New rule: never recommend anything to anyone. There is no point, as whatever you’re recommending will, by dint of entropic machinations as yet unexplained by science, descend into suckage.

Case in point: I recently discovered BBC Radio 4’s Friday Night Comedy podcast. It’s essentially Have I Got News For You on the radio, and is great. The panelists are usually excellent, but Sandi Toksvig and Jeremy Hardy so regularly reduce me to hysterics that it’s dangerous to listen while driving. So after a few weeks of enjoyment I emailed a couple of close friends with a recommendation. I felt quite pleased about this - here was a New Thing we could all enjoy. Then I listened to this week’s show.

One of the panelists was Mark Steel, who acts as the always-inexplicable boor in the corner, shouting obvious insults and generally sucking the warmth, charm and humour from the immediate area. As ever. I guess some people must find him entertaining, although it’s possible he gets invited onto these programmes to make everyone else sound better, but the show was awful as a result.

Guys! It is usually good! I promise!

What’s with BBC News going all BNP over ‘foreign-born mothers’?! It was all over the Ten O’Clock News, too. It’s costing £200m a year more than a decade ago, apparently, and in 2006 over 20% of births were to ‘foreign-born mothers’. Oh no! How terrible! Let’s tell immigrants they can’t have children, or deny pregnant women visas, or something. It’s our NHS, we don’t want any dirty immigrants using it, especially to have evil immigrant babies.

The real story seems to be that the NHS isn’t coping as well as it should with high numbers of births. But the emphasis is on immigrants, and how evil they are for having children. Weird. Maybe it’ll make sense in the morning.

Last night’s Watchdog exposed a bogus psychic, then promptly rendered their report inert. The woman diagnosed ‘cracked auras’ at every appointment, and recommended various treatments including an £800 candle. Watchdog Reporter Guy had her come around to his house for a reading, then brought in the cameras and asked her how she could justify recommending he pay nearly £2000 for his aura repair and associated ‘claptrap’. She didn’t say much.

Cut back to the studio and presenter Julia Bradbury spoke to Office of Fair Trading Guy. He did quite well. She didn’t:

of course there are genuine psychics out there as well, so what are the tell-tale signs [of 'bogus psychics]?

Watchdog thinks there are genuine psychics out there. Watchdog. Office of Fair Trading Guy emphasised that every time they’ve tracked down psychics there’s never anything genuine, and reading between the lines I think his personal position is fairly clear. But she pressed him for advice on how to avoid being duped, and his only real response was that psychics who try to scare you into readings aren’t to be trusted.

So Watchdog’s advice is that nasty psychics are probably scamming you. Nice ones, though, are fine and dandy and you can feel free to give them money if you want. Watchdog, supposed champion of the consumer, isn’t prepared to say that psychics are ripping you off. Rubbish.

Originally found via Harry’s Place. I caught the relevant section on the iPlayer.

I have been watching BBC1’s ‘Mistresses’ for the past few weeks. It’s quite good, but has unexpectedly brought out the backseat psychotherapist in me. Don’t do that! Why would you possibly be attracted to him? That’s clearly a mistake. Ignore him. Now, look, if you do that you know what’s going to happen. You’re just overreacting - she wasn’t saying that at all. DON’T TEXT HIM. Dude, stop being a cretin or your wife will…too late, she did.

Basically, I want all conflict removed from the drama. They seem like such nice people, why can’t they just be happy? Really I just want to watch programmes in which attractive people struggle over a crossword while chatting about mistakes they nearly made.

Watching Robin Hood is a bit like going to the panto and finding everyone on stage taking it seriously. Last year’s season finale was a bit bonkers, and yesterday’s more of the same.

I missed the first half hour, but I think this was the basic plot: the Sheriff of Nottingham and Guy of Gisborne head off to the Holy Land to kill King Richard. As you do. They take Marian, recently exposed as an ally of Robin, with them for no particular reason. Robin and Men follow, determined to thwart said scheme.

