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A samizdat video circulated the 18th floor, distracting journalists from their work. Rumours flew about who had made a total prat of themselves, who had been disloyal, or slimy or divertingly, indeed suicidally abusive to their betters.What you take away from the show, however, isn’t so much insights into journalistic endeavour and the loneliness of power, or revealing, off- duty unbuttonings of emotion in E14 wine bars What you get is body language. At one point Rosie Boycott is seen getting tough with the deputy foreign editor. Upset because he has failed to get the job he thought he deserved, the hapless man starts to go on about improved circulation figures. Boycott snaps, “You’re displaying a massive lack of cool, if you don’t mind my saying so”.But what she herself displays throughout is a whole repertoire of giveaway mannerisms: Rosie examining her nails then lifting her steepled fingers over her face, peek-a-boo fashion, while listening to unwanted praise; Rosie untangling her telephone cord with ferocious concentration while struggling with budgets, Rosie’s girlishly innocent, gap-toothed smile at the height of her Legalise Cannabis march, Rosie’s right hand comforting the left as she phones Security to ask to be let her into her new office…She is not alone. But the evidence is there, all the same, that you’re flailing inside.Look, for example, at Channel Four’s Cutting Edge documentary, “Independent Rosie”, which goes out at 9pm tomorrow night. It has a special resonance for the staff of the newspaper you hold in your hand, and their relatives (who will, I suspect, constitute the bulk of the viewing audience), since it is set in the walkways and offices and open-plan expanses of the Independent newspapers, 18 floors up the Canary Wharf obelisk, and concerns the first 40 days of Rosie Boycott’s brief reign as editor of this organ and the Independent on Sunday.

Instead they become a-flurry with what he would call “social leakage”, raising to an unprecedented degree the tiny mannerisms which betray our discomfort at being seen too closely.
The standard human response to having a video camera trained on you is to wave it away like a wasp; when it’s a TV camera, and you cannot afford to be seen by a million viewers flailing your arms about as if being pelted by invisible stones, your response becomes more restrained, more subtle and diplomatic. There is something remarkably sexy about the one-eyed technological monster – both penis and vagina, something that prods and pokes you into response and simultaneously draws you inside it – but non-actor humans, when confronted by it generally do not react by what Desmond Morris would call an exhibitionistic display. Frankly, it’s about as likely as me bearing David Beckham’s love child.. AGEING FANS of the Sixties children’s TV series Zoo Time, fronted by Desmond Morris, may remember the occasion when the producers decided to film a pride of lions in captivity, and do it live for maximum effect. To the puzzlement of a million watching children, every male lion at which the camera was pointed immediately mounted the nearest female and began enthusiastically to mate. It was an unusual reaction to the power of the television camera.

I feel like a lumbering old tweed-clad biology teacher for the first time, whereas in my head, I am barely yet fit to utter the blush-making word “pregnancy”.Do these girls think that there will be a radical rise in teenage pregnancies? “Nah.” By common consent, “nah”. Don’t really like them that much,” added Ozlem.The message is loud and clear: the Spice Girls are naff, and we’re not stupid, innit? To remind a 15-year-old of her platform-trainered past, an innocent round of “zigazig-aah”, is to inspire a whole repertoire of indelicate moues and references to primary schools. To give two hoots about the Spice Girls these days, you have to be a 35-year-old bristling with demographic concerns, or aged eight. All Saints are given a reluctant head-tilt of cool rating, but pregnancies mean nothing, innit?I am, in fact, an alien, equipped with my statistics (teenage pregnancies in Britain are the highest in Western Europe, with nearly 9,000 girls under the age of 16 becoming pregnant every year: the Home Secretary is concerned), and my roster of Spice Girl facts I am, let us say, at the Whistles stage Not Damart, but not Top Shop. “Just because they’re pregnant, all girls are going to go out and get pregnant,” said her friend Pinar Simoglu, 18. “Nothing would influence me! Not the Spice Girls.” Nothing? “No – completely not the Spice Girls.