Daily Blague

My correspondent in Pittsburgh sent me the link to a BBC story that her husband stumbled upon. In a case of mistaken identity at Reception, an African bloke with the first name of Guy was mixed up with an English expert on music downloads, also with the first name of Guy. The African Guy was led to a studio, where a television correspondent introduced him as English Guy and then asked him how he felt about a High Court decision in favor of Apple (iPod) against Apple (Beatles).

"Were you surprised by this verdict today?" Bowerman asked.

"I'm very surprised to see the verdict come on me because I was not expecting that," he said in a heavy French accent, blinking in the studio lights. "When I came, they told me something else."

Nonplussed, he pressed on, growing more confident in his punditry as the interview progressed. He gamely delivered his opinion on the future of music downloads and cyber cafes following the landmark verdict.

Meanwhile, the real [Guy] Kewney, who was waiting to be taken to the studio, looked up on a monitor and found another man in the interviewee's chair.

Ha-ha. This is a little story, to be sure. It suggests a certain disregard for the wonderful world of music downloads on the part of television journalists. It depends upon a farcical coincidence at Reception. (Guy Coma was there to try to get a job. He must have thought he was auditioning.) But here's the most delicious line in the story.

Producers apparently realized by the end of the interview that something had gone wrong - and, after they had gone off the air, asked their "expert" if there was a problem.

Watch the video, and see how long it takes you to see that "something had gone wrong." Things like this don't happen very often, it's true, and I don't mean to suggest that the Coma/Kewney mixup is a good reason to distrust all television news (although you shouldn't be watching it anyway). It does illustrate, however, how plausible a medium television is. Everything is flattened to look normal. The wild improbability of the BBC's fielding an expert whose English is sometimes unintelligible, which is making me laugh as I write about it, evaporates under the diminishing glare of studio lights. Mr Coma's double-take - which unfortunately looks like a face that Buckwheat might have made in a Spanky and Our Gang short - is the biggest "Ooops!" that I've ever seen on television, but when it's over, it never happened. Amnesiac and banal, television naturally short-circuits judgment and common-sense. It always does. This little episode simply provides the opportunity to watch it happen.