In Frontline, a brilliant Australian satire of TV news, a reporter learns show to conjure drama from a dull scene by delivering his piece to camera crouching down. Suddenly, it looks as if he’s dodging bullets. The BBC must have been watching. Its coverage of Zimbabwe’s elections is just the latest example of its expensive new fondness for dispatching “anchor” coverage from a gritty location.

Never mind the mindless air miles or BBC budget cuts, let’s have a tense-looking George Alagiah whispering the Ten O’clock News from “the South Africa and Zimbabwe border”, a dark strip of land that could easily have been the building site beside the BBC headquarters in west London. Alagiah didn’t squat to deliver the news but that’s because TV news has a different trick: wait until a scene is in darkness, stick a big light on it and, hey presto, you have the perfect theatrical setting for an evening of news drama.

In recent months, the BBC has dragged its arc lights around the world to inject some extra hysteria into Portugal for the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, the UK floods last summer and the US presidential primaries. This self-aggrandisement is matched by its language, with our public service broadcaster’s increasingly boastful predilection for “the BBC can exclusively reveal” and “the BBC is banned”.

In case you didn’t know, the BBC is banned from reporting inside Zimbabwe, just like dozens of other media groups. It is banned from Tibet, as is everyone else, and was recently “banned” from reporting in London-Heathrow airport. This boasting belittles the real bravery of undercover journalists like the BBC’s own John Simpson, unfairly mocked for his burka in Afghanistan and baseball cap in Zimbabwe.

But Steven Barnett, professor of communications at the University of Westminster, says that although the BBC was “sheepish” about its McCann coverage, stationing news anchors on the edge of Zimbabwe is a valid exercise. In an era where technology can chain reporters to their desks, he argues it is good that some journalists strive to leave the office. And who knows? Getting to Zimbabwe’s border may enable the BBC to report information from people crossing it.