The beaver is a proud and noble animal

I’ve been in the UK for coming on 5 years now. Every year I’ve been here, it has snowed at some point. Every year, people lose their mofo’n mind and go totally batshit. People sleep in their cars and offices. Schools close down for weeks. People empty gas station tanks and Tesco shelves are barren.

Every damn year.

And you know what? People still don’t learn their lesson and prepare for it. Snow tires are unheard of, except in the far reaches of Scotland. Grit and salt are always in too short a supply, and there is no infrastructure to use it.

Current Mood: Cold

Katy got some postal spam yesterday from a “personal finance” company that targets people with a bad credit history. It’s all shiny and lovey and sparkly, telling her how she can get lots of stuff for cheap, and how she can “make this Christmas the best ever!”

Among the shiny-shiny, there’s this little gem:

At first, I thought it was a typo, but no. It does, in fact, say 235.5% APR.

And if things couldn’t get any sillier, I went on their website and had a play with their loan calculator. There’s a little disclaimer, hidden away in the FAQ, that reads:

The Annual Percentage Rate (APR) on your loan will depend on how much you want to borrow and how many weeks you choose to repay it over.

So, if you try and borrow the maximum amount of money they’ll lend (£500) for the shortest period (23 weeks), it works out like to a weekly payment of £32.50, for a total repayment of £747.50. In other words, you get charged an APR of 545.2%

And people wonder why the UK has one of the worst credit profiles in Europe.

Current Mood: Enraged

Louis Walsh is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the biggest crackpot I’ve ever seen and it would seem that his tenuous grip on reality is slipping.

The whole “I’m a judge, I’m allowed to have an opinion. You’re not a judge, so shut up” thing with the host of X-factor was already a pile of horseshit, but then he said the same thing to the whole audience – with lovely visuals – after his pair of trained monkeys sang the Ghostbusters tune. Stay classy, Louis.

Seriously. I can understand the financial reasons to keep the twins (I refuse to call them Jedward) on. They cause controversy. It’s like the Howard Stern show in the US. More people who hate the show listen to it than people who actually like Stern. Why? Because they want to hear what he says so that they can complain about it. Same difference here. The idiots are a cash cow. Of course they can’t sing and have no talent. Of course they’re going to be toned down, tuned out, voice-overed and backup-signered to death. It’s still car-crash TV. You know it’s bad, but you can’t help yourself. And that’s why Simon Cowell didn’t vote them off. It’s better for the ratings and therefore his own bottom line in merchandising tie-ins, show tickets, tour tickets, yada yada yada. He knows they’re not going to win, but he’s going to make as much money from them as he can in the process.

Cowell’s motives are based purely in capitalism and greed and I can respect that. Louis firmly believes that they’re good and they can win. For that, he must die!

Current Mood: Aggravated

Wannabes queued up to conceive a baby with a stranger live on air for a £100,000 prize. The show was a spoof, but what does it say about reality TV?

It started as a challenge – to come up with the ultimate tasteless reality TV show and test the boundaries of the format. But in just eight weeks, “Let’s Make a Baby” came dangerously close to becoming a real show. Hundreds of reality TV hopefuls jammed the phone lines when the show advertised for contestants, and TV channels from all over the world offered vast sums of money to buy the rights to the series.

“Never in our wildest dreams did we imagine we would get that far with such little effort,” says the programme’s producer and director, Helen Sage.

The undercover experiment was for BBC Three’s current affairs series Mischief. The programme’s makers came up with the most “tasteless and morally dubious” idea they could, and a fake production company to sell it. Let’s Make a Baby would centre around contestants – all strangers – living in a “fertility house”, with the least attractive being voted out each week. The remaining two couples would then have a race to conceive a child and win £100,000 each.

The idea was first pitched to focus groups, all of which agreed it was morally questionable but said they would watch it. “It’s completely offensive,” said one group member. “Would I watch it? Yes.”

More than 200 people – including a gay man who was up for the challenge of trying to have sex with a female – applied to be a contestant. They were not told the show was a fake until after the auditions. Real reality stars also bought into the idea of the show. Makosi Musambasi and Craig Coates from Big Brother 6 agreed to host it.

Finally, a party was put on at Europe’s biggest TV sales fair in Cannes to pitch the fake idea to TV channels from all over the world and test their reaction. Disturbingly, it created a real buzz and several offers came in. “As a TV producer, I was really interested in the question of how low my industry would go in its bid to attract viewers and attention, the answer is very low indeed,” says Ms Sage.

Professor David Wilson, who walked out as a consultant on Big Brother for ethical reasons, says the premise of Let’s Make a Baby is morally repugnant and all about cheapening life, but he is not surprised that it attracted so much interest. “Reality TV is not only reinventing the freak show, it’s about bedlam,” he says. “It’s the TV equivalent of slowing down to get a better look at the accident on the other side of the motorway. It’s about getting a view of other people’s misery.

“Those who take part are considered odd or bizarre for wanting to do so, but they are merely products of a society that now holds fame above anything else. All cultural reference points are now rooted in being a celebrity, and not attached to having an intrinsic skill.”

He says there should be an independent body to regulate reality TV, and is also critical of the psychologists and other academics who take part in the shows and “endorse the programmes with a fig leaf of credibility”. But the prize of large audiences and the chance of a big reward take over people’s moral compass, says Alan Hayling, head of documