SYNCRONICITY they call it, I think. It’s two events happening that appear related but don’t come about for the same reason. The two events preoccupying us at present both centre on broadcasters, both involve the use/abuse of money, but only one of them involves sex as well.
Let’s start with RTÉ and Ryan Tubridy. As the world and his mother now knows, Tubridy’s salary as the top earner in RTÉ was officially €440,000 a year. Except that the RTÉ bigwigs, for reasons best known to themselves, arranged for Renault cars to slip him another €75,000. If for some reason Renault decided they didn’t want to go on with the arrangement, the RTÉ bean-counters said they’d stump up the money. So Tubridy was getting quite a lot more money each year than the public had been led to believe.
When the people of the south heard the truth, they got very, very upset. They all loved Tubridy – well, those who liked consuming schmaltz every Friday night did – but the realisation that he was getting this extra back-hander while they were struggling to put bread on the table and to find a house in which that table could be accommodated really cheesed them off. And the fact that Tubridy along with his agent Noel Kelly, who bears some resemblance to Dominic Cummings, were quizzed with energetic hostility by politicians live on TV added to the bloodlust. As George Bernard Shaw said: “Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.” Yes, indeed, Virginia: Ryan plummeted from hero to zero in record time.
Meanwhile at the BBC in London, there were ugly rumours about a top presenter having paid £35,000 to a teenager for sex photographs. This started a guessing game as the public tried to decide who this person could be. Then it emerged that the top presenter was in fact veteran newsreader Huw Edwards, and his wife informed the public that her husband was suffering from mental health issues and was being treated for them. The Met Police investigated the case and found that Edwards had broken no law, but the BBC said they’d look into the case just the same. Meantime Edwards, like Tubridy in Ireland, is off-air.
So how do you like them apples?
The public in the twenty-six counties were pretty damn hopping mad with Tubridy until the suits from RTÉ were seated in front of the Oireachtas firing squad. A few hours of that was enough to shift public loathing away from Tubridy and on to this conniving shifty shower. Public animosity to Tubridy began to soften.
In a similar way, the British public began to feel sympathy for Edwards. Paying a teenager to send you dirty pictures isn’t exactly an attractive activity for a husband and father of five to get up to, but a look at Edwards’s face made most people realise that this was a man grappling with inner demons. There’s a growing feeling that the Beeb should just leave the man alone, he’s not well.
Two odd but similar cases. When someone’s face and form appear regularly in the corner of your living-room, you begin to think of them as, well, dammit, friends. And seeing your friend be set up for a public lynching leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
There’s only one thing worse than a sinful broadcaster and that’s a hypocritical broadcasting organisation.
