170. Television Intrusion

I should apologise to those of you who live outside the UK because what follows probably won't mean much to you.  This post is parochial as it is all about our revered, national public service broadcaster, the British Broadcasting Corporation, known as the BBC.  

I’ve mentioned before the dreariness, dullness and irrelevance of our local BBC news programme, “Look East”.  The east of England is such a large area that news about burst pipes in a village that could be 130 miles away, must be of no interest at all to most people in the region.

Nevertheless, on Wednesday evening we were actually eager to see Look East as Caroline hoped there would be an item about the schools in Luton for which she has responsibility.  She had been expecting it for a day or two and so we had recorded those bulletins. 

That was just as well as minutes before the programme began, the phone rang and we missed its start.  The conversation ended quite quickly but so we didn’t miss the headlines and the main item, we went to “Recordings” to watch the programme from the beginning.

There was no mention of Luton and at the end of the news came the weather forecast.  The first words were, “Wednesday will be wet and windy.”  What!!!!

It would appear that we had been watching Tuesday’s bulletin for the second time and until that moment, hadn’t realised.

Is "Lockdown Loopy” a recognised medical condition?

*****

There are a number of characteristics of the BBC that have really irritated or annoyed me in the last year or so.  Its determination to be the ‘wokest’ organisation in the country is driving me bonkers.  Now, I've discovered other aspects of the BBC that are troubling.

Maybe I really am going “Lockdown Loopy” but my irritation at hearing someone saying,  “any time soon” on the BBC television news programmes, is mounting.  

In the same way that I only ever hear the phrase “the here and now” in weather forecasts and never in general conversation, I only ever hear “any time soon” during the news bulletins.

Here are examples of “any time soon” from the past month:

“Remember this?  When people could crowd into pubs and restaurants?  You won’t see that again any time soon.”

“It doesn't look as though that line is going to flatten any time soon.”

“A major hotel chain has warned that up to 1800 jobs could go because there’s little prospect of the industry returning to normal any time soon.”

“For many businesses and organisations, there’ll be no going back any time soon.”

“Is this blustery weather going to end any time soon?”

“This heavy-handed law enforcement is unlikely to end any time soon.”

“OK, let’s find out if it’s going to stop raining any time soon.”

“This amusement park has not been able to open for months and there’s no likelihood of it opening any time soon.”

“Is the weather going to settle down any time soon?”

“BBC research reveals that fifty major companies aren’t planning to have all their staff back in the office any time soon.”

I have never heard “any time soon” said by anyone in everyday conversation but during BBC news bulletins, I usually hear it at least once.  

“Any time soon” is said by newsreaders and reporters when normal people would say, “in the near future” or “imminently”; "for some time"; “in the next few days/weeks”; “before long” or even just, “soon”.  I wish they would stop it.

By the way, there is something interesting about the quotes above.  Even though most are about the impact of the Covid pandemic, our thoughts are always turning to the weather.

*****

Ofcom has reported that the BBC is struggling to engage the younger audience.  That is even though it is doing all it can to attract the politically correct and ‘woke’ Under 30s.  

In a new BBC historical drama series, I have been told that Idris Elba is taking the part of Henry VIII and that Christopher Biggins will play the rôle of Cardinal Wolsey.  Will that be woke enough for them?

At the same time that it’s failing to attract young people, the BBC is losing its primary audience.  Last year, it lost 2% of the age range that is said to make up the BBC’s core audience: people like me.  

I know exactly why those viewing figures are declining and why the BBC is losing £300 million a year in unpaid licence fees.  Is it just me or are their television programmes generally awful at the moment? Cooking, travel, property and antiques are the topics that seem to make up the bulk of its output.  

I should be interested in them.  After all, I enjoy cooking; I’ve travelled; I live in a house and I am very nearly an antique but I find that those programmes are all terribly dull and boring.   Consequently, I do not watch many television programmes and virtually nothing that the BBC offers.  

A programme I record but then watch but only for the first 2 minutes, is an afternoon programme on ITV - The Chase.  It is essential viewing in order to play the game that Caroline and I have created.  

The first thing to happen on that show is the four contestants, whose names are visible in front of them, introduce themselves in turn.  All four will state their name (which we already know), age, occupation and where they are from.  So, the first contestant might say: “I’m George.  I’m fifty-four, a newsagent from Bradford.” 

What Caroline and I do is watch with pen and paper in hand and with the sound muted.  The object of the game is to try to lip read those three unknown facts about each player and a point is awarded for every one you get right.

