Media Matters

Keep informed about the virus – but not at the expense of your sanity

This column assumes that its readers are interested in the print and broadcasting media. So it may surprise you that its one piece of advice during this period of prolonged self-isolation necessitated by the pandemic is to watch as little television news as possible.

A daily dose of not more than half an hour should suffice. That will be more than enough to absorb the latest instructions from government and glean useful information. I am convinced there is a danger to one’s psychological health in watching and listening to endless bulletins. Believe me, I speak from experience.

My own day starts at around 7 o’clock with Radio 4’s Today programme. When it ends, two hours later, I am usually pretty depressed. After a light breakfast, I read the newspapers – a far less lowering process because they carry articles on subjects other than coronavirus.

Then I scour the BBC website and various online publications, and throughout the day consult them with neurotic regularity. I sometimes turn on Sky News to hear a pundit droning on, and I seldom miss Boris Johnson’s late-afternoon press conference. Radio 4’s World at One and PM are habitual ports of call. In the evening, I binge on television news programmes (admittedly somewhat anaesthetised by generous quantities of wine) before wrapping up with BBC2’S Newsnight – and a nervous headache.

Unfortunately I probably have little choice since I am required to pontificate about the contagion in the public prints. But for those who are free of such obligations I suggest a lighter diet. And yet I suspect that many of those holed up in their homes are becoming mesmerised by the constant onslaught of coronavirus news from every corner of the planet. It may be because they are bored. Or possibly they are reduced to abject jelly by fear or an irresistible fascination for the morbid.

For such people, too much coverage (which, by the way, is repetitive, and lengthened by long-winded speculation) may be especially harmful.

So my recommendation is to turn off the news once the essentials have been grasped. Why not read a book? TV oldie Esther Rantzen has recently extolled the delights of P G Wodehouse, and I follow her sound advice whenever I can snatch a moment between news bulletins. These are probably not the times for gloomy Russian novels, though everyone will have different preferences.

Television other than news is another fruitful path. Unwatched box sets can be dusted off. The more technically minded will ransack Netflix. Meanwhile the BBC could turn out to be a cornucopia. In fact, even in the midst of disaster there may be cause to celebrate, since the filming of tedious soap operas such as Eastenders has been suspended to protect members of the cast and crew from infection.

I daresay the first thought of unimaginative BBC bosses will be to unearth equally tedious recent repeats to fill in the gaps. Yet Auntie has an unexplored treasure trove of almostforgotten programmes from the golden age of television.

I am thinking of the likes of Play for Today, which ran from 1970 to 1984, and Screen One, which produced excellent dramas throughout the 1990s. By the way, if Tony Hall, the Beeb’s directorgeneral, happens to be reading this, could he consider reviving Prince, a wonderful Screen One film written by Julie Burchill, starring Sean Bean and my wife, Celia Montague, which hasn’t been shown since its first airing in 1991?

As for comedies, the BBC and ITV would bring joy to millions if they brought back comics such as Frankie Howerd, Eric Sykes and Tommy Cooper. And what about the affectionately satirical All Gas and Gaiters, probably not remembered by anyone under the age of 60?

These are going to be testing weeks for many of us. But they will be more trying still if we spend them glued to the television news, crowding our minds with dismal and fearful thoughts. We must keep informed, of course. But if we wish to maintain our sanity, we will have to learn to switch elsewhere.

Here is an extraordinary fact. According to the analytics company Comscore, in January the Independent online had a slightly larger audience than the Guardian online. Its so called ‘unique browsers’ in the UK (visitors who look at a website one or more times over a defined period) were put at 24.7 million versus the Guardian’s 24 million. The Independent also did better than the Telegraph or Times online, and far better than digital-only publications such as Buzzfeed.

Success has brought the online paper modest profits, whereas in its 30-year life the print title turned a profit in one year only. In the year to September 2019, the Independent made £2.3 million.

It happens not to be my favourite newspaper website, being hysterically anti-brexit and rather left-wing. Some of it is quite downmarket. It’s certainly aimed at readers younger than me. Nonetheless, it is a publishing triumph which almost no one predicted when the print edition was closed four years ago.

‘Newspapers still carry articles on subjects other than coronavirus’