So, machinations lead to Robin, King Richard (sans any kind of bodyguard), Marian and Men wandering about in the desert. Robin does a completely rubbish job of strategising a coherent plan, and they all end up running around a bizarrely deserted village, which culminates in the Sheriff of Nottingham firing an arrow into King Richard’s back¹. Oh dear.

King Richard then loses consciousness and falls off his horse in the deserted town square. The Sheriff somehow isn’t around so Guy of Gisborne is the man on hand to finally finish off the King. Will he do it? He’s been having crises of conscience all series - which path will he choose? Up turns Marian, who stands between him and the King in Heroic Fashion. She knows Robin and the other superheroes are around somewhere, so all she needs to do is keep him talking for a few seconds.

Obviously, this is a stressful situation. If I’d been Marian, though, I think I’d have gone with ‘Guy, I love you and if you don’t kill the King I’ll marry you’ as opposed to ‘I’m in love with your sworn enemy and am going to marry him, you moron, yah boo sucks to you’. The former might help, since he clearly fancies you², while the latter might, say, get you stabbed in the chest. I actually wasn’t expecting that.

Everyone else turns up half a second later. Guy and the Sheriff give up on trying to get at the still-unconscious-and-exposed King Richard - if only they had some kind of weapon that worked from a distance - and instead elect to escape on magic horses. All King Richard’s injuries are instantly cured by removing the arrow, so he’s back to full health, but Marian dies in Robin’s arms. It was actually a little bit sad, mainly because Marian’s one of the few you can bring yourself to care about. After that two more cast members announce they’re leaving, there’re some obligatory Koran references, King Richard doesn’t send word to have the Sheriff killed or anything, Robin looks even more depressed than usual, and they walk off into the desert. The end.

In the 1980s ITV ‘Robin of Sherwood’ the original Robin died heroically and was replaced. I think they should have stolen this plotline. Kill off Robin, ’cause he’s annoying, and have Guy, the most watchable character by a million miles, switch allegiances and become the new Robin Hood. His first act would be to fire Little John for being overexcitable, and Much for being a waste of space. Sorted.

Apparently Series 3 is in production. Yikes.

1. the Sheriff’s one-liner? “Long live the King? No.”. Dearie me. [↩]
2. also has the advantage of ending up with Guy over Robin. I am a heterosexual man, but come on [↩]

Last week The One Show presented Charles Kennedy with his own star. This came in the shape of a gift certificate from the International Star Registry. Looking at their website, this probably cost a minimum of £30. I can’t remember whether it was framed, but if so it’d go up to £80.

Just in case anyone reading isn’t aware: the International Star Registry is completely bogus. They, along with all the other star naming companies, are purely commercial and have no connection to anything official. The name of the star will not be registered outside of their internal databases. It’s not possible to name stars, like it’s not possible to buy land on the moon. This information can usually be found in the small print of their websites. It’s not exactly a con, but they don’t go out of their way to point out their unofficial nature. I’d argue it’s misleading at best.

I guess you could say ‘what’s the harm?’. So what if it isn’t real, isn’t it just a bit of fun? This is true, but why pay £30 (and the rest they’ll undoubtedly try to get out of you) to people who are clearly trying to rip you off, just for a bit of paper? Doesn’t the duplicity completely ruin the sentiment, anyway? It’s a lovely, romantic idea that’s completely spoiled by not actually being true.

If I had any design skills, I’d create a beautiful PDF certificate saying ‘If I could, I’d name a star after you’, and let people download it for free. I should so do that.

A scandal is rocking the music industry:

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke has admitted he was among the thousands of people who paid nothing to download the band’s latest album.

Despicable. Just because he wrote and recorded the thing doesn’t mean he shouldn’t pay for it like everyone else. Who does he think he is? I predict there’ll be a wave of revelations. I bet J.K. Rowling didn’t pay for her own copy of Harry Potter 7.

There are a lot of naysayers, and they’re all full of it. I guess part of being a critic is enjoying being critical, but online Doctor Who ‘fans’ seem incapable of liking anything, any more. Time Crash is just lovely.

