Post by Teddy Bear on Mar 27, 2015 15:01:29 GMT
A humorous but apt reflection on what can be seen as usual BBC output to fit their mindset.
TOM UTLEY: My life's so much richer for having the pants bored off me by Russell Brand and Woman's Hour
By Tom Utley for the Daily Mail
Even by the exacting standards of Woman's Hour, seldom the most stimulating programme on the airwaves, Wednesday's edition was monumentally, mind-numbingly, crushingly, tear-jerkingly boring.
To be fair to the Radio 4 producers, they'd tried to cast their net wider than their usual obsessions with female genital mutilation and the welfare system's unfairness to lesbian couples from ethnic minorities who wish to adopt children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Instead, they promised a rich diet of debate on the issues that apparently every woman in the country is talking about (except, strangely, my wife or any other woman I've met outside the corridors of the BBC): 'Are you a feminist or an equalist?'; 'Do gay men make better dads?'; and 'How close are children born through surrogacy to their parents?'
Now, I have to admit that though I start work in the morning much later than most people, I only ever catch the first ten or 15 minutes of Woman's Hour before I have to run for my train.
So, I can throw no light on what the programme had to tell us about the relative merits of gay and straight fathers or the family relationships of children born to surrogate mothers.
But mindful of my duty to readers, I did my very best to concentrate on the first item on Wednesday's agenda.
After all, we columnists are supposed to be up to speed on all the latest 'isms' — and though, of course, everyone has been familiar with feminism for decades, equalism seemed to have passed me by.
What, exactly, is an equalist — and in what respects does she differ from a feminist? Can men be equalists? Was I, perhaps, an equalist myself, without knowing it?
With such questions turning over in my mind, I switched up the volume and awaited the answers, with a view to recording in print any reflections that might occur to me. But, reader, I've let you down.
As so often happens during Woman's Hour, I found my mind wandering off in all sorts of irrelevant directions. Which is best for an Easter mini-break, I wondered: Vienna, Budapest or Prague?
How much should we worry about reports that Vladimir Putin is to lease bombers to Argentina to attack the Falklands? Would Clarkson survive?
How long would it be, after this week's report that a smoker's dog had died of lung cancer, before Parliament banned me from owning a pet?
Meanwhile, in the background, under the motherly supervision of Jenni Murray, a scientist called Laura and a barrister called Charlotte were arguing the pros and cons of feminism and equalism (I think Charlotte was the feminist and Laura the more sensible sounding equalist, but I won't swear to it).
Oh, and a bloke called Tim was roped in later to explain his demand for a Minister for Men.
Odd snatches of the debate wafted in and out of my consciousness. Was it Charlotte who said: 'This is very much a gender dynamic which permeates every sector in every sphere of work?'
Was it Tim, a self-described 'feminist man', who waffled on about a 'communality' in men's 'individual life experiences'? Who knows — and who cares?
All I know is that by the end of the debate, when Murray said 'we want to hear you discuss this all day' (No, Jenni, pleeeease NO!!!), I had long lost any desire to know the difference between a feminist and an equalist — and with it, the will to live.
Only now do I discover that by boring our pants off every morning, the Woman's Hour team is, in fact, doing the nation an enormous favour. For a fascinating report in the British Psychological Society's magazine (all right, not all that fascinating) finds it's actually good for us to be bored, because allowing the mind to wander fuels creativity.
Dr Sandi Mann, of the University of Central Lancashire, reached her conclusion after giving 80 adults two polystyrene cups and asking them to come up with as many uses for them as possible.
Half set straight to work, while the rest were first made to spend 15 minutes copying numbers out of a telephone directory.
Lo and behold, the 40 who had been set the boring task came up with more ideas.
But if tedium is truly the mother of invention, it's not only Woman's Hour we must thank for stimulating our creative juices. Just think of the amazingly imaginative uses we will be able to find for two polystyrene cups, after another six weeks of this interminable election campaign!
Indeed, I can't remember a time in all my 61 years on this Earth when the level of political discourse in Britain has been quite so boring and banal.
True, it will be most interesting to learn the outcome of this most unreadable election in living memory. Will the Scots Nats wipe out Labour north of the border and hold an Ed Miliband government to ransom?
Will David Cameron scrape through to realise his retirement plans for 2020? Will Ukip remain a force to be reckoned with or will it fizzle out? Will Whitehall be saddled once again with the dead weight of Nick Clegg — or will he lose his seat?
