Should Funerals Be Broadcast on TV?
Tony Horne explains why he is uncomfortable with funerals being broadcast on television.
4 Sep 2011, 09:10
Should funerals be totally private?
Five’s editor will say “it’s a massive human interest story” or perhaps confirm that the family thought it was the best send-off they could give to a man barely married a fortnight before a shark took him in his prime just off the Seychelles. It doesn’t sit right to me.
Of course, we all watched Diana in 1997 and people will say that her funeral was different because of who she was, but I remember feeling so miserable and “enough is enough” about it all that at lunchtime on that day, I drove from Durham to the Lake District to get away from it all.
The roads, you will remember, were ghost like. I wandered into a pub in Keswick, and I might as well have stayed in Durham. It was packed, people watching the big screens like Arsenal had just let eight in against Manchester United. What kind of human condition is that, staring at the TV, silence only broken by the words “another Foster’s?”
For Diana, I acknowledge the sense of national occasion but you can’t be right in your head if you think that the young princes should be paraded like that to a global audience, whatever role the lottery of birth has thrust upon them.
Likewise on Tuesday, didn't the family deserve some privacy? Shouldn’t there be rules against this? You can’t argue that any coverage is in the public interest. What do you say other than “poor girl” and “brave girl” followed by “her life is over, she won’t get over that” when you watch it? Of course, it was covered appropriately and the story is jaw-dropping but we don’t need to sit down and show the funeral just to evoke that language from you, do we?
I can - and have - play bastard journalist if I want to, but I see no intellectual or moral value in doing so here, unless (I repeat) the family had invited me so as many as possible knew how much this man was loved. He clearly was.
Sometimes the police can argue for a “public” funeral. Look at those three hundred who turned up for Raoul Moat’s. In amongst them several of Northumbria Police’s finest detectives I hope, weeding out some of the scum who thought he was a hero. Equally, there are examples in crime when the funeral keeps a story alive and it may jog people’s memories as to the sequence of events. You could have argued this for Joanne Yeates, perhaps, at the turn of the year.
One very unfortunate individual perishing to a shark attack doesn’t seem to fall into any category.
What of Declan Donnelly who buried his father at the weekend? Press reported his face of “grim determination”, his eyes “cast downwards”.
Well, yes, that happens at funerals. Ant was there too, they printed – hardly breaking news, given their relationship.
I don’t care if Dec is one half of Mr Saturday Night nor part of the Geordie A-list, I don’t want to read or see pictures of his father’s funeral.
In a moral world, obsessed by celebrity and soundbites, some things are still none of my business, and that is one of them.
My thoughts are clearly with Gemma Redmond.
The author
Tony Horne
Network Broadcaster for UTV Media, Ghostwriter of “Bodyguard – My Life on the Front Line” with Craig Summers and “Tango 190” with PC David Rathband.
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Words fail me. As they clearly do you too.
04/09/2011 21:06