The Sunday results show for Strictly is a bit odd, given the BBC’s recent pronouncements on not misleading the audience. It’s clearly filmed on the Saturday night as the audience is the same, and although Bruce and Tess are careful not to say anything about being ‘live’, they work hard to give the impression it’s another day. Strange. It’s also odd for the audience and cast to know the result 24hrs before the rest of the country - surely any of them could leak it? The various TV gossip sites will surely get hold of it early. I’m not convinced it’ll last.

I introduced Abi to the show and thankfully she enjoyed it Good job, since between it and It Takes Two there’ll be Strictly every single day between now and Christmas! She found Bruce a little irritating, and I was trying to convey how his on-screen personality is part of a greater whole that’s more dedicated to entertaining the studio audience, and actually he’s far more likeable once you’ve seen that. It’s tricky to explain unless you’ve been there, though. 

Shame about Brian and Karen being voted out so early. He was probably one of the weaker dancers, but definitely had the look and I’m sure would have improved significantly. Oh well, it’ll please the various Karen-haters who surprised the hell out of me last season. She’s still the best, though
I thought Kenny was a bit miserable and not really into the spirit of the thing, but the other guys were all likeable. Fun as they were, though, they couldn’t hold a handle to the girls. Even with only a group routine they completely stole the show. Blimey. Next week should be great.

The BBC’s headline ticker is currently running with:

Experts refuse to rule out long-term mobile phone use causing cancer.

Damn those experts! They simply refuse to make long-term health predictions on recently-developed technology. What is wrong with these people!?

The article itself concentrates on the long-term health worries, all of which are entirely speculative, and is heavy on lung-cancer/smoking comparisons:

He said: “We can’t rule out the possibility at this stage that cancer could appear in a few years’ time.

“With smoking there was no link of any lung cancer until after ten years.”

He said the problem during the study was that there had been very few people using mobile phones for over ten years.

Cancers do not normally appear until ten to 15 years after exposure.

The last sentence is weird. Exposure to what? Radioactive materials? Do you think the reporter is confusing different types of radiation?

And this is with a decent study that’s pretty conclusive in its analysis that using mobile phones for ten years isn’t dangerous, a fact you’d think might be newsworthy.

Science reporting by non-science-reporters always tends towards ’scientists don’t know anything’. If it’s a health study that shows no effect, it’s a tentative conclusion. If it does show an effect, it’s an obvious common-sense result. If it’s new evidence that contradicts previous research, it’s impossible to know what to believe. What do you mean, you can’t win?

Being rather a fan of Strictly Come Dancing, I last year spent three hours on the phone in an ultimately successful attempt to get tickets, and a fine evening was had by all. Ten months later and the new series is rapidly approaching.

I didn’t mention at the time - on the off (and possibly paranoid) chance that it affected my application - that I found a way to cheat manipulate the phone system. I was dialling once every five seconds, averaging one connected call every forty minutes. Once through, a menu system told me to ‘press 1 to be put through to an operative’. This I did, and I’d promptly get cut off. After a couple of hours they’d fixed this problem, and five minutes of waiting resulted in a message saying ‘our phone lines are busy, please try again later, or press 2 to hear about other bbc shows’. The thing was, pressing 2 didn’t provide more information, it sent me back to the first option, where I could press 1 to be put through to an operative. Having actually managed to get through I was loathe to disconnect, so I looped the menu systems continually and eventually got lucky. I felt kinda bad about fudging the system in this way, even if I didn’t really do anything wrong.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of last year, I wasn’t relishing the prospect of trying again, especially as it feels a little unfair to go two years in a row when other fans would love the opportunity. Thankfully, the BBC emailed today to say this series’ tickets will be allocated by a lottery, which everybody has until 18th September to enter. This is much fairer. Apply here here (link corrected) if you’re interested…

Only a month until the new series starts! Very very exciting

The BBC’s head of tv news, Peter Horrocks, last week wrote this on his blog:

BBC News certainly does not have a line on climate change, however the weight of our coverage reflects the fact that there is an increasingly strong (although not overwhelming) weight of scientific opinion in favour of the proposition that climate change is happening and is being largely caused by man.

