vehicles and jokes

Some stories are difficult to tell - especially if you need to be brief. You can't tell all the background and give all the analysis in a minute, let alone 40 seconds. Some long-running stories are like a voyage on a ship - there's a departure, and one day, in the future, an arrival. There may be stop-offs en route, but for 99% of the voyage there's just sea.

Economics is one of several subjects which are like this - nothing ever really happens in economic life: trends occur, or change, but identifying the day or the hour when these changes actually occur is impossible. So economics journalists have to find a vehicle to carry their report, and to allow them to note the trends: they might survey the state of a particular area of the economy, or show how sales of a particular toy, say, are a symptom of the country's economic health. The good ones - like the BBC's Economics Editor, Evan Davis - will almost never lead a story on "today the government announced a record trade surplus/deficit", or "inflation fell today by 1 percentage point" - they find better vehicles to tell the story.

It's about being memorable. One of the reasons why storytelling is such a buzzword in business, and strategy, as well as journalism and writing skills these days is that so many people have realised that human beings need to make sense of everything - and they do this best when there's a pattern to help them understand, digest, and then recall what they've learned. If you were learning a language, wouldn't you find it easier to remember new words if, instead of being random, they had a theme - "buying a bus ticket", "going to the doctor" etc.

So it is with stories in the news. Often the most memorable stories aren't the big headline, top stories: the down-bulletin stories, if well told, are the ones people actually remember. And, like all good novels, stories need atmosphere, characters, plot, suspense. So many of the "classic" news stories don't lend themselves to such treatment - and the pressure of 24 hour news won't allow people the time to develop the stories in such a way as to make them become memorable.

I often compare good storytelling with telling good jokes. Here's a lovely simple story as told by the Irishman, the late Dave Allen -

"This character arrives in a very rural part of Ireland. It’s a town. And he’s aware of the kind of atmosphere of the town even before he gets to it because there’s a stillness about the town – and normally towns are full of bustle and cattle and markets, and gossip and neighbours. And there’s nothing. There’s no movement at all. And as he walks down the streets of this town all he sees is occasionally the curtain of a house moves as he passes by and little faces looking at him as he goes down.

Until he eventually comes to the square, and in the square is a funeral entourage, which is made up of a coffin being carried by six men in black. And behind it is a very very tall, extreme looking man. By extreme I mean his face looks as if it has been cut from granite, cold eyes, a great chin. And on a lead he has this enormous Irish wolfhound – extraordinary, even double the size of a normal Irish wolfhound, and its tongue is lolling out and its eyes are red and bloodshot – it’s a fierce looking dog.

And behind the dog is another man in black, and behind that man is another man in black, and there’s just a line of people walking behind the coffin. And the stranger is totally enthralled by this, and he can’t curtail his curiosity, and he runs up to this great looking man with the granite face and he says “excuse me. What’s happening here?”

He says, “I’m burying me wife.”

He says “Oh --- this is your wife. Dead.”

“Yes.”

“Obviously she was a deeply loved person – by the atmosphere of this funeral.”

“No. She was the most despised person in the whole town. Everybody hated her. Everybody prayed that she’d die every day. And she didn’t.”

“Nobody liked her at all?”

“Nobody liked her, nobody loved her. She was a despised person.”

And he said – “well obviously the dog. This was her dog. At least her dog loved her. The dog going to the funeral. …”

“The dog hated her. The dog killed her. The dog bit her throat out…”

And the stranger said “could I buy that dog?”

And he says – “get to the end of the queue.”"

***

It's barely 400 words. It takes about 2 minutes to tell. When Allen told it he took his time, built up the tension - the "what on earth is going on here?" - and had the audience hooked in seconds. It's beautifully constructed. There's character, tension, atmosphere, some progress, and a pay-off: the punchline.

If the events in that fictional town had really taken place, most radio newsrooms would reduce the story to something like this:

It's emerged that a Cork woman who died on Thursday was killed by her own dog. At the funeral of the woman, Frances O'Connor, her husband, Kevin, told our correspondent that the dog had hated her, and had bitten her throat out. Our correspondent says that by the end of the funeral a large crowd of men had formed, all of them interested in buying the dog.

.....Even in the current culture way of doing news journalism, there's probably no alternative to this way. And telling stories well takes time, in preparation as well as on air: but which would you rather listen to, or watch?

The BBC Radio 4 programme Home Truths - loved and hated by people in almost equal measure, is actually just a celebration of storytelling: at its best it's full of people with crazy stories about life today. Not one of their stories would make the news bulletin. Home Truths is preceded by a News bulletin on a Saturday morning, which is also made up of stories. Which ones do I remember later? Have a wild guess?