Fri 26th June 2009

I’d like to use today’s blog to say a few words; pay my own very special and personal tribute to someone. If you happened to catch the news this morning you might have already seen what I am referring to. I am of course talking about Susanna Reid, the lovely BBC Breakfast presenter. I like her a lot. Not as much as this man here clearly does, obviously. I like her the about the right amount.

Hers is the first face I see after opening my eyes on a Friday morning. And in my mind, that makes her the closest thing to my wife (only a wife that I actually still find titillating and have not yet started taking for granted. Which in a way is better. So no there's need to patronise my lonliness with your detatched sympathy). She is clearly humble too, often choosing to play down her lad-mag potential by pulling odd little faces at camera.

At one point during today’s inevitable coverage of the death of renowned West Ham supporter Michael Jackson, lovely Susanna corrected her co-presenter (I don’t know his name, but who cares anyway. It’s not like I’ve any desire to search for HIM on Google Images like Susanna- which incidentally I did solely for the research purposes of procuring referential pictures for this blog entry, rather than for any other reasons) over the origin of one of the photo stills on the screen. He was in the flow of narrating one of them picture gallery tributes, saying something like “And here he is on the cover of ‘Off The Wall’”. Then suddenly Susannah interrupted her co-host to inform him that is was actually the cover from the “Billie Jean” single. There was a brief pause as both of them looked a bit momentarily stunned at what had just been said. Technically she was probably right, but either way, surely it was irrelevant given the contextual gravitas of the greater story. Nevertheless, I felt all a-quiver. Maybe it was the earnest dedication to pedantry that I found so profoundly arousing.

Susannah soon realised her tactless frivolity and was soon trying to justify herself, saying “I just wanted to correct you, before we had thousands of letters of complaints from people saying you got it wrong.” Because of course if you were a Michael Jackson fan, the last thing you’d want to see is the legacy of his life being defiled through any possible misrepresentative media speculation. You just wouldn’t be used to that sort of thing, would you? And this is the cover art of his DISCOGRAPHY we’re talking about! What else is interesting enough about the mythical, super-rich and darkly troubled pop-star to neglect referring to his sleeve art correctly?

Usually, I would have snorted derisively upon witnessing such a haplessly flailing display of banter before my eyes. Definitely if Kate Silverton was at the helm (she seems to be trying too hard to pull the intellectual MILF schtick, but without her adept skills of pronunciation she is nothing more than a potential ‘flashback’ scene for Diedre Barlow, should the writers of Coronation Street go all ‘Twin Peaks’). But no, this was Susanna and Susanna never gets even the faintest scoff from me. And in her defence, after the endless mawkish loop of celebrity tributes, and massively hypocritical tabloid opinion u-turns, this moment was the most honest and human piece of Jacko coverage I’ve seen all day.