Lord West in black tie cut an anachronistic figure in these dressing-down times
Any foreign tourists who tuned into Tuesday's Newsnight (BBC2) on their hotel sets may have got a misleading impression of the prevailing dress code in British television. One of a trio of pundits discussing the overseas aid budget, Lord West, the former First Sea Lord, sported dinner jacket and black tie, with four naval service medals pinned in a line to his lapel. Another gold insignia, saucer-sized, dangled on a ribbon round his neck. Although this was never explained, the assumption was that he had come directly to the studio from an old salts' dinner.
In the early years of TV, it was common for the political and artistic classes to fit appearances into their existing evening schedule. I have memories of Bernard Levin opining in an electric blue smoking jacket and bow-tie, when a pundity opportunity clashed with a gala at Covent Garden, and Lords Whitelaw and Carrington turning up in the Newsnight studio in dinner jackets with cummerbunds at the time when they were government ministers.
No communications director these days would permit a politician, especially a Conservative, to face Paxo in a tuxedo now, because of the risk of being labelled the posh rich dilettante party. And this is evidence of how the relationship between the establishment and the media has changed. By broadcasting in their social togs, those earlier chaps were emphasising that TV was fitting in with their schedule rather than the other way round.
Lord West perhaps wished to make a similar point but he stuck out because he was wearing what he would have been wearing anyway, which almost nobody on the medium ever does.
In the discussion to which he contributed, the young man from Human Rights watch sported an open-necked shirt and development secretary Andrew Mitchell a dark suit and blue tie. Each of these costumes sent a particular message (political outsider/ insider), as did the reporters in the filmed packages, tie-less in line with the modern BBC policy of greater informality. Although Lord West looked as if he had dressed up for television, he, paradoxically, was the only participant who hadn't.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/mar/03/tv-matters-newsnight-dress-code
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