The Times gets it in the Neck

The Times of London likes to think it is very superior to all other newspapers. However over the years it has allowed this sense of superiority to lull it into lowering its standards to a disgraceful degree, without really noticing. BUT... WE have noticed, and we are not impressed. They are now employing some of the laziest journalists available in Fleet Street. And it is like incest a Hotbed of Nepotism. They are all related to each other, some OPENLY. A few have the decency to try to mask their relationships, but an alert reader can soon discern that they are married to/ carrying on with/ children of other members of staff. It makes us who would like to get £10million a week for writing a few rubbishy column inches but lack any uncles or godparents etc. on the Times' payroll, very annoyed. I buy the paper most days, only because I like their crossword, but I resent every penny they get out of me. It is currently £1 4s 0d per day which is a lot. They never print my letters that I write them either, the ungrateful fools.

Allow me to give a brief resumé of their supposition, which is that you, the reader, are assumed like themselves to
i) hate Christianity and Christians,   Well I don't. I am very devout.
ii) admire the Beatles,   Wrong! I despise Beatles.
iii) have billions of £ at your disposal,   My personal fortune consists of 2/- and the keys to the family chocolate safe (where the chocolate lives. There is usually nothing in it as the safe is not secure since all the teenagers in the district know where the key is.)

iv) are obsessed with your appearance and diet,   I am not. Any fule can see that.
v) know what quinoa and taichi are and what they are for,   Nope. Not got a clue. 
vi) live in London,   183 miles distant here
vii) avidly follow the football and other sports   No thanks, I can not abide sport.
in short, viii) are a halfwit (a rich and overprivileged one) and are related to a member of staff. 
Adhere to these demands and you will enjoy reading The Times. 

Here is a typical day's layout:

Page 1: usually a hideous photograph of a footballer or other sportsman in an unfortunate pose dominates.

Pages 2 and 3: Advertisement. Waste of paper.

Page 4: Boastful list of contents, plus frivolous reports about serious issues. This is to show the readers that Times writers care NOTHING for the suffering of others. In the bottom left hand corner a useless recipe requiring ridiculous exotic ingredients you have never heard of. The recipes have not been tested and do not work.

Pages 5-26: Home news. Never anything interesting. Occasional pictures of baby animals. Articles on topics of interest to me eg maths, science usually hopelessly ill-informed and badly-written, full of elementary blunders such as calling thoracotomies 'thoracectomies'.

I apologise for including this
but I needed to show you how nasty it is.

Pages 27-29: Trite trivial nonsense from column-writers who really ought to know better. We have NO WISH to hear another word, nay not even in a thousand years, about Matthew Parris's llamas or his young man or his estate in rural Spain. Nor do we want to know some rich nepotism-fuelled young puppy's misguided and infantile views about the political landscape thank you very much. The use of inappropriate present tense is seen here increasingly often, which I view as a very alarming development. Extremely unpleasant and vulgar cartoon fills half of page 29 and here is a sample (right):

Page 30: Opinionated opinion from the leader writers. Only read this if you wish to elevate your BP above safe levels. Also Nature Notes which is written by someone's great-uncle and you can tell he hasn't been outside in years, telling us about out of date things which finished weeks ago due to this year's early spring etc. but since they happened later in the year during 1950 or whenever he actually wrote the column we are given false information about the first sightings of wood anemones and the arrival of spring migrants.

Page 31: Letters from readers. Better than the stuff written by their own people. However as mentioned above, my own contributions are always omitted.

Pages 32-38: World news.

Pages 39-50: Business news. I haven't got any shares or gold or anything so I couldn't care less.

Pages 51-52: Obituaries. The best copy found in the obituaries section is provided by readers themselves, when they write in with their own recollections of the deceased. Court circular (v important. One MUST know where Her Majesty will be at all times).

Page 53:  Births, Forthcoming Marriages and Deaths announcements. Worth seeing as they sometimes bring information about people one knows. 

Weather Report: Concealed somewhere between pages 2-71. Can rarely be located. Why the hell they can't put it somewhere easier to find, eg. front or back page, I do not know.

