Why bad news sells
WHO SHOULD come charging forward into the central reservation of my mental superhighway this week than good old William Shakespeare. Next year it is the 450th anniversary of his birth – and to mark the occasion the august Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, who run the UK’s Shakespeare assets in Stratford-upon-Avon – most notably his birthplace and museum – have set up an initiative for UK schools to honour our national hero every year with a Shakespeare Week.
Tuesday this week saw the official launch of Shakespeare Week (which actually starts next year – so we now have a year to prepare!). The ambitious plan was unveiled at a reception near the House of Commons in Westminster for Shakespeare Week partners – a pot-pourri of educational, publishing, dramatic and curatorial organisations. What on Earth Publishing, my little baby, is a proud partner of the initiative since, in collaboration with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, we are about to start work on hand-crafting a giant 2.3m long Wallbook featuring the 100 most dramatic moments across all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays on a timeline – fully illustrated by Wallbook wonderman Andy Forshaw. It will be published in time for Shakespeare’s birthday week next Spring. I promise!
Top of the bill at the reception was a speech to be given by none other that our very own living educational bard, Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education.
Never having met the man, I was mildly interested in him having a chance to speak for himself in person rather than for my views on his so-called reforms being shaped entirely by second-hand sources.
But two minutes after he was due to speak, an apologetic minion announced that the great man – even though he was only 5 minutes walking distance away and even though the date must have been in his dairy for months – sadly couldn’t make it.
An unexpected surge of relief rushed through me – not because I no longer had to suffer his speech – but because his cancellation made me feel so infinitely grateful that my job – unlike his – is not one where generally, at every turn, I am letting people down.
Needless to say we had a splendid time without him – many creative minds all pouring out their juices on what can be done to engage young minds in the national treasure that is Shakespeare – the bard who articulated so beautifully the full panoply of human nature from A-Z in his wonderful spectrum of plays ranging from Comedy and History to Tragedy.
I have been musing since Tuesday – on and off – on what it is that Shakespeare’s works can teach us about ourselves today. I have reached one rather unexpected conclusion. He has helped me to understand – which is quite significant for me as a one-time journalist – why bad news sells.
Flick through the newspapers, switch on the TV – turn up the volume on your DAB radio set – and I guarantee that if you had to classify all the news stories you read, see or hear than at least 95% could only be said to be BAD. Go on, try out this morning. I assure you, it is true.
In fact you’ll need no assurance because instinctively we all know that it’s true! We are a culture addicted to BAD NEWS – me, you - all of us are – but why? Ironically, so my Shakespearean thoughts of the week inform me, it’s because modern Western society has become addicted not to tragedy but to comedy.
Just think about it. Today’s Hollywoodisation (horrible word, I know, but somehow appropriate) of storytelling means that it is almost impossible to create a commercially successful story – in film, in a book or on TV – without it being what Shakespeare would call a comedy – you know, something that ultimately has a happy ending. How many mainstream films can you think of that have a truly tragic ending – Romeo and Juliet-like – without even a surviving dog popping its nose out of the wreckage? (The surviving pet scenario is a perfect, and essential, device for flipping Hollywood’s gliztiest global disaster movies from Shakespearean tragedy to modern farce).
Today’s mainstream media cannot stand true tragedy – King Lear-style. We are far too squeamish. How could film-makers possibly sell stories that leave people feeling worse off when they leave the cinema than when they went in? Paying for ‘content’ means giving ‘value’ be it a sense of escapism, an illusion – or virtual reality – where things are better than they really are. If not, then why bother going in the first place? Who these days is going to pay for something that makes them feel more miserable?
Today’s mainstream media cannot stand true tragedy – King Lear-style. We are far too squeamish.
But if tragedy is such anathema in our post-Shakespearean age, then why are our newspapers, TV and radio news programmes so damn full of it?
Thanks to the bard, now I see that of course one person’s tragedy is another person’s comedy. As long as I can read about someone else being more hard up, more miserable, more hungry, less happy, more screwed up than me then, of course, I will feel better. It’s not deliberate or sadistic – it’s just a natural human (mammalian?) instinct that imprints on us a perspective in which we become the comic pieces of a puzzle that turns a bad news story into something that feels good. I – the reader, the viewer, the listener who is not suffering in the same way – becomes the pup poking its nose up out of the rubble.
Like boredom, I suspect our apparent lack of stomach for what Shakespeare called tragedy is a mostly modern disease. We are so used to our feel-good fix that we can’t resist flicking onto the news – to get our Daily Blast of other people’s bad tidings in order to trigger that happy sense of relief deep inside us which courses through our veins each morning – along with the caffeine – giving us the energy, the confidence and the drive to face another day. Our daily Sense of Purpose is built on the backs of all those poor sods everywhere else who make it into the grim headlines.
Like boredom, I suspect our apparent lack of stomach for what Shakespeare called tragedy is a mostly modern disease.
Did bad news sell in the same way in Shakespeare’s England, I wonder?
I suspect not. For a start, people back then didn’t have newspapers, radio or TV (or coffee, for that matter – not quite). What’s more, the vast range of Shakespeare’s extraordinary dramatic output suggests to me they had a wider outlook than we have today. People were certainly less squeamish, they must have had a broader emotional appetite, a less narrow everyday perspective – at least that’s what Shakespeare’s plays suggest to me, which is something powerful, I believe, they also say about us.
A less narrow everyday perspective – hmmm. What a bizarre irony for a modern world that prides itself on global communications and 24 by 7 news! And as for my feelings of relief when Mr Gove didn’t make it to the Shakespeare Week launch? Ahhh – now I understand why I felt so good…..
