I'm minded of mice in a cage, the ones with treadmills, on which the tireless creatures are forever spinning. An unfortunate allusion, perhaps, but one which springs to mind as the royal nuptials approach. We are still more than a week out from the date and already we can't get enough of the big event and the players in it.
Why the fascination? Don't tell me - it's the "fairytale" nature of it all. A Russian academic - I think he was something called a "structuralist" - once conducted a survey of all "narratives" and concluded they could each be assigned to about 40 archetypal stories.
You don't have to be an academic to interpret the story of Prince William and his bride to be, Kate Middleton, as conforming to a certain classical type.
Handsome, high-profile, young prince, heir to the throne but with tragedy in his past, meets beautiful, intelligent but anonymous young commoner.
Their marriage will elevate her to fame, fortune and, albeit somewhat diminished in this age, a degree of power; it will provide him with handsome heirs, happiness and help extinguish the dark void of that terrible tragedy all those years ago.
But will it have a fairytale ending? We all know that the last big royal wedding, of Charles and Diana, had anything but.
From pomp and ceremony - occasioned even by the presence of our own Dame Kiri Te Kanawa - it descended into a rancorous misfit marked by melancholy, farce, misery, anger and, tragically, death in a Parisian underpass.
Along the way we learnt far more than we would have wanted to know about the private lives of royalty: a sort of anatomy of a dyspeptic, disintegrating marriage for which, if the British tabloid press were to be believe, we all had an insatiable appetite including, in graphic detail, lovers, mistresses and the pillow talk.
Or more precisely telephone talk; royal phone sex talk even, brought to the world courtesy of hackers. Unforgivable and, unfortunately, unforgettable.
It set a precedent for certain news hounds, however. Jolly good ruse, what? In the last week or so the mass-circulation red-top News of the World has apologised for its part in a more recent phone-tapping scandal.
Having tried to deny that it was involved to any culpable extent, it now seems to admit various of its "executives" sanctioned the tapping as an investigative method to obtain "stories".
There were suggestions, at one point, that during subsequent investigations by the police the integrity of Scotland Yard may have been impugned through its association with Rupert Murdoch's London representatives.
Now that the organisation has come clean, and phone-tapping is off the menu of "investigative" tools available, no doubt all manner of alternative boundaries will be tested in an effort to provide royal exclusives in the days, if not weeks and years to come.
What investigative tools Radio New Zealand journalists might have available in future, and how they might deploy them, will have friends of public broadcasting shuffling uneasily in their seats following musical chairs on the board of the august state broadcasting operation.
Did anyone else detect dulcet Wagnerian notes in the announcement of the recent changes by the Minister of Broadcasting, Jonathan Coleman?
Radio New Zealand has a board that "now clearly understands the Government's requirements to provide a quality service for the funding available ..." the minister announced last week.
Primarily it has such a board because it has installed, as all governments tend to do, people on it to do its political bidding. New chairman is long-time media man and former Radio New Zealand political editor Richard Griffin.
Dr Coleman was at pains to point out the suitability of his appointee to the task, highlighting his long journalistic experience and other undoubted qualities.
Mr Griffin is a seemingly amiable and capable chap, but having been chief press secretary and senior media adviser to the National government between 1993 and 1998, there can be little doubt on which side his political bread is buttered.
In his endeavours to set Radio New Zealand on the straight and narrow, he will be ably assisted by a gaggle, to borrow a newly minted collective noun, of game members whose expertise in all manner of private enterprise will doubtless help steer the ship towards the same reef upon which the Government has already directed the rest of public broadcasting in this country.
Yes, Minister, no Minister, three bags full, Minister. Did someone say something about mice on a treadmill? Blind mice?
- Simon Cunliffe is deputy editor (news) at the Otago Daily Times.
