Having lived for eight years in Penzance, at the far western extreme of the country, I am used to seaside towns in the winter. When the tourists go and the gales blow, they hibernate. The hectic months give way to pub signs swinging in the wind, rain sodden roofs, empty streets. The world goes indoors. The elements rage and depression settles in for six months. Brighton ignores winter. Where its dullard seaside sisters scattered along the South coast – Eastbourne, Hastings, Worthing – revert to faded decrepitude from October onwards, Brighton just dons a rainbow coloured cagoule and carries on. Like in summer. But with rain. And wind. The seafront hums with hen parties. The pubs steam up with stag do’s. The money pours in from London come Friday evening and the coffers are filled. Sunday sees the sore heads in Sombreros and laddered stockinged flesh falling back up the streets to the station, London bound and back to work. Wage packets depleted and wallets replete with nothing more than receipts. Heads, wooden, dull with a hangover headache and hazy memories of a very good weekend.

But this winter, the winter of 2020, Brighton is trying on Eastbourne clothing for a good cause. We’re in unfancy dress. We’ve gone quiet. Less loud. Like the rest of the country, we are staying indoors and playing it safe. Yes, Sin City is in lockdown. But like a stripper disguised underneath a dirty old man mac, we can’t wait to reveal all and get raunchy. Like a butterfly wrapped up in a cocoon, we are desperate to emerge and show off our lovely colours. Loud, proud and pleaser to the crowd, we are like the fun fair shut up for the season: desperate to switch on the lights again and cry “roll up, roll up!” Sometimes it’s good to be the little bit of foolishness in everyone’s life. The place where people can let their hair down. Britain will need cheering up after all this serious stuff. It will need somewhere to illuminate our lives again. And Brighton will be waiting. Like an ostentatiously packaged, large, gaudy present sitting under the Christmas tree – desperate to be opened and tantalisingly tempting. Naughty but nice. But not just yet.

Our world is in chaos. As I say, we have tried to stop watching the news, but it has us hooked. Nightly we turn it on to see if anything – anything – has got better. Instead, the familiar faces auto-cue crisis to every camera in the studio. The TV anchor men and women shake their heads at having to read out such depressing news. They think that serious stories need serious faces and sombre voices. That such times call for sobriety. They are wrong. What we need in such times is a latter day Reggie Bosanquet to make it all seem better. Reggie Bosanquet, the less than secure anchor on ITN News at Ten back in the day. We need on our air waves his charmingly lazy brand of insouciance brought on by a slight excess of insobriety. Something the poet prince of depressing times, Leonard Cohen, understood brilliantly: I – we – need someone to ‘dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in’. Gathered in one way or the other.

Reggie Bosanquet. Just the name makes me smile. Watching him present the ITN Ten o’clock news was entertaining – my parents would tune in just to see how far the wrong side of a bottle of red he was. His inebriation was an open secret and in those days, there was no shame in it. It just endeared him to the nation. He covered news just as depressing as any we get today. On ITN News at Ten from 1967 to 1979, his watch included some of history’s most tragic stories: the Prague Spring, the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Bloody Sunday, IRA bombings, Apollo 13, Biafra, the Killing Fields, the Iranian revolution, the Beatles disbanding. He made the uncertainty of existence bearable in a way that looking through the bottom of a glass filled with wine usually does.

When Reggie was on air, he kept two goblets of wine on a shelf just beneath the news desk, which he guzzled during the pre-filmed reports. If the world was going to end, you wouldn’t mind hearing it slurred from the side of his mouth. I’d rather go in the company of a man who drank his way through the news. I would rather spend my last few moments on Earth with the man who entitled his autobiography “Let’s get through Wednesday” than with the prim Fiona Bruce – the icy, charmless Head girl – or Mogadon Man, Huw Edwards, which would be like living out your last moments with that rather tedious, dull colleague from accounts. I’d just prefer a party and to go out with a smile than a scold or a yawn. Purely a matter of style. News readers should be chosen by this criterion rather than journalistic integrity or gravitas. Preferably all three: old school style.

