You know, that might be the answer - to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That's a trick that never seems to fail.

So here is the sky this morning, at about 7:45 am. Some interesting cloud formations going on, and if there are any meteorologists out there that can explain to me why you get these ‘cotton ball’ clouds, I’d be most appreciative.

I don’t watch a lot of TV. I do stick it on for the morning news headlines though, so even with my limited exposure I haven’t been able to miss the almost-pornographic orgy of grief that appears to have overtaken Australian television screens over the past few days.

I’m all for covering important stories, and I understand that capturing the ‘human element’ is important when endeavouring to understand the magnitude of an event like this, but there is a point that aiding comprehension becomes gratuitous exploitation of other people’s misery.

This morning the TV crews appeared to have run out of locals to goad into crying for the camera, and had resorted to the old standard of “one branch of the media talks to another branch of the media about the locals”. In the twenty minutes before I left, they’d had a photographer, cartoonist and radio personality all talking about the Aussie spirit, mateship, and Aussie bush mateship spirit. Oh, they also got to showcase each of their wares too. So at least somebody wins.

I’ll cop that ahead of some of the questions posed to victims of the bushfires though. Again, with limited exposure, I’ve seen at least five times an old chestnut wheeled out, the one where some young, attractive waif shoves a microphone under the nose of a tired, blackened local and reels off the usual list:

“So you’ve lost your wife, your children, your parents, your home, your possessions, your dog and your cat...

How does it feel?

HOW DOES IT FEEL?

I would imagine that it doesn’t feel very good, actually.

I’m quite surprised that I haven’t yet seen a tired, hungry and angry interviewee deliver a mouthful. If they do, it will be quite deserved.

So the TV continues. All the channels.

Yesterday morning, after an interview in which a woman described the final time that she spoke to her husband of 48 years – they fought, she called him an idiot for wanting to stay and protect their house and stormed off – she broke down. After a couple of minutes of uncontrollable sobbing, snot, tears and dribble (raw grief can get that way), the host tried to get her arm around the poor woman without soiling her blouse and they called it quits.

So they cut to the other host, and with the most sombre face that he could manage (he looked constipated), he observed: “it is quite difficult to watch, isn’t it?”

Obviously it is not as difficult to film and broadcast the whole ordeal, I guess.