chrishansenhome

As many of you will be aware, Britain (and Europe generally) has been hit with a large (for us) amount of snow coupled with rather low temperatures in the last week. This has resulted in the closure and then tight flight restriction of Heathrow Airport, the cancellation of a number of Eurostar services, and a great amount of disruption on the East Coast Main Line from London to Scotland. On the roads and the sidewalks (pavements), clearing of snow and ice has only taken place on the main roads, while most pavements are still mired in ice and are skating rinks for the unwary.

For the last three years, Britain has lumbered under severe snowfalls at least once each year. This was not the case in the previous 14 years I have lived here—snow was rare and mostly consisted of flurries which did not stick, and temperatures stayed above 0° C most of the time. Every year for the last three, after the snow has fallen and the country is faced with paralysis, the scream goes up from the citizenry: "Why?"

Well, I'll tell you why. The United Kingdom does not believe that buying snowplows, antifreeze, sand, and salt in the amounts necessary to cope with the kind of winters we've had lately is economical. This is belied by the pictures on the evening news of acres of hopeful passengers camping out at Heathrow Airport waiting to get on an airplane, and the queue to get on a Eurostar train, which queue stretches out the doors of St. Pancras International Railway Station down the Euston Road, ending somewhere in front of the British Library.

Heads will, of course, roll. Probably not the Transport Secretary's; the government has no appetite for sacking yet another Cabinet minister (see below). Something may be done with the people at the airports and the railways responsible for deicing runways and running rails and overhead catenary wires. But sacking the personnel involved will not help the situation unless the country is willing to bite the bullet and plan out exactly what will take place when a snowfall occurs here.

Airports like that of Stockholm are still running; the only services curtailed are those to Heathrow and Frankfurt. Why doesn't BAA (the owners of Heathrow) tempt Stockholm-Arlanda's Director of Preparedness (or whatever they call the post) with a huge salary to come here and sort this out for us? If something like this does not happen, then next year, or the year after, when a paralysing snowfall dumps itself on the United Kingdom, I do not want to hear ANYone complaining about it. Either we decide to take our lumps and wait until the weather and the snow clears, or we plan for this occurrence and commit the money required to keep transport running through it.

In political news, we were greeted this morning with the news that the Business Secretary, Vince Cable MP (a Liberal Democrat), had been caught speaking indiscreetly to two people who he thought were constituents but who were actually reporters for the Daily Telegraph, which is the main Tory broadsheet newspaper here in the United Kingdom. Among the tidbits were:

Being in the coalition government is like being at war.

However, if the Tories push him too far, there is always the nuclear option of resigning.

He compared the Coalition Government's policies and reforms to 'a kind of Maoist revolution' and thought that the Liberal Democrats should be a kind of brake on them.

He "declared war" on Rupert Murdoch (owner of News International, Sky, and lots of other stuff here, in the US, and in Australia) and thought that he himself would win.

Now the first three should not be news to anyone who follows British politics. However, the last one is one nuclear option that perhaps Mr. Cable wanted to avoid. His department is considering whether Murdoch should be able to buy the portion of BSkyB that he does not now own. For the Cabinet minister who would make the decision as to whether this purchase should go ahead to express such bold anti-Murdoch sentiments to people whom he did not know is unwise, to say the least. While many were calling for Cable's head, the news has just broken that he will continue as a Cabinet minister while losing control over the BSkyB sale to Jeremy Hunt, the Culture, Media, and Sport Secretary. For the Liberal Democrats to lose two Cabinet ministers (David Laws being the first to resign from his post as Chief Secretary to the Treasury because he fiddled his expenses to conceal the fact that his landlord was actually his same-sex partner.) would be extremely unfortunate. (Declaration of interest: I am a registered Liberal Democrat.)

An additional bumble is this: the Daily Telegraph did not break the news about Cable's attitude toward Murdoch. A leaker within the Daily Telegraph passed that information to Robert Peston, the famously hesitant-voiced economics editor of BBC News. The reason that the Telegraph chose not to publish these remarks is probably because it agrees with them and did not want to expose Cable's indiscretion on this subject to public view. Sauce, goose; sauce, gander!

