The shame

Let's skirt as quickly as possible past the obvious jokes - The Kids Are All Tight; Hope we date before you get old, etc etc - and ask: what the hell was BBC News 24 doing last night?

Obviously the police search of Townshend's home was news, and you can understand the minute-by-minute news service waiting to pounce the moment anything happened. But yesterday evening, the 6 pm bulletin carried a continuous live feed across the bottom the screen of Townshend's front door. This added nothing to our understanding, told us nothing about the story (child porn users have white front doors?) and turned the serious search of Townshend's home into a Rolling News Circus. Fair enough, the media scrum would have been bad enough anyway, but for the BBC to ensure we could keep an eye on a closed door lest the other news - impending war, cabinet splits, missing women - bored us a little too much. Had we flipped, we might have missed... erm, a policeman in shirt sleeves (child porn users = well heated homes?) emerging, saying nothing and getting into a car and driving off. The excitable editors at N24 should take away a valuable lesson that something doesn't become news just because there's a news camera pointing at it.

Meanwhile, we were amused to see the Star's editorial yesterday - "How many more celebrities will it take before the government understands that we hate paedophiles?" So not only do we need celebrities to help us choose which supermarkets to shop in and how to vote, but we can't even know something is wrong until someone we've vaguely heard of commits a crime now? No wonder the gangsta rap/guns story is such a runner, as it involves Number One Recording Artists. Presumably burglary must wait until that one off Hollyoaks who's just dyed her hair black buys a tin of treacle and some brown paper. But it's nice to see the Star on its high horse about child porn. Remind us which national daily ran a front page picture of a child in a bikini top with the headline "She's Fifteen, She's 38DD*, and on her sixteenth birthday she's going to show them to you?" That would be The Star, of course.

(* - we can't remember the actual size of the breasts in question)