I love this NUJ strike. The BBC has been amazing because of it. I genuinely mean that.

I have issues with broadcasters zealous doctrine that News and current affairs are the most important and unmoveable items on the schedule.

My issue is this really:  The News as a thing is very important. It is very important to know what is going on in the world and to able to be kept up to date with world events. That I do not dispute. However, whilst The News as a thing is very important, The News as a TV Programme isn’t. Not one bit.  And this insistence on News News News is a waste of scheduling that could be used to do dramas or decent comedies.

I bang my head against a wall when people schedule news programmes to compete to see who has the best news at 10 and the fact that viewers genuinely give a shit about it and complain that ITV do their news at 10.30 instead of 10.  Apart from anything else, unless a terrible disaster occurs or there is breaking news (which there really isn’t all that much of these days) the news at 10pm is the same news at 7pm which was the same news at 6pm and was mostly the same when it was on the hour all through the day since breakfast TV told us all the news there was in 15 minute intervals.  When I worked in places that had the radio it would be the same 8 songs and same 5 news stories every hour.  But at least Radio news takes a minute.  1800-1930 is the worst time for terrestrial telly as it’s just news or one show style news and current affairs shows. Plus, I live in Essex so we have the main news and then we get London tonight which pretty much just tells us everything we have heard in the main news.

I get by on scanning headlines on google and then investigating further anything I find interesting, why do we need hours and hours and hours of TV programming wasted on News?

Also, they interrupt films to have 15-35 minutes worth of news in the middle. Because YOU CAN’T MOVE THE NEWS!!! So what happens is I don’t watch the film thus losing an audience figure.  Channel 5 do their 90 second update, but that’s 90 seconds more than I want in the middle of whatever Steven Seagal film they are putting on to fill the void that is their schedule.  When your advert breaks are 7 minutes long and come along every 6 minutes, an extra interruption of the news really is the straw that breaks the camel’s back

And let’s look at the news.

They have two people to read the news, someone to do the sport, OBs – you don’t need this. Just one person reading the news telling me what happened is fine.  I don’t care about graphics, idents, I just don’t care. Just tell me what’s happened so I can go and investigate it online and get to the truth of it.  They were forced to do this yesterday and it’s the most I’ve ever enjoyed the news. I turned over at 10 to see what episode of Dad’s Army they were hastily forced to show instead of the news but there was one news reader reading the news on their own and it was great. Please, please, please keep this as the norm. If you want to save money, why not start with getting rid of the 7 extraneous presenters that there are in every news show?  It works with one. You really don’t need any more.

It wasn’t just the News. Late review wasn’t completely full of dickheads unable to take any joy out of anything artistic. I normally find it like watching smug, snobbish Simon Cowells discarding a book or film like it’s a deluded 17 year old who thinks it can sing. Last night, I quite enjoyed it because it wasn’t four arrogant, miserable people talking about the arts from which they no longer gain any joy from. Some of the people yesterday seemed to actually enjoy things like films and books and music. Enjoying things on Late Review? Viva Le Revolution!

And the best thing ever:  We got films instead of News 24.

News 24, the bane of my working late nights existence.  There is a channel called news 24 and I can live that, it’s like sport, give its own channel so I can avoid all of it in one place. But BBC2 becomes news 24. I get back from a gig and I want to stick a bit of telly on and I have signed documentaries, News 24, QVC, Stuff about bands I have no interest in and Casino to choose from. It’s infuriating. Not everyone up late is a twat, please programme stuff for normals too.  It was like when ITV had the phone line scandal, all call in shows got binned and they replaced them with films.  Films. I was in hog heaven – I actually started watching ITV as from 11-3 they stuck films on AND they weren’t invasively signed to make them unwatchable like ITV1’s films are now.  It was like that last night. Instead of News and News and News we were given Eurotrip and Day of the Dead.  God Bless Ya!

So, NUJ, please strike for as long as you like. I have no particular axe to grind with you and I feel your concerns and reasons for striking are valid and admirable, it’s just that, by forcing theBBC to be unable to use your personnel and your input, you have inadvertently made the BBC a 100 times better – you might want to think about that.

Although, as I have said, everyone is so fascistically driven to make News and Current affairs the main focus of programming you will undoubtedly get to have your cake and eat it.  Which I am not angry about. I’ll always have these three days when news wasn’t the all channel blanket it usually is and BBC1+2 were just how I like them. News as information, not entertainment and full of films.