The third bumble was committed on the Radio 4 breakfast news and comment show, Today. I listen every day and get my main daily diet of news from it. Last week, one of the subjects of discussion was the aforementioned Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, Jeremy Hunt. In announcing the segment, James Naughtie, one of the main presenters, said that he was going to be interviewing "Jeremy C*nt". He followed this with a long interval of coughing and sputtering. This mistake captured the smiles of millions at their breakfast tables. While that particular word is considered fairly taboo here, it is not absolutely proscribed in print or on TV or radio. Any usage of it has to be justified. In the US, of course, anyone who made that particular mistake would be banned from the airwaves and the station or channel that carried it would be fined. Naughtie apologised later on during the show, and disappeared for a few days while the country was digesting the news that he'd slipped up. Later on another BBC presenter, in reporting Naughtie's mistake, made the exact same mistake. Another apology. The nation chortled.

Thus, I live in a country where gaffes are made almost continuously. I love the frisson of danger this adds to listening to, watching, or reading the news. Others think that the country is going to the dogs. If it is, then I say, "Woof!"

Current Mood: chortling
Current Location: London, in my study

There has been a very-much-trailed announcement this morning that the BBC (known fondly on these shores as Auntie Beeb) will be cutting about 1/3 of its website and two radio stations: Radio6Music and BBC AsianNetwork.

Now these are two radio stations to which I never listen. 6 Music is quite popular with the musicerati, I gather; Jarvis Cocker is one of the presenters of 6 Music and he said during an interview on The World at One that all his friends listen to 6 Music. There is currently an interview with the Director General, Mark Thompson, in which he is trying to defend his choices of services to cut.

Now I listen to Radio 4 (news and talk) every day I'm within earshot of it. I rarely listen to any other British radio station and even more rarely watch TV, BBC or not BBC. I think Radio 4 is great and I'd be happy to support it by a subscription. However, much of the TV output of the BBC is crap, spread over 4 TV stations. Their salaries, for executives as well as presenters, are bloated. Graham Norton, an entertainer who (in my opinion) is past his best work and just recycling the old stuff, is paid around £2 million (around US$2.9 million). Jonathan Ross (@wossy on Twitter, taken from his slight speech impediment) was paid around £6 million (close to US$9 million) to call Andrew Sachs (along with Russell Brand) and tell him that Russell had fucked his granddaughter. You may recall Andrew Sachs: he was the Spanish waiter Manuel in Fawlty Towers. He is now an elderly pensioner, and news of that sort isn't exactly what he is longing to hear. Wossy was suspended from the BBC and Russell Brand was terminated. Wossy is now back, but has announced that he is leaving to pursue other activities. The fact that the BBC is reducing what it pays its talent had nothing to do with Wossy's decision, oh no!

And, of course, we can't forget the renovation and enlargement of Broadcasting House, in the heart of London. It's quite a bit over budget, I'm told. It has to be ready for the exodus of the World Service from Bush House on the Strand.

Do remember (if you are not British or not an Anglophile) that each household with a TV in the United Kingdom pays a license fee to watch that TV, currently around £125 a year (US$185 or so). All this money goes to fund the BBC. It is what is called a hypothecated tax, and evading it is a criminal offense. Even if you never watch BBC TV or listen to BBC Radio, you must pay for it.

The BBC, in its own news broadcasts, is pointing at all the protests against these cuts and implying that the whole country is behind the BBC and doesn't want this kind of cut. Bushwah! I believe they're trying to build a groundswell of protest that will force the BBC executives ("force" being a relative word here) to re-evaluate what to cut.

Start with your own salaries, guys and gals. Then cut BBC3 and BBC4 TV, which would save £150 million a year and inconvenience about 5 people nationwide. At the end of the process, we should have BBC1 BBC2, Radio 4, Radios 1, 2 and 3 (if you must; I find them either too boring or too young), and the World Service and the website, especially the news pages. That would cut my license fee to about £50 a year (I may be exaggerating). And if you need any more encouragement, remember this: the largest proportion of women in prison at any one time are there because they have evaded the license fee.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Location: London, in my study

First, that Massachusetts elected a Republican to the Senate seat held by John F. Kennedy and Ted Kennedy. Enough said about that: I'm not close enough to Massachusetts politics to be able to complain intelligently about it. But, in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by a very large margin, isn't it natural to expect that Democrats will, all things being equal, put up competent candidates, run competent campaigns, and more often than not, be elected to office? And why haven't they learned the lessons taught by the succession of Republican governors the Commonwealth has elected?

