Back in your box, royal and political correspondents

Now that royal babies and general elections are out of the way, it’s safe to come out from behind the sofa.

Hopefully.

As a child, I vividly remember sneaking the TV on and watching Doctor Who whilst my mum had a chat with a neighbour (Yes, it was in black and white, you cheeky wotsit). I was so terrified by the Daleks that I didn’t want to go near the TV to turn it off, and tried to drown out their frightening voices by hiding my face in a cushion.

I have pretty much the same experience with those most transient of TV journalists, the royal, and political, correspondents. Happily, someone conveniently decided to invent the TV remote control since my short trouser days, so the cushion isn’t troubled by me screaming into it any more. Unless you count ‘Talent’ shows and Big Brother.

With the recent General Election, they got more and more screen time, with their swingometers, bar charts and on-screen wizardry, until it started to get dangerous to pop out for milk, in case you were stopped and ‘polled’ by one of them.

Gangs of them were hanging around in town centres, and could strip the unprepared of their sanity by surrounding them, repeatedly asking “What do YOU think..?” or some cryptic question about the pounds in your pocket, until you agreed that it was ‘a fiscally prudent scenario’, or tried to beat them off with a heavy visual metaphor.

Whether you love or hate Mr Cameron, we should at least be grateful that the Tories getting into office saved us from weeks of hung parliament piffle, and further debilitating waves of earnest types standing outside Number 10 in the dark and over-using the words ‘crucial, decision, uneasy’ and ‘alliance’.

I’d only just got over seeing politicians’ faces on my doormat every day when I got home. We got so many ‘I’m fab! (And the other one isn’t!)’ leaflets, I had enough to craft my own papier mache Houses of Parliament. The only thing that stopped me was the thought of finding a bemused political editor stood next to it in my living room, preparing to go live to Huw Edwards whilst I was putting my pyjamas on.

And then there were the even more fleeting, and scary, royal correspondents. Forced to stand outside posh hospitals for days on end without food or water, and bombarded with the same banal “So, is there any news yet?” question every ten minutes when there patently isn’t, they collectively went mad several decades ago, and have taken to filming each other standing around to prove their own existence.

When a royal baby actually does show up, they know their correspondent-ing time in the spotlight is nearly up, and are reduced to frenziedly trying to guess what it will be called.

Unusually, Prince Charles’ old hate mail to governments woke them from their hibernation briefly, but now they’re back in their boxes again.

It’s OK. You can come out now.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 22nd of May 2015. It hasn't appeared on their website yet, but the print edition was retitled as "Glad to have a remote control" - you can keep an eye out for it on their website here

We've had visitors this weekend (hence the delay in getting this online) and it was entertaining to have them express surprise when I said yes to the question "are you still writing that newspaper thing?". I think they were trying to look pleased for me, but I detected a definite undercurrent of "Wow - really? They're STILL letting you do that, are they?!"

Fair enough - I think the same thing myself most weeks. Seeing my face in the newspaper was also a shock for them, as I'm sure it is for anyone who stumbles upon the appropriate page each Friday. Sorry if I put you off your tea.

In a rather exciting (for me, at least) bit of media domination, photos I took at last weekend's Brathay Windermere Marathon were used by the Westmorland Gazette, which makes me a media mogul, at least. That's South Cumbria ticked off the list - watch out, Fleet Street...

(CD singles? Yup. Some angst from Alanis Morissette at the moment, in the form of her 1999 single "So Pure".)