Once journalists tasked with covering huge news events prided themselves on their detachment and impartiality. These days TV’s elite broadcasters see themselves as celebrity activists whose views and prejudices must hold sway.
Take Emily Maitlis and Krishnan Guru-Murphy whose coverage of the US Presidential election on America Decides (Channel 4, Wednesday) was less even-handed than a Captain Hook Convention.
Forget irreverence and ribbing, what we got from their marathon eight-hour overnight special was a weighted diatribe against Trump. The only second term they wanted the Donald to serve was a jail term.
We got allegations, insults, and regurgitated scandals but neither of them once questioned Kamala Harris’s record. They didn’t ask about her changing her mind on key issues; for example, in 2020, Kamala advocated decriminalising border crossings and banning fracking. They didn’t wonder if her one-time allegiance to all things woke, including defunding the police, might have turned off millions of floating voters.
The closest Maitlis came to querying her candidacy was to ask: “Has she run a strong enough campaign?”
Which was hardly up there with questions like, “What do you fear most from a Trump victory?”
Stormy Daniels asked former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, “Would you leave your daughter with Donald Trump?”
Maitlis got grumpier and more graceless as the night progressed, haranguing anyone she suspected wasn’t entirely onside with Team Harris. At the death, Guru-Murphy had to tell the former BBC TV news presenter and Newsnight anchor to stop swearing after she branded once and future President Trump “bat-s*** crazy”. Emily, and her Martini earrings, left the room.
Dundee-born actor Brian Cox captured the vibe of the show perfectly when he said: “We have to make sure he doesn’t get in…he’s crazy, he’s insane, he wants to be a dictator…”
We, Brian? Surely American elections should be decided by American voters, not Channel 4 and their virtue-signalling battalion of luvvies.
It took former White House press secretary Sean Spicer to restore a little balance by reminding us that the Democrats had tried to kick Trump off the ballot papers. Not so democratic, then.
The constant claims, common to all the TV coverage, that the election was “extremely close…on a knife-edge…too close to call” turned out to be hogwash too.
Impartiality is tough to achieve these days, but the much-maligned GB News managed it far better than C4 or the BBC, whose efforts on election night coverage was surprisingly underwhelming.
Viewers hoping for fair-play and balance will have been disappointed by ITV too. At one point, host Tom Bradby branded Trump “a fascist”. There’s impartial for you. A few hours later Good Morning Britain (ITV, Thursday) saw Susanna Reid, at her most sanctimonious. “He’s a convicted criminal,” she fumed.
I’m not Piers Morgan’s biggest fan – he is – but it reminded viewers how much the show needed Piers as a counter-balance to all this red-faced media class indignity.
Few things on earth are smaller than the egos of big-shot TV presenters. Peter Crouch, King Kong, Ben Nevis… all these giants are dwarfed into insignificance by the sheer scale of their self-importance and self-righteous conceit.
It was a bad election for pampered, multi-millionaire, Trump-bashing celebrities like J-Lo, Oprah and Cardi B. Floating voters largely ignored them and handed Trump the greatest come-back since Lazarus. Or at least since Grover Cleveland 131 years ago.
It was also a bad election for puffed-up British podcasters like Alastair ‘Dodgy Dossier’ Campbell and Tory wet Rory Stewart. The gulf between their predictions and the actual result mirrors the disconnect between the commentariat and the general public over Brexit, and explains the robust rise of Reform UK.
Satire didn’t blossom either. America’s now-dismal live topical ‘comedy’ show Saturday Night Live (Sky Comedy, Sunday) had Kamala as a surprise guest last weekend and gave her the easiest ride this side of a kindergarten playground.
In a short skit, Harris told her mirror-image (played by comedian Maya Rudolph): “It’s nice to see you Kamala, and I’m just here to remind you, you got this.” Whoops.
Earlier in the campaign, CBS show 60 Minutes had edited Harris’s appearance to make it “more succinct”, that is, less over-flowing with word-salad gobbledegook.
Would our own Have I Got News For You (BBC1, Friday) be more even-handed? What do you think? Self-appointed satirist Ian Hislop defended Rachel Reeves after her budget – even though bond markets reacted worse to that than they did to the Truss-Kwarteng mini-budget.
But last night a surprisingly chilled Hislop contented himself with puerile digs, directed at Trump dancing, like “The Village People – and there’s the idiot.” Again, not a word on Harris. I would politely suggest that satirists should view all politicians with equal cynicism. Some smart, savage wit would be helpful too.
The Day Of The Jackal (Sky Atlantic, Thursday) was a welcome relief from the argy-bargy of American politics. It isn’t a remake of Frederick Forsyth’s novel, or the 1973 film that followed, rather this stylish series is loosely inspired by the book’s spirit.
Eddie Redmayne is the Jackal, aka Charles Calthrop, with Lasanda Lynch as MI6 sniper Bianca Pullman who is out to put him away.
At the start, we see the enigmatic assassin a lean, mean killing machine, heavily disguised as a doddery old cleaner. He infiltrates an office and bumps off multiple targets before eliminating a right-wing German politician meticulously from a record-beating distance range of nearly 2.4miles.
Someone should pitch those telescopic sights on Dragons’ Den.
Forsyth’s book was based on fact – in 1962 disaffected French army officers plotted to kill General Charles de Gaulle after he granted independence to Algeria.
This series, written by Top Boy’s Ronan Bennett, is entirely fictional, and revolves around the Jackal’s bid to snuff out a tech wiz known as UDC (no relation to the UDA) whose revolutionary currency software programme has made powerful enemies.
The action shots and car chases are nifty but, where the original was taut and focused, this ten-part tale suffers a little from plot-padding, like Bianca’s unlikely home life.
I feel the same way about The Old Man (Disney+). It sparkles every moment Jeff Bridges is on screen as grizzly ex-CIA operator Dan Chase. When he’s not on screen, and the action lingers in the back story or the dreary kidnapping, I find my finger hovering over fast-forward.
The oddest thing about TV’s latest grim true-crime horror story Until I Kill You (ITV, Sunday – Wednesday) was Anna Maxwell-Martin’s wandering accent as victim Delia Balmer. Even odder, if the watched the documentary that followed, it almost matched Delia’s actual accent.
This was the real-life tale of evil Liverpudlian John Sweeney – a carpenter turned scalp-taking axe murderer. Delia, a spiky hard-to-like nurse, was due to be his third victim. Shaun Evans – the shy and sensitive young Morse in Endeavour – was almost unrecognisable as the creepy control freak.
True crime is ITV’s forte right now. Technically their series are hard to fault. My only thought is, the modern world is miserable enough. Isn’t it time to revive the kind of imaginative escapist action dramas that their predecessors gave us in the 1960s and 70s?
Mrs Peel, you’ve never been more needed.
Random irritations: Eight weeks of Christmas TV adverts. They’ve been running since the end of October. Wake me up when it’s over.
