Snow's here, we're all gonna die.

You can always tell when the first snow of the winter arrives because it is accompanied by the sound of relieved cheering from local newsrooms throughout the land. Reporters, feverishly searching for cats stuck up trees, can now find gainful employment by reporting on some real news. The weather. It’s a little like one of those wildlife programmes in reverse where, after months of hibernation, the huge warm blooded mammals emerge from their hides and stand blinking in the sunlight at the prospect of new life for them to devour. In the case of ‘snow news’, local reporters emerge from an autumn of talking to retiring lolly pop ladies and disgruntled councillors who have given planning permission to the wrong kind of supermarket, and see a new dawn where they must gorge themselves on a diet of travel chaos, treacherous road conditions and, best of all, flooding. They run, bursting with new life, at 5am to take up positions in a field with their camera crew just waiting for the breakfast news to come on and go to them ‘live’.

This morning on BBC Breakfast, they went live to someone called Simon who was in Canterbury. Don’t ask why Canterbury suddenly had such nationwide appeal when it came to the metrological conditions, or rather DO ask me because I think I know. He was the only bugger who was set-up at the right toime and in the right place so they went to him because he was ready to go. Or perhaps it was because ethe Archbishop had some sort of influence. Whatever, Simon sprang into action and became Local Reporterman.

“These cars,” he gestured, “are now moving slowly up the hill, but earlier (yes?) vehicles had to be pushed by people in order for them to continue without causing delays!”

Many viewers at home, especially those who had only passed their driving test a few minutes ago or, alternatively, had never actually been behind the wheel, or even seen,  a car, sat aghast at the fact that snow and ice had caused some vehicles to need assistance when trying to climb a steep hill.

In order to help our feeble imaginations, Simon mimed the act of ‘pushing’, leaving us in no doubt what he had seen earlier that never-to-be-forgotten morning.

“These main roads are now pretty clear of snow and ice.” He elaborated, “but roads such as this one,” he said, pointing up a side street, “are still quite bad.”

It was difficult to know what ‘quite bad’ actually meant as, as far as could be seen, there were no cars actually driving up the road at the time, so we had to make our own mind up. My guess was that they were actually quite passable but this would have detracted from Simon’s narrative, namely that the country, as represented by one junction in Canterbury, was slowly coming to a standstill. He then gave us the news that we had been dreading, weathermen had warned that the bad weather was set to continue or get even worse over the coming weeks. Here we were at the start of January and were being told that winter was going to last well into the next month.

We then cut to a woman standing up to her waist in a lake in a place called Heston or something. She looked sincerely down the camera and told us that the last time this area had seen the river so high was in 2012. Thus, the intervening 4 years was made to look like paradise in comparison as now the reporter stood, hair blowing uncontrollably in the quite stiff breeze, right next to the banks of a nearly-overflowing river informing us that some homes may have to be evacuated if the weather get much worse.

“Back to you, Chris.”

“Thanks, Helen. Now…how many of you have noticed the increase in the Robin population?”

And on it goes. One non-story after another fed to us by a team of graduate researchers who need to fill 3 hours of rolling news reporting before the next lot clock on and take care of the mid-morning shift, which mainly consists of interviews with overweight couples with nine children under 6 who are struggling to pay their water bills, then the heavyweight political team get in to let an audience of about 350 know what a select committee on agriculture and fishing thought about the proposed DEFRA report. I wonder if any of these people ever stop to think that what they’re doing is largely a waste of everyone’s time including their own. Probably not.