Normally, I like to joke about the links I publish here, perhaps slipping in a gentle pun or two, to point out the ridiculous nature of the idea communicated.

Here, I just don’t know what to say.

Channel 4 is to bring mass public masturbation to the small screen.

The broadcaster – once led by Michael Grade, dubbed “pornographer in chief” by the Daily Mail – has commissioned a documentary about the UK’s first “masturbate-a-thon” as part of a series of programmes dubbed “Wank Week”, MediaGuardian.co.uk can reveal.

Wank Week!?

A little bit late I know, but could this, from 21st June, be the best Grauniad correction ever?

In our review of The Who at Leeds University, page 36, June 19, we attributed to Pete Townshend the exclamation, “You are wank!” [sic]. We are assured that what he actually told the audience was, “We are all back.” Apologies.

Oops.

From last week’s Friday Thing:

‘A third of the population regularly suffer paranoid or suspicious fears that others intend to harm them, say researchers,’ reported the Daily Mail this week. Apparently psychologists at King’s College London have found that a worryingly large proportion of people believe others intend to do them harm or are criticising them behind their backs. The research suggests that paranoia could be as widespread as depression or anxiety.

Exactly why we’re all so paranoid isn’t clear, but one explanation could well be: ‘It’s because you’re reading the Daily fucking Mail.’

The *same* edition contained the following headlines:

– Will Britons be forced to eat hormone injected beef?

– Security bosses keep terror watch on 1,200 homegrown fanatics

– Schoolgirls’ websites make them prey for paedophiles

– Migrant housing cheats

– Child protection police chief ‘throttled girls’

– The freak accident that left my son obsessed with sex

– You’re eating the WRONG fruit and veg

– IS YOUR X-RAY SAFE?

– TRAPPED IN HER BED FOR 14 YEARS

And, perhaps best of all:

– Is going to the gym BAD for your health? – Lurking on the dumbells. Hidden in the towels. The millions of killer bacteria festering in your gym.’

Yes, millions of deadly bacteria, all waiting to get you, like microscopic Viet Cong. It’s a miracle that regular Daily Mail readers don’t just kill themselves and have done – blissful release from a world of fear and loathing. Or maybe they’re happier that way. As Sparks so eloquently put it: ‘My parents say the world is cruel. I think that they prefer it cruel.’

It’s worth mentioning, too, that for the last little while, The Friday Thing has been free… I’ve always said it was worth signing up for – and that’s true now more than ever!

If there was one thing the BBC could always be relied on to provide, it was serious, sombre coverage of national events and the Queen. Yet, apparently, no more.

Yesterday, here in the UK, there was a national two minutes’ silence to mark the first anniversary of the London bombings. This is the kind of thing the BBC would normally be excellent at. We’d have got a serious sounding announcer over a clock, telling us that we now joined BBC News, where upon we’d be greeted by a senior, authoratative news presenter in a suit, behind a desk. We’d wait for the chimes of Big Ben, be silent for two minutes whilst watching pictures of the Queen and of the country at large doing the same, and then life would continue. It would be a respectful, appropriate silence.

Yet, yesterday, the plan was to introduce the silence programme over two male dancers doing acrobatics, and then cross to a presenter best known for light-entertainment shows standing in a tent. That’s bad enough, but it’s not even what we got, as the following video shows:
[flashvideo filename=”http://sjhoward.co.uk/video/cockup.flv” /]

I’m all for making news accessible and open, but in times gone by the BBC would have just got this right. There would have been no room for cock-ups crashing into the programme, or interruptions with Cash in the Attack. This kind of thing used to be what the BBC excelled at, and just got right. Why no more?

FactCheck, Channel 4’s despinning, debunking, delightful website crafted to help with coverage of the General Election and inspited by the US’s factcheck.org, is back after a 14 month hiatus. Here’s what I said when it launched first time around:

This is an excellent idea – an independent website which will check the facts spouted by the politicians between now and the general election. Perhaps it will encourage our party leaders to be more honest in their speeches, instead of making false claims in order to scare voters into voting for them above the opposition parties. Perhaps it will mean that the leaders can no longer hide from the truth about their past performance behind some dodgily compiled selective statistics. Perhaps it will even stop the politicians from telling outright lies.

Of course, it never actually did any of those things, but it was still fun to read, and hence got a reasonable amount of coverage on this blog. My only complaint thus far is that the logo’s been replaced with an uninspiring red box with the Channel 4 font surrounded by compression artefacts (see picture), and each article is split over several pages. A disappointment. But the actual content still seems to be up-to-scratch.

I, for one, am glad to see it back.

Are you prepared?

The Scene
On their way back to Earth, having been away for many years trying to discover a cure for avian flu, astronaut Bernard Matthews and his crew are brought out of their cryogenic sleep as their ship intercepts an interstellar distress signal. They crash-land on a planet that seems uninhabited, but are soon enslaved by giant, English-speaking chickens in leather jackets.

Sample lyric
“It swept the planet and laid us low,
This pandemic,
This terrible blow.

We travelled the skies, In search of a clue,
A prescription,
For this avian flu.

I returned with a cure, but now what really sickens,
Is that I’m being pushed around,
By a bunch of free-range chickens”

The Grauny’s other fantastic musical suggestions, including Oxford English Dictionary: The Musical, can be found here. This is all in celebration of NHS: The Musical and Shane Warne: The Musical… which are, scarily, genuine.

