April 30th, 2005
Blog widows and politicians’ ex-wives
I was really interested in Amanda Delevan’s post about politicians wives blogging for a couple of reasons. Firstly she reminded me of that term blog widow. My other half is more of an internet widower because of the sigla site, with the blog being just one arm of it. I find myself (usually on the weekend before the sigla goes live) getting up early, very quietly, and skulking around the net tweaking and subbing, writing and checking broken links. He often complains that when I’m in sigla production mode, I’m monosyllabic and a bit like Aertel, ie not very interactive.
Another thing Amanda pointed out was that some UK politician’s wives have started blogging in the run up the UK General Election. Michael Howard’s wife has her own page on the Tory site but it gave me a much better idea based on past experience.
Before I was journalist, I worked as a television researcher in RTE. The first show I worked on was, let’s just say, an experience. It was a late night round table discussion show (NOT Questions & Answers) with a female host of huge ineptitude. Briefs on guests would only be read if they were
a) on ONE A4 page regardless of their personal story
b) with the “salient” points in bold (don�t think she knew what the word “salient” meant)
c) and handed to her while she was having her make-up done before the show.
Anyway, I digress, but one particular show we had in mind - and never got to make -was trying to round up the ex-wives of politicians to come on to the show and dish the dirt on their husbands. This involved me and another researcher having to cold call Jim McDaid’s ex-wife and Miriam Ahern among others. Needless to say, we got a lot of abuse and I wondered if I could ever be a door-stepping, scoop-breaking tabloid hack.
So what I think people would be way more interested in reading is blogs by the EX-wives of politicians. It wouldn’t have to be ‘hell hath no fury’ stuff, just some mindless info that the politician husband wouldn’t want us to know, or some Christine Keeler style pillow talk secrets. Imagine the traffic?