the mining company will release it as a school holiday blockbuster. But let's leave all those quibbles aside. Webb and Russell are terrific talent. Their story is gripping. They tell it well. Grimshaw, cosmetics notwithstanding, did an admirable job putting two miners at ease when she could have put them on the spot. Tracy Grimshaw is a total pro. Now she must go back to her day job of tracking down all the single mums, young Muslims and shonky builders who are rorting the system.

Though it pains me to say it, Eddie, it was money well spent. And so the nightmare goes on.

TV programs - Pages 54-55