Take one hugely popular TV show that's made celebrities of its presenters. Give it a mysterious, masked character and sustain the mystery until the character decides to blow the gaffe in an autobiography.
The row between the BBC's Top Gear and racing driver Ben Collins, aka The Stig, is a low-grade disagreement in the grand scheme of things. But it has unintentionally pushed to the fore something of growing significance in the world of journalism.
That phenomenon is Witney TV - basically, a community newsletter on the web with moving pictures. It's local news for the village of Witney in Oxfordshire and the surrounding area is produced by citizen journalists kitted out with video camcorders and home computers.
It also has the pre-requisite of success in any news programme: curiosity.
Therefore, when a Witney TV reporter went to cover a charity event attended by Jeremy Clarkson, the reporter asked the Top Gear presenter for his thoughts on the Ben Collins situation.
And Clarkson told him exactly what he thought.
Collins, said Clarkson, was "sacked" from Top Gear and he told Witney TV he felt hurt because: "I liked him [Collins] and he came round to my house and had drinks and all that time he was writing a book."
Watch the whole interview here.
That candid response gave Witney TV an exclusive that was soon picked up by the rest of the media.
It's a good, old-fashioned scoop and, I've little doubt, it took guts on the part of the reporter to ask a celebrity like Jeremy Clarkson an awkward question when the presenter maybe wasn't expecting it. Hats off to Witney TV.
But there's more to the Witney TV/Top Gear story than it being a case study from the school of 'if you don't ask, you won't get'. Media Guardian concludes:
"Clarkson's interview has also unwittingly advanced the cause of local television and media - a key plank of Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt's plans for the industry. And all done in the constituency heartland of Prime Minister David Cameron. Surely there's a link?"
Personally, I think it's no more than coincidence. But Witney TV shows (as the BBC's own regional television news programme discovered) that you don't need a multi-million pound budget to make news and break stories with moving pictures for a global audience.
What it takes is a website, a camcorder and the nous to ask somebody famous a pertinent question.
