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A Happy New Year/Blwyddyn Newydd Dda to all our readers!
In 2024 The Eye promise to continue holding important people to account, and revealing information which may be unwelcome to some.
Here we show, in a piece by our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry how the news does not stop at holiday times like these so it must be reported by journalists, and that ‘calls’ to emergency services have to be made.
Some seem to think because little is in the papers and being broadcast, then nothing much happens at this time of year!
There are stories about the weather, travel ‘chaos’ and the sales.
These sales can be record-breaking {in fact my first front page lead on the South Wales Echo [SWE] (then the biggest-selling paper produced in Wales) was reporting exactly this}.
For example, The Sun’s front page the day after boxing day screamed: “CASHBACK WITH A BANG”, and the strapline was: “SHOPPERS IN A £4.7BN spree”.
At the other extreme the sales are reported as being terribly poor – there is nothing in between!
There are hardy perennials around now, such as the number of pets which are kicked out after they were given as unwanted presents, or a ‘record’ rise in contact with the Marriage Guidance Council (now called ‘Relate’), because people are cooped up indoors and realise they can’t stand their partners.
But there are also ‘good’ (‘bad’) stories, which might not receive the attention they usually would (unlike during ‘normal’ working hours!).
Houses get burnt down because the celebratory meal goes badly wrong, and with the thought of most people at home alongside their families there are, I’m afraid to say, a number of suicides by those who have no-one.
Families are thrown together in an oppressive atmosphere, pretending to be cheerful, and anger builds up, so there are also, unfortunately, plenty of drink-fuelled murders.
All these terrible events have to be reported – even if the coverage is only a few paragraphs in newspapers, or scant details on broadcast medium.
They are usually first picked up through the ‘calls’ to emergency services, which are regular contact with the police, local fire brigades and ambulance organisations (now just one in Wales), to see what, if anything, is happening.
When I started they were done on the phone, but now a lot of the calls are made using the internet, and are often automated.
On one New Year’s Day in the early 1980s I had to do the calls in an almost empty newsroom, and I also did them (although from home) at the Cardiff freelance agency I worked on, Cambrian News Agency.
I feel for the poor people who have to do the calls now in news organisations!
Once when I did them I was party to the black humour which seems to persist with the police.
A sergeant at a Welsh police force, picked up the phone when I rang (it’s all centralised now) and told me about an apparent suicide at a beauty spot in South Wales when a man had driven his car off a cliff.
Sadly suicides on Welsh cliffs happen all too often during the holiday season, and another police officer told me that people who wanted to take their own lives would, bizarrely, lock their cars before getting out and jumping to their deaths.
This time though, the man had stayed in his car before driving it over the edge.
“He’s dead”, the officer said. I cleared my throat, desperately trying to sound older than my years, and not shocked.
We were never allowed to say someone had died until we were given the news officially by the hospital.
I stuttered: “Um, how can you be so sure?“, my voice wavering. “Well,” he answered stifling a laugh, “his body is in the front and his head is in the back”…
Details of Phil’s astonishing decades-long journalistic career (which started when he had to make ‘calls’ to emergency services), as he was gripped by the rare and incurable neurological condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in an important book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now.
Regrettably publication of another book, however, was refused, because it was to have included names.
Tomorrow – the controversies swirling round a sports personality who has been unveiled as a star ‘mystery runner’ in a Welsh New Year ‘fun run’ event.