This is good stuff. The media generally fails spectacularly at science coverage because the usually-reasonable journalistic standard of ‘fairness’ requires them to present an opposing viewpoint. In the 90’s the whole of the medical industry was screaming that MMR was safe, yet every reporter felt it necessary to interview one of the very few crazies on the basis that it’s a balanced view, often followed by ‘viewers get to decide’. Unfortunately, this decision is the necessarily based on a misrepresentation of the facts.

It’s the same today with global warming: the vast majority of climatologists think it extremely likely that a) global warming is happening (actually, nobody doubts this) and b) it is very likely that man is causing it, yet the deniers get just as much coverage, if not more. The problem is that, unlike politics, a scientific consensus has genuine authority.

Because the process of science is so ruthless - the job of your colleagues is to destroy your arguments - and disparate - hundreds of countries with thousands of independent organisations and millions of scientists from every part of the political spectrum - a consensus of opinion is genuinely valuable, and isn’t suddenly turned into a 50/50 probability when a lone-hero / complete whackjob (take your pick) starts claiming everybody else is wrong. The scientific method will assess the validity of their arguments, because that’s the only authority with the expertise to do so. The results cannot be published by any ultimate authority, because science has no such authority¹ but must be gleamed from consensus opinion. It may even turn out to be wrong in the long run, but it’s the only way that can possibly work. No journalist can accurately assess the merits of a scientific claim, given their lack of time and expertise, so the only sensible approach is to report in a way correlated with the scientific opinion.

To hear exactly such a conclusion coming from a head of BBC news was very encouraging. Then came this:

The BBC has scrapped plans for Planet Relief, a TV special on climate change.

The decision comes after executives said it was not the BBC’s job to lead opinion on climate change.

(…) But against the backdrop of intense internal debates about impartiality, senior news editors expressed misgivings that Planet Relief was too “campaigning” in nature and would have left the Corporation open to the charge of bias.

“It is absolutely not the BBC’s job to save the planet,” warned Newsnight editor Peter Barron at the Edinburgh Festival last month.

Head of TV news Peter Horrocks, writing in the BBC News website’s editors’ blog, commented: “It is not the BBC’s job to lead opinion or proselytise on this or any other subject.”

The BBC clearly feel happy to present the opinions of climate-change activists in a large way - Live Earth shows this - and to balance their news output according to scientific opinion, but are uncomfortable with organising anything themselves. This almost seems reasonable, but how does it fit with Comic Relief? There are plenty of conservatives who might argue that the suffering of children in other countries is nothing to do with us Brits - how dare the BBC ‘proselytise’? Of course, most people consider this morally unambiguous - of course the BBC should do everything it can to help people who are suffering.

But what’s the difference between campaigning against African suffering, and campaigning against a climate change that will cause similar suffering in the future? Is it the immediate visuals? I doubt it. I think it’s more likely what’s alluded to in the above - the BBC would be left open to a charge of bias. Because climate change is so politicised, and because much of the country thinks, wrongly, that there’s some major scientific debate as to whether it’s man-made, the standing of the BBC probably would suffer if it were to take an active position. It’s not an easy position for them.

I must point out that the BBC have said:

Our audiences tell us they are most receptive to documentary or factual style programming as a means of learning about the issues surrounding this subject, and as part of this learning we have made the decision not to proceed with the Planet Relief event.

Instead we will focus our energies on a range of factual programmes on the important and complex subject of climate change. This decision was not made in light of the recent debate around impartiality.

Which isn’t unreasonable. It’s certainly better than Channel 4’s outright promotion of global warming deniers.

I have no problem with an activist BBC, when it comes to scientific issues. Their news departments may not want to ‘lead opinion or proselytise’, but, providing it’s done according to evidence, I don’t see why the BBC shouldn’t lead the way. They have a huge amount of influence, and even, possibly, a moral duty.

