I need some top racing more than ever - just as a distraction from all this chaos

When April rolls around, it will be 30 years since derision was aimed at Sir Martyn Lewis, the face of BBC News at the time, for suggesting the news agenda was overly inclined towards the distressing, upsetting and scary, and that more space should be given to stories likely to raise the spirits. "Why is the news so gloomy?" was a question he said viewers put to him "with depressing regularity".

Reports from the time suggest – surprise! – that journalists across print and broadcasting did not take kindly to being told they were doing things wrongly. "If it bleeds, it leads," has long been the industry maxim and, as I recall, people rallied round it like a flag.

"Even if it makes people slit their wrists, we have to tell it the way it is," was the response from Peter Sissons, also a BBC newsreader, while corporation veteran Jeremy Paxman dismissed Lewis's argument as "nonsense" and suggested he should be editing a paper in Burma, overseeing stories about army majors being sent on bee-keeping courses.