Whilst watching the BAFTA’s the other night I was woefully watching the Loved and Lost montage when a familiar face popped up – that of Michael Winner, the film director whose deep tan and startlingly white hair are of such contrast that he resembles a squashy Mr. Whippy. Or rather, resembled a Mr. Whippy, since the Michael Winner has passed away, as I discovered after a swift google. I really thought at first they might have put it in as a joke – a very bad taste joke, I might add, but not in Ricky Gervais territory. But it turned out the poor man had in fact died, and did so on the 21^st of January. And I completely missed it.

You see, the news is rather like this nowadays. If you blink you’ll miss it. Maybe on that day I gave my newsfeed an all-too-cursory glance, and perhaps I watched Dave instead of the news, and perchance my dad forgot to pick up the paper the next day. And the death of this British catch-phrase colossus completely passed me by.

This is not the only occasion I’ve discovered a blank void where the news should be. Last year I was speaking to a university friend of mine over the phone and mentioned Anders Breivik, whose trial was then being followed live online, months after the terrible shootings. But she innocently remarked that she’d never heard of him. The Norway killing spree, I said, a nation in mourning; a lone assassin acting against perceived ‘Islamist Marxism’? But she pleaded ignorance of the whole case. It was absolutely bizarre.

One would have expected that by August 2012, over a YEAR since the worst mass killings in Norway since World War II, someone would have turned to my friend at work, in church, in the pub, and said, ‘I can’t believe what’s happened in Norway,’ or, ‘Did you see that Breivik is pleading sane?’ If I felt out of the loop for missing Michael Winner, how much more of a peasant must she have felt?

The thing is, the news is now so easy it’s cheap. It’s so quickly spoon-fed to us, then quickly surpassed by something else, by the time it gets back to our lips via our brains it’s already cold. It’s easy to avoid the serious stuff; we can ignore the news that we don’t find interesting; thus why any news site’s Top 10 stories are always populated with celebrities. We can manipulate the significance of the outside world by choosing what we surround ourselves with.

And therefore, when it comes to talking about the news, since we don’t know or care anything about Police Commissioner Elections, or the political crisis in Tunisia, it doesn’t come up. It is telling that it took me some time to dig out some significant world news that hadn’t occurred in the last 36 hours, or to remember any.

There are many more issues that need to be discussed about contemporary news dissemination. But alas, as I write, little #RIP’s are popping up everywhere, and now it is the wonderful, eternal uncle, Richard Briers, who has passed away. The irony is I’m sure all my friends will hear about this. But will we hear about the thousands of unnecessary deaths that occurred in the NHS last year? Will we talk about North Korea’s nuclear plans? Perhaps not. Perhaps it’s time we started behaving like the news wasn’t everywhere around us everyday. And then, maybe, we might take notice of it.

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