All Become Idiots

Breakfast on BBC1 is currently displaying one of my pet hates: a reporter interviewing people in settings, or involved in activities, inappropriate for the interview. So, for instance, the piece currently airing is about a teenage girl who lost a lot of weight by exercising. She is answering questions while using a cross-trainer machine at a gym. She is dressed nicely for an appearance on telly, not in sports gear, and the exertion of the exercise makes the whole thing look awkward in the extreme.

What is this idiocy? Are we as viewers not trusted to understand what exercise in a gym actually entails? Or is the fear really that the package would be deathly dull without the interviewee performing in this way? And, if so, what does that say about the item in the first place?

This practice of embedding the reporter in the environment or activity they are reporting is often so ludicrous as to distract all attention from the story they are telling. The prize example of this, performed time and again, is when the feature is on education, and the reporter delivers their piece to camera while standing in the middle of a quiet classroom of children ostensibly working away. It's a fatuous practice, and one that cheapens us all.