Errors & Omissions: A building fire need not always be an ‘inferno’

Smoke and flames pour from 63-story skyscraper, Dubai. Photo by Ayman Yaqoob/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

It may be a new year, but some things never change. Dramatic mishaps always have newspapers rummaging through the shabby old costume-box of exaggerated language. Here is the opening paragraph of our report in yesterday’s paper of the Dubai hotel fire.

“One of the tallest skyscrapers in the world turned into an inferno last night after fire ripped through the 302m Address building in Dubai in seconds, sending tourists who had gathered for the city’s famed New Year celebrations fleeing in panic.” The rest of the story contains nothing to justify “inferno” or “ripped through the building”. It quotes officials as saying that the fire started outside and it was prevented from spreading by internal sprinklers.

And as for “panic” – which is a complete loss of self-control in the face of danger – the people in the hotel simply got out of the building as fast as they could, which was the right thing to do. The story even reports one instance of selfless coolness, on the part of a man who carried a wheelchair user down the stairs and out of the building on his back.

µ Here is the beginning of a news item published on Thursday: “The moment when Aidan Turner breaks into a sweat while scything the fields of 18th-century Cornwall in the BBC series Poldark has been voted 2015’s best television moment by readers of Radio Times.”

And after he had finished scything the fields of 18th-century Cornwall, Turner presumably got back into his time machine and returned to the 21st century.

Let us be clear: any scything of 18th-century fields was being done not by Turner himself but by Ross Poldark, the character he was portraying. I don’t think anybody ever mistook a stage actor for the character he was playing, but the confusion seems to be fostered by the more immersive illusion experienced by the viewer of film and television. It certainly goes back to the early days of the cinema, when the old Hollywood studios devoted much effort to concealing any perceived moral blemishes on the character of their star actors, fearing that their screen performances would be contaminated in the eyes of the audience.

µ The blurb that introduced a feature article on Wednesday displayed one of the most fashionable clichés of 2015: “A new service from Channel 4 is making it the go-to destination for foreign-language treats.”

New Year resolution: “go-to” must go; it has gone on long enough.

µ On Wednesday we published both an obituary and a personal appreciation of the rock star Lemmy, deeply mourned by people who like very loud music. Both referred to his liking for “Jack Daniels” whiskey. Look at the label on the bottle, chaps. It says “Jack Daniel’s”, with an apostrophe. The founder of the firm was called Jack Daniel, and it is his whiskey (with, don’t forget, an “e” in “whiskey”, the right spelling in Ireland and the US).