@spendius,
Recess.
This coverage today is about as fascinating as fascinating gets to a literary mind. What it actually means? Getting past all the rights and wrongs and partisan positions such as Mr Jay QC's chance to pirouette his stuff in a manner Cicero might have managed, at a stretch, were he to be faced with a society as complex as ours is which yet betrays under close scrutiny to be not dissimilar to a world populated by what Mr Blair called "feral beasts".
Kings may well be feral beasts but they also may not be. Democracy is showing signs of producing a world in which we have no chance of anything else to rule us but feral beasts. aka "
Core Participants".
The show confirms that the movers and shakers in Mediacorps take virtually no interest in the content of the vast bulk of any newspaper. They may ask the gardening editor to write a puff for a Miracle Grow product as a favour to a golfing chum with an interest in horticulture.
Or suggest to the Classified Advertising Manager that motorised dildos should be moved from Personal Services to Plant, Machinery and Tools.
Or complain to the Features Editoress that the "tall, dark, handsome stranger" routine in the Your Fortune in the STARS column is getting a trifle
passe.
In Michael Frayn's book Towards the End of the Morning (he's an optimist. Dylan has the night coming steppin' in.) Mr Frayn has the crossword compiler pass away and his colleagues finding the next ten years crossword puzzles piled up in his desk. And he has been in post so long that nobody can remember when he started. I think Mr Frayn was suggesting, in line with the findings of behavioural psycholgy, that anybody who had solved all the crosswords this old eccentric had complied had had their mind brought into congruence with his. The large pile of future crosswords, which were used, might make some think that compiling crosswords is more addictive than solving them. Possibly with formulations in physics as well.
The sports results probably go straight in by electronic transference without anybody in the newspaper seeing them. The same with stock prices. Texts from other sources will have to be touched up to make them look original.
All that stuff, and much more, is of little or no concern, except for minor adjustments, to these people. It's the top of the greasy pole and the amusement is directly proportional to the determination of the scrambling. To a literary mind I mean.
I must say that the lady did very well all things considered. The soul of discretion even under the goadings of Mr Jay: an excellent example of the modern Inquisition.
