- Time on your hands… - 19th December 2024
- Order of the British Endgame - 18th December 2024
- Wallace and groaner again… - 17th December 2024
Timings were critical for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry during 23 years with The BBC, and a 41 year journalistic career.
The time that events happened was absolutely crucial.
In evening newspapers (when there were such things!) the deadline was a certain time for page one, earlier for page three and so on.
In television news it was a specific time (then) for the lunchtime bulletin, with another deadline for the main evening programme.
In television Current Affairs it was longer, but the time limit was no less severe because as the date of transmission approached there was a slow ratcheting up of tension, especially if you didn’t have enough cases!
I remain very proud of the fact that I have NEVER missed a deadline.
But perhaps the greatest time-prediction came on a much broader scale with worldwide implications – the collapse of the Soviet Union (SU).
This was predicted by Andrei Amalrik in his 1970 book, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?.
The book anticipates the huge area’s eventual breakup under the weight of social and ethnic antagonisms.
He declared about it then: “…it may appear to be only empty chatter. But for Western students of the Soviet Union, at any rate, this discussion should have the same interest that a fish would have for an ichthyologist if it suddenly began to talk”.
Fair play to him he was only a few years out, and if you are saying this in 1970 when it looked as though the SU would be here forever, you can be allowed a little leeway…
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formally dissolved as a sovereign state and subject of international law on December 26 1991.
This sort of deadline is far more important than getting stories on page one of the paper – but it is still about TIMINGS!
The memories of Phil’s astonishing, decades long award-winning career in journalism (when deadlines were always met), 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.
Tomorrow, how for him reporting the potential downfall of famous people has always been paramount, and now this is highlighted by the news that many have deserted Elon Musk’s controversial social media platform, with one UK media outlet asking if it could be the end for ‘X’.