3 points at stake per player; there are 4 players and so 12 points are available every day; the programme is shown 5 times a week, meaning there are 60 points available in a week.  

Caroline is much better than me at this.   Last week, she beat me 46 - 22.  She often identifies the occupation whereas I never have.  She correctly identified a woman as a “Legal Secretary”.  I thought she was a “Local Sex Worker”.

There can be problems, however:  Should I have allowed Caroline a point for saying a woman was from “Warrington” when it was in fact, “Workington”?  No, you are wrong.  Those two towns are 130 miles apart and in different counties.  Rules are rules and she scored nothing.  

Ramble:

This is a really great game that anyone can play.  If I could think of some way to refine, package and market it, we’d be rich.  I’ve got a name for it: “WALDOE’S TWIN”. That’s an anagram of WILTON and DAWES.

I can imagine someone saying, “Fancy a game of Waldoe’s twin?”

The only BBC programme I watch with any regularity is the 10 o’clock news and recently, I have discovered something that I find troubling.  

I started to make a record of a rather disturbing aspect of the BBC news coverage.  What follows is just 11 days of data.

On August 8th, there was a troubling news item about bullying within British women’s gymnastics.  A former gymnast was interviewed.  Throughout most of the interview, she appeared on screen like this:

Then, for no reason, the picture changed to show her hands:

Why?  Was it so we could see that she had slightly ridiculous false nails?  Then, five seconds after returning to the original shot, this appeared:

OK, so she has false eyelashes too.  Remember that this was on the BBC’s main news bulletin of the day.  It wasn’t a feature on The One Show or a Sports Magazine programme.

On the next day, Laura Gardiner from the Resolution Foundation was interviewed about the effect of Covid pandemic on the labour market.  The BBC news team thought that as well as seeing her like this:

The viewers could see that she has a protruding skin blemish and somewhat over-plucked eyebrows too:

Why?  How does a change of shot to produce an unflattering image, add anything to the information being imparted?

Why do the BBC do it to women and never to men?  Here are some more examples:

August 14th.  Kate Bingham, Chair, UK Vaccine Taskforce. 

August 18th.   Lizzie Harper, the widow of PC Harper.

August 19th.   A woman who, for psychological reasons, can’t wear a face mask.  

This is a sixth form student, upset about the exams debacle.  It was decided that it would be enlightening and would add to the story if we saw that she has a chicken pox scar.

Does the BBC do this because they hope that the speck of mascara that has stuck on to the woman’s cheek may be thought to be a blackhead?  Why do they zoom in on blemishes or unusual features of a woman but never those of a man?  They are particularly prominent on large, High Definition television screens.

Perhaps the editors think that what a man has to say is intrinsically more interesting than a woman’s point of view or opinion, however expert that woman may be or how renowned in her field she is.  Do viewers need quirky images to retain their interest when a woman speaks?

I usually already know the answer to questions I sometimes ask on this blog but this time, I am stumped.  

Just as I have no idea why the BBC altered the structure of the questions on Mastermind  to make the programme dull and tedious (click to see), I have no idea at all why the BBC insists on showing close ups of most of the women they interview on news bulletins.

Enlighten me please!

Was this the practice when the BBC interviewed Caroline in 2014?  She spoke interestingly and informatively without a close up.  That was just as well as you can have no idea what could have appeared!

113. Yawn....

In July 2012 I wrote about some changes I have noticed in my life since Caroline and I moved from the suburbs of north London to rural Buckinghamshire (Rural Stress). In that post I wrote about the difficulties I find in obtaining the services of local tradesmen. 

I have stopped worrying about all that now.   I’ve either lowered my expectations or maybe I have adjusted my pace of life to that of the people I come into contact with around here.

My life is not stress free, however.  There is something else about living here, 45 miles north of central London, that irritates me daily and it is something that I can do nothing about.  The thing that irritates and is driving me mad is the BBC regional news.

When we lived in London, the BBC “London News” followed the BBC “News at Six” and every story in that local news programme was interesting and significant, not just to me but I am sure to everyone in London. 

Even a story about the opening of a new shopping centre in Streatham, which is on the far side of London, diametrically opposite from where we lived in Winchmore Hill, seemed relevant and germane.

Most evenings when I watch the east of England local news programme,  “Look East”, I usually feel that it is really nothing to do with me at all.  

Why we are classified as being in the Eastern region and not the Midlands, when we are only forty miles from the geographic centre of England is beyond me.

