Telly news grabs the headlines

When the last bong rings out on News At Ten tomorrow night, when Trevor McDonald says his final ten-thirtyish And Finally, the landscape of television news will shift.

Trevor is going from ten to 6.30pm, and taking his bongs with him, as well as his famous sign-off line. He has been the man of the hour, and now he will have to be the man of an earlier hour.

The first announcement of the change brought much protest, especially from politicians. Tony Blair spoke out against the move, and his opposition was enough to make you think. After all, if the Prime Minister was worried we should ask why? Perhaps the news is harder to manipulate at 6.30pm. Ten o'clock was said to tie in more closely with the lateness of the Parliamentary day, but as Mr Blair seems to run the country via the television studio or newspaper column rather than via the House, this shouldn't bother him.

Anyhow, 6.30 it is - with another 30-minute bulletin at eleven. Terrestrial television news is now crowded into the early evening. BBC1 has the Six O'Clock News, which is to be revamped in May with a new anchor, Huw Edwards. Over on Channel 5, Kirsty Young is being moved to six on March 15, bang up against BBC1. Six-thirty belongs to Trevor - and to the BBC's regional programmes. Seven o'clock ushers in an hour with Channel 4.

Then it's no news until BBC1 at 9pm. After which there is a news-free hour until Newsnight on BBC2, which will now overlap with ITV's late night programme.

This is an awful lot of television news. More than five hours, if you include the bulletins and regional programmes.

Television changes all the time, faster and faster these days. So the end of the 31-year-old News At Ten, while certainly carrying a certain cultural significance, is just another one of those things. When you take in Sky News, the BBC's 24-hour news, and the Internet, you can see just how much news there is. And I haven't even mentioned the user-friendly radio, or those funny black and white things - ah yes, lovely newspapers.

As a measure of these modern times, Trevor McDonald this afternoon held a live conference about News At Ten - on the Internet. The 'live chat' with "Britain's most trusted news presenter" ran for half an hour from 4pm.

All this television news takes me back to a worrying fantasy I had when I started work as a journalist. Don't tell anyone, but I used quietly to wonder: what if there is no news? Nothing. Not a squeak of trouble. Not a sliver of scandal. No convenient disaster. No misbehaving or pontificating politicians. Not a single event worthy of the name. Nothing. Zilch. Nowt.

How nave I was. I hadn't realised that as long as there is newsprint to fill or airwaves to clog, there will always be news. Rebecca West understood the practicalities as long ago as 1956 (when your columnist was at the mewling stage), writing: "Journalism - an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space."

The need to fill space is largely positive, the stress that gets us all going - the reason why important stories are covered.

Yet for all that, there is an awful lot of news on television. I used to watch most of it, until children distracted me from my addiction.

So imagine what a strange, eerie world we would live in if, on Monday at 6.30pm, the cameras zoomed in on Trevor McDonald's garish new peach and electric blue set to reveal a sign propped against his glass of water: Sorry, no news today.

But there will always be news. As much as anything else, news is a commodity. Just look at Monica Lewinsky, whose grubby dalliance with President Clinton has made her a valuable product. She'll be selling her side of the franchise on Channel 4 tonight at 9.30pm.

04/03/99

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.