We are all shocked and saddened by the news of the death of
the nurse who took the phone call purporting to be from The Queen. The Australian radio station responsible for
the prank has taken the usual action when something goes wrong like this and
suspended its most junior staff. They
have also issued a reasonable sounding statement apologising and claiming that
no one could have expected such a tragic outcome.
Well, I’m not so sure about that. What after all was the point of the ‘joke’ in
the first place?
I started writing this a couple of days ago, and when I saw
the media reaction hesitated to post it.
Most people it seems feel the same way I do. I have also seen the Daily Mail’s
contribution today and was beginning to think I might do better writing a Mr
Angry letter to them. But I had
originally assumed that the radio programme was live. I have just learned that it was in fact
recorded and then approved for broadcast.
I think that changes everything.
I have to say here that the radio station concerned is
apparently very popular in Australia. It
prides itself on its ‘edgy’ broadcasting, which presumably means saying things
on air that are at the limit of acceptability.
It garners its main audience from among 15 to 25 year-olds, who seem to
like that sort of activity. And the DJs
concerned are also very young, if not quite in that age group; one had just
started working for the station that day.
I am not quite in that age group myself, so I discussed this with some
who are, including journalists, and found to my surprise that my views were not held by those half my
age. Apparently, they find this sort of
prank perfectly acceptable, if not necessarily universally amusing, and legitimate
broadcasting. I have to accept
that.
But what would a reasonable controller of broadcasting think,
when giving approval for the programme? The
DJs’ defence is that, with their silly accents and voices and daft comments,
they thought they would be told to go
away as soon as they telephoned. Well,
OK. However, they were put through and given
confidential information. So what should
a controller of broadcasting do then?
What he actually did was to agree to put the programme on the air. The DJs followed that up in subsequent
programmes by crowing about the ‘scoop’ and giggling like schoolgirls that they
were believed. So, I ask again - what
was the point of the ‘joke’ in the first place?
I’m afraid that even the DJs’ words at the time made it clear to me that the
prank was an attempt to fool the hospital staff and draw out the
laughter at their expense.
Surely anyone considering approval of the programme would
reason that the nurse taking the call would be made to look stupid; she would
be humiliated on air before hundreds of thousands of Australians; the British,
and without doubt the rest of the world’s, media would quickly pick up the
story and deepen her humiliation; there might be (but weren’t) Royal complaints
about her actions; much of the population of the world would tweet, poke and
text the extent of the nurse’s stupidity
and make jokes at her expense; cartoons would appear basing their humour on her
naivety and incompetence; she would be forced to listen over and over again to
her voice on TV and radio and listen to commentators laughing at her; her
credibility, her competence, her abilities in her job would be questioned; she
might even lose her job under a cloud of ignominy. In short, her life would be made a
misery. As ever, I have the benefit of
hindsight, but is it right to say that no one could have expected a tragic
outcome? Surely someone might have
wondered just for a moment what effect such an appalling attack might have on
an innocent nurse? They knew nothing
about her circumstances or state of mind; they certainly didn’t speak to her
again, or to anyone else in the hospital, least of all to ask for consent to
the broadcast. Why do they think that no
one could have considered that she might be so distressed that she might take
her own life?
I mentioned at the start that my views are different from
those of young persons. I had previously
thought that ‘edgy’ meant challenging societal norms and that it was primarily
a young term. I intensely dislike
comedians who rely on this sort of material; I have never found anything clever
(and therefore amusing) about jokes about persons less fortunate, physically or
mentally, than me. We can all make up
such jokes and they are only funny to the extent that we are laughing at others. But I know that other people, not only those
a lot younger than me, find such humour hilarious. Anyway, I looked up ‘edgy’ in an urban
dictionary and found the following definition, which just goes to show how out
of touch I am – ‘edgy occurs when middlebrow, middle-aged profiteers are
looking to suck the energy -- not to mention the spending money -- out of the
youth. They come up with this fake
concept of seeming to be dangerous when every move they make is the result of
market research and a corporate master plan’.
Hmmm.
But, back to Australian radio – one problem for me with this
sort of prank is that it so resembles the sort of cruel bullying that we see on
social media. Either someone somewhere finds all this
great fun or the young have become educationally ignorant, incapable of
sensible debate and insensitive to societal norms. I know the latter is not entirely true, so I
guess it must be amusing to someone.
And here we have the problem. Giving control of radio programmes to young
people who are not fully capable of liaising with intelligent adults, or, in
other words, running a radio station entirely for those who are not yet mature
enough to understand what is fun for others and what is a societal norm, seems
to me irresponsible. I admit that I am
now definitely speaking with the benefit of hindsight. Previously, I would probably have dismissed
the radio station as pandering to a lowest common denominator and accepted that
it was successful because it was making a lot of money. Now I am hard pushed to see what the value of
it is. I know it plays pop music, but so
does BBC Radio 2. Or is it wrong for the
media to be informative, entertaining and mind-expanding?
There is another point here that I haven’t heard discussed
yet – there is a law in Australia explicitly forbidding the broadcasting of a
recording without the express permission of the person concerned. The DJs have been suspended; I expect the
radio station will eventually be fined, as the BBC was for a similar Ross and
Brand prank some years ago; but, if there is a criminal offence too, as it
seems pretty clear there might be here, then the faults lie much deeper.
The poor DJs, silly though I think they were, have been
traumatised apparently by events and the radio station has provided them with
counselling. That shows a certain
responsibility by the station. The next
thing I would like to see is the programme controller taking responsibility for
letting the programme go out. Maybe he
should resign. I don’t know what the
punishments are for transgressing Australia’s broadcasting laws, but clearly
the station should be fined and maybe also prosecuted. But, finally, I think maybe it’s time to
accept that this sort of station has had its day. This isn’t the first time the station has got
itself into trouble with the law and the public over its view of what constitutes
acceptable programming. The Australian
authorities can now understand, if they didn’t before, what human consequences puerile,
uninformed, trivial broadcasting can have. So now I suggest they close down the radio
station and put out a tender (or whatever process there is in Australia) for a
licence for another radio station that might give more value and be of more
benefit to the young and to society as a whole.
I've been trying to put my thoughts on this into something coherent, but unusually for me, word fail me. The utter thoughtless stupidity of the prank is just beyond me.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that it was a rather pathetic prank that has gone disastrously wrong and it has effected a number of people very seriously.
ReplyDeleteThe prank was stupid but I tend to agree with the radio station that no one could have expected such a tragic outcome. Lets wait to see the result of the post mortem. Perhaps the poor lady had other contributory problems. During my working career I had first-hand experience of a colleague committing suicide over the Christmas period. It was a frightening thing to realise how apparently normal people can have such a fragile hold on life.
ReplyDeleteI havent heard about this and becane very sorry .
ReplyDeleteWe have an isiom for this kind of prank , ' donkey's prank ' . It perfectly fits for this situation .
Sorry to hear of your colleague, Jeff. But of course not knowing whether the victim was able to stand up to the ridicule or not is the reason why this prank shouldn't have been allowed to happen. But anyway it shouldn't have been broadcast.
ReplyDelete