The first time I realised that “Look East” is a programme that had very little to offer, was the evening when the lead story was about an argument in Wellingborough to do with the Christmas lights.  I didn’t even know where Wellingborough was and I, along with probably 99% of the programme’s viewers, was completely uninterested in what sort of bloody lights were hanging in their High Street that Christmas.

Last week, the first story one day was about an upgrade of the railway line from Norwich to London and the main thrust of the story was that it wouldn’t be completed for ten years.  A topical story?

The next story was about the new Northampton railway station.  I’m sure that may have been of some interest to people living in Northampton but not to anybody else in the huge region that is the BBC’s definition of the East of England.

Another feature recently was about a doctor who had treated sufferers from Ebola in West Africa.  The only relevance it had to us in the East of England was that the doctor came from Norfolk.  I expect his friends were interested.

A series of stories was titled “Unsung Sporting Heroes”.  The first ‘hero’ was a diving coach from Letchworth in Hertfordshire.  He and other people in the series are ‘unsung’ because they are not very important or interesting and probably not particularly good at what they do.

Another story in our local news was about a stunt involving a racing car that drove underneath a lorry and out the other side.  Its only relevance to viewers in the East of England was that it was filmed at a disused airfield in Suffolk. 

If a story in the national news has any connection whatsoever with Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire or Northamptonshire, it will be repeated within half an hour on the local news.  Usually it is just a repeat of everything, including the same film and interviews that we have already seen in the main news.

Anything that Greg Rutherford, the Olympic gold medallist, achieves that is worth a mention on the national news, is blown up for all its worth on “Look East” because Greg Rutherford is from Bletchley in Buckinghamshire.

Sometimes, the producers at “Look East” are so desperate to fill 30 minutes every evening that what they tell us is risible. 

When John Hurt was knighted, it was a lead story for us because he owned a holiday home somewhere in the region.

The death of Roger Lloyd-Pack was newsworthy apparently, because some years previously he had owned a house in Norfolk.

The lead item one day in March 2014 in the East of England news was about the funeral in Newry, Northern Ireland, of Lord Ballyedmond, a Northern Irish peer.  It was the most important story for us in the east because he had been killed in a helicopter crash near Beccles in Suffolk ten days earlier.

You may wonder, as I did in January 2014, why “Look East” featured a story about a couple who were murdered on their yacht in St Lucia, 4200 miles away in the West Indies.  Perhaps they were from one of the region’s counties? 

No, they were from Cannock in Staffordshire, in the west of the country. The somewhat tenuous link the story had to the east of England and therefore to us in Buckinghamshire, was that when they had started on their yearlong voyage, they had set sail from Lowestoft in Suffolk.

That association was both absurd and ridiculous!

The lead stories in “Look East” tend to fall into one of three categories.  The headline story is always either about transport, schools, or health and hospitals.   It is so dull.  The “London News” programme has its own Arts Correspondent!  

A new low point came when the entire “Look East” programme came live from a sheep farm near Ipswich.  All afternoon the trails told us that we would be seeing lambs being born.  You may imagine what happened – absolutely nothing!  Thirty minutes of tedious anticlimax, listening to an overawed, inarticulate farmer telling us what we could be seeing if we were there at another time.

If the BBC needs to save money, one of the first things they could do is terminate “Look East” and all other local programmes around the country that have to scrape the barrel in order to find content.  I’ve had enough of it.  I feel sorry for the hotel owner in Overstrand, Norfolk whose hotel is at risk of slipping over the edge of the cliff, but Overstrand is as far from me as Wrexham in Wales. 

I am not bleedin' interested!!

50. Losing it?

I worry a little these days that I may be ‘losing it’.  How do you know when you start to ‘lose it’?  I suppose that other people know before you do and I guess that, because there is not much that can be done, they just keep quiet about it and you never get to know. 

I’ve just seen a BBC news reporter who may have ‘lost it’ already and that’s sad as she’s only in her mid twenties.  She was standing on the beach at Bognor Regis and she was there to report on a partial eclipse that would be visible as the sun rose over the sea. 

“To see the eclipse you need to be as close as possible to the horizon,” she informed us with some assurance and authority. 

That conjures up an interesting scenario.  “Will you sail a little closer to the horizon please, Captain.  I’d like to get a better view of the eclipse.”

When my father was only four or five years older than I am now, he began to lose it.  He became a little vague and forgetful and he struggled with names.  My mother’s name was Pat and my brother is Peter and whenever he spoke to me during those years my father, in his confusion, always called me, “Peter-pat-terry.”

