Anyone for breakfast?

No rants today I promise - was just thinking that as I enjoyed the Tom Jones clip from Morecambe & Wise so much, I thought I would share what is possibly their finest hour:



Enjoy! I'm typing this at work...sadly it's just not quite as funny without the sound.

They don't make 'em like that any more!

Why is it these days...

...that when you hear two people having a conversation, the person listening will invariably keep saying "yeah yeah yeah" as the other person speaks? I know it's intended to indicate that they are engaged in the conversation, but it always sounds as though they are being somewhat dismissive of what the speaker is saying. I hear this all the time: "yeah yeah yeah". Please, please stop!

Have people no manners any more? Or do a large proportion of the UK population have some kind of nervous tic that causes them to say "yeah yeah yeah" entirely involuntarily? Is it just a Birmingham thing? Or is it just me being pedantic?

It seemed a lot funnier when these guys did it:

Time for Auntie to shuffle off

I've not yet had the chance to fisk Polly Toynbee, but this piece in today's Grauniad by Jonathan Freedland deserves a liberal (!) helping of scorn:

BBC support shows we still love Auntie
The Guardian/ICM poll shows the BBC is admired and trusted, although there is work to be done on the licence fee question

Jonathan begins his apologia thus:

The BBC top brass will probably be relieved by the findings of the latest Guardian/ICM poll. True, there'll be disappointment that they couldn't muster a clear majority in favour of the licence fee, even if this poll shows that the licence fee remains the most popular method of funding for the corporation, ranked ahead of both advertising and subscriptions. And there will – and should – be alarm that as many as 58% reject the notion that the BBC is more likely to tell the truth than the likes of ITV or Sky. It's surely central to the BBC's raison d'etre that it will always be more reliable in providing
truthful news than those broadcasters who serve a corporate owner.

Hmmm. I'd also argue that "it's surely central to the BBC's raison d'etre" that they get their licence fee money every year, otherwise they might actually have to compete for funding in a market (how vulgar and frighful). And 58% of responses suggest that they're no better that ITV or (whisper the name of the evil empire quietly!) Sky.

Well, where to start? The rigged gameshows (admittedly, they were not the only offenders), the £200k of licence monies spent to suppress a report that suggested an anti-Israeli bias in their news coverage, the over-indulgence of crude Leftist "comics" (and again here), their "spend" on "talent" (where the BBC thinks we silly little people are too stupid to comment on how they spend our money), etc, etc etc...

Oh, and let's not forget this talentless non-entity:

Jonathan Ross: a voice for silent cinema if ever there was one

But back to other Jonathan now:

Otherwise, the poll confirms what the BBC's advocates have always said is true.
As I argued earlier this week, the BBC remains admired and trusted.

So, basically, it confirms your own prejudices. And you've written an article about it to prove the point.

In an age of deep scepticism, when deference is dead and trust in institutions is eroding fast...

Yeah, largely because baby-boomer liberals like the folks at the Grauniad (and the BBC) are forever attacking institutions they see as conservative (the House of Lords, the monarchy, etc).

...these are strikingly high figures [he mentioned above that 77% regard the
BBC as "a national institution we should be proud of", while 69% declare it
trustworthy]. Those who attack the BBC – whether political parties or rival
media organisations – should ask themselves whether an opinion poll about them
would bring numbers anywhere near as good.

Well, let's have a few more polls then. This one was a Guardian/ICM poll - so it will more than likely produce the answer the Grauniad want it to. How you phrase the questions impacts upon the result you get.

Don't believe me? Watch this (from the BBC's heyday - it's been a while since they showed programmes of this calibre!):

Still, the BBC should rest on the laurels of these results for about as long as it takes to read them. It has some work to do, especially it seems on the licence fee, backed by just 43%.

That many? Blimey!

Here's one suggestion. One reader emailed me this week to say, "I am convinced that there are many people who view their Sky subscription of, say, £45 a month as good value, but their licence fee of £142.50 a year as poor value." I suspect he's right. But what if Sky had to advertise their subscription as an annual sum, the same way the licence fee is always expressed? For plenty of customers, it would come out at £540. Wouldn't sound quite so attractive then, would it?

Don't you get it, you clown? Do you really not get it? Yes, £540 pa is a bigger number than £142.50. But people with Sky CHOOSE to have it. Anyone who watches the TV is FORCED to pay the licence fee, regardless of whether they want to watch the state broadcaster's output or otherwise.

If you only want to watch repeats of Heartbeat on ITV 3 and Countdown on C4, the you still have to pay the telly tax. If you have no use for Sky's film channels and sports coverage, then you don't have to pay for it. There's a choice, see?

Suppose the next Conservative government decided to put out an "unbiased" newspaper every day. Let's call it The Britisher. And they fund it through a 'newspaper licence', so you need to pay for this before you can buy ANY newspaper. So if you want your Indy or Freedland's Grauniad, or the Telegraph, or the Mail, you have to pay for your newspaper licence. But what's to complain about? You get The Britisher every day as well. And it's "unbiased". It doesn't have to make a profit. It's superior to all those other newspapers. I don't think the Lefties would be too happy with that somehow.