But while politicians through the ages have told less than the whole truth, there always used to be a certain excitement about the exchange of ideas in the campaign itself.
These days, voters are treated like imbeciles, with no party getting down to the nitty-gritty of how it proposes to defend the nation, secure the long-term future of the Health Service or pay off our (still mounting) debts.
Instead, all we get are endlessly repeated slogans: 'Long-term economic plan!'; 'Cost-of-living crisis!'; 'Anchor the Government in the centre ground!; 'Long-term economic plan!'; 'Cost of living crisis!'; 'Yah, boo to you!'; 'Yah, boo to you, too, with knobs on!'
Look at Newsnight — or rather, don't. In the old days, BBC2's flagship political show was compulsive viewing during an election campaign. Now, it is reduced to pathetic gimmicks in its vain effort to disguise the poverty of the debate between the parties.
Did you see Emily Maitlis on Wednesday night, dressed up like an extra in a St Trinian's film as she chaired a barren discussion between Labour and the Tories over VAT and National Insurance?
Am I imagining it, or did the programme sign off the other night with film of a tourist being pursued at 1mph by a giant tortoise he'd disturbed in the act of mating?
With desperate devices such as these, Newsnight's new editor Ian Katz surely succeeds only in emphasising the dullness of this campaign. Full marks to him, then, for stimulating the nation's creativity by boring for Britain.
And while we're dishing out these awards, special mention must surely be made of former junkie comedian Russell Brand.
Suddenly, I understand why readers of the pseudo-intellectual Prospect magazine this week voted him the world's fourth most important thinker — the top-ranking Briton on a list of names headed by the French economist Thomas Piketty, which might have been headed Great Bores of Today.
Until yesterday, Brand's chief contribution to the realm of political thought was his advice that we should cause a revolution by refusing to vote — though details of how this would work were slightly sketchy.
Now he has put flesh on the bones by donating all the money from paperback sales of his book, Revolution, to a cafe on an East London estate, to be staffed by drug addicts undergoing 'abstinence-based recovery'.
'We will start more and more of these social enterprises,' he said. 'We are going to create our own systems, our own federations, our own currencies, our own authorities . . .'
Yes, dear, of course you are. And while you take your medication, I wonder if you'll excuse me. I've just thought of some truly ground-breaking new things to do with polystyrene cups.
PS: If you found this column insufferably boring, let me just say that I'm happy to have been of service.
By Tom Utley for the Daily Mail
Even by the exacting standards of Woman's Hour, seldom the most stimulating programme on the airwaves, Wednesday's edition was monumentally, mind-numbingly, crushingly, tear-jerkingly boring.
To be fair to the Radio 4 producers, they'd tried to cast their net wider than their usual obsessions with female genital mutilation and the welfare system's unfairness to lesbian couples from ethnic minorities who wish to adopt children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Instead, they promised a rich diet of debate on the issues that apparently every woman in the country is talking about (except, strangely, my wife or any other woman I've met outside the corridors of the BBC): 'Are you a feminist or an equalist?'; 'Do gay men make better dads?'; and 'How close are children born through surrogacy to their parents?'
Now, I have to admit that though I start work in the morning much later than most people, I only ever catch the first ten or 15 minutes of Woman's Hour before I have to run for my train.
So, I can throw no light on what the programme had to tell us about the relative merits of gay and straight fathers or the family relationships of children born to surrogate mothers.
But mindful of my duty to readers, I did my very best to concentrate on the first item on Wednesday's agenda.
After all, we columnists are supposed to be up to speed on all the latest 'isms' — and though, of course, everyone has been familiar with feminism for decades, equalism seemed to have passed me by.
What, exactly, is an equalist — and in what respects does she differ from a feminist? Can men be equalists? Was I, perhaps, an equalist myself, without knowing it?
With such questions turning over in my mind, I switched up the volume and awaited the answers, with a view to recording in print any reflections that might occur to me. But, reader, I've let you down.
As so often happens during Woman's Hour, I found my mind wandering off in all sorts of irrelevant directions. Which is best for an Easter mini-break, I wondered: Vienna, Budapest or Prague?
How much should we worry about reports that Vladimir Putin is to lease bombers to Argentina to attack the Falklands? Would Clarkson survive?
How long would it be, after this week's report that a smoker's dog had died of lung cancer, before Parliament banned me from owning a pet?
Meanwhile, in the background, under the motherly supervision of Jenni Murray, a scientist called Laura and a barrister called Charlotte were arguing the pros and cons of feminism and equalism (I think Charlotte was the feminist and Laura the more sensible sounding equalist, but I won't swear to it).
Oh, and a bloke called Tim was roped in later to explain his demand for a Minister for Men.
Odd snatches of the debate wafted in and out of my consciousness. Was it Charlotte who said: 'This is very much a gender dynamic which permeates every sector in every sphere of work?'
Was it Tim, a self-described 'feminist man', who waffled on about a 'communality' in men's 'individual life experiences'? Who knows — and who cares?
All I know is that by the end of the debate, when Murray said 'we want to hear you discuss this all day' (No, Jenni, pleeeease NO!!!), I had long lost any desire to know the difference between a feminist and an equalist — and with it, the will to live.
Only now do I discover that by boring our pants off every morning, the Woman's Hour team is, in fact, doing the nation an enormous favour. For a fascinating report in the British Psychological Society's magazine (all right, not all that fascinating) finds it's actually good for us to be bored, because allowing the mind to wander fuels creativity.
Dr Sandi Mann, of the University of Central Lancashire, reached her conclusion after giving 80 adults two polystyrene cups and asking them to come up with as many uses for them as possible.
Half set straight to work, while the rest were first made to spend 15 minutes copying numbers out of a telephone directory.
Lo and behold, the 40 who had been set the boring task came up with more ideas.
But if tedium is truly the mother of invention, it's not only Woman's Hour we must thank for stimulating our creative juices. Just think of the amazingly imaginative uses we will be able to find for two polystyrene cups, after another six weeks of this interminable election campaign!
Indeed, I can't remember a time in all my 61 years on this Earth when the level of political discourse in Britain has been quite so boring and banal.
True, it will be most interesting to learn the outcome of this most unreadable election in living memory. Will the Scots Nats wipe out Labour north of the border and hold an Ed Miliband government to ransom?
Will David Cameron scrape through to realise his retirement plans for 2020? Will Ukip remain a force to be reckoned with or will it fizzle out? Will Whitehall be saddled once again with the dead weight of Nick Clegg — or will he lose his seat?
But while politicians through the ages have told less than the whole truth, there always used to be a certain excitement about the exchange of ideas in the campaign itself.
These days, voters are treated like imbeciles, with no party getting down to the nitty-gritty of how it proposes to defend the nation, secure the long-term future of the Health Service or pay off our (still mounting) debts.
Instead, all we get are endlessly repeated slogans: 'Long-term economic plan!'; 'Cost-of-living crisis!'; 'Anchor the Government in the centre ground!; 'Long-term economic plan!'; 'Cost of living crisis!'; 'Yah, boo to you!'; 'Yah, boo to you, too, with knobs on!'
Look at Newsnight — or rather, don't. In the old days, BBC2's flagship political show was compulsive viewing during an election campaign. Now, it is reduced to pathetic gimmicks in its vain effort to disguise the poverty of the debate between the parties.
Did you see Emily Maitlis on Wednesday night, dressed up like an extra in a St Trinian's film as she chaired a barren discussion between Labour and the Tories over VAT and National Insurance?
Am I imagining it, or did the programme sign off the other night with film of a tourist being pursued at 1mph by a giant tortoise he'd disturbed in the act of mating?
With desperate devices such as these, Newsnight's new editor Ian Katz surely succeeds only in emphasising the dullness of this campaign. Full marks to him, then, for stimulating the nation's creativity by boring for Britain.
And while we're dishing out these awards, special mention must surely be made of former junkie comedian Russell Brand.
Suddenly, I understand why readers of the pseudo-intellectual Prospect magazine this week voted him the world's fourth most important thinker — the top-ranking Briton on a list of names headed by the French economist Thomas Piketty, which might have been headed Great Bores of Today.
Until yesterday, Brand's chief contribution to the realm of political thought was his advice that we should cause a revolution by refusing to vote — though details of how this would work were slightly sketchy.
Now he has put flesh on the bones by donating all the money from paperback sales of his book, Revolution, to a cafe on an East London estate, to be staffed by drug addicts undergoing 'abstinence-based recovery'.
'We will start more and more of these social enterprises,' he said. 'We are going to create our own systems, our own federations, our own currencies, our own authorities . . .'
Yes, dear, of course you are. And while you take your medication, I wonder if you'll excuse me. I've just thought of some truly ground-breaking new things to do with polystyrene cups.
PS: If you found this column insufferably boring, let me just say that I'm happy to have been of service.