Wires and Lights in a Box...

 I rarely watch TV - if truth be told I gave up watching it almost 20 years ago and should I happen to see anything these days it's by accident and not design. As a youngster, I recall being both horrified and entranced by Cathy Come Home and Just another Saturday - as an adult I stood up in my own sitting room and applauded BBC Scotland for their drama Down Where The Buffalo Go (starring a little known American called Harvey Keitel). Although dramatisations, these programmes brought social issues crashing into our sitting rooms with the force of a hurricane. They changed lives by confrontation, with information, all wrapped up in dramatisation. How many TV dramas of the last 20 years can claim to have changed lives?

I became a political activist - not just because of what I read in newspapers, or in books, but because of what I saw unfolding nightly on our news broadcasts. Then, things turned sour. I could no longer trust the news. The impartiality of the BBC, for me, was lost when they admitted to editing news footage to make it look as though striking miners attacked Police - when in fact reality was the other way around.

And so my love affair with television ended.

There's a journalist from America who's work I have grown to appreciate over the years. He's long since departed this earth but he truly was a visionary. Many Americans may not even have heard of him, but his relentless pursuit of truth and his plea for that truth to be disseminated via television is something which anyone being introduced to the media should be made to recite.

He saw the future - and he saw it in stark contrast - it could be the enlightening of the masses via television or television could simply be 'Wires and Lights in a Box' - below is a two minute re-enactment of what for me is one of the most important speeches of the twentieth century. It is men and women like him, who ensure I never lose faith in America, that faith gets dented, it gets beaten, it gets questioned daily - but it never gets broken, because a nation which can produce an Edward Murrow - can do it again.

Goodnight - and Good Luck.

Rory