Britain develops gills; the news fails us

Apparently, so the BBC News tells me, Britian is under a bit of water. Ooh, not a bit, they cry- a lot. We as a nation are busily acquiring useful webbing around the digits, and in Gloucestershire, the first man in the world to develop gills is having, err, well, a whale of a time, swimming around evading the pitchfork-wielding "norms" who are jealous of his underwater prowess. When the flood receeds, he'll look like a prat, but for now- he's laughing. In more than one village in our sodden nation, there is a doomsday naysayers with a beard adding the finishing touches to the ark, which he has been busy building since retiring in 1982. They'll look a bit ridiculous when it all dries up, too.



This might all seem a bit flippant, in view of the enormous financial (and tragic human) cost of it all. But, I'm afraid, this is what the mind is pushed into by the way the crisis is presented to us. We get five minutes of serious discussion of water shortage and relief efforts, and then twenty minutes of gormless reporter in wellingtons interviewing a variety of wet labradors, and a quirky shot of a couple tying up their dinghy in the local short-stay car park. You wonder whether onlookers like myself, perched upon high in the relative safety of County Durham, might take it a bit more seriously if we had less of the human interest rubbish afterwards.



Because, in the time we've been frantically giving prime-time news slots to George Alagayah's anorak and squirrels backstroking through Tewkesbury, we have been told nothing of the tragic death of a South Korean Christian Missionary, held hostage by the Taleban, shot when his captors panicked en route to collecting a ransom for the prisoners' release. Nor have we seen anything about the team of Bulgarian nurses, finally returned home to Sofia after being held captive on death row in Libya for nearly a decade after being convicted of deliberately infecting hundreds of Libyan children with HIV, when they were in fact just there to help. The children were found to have had the HIV virus for up to three years before the Bulgarian nurses arrived; yet they were apparently tortured with electric shocks to force a confession which may or may not have ever even existed. It's not an exact science, of course- a news show is a TV programme like any other, and, unfortunately for the truth-hungry people who watch it to actually find out what's going on in the world, we get a pretty skewed impression. I for one would have loved to have seen those Bulgarian nurses kneeling down and kissing the tarmac at Sofia airport- surely much more of a feel good image than Worcestershire's wettest corgi being winched through an upstairs window to safety.

Wembley hums to the tune of a changing climate-the nation cringes

It was instructive and, in a typically modern "cringable" type of humour, funny. Live Earth came, and after an elongated and horrendous day of supposed awareness-raising, it slipped away into history, and mercifully so. Yet this monstrous display of self-congratulation wasn't, of course, instructive in the way it was meant to be. The people who came to watch, and even the couple of dozen who watched on television, were likely to either know all the facts and stats of global warming and climate change, or simply not care. At least half the assembled throng, I would like to imagine, were just there to see Spinal Tap re-form and perform.

What was in fact instructive about the day was just how much of a hollow exercise it all was. Radio 1 had instructions to cover it when they would clearly rather have been covering the T in the Park Festival from Scotland; their reporter at the Live Earth event sounded palpably (though quite rightly) embarrassed to have to talk about the message behind the event. To top it off, the embarrassed reporter asked embarrassed artists for their views on climate change- cue the expected stream of drivel. "We know that, being a band, we're not in the most carbon-neutral of professions", spake the prophet Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol. at least he was decent enough to admit the hypocrisy, and hinted at the real problem of this event. Performers were never going to say "no, I will not perform at a packed Wembley in front of a large TV audience. I love to fly aeroplanes, drive 4x4 trucks, and consume massive amounts of electricity on-stage too much". The artists were trapped into a cause they were, at best, indifferent to. Only the sweet Corinne Bailey-Rae sounded remotely sincere, and that was because she was mostly talking about her hair, and how afro hair "saves the planet" by not requiring as much electrical tending-to as the straighter Caucasian variety.

These artists were fine. They got up and did their thing, and hopefully by playing good songs well, led people to pay attention to the organisers, who could deal with the "message" in between acts. It was, as ever, Madonna who was the real disgusting spectacle. This woman, this almost bionic, soulless wraith of a songstress, penned a special song for the occasion. Of course she did. Why wouldn't she? Never mind her portfolio of shares in some of the biggest polluting companies in the world. It's those shares that allow her to afford her home in the UK. And without her being in residence in our fair nation, we wouldn't have seen her at Wembley, promoting climate change awareness. Ergo, ipso-facto, she's good for the environment. Bravo, Madge, buy yourself a private jet as a pat on the back.

It's difficult to write about this event without mistyping, and accidentally describing an event "promoting climate change". The awareness bit is crucial to the humble scribe. Yet, with its enormous lighting rig, huge speaker systems, and all in a concrete and metal stadium, promoting climate change is exactly what it did. This may well have pushed us that little bit closer to meltdown. On the plus side, within a decade we'll be able to make a truly decent Scottish wine.
Chris Moyles was right on the money when he pointed out that this hollow effort was nothing more than a carbon copy (no pun intended) of the equally annoying but at least 100% sincere Geldof & Friends Live 8 production of 2005. Their "Make Poverty History" rallying cry may as well have been, as Moyles said, transposed to this weekend's Wembley embarrassment. "Ladies and Gentlemen, we're here to Make the Earth History." It'd be nice to think he was over-doing it for the sake of comedy, but faced with this embarrassed cast of artists, plus the usual cause-whores Madonna & Co, he was right on the money.