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It was no April fool joke that a politician in Russia was fined for dangling spaghetti from his ears during a speech by Vladimir Putin, and here our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry who has spent 39 years in journalism (23 of them at the BBC), outlines the fine line he has also experienced between extreme drama and humour.
Earlier he described how he was assisted in breaking into the South Wales Echo office car when he was a cub reporter, recalled his early career as a journalist, the importance of experience in the job, and making clear that the ‘calls’ to emergency services as well as court cases are central to any media operation.
He has also explored how poorly paid most journalism is when trainee reporters had to live in squalid flats, the vital role of expenses, and about one of his most important stories on the now-scrapped 53 year-old BBC Wales TV Current Affairs series, Week In Week Out (WIWO), which won an award even after it was axed, long after his career really took off.
Phil has explained too how crucial it is actually to speak to people, the virtue of speed as well as accuracy, why knowledge of ‘history’ is vital, how certain material was removed from TV Current Affairs programmes when secret cameras had to be used, and some of those he has interviewed.
He has disclosed as well why investigative journalism is needed now more than ever although others have different opinions, how the pandemic played havoc with media schedules, and the importance of the hugely lower average age of some political leaders compared with when he started reporting.
It has always struck me that there is often humour at times of extreme drama.
For 10 years from 1989, I presented the BBC Cymru Wales (BBC CW) Current Affairs programme Week In, Week Out (WIWO), which involved a huge amount of travelling and lengthy filming schedules, often late into the night.
Sometimes we were so tired we were reduced to fits of hysterical laughter for no reason whatsoever.
When I conducted interviews for it, the film crew might have to dismantle almost the entire room, and remove altogether any clocks, because otherwise the sequence wouldn’t cut properly as you might get ‘tick tick’ when two sections were edited together!
Obviously these were terribly traumatic events for the interviewee, who might have already been through a lot, but they could be very funny for us…
On newspapers I would sometimes have to stop my mouth turning into a grin, as the victim of a terrible crime recounted what had happened to him or her, which was actually a bit of a joke!
Bizarre names would invariably set you off, and a friend was once talked to sternly by a judge when he sniggered in court after the accused’s name was read out.
All of this has been thrown into sharp relief for me with news that a politician in Russia had a picture of himself taken dangling spaghetti from his ears, as he listened to a speech online by his president Vladimir Putin.
Evidently Mr Putin did not see the joke, because the politician Mikhail Abdalkin, was fined £1,650 for “discrediting the armed forces” in the stunt on February 21, when the president gave his state of the nation speech.
As well as being extremely funny, this had a serious purpose behind it.
In a Russian saying, someone who has been deceived is said to have had noodles hung on the ears.
Mr Abdalkin, a Communist party lawmaker in the Samara region, said it was an ironic gesture to express his dissatisfaction with “the president’s silence about internal political problems”.
At least he has a sense of humour, as well as a knowledge of cultural sayings (even though Mr Putin apparently does not possess one, and takes offence at some of these sayings directed at HIM!), so perhaps it was the best way of getting his point across, despite being fined.
Others have been arrested.
One example is Evan Gershkovich, a well respected reporter from the Wall Street Journal.
Mr Gershkovich has been accused of espionage, a charge that carries a maximum prison sentence of 20 years, and it’s claimed he “was collecting classified information about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military industrial complex”.
This too is laughable (although the possible sentence isn’t!), but not as funny as dangling spaghetti from your ears during a speech by Mr Putin….
The memories of Phil’s extraordinary decades long award-winning career in journalism (when humour was never far from the surface) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A Good Story’. Order it now.
A different book, though, has not been published, because it was to have included names.
Tomorrow – why the latest worrying disclosures about the behaviour of police officers have shone the spotlight on the biggest force in Wales – South Wales Police (SWP).
