I have enjoyed watching Sky News lately. It makes good background viewing, particularly when they show scenes from the campaign trail. They go into quite a bit of depth, even showing the name of the constituency and the size of the majority of whichever party won in 2005. e.g. Battersea, LABOUR MAJ 336.
However, this most recent news story is a shocker, partly because it isn't actually news at all. Ahem, the 'news' story which seems to be taking up most of the airtime (you will excuse the pun) is the volcanic explosion in Iceland that has led to the decision to suspend all flights in Britain. Fair enough, not much more to report. Well, you'd think so. Yet Sky seem to have a correspondent permanently based in the 'eerily quiet' Manchester airport. The BBC have gone even further - they claim to have correspondents all around the country "and will bring us any developments as and when they occur".
Worse still when they have to fill up the time interviewing gormless members of the public. To be fair to the 'public', most of them have spouted fairly rational responses, somewhere along the line of 'there's nothing much we can do about it and it isn't anybody's fault'. This tends to surprise and disappoint the news reporters, who comment on the 'philosophical' nature of these comments. At least they haven't used the word 'stoic' yet, as if to conjour up the nation's indomitable spirit like they seemed to do during the snows of January.
Even the weather forecast has coverage of the 'Volcanic Plume', but that's fair enough - it might actually affect the weather. Except it won't. Not really. Because the plume is safely nested above the weather system, which is precisely why the flights aren't going ahead - most commercial airliners fly abouve 30,000ft to avoid being under the weather system
Tonight's political debate gets some coverage too, thankfully. I will be watching it tonight with some of my friends over pizza and beer.
But why is the airline thing the top story? Excuse me for being an extremist bastard, but I think the debate which could determine who governs our country for the next five years is a little more important than a bit of dust, albeit the sort of dust that will clog airlines.
One of the main features of the closure of UK airspace is that it "has never happened before". Well, neither have the primeministerial debates.
"The disruption is even worse than the days after 9-11"
Well it would be, because you can't get much worse than all the planes in the country being grounded.
Apart from planes crashing into buildings.
Erm...
Hopefully I won't have to see too many more pictures of parked aircraft at Heathrow. We saw enough of that during the strikes.
Still, I'm sure this'll make it's way onto NewsWipe.
However, this most recent news story is a shocker, partly because it isn't actually news at all. Ahem, the 'news' story which seems to be taking up most of the airtime (you will excuse the pun) is the volcanic explosion in Iceland that has led to the decision to suspend all flights in Britain. Fair enough, not much more to report. Well, you'd think so. Yet Sky seem to have a correspondent permanently based in the 'eerily quiet' Manchester airport. The BBC have gone even further - they claim to have correspondents all around the country "and will bring us any developments as and when they occur".
Worse still when they have to fill up the time interviewing gormless members of the public. To be fair to the 'public', most of them have spouted fairly rational responses, somewhere along the line of 'there's nothing much we can do about it and it isn't anybody's fault'. This tends to surprise and disappoint the news reporters, who comment on the 'philosophical' nature of these comments. At least they haven't used the word 'stoic' yet, as if to conjour up the nation's indomitable spirit like they seemed to do during the snows of January.
Even the weather forecast has coverage of the 'Volcanic Plume', but that's fair enough - it might actually affect the weather. Except it won't. Not really. Because the plume is safely nested above the weather system, which is precisely why the flights aren't going ahead - most commercial airliners fly abouve 30,000ft to avoid being under the weather system
Tonight's political debate gets some coverage too, thankfully. I will be watching it tonight with some of my friends over pizza and beer.
But why is the airline thing the top story? Excuse me for being an extremist bastard, but I think the debate which could determine who governs our country for the next five years is a little more important than a bit of dust, albeit the sort of dust that will clog airlines.
One of the main features of the closure of UK airspace is that it "has never happened before". Well, neither have the primeministerial debates.
"The disruption is even worse than the days after 9-11"
Well it would be, because you can't get much worse than all the planes in the country being grounded.
Apart from planes crashing into buildings.
Erm...
Hopefully I won't have to see too many more pictures of parked aircraft at Heathrow. We saw enough of that during the strikes.
Still, I'm sure this'll make it's way onto NewsWipe.
a diagram of how the ash came into the air and how it intends to travel, as if it were some plague.
Oh, and sky are doing a special two hour report tonight from 8pm-10pm called BRITAIN GROUNDEDB
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