ONLY last night, it happened again. There I was, on the sofa, watching the latest episode of the very excellent Broadchurch.
The beautifully-filmed and generally well-constructed ‘whodunit’ suddenly went a bit sour for me when a media pack turned up. As usual, they were portrayed as a baying feral hoard of snappers who’d do anything to photograph the innocent victims.
This time they were giving each other a leg-up to poke their lenses in the family’s sitting room window or crowding round the church yard gate.
It’s such a telly cliché – an amorphous mass of clicking, yelling sneakiness that the viewer automatically knows to be the ‘baddies’. Every other character gets a back story with some well-considered and insightful explanations of their motives. Heck, even murderers get to have their bloodlust explained by lack of proper maternal attention. Not so The Press.
