KEY POINTS:
To say the news media operate on the principle that good news is no news would be an overstatement but there's a strong element of truth to it. We don't turn to the front page expecting a barrel of laughs or a spiritual pick-me-up.
An exception which springs to mind is the Sun's legendary "Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster" front page claiming that the entertainer had assembled a late night snack with his girlfriend's furry little pal as the piece de resistance. It turned out to be a publicity stunt but with typical shamelessness the paper reproduced the front page on a line of T-shirts. I bought two thinking they might become collector's items but they turned out to be as shoddy as the journalism.
Under the editorship of the infamous Kelvin MacKenzie, the Sun pushed the envelope when it came to confrontational front pages. The sinking of the General Belgrano with the loss of 1200 Argentinian lives was reported under the headline "Gotcha!". When Private Eye magazine parodied the Sun's bloodlust with the mock promotion "Kill an Argie and win a Metro," the unsinkable MacKenzie lamented, "I wish I'd thought of that."
And when the space shuttle Challenger exploded on a slow news day in January 1986 Mackenzie summed up the callousness of an industry which, of necessity, sees a story where others see only tragedy by bellowing across the newsroom, "God bless America".
But this week the Dominion-Post made my day with a front-page story about residents of an apartment complex near Parliament complaining about the Wellington Cathedral bells.
Below the headline "For whom the bell tolls", the apartment manager moaned that the street's quietness had been a major selling point for the 64 apartments, many of whose occupants "would like to put a bomb in the belfry".
Reading this story I came over all misty-eyed. When my father was vicar of St Mark's Church in Remuera, I often fielded calls from irate near-neighbours whose Sunday morning hangovers had been kick-started by the pealing of the church bells. Being a teenager, I was obliged to point out that they'd got me mixed up with someone who gave a damn.
After nostalgia came pride. When his work was done in Remuera, my father moved south to become Dean of Wellington. The new cathedral's belltower was only half-finished so he embarked on a dogged fundraising drive which raised more than $1 million. Bells from the old cathedral were sent to Britain to be re-tuned, extra bells were obtained from a church in Northamptonshire and several years after the first arm was twisted, the tower opened for business.
My father passed away in 2005 but he lives on in many hearts and in the James Thomas Belltower whose chimes ring out over Thorndon three times a week.
It should be noted that, firstly, the belltower was there well before the apartment block and, secondly, its existence is hardly a secret. The paper rather emphasised that point by running a picture of the apartment manager with a face like a squeezed lemon as she contemplates a vista dominated by the cathedral and its majestic belltower. It's a bit like buying a chunk of the Australian outback and then complaining that Uluru (Ayers Rock) blocks your sun.
A reader drew the editor's attention to a court action in London some years ago brought by the owner of a flat in a converted office block opposite St Botolph's Church in Aldgate. Having established that the plaintiff had been in the flat for six months while St Botolph's bells had been ringing since the 1600s barring a few months at the height of World War II, the judge dismissed the case.
In passing one could question the paper's readiness to encourage our culture of complaint by displaying this non-story on the front page with a sub-heading asserting that the thrice-weekly chimes "make life hell" for the residents of the luxury apartments. The choice of words seems particularly crass given that buried inside the same edition was a feature on the cold, damp and draughty houses in which many New Zealanders have to live and which health experts say contribute to the deaths of 1600 of us each year.
An earthy, optimistic individual whose career was marked by a blithe disregard for the caveats of the small-minded and the otherwordly, my father would have dismissed these bleats with a snort of derision and a few well-chosen words. And being familiar with the poets, he might have quoted the full line from John Donne: "Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
