Just give us a rest from BBC gloom

GOOD grief, the TV news bulletins are depressing at the moment, aren’t they? Watching the BBC’s 6pm bulletin on Tuesday evening made me want to shrivel up and die. As if endless, turgid Brexit analysis øevery night wasn’t enough, the Beeb also treated us to an excruciatingly boring five or six minutes about how China’s leader, President Xi, has been elevated to a status on a par with Chairman Mao.

Hold the front page. That’s so relevant to people at home at 10 past six, stuck in the kitchen making the kids’ tea, trying to remember if they need their sports gear tomorrow and if little Martha is coming over for a sleepover.

What’s happened to the news (in particular, the BBC’s bulletins)? It’s Brexit, of course. The heart of the regular evening news viewer (and I’ve been one for decades) sinks every night at about 6pm. Poor Fiona Bruce looks as if she hasn’t had a laugh for years. As soon as I see her grim expression JARED O’Mara is unwell. Or he at least ought to be this morning. The Labour MP has had a terrible week. First came the leak of online posts he made 15 years ago. In a blizzard of homophobic, woman-hating nonsense, the parliamentarian-to-be said singer Michelle McManus only won the 2003 series of Pop Idol “because she was fat”, he wanted to have an orgy with Girls Aloud and he made a string of unprintable remarks about gays. Oh, and there was some casual racism about the Spanish and Danes. In short, the 21-year-old Jared O’Mara was a racist, homophobic, sexist pig.

And then he became a Sheffield MP and in a hand-wringing apology on Tuesday said he had been on a “journey” and was a totally different person now from the one he was back then. Jeremy Corbyn gave him the benefit of the doubt and the Labour whip was not withdrawn.

Er… until next day, when in a volte-face the party suspended him. at the start of the bulletin, I think: “Oh dear, here we go, nasty old Jean-Claude Juncker has been horrid about Theresa May again today.”

And there he is, with his impossibly smug face, denying he ever told anyone that our PM is tearful, frightened, looks as if she hasn’t slept for a week, etc, etc.

As if anyone believes anything the fat, tipsy little toad says any more. And yet here we are, night after night, forced to watch such well-fed, well-refreshed besuited gossips tell us our fortune. I’m thinking of switching off permanently – and wondering i f the TV news ratings are in freefall already.

Please, Beeb, have mercy on us countless viewers who have a life and are sick of the sound and sight of Brussels and the nasty menagerie that dwells there.

The ITV news is stuck with the same daily agenda as the Beeb but at least it produces a bulletin much more vivid and engaging. On t’other side, paint dries quicker between six and six-thirty.

what a nasty little thug o’mara is

Why? Step forward Sophie Evans, one of the MP’s constituents. Sophie, 26, may be able to provide an interesting insight into exactly where on his “journey” O’Mara has actually got to. If what she alleges is true, I’d put it at around 2004. Her encounter with him was seven months ago at a nightclub where O’Mara was DJ-ing. “He called me an ugly bitch.”

And a lot more besides, she says, again unprintable (and unbroadcastable, too. When I interviewed Sophie on Wednesday’s Good Morning Britain with my co-host Ranvir Singh, we simply couldn’t repeat the repulsive things she claims he screamed at her in a bizarre tirade).

I’ve been interviewing members of the public for more than 40 years. Sophie, in my estimation, is a plausible witness. And if she’s lying why hasn’t O’Mara issued a writ for slander?

I suspect he’s too busy planning his imminent career change. Expect a by-election in Sheffield Hallam before very long. ABUSE: Sophie Evans