Tabloid TV

 Here's a Commonwealth joke for you:

Q What's bordering on insanity?

A Wales and Scotland.

No, I don't think England or English people are insane. But they are definitely getting a bad press. 

I don't believe for one minute that England is populated by right-wing crazies, staging demos in Brighton to fight off the hordes of furriners trying to get there in wee boats from Europe. Ignoring advice to wear masks and observe safe-distancing. 

Nor is England overrun by Covid protesters marching around Trafalgar Square, waving placards and claiming the virus is a government plot or a conspiracy by the Russians and the Chinese to attack 'British' freedom. They too refuse to wear masks and observe safe-distancing - oh, and, of course, they take their little kids with them, thus putting them at risk. Action that would have social work at your door if you were living in Leicester or Bolton. 

And England is definitely not full of people who can't see a day off coming without rushing off to a beach (often all to the same beach, it seems) and sitting elbow to elbow with no thought to the virus or any precautions. 

And England is definitely not full of people (I notice, mainly white) under the age of 45 who think the virus is an entity - you know, kinda like the scary monster off Alien, although now that I'm watching Lovecraft Country I promise you there's a lot worse than that in writers' fevered imaginations - and it's an entity that you can negotiate a nice weekend with before you all get slapped into lockdown - again. 

So what's going on? 

It's fairly simple: everyday, honest, decent people are not represented on TV (or in newspapers, come to that). People who obey the law and follow guidelines are not newsworthy. To get viewers (and readers) you need people behaving badly. I'm sure there are people behaving badly in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland but you're not going to see them on TV. Not while the news channels can find footage showing lots of English people behaving like brainless morons who either don't know or don't care that there's a pandemic. 

If you only judged the UK or any part of it by what you saw on TV, you'd have a warped kind of picture in your head.

The tabloid TV approach was fine when all was well (well, in fact it wasn't for some of us) but it spread the idea that bad behaviour (flouting the rules, ignoring expert advice and generally behaving like an arse) was okay. It's not now. A lot of people in the four nations of the UK have changed their behaviour in the light of the Covid situation. It's really the media that haven't. 

Well, change is not in their interests: their main interest is selling advertising. 

The trouble is, not adapting to changing conditions is a bad policy. If that's what tabloid TV leads to, there will be no money to buy the stuff that's advertised and nobody left to sell stuff to.