Criticism demands articulacy; single adjective dimissals (He’s rubbish!) are for soccer fans. But why is it difficult to frame the BB family’s dislike of Huw Edwards, main presenter of BBC’s News at Ten? He’s a bollard of man but I’m no Adonis. He repeats phrases (“We’ll be analysing…”, “So, James, give us a flavour…”) but so do they all. He’s Welsh but I’m (God forgive me) West Riding. There's got to be more than that.He’s portentous but that’s his job. But portentousness could be the clue. He got the job because, in the cant broadcasting judgement, “he’s a safe pair of hands”. Thus his headlines are never violent. His portents are cardboard. For big fixed events (eg, the present Tory party conference) he’s parachuted in to do his anchoring on site. He stands there (to Mrs BB’s mouth-foaming outrage), outside the venue, in his blue suit, muttering middle-class excitement, frowning slightly.
Some day he’ll be required to announce the end of the world (“We’ll be bringing you reactions…”) and it’ll be such a bore. And Mrs BB will be catatonic.
WORKS WELL HITS Monday: 26 (Poor day. Pack it in?). Tuesday: 80 (Looks good. But not for me. Lucy’s Tom writes monster comment on social kissing). Future action: Change blog title to: Works Well by Tom and BB?
NOVELS A Stall Recovered. Plutarch has read full MS and phones with suggestions. Both The Crow (Housing details in Tucson, Arizona; accent/vocabulary for Texan flight instructor) and Julia (US educational system) have helped but by email. This is first time anyone else has spoken aloud on behalf of my characters. P says Christopher cannot lie. It’s as if P’s joined the family. And he’s right
Blest Redeemer 11,993 words.
5 comments:
Okay, first impression of Huw is that he looks like Sam the Eagle from the Muppet Show - heavy browed scowl insinuating overweaning sense of self-importance, which probably means he actually has low self esteem, but puts on a good face.
Mrs. BB is reacting to that countenance the same way I would.
Flehh!
May be it is the way Huw's left eyebrow rises involontarily regardless of what he is saying while the other eyebrow remains static that upsets you. Rory Bremner seems to share your dislike with his rather cruel mimicry.
One eyebrow up one eyebrow down was roger Moore's self-confessed acting style wasn't it?
I think the final nail in Huw's coffin for me was that awful trail thing he did many years ago for BBC news where he was simperingly saying about how he just sometimes has to go off on a wild tangent and do his own thing because he's just that kind of guy... when, as a friend once cruelly remarked about Brando in 'The Wild One', he's about as wild as Alpen. Dull people insisting on how wacky and eccentric they are never fails to annoy and more firmly convince one of the opposite. Whereas I liked Angela Merkel's reply to the question of how she got on with Sarkozy: 'I think I'm probably the most boring person Mr Sarkozy has ever met.'
Also, I don't remember Huw E ever being otherwise. George Alagiah is pretty smug and inane these days to my mind but I do remember him once having some credibility as a proper correspondent which still counts for something.
But I don't think you always have to explain and justify a dislike, as your title implies, there have always been and always will be those Dr Fell characters about.
Re stats, much as I dislike to dismiss my loved one's pulling power, there is something downright funny going on with stats these days, again. Mine are implausibly through-the-roof and the referring addresses mostly seem to be weird encoded URLs which all lead to the same site run by someone in Korea, I think.
The Crow: I'm delighted that HE's qualities raise transatlantic hackles and I admire your full-flighted fantasy that (probably) implies he beats his wife, albeit with a feather duster. I could plead my 300-word limit but I still haven't managed to reach down and palpate his essence and it worries me. Often, as in the US I seem to remember, the news ends with a "funnny" (My younger daughter labels this part as "A snake learned to roller-skate") and when the camera cuts back to HE at his desk he can be seen smiling, not because the "funny" was funny but because he's doing what he imagines news presenters should do. He is the master of the artificially generated gesture.
Plutarch: You are careful not to align yourself with HE's critics. From politeness, from fear of retribution or from the need to hide an even greater antipathy than mine?
Lucy: Well-spotted, the superficial desire of the dull to be seen as hell-raisers. This tendance emerged in one of the most stiflingly middle-class autobiographies ever written in which Janet Baker, whose singing I admire the far side of idolatry (I even wrote a sonnet about her and you were kind enough to be kind about it) claimed to have an over-developed sense of mischief. Perhaps it's a mark of her pathological restraint that her claim was such a mild one. Janet Baker in cap and bells! Then surely it would be time for the graves at Cookham to open up and spill out their dead.
If I say I was terribly pleased (and secretly flattered) Tom chose Works Well as the compost heap on which to drop his delightfully non-PC observations, I hope you realise that this in no way diminishes the pleasure I get from spotting that briefest of blogonyms in my email inbox and then rushing straight over to Blogger so that I can read it framed as it ought to be. Good wine, as it were, always deserves the decanter. I am pleased that an anti-HE bond brings us closer together.
I must see this man in action. I'm so excited. I wonder if he could be as boring as my husband's uncle Ted who is, to date, the most boring man I ever met.
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