Shush. Dad Needs To Watch The News
IT’S not easy being a dad these days. Back in the day, you came home in the evening after a hard day’s work and you watched the news. That was the rule in most houses. Shush. Dad Is Watching The News.
Nowadays you come home and you’re supposed to get down on the floor and start doing LEGO, or colouring, or whatever. Of course, it’s nice in a way to have two of them fighting for your attention. The younger has such a cute way of saying, ‘Daddy, will you play with me?’ that it’s hard to say no, because I worry all the time that some people might not want to play with her.
The elder, Amal Clooney, is expert at pushing buttons already and is very conscious of her rights, especially to some Dad time. And God forbid that her younger sister, the one who needs extra help, would get extra attention. We’re like RTE during a referendum in our house. The metaphorical stopwatch is always on, and one side is always watching for any slight favouritism showed to the other side.
But equally a man needs to sit in silence for some part of an evening. So I have been working on reviving the old Irish custom of Dad Needs To Watch The News. The truth is, of course, that I do need to watch the news. That’s my job isn’t it? And of course there is a new twist on Dad Needs To Watch The News now. Which is that there is so much news. Technically, these days, Dad could spend his whole life watching the news. You could go nuts from it. One is reminded of Newman’s explanation to Jerry in Seinfeld about why postal workers sometimes go crazy and shoot people: “Because the mail never stops. It just keeps coming and coming and coming. There’s never a let-up, It’s relentless. Every day it piles up more and more, but the more you get out, the more it keeps coming.” Anyone who works in or around the news will understand that sense of relentlessness.
So while Dad Needs To Watch The News was, in previous generations, something that happened at six or nine o’clock, there are no time boundaries any more. But there’s an opportunity here too. Because it means that, technically, you can invoke Dad Needs To Watch The News at any time, for any length of time. And in times like this, well... Dad Needs To Watch A Lot Of News.
I have settled into a nice routine in recent weeks. I usually like to kick off the evening with Trump spokesman Sean Spicer’s White House press briefings.
I know this is not a popular point of view, but I have a certain admiration, even a sympathy for Spicer. He is the ultimate man with a crazy, embarrassing boss/ friend/relative who has to keep trying to explain that person’s behaviour in a reasonable way. And in Spicer’s case he can never give an inch. He can’t sometimes say: “Well yes, he is being a bit of a dick about that.” I have even more tolerance for Spicer than some of the American news channels. Sometimes they will cut off from the press briefing before it’s over. I’ll then go hunting for another channel that has stuck with it. It feels like a box-set I’m hooked to. There are great old characters too in the White House press corp, all with their own idiosyncrasies. It’s a bit like a TV show from the latter part of the 20th century. There are jaded old hands; self-important, wellrespected well-groomed patrician types to whom the others defer; cynical young men on the make, and then there are these very impressive young women, if we are allowed to say that any more.
After Spicer, I like to surf the rest of the news channels to see what they have to say about Spicer. This involves a lot of Americans with really startling teeth who are amazing at talking. They keep spewing it out really fluidly. There’s no emming and awing or thinking out loud like you get when people in Ireland discuss things on TV. This crowd all act like they are reading a script in a slightly barking but robotic manner. It’s hypnotic.
Basically there are a lot of really well-groomed, highly confident but often quite deranged people, at varying degrees of their plastic surgery “journey” all barking madly at each other.
By the time I’m done with that it’s almost time for our own nine o’clock news, which is a kind of a welcome relief after the madness of the American channels.
And then, having worked the whole evening, it’s off to bed with a good book for some well deserved downtime.
‘A man needs to sit in silence for some part of an evening’