Let’s face it, nowadays the Reggie B method would be the only sensible defence mechanism given the unending list of dreadfulness today’s news anchors have to read out. I would have nothing but respect for them if they parked a heavy glass tumbler and a full decanter of Lagavulin on the desk, ready for action, as Big Ben chimed. At least it would be an honest reflection of the unpalatability of their job. Which, right now, is not much different from Tom Hagen’s role in The Godfather, having to go upstairs and tell Don Corleone, his mafia boss, bed ridden and recovering from being gunned down in the street in a failed assassination attempt, that the Don’s eldest son, Sonny, has just been riddled with hundreds of bullets and killed. Hagen has to have a stiff drink in order to face the Don and tell him the sad news. Imagine having to do that on a nightly basis. Hell, if I had to do their job, the studio would need to set up an intravenous drip filled with a litre of 80 per cent proof just to get me to face the camera.

In this news cycle, for the whole of 2020, you’d need a survival strategy just to go on air. The nearest to perfecting such a survival strategy – but clearly sober – is Tom Bradby. He has eschewed any pretence at impartiality or resisting the temptation to express a personal view on the headlines. Every item of news ends with a sardonic raised eyebrow and a fatalistic comment. A bit like the fabulous comedienne Caroline Aherne’s nosy supermarket cashier, who commented rudely on every item she rang up as they made their way down the conveyor belt – “Tampons? Thought you looked a bit grouchy this mornin'” – much to the embarrassment of her hapless customers.

Bradby and Peston. The Two Ronnies of news broadcasting. One, the straight faced deliverer of acid put downs and muttered asides; the other, the erratic cadence and windmilling actions of a Vaudeville performer. Together they just about add up to a single malt Reggie. Thank God you can still get bad news delivered with a decent bedside manner. It may not be what you want to hear but at least it’s palatable.

The problem is, when things are hard and scary, when we’re tired, when we’ve had blow after blow and we are fed up, that’s when it happens: Magical thinking kicks in. This will all be over soon, we convince ourselves. This one thing will solve all our problems. The pandemic will just disappear because we want it to disappear. This kind of thinking makes us feel better, sure, but it is delusional and therefore dangerous.

The last 6 months have been a great example of the costs that come when magical thinking doesn’t materialise and the consequences hit hard. When hope is your strategy, you get caught unprepared. When you expect problems to go away and you tell everyone you do and they believe you, you – and they – are disappointed. When you don’t listen to advice because it’s unpleasant or comes with difficult obligations, when you focus on short-term solutions or disregard risks, you’ll find even bad situations can be made worse. Just look at America’s experience of the virus and the magical thinking strategy of its President for proof. He hasn’t heeded his own intelligence agency’s credo, and it has come home to roost on a cataclysmic scale.

Not speaking the harsh truth, just because it might not be popular to say it, is dangerous. Dangerous at a national level and dangerous in business. However big the temptation, we must each combat magical thinking. It is not an answer to real issues to wrap ourselves in the flag and say that what is needed at this time is for us all to pull together and collectively hope for the best. That isn’t leadership. It is facile to see what you to see and believe what you want to believe rather than to seek to know what you need to know. For us in business, we cannot labour under the illusion that this is temporary. That things will revert to BAU. Now is the crucial time, on the day the Chancellor has faced the hard financial facts and is announcing a new package of measures, for us to coldly assess the facts, re-assess the risks, plan for the dangers, prepare for a worst case scenario and, most importantly, act. Now is the time to do the necessary things that will insure the business. What needs to be done? What must change? Take advantage of the crisis to cut through the bindweed that tied you down or held you back. Use it to cut through the inertia that exists in your organisation and make the changes that have needed to be made for too long but have not been made.

Facing the facts is liberating. It sets you free. We do not have the power to change the reality of this current situation. Things are what they are. The situation is what it is. And it must be faced—with courage, wisdom, discipline, imagination – and it must be acted upon. We cannot wait for a magic wand to make it all go away. For the foreseeable future, this is it. It is a gift. As the great Emperor philosopher said: “The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, in so far as it stands ready against the accidental and the unforeseen, and is not apt to fall.” We will not fall if we use the time now to prepare, to ‘stand ready’ and to act decisively rather than to wait hoping.