Burbling away

I feel a bit like the BBC at the moment: All I can talk about is Nelson Mandela. So here's another post on the same subject.

Tomorrow will see extensive coverage of the great man's funeral on  BBC One, the BBC News Channel, the BBC World Service, BBC Radio 4 and 5Live and, frankly, it's even getting too much for the BBC's Kate Adie.

DB at Biased BBC has transcribed part of an interview she gave to the BBC World Service: 

Paul Henley: Kate how are you taking to the Mandela coverage that has been pretty much across all the airwaves for the past week?

Kate Adie: It’s not been “pretty much” across it, it HAS been across and it’s been an example of eventism in television. Hours and hours of, as it were, a camera placed staring with no great reason for it to be there.

Paul Henley: But it’s the death of a world figure who perhaps inspires more people across the planet than any body else.

Kate Adie: Indeed, but that doesn’t mean you spend hours staring at nothing and with people burbling away. There is a fascination amongst the media with big events. They’re a kind of modern drama and they’re unscripted and they go on forever. And at times I think they do a disservice to the actual central figure in the sense that they turn it into this long-running soap opera and it devalues it. And certainly with Mandela what you have is an extraordinary life and when it comes to the end of it suddenly the media turns into this quasi-religious fascinated-by-individual-grief monster which in a way does not reflect well on the man and his particularly simple approach to life.

Couldn't agree more, Kate!