IT’S never nice catching oneself unexpectedly on camera.
The CCTV displays in shops are a primary offender in this category but this week I was treated to a rolling feed of my chin for around an hour – on a feed being beamed around the world to an audience of … probably very few people.
On Tuesday, I found myself sitting directly behind GB News CEO Angelos Frangopoulos as he gave evidence to the House of Lords committee on communication and digital.
On the substance first. Frangopoulos defended the broadcaster against accusations of bias, saying he would like to recruit political presenters not drawn from the Conservative Party – or its frothing offshoot Reform UK.
He also said he was very worried about the BBC taking tentative steps into the advertising market.
He’s a good performer, Frangopoulos. In those situations, he comes in wanting to stymie people like me – hacks looking for a line. Give them as little as possible to work with. It’s like a cynical Hippocratic Oath: “Do no harm, create no headlines”.
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Frangopoulos reminded me of his countryman, the former Celtic manager Ange Postecoglou (below) (who incidentally mirrored my own move last year from the East End of Glasgow to north London).
Cool, calm, collected, brushing off criticism, exuding that natural down-to-earth Aussie charm. You could almost see him batting away concerns about the Ofcom rules with a schooner in hand: “Don’t worry about that, mate. All under control.”
Before he began his evidence to the committee, I got in and plonked myself on a bench at the back of the room.
Directly opposite me, across the grand committee rooms of the House of Commons was Baroness Stowell of Beeston. It did not occur to me that the most natural place for Frangopoulos to sit was in front of me, facing the Baroness.
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So for the next hour, I was treated to a view of the back of his baldy head. To see his facial expressions, I had to turn my head to the right, where a camera was displaying his face – and to my shock, my chin.
Like budgies, people are taken by their reflections. I found my eyes drawn away from the back of Frangopoulos’s head, to the live feed of his face, and inevitably, back to my chin hovering above his noodle.
Most mortifyingly, when I returned to my desk to write up my story, a colleague who had been watching the committee hearing (and my melon bobbing around in the background) texted a photograph of me taking notes, though looking more asleep than attentive.
Vanity has prevented me from taking up his suggestion that it would make a good Twitter/X header picture.
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