No funny. At all.

The coverage of the tragic school shooting in Conneticut, combined with the ongoing coverage of the suicide of the mother and nurse who was the victim of a ‘prank’ call by two tossers who ‘worked’ for an Australian radio station, makes watching the news or reading a paper a fairly depressing activity at the moment.  Essentially, if Angela Merkel pops up and you think ‘thank Christ!’, you know things are grim.

What’s striking about the tossers who made the ‘prank’ call is just how mind-boggingly insensitive they truly are.  When they gave a press conference, their first public appearance following their actions that had led to a woman taking her own life, they talked of how ‘shattered’ they felt.

Let’s be quite clear here, nobody cares how you feel.  Nobody.  After you have driven a woman to her death, you do not go on national telly and talk about how it has affected you.  You go on telly, and you say ‘I am sorry’.  You say that and only that and you keep on saying that until the camera crew have packed up their lights and gear and shit and have left the room, left the building.

Following the death of Jacintha Saldanha (charmingly described as ‘Kate nurse’ in the media) the tossers who made the ‘prank’ call had to take down their Twitter accounts.  This is probably because being self-absorbed media wankers (question, does working for a radio station in Australia qualify as being a job in the media?) check their Twitter accounts before they take their morning dump, although sitting on the loo is probably a great place to discover that everyone in the world wants to kill you.

There have been a few protestations that the level of abuse heaped upon the tossers was out of proportion, but I’m not so sure.  First of all, it’s not like anyone has actually seriously made any sort of death threat against them, knowing the internet community, it’s more likely that people have been tweeting that the pair should meet an unpleasant fate in an unlikely fashion, like being gored to death by goats, or struck by a hot air balloon making an emergency landing.  Essentially, a non-specific remark that the planet would be better off without you.

Certainly, the world would have been a better place if they had not made that call.  I have to admit that I have never appreciated practical jokes or hoax calls.  Maybe somebody can explain to me the humour in ‘phoning up a hospital to get confidential medical details about somebody and then broadcasting it.  I can’t see the humour but can see that in terms of filling air time this is a lot more economical than paying a writer to sacrifice an entire summer and develop a coffee dependency in order to come up with six half hour radio shows that only receive a luke-warm reception and will never make the jump to television.

Contrasting the tossers with the television footage of Jacintha Saldanha’s daughter giving a statement to the press about how much she will miss her mother was quite revealing.  Composed and dignified, it demonstrated the gulf between those who have something to say that’s worthwhile listening to, and those who want to talk about themselves, without having anything interesting to say.

Without wishing to add to the sum burden of human misery in the world, and without wishing to make a judgement about somebody based upon reading a few words and seeing a few seconds of television, it’s pretty clear that even if the tossers are not terrible people (and I suspect they are, sometimes you don’t need much information about somebody’s actions to make a judgement about them, like if you knew somebody spend their evenings peeing on choirboys and that’s all you knew about them…what more do you need) they are at least terrible broadcasters.

I know this because at a time when dee jays and radio presenters in England were being arrested as sex offenders and more accusations about peados on the radio came out, these were the two people that the internet (for which read: The World) decided to hate.  Says it all.