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LIVING IN A BUBBLE SHOWED ME REALITY REALLY IS SURREAL

David Mitchell quizzed Julia after a week without any news

Sunday March 14,2010

By Julia Hartley-Brewer

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I'VE JUST returned to the real world after a week in a news-free bubble and, rather disappointingly, I didn’t seem to miss a thing. Even worse for a self-confessed news junkie, I actually rather enjoyed my bout of news abstinence.

I was shipped off to a remote (if rather luxurious) house with the brilliantly funny and lovely comics Marcus Brigstocke and Sue Perkins, where we were cut off from the outside world before being quizzed on what was and wasn’t in the week’s news by host David Mitchell for the new BBC2 quiz show, The Bubble.

The prospect of life without newspapers, television, radio, phones, e-mail or the internet had filled me with dread that the most incredible earth-shattering event might happen while I was incommunicado and I’d be the only person in the world who didn’t know about it.

What I discovered was the sad truth that all of those oh-so-urgent e-mails, phone calls and text messages which make me feel so important aren’t actually that urgent after all and almost every query can easily wait a few days for a reply without the world coming to a grisly end.

It might feel like forever but actually it’s just the blink of an eye. As a former guest on The Bubble, comic Sarah Millican, said on her exit from the house: “I was hoping that things might have moved on and been a bit more futuristic, with hoverboards and silver outfits and tablets for meals.” Curiously, the world had stayed stubbornly similar to the one she’d left a few days earlier.

My biggest (if ultimately futile) hope was that I’d manage to miss the general election campaign while I was offline without my remote control glued to my hand.

I went to bed every night with my fingers crossed that, by some hitherto unknown constitutional fluke, Gordon Brown had been able to call a snap election, hold a hair-raisingly short, four-day campaign and that the whole ghastly business was already all over bar the counting. I wasn’t even all that bothered who won as long as I didn’t have to endure another seven weeks of pointless mud-slinging.

The trouble is, as my dismal scoring in the end-of-week news quiz proved, it’s alarmingly hard to tell what is a real and what’s a made-up news story.

How could we possibly have known whether the Germans were being asked to sponsor potholes, if Britain’s first dwarf bowling contest was taking place or whether vegan Heather Mills had sat on the floor of a car because she wouldn’t sit on the leather seats? To my mind, all three stories were just as likely to be true (although it turned out the show’s producers had made at least two of those stories up).

Did anything surprise me when I got out of the house and saw the real news? British MPs thinking they’re above the law? The French president having a mistress? A pop star cheating on his wife? Actresses wearing dresses (some nice, some not so nice) to the Oscars? Social workers being slammed for failing to save children from abuse? Prince Phillip being rude to someone?

It was, it turns out, just a typical news week…

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