The rising tide of clichés

In more tranquil times, before the Gilligan storm broke over his head, the BBC’s admirable and honourable director of news, Richard Sambrook, contributed a foreword to one of the corporation’s periodic attempts to remind its journalists of their responsibilities towards the English language. ‘Clear storytelling and language,’ Sambrook wrote, ‘is at the heart of good journalism.’ These are words which, given subsequent events, have acquired an ironic resonance.

What is at issue here is not Sambrook’s unexceptionable sentiment, but his grammar. Richard, Richard, I can hear myself saying in the pedant’s weary tones (for many years ago, when he was an eager and fresh-faced newsroom subeditor, I used to check his stories), plural subject requires plural verb.

Periodically an old (or hoary old) question is raised. Is the standard of writing at the BBC declining (or plummeting or plunging or even in free-fall)? Or is it improving (or soaring or rocketing)? A couple of months ago an old friend and former colleague of mine was scratching his receding hairline as he pondered a familiar task for BBC subs: how to convey clearly and in an irreducible number of words a complex international situation. In Duncan’s case, he was required to inform the Radio Four audience that the American peace plan for the Middle East was in trouble because of suicide bombings. With one eye on the clock and one hand rummaging in the newsroom sack of serviceable phrases, he conjured the possibility of the road map being derailed before it had got off the ground.

I felt for him. By taking elements innocuous on their own (derail – an invaluable cliché, with no single-word synonym; got off the ground – stale but handy figure of speech) and applying them to a nonsensical tag dreamed up by some language assassin in the State Department, he achieved a mixture of metaphors almost miraculous in its compression and absurdity.