The Rule of Six

Chris Whitty is back in the TV. It’s serious. Boris starts to speak: Hands, Knees and boompsie-daisy. Face, make space, don’t kill your gran. Get a test. Don’t get a test. Moonshot testing. Reach for the moon with your testing ambition because at least when you fall on your arse you are looking at stars. Go to University. Don’t socialise in groups of more than six. Christmas is cancelled. Back to normal by Christmas. Dancing in the Streets. Christmas. Spring.I’ll make it simple. Just remember the rule of six. Don’t want to blame people. Breaks my heart to do so. Backs two horses. Flat out. 

Chris Whitty rolls his eyes and talks about ‘if’ we ever have the technology to test in that way. He thinks Christmas is cancelled. Spring might be OK.

It’s all very depressing.

Once I heard Boris mention the rule of six I couldn’t concentrate. I thought it was something I’d vaguely read about once. Was it to do with writing? I didn’t think so; that was the rule of three. Three things are better than two (which is why we have Patrick with Chris and Boris - no one listens to him but he is there to make the others more interesting). I thought it was something to do with screenwriting, so I had to look it up.  It’s a video editors rule book. If you’ve ever watched a film then the experience will have been made better by the rule of six.

The Rule of Six is Walter March’s list of priorities for editing film.  “If you have to give something up, don’t ever give up emotion before story. Don’t give up story before rhythm, don’t give up rhythm before eye-trace, don’t give up eye-trace before planarity, and don’t give up planarity before spatial continuity.” 

This quote probably makes no sense unless you are an editor, bothered by the intricacies of which bits to cut out but I wondered if Johnson was using it in an attempt to edit the history of this pandemic. There are bits he would love to leave on the cutting room floor.

The trouble is that the rule of six tells is not to cut the emotion before the story and the overriding emotion for most of us now is confusion. Murch, knows how difficult these editing decisions are and so has a whole chapter of his book called: “Don’t Worry, It’s Only A Movie.”

Unfortunately, it’s not a movie and the bits the Prime Minister doesn’t like can’t be made to go away in the blink of an eye or the click of a mouse in an editing software package.