Rather than a Comic Relief-style show, how about an evening of detailed analysis? The BBC have a huge expertise when it comes to presenting knowledge in an accessible way - why not put this into explaining, as clearly as possible, why the climatologists are correct? You could even have a section explaining why the deniers are wrong. I guess people might not watch, but I suspect there are many people with the interest but without the time or knowledge to do any research themselves. Which is perfectly understandable. I wonder whether it could work.

1. enormous UN studies nonwithstanding [↩]

iTunes launched their UK TV service today. I think it’s the first UK retailer to sell season 3 of Lost, which at £33 is roughly the same price as the DVD box set. Otherwise, individual episodes are £1.89, which isn’t an unreasonable price. Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy and South Park¹ are probably the most interesting of the 28 US shows. Damn. I was happy to pick up the odd not-available-in-the-UK show via bittorrent before this; now I’ll feel guilty if it’s available legally. There’s nothing from UK tv yet, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.

I haven’t tried it out yet - I don’t have a video iPod, and there’s nothing I’m itching to see - but it’s a popular service in the US and I’m sure it’ll come in useful. News articles have compared it to the ‘catch-up’ offerings from the BBC and ITV, but it’s actually quite different. I can keep these shows for as long as I want² - the ‘catch-up’ services only let you watch for a week /month after transmission. The commercial channels will surely have to implement something like this; ‘catch-up’ just doesn’t cut it - I’m happy to pay for something without adverts that I can watch whenever I like and keep forever, and it seems like it should be profitable, depending on bandwidth costs. Not sure what the BBC will do, though…

1. 22min episodes of which cost the same as 45min episodes of other shows; worth it for the Scientology episode, though. [↩]
2. admittedly if iTunes folds the DRM would ensure I couldn’t watch them any more, but that’s at least not the point [↩]

Regarding the Queen and complete bloody hysteria over what was probably an internal lark that went national, I would like to entirely agree with the words of Martin in The Margins. He also links to a fascinating discussion between David Thompson and Ophelia Benson over postmodernism, the state of the left, and Terry Eagleton.

Written ‘live’, so not particularly coherent:

—–

Is anyone else watching Panorama? They’re scaremongering over wifi radiation. The notorious Powerwatch just got a plug, and various permutations of ‘electromagnetic smog’ are turning up every couple of minutes, along with calling routers ‘mini-masts’. It’s pretty strong stuff - some guy just claimed it could cause chromosome damage, cancer etc. - but it’s pretty appalling journalism, imho.

They’re talking to many ‘world-renowned experts’ who are for some reason only available via the internet. They keep throwing out phrases like ‘its safety is not yet proven’. Now they’re talking to electrohypersensitives! This is mixing implausible but vaguely plausible health worries with very fringe ideas. There was just an odd look at a study into whether ‘hypersensitives’ can detect radiation gave ‘inconclusive’ results, which were skipped over in favour of the test subject’s own personal feelings on the matter (she’s installed silver foil all around her bedroom). I have sympathy with ‘electrohypersensitives’ in that they’re clearly suffering, but from what I’ve read the symptoms - headaches, trouble sleeping etc.. - are generic problems that can be caused by many many things. And radiation exposure has been studied a lot. As has electrosensitivity, as people have had exactly the same fears since TV started broadcasting.

We’ve now got (made up) figures indicating over two million UK electrohypersensitives that - profound tone of voice - the government is ignoring. And now we’re slagging off the World Health Organisation in favour of one UK investigator.

They have at least interviewed one of the (apparently) head scientists in charge of setting health limits, but poisoned the well by claiming he’s a controversial figure as he testified on behalf of mobile phone companies who want to place masts in controversial areas. But the danger of such radiation is the very issue being discussed! He claims that the weight of scientific evidence is very much in favour of there being no danger, but the programme is heavily hinting that this is not to be believed. Why aren’t they paying attention to the huge number of studies which show no problem? I thought this was meant to be a serious programme?

—–

I’m glad to see it’s not me being sensitive: the Bad Science forums and now the front page are talking about it. They both want to know why the background of the head scientist was queried, but the Powerwatch guy was given a free ride. There’s also a sensible rebuttal in today’s Guardian.