So who comes out tops in the compassion stakes?

Maurice O'Brien • Published 28 Aug 2009 10:00 0 Comments

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FOR years I've thought it would be fascinating to sit in on one of those summit conferences where Tony exchanged hair care tips with Muammar, or George W swapped bubblegum cards with the Karzai of Kabul.

But now it transpires they're all seriously dull affairs and they never discuss anything interesting.

Yo B chatted about swapping prisoners, barrels of oil and all sorts when he met that kindred straight kind of a guy Gaddafi, but the name Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi never passed their lips.

Bit of a mouthful maybe, but AAMAM would surely have sufficed, and yet Lord Mandy didn't bother either when he met Gaddafi Junior. Then again Pete meets Rothschilds, Russian oligarchs and Tory boy shadow ministers and keeps schtum about everything.

Not a scintilla of gossip does he let drop.

Meanwhile Old Prudence is in purdah for a month so naturally never shared any thoughts on AAMAM's release with hapless Kenny MacAskill, who's apparently contemplating a name-change to Patsy.

America's outraged. Mind you there wasn't a peep when the US courts aided and abetted IRA bombers to evade extradition, neither did they say much when the White House did the compassionate cheerleading while a stream of brutal murderers from both sides of the sectarian divide strolled from jail to prop up the Good Friday agreement.

- FOR students of regional television news it was a moment of pure magic.

Having endured for many years the routine mutilation of the concept of "the news where you are" by BBC South (Brighton to Weymouth via Bicester in 90 seconds) we thought we were immune to acts of geographical piracy.

Then Meridian completely redefined the word 'local', traversing the northern hemisphere in a flash to whisk the viewer from 'Shoeburyness' to Sherborne and Didcot to Deal while, against a bogus backdrop of Caversham Bridge at sunset, two presenters give a perfect impression of nodding dogs on a Ford Cortina parcel shelf.

It's not difficult to pull a muscle in the brain as they switch from politics in Piddletrenthide (Dorset) to yellow lines in Yalding (Kent), but every now and then they produce a gem of such priceless irony that they probably don't even know they've done it.

Such a moment occurred one day last week when the lead story on a typically amorphous Meridian bulletin came, I kid you not, from a village named Nomansland.

- LISTENERS to the Today programme on Radio 4 could have been excused for thinking Westminster was the topic when the reporter's voice droned: "People here tend to consider politicians crooks, and deeply corrupt, and they're not always wrong."

How shocking when it dawned that John Simpson was actually reporting from Kabul on Afghanistan's iffy election.

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