Marian Ovsyannikova’s bravery was the very best of on-screen protests

“We interrupt this programme…”, has become a television cliché in both fact and fiction. The fight for the television transmitter is key in many attempted coup d’états.

Formal interruptions sanctioned by the networks are reserved for the gravest occasions. In recent weeks each of the original networks in the US  — CBS, NBC and ABC — have interrupted normal programming to cover Joe Biden’s statements on the attack on Ukraine.

Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather reporting the assassination of JFK have become legendary entries in the annals of live TV. The turbulence and progressive currents of the 1960s were also apparent in the decision of NBC in 1965 to break into its Sunday night movie Judgment at Nuremberg to broadcast fresh footage of the brutal suppression of the civil rights march at Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama.

We have also become accustomed to occasional attempts by protestors to disrupt live broadcasts. Most famously, in this country, the opening minutes of a BBC Six O’Clock News bulletin in 1988 were overlaid with cries of “Oh **** we’ve got a nutter in the studio,” and “Stop Section 28,” when a group identifying as lesbian activists broke in. Sue Lawley stuck doggedly to reading the autocue, while her co-presenter Nicholas Witchell, later said that he sat on a protester to prevent her from getting on screen. It transpired that history was on the side of those demanding gay rights then, as it was eventually with those who brought the Miss World Pageant to a halt in the Albert Hall in 1970.

Marian Ovsyannikova’s protest on Russia’s Channel One was only on screen for five seconds but it is special and historic for many reasons. The first of these is the gravity of the issue at stake — an unprovoked war in Europe that has already claimed the lives of thousands on both sides. 

Next comes the sheer bravery of a woman on her own, challenging an increasingly repressive state with no chance of escape. 

Most distinctive though was that her protest was an inside job, carried out by a professional communicator. She is not a demonstrator crudely trying to drown out an official broadcast. Only someone fully accredited, a professional broadcaster herself, could have got into that studio while it was on air and pulled off the stunt with such aplomb. Yet while Putin’s favourite newscaster, Ekaterina Andreeva, droned on stolidly, Sue Lawley style, Ovsyannikova obviously did not represent the powers that prevail on Russian state-controlled media.

On the outskirts of almost every European capital city — east and west — there is an enormous concrete bunker, usually 50s and 60s brutalist architecture, built for a state broadcaster. The BBC’s abandoned Television Centre in White City is a typical example. These buildings are threatening. Nobody gets in easily. Once inside there are endless dingy corridors, with heavy doors which sometimes open onto cavernous studios. Ovsyannikova must have planned her protest meticulously, finding a pretext to get near the studio while hiding her home-made banner until she unfurled it. 

She had a little trouble positioning herself on camera so that the message was not blocked out by Andreeva.  She had made sure that the words, in Russian and English, would get across to audiences at home and abroad. “NO WAR” and “Russians Against War” made up the bread of her message sandwich; it’s filling for her fellow citizens in Cyrillic characters warned, “Don’t believe propaganda. They are lying to you.” 

Ovsyannikova worked on-screen as a news reporter in southern Russia before coming to Moscow as a producer, so she was not phased by finding herself in the bright studio lights. She also showed that she is a true woman of her times, having prepared a selfie message in Russian for release on social media explaining her actions. She knew that clips from this message would be tweeted around the world along with her original studio protest. 

This second shot of publicity was carefully constructed, briskly laying out points and gestures to be picked up with a storyteller’s skill. Ovsyannikova explains that she is of Ukrainian and Russian parentage, and draws attention to the necklace she is wearing in both countries’ colours. The bulk of her minute-long message focuses on the responsibilities of her profession of journalism. “Unfortunately,” she says, “in recent years I have been working on Channel One, working for the Kremlin’s propaganda.” After that, she confesses her own role as a media apparatchik and repeatedly says she is “ashamed” for “letting them tell lies”, for keeping silent and for allowing “Russians to be turned into Zombies.”

With this explanation and her unbowed comments to international media outside the courthouse after being fined for making it, Ovsyannikova metamorphosed from a protester to an alternative voice of authority. It is little wonder that President Zelensky, who has managed a similar transformation over a much longer period, was quick to praise her.

Managing to make a protest in a main news TV studio is difficult, but also a Holy Grail of protest, because it puts the cause being promoted immediately against the backdrop of considered authority. Ovsyannikova further enhanced this impression in advance by recording her uninterrupted statement, spoken calmly to camera. 

Most interruptions are coarse in comparison. I’ve had interviewees stage walkouts from a studio. It never does them much good. The transformation from sitting to standing is awkward and the cameras usually don’t capture clearly what is going on. Most trouble happens once the studio is left behind. Outside broadcasts seem to have become fair game for some nuisances, especially in the politically charged spaces around Westminster. At moments of crisis, broadcasters tend to work live from Abingdon Green. Just as predictably small bands of dedicated protestors turn up, often with causes unrelated to the issues at hand. A lot of them just want to get in the back of the shot — which is irritating but can be worked around. Nick Robinson once had to apologize after angrily tearing up one disrupter’s banner. 

Far worse are those who make so much noise so neither the anchor, the guests or the audience at home can hear themselves think. Some shout, some bring amplified bullhorns or music. This has sometimes forced me, and other broadcasters, to abandon our positions outside. 

A nastier variant, usually aimed at women reporters, is the shouting of audible obscenities, as happened recently to Sky’s Kate McCann reporting from outside Scotland Yard. The appalled mother of her tormentor sent her son back to apologise in person. Shamefully, there is a market for such behaviour. In North America a prankster has made a lot of money, selling merchandise related to fake bloopers he creates which purport to record an unguarded obscene comment, worse than Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood remarks, made by male commentators about women. 

Ovsyannikova’s elegant protest is not vulgar. It is deadly serious and has broadcast to the world an important and repressed aspect of public opinion in Russia. The only equivalent TV protest I can think of is in fiction, in Joe Dante’s horror film The Howling, about a global outbreak of werewolfism. The heroine is a LA news anchor played by Dee Wallace, best known as “mom” in E.T. She has been bitten, and to warn the world of the danger, she transforms into a werewolf live on air while reading the news, in the knowledge that her boyfriend will shoot her dead with a silver bullet. 

What should worry us and Marina Ovsyannikova, is that in the movie a man in a bar watching the studio action unfold on a TV screen, simply shrugs and orders a hamburger when the channel switches to a commercial break.