In the early 1990s, I signed up to lead one of a number of teams tasked with coming up with zero-cost solutions to knotty BBC News problems. (I had decided to change the habits of a lifetime by sucking up to management, having realized that my moderate production skills weren’t likely to guarantee automatic promotion.) I chose as our issue the propensity of all BBC TV News producers (in those days, at least - it may have changed) to never, ever, under any circumstances, actually have a video package ready for transmission more than 90 seconds prior to the start of a bulletin.
This “cutting it fine” culture meant that the main story of the day sometimes failed to make the top of the programme, which in turn lead to the impression we didn’t understand the news agenda. It also meant that package which had made their slot would occasionally go out with a few frames of black, or with missing audio, or with one phrase repeated – all because there hadn’t been time for a final run-through.
There was no rational explanation and no necessity for this state of affairs. Colleagues who had defected to ITN’s News at Ten – a programme consistently superior in those days to our own in almost every respect – used to taunt us with stories of regularly being in the local downing a Becks half an hour before transmission, their item safely done and dusted. Consequently, ITN always looked more polished and professional than the BBC’s Nine O’Clock News, and the same was generally true of the One and the Six as well.
So why couldn’t we manage it?
The popular, self-serving view amongst news staff was that we all simply cared too much about making our packages as insanely great as they could possibly be: this striving for perfection made us steal every second in order to give us a fighting chance of attaining our own Olympian standards.
The truth, of course, was somewhat different. First, thanks to a ludicrous deal with the unions, video editors (there was no desk-top equipment to allow producers to do their own editing in those days) always seemed to bugger off for a meal break at the very moment you wanted to get started. Second, if you got a package ready early, the programme editor would come down to view it and would invariably ask for changes, which was infuriating, and would mean you’d be cutting up to the wire in any case.
Third, and the real reason why people put themselves under so much unnecessary pressure, one of the main pleasures of working in TV News is the mad adrenaline rush as your deadline approaches and it’s touch and go whether you’ll make it. Then, afterwards, when you realize you’ve got away with it yet again, your body is flooded with endorphins, and you feel gloriously, ecstatically relieved: that chemical-release sequence soon proves utterly addictive.
Fourth, there was absolutely no reason – apart from managing your stress levels – for acting more sensibly. There was no credit to be gained from getting your package done early – in fact, it was taken as a sign that you didn’t have the right stuff for News: you lacked ambition! Not only did completing a package early bring no rewards, failing to make your slot was rarely seen as that big a crime: unless you did it regularly, and as long as your tardiness was the result of trying to squeeze in that utterly vital last-minute clip or ten seconds of fresh pictures, you suffered no sanctions, and your reputation as a balls-out go-getter remained intact: you weren’t willing to settle for a quiet life – you cared, see?
I was reminded of those jittery but occasionally exhilarating days when I read today that 3,018 convicted burglars guilty of at least 15 previous offences were spared the inconvenience of a jail term by our Criminal Injustice system last year.
Burglary is never a matter of necessity, no matter what fatuous liberal fantasists tell us: no one ever steals in order to buy shoes for their poor, starving little mites. Most burglars (apart from being massively lazy and disgustingly immoral) are simply addicted to the excitement of carrying out the crime itself – and to the relief at (almost invariably these days) getting away with it. It’s that old chemical release sequence. The tendency to reoffend has absolutely nothing to do with our prisons being little better than colleges of crime: in most cases, the criminal is simply an adrenaline/endorphin junkie (of course, he’ll often be addicted to a whole bunch of illegal chemicals as well).
Just as it was hard to expect the TV news producer to break his or her cycle of addiction to delivering packages at the last possible moment without some form of career-harming deterrent in place, there is no possibility of breaking the hardened criminal’s addiction to burglary or mugging or joy-riding or rape or causing a public affray or vandalism without severe and inescapable deterrent sentences and a distinctly unpleasant prison regime.
To think otherwise, you either don’t care about the victims of crime, or you have utterly failed to understand the addictive nature of criminal behaviour. Any liberal do-gooder who imagines that not punishing a criminal is somehow doing them good is simply wrong – they are doing the criminal, and, far more importantly, his myriad victims, immense harm.
Shame on them.
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