First Shahbaz went nuts, and now Dawn’s done a Nick and been thrown out for rule breaking. Tomorrow, another’s going to be thrown out because, hell, we don’t like them.

So we’ve already got fourteen housemates, one more’s going in through a Kit Kat promotion, and there’s two more to go in to replace the two that’ve been kicked out. After one week, we’re up to sixteen housemates. Then there’s eleven housemates from series one, eleven from series two, fourteen from series three, thirteen from series four, thirteen from series five, sixteen from series six, plus thirty-three ‘celebrity’ contestants. That’s 127 Big Brother Housemates. Another eight from Teen Big Brother takes the total to 135.

Surely there can’t be that many more people who want to go in? Everyone knows that the majority of the contestants are treated cruelly on the show, and then ridiculed by the press, before fading to obscurity. We have the experience of 135 people to tell us that. I wouldn’t know Tania Do-Nascimento, Herjender Gosal or Lynne Moncrieff if I fell over them in the street. Why would anyone put themselves through all that?

Bad books sell better than good ones because so many people are semiliterate.

That’s the opinion of Andrew Brown in his thought-provoking piece “Unputdownable but unspeakable” over at Comment is Free.

Well worth a read.

I don’t care, I’m going to moan about them anyway. That was my response after being told I’m too easily irritated by minor things, and they probably don’t make blog posts that can be described as interesting. But it’s not going to stop me.

Front loading on news programmes is annoying. This is the conclusion I’ve reached, after seeing an epidemic of front-loaded introductions to news reports spreading across all UK news outlets. It’s like somebody reading the Daily Mail outloud, and it’s incredibly tedious and irritating.

Worse, though, is that it undeniably introduces an element of bias, through implicit agreement with the statement made. News broadcasters often say things like:

The death toll from the Chernobyl Nuclear accident twenty years ago today will be much higher than government estimates predict. That’s according to Greenpeace…

There, they are clearly agreeing with Greenpeace over and above what the Government estimates might suggest. You can never imagine them using this construction for something they find controversial, or that they might disagree with:

Asians are invading Britain and stealing the jobs of hard working white people. That’s according to the BNP…

It would never happen.

On top of this, I have no idea what to make of the statement that is being read to me until I know the credibility of the source. Compare:

Tony Blair should resign immediately in order to protect the future prospects of the Labour Party, backbench MPs have said today.

Tony Blair should resign immediately in order to protect the future prospects of the Labour Party, his cabinet have said today.

The first one’s a non-story, the second is huge. And yet they delay bothering to tell me until they’ve got the quote out of the way first. Irritating! What’s wrong with

Tony Blair’s cabinet have today announced that they beleive he should resign immediately in order to protect the future prospects of the Labour Party.

I realise it pushes the content of the news story back by, ooh, two seconds, but it actually allows me to assess whether the story is a real story or not straight away.

In Tuesday’s G2, Dave Simpson argued that the Goth subculture amongst sections of today’s youth is probably a good thing (via). Quoting an academic from Sussex University:

Most youth subcultures encourage people to drop out of school and do illegal things. Most goths are well educated, however. They hardly ever drop out and are often the best pupils. The subculture encourages interest in classical education, especially the arts. I’d say goths are more likely to make careers in web design, computer programming … even journalism.

This is not normally the kind of thing I’d pick up on. I knew many goths, but could never claim to have been one. However, something does quite regularly strike me. Often, on a Wednesday, I trundle back from my morning in GP Land and stop off at Sainsbury’s to pick up some groceries and other sundries. Now, my local branch of Sainsbury’s (which is laid out most oddly, but that’s by-the-by) is just down the road from the local Sixth Form College, and many of the students pop down there to purchase their lunch (and they might possible pick up some other sundries too).

As I’ve shopped, I’ve become increasingly aware of the disdainful attitude of the staff and other customers towards these youths – some of whom are dressed in the Gothic style. This is despite that fact that during my regular visits, I have never – never – seen any of the pupils misbehaving in the shop. Yes, they’re boisterous and occasionally loud, but that’s not really doing anyone any harm. I can quite easily pick up my shopping with no trouble whatsoever. And yet these young people are tutted at, often stalked by staff, and generally treated as second-class citizens. This is based purely on their profile as young people.

I ask you, if the staff of Sainsbury’s had a similarly negative attitude towards elderly people, would it be acceptable? Certainly not. And yet the elderly cause more logistical headaches for the supermarket than do the young people, through no fault of their own. They tend to require more assistance, and tend to spend longer in the shop, for example. The basis for the blatant discrimination against the young people appears to be a popular stereotype perpetuated by the popular press, and no-one complains about this. Society views youngsters and a nuisance, not recognising that these are the doctors, lawyers, and priests of the future, whilst simultaneously rejecting the disrespect of the elderly based on their past lives as doctors, lawyers, and priests. And yet surely it is more logical to respect someone for what they have the potential to become than to respect them for what they have been, and will never be again.

If a section of the community is not respected, then respect is not fostered within that group. If we insist on discriminating against and criminalising the harmless, natural activities of the teenagers of this country, then we cause more problems than we solve. So next time you see a ‘goth’, or read about some kid being given an ‘ASBO’, please look beyond the stereotype, and respect that the individual you’re tutting at today might well be caring for you tomorrow.