GEORGE MICHAEL : WHO ?

Once again the BBC shows itself to be obsessed with its own industry. Today's news broadcasts have been utterly dominated by stories about the newly deceased pop singer, George Michael, to an extent which would suggest that he was, at the very least, some middling member of the Royal Family. How ridiculous.

Michael was, in actuality, a rather pathetic figure who enjoyed a brief period of fame in the 1980s and lived on the memory ever after. The paucity of song clips played on the radio today demonstrates rather well that his output after the breakup of the duo 'Wham !' was of little note. His fans will obviously not agree but the fact is that he was a very minor figure in the world of real music.

He was a covert frequenter of dubious places in the same 1980s but was later caught "engaging in a lewd act" in a public lavatory in Beverley Hills; a few years later he was accused of engaging in public sexual acts on Hampstead Heath in London, something which he apparently thought was perfectly reasonable to do. Michael was a drug user and addict who had various encounters with the law; he was arrested at least twice for "driving while unfit through drink or drugs", and also received cautions for possession of both Class C and Class A drugs.

His lifestyle clearly led to health problems. In 2011 he suffered what was labelled as a viral infection which caused pneumonia and nearly killed him; given that Michael was homosexual and that one of his earlier partners had died of AIDS, the nature of the 'viral infection' could be questioned. In 2013, Michael somehow managed to fall out of a moving car of which he was, apparently, the only occupant; he suffered head injuries and was airlifted to hospital.

How on earth does the death of such a person add up to being the single most important news item of the day on our national broadcaster ? Worse still, the 1 o'clock news gave over most of the first 20 minutes or more of its broadcast to this item. On a day when severe storms struck parts of Scotland and the Northern Isles, 92 people died when a Russian aircraft crashed into the Black Sea, the row over Israel's disputed 'West Bank settlements' continued and a massive hemi-centennial storm struck central Australia, was the death of a pop singer really the most important news ?

There can be no better demonstration of the way in which news priorities have become skewed in recent years. The media and its inhabitants, regardless of how unsavoury they may be, is all; all else is nothing.