He concludes:

But this works two ways. If I were the BBC, I'd never let the £142.50 annual figure pass my lips. It should say the BBC costs each of us £11.88 a month. Not bad for five TV channels, five national radio stations, several more digital ones, a local radio station in every corner of the land, one of the planet's largest newsgathering operations and a world-class website. Now see if Sky can match that.

Well done - you can divide by 12. But again - we have no choice in the matter but to pay our £11.88 per month. The local radio stations he mentions crowd out independent ones, and the website may be "world class", but comes at a price. If it's hard to justify the telly tax to fund the TV channels, it's positively outrageous that we're paying this money to fund a news website, when they are crowding out the market for UK news on the internet.

The BBC is a lynchpin of the liberal elite that run this country, the licence fee an outdated anachronism that belongs in the 1950s along with rationing and the Light Programme. Let's axe them both.

Might even get the traffic up on the Guardian's website. Where else would the Lefties get their news?

We've all seen your chopper - now put it away

I know that some bad stuff is happening in Brum today, but is it necessary for a helicopter to be stationed over what looks like the Great Charles St section of the Queensway for hours on end? I presume it belongs to West Midlands Police.

Taken from a vantage point nearby:

I've been listening to that bloody thing buzzing away outside for about an hour - and I've been trying to do some work as well. What purpose does it serve? All the folks up there can do is see what's happening below. Given that every second person you see in Birmingham city centre today is a policeman, I don't think there's much of the city centre they haven't covered.

All the chopper is doing is costing a fotune to run and being a nusiance to the folks that live on the southern side of the Jewellery Quarter. This seems to invole a few chaps sitting on their fat backsides up there where the air ir rarified. Enough already.

And what about their carbon footstep? Won't someone please think about West Midlands Police's carbon footstep?

PS hope you like my photos! I must invest in a telephoto lens!

The limitations of the Ryanair model

My girlfriend has pointed out, not incorrectly, that my blog is "a bit angry". So I will strive to be more positive! But this post is added at her behest:

Last night she and I visited a branch of a chain restuarant whose name I will not mention in the interests of privacy. Let's call it Pizza H...no, that's too obvious, let's just say P Hut.

When we were being served our pizza, my girlfriend asked for tomato and barbeque sauce to go with it. The waiter suggested that we could have a third sauce...all for just 99p!

So said chain (P Hut) now charges you if you want some sauce to go on your plate! It's a bit much!!! She wasn't impressed (and neither was I) - someone else asked how we were getting on, and she gave them the benefit of her views on charging for a small portion of sauce. The girl explained that they had previously given them out 'on the sly' but that management were watching.

The Ryanair approach (low cost for the core business activity, charges for add-ons) might have helped make make flying more accessible to those who'd never have dreamt of it just 30 years ago. But here it grated a bit.

I'm a capitalist; I staunchly believe that the first duty of every business is to make a return for the owners of capital (its shareholders). But in a free market, people vote with their feet when they feel they're being ripped off. It's a bit like shops charging for carrier bags (WH Smith, M&S food) - when you elevate 'twerpism' over customer service, people get a bit hacked off.

Squeaker Bercow - is an end in sight?

Perhaps this is too much to hope for:

UKIP leader Nigel Farage is to stand against Commons Speaker John Bercow at the next general election.

Squeaker Bercow only got where he is because Labour MPs wanted to piss off their opponents, and, given his own expense scandal, demonstrates that they're still flicking the V signs at the electorate.

I've felt before that Bucks Conservatives should have run a new candidate against the Squeaker, but getting Farage into the Commons can only be good. He'd keep the more Blarite (and pro-EU) of the Cameroons in check, and he can hardly be dismissed as some crusty old worthy the way that many of our backbenchers are.

I'm a Tory to the very core of my being, but quite frankly Bercow isn't, and Nigel Farage would be a vast, vast improvement. One place where I would be happy to see "UKIP gain" on election night.

The excellent Nigel Farage MEP - a true patriot

Eco-wackery and screwing Britain over

Back after the Bank Holiday weekend...who deserves a mention on the blog today?

What about this eco-lunatic, the subject of an article in the Guardian (oh, where else?), entitled 'If you're not fighting climate change or improving the world, you're wasting your life'?

Yea Gods. It's the usual stuff, must act now (not that they've been coming out with this stuff for over a decade now), let's harangue business and the Government, blah blah fishcakes. But one quote really jumped out at me:

"Sorry," Armstrong says, apologising for the yeast story. "I just think about climate change all the time and campaign around it 24/7. When I take a day off, I think what a waste of time. I'm just a climate-change obsessive. That's all I do."

Perhaps a visit to the doctor might help. Here's a picture of the woman:

The words "Get a life, dear!" spring to mind. Something to distract you from it all. Nuff said - I could carry on in this vein but I think you can see what I'm getting at.

While we're at it, why are the Government so determined to make it as s*** to live in Britain as possible? To take three such stories from the recent press:

• Petrol's gone up again...not because of a rise in fuel prices, but cos Greedy Gordon's fleecing us again;
• We're banned BY LAW from being able to buy proper light bulbs;
• And we'll be back to rota power cuts by the end of the next decade because we've gone for ten years of not having an energy policy beyond putting up those useless windmills.

I don't just want to see Gordon Brown lose the election. I want to see him lead out of Number 10 in handcuffs and thrown in prison. That way he can have done to him what he's done to us over the last twelve miserable years. Useless tossers, the lot of 'em.