'Bagsy I get the cave with the view…..'

Good evening and welcome to the Nine O’clock News.

The world is going to end and it’s all Kevin McCloud’s fault……reportedly.

You may be surprised by that headline as we normally like to start the program by reporting on a grisly murder or such like.  Ideally, a good hammer attack in some pretty middle class village, although anything that makes you feel like ‘you could be next’ is good for us. Unfortunately, and surprisingly, nobody was murdered today, which caused us a bit of a problem. We tried very hard to find one, and in desperation the Producer even considered bringing one about however we talked him out of it.

We’re sure that lots of nice people did some good things today but as the media, we are unable to bring ourselves to report these to you for fear that you may go to bed in any state other than terrified for your life.

On the economic front nothing of any significance happened. Again we tried very hard to find some bad news but despite the lack of murders, nothing untoward actually happened.

We first thought of talking about how the FTSE ‘had billions wiped off its value’ just to scare the living pants off everyone and to try and panic you into cashing in your investments so the price would go down a bit and give us more of a story tomorrow but we were very disappointed because it had only gone down by 20 points. We tried converting this into a percentage to see if it sounded any worse but it was only 0.0035%. We even got our graphics department to do a graph over a very short timescale and make the drop look more dramatic but it just looked silly.

We then looked at the economic statistics released by the Government and its various agencies but again we could find nothing overly horrific within them. Some were up a bit and some were down a bit but we couldn’t really run a story on that.

We even thought about asking the Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls for a comment as we figured he would be happy to talk down the economy and he duly obliged. Fortunately however we remembered that he had the fiscal credibility of a 12 year old clutching a fiver in a sweet shop and asking him for comments on the recovery was a bit like asking Imelda Marcos to talk about money saving tips for the poor. Admittedly, she is much less annoying and always wears fabulous shoes but it wasn’t felt that that was enough.

So, in desperation we decided to fall back on our favourite technique……..speculation. Back in the days before Grand Designs, factual TV programs and news bulletins were just that, a report on the facts of the situation. Then Kevin came along and showed us that if you provide a commentary and start guessing what might happen then it is a much better story than……well the truth.

He showed us that he could make every house build that ever appeared on the show follow a certain path. He would start off full of enthusiasm and be nice to their faces when he first met them but during the middle part of the show he would urge us to come back after each commercial break to see if it had fallen down, they had run out of money or endured a clinical physiological collapse due to the stress. They never did, but it made you want to watch just to see, and he always liked the house in the end so it was OK. Admittedly X Factor and the like have refined the techniques to stratospheric new levels but it was Kevin that showed us the way.

Hence, in the absence of any true economic facts we sent an email out to a few companies and asked them to tell us what they thought might happen. Most of them replied with statements that pretty much agreed with the facts that we had already established. We did manage to get one self-proclaimed expert to spout on about some doom and gloom in return for mentioning his name on the telly. We think his sole source of research was the Daily Mail as he also proclaimed that Diana may have been killed by the KGB or was it an asylum seeker or benefit claimant?….we forget.

In relation to the economy he said he thought 2012 might be a rocky road and that if German inflation gets out of hand then they may be less inclined to allow the ECB to bail out some of the weaker Eurozone countries. If this did happen then one or more of those countries could go bust, which could have an effect on some of the banks in France and Germany, which could cause a second credit crunch. This, in tandem with a collapse of economic confidence, could plunge the world (including the UK unless Mr. Cameron has totally caved in to the Tory right wingers and has pulled us out of that as well as the EU) into a deep depression and even a total collapse of the global economic system. Money would become worthless, society would break down and we will all be living in caves by the summer.

Despite not having a shred of evidence, proof, or reasoned thought, we decided that this would have to suffice given that there had not been any murders so far today. Obviously we couldn’t run it as news because it isn’t true and in fact is just the opinion of one person so what we do is announce the headline and then after it add one of the following phrases;

[Insert headline here]……’reportedly’. Translation; some other news channel has actually done some good old fashioned journalism and come up with a story which we have pinched and are trying to claim as our own

‘It was alleged today that’……. [Insert obviously not true headline here]. Translation; I hope the person who put their name to this has a good lawyer because our legal department couldn’t make it fly so we put the blame on someone else.

[Insert ridiculous headline here]……….’it was warned today’. Translation; as above, we just asked some bloke off the street to guess about some stuff and we’re peddling it as news when actually it has no more factual content or forensic rigour than some kooky celebrity telling cancer sufferers that their new self help Crystology book is a much more effective treatment than that old fashioned chemotherapy.

Then when we lead into the main details we introduce the opinion giver as a ‘respected analyst’. This is what we call people who were so bad at actually doing the job that they like to critique upon that they just decided to start guessing in the media. It’s a bit like cold reading, if you get one or two lucky guesses in there then nobody remembers the other ten that you got wildly wrong.

It will normally do the trick because hopefully enough of you will panic and cash in some of your investments and start burying your money in the garden. This will push down share prices to a level (FTSE of 5,000 normally) when all the professional fund managers will start buying them because they are such good value. This will push the markets up (but obviously this will not get a mention on our program, even if there have been no hammer murders that day) to a higher level and then they will sell the shares back to the amateur investors who decide it is safe to come back into the market and start digging up the lawn. In the end we will relent and, like Kevin, tell you that everything is going to be alright after all despite us scaring you witless in the meantime.

Remember that you may still be hammered to death by a maniac at any time though, so don’t drop your guard.

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