How to cook up a good scoop

Fairfax

JUST WATCH: Entertainment in a trillion shoddy forms buzzes around us at all times, seeking entry by any orifice.

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Joe Bennett

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OPINION: It was perfect. She was lucky. And she knew it. Perfection rarely visits this smudgy world. So when it does, when the stars of serendipity align and grant a glimpse of the ideal, you must seize it. And, Lord bless her, she did. She seized it good.

She was a journalist, what they used to call a cub reporter. And being a cub, she got the jobs that the full-grown wolves found demeaning. Thus she found herself in change of the entertainment section of her local rag.

Has any generation in history been so relentlessly entertained? "Give 'em bread and circuses," said Juvenal, and now we've all got bread, the circus business has swollen like a detonated H-bomb.

Entertainment in a trillion shoddy forms buzzes around us at all times, seeking entry by any orifice. Television game shows, the internet, boy bloody bands, i-bloody-Pods, Dis-bloody-ney, porn, sport, beach volleyball porn sport, nature docos, tourism promos, music in airports, giant screens in waiting rooms, jokey- bloke commercials for fat multinational breweries, dancing with television weather men, comedians plugging meat, comedians plugging Bonus Bonds, the titillation of televised murder trials, online poker, all of it hammering on the door and tapping at the windows of our shrunken attention spans, desperate for entry.

In the process, good, rare, subtle and complex things have become whittled down to wafer-thin parodies of themselves: music has shrunk to up-you rap, the slow-burning joy of test cricket has become the Twenty20 slogalot, and the loving craft of cooking is reduced to watching ubermother Nigella do it for us, or Jamie of the lisping blistered lips.

Yet it was just such celebrity chefery that brought the reporter her glory. Some TV production company, long on imitation, but short on ideas, was making a reality TV programme - and no I am not going to discuss the term reality TV. You either scoff the moment you hear it and reach for the bottle, or you're beyond hope - which featured supposedly celebrated chefs on a cruise ship.

They were to cook for and be judged by the wrinkled widows on board. Those whose meals the widows liked stayed to cook again; the losers were thrown metaphorically overboard to paddle back to the shores of anonymity.

Called Survivor Chef or something equally noxious, this programme was a sure-fire ratings winner, combining fame, food, winners, losers and a veneer of opulence. And our cub reporter, poor thing, was dispatched to write about the making of the show, expenses paid by a PR company, to excite the appetites of the proles in the suburbs with their slumping sofas and their worn remote controls.

Consider the reporter's plight. She who longed to do real journalism, to sink her lupine fangs into the hypocrisy of high places, to fossick beneath the counterpane of power and haul out the stained sheets of scandal and self- interest, was condemned to this floating, factitious pointless hell.

But then, glory and hallelujah, in walked chance, wearing the beautiful boots of irony. An uninvited guest had come aboard the cruise ship. Its name was swine flu. Swine flu is the flip side of the entertainment coin. It is so exquisitely named, so suggestive of bestial contagion, that it's a guaranteed ratings winner.

Despite being no more lethal than the everyday flu that we live with happily as it bumps off millions a year, it seems such a thrilling addition to the arsenal of threat, a glimpse of a grunting apocalypse.

Three of the widows fell ill. They shivered and sweated and were isolated and swabbed and the swabs confirmed the virus.

All three victims had cabins on the lowest deck but one. That deck was quarantined. No one was allowed to leave it or pass through it. So the deck below that, though uninfected, was effectively quarantined as well.

And on that deck lived the only chef who had yet to cook. He was due to perform that day. The show was stymied. Unused to being thwarted, the television people begged and wheedled, but the ship's medical officer was immovable. The chef they wanted was staying below decks.

While the show hung in limbo, the reporter went to work. She filed several thousand colourful words that made the front page. But it was when she filed her weekly entertainment column that she heard the wings of glory flutter. Her fingers shook as she typed her headline. She checked, it, sat back, smiled and pressed "send" on her wifi- enabled computer.

When, moments later, the chief sub received her email, he read the headline, stopped, and smiled. "Good on you, girl," he said to himself, "Good on you."

On the screen in front of him, in bold block capitals, "Swine Flu Over the Cook Who's Next".

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