Ian McMillan: And the news is... I’m rather exhausted by events

I mark them with a pen and somebody comes and takes the papers away and sorts them into a pile and I get some makeup on and suddenly there I am on a settee talking and I’m in your front room or your back room or your bedroom or wherever you happen to watch TV.

I try to reflect what’s happening in the world but in a sideways fashion, plucking offbeat stories from the pages that somehow reflect something wider, more profound. That’s the idea, anyway. Or sometimes I just celebrate headlines with puns in them.

Last Saturday was a little different, though, because it almost felt like there had been too much news over the previous few days: Margaret Thatcher, the economy, the explosions in Texas and the bombs at the Boston Marathon were dominating the papers.

As we were on air. the story of the capture of the surviving Boston bomber was breaking and developing all over the place.

And I felt slightly news-weary. I looked at a page in a paper and saw a picture of Womble the dog from Leeds that had had all of its hair shaved off and I felt oddly comforted. Perhaps that was the kind of story the nation needed.

Regular readers will know that I normally love news and the analysis of news, so reviewing the papers on a media outlet should be a bit of a busman’s holiday for me. I devour newspapers and newspaper apps and websites and radio and magazines and, sometimes, TV.

I like to hear about an event then 
read about that event and then read why the event happened and take 
in different views about the consequences of the event. Then I 
enjoy taking in the letters page and wallowing in the violent disagreements about the story.

I sometimes wish I still lived in those pre-internet times when papers rushed out special editions when something huge happened and there would be boys on the street shouting ‘Extra! Extra! Read all about it!’ and there would be placards saying “War Declared” or “King Dies”.

I also sometimes wish I lived in small-town America where the paperboy cycles down the street and flings a rolled-up newspaper onto your suburban lawn and somehow it seems that because the paper has flown through the air the news it contains is magical.

The other morning, though, I was feeling a little news-weary. I felt like I was getting news-lag. I read somewhere (in a newspaper!) about a bloke who said that you should give up news, 
that it didn’t do you any good and anyway there was nothing you could do about it.

It’s true to say that news will happen whether we read it or not, and thinking about that stopped me in my tracks because I have this odd belief that if I read about the news I can influence it in some way, which is a bit like thinking that if I’m at Oakwell watching a game I can somehow make a difference to the result.

There’s a tale that’s probably apocryphal about the early days of the BBC when the newsreader simply said “There is no news today” and he played some music, and you can’t really imagine that happening in 2013.

It was just that I felt there’d been 
too much to take in, and I wanted 
some small stories, something to make me smile, some of those ‘…and finally…’ moments they have at the 
end of television news where they 
show you a skateboarding gerbil or a parsnip that looks like Cliff Richard.

So I sat there in that room at the 
BBC and I looked through the 
papers and I selected a few small 
stories that wouldn’t disturb anybody and I thought about the way that sometimes we get full to the very top (as my kids used to say when they were little) of news.

Then the producers looked 
through my list and they said they 
quite liked them but could we maybe have one or two more serious stories and so I plunged back into the front pages and the analysis columns and I came up with more weighty topics 
that I tried to knit into the funny 
stuff, and I think I got the mix right, 
just about. And I felt my news-lag slipping away.

So, to all my fellow newshounds 
out there, to those people who read 
the Yorkshire Post from cover to 
cover as though you’re embarking 
on a coast to coast walk with no stopping at B&Bs, let me tell you 
that it’s okay, sometimes, to feel 
that you’re overwhelmed by the world and its happenings. It’s okay. I share your pain.

Just jump back in and read all about it!