Saturday, May 02, 2009

Reporter? Journalist? Crapster?: Peter Oborne in Car-Bull/Carble



Last night I watched an extraordinary film featuring one Peter Oborne on camera and off, voicing over one of the most poppy-cocky-cal, directionless and cobbled together documentaries I've ever seen. And I've seen a few stinkers I can tell you. Some of the time it was from Cab-Bull, some from Carble, all the time from garbled. A shocking shame to the profession of journalism. Leading questions, random hearsay, possible and actual pictorial misrepresentations - including pointing a camera at "a hole" that had ceased to be one, arrant twaddle whose slightest hint of a direction of travel appeared to be towards a return to Happy Old Talibania. You may be able to catch up HERE.

AND I HAD A THOUGHT:
Next time Channel 4 commission a piece of tosh from the frontline, they should send Keith Floyd. There is a passing physical resemblance of course. But even ten sheets to the wind, in his cups Floyd is a professional journalist, can take his drink, and would not pass off an unprepared mess of offal tripe as a splendid dish fit to set before a TV audience expecting revelations.

Now, today, the morning after the shoddy garble of the night before we have this twaddle. For goodness sake! Oborne really is a crapulent crapster. In no position to tell anybody what to do over a glass of whisky and a loaded revolver.

Simon Jenkins is another. Channel 4 will probably have him doing a turn too. They haven't? Perhaps next series. But please don't think you can reveal: "There are beggars, bombs, and bent coppers in Kabul." It took some investigating but it's been done. To general amazement of the viewing public. Oborne really has lowered the bar.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It was incredibly bad, PO looked pooh-faced at times.

Chris Paul said...

Channel 4 must have felt wretched when they had to find 21 minutes from the cutting room floor to make a 24 minute tape. Really piss poor I thought. And likely to have endangered some of his interviewees.

Anonymous said...

We saw Keith Floyd when he was "on tour" a few years ago at the Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal (how very appropriate.)

He spent the entire evening, at best half-cut and going downhill fast.

But he was hugely funny and entertaining throughout and we'd certainly go back to see him again.

Something in my bones tells me he is a Conservative voter....