The Baillie Bugle

Listen, it’s not my fault. I’ve had these journal postings on my laptop for a couple of weeks now and I have tried to upload them. Slow connections, dodgy webservers, the absence of wi-fi on my train, in either direction, and various other technical difficulties have been my main enemies.

I’m typing this on my way back to London after a few days of much needed relaxation in Scotland. (Did I mention the lack of wi-fi? The free biscuits have almost made up for it).

I watched the first ‘show down’ between David Cameron and Tony Blair yesterday. It was far less spectacular and impressive than the press has reported. I couldn’t help but be amused by ITN News last night (when did it start to look more like a Playstation game than a news report, I wonder? Brass Eye has unwittingly become the template for modern news programmes –Chris Morris should demand a percentage). What really got me though was the plethora of boxing analogies used as a crutch by an extraordinarily lazy bunch of newspaper hacks this morning.

Now, last night, before bedding down, I watched a couple of old Mohammed Ali fights – his first meeting with Leon Sphinx and then the rematch, on Channel 5. The minor verbal clash and semi-clever, yet still irritatingly juvenile, jibes that Blair and Cameron traded bore no resemblance to anything that goes on in a boxing ring.

And what I saw on television last night, and in the papers this morning, bore no resemblance to journalism.

Speaking of the press… If you pick up today’s Times you’ll find, in the T2 section, a piece of actual journalism by my friend Joel Meadows, covering the new King Kong film, which he assures me is excellent.