In the Seventies — 1974, I think — there used to be a song that went ‘Watched a horror movie right there on my TV’. Skyhooks, the band that performed it, went on to become famous in Australia. Their music — during the period of Glam Rock — addressed several young adult issues. Horror Movie, however, is a song whose subject matter has become perennial because the ‘horror movie’ referred to in the song is the Evening News.
Truly, nothing has changed. Every day one sits, benumbed and almost feeling-less from so much constant exposure to it, and waits for the tally. Five dead the day before, one of them an elderly grandma driving home to celebrate the festive season with her children — hit by a speeding truck driven by an intoxicated, unlicensed youngster that ran a red light. Another two yesterday, the reports of their passing cushioned between the ferocity of thunderstorms that struck in the Blue Mountains and delivered thirty thousand lightning strikes; and bush fires that were threatening to rage in South Australia. Three days earlier, eight children, all stabbed to death; on this day, a crashed fighter plane whose pilot had gone missing; days earlier, a man taking people hostage, stopping a city in its stride, causing it to catch its breath.
Attacked as we are systematically, day after day, as I said earlier, a certain drowsy numbness has begun to fill our senses, to borrow from Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale.
The moment we turn on the news we know for sure our auditory senses are going to be confronted with blood and gore and horror. It is the nature of things, it is how we give our fellow man a final send off, even if he happens to be someone that’s brought it upon himself — taken people hostage before being shot dead. He still rates a mention. We listen, we slouch, we are interested but in a resigned manner. This is the world as we know it. This is the Evening News, this is its composition, this is its structure.
This day’s news was more or less true to form. I was sat slouched when the news reporter began the narrative about a five-year-old girl who, ten years ago, was riding in a car with her granny at the festive time when she had a thought. “Do the policemen have no holidays on Christmas Day?” she asked and was told no, someone had to be on duty to keep an eye on law and order. The answer touched her heart.
“Could we take over some lollies to the station?” she asked.
She and her gran did that, not just a few lollies but a lot of other sweets as well. The action left the cops, to put it in current parlance, ‘gobsmacked’. Nobody had ever done that before — shown concern. Today, ten years later, the young girl is a young lady and her routine hasn’t changed at the end of the year — she still ventures in to the local police station armed with bags full of goodies for the local cops. It is one small way, she said in an interview, of saying thanks to the people who take care of our safety who put their lives on the line so that we may sleep peacefully at night.
My mind went out to our soldiers who do exactly that, sometimes fighting wars that can be avoided. It is this story of the young girl and her generosity of spirit that brought me out of my depressed slouch. I listened to it intently and discovered I was sitting upright. I wanted to hear more. I wanted the story to go on. Later, analysing it all, I realised how one good news story amid the ‘horror’ that we are faced with every day becomes like that stray ray of sunshine on a wintry day; how it warms and comforts; how we wish it could play out forever.
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.