Pages 55-71: may be safely used for lighting fires. Believed to contain sports news but I never look.

Back Page: a final Sports image with accompanying drivel, and then... at last! The Crossword!

However you still have the sillily named T2 to look through, which contains copy even more fatuous than that in the main paper. Often has a shockingly extreme close-up of some superannuated actress or unshaven footballer on the front cover. Horrible.

Over-indulged hip young columnists infest the pages within, voicing their offensive thoughts and stating such as definite facts in terms calculated to indicate that we must either concur or earn their scorn. They tell us about fashion, medical and psychological matters, food, feminism, London theatre shows and other stuff we don't want to know. They always use phrases banned under G-AHLK guidelines, eg. the term 'movies', 'like' when they mean 'as though', the construction 'just because...doesn't mean'. For the sort of money these people are paid you'd think the editor might employ ones who can use proper English.

Prof Tanya: Grandmothers write in to ask what to do about their daughters-in-law's poor parenting. Prof Tanya's solution always involves telling her that everyone involved is suffering mental health problems and the whole family needs to go into therapy. Often she advises that 2-yr-olds should be given their own bathrooms, and other impractical suggestions. She NEVER says "You are an interfering old harridan and should get out of your grandchildren's lives," which would be the obvious and sensible riposte.

Television and radio listings. Reviewer's choice recommendations help you to know which programmes to avoid.

Back pages : Sudoku (a pointless but entertaining number puzzle), and a new quick crossword they have brought in which means I have more things to distract me from getting on with the housework. The sudokus are graded by difficulty, and I am so clever that I only do the very difficult ones. It is a sign of their shoddy workmanship that often the sudokus are wrongly labelled and the 'difficult one' is so easy that it is an insult to readers' intelligence. 

Look at these stupid sudokus. 'Gentle Killer', what a daft name. Killers should be deadly. However, see how laughably easy this one is.

At £1.20 we expect better, Editor. Get to it.

An Attack on Radio 4

The bewildering news that Radio 4 have been doing a retrospective on their programme Ramblings prompts me to offer a critique of their broadcasting values.

If you haven't heard of "Ramblings" you aren't going to believe this: Ramblings is a RADIO programme about going for a walk with a group of ramblers. Try to contain your excitement. There is a different ramblers' group each week.

As you can imagine the subject does not lend itself well to radio. Listeners are treated to the sound of a fat old bore puffing up hills telling us about the puddles, distant farmhouses, unidentified birds etc. that she can see and informing us when the sun has come out. Not very useful, since she is somewhere we have never heard of, and the recording took place months previously so the weather information is not even current. Yet, because it is 10 yrs since the first edition of it, or something, they are reprising some of their favourite episodes. Look, Controllers of Radio 4, it didn't work the first time, and it sure as hell aint going to work now it's 10 yrs out of date.

A quick look through the schedules for the last few weeks tells us plenty about the state of despair in which the Radio 4 personnel find themselves, faced as they are with 137hrs 40mins per week to fill. Regular programmes include :

You and Yours 

Consumer Affairs programme. Worthy dull people discuss topics of utter tedium. This week:

• i) Childcare costs. The presenters ponder the choices parents are making: go out to work or stay at home? Largely irrelevant since most people do not HAVE any choice. 
  
• ii) Furniture is one of the biggest areas of customer complaint in the UK. The Furniture Ombudsman explains how to complain effectively. Gosh, thanks!
• iii) Cosmetic surgery: many industry figures believe the new regulatory rules fall short of what's needed to protect consumers. Fancy!
• Finally, you are rewarded with light relief in the form of : "Budgie Round-up"  - Listeners' emails about budgerigars. God help us.

What hope is there for them, with subject matter like that? They ought to call it You and Bores. On daily, ¾ hr at lunchtime.

OK! You can wake up now!

Money Box Live

Offers an opportunity for listeners to phone in with their money queries interspersed with dreary features on subjects such as 'The Right Mortgage for You', and 'Last-minute Tax Planning'. As stultifying on the airwaves as it looks on paper. Routinely referred to even by Radio 4 staff themselves as Money Box Dead.

On for a full ¾ hour every Wednesday afternoon, week after week after week.

