England shook tonight. I live in Lincoln — just south of the epicentre.
I was just about to go to bed when the plentiful beer cans on my desk began to shake. And then a few fell off. I grabbed my bed which wasn’t coping any better.
Naturally, I’ve legged it downstairs to my housemate. We both go outside to see what’s going on. People have come out of their houses to find what’s going on. Car alarms going off everywhere.
24-hour news is made for this. After we all went inside, we turned on our news channels.
Sky News were straight on it. Literally within fifteen minutes. They had Lisa Dowds, a reporter, on the phone from her home in Leicestershire. They were getting as much information as they could.
And what were the BBC doing? Well… feeling guilty for not turning a bit citizen journalist and filming everyone outside, I just filmed, er, the TV. Or rather, I filmed us waiting to see if the BBC would ever get their act together. The video is at the bottom of this post, and contains some strong language.
Now this may be a light-hearted ’students in a house taking the piss’ type video, but it has a bit of a serious meaning. The BBC were a full half an hour late on this story. And when they did finally pick it up, they continued to broadcast ABC’s World News Tonight. Dear me.
Meanwhile, Sky News have had callers from all over the country. They’ve told us the epicentre was in Lincoln (which, curiously, made us all cheer) and that more tremors could happen. Sure, there wasn’t anything else to add — the drama had happened — but at the end of the day, thousands of people have turned on their televisions to find out what the hell was going on.
4.7 on the Richter scale is nothing in the global perspective — but we were all terrified. Where was the BBC? Why didn’t they explain what was going on? Why did the newsroom go into complete meltdown? Why did they instead run three long adverts; one of which being one for how they’re always there with the breaking news?
Questions that need to be answered tomorrow. The BBC is our public service broadcaster. Yet, tonight, it failed to provide a public service.
Special shout-out to the Lincolnshire Echo. Not only did they post this story in double-quick time, but someone has clearly hit the social-networks to spread the link.
Facebook on top again: Is this the first video of the quake? On second viewing, clearly not.
My video can be viewed here!
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