Local is all relative
Growing up in the country provides you with innumerable experiences that our city brethren can never truly appreciate, or perhaps even understand. One of these things is the local TV news bulletin.
Before the state-wide 6pm news that everyone is familiar with, regional TV networks do their best to prove their local credentials by covering the important issues in the surrounding area. This is a difficult task as these networks cover large areas, have small budgets, and are mostly staffed by people desperate to leave for the capital cities. What you usually end up with is a combination of council meetings, football matches, photogenic school children and any visitor of note who passes through.
The other feature of local news is the ability to tie fame-worthy events and individuals to the local area. Sometimes this is easy, like Albury and Lauren Jackson or Mark Taylor and Wagga Wagga, sometimes it is a little more tenuous, like the time our local media decided to cover the wedding of a northern European lass into an obscure royal family on the basis that she’d spent six months in Wangaratta as an exchange student.
Because the hours between five and seven PM require fairly constant activity to get Buster Boy and the Troll Princess fed and to bed, seeing local news is a rare event, but I was reminded of how wonderful it can be earlier tonight when the mid-north coast news bulletin on Prime moved on to sport. The lead item on the sport report was an update on Le Tour de France, because they needed to report the progress of ‘Upper Corindi’s own Cadel Evans’.
I love local media.
Then there’s our Timmeh in Rome. Sometimes the reports on his sojourn are so painstakingly accurate, I swear I can hear the trough snorting in the background.
Prime TV Wodonga even reported how “our Andrew McDonald” didn’t get selected in the First Test side.
I’m hoping that Albury mayor Patricia Gould is arrested for spying whilst on her important mission to China.
Now that would make good ‘local’ news.
I’m hoping she gets quarantined for suspected swine flu.
The Chinese secret police will have a wow of a time working out the importance of that mission, elephantandrat.
The Chinese secret police will probably think it’s just another seniors tour … with walking frames.
I spent a year in Hobart – it was amazing how much their localy produced ABC news was like rural local news. Their weather man, Michael Pook, looked just like a year 7 Australian Studies teacher.
Saint Mike Pook, and his brown suits, are still mourned here every night at the end of the ABC news.
“The ABC in Tasmania have had a proper meteorologist for as long as I can remember. Mike Pook did it for years and years and became an idol. My science teacher in college loved him and my dad nearly cried on his final weather report. If Mike said it was going to rain, it was going to rain and if it didn’t he’d give a proper technical reason as to why it didn’t and all would be forgiven.”
(Off some blog or other.)
Then there’s Peter Cundall, Timmy Lane, Mal Walden and a fair number of sports commentators you lot have pinched from us.
Local TV is the breeding-ground for the stars,
The fact that I remember Mike Pook’s name after nearly a decade and a half demonstrates the impression that he made. I couldn’t even name another weather person (other than the other former ABC Mike). The brown suits and matching ties…ahh, the memories….
Perhaps better than the local news are the locally made ads. There might be plenty of talented, good looking journo’s heading for the big smoke but there’s a pretty shallow pool of marketing men to fish from.