The Archers.

Don't get me started. 50-yr-old soap opera which long ago established a baseline level of banality to which it adheres doggedly, fluctuating only to astound the audience with the inane nature of some of the storylines (eg. Will Granny Archer's shepherd's pie find favour with the grandchildren? Henry is getting a new bed. Helen and Tom or someone choose a venue for their wedding. - the on-going sagas for the current week). The inability of the actors to deliver a consistent Borsetshire accent adds, perhaps, a tinge of interest; it gives the social anthropologists something to complain about, at least. The theme music is extremely irritating and should be banned under the Geneva Convention. 
The Archers is on twice a day every single day except, blessed relief, Saturday. Bumper Edition (rpt) on Sundays.

Loose Ends

Sadly they fill the spot left vacant by the Archers on Saturday, with "Loose Ends", Lord have mercy, which really would be better left out to die. Billed as "an eclectic mix of conversation, music and comedy" (in their dreams) this is actually a  completely futile programme in which vacuous media persons drone away about themselves. A waste of time.

More or Less

Oh spare us do. This is a programme about statistics and as such ought to be really interesting and could be so - but no! All they do is state the obvious, at incredible length, for the whole half hour, and thus leave no time for explaining how to see through the manipulations that can be wrought on our opinions by the deceitful handling of data. The presenters could be exposing all manner of idiotic but fascinating misunderstandings perpetrated by journalists who don't know anything about statistics. They have been given a really promising, golden, subject with potential for useful and entertaining programmes but they work their reverse alchemy on it and render it dust and ashes. Lazy stuff indeed. They sound like a bunch of schoolboys who know nothing about the subject they have been given for their homework and are just trying to fill 2 sides of A4 as demanded by their teacher.

Front Row

This comes on every evening at 7.15, regular as clockwork and all the housewives automatically reach for the off button. It has features such as "discussion with Bob Hoskins about being directed on a film by somebody-or-other about whom we neither know nor care." This might be of slight interest to, say, Bob Hoskins himself, and his mother, if she is a particularly doting parent, which I doubt (have you SEEN Bob Hoskins?) but there really can't be anyone else willing to listen. Thus we have a programme whose content will appeal to 2 people at most, i.e. 0.0000000003% of the population, and such pinpoint niche marketing is inappropriate for national radio.

Adding insult to injury and demonstrating a remarkable lack of percipience, once a week they air 'Pick of the Week', a self-congratulatory resumé in which they unerringly home in on all the programmes you least enjoyed, and make you listen to bits of them again.

Verdict : Radio 4 is failing in its duty. You can't expect people to do the ironing whilst listening to this tosh. We want amusing comedies, news from the Tannery, and articles on fine wine and aeroplanes. We'd like the questions in the quiz programmes to be easier too and on topics we know about.

In accordance with internet tradition in these sorts of cases, here is a picture of a kitten.

Due to the boringness of the radio programme it was listening to, the kitten has fallen asleep.

Floods Outrage

Across the country in recent weeks we have seen floods galore, Firemen and Army deployed, old ladies rescued by burly lifeboat crews, bridges washed away, towns marooned and roads under 6' of water. Look at these beautiful pictures of elsewhere in Somerset:

I feel sorry for the poor people who have been flooded, I really do, but you can't say it hasn't been exciting. I defy anyone not to want to get out to these thrilling scenes in their gumboots and enjoy the drama:

At Porlock however, the conditions have been pathetic - the stream behind our house has not risen more than a couple of inches, and that was only for about one hour. This despite 18 months of solid rain. The roads have been passable throughout and no communities have required assistance. Royalty have not thought fit to visit and we have been ignored by the MPs.  The council is to blame since they have spent the summer squandering our council tax money on clearing ditches, unblocking drains and keeping waterways clear. This is Damn Boring. There has not been a day's schooling lost, not so much as a free hour off vouchsafed to any worker and hardly a puddle has been available for splashing in. Very disappointing and an utter swiz.

Better days: this was our house in Sussex in the best flood we ever had; 3'1" deep in the kitchen. Great for me as I was a child at the time but our parents were not pleased.