Sunday, 12 October 2008

The BBC's Achievements...

Yesterday, driving back from a leisurely lunch, I flipped on the radio.  I seem to remember doing this last week... anyway, this week they seemed to have another play about the Catholic Church.  I heard the words "journalist," "conclave," "cardinal," and "can it really be true that the Pope was soooo ill he died after 33 days...?" and promptly switched off before they succeeded in getting me really riled up again.

I have, therefore, spent all of Saturday evening avoiding the radio.

So far, so good...

Paulinus (whose Feast Day was Friday, so belated good wishes!) has obviously reached a similar point in his relationship with Auntie Beeb.  He has come to the conclusion that the only things worth listening to are the Shipping Forecast and "Sailing By" (a particularly saccharine piece of music used to fill in the time before the Shipping Forecast starts... )  And, to prove the point, he has a video for each item.

The Shipping Forecast video is very, very funny (though I suspect it only appears so to sad people who have actually listened to the Forecast on several occasions... people like me and Paulinus, I guess!)

"Sailing By" is actually a form of torture which ought to be legislated against under the Geneva Convention on Human Rights.  I couldn't quite believe that Paulinus would actually put a video of nothing up on the blog, and so watched the whole thing in the hope of getting the joke.  I guess that means I've been had!

In revenge, I'm going to steal the Shipping Forecast video and put it up myself...  

on

7 comments:

  1. .The Cellarer10:18 am

    My two pennyworth on the Beeb

    http://how-the-west-was-lost.blogspot.com/2008/10/bbc.html

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  2. the mother of this lot5:15 pm

    Love it! Ask anyone can they quote anything from the Shipping Forecast and if they can they'll say 'Dogger, Fisher or German Bight'. Try it!

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  3. Mulier Fortis5:24 pm

    Heheheh... or even all three!

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  4. the owl of the remove10:45 pm

    Mac - what's the deal - Fr. John Boyle's blog gone, Fr. Stephen Fisher's gone - has there been some sort of crackdown against priestly blogs in Southwark?

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  5. Londiniensis11:09 pm

    The Shippimg Forecast has never been the same since they stopped calling Finisterre "Finisterre" and started calling it "FitzRoy" in 2002.

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  6. Mulier Fortis11:12 pm

    Don't think so - Fr. Tim is still going strong... and so is Valle Adurni (though he might be A&B)

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  7. Melancholicus1:12 pm

    Hilariously funny video.

    Intimately familiar with the shipping forecast I, and listen to it nightly for its pleasingly soporific quality. Depending on the time I go to bed, I listen to Today in Parliament for precisely the same reason - unless the MPs are talking about the promotion of buggery or mahometanism, in which case there'll be no sleeping until the rage abates.

    I have always been rather fond of Sailing By, considering it oddly comforting and vaguely pastoral, in the good (i.e. non-ecclesiastical) sense of the word (but 7 minutes and 16 seconds thereof is too much even for me).

    So I'd be less than pleased if Al-Beeb were to axe it, regarding such as analogous to the dropping of the Last Gospel and the prayers at the foot of the altar.

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