Do more people read the blogs than watch BBC Digital? Speaks for itself.
Second comes a wee snippet about the Kirsty Wark affair which in turn links to this post from Freedom & Whisky. (Some of our US readers, or indeed some of our English readers, may not have been following Warkgate. You should. It’s something like Celebrity Big Brother for the Scottish ruling elite. Check out Ed Thomas’s recent posts. Kirsty Walk is the BBC Scotland presenter who does their election night specials and lots of other political work. And holidays with the First Minister. And helped approve the designs for the famous and astonishingly costly Scottish Parliament building. And who refused to hand over footage from a documentary about the building and its astonishing cost to the inquiry about the same, a refusal backed up by the then controller of BBC Scotland, John McCormick, who said surrendering the tapes would clash with the BBC’s policies.)
The Bunny has up a third post that includes the wonderful line “it was as if Grima Wormtongue had been banished for the day.”It’s about the BBC when it was Auntie.
I read that Bunny post yesterday. Actually you could use the Grima Wormtongue quote on a lot of US media too, as well as the usual current dreck from Hollywood.
The hopefulness and confidence of the 50s and early 60s, contrasted with the snarky, self-hating nihilism of today. . .it’s really stark. And the people look so much cleaner and neater, too.
(I’m not saying that the 50s and 60s were free of their problems, such as segretation in the US, of course.)
The contrast, both sides of it, are dealt with rather well (in a joky way) in the film “Back to the Future” . There is brief scene set in a grafitti-strewn self-service petrol station in the nineties. When the hero goes back in time the same garage is shown as sparkling clean and attended by a bevy of service attendants who, if I’ve remembered this right, sing in harmony like a barbershop quartet.
On the other hand no one can conceive of a black mayor until the hero recognises the young black man cleaning in a restaurant as the future mayor and puts the idea into his head. (One of those self-fulfilling time loops without which no time travel story is complete.)
Personally, I don’t see why we can’t have mayors of all colours AND sparkling clean garages.
Pedantic correction:
Its Kirsty Wark not Walk
Back to the Future Trilogy on DVD. Great present for all the family!
Susan, would it be OK if I quoted your comment in a post on my own blog about the contrast between then and now?
Oh, and thanks, Bishop Hill. Will correct.
Should I address you as My Lord Bishop? 😉
Cleaner and neater perhaps – but they didn’t half pong.
Yes Natalie, that is okay with me. Thanks for asking.
I found it interesting that you asked the question: “Do more people read the blogs than watch BBC Digital?”
This week, after more than a decade of having the BBC’s website in my bookmark list, I finally deleted it.
The reason was that I had realised that for all the serious news I want – econommics, finance, business, science news, world news, commentary – I go to blogs. I don’t always agree with what I read, but I know that I’m getting something solid with someone who stands behind what they write.
But the BBC feeds us a constant diet of what Prince Harry wore to a party, what Brown said to Blair, and whether Blunkett gets to keep his official flat in town, plus of course the usual slanted questions aimed at letting people pile in on the US, the Royal family, or corporate “greed”.
In other words, bias aside, we’ve seen a massive reversal of roles. Today blogs are the place to go for hard news and commentary, and the BBC is mostly a source of soft entertainment,