Terence Blacker: Sex, drugs and shame: a perfect media crime

"Yuk," wrote the newsreader Huw Edwards after I'd suggested that broadcasting the BBC news from the site of a bomb blast the previous day was prurient and melodramatic. Coincidentally, the same useful word occurred to me seeing Huw, concerned expression in place, presenting the news last week from the neon-lit streets of Ipswich.

Equally yukky in its way was an instant programme in which his colleague Fiona Bruce visited Ipswich to ask the usual utterly pointless questions about prostitution and drugs. For newsrooms everywhere, these murders have become an exciting Christmas special.

Coverage of this kind of story has changed radically over recent years. The media, with its growing hunger for drama and colour, is no longer prepared simply to report, but needs to be part of the story, at the centre of things. There is potentially no limit to the process. Now that Huw and Fiona are out there on the streets, their editor might soon consider getting them to read the news from a curb-crawling car, perhaps, or from the side of a road.

For here has been the perfect media crime. Not only does the story have sex, drugs, hidden lives, shame on every side, allowing reporters to grub around for messy details and commentators to be scandalised and concerned in a variety of ways, but it also has taken place at a comfortable, comforting distance from the lives most people lead.

Once news becomes entertainment, what used to be known as "tabloid values" are everywhere. In one broadsheet, the respected writer Nicci Gerrard has written a feature about living near Ipswich; in another, Susanne Moore revealed that she had been raised in Ipswich but had later moved away. Presumably, since I live in the area, and must even have passed through the red light district on the way to the occasional football match, I, too, should provide a thrilling account of what life is really like on the front line in East Anglia.

This new hunger to be involved in the drama of a news story has developed since the death of Princess Diana, and soon affects those who really are at the centre of it. Once the police could concentrate on the crime; now answering questions from the press and appealing to the public seem to be the first jobs of the day. When a police officer marvelled at the "phenomenal" 10,000 calls received from the public, the figure was seen as a measure of concern rather than what in almost every case it was - the desire of bogglers and curtain-twitchers to become part of the story.

Interviewees began to use the word "chaotic" in the context of the lives of the prostitutes. It's not a bad descriptive word but it is a new one; it was as if everyone was taking cues for their lines from others in the drama.

However sensible they may be, the police will inevitably get caught up in the excitement and start behaving as if they are in Prime Suspect rather than investigating real murders. The families of victims start playing roles, too; the father of one of the murdered girls has taken to reading his own rather self-consciously poetic prose for the benefit of the press. Somehow it was inevitable that the division between the reality and the story would become further confused when a suspect began to play the media game himself.

Real pain and death have succumbed to reality-show values and presentation. The dignity of the victims has been traduced by the news entertainment business and its ever-eager public.

Regan should be a Londoner

Until this week Judith Regan, head of her own publishing imprint in America, had seemed to personify the unacceptable face of the modern book industry. It was she who commissioned OJ Simpson to write an account of how, hypothetically (nudge-nudge) he would have committed the two murders of which he was famously cleared.

Now Regan has been fired at the request of that great defender of morality, Rupert Murdoch. It was something she said, or maybe something she did. Either way, she became an embarrassment.

Suddenly it all looks different. Publishing is absurdly cautious, and its occasional fits of integrity are almost always bogus. Judith Regan should come to London and set up shop. We need her.

* In Asia and in the Middle East, they turn in moments of erotic insecurity to tiger penis, rhino horn, sea-horse or, if particularly desperate, to the powdered remains of the rare Owston's palm civet. The British prefer to improve their sex lives with berries.

An enterprising campaign by an association called British Summer Fruits deployed a photograph of the model Sophie Anderton rolling around orgiastically in strawberries and a message from the sex guru Tracey Cox that berries have powerful aphrodisiac qualities. The effect was startling, with sales of blackberries soaring by 41 per cent, followed by raspberries at 26 per cent.

Although it is reassuring to know that the death of an endangered species is not required to get us "in the mood", there is something indefinably sad about the thought of all those hopeful trips to the greengrocer; the anxious guzzling of berries before a big night out.

terblacker@aol.com