Piers today, gone tomorrow

March 10, 2021, 1:10 pm , by news desk

Richard Lutz watches tv eat itself

They say the best way to stop a bad story is to cut off its legs.

The Ruratanian royals want to put a plug in the Harry/Meghan debacle. So the idea is to give a definitive comment, maybe push someone’s sorry head above the parapet …and then duck and move on.

Easily said. Put then the fun begins. Cut off the legs and that story keep on coming. And that’s the truth when it comes to how loudmouth tv presenter Piers Morgan took the hump over the Oprah interview and stormed off his own show. I mean, famous people have huffed offstage in the past when they didn’t like how studio questioning was going. But for the actual overpaid reporter to storm off is not only big stuff but, ultimately, funny.

But though another tv name quitting is really neither here nor there, it is worth asking what role Morgan played in the UK’s World Wide Media Mess. Yes, he is obnoxious, launches into ludicrous rants and eats airtime like a hungry hippo. But like any hot air balloon with a microphone, sometimes he hits the mark.

He quit because he was publicly told to shut up over Meghan….

For instance, he has been right on top of the pandemic chaos, not giving cabinet ministers an inch of leeway with their loose jargony squibs of junk that have been memorised with key phrases and bullet points. As a matter of fact, he has been one of the most incisive journalists in broadcasting to see through the buffoonery emanating from Number 10 and getting to the essence of a story of just how the government has screwed up many opportunities to save lives lost through the Covid crisis.

But, he’s quit because a studio colleague basically told him to shut it over his personal antipathy to the Duchess of Sussex. Or maybe he was forced to quit after being told to apologise or leave. But he’s gone, probably to another high paying talking head slot chucked onto your device each evening from the crystal box. And he’ll bang on and on and he’ll continue his stupid scatter gun poison about Harry and Meghan.

And this brings us back to Buckingham Palace. Polls indicate that it’s a generational news story. Older folks are circling around the royal family to defend them. The younger generation says it’s another nail in the coffin for an out of date self-constructed House of Windsor that can’t lead a normal life: there’s been Diana, Charles’ unfaithfulness,, questions over their wealth, Fergie, Andrew’s seedy links with a convicted paedophiliac, and now an in-law who says she was faced with racist behaviour.

It’s no coincidence that both Meghan and Harry described The House of Windsor (manufactured by the way in only 1917) as ‘The Institution’.

The Royal Family, yes. The Firm, yes. But The Institution? Never heard that one before until Oprah. But it just may be a neologism that makes quirky and unsettling sense these days.