Terence Blacker: The serious side of the celebrity business

No one ever said newsreading was a high art. The ritual of TV news requires character, not intellect

A few days after last year's Madrid bombing, an e-mail was sent to me with a starkly concise subject heading. It read: "Yuk".

A few days after last year's Madrid bombing, an e-mail was sent to me with a starkly concise subject heading. It read: "Yuk".

I had argued in a column that for the BBC to relocate its news team to the site of the bomb, placing its newsreader Huw Edwards in front of the wrecked train, was ghoulish and faintly exploitative. My e-mail correspondent was outraged by what he saw as journalistic cynicism, lack of respect towards the dead and so on. It was from Huw Edwards himself.

There is something disconcerting about a newscaster in a huff. With one or two exceptions (for some reason, I have never been able to take Sir Trevor McDonald entirely seriously), those who night after night bring the events of the outside world to the privacy of one's TV assume a lofty, semi-divine status. They are stern yet comforting, sympathetic yet dispassionate. The best of them allow a hint of feeling to enter their voice without descending to outright emotion. I imagine that Edwards, Natasha Kaplinsky or Anna Ford provide more company and solace to the lonely or the mentally frail than any social worker could manage.

The "yuk" e-mail was a problem. It made Huw seem like a normal human being - even, worse, like a journalist. These days, I find it difficult to hear that gentle Welsh lilt, or look into those sweet, concerned eyes, without imagining him, as soon as the cameras are switched off, reverting to "Disgusted of Shepherd's Bush" mode and sending off a few angry e-mails.

So I hope that neither he nor any of his newsroom colleagues will have stooped to reply to recent literary festival chatter emanating from the likes of John Humphrys and Andrew Marr. It is a myth that reading the news is difficult, these great men have told us. Some of them were paid far too much for simply reading an autocue, said Marr. The job required "no brain", agreed Humphrys

These arguments are clearly absurd. No one has ever claimed that newsreading was a high art. The ritual of the TV news requires qualities of character, not intellect. Comparing what Dermot Murnaghan or Fiona Bruce do to the work of the Today programme's favourite rottweiler or to the wry insights of the BBC's chief political correspondent is to misunderstand their role.

What a good newscaster provides is precisely not brains, wit, knowledge or brilliance. He or she is an everyman figure, an idealised version of ourselves - nice-looking, full of integrity but not off-puttingly clever- who will bring news from elsewhere in a friendly yet authoritative manner.

In other words, they are the serious face of the celebrity business. Their personalities add colour to the glittering surface of everyday life in the 21st century. Because they occupy a sort of wonderland, in which rules of normality are suspended, the amount they are paid is also unreal. For the tiny number of people whose lives or personality, through a mysterious process of luck and personal alchemy, is of interest to a large number of people, money can be so easily available as to lose meaning.

It is as pointless to fret over why Fiona Bruce is said to earn £400,000 a year, or why Huw Edwards allegedly pulls down £250,000 for reading the BBC news, as it is to wonder why Hello! magazine will pay tens of thousands to get a moderately famous person to answer a few questions and pose for a picture.

The pay-scale of someone who has been sprinkled with celebrity magic dust is incomprehensible to the rest of us. How much would a soap star, or someone whose private sex video has been released accidentally on purpose on the internet, expect to be paid simply to turn up at a night club? £30,000? £50,000?

Prominent footballers are now being offered around a million pounds to sit down in front of a tape machine so that a tame wordsmith can produce their autobiography, but at least one of them has decided not to bother. What's a million here or there when even someone semi-famous can pull down £100,000 for sitting beside a swimming-pool for Celebrity Love Island?

It is easy to become enraged by the injustice of all this and, on the face of it, there is something morally whiffy about a society in which simply being a famous person can be more richly rewarded than doing a job of work. On the other hand, we live in a sharply capitalist world and the celebrity business is a pure reflection of market forces in a publicity-obsessed world.

Perversely, I find myself more irritated by acts of greed which take place in a world which I can recognise. An actor or sportsman being showered with cash during their brief moment of fame seems somehow harmless beside the fact that chief executives of the top 200 UK firms now earn 80 per cent more than they did when Labour came to power in 1997, rising from an average of £995,000 to £1.7m.

It would be wrong to argue that those earning celebrity bonuses, whether they are airhead topless models or serious-minded BBC newsreaders, should be judged differently from some City fat cat lining his own pocket, but everyone, even media titans like Messrs Marr and Humphrys, should recognise that personality is sometimes as worthy of reward as brains.

terblacker@aol.com