Who says the BBC is full of moral relativists ?
“Outrageous Wasters sees a crack team of eco experts on a mission to transform Britain’s most wasteful households … Joanna, Dan and Andy descend on a household of wasters to assess just how bad they are based on what they see in the house, by ‘interrogating’ them and from the evidence of a waste diary that the family has compiled. The family then spends up to five days living at ‘the house of correction’ – a purpose built eco-camp of large traditional Mongolian yurts (tents) – where they live without creature comforts and have Joanna and Dan teaching how them to waste as little as possible and how to live off the land. Meanwhile, Andy oversees an eco-makeover at the family’s home – designed to challenge their behaviour and inspire them to change their ways …”
“Just how bad they are”, “house of correction”, “to what extent our outrageous wasters have reformed their lives” – that kind of evangelical, Victorian moral certainty has pretty much disappeared from BBC Religious Affairs, but no matter. We have a radical new priesthood, too – represented here by “anti-waste enforcer Dan Carraro“.
(via Tim Blair)
wasters
Watch them try to change the meaning of this word and make it the next fashionable insult.
the bit I saw was a truely terrible, terrible programme. No attempt at any balance whatsoever, and even claimed at the end that CO2 is a pollutant. But it was alright because the “family” could be absolved for burning a wood fire to survive at the camp by planting a tree.
I found this programme chilling. It is openly and humourlessly Stalinist. It depresses me that this sort of thing is even socially acceptable in this country.
So the Beeb is finally building its own concentration camps and arresting people for thoughtcrimes. It has always been their ultimate ambition.
When I saw the title “Outrageous Wasters” my heart leapt for one brief, naive moment. I thought it was a programme which followed three public sector “servants”: a BBC employee, a civil servant and a “Diversity Tsar” for a local council. Now THAT would deserve the title “Outrageous Wasters”.
Interesting that they sent them to a “yurt” in the Welsh valleys. From my experience, any “yurt” in the Valleys would be burned within 60 seconds, and rightly so. It is not a hotbed of bourgeois absurdity.
Anyone, I mean anyone, who has grown up even one generation removed from real poverty wouldn’t go within 500 yards of a “yurt”. They KNOW what it is like to sleep with no warmth, to wash in cold water, or to tremble with cold. Only middle-class liberals living in huge houses in Hampstead could even consider this, because for them a five-day camping trip in a “yurt” is a holiday, not their life.
I feel like telling all these eco nuts to go swap places with someone in the 3rd world. De Roy Kwesi Andrew makes a really really good point about the self flagellating West in his article http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3771/
Be fair. Yurts can be quite cosy. After all, it gets pretty cold in Mongolia or on the Tibetan plateau.
By strange chance I have a friend in West Wales with a yurt in her garden, which she lets out to tourists (the yurt, not the garden).
I stayed in a yurt-like structure over my recent vacation in the Sierra Nevada mountains; it was hell on earth. Even with a single electrical outlet and wind-up flashlights to light your way to the outdoor toilets, and relatively balmy California night time temperatures.
I agree with the guy who said it was too close to the conditions of poverty to appeal to anyone who hasn’t had a comfy Western middle-class upbringing.