Aurora Sensation or not, as the case may be

 I had thought that the idiocy of local news stories featuring enticing headlines, followed by little more than what we serious journalists call "utter bilge", had reached its nadir with the big cat that wasn't story that featured a few weeks ago. How wrong I was! [Good strapline that, I shall save it for future use: Ed].

Today's snippet must rank amongst the most utterly pointless uses of a news medium since, I don't know, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle straplined "Monk finds Holy Grail" and followed it up with "According to a man who claims his neighbour heard about it from a passing minstrel who said his brother-in-law definitely heard a rumour about it at the Winchester Fair from a man called Ethelbert the Liar". We are used to finding garbage from the garbage websites mostly operated by Reach but this is worse. It was on the BBC website. And not the entertainment section either but the BBC News!! [Yes, two whole exclamation marks there and I utterly concur with their use on this occasion, and damn the expense: Ed]

Here it is. I've cut all bar the first sentence of the copy and that is more than enough, believe me.

source: BBC

This is the entire story, bar some stuff about how she went onto social media that is of no consequence. The BBC news department regarded "slightly disappointed" as good enough to record the incident for posterity and to take up valuable disk space on their servers.

There might have been a decent story here. Suppose the content was something like this:

The woman, aged 53, with three childen and a gerbil, became so distraught with worry after telling all her friends on social media about the wonderful aurora that she has left her family home, taken up residence in a beach hut near Sheringham and has changed her name to Boudicca the Unforgiven. She has vowed never to speak again until either seven years have elapsed or she receives an apology and a year's supply of tomatoes from the factory, and has launched a website called FakeAuroras.co.uk which has already attracted no fewer than 14 visitors, including two from Canada who have written supportive messages that they frequently mistake the lights from the local disco as being messages from space aliens.

As it happens, she was just "slightly disappointed". Come on, George King (and when you fill official forms that have the surname first, does it seem odd naming yourself after a monarch?). Not "massively" or "overwhelmingly" or the ever-popular "incredibly" but just a little bit, hardly at all really, in fact she's already forgotten the whole thing, or would have had not a journalist with absolutely nothing to do and a deadline to fill stumbled over her Facebook page and thought "This is it, Georgie-boy, this is the big one, next stop Panorama and look out Amol Rajan, I'm coming for you". Now the whole sorry episode has come back to haunt her and her name is being plastered over the media (but not in this column because we respect the identy of innocent citizens plagued and pilloried by the paparazzi) [I had one of those last night, the cheese was a bit off if you ask me: Ed].

How easy it would be for me to create a few bitingly-satiric spoof pieces such as "Red traffic light changes to green and utterly baffles pensioner" or "Local footballer misses a pass and fans regret it" or "Two teenagers went into a shop to buy something but it wasn't in stock, although it had been last week". I don't think I will. I don't think I can outdo the inanity of the original.