Is It Really Too Much to Ask? Read Online Free PDF Page A

upside. Because in recent years I’ve noticed that ‘news’ is not what’s happened. It’s what’s happened on camera.
    If a herd of tigers runs amok in a remote Indian village, it’s not news. If a gang of wide-eyed rebels slaughters the inhabitants of a faraway African village, it’s not news. But if it’s a bit windy in America, it is news. Because in America everything that happens is recorded.
    I find myself wondering if last week’s Israeli raid on a Turkish ship in a flotilla carrying aid to Gaza would have had the coverage it did if the battle hadn’t been captured on film. And likewise the racing driver who broke a leg after crashing in the Indy 500. It only became a big deal because we could watch the accident from several angles in slow motion.
    In recent months this phenomenon has even spread to the natural world. I mean it. When an animal does something
normal, it’s not news. But when it is ‘caught on camera’ doing something normal, then it’s in the
Daily Mail
. These days, if you snap an owl catching a mouse, you are Robert Capa.
    In the end, this can only be good for all of us. Figures out recently show that more people in India have access to a mobile phone than a lavatory. Soon, it will be the same story in China and Africa. And then, when all the world’s being filmed, all of the time, we can go back to a time when news was something interesting rather than something we can simply see.
    That way, I wouldn’t have to spend half my morning looking at pictures of Twiggy going shopping. And an eagle eating a fish.
    6 June 2010

Surgery to solve the deficit – cut off Scotland
    As we know, the country is in a terrible mess, and as a result, the head of every government department has been told to go away and implement cuts.
    This all sounds very sensible but because I’m a television presenter, I know it won’t work.
    Here’s why. Every Thursday night, the producers of
Top Gear
stitch together the various elements of the show to create a finished product that is around seventy minutes long. Because this is eleven more than the time slot, we have to make cuts.
    Or as Clive James used to say when he was making TV shows, we have to throw away our babies.
    It’s extremely annoying. You’ve edited a segment to be as good as possible, and now you have to start with the scissors, losing the odd fact here and the odd joke there. It takes an age, it hurts and the same thing always happens when you’ve finished. The programme is better, tighter and sharper. But it’s still six minutes too long.
    So it’s back to the drawing board. And this time, you must lose links and explanations. You are no longer performing liposuction on fat. You’re cutting away at bone and muscle. Important stuff. You are bringing it in on budget but the finished product won’t stand up. Think of it, if you like, as a hospital with no electricity. It’s still a hospital but it’s not much use if the iron lungs don’t work.
    To prevent this happening on
Top Gear
, we try not to trim
muscle and bone. When we’re desperate to cut time, we lose limbs.
    You may have seen the Vietnam special we produced a couple of years ago. What you didn’t see in that show, however, was a sequence involving the Stig’s Vietnamese cousin. This had been tough to make. We’d located a local motorcycle stunt rider, we’d shipped a bike over from Japan, we’d done two recces and written several treatments, and twenty-five people had spent a whole day filming the scene under a sticky sky and watchful gaze of government officials who kept wanting to see the rushes.
    The reason you didn’t see it is because so many unforeseen things had happened on the trip, the finished programme was miles too long. And when we’d slashed and burned the fat, there was still twelve minutes to go. So instead of slashing and burning at the muscle and bone, we threw away a whole sequence. Better, we thought, to lose an arm than ruin every organ in the