The first time that Caroline accused me of being senile and possibly ‘losing it’ was about three years ago as we were sitting together under a large parasol on a beautiful, hot Saturday morning at the Cracked Conch bar/restaurant by the sea on Grand Cayman.  Ten metres from us was a set of metal steps going down from the outside bar area into the beautiful clear water.  We watched numerous divers embarking on or coming back from their dives.  Two young boys went down the steps.

“Look at that,” I said, anxiously.  “Those two lads are going diving without scuba gear.” 

Caroline gave me a sad look.  “They’ll be snorkeling then.”

Twice in my life though, I have had a moment of insight that made me certain, for a minute or two at least, that I had special mental powers.  The first time was in February 1967 in the kitchen of a flat in Edinburgh.  It was about eight o’clock in the morning and my friend Ian and I had hitchhiked overnight from Durham.  I can’t remember now why we were there but I do remember that there was a pack of cards in the kitchen.

I took a card from the pack, held it to my chest and said to Ian, ”What card am I thinking of?”  He stared at me intently and then after about ten seconds said, “Five of clubs.”  It was!  We tried to repeat that phenomenon for the next hour but never did.

Some twenty-five years later, at about one o’clock in the morning, I was with Ian again but also with Roger and their wives.  We’d been eating and drinking for the previous five hours.  I left the room for a few minutes and when I returned I was told that they had a story and I was to unravel it by asking questions to which they could answer only ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

Does the story concern me? Yes.

Does it take place in Hertfordshire?  Yes.

Is it set in Borehamwood?  Yes.

There it was: “Borehamwood in three.”  Pretty impressive I thought.  I had managed to narrow down the place, out of all the millions places in the world where the story could be set, in just three questions.  Psychic?

No.  They had agreed to answer “Yes” to any question, the last letter of which ended A - K and “No” to a question that ended L – Z and see how the story developed.  Oh how we laughed (and still do)!

Yesterday I said something that produced that same look of pity and concern from Caroline that she had given me at the Cracked Conch. 

“We’re going to be rich,” I told her.  “I’ve had an idea for a gadget.  It’s brilliantly simple, has no moving parts and although no one but me realises it yet, it’s something for which the world has been waiting for a hundred years or more.  All I’ve got to do now is to produce a stereotype and take it on to ‘Dragons’ Den’.”

I put it down to all those years teaching students in the Peoples Republic of Haringey where we always had to actively suppress any thoughts of stereotypes.

It’s a good job that she had left for work and wasn’t at home this morning.  I had installed a new Cable Box for my television and then I phoned the company to ask them to activate it. 

“What can you see in the display panel at the moment?” the woman asked me.  “PL70,” I said.

“OK, that’s good.  Now, it takes about twenty minutes to activate but when it says 999, it’s ready,” she said but forty minutes later I was still waiting for 999.  I phoned again.

“It’s not worked,” I told her.  It says 852.  No, it’s just changed.  Now it says 853.  This is going to take hours.”

She sighed.  “That’s the time you’re looking at.  Press the red button.  What’s it say now?”

“999,” I muttered

I spoke to Mark on the phone on Wednesday. “Did you do that test I sent you?” he asked.

“What test?”

“The one that I sent you a few days ago.”

“Was it an e-mail?”

“Yes.”

A bell was ringing but it was only a little tinkle.  I vaguely remembered something. 

“No,” I said confidently.  “You never sent me anything.  I never got it.  You never sent me anything.”

“Yes I did - on Saturday.”

“No, I haven’t had an e-mail from you for weeks.” 

“Yes I did send you one.  It was about colours.  Hang on a minute and I’ll go to my ‘Sent Box’ and see if it’s there.”

There was a short pause while he must have been looking at his computer screen.  Colours?  Yes, maybe I did remember something about colours but what was it?

“Yes, there it is.”  Mark had left his computer.  “I sent it to you at the same time I sent it to Paul and he told me he’s done it.  You have got it.  I bet you’ve deleted it without reading it.  Look in your ‘Deleted Box’.”

My computer wasn’t on so I kept quiet for about fifteen seconds, pretending that I was looking.

“No.  It’s not there.”

“OK,” Mark sighed.  “I’ll send it again but I bet you did get it.”

“No I didn’t,” I insisted, grumpily.  Maybe I was wrong but I didn’t remember getting it. 

“What’s it about anyway?”

“It’s a test to see if you’ve got Alzheimer’s,” he said.