Nicky Campbell stumbles over TV religion anecdote
Sunday, 14 October 2007
Presenter Nicky Campbell got into a spot of bother this morning on The Big Questions, a religious/”issues” programme I found myself watching on BBC1.
The author Joanne Harris was on there as a guest and Campbell was talking to her about a religious experience she supposedly once had. He reminded her of the time she fell off a horse, cutting herself. Then a dog came along and licked her, miraculously healing the injury and leaving no scar.
Pause to reflect on the idiocy of this statement for a moment.
Still with me? Good. Harris, with the understandable look of a woman falsely labelled a fantasist, appeared totally confused, remarking that she didn’t recall the incident but admitting that dog spells God backwards. Campbell said it was on the internet. Harris was definitely of the opinion that it had never happened. Everyone looked baffled and then moved on.
What can it mean?
In fact, the incident is out there on the web. It’s featured on Helium, the site “where knowledge rules”. But Joanne Harris isn’t an especially uncommon name and it’s fairly obvious that a bestselling novelist wouldn’t be contributing random articles to a site aimed at aspiring writers and amateur critics. In fact, the dog/God incident is recalled by an entirely different Joanne Harris, who appears to be an expert on “edible art cookies” but is in no way the author of Chocolat.
The cock-up has echoes of the farce involving Ronnie Hazlehurst last week, where, upon the composer’s death, several media outlets, including the BBC, the Times and the Guardian falsely claimed he had written the S Club 7 hit Reach because of a joke insertion on Wikipedia (since corrected).
The lesson? If you’re going to research a guest on a chat show, it perhaps pays to use sources other than Google. Unless, of course, you’re desperately attempting to enliven an otherwise stilted debate about religion. Here endeth the sermon.
Update, Monday 15 Oct: Someone who was in the studio during this incident has been in touch. They report that after the programme, Campbell was visibly livid and “glared” at a member of the production team before leaving the set. I’m also told that the presenter is a “complete cock”. Well I never.
No. 1 — October 14th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
I never know who to blame when cock-ups like this happen. Campbell is obviously only recounting something that a hard-pressed researcher has handed him, so it isn’t really his fault as such. But maybe the well-paid presenters should be expected to do a little more legwork off their own bats, so that they understand what they’re talking about. Perhaps if he’d seen how shaky the source was for the Harris story, he might have questioned it.
Marr and Bragg manage it on Radio 4; why can’t others do their homework?
No. 2 — October 15th, 2007 at 9:58 am
Ludicrous. While the researcher in question should clearly be shot, it beggars belief that Campbell - whom I greatly dislike - took it at face value.
This reminds me of a recent story on Metro’s website involving teenage hoodies stealing elderly people’s scooters and joy-riding around on them.
The story was clearly taken from this website:
http://newsbiscuit.com/article/teenage-joy-riders-stealing-pensioners-electric-scooters-213
and pretty much copied wholesale.
All of which begs the rather obvious question, why is Metro so f***ing shit?
No. 3 — October 30th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
So Nicky Campbell’s a complete cock. I thoroughly expect this revelation to be on several hundred thousand websites around the world