Second, the BBC's pronunciation rules. The British pronounce the name of the Dutch artist Van Gogh as "van goch" with the "ch" being a slightly less emphatic form of the Scots "ch" in "loch". There is a Van Gogh exhibition here in London at the moment, and it's been in the news daily, and every time I hear them pronounce his name I wince. Americans pronounce it "van go", of course.

But what really irks me is that, while in this case the BBC bends over backwards to pronounce the name as the Dutch do, when they pronounce American words, especially place names, they take no account of American pronunciations. BBC announcers pronounce the name of the state in which Baltimore is located as "MAY-ree-land", not "MEH-rih-l'nd". I have heard them pronounce the name of the state in which Detroit is located as "MITCH-i-gan", rather than "MISH-i-gan". There are other instances of this which I can't remember now (no coffee yet).

I should found a Facebook group: Get the BBC to pronounce American place names correctly.

I need to go and forage for breakfast.

Current Mood: irked
Current Location: London, in my study

I listen most afternoons at 5 pm to the afternoon news and interview show PM on Radio 4. Today they changed a little bit of the program, in which I was intensely interested. They've modified the weather forecast.

Now those of you in the U.S. or in Singapore might wonder what the fuss is about. I gather that Singaporean weather forecasts are pretty much the same every day, and weather forecasts in the U.S. generally focus on a small metropolitan area in which the weather is mostly homogenous.

Here in the United Kingdom, weather forecasts on the radio and TV have generally been delivered as a story. In order to keep the Scots, Welsh, and Northern Irish happy, sometimes the forecast begins with those, other times, and perhaps even most times, the forecast begins with Southeast England and East Anglia, corresponding to Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire, Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk counties and the London Metropolitan Area. But, what often happens is the one's ears glaze over when the weather forecast starts, only to snap to attention when it's too late and your area has already been mentioned.

A few weeks or a month ago, a woman wrote in to the PM program stating that the current weather forecast was very easy to forget to listen to; she wondered whether other formats would work better. So some experiments were conducted, including:

Delivering the regional forecasts in the accent of the area concerned—Scotland in a Scottish accent, North East England in a Newcastle accent, and so on;

Playing music behind the forecast;

Playing agricultural sounds such as birdsong behind the forecast;

Playing sounds corresponding to the weather being forecasted—gales behind strong winds, pattering rain behind showers, and so on;

Finally, dividing the country up into regions and announcing each region, then its weather—similar to the Shipping Forecast.

After trialling each of these, and consulting within the BBC and the Met Office (=USan Weather Bureau), the last alternative was selected. Peter Gibbs, the head of weather broadcasting for the Met Office services for the BBC, (also a hottie for those who are into men like him—unfortunately, he's already taken), went on PM and explained how and why the new style forecast was being trialled. If it works well, and people like it, it'll probably replace the current story weather forecasts on radio. The PM host asked for comments to be left on the PM Blog.

I heard the forecast, and I liked it. I was able to concentrate long enough to get the gist of what will be happening here tomorrow. However, when I went to the BBC PM blog website to comment, I discovered that one has to register to leave a comment.

No problem? After filling out the form, you have to also verify your email address by clicking on a link in an email that the blog will send you, presumably automated. What PM didn't seem to anticipate is that so many of its readers would not already be commenters that the comment verification email mechanism would be overwhelmed and is probably down for the count. I asked for the verification email to be sent 27 minutes ago. Nothing yet. Normally these emails arrive almost automatically.

Of course, when I finally get my email, finish registering, and make my comment, I'll have a short approving phrase for the weather forecast and a rant about not anticipating this kind of load.

#BBCPMBlogFAIL

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Location: London, in my study