Too much jaw jaw?

SIR Winston Churchill, ever master of the succinct, perceptive sentence or turn of phrase, once said, memorably, ‘It is better to jaw, jaw than to war, war.’

This was spoken back in the 1940s when, following the carnage of the Second World War conflict, he was attempting to prevent armed strife between two belligerent nations; clearly he was right.

To sort out disputes and neutralise aggression with words across a negotiating table is clearly infinitely better than doing so on a battlefield where the harvest, inevitably, will be mayhem, misery and death.

Without doubt there are so many areas of strife now, many internecine, where bloodshed, anarchy and injustice could be avoided if only there was more ‘jaw, jaw’.

Sadly we live in a world where far too many take up arms at the drop of a hat and too few, for fear of looking weak, attempt to solve their disputes with ‘tongue’ rather than ‘gun’. Having said this, however, there is an area of human ‘conflict’ where there is surely infinitely far too much ‘yap’; I refer to sport, or to be more exact, that which is shown on TV.

Here such talk is not aimed at preventing the ‘battle’, but rather in providing the onlooker with an evaluation and summary of that which is unfolding before them.

Granted such is what someone once described as a civilised form of warfare, but whilst we viewers need nobody to ‘jaw, jaw’ to try to prevent it, we assuredly do not require anybody to explain it, analyse it, predict it, praise or criticise it either; television is, essentially, a visual medium – we sit in our front rooms and watch.

Whilst the occasional comments and information from so-called ‘experts’ and pundits can be useful, they should be just that – sporadic, edifying, devoid of opinion, prediction, bias and prejudice.

This is not the case; for the most obscure of football fixtures, if televised, will have a battalion of pundits – mainly ex-professionals of varying abilities – giving viewers the ‘benefit’ of their opinions regarding what is taking place in the match; mind you, if it is the half-time discussion a majority of the audience will probably have ceased viewing and gone to the bathroom or the kitchen to make a cup of tea – often both.

A financial thought also – if the match is on the BBC, the fees paid to these ‘authorities’ on the game, or ‘fillers’, depending on your viewpoint, will come out of that iniquitous tax levied on us all, the TV licence.

It is not just the ubiquitous ‘beautiful game’ which is plagued by these so-called ‘specialists’ – men and women adept at stating the obvious and the banal and making their observations sound profound; for these days virtually every sport that has some television coverage – and they are manifold – will be scrutinised by a panel of retired ‘talking heads’. At times their numbers will almost exceed paying spectators.

Surely they are not needed in such abundance, if they are needed at all.

Mind you, one feels that these are not the only media men and women who make no great donation to the quality and enhancement of our lives; indeed, for every one in the sports department there are probably half a score bringing us the news – or, all too often, what purports to be the news but is mostly a selection of hypotheses and debate about what could be, what should be and what is desirable but unlikely to be. Studios are jammed with correspondents and sages dispensing such, with many given august titles such as Health Editor (prominent in recent times, of course); also those covering diverse areas of ‘expertise’ as politics, finance, security, arts, environment, education and such like are also ‘Editors’. The only Editor missing is one who ‘edits’ the screen-time of these chattering reporters as they clamour to be both seen and heard. In the studios too will be those so often most unreliable of soothsayers – weathermen and women.

When it comes to actual happenings in other lands – or (again) the expected, or hoped for, or unlikely – virtually every major city about the globe seems to house a BBC correspondent who so often will ‘make bricks without straw’ by giving authoritative sounding reports based on the flimsiest of evidence.

Then there are home-based newshounds – not sparse in number either. Many seem to linger in Downing Street in all winds and weathers, and every time the Prime Minister – or any other official – appears they hurl questions to which they hardly ever get an answer; daft, surely.

Press and media photographers and cameramen likewise, taking pictures in almost manic fashion of anything that moves, a favourite being the back of the PM’s official car as it speeds away.

To a cynical, pragmatic mind such as mine, the entire enterprise and exercise seems to be pointless and, to a degree, illogical. Perhaps in this I am totally wrong. Perhaps this is democracy at its very best; after all, the searchlights seeking truth and honesty cannot ever shine too brightly.

Perhaps moaners like myself should just shut up and accept, with gratitude, our British sense of democracy, egalitarianism and the right to discuss issues, as being that which makes us a great nation.