Congratulations Antipodeans! You've made it after decades of struggling to get a toehold, however small, on the top end of British TV News. You've scored, though only modestly, at least twice in the last couple of years with the bush fires and the recent "Woman Knifes Man" stuff about your previous Prime Minister getting it in the back behind, or even before, the curtains.Ozzie politics were always considered to be "more robust" than ours, but then we quickly trumped this one with our very own "Brother Knifes Brother" story in the Labour Party leadership elections.
Last night, for the first time in living memory ,with the Qantas A380 Singapore story, an Australia related item hit the number one spot on both BBC 1's and ITV1's main evening news bulletins.Grainy pictures of the aircraft flying over Indonesia's neighbouring Batam Island were followed by better ones of the apparently damaged wing leading edge, a pretty decent landing at Singapore, engineers on the ground examining the damaged engine and pretty together and cheerful looking passsngers streaming through the airport arrivals en route to an unexpected fully paid for evening in town. Free counselling or a late meal and a cold Tiger down at the quays? What a choice. Any veteran national servicemen or sailors amongst them looking forward to revisiting their youthful haunts in old Bugis Street were in for a sore disappointment though.
The script made a much bigger meal out of it than the pictures, but that's our media. Australia had successfully beaten the next two world items,"Paedo Nursery School assistant jailed" followed by Obama's bad news day. Thanks to you down under we here were spared another evening of seamingly endless headlines about our wicked coalition government's evil cuts and the forthcoming end of the world as we've known it.
So... well done folks, but don't expect another number one headline slot for a while.
