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TV pays disrespect with vulgar Kray funeral airtime
Sunday Herald, The, Oct 15, 2000 by MurielGray
Whether we like it or not, the media validates things. All sorts of things. And the news, especially the BBC news, is the arm of the media that validates most profoundly. It's quite terrifying. A famine is only worth bothering about if Michael Buerk tells us so. We decide whether the rogue meteorite that has worried scientists should worry us by whether it appears as a top story with Hew Edwards frowning, or as an "and finally" with him smirking. Even our own national sense of worth is regulated by the BBC in that if something Scottish makes it on to the national bulletin then it's pretty damned important. But most tellingly, the news validates fame. Are you sufficiently worthy to get a mention on the news when certain life events occur? Is the birth of your child of interest to the common hordes? Your marriage? Your divorce? Your death?
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Last Wednesday's sombre night of news was revelatory. A man had died. A large part of the news, larger in fact than an item on some devastating violence currently occurring abroad, was devoted to his many mourners paying their respects, and sound-bites of ordinary people mixing with celebrities to recall the man's past with great affection and reverence. And if counting the broadcast minutes denotes worth, then it was one of the BBC news's more obscenely misguided decisions. That's because the man in question was not the one at the front of the news, the First Minister of our Scottish parliament, who deserved every second of airtime afforded him, and more, to help us remember a lifetime of devotion to public service, and a human being of outstanding integrity, compassion, wit and charm. Instead it was an item not much further down, celebrating a moronic cockney murderer whose life's work amounted to a catalogue of shabby violence mixed with the brutish, mawkish sentimentality favoured by criminals to fill the cavernous vacuum where their conscience should be.
What utter nitwit at the BBC decided that the disgusting, vulgar spectacle of Reggie Kray's funeral was worthy of valuable news time on any night of the year? To decide that such a non-event ranked high enough to devote several precious minutes of prime-time coverage on the night Donald Dewar died was offensive beyond words.
Only minutes after the restrained and fitting tributes to the unique and admirable Donald had been broadcast, we were confronted with shots of a Victorian style hearse with the word "respect" emblazoned on it in white chrysanthemums, being dragged through a crowd of dick-wit east-enders, clapping and nodding in approval.
What virtue precisely was this floral respect referring to? The respect that Donald Dewar had earned had been tangible, not just on the news but out here in the real world. Who did you encounter last Wednesday that wasn't talking sadly and genuinely about his passing? Taxi drivers were, shop keepers, hairdressers, doctors, builders, every friend or colleague you spoke to on the phone that day. Everyone, it seemed, this columnist very much included, felt a little personally diminished by his death.
And the respect that Reggie engendered? Actor and utter twit Stephen Berkoff, who had apparently attended the ugly spectacle, was allowed a long and ponderous epitaph to the pathetic old lag in the gaudy coffin.
Given the all-important validating news time, how the ghastly old luvvie droned on. Oh dear, dear Reggie. He was an icon of the people. Berkoff even had the nerve to pronounce that Kray had provided "a mythic service in a dull dreary post-war environment". But what's worse was that the news chose to broadcast such tosh. Berkoff just stopped short of the famous Monty Python sketch parodying such idiot adulation: "But they was gentlemen, mind. They would nail your head to the floor right? But they was always clean and they always treated their old mum like the duchess she were."
Somehow the similar coverage on ITV was, if not forgivable, at least understandable. The ITV news can never really be taken seriously. It's never about validation. It's about ratings, about Anthea Turner, Grant Bovey and Les Dennis. About Posh and Becks and maybe a tiny bit about the Arab-Israeli conflict once Kevin Keegan's resignation is dealt with. But what possible excuse can our state- funded public broadcasting service have for elevating the vulgar send- off of a shabby worthless man to almost the same status as the death of someone so unquestionably honourable he is impossible to replace? The broadsheets were just as culpable. Obituaries exist for public figures who've achieved something of worth in their life. And yet at least three of our main respectable broadsheets carried an obituary of Kray as though he had mattered, as though he too had done something of note.
What next? An Omnibus about Thomas Hamilton? A tribute to Harold Shipman? Criminals need to be punished, hopefully reformed, but completely disrespected by the simple means of an absence of public attention. The mildly critical commentary over the Kray funeral was hardly a justification for its inclusion. It didn't matter which words accompanied the nauseating pictures of stupid old women shedding crocodile tears and applauding the coffin, the whole thing remained duplicitously reverent by the very fact of its inclusion among serious news.
