The Observer | UK News | After a day of frantic struggles, the London whale dies a lonely death
The whale was probably doomed from the point it entered the Thames Estuary – it wouldn’t have swum in towards London unless something was wrong. Put it down to disease, confusion or whatever you like – maybe the autopsy shows something when it comes through.
The BBC did what the BBC do best – swinging into action in a non-stop live broadcast of the suffering of the whale as it was beached at Battersea Bridge and carried out towards the ocean, the boat looking like a funeral cortege in the dusk, even before the whale went into convulsions and died. It shouldn’t be surprising that the whale didn’t make it – swimming in the muddy waters of the Thames, boats buzzing past, cutting itself on the rescuers boat and whatever vast accumulated collection of jagged rubbish sitting on the floor of the river would have been incredibly distressing – and yet, to begin with, there seemed to be some kind of collective joy and fascination at seeing something as unusual as a whale swimming through the center of London, almost as if Santa Claus had been spotted overhead with his reindeer.
The BBC commentary went on, and on, and on, as it always does when something out of the ordinary happens and the newsroom mobilises. Terry Nutkins was kept on all day long, giving a looped commentary on how the whale’s rescuers should have been working faster and how he had rescued a whale himself just a little while ago. He then started getting desperate I think, when he started talking about the whale being an ambassador for a nation of whales, sent to remind us of the worldwide plight of the creatures. His sentiment was commendable if mystifyingly put. The increasingly tenuous commentary, live video feeds from helicopters, and interviews with every expert and commentator they can track down are the very bread and butter of BBC News, and a blessing in disguise for poor old Mark Oaten, who resigns after confessing that he’s been seeing a rent boy, and is probably hoping that a dead whale will distract everyone’s attention from the fact. Today was apparently a good day to bury bad news.
Today was a prime example of a news Event that will be forgotten in a month or two, a sad thing being that very little changes as a result of a whale’s death on the Thames, where 9/11s and tsunamis change the world. People will think about the whale while they read their Sunday papers, maybe then think about the hunting of whales. Britain will still be able to say that it is a nation of animal lovers, but it’s unlikely that thousands will mobilise to force the Japanese to stop whaling, or give too much thought to whatever environmental factors may be contributing to whales swimming into the centers of cities. Today was another example of a collective consciousness that is fed by and feeds the news. The worst example could be thousands of people in misty-eyed faux-mourning for Lady Diana – maybe the best example is thousands of people projecting goodwill and high hopes towards a solitary pathetic animal in the Thames.
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