Sam Casey: Let’s face it, trivia can be so much fun

Nov 26 2008 by Sam Casey, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Mainly, I’m ashamed to say, because I didn’t feel any.

I was shocked to read that a blogger got 20 years for drawing a cartoon of Burmese ruler Than Shwe.

But I still didn’t feel the need to mention it.

The rest of the country seemed to share my interest in the Sergeant saga.

For the next 24 hours, the story dominated the papers and led news and discussion programmes on radio and TV.

People called chat shows to talk about how annoyed they were that people were talking so much about it.

Others spoke in grave tones about bullying and anti-democratic forces within the BBC.

Politicians diligently discussed it on BBC One’s Question Time programme.

In the grand scheme of things, the John Sergeant story was not a seminal moment in history.

But it was treated like one.

And there is an argument that it illustrated an unhealthy appetite in this country for meaningless, celebrity-led froth.

There are, however, two compelling counter-arguments: 1) at a time when the alternative is talking about how poor we all are and what a grim state our economy is in, a tubby journalist’s decision to curtail his brief dalliance with dancing provided a welcome diversion, and

2) The fact that we feel able to devote so much time and energy to something so frivolous surely demonstrates that, actually, we don’t have things that bad.

The whole debate over Sergeant’s departure from Strictly was not a matter of life and death.

For those caught up in the fighting in the Congo and for people exercising a basic human right to freedom of speech in Burma, the day-to-day is often exactly that.

So I, for one, am grateful that we have the luxury of getting worked up over John Sergeant and Strictly.

And, in general, that we can continue to indulge in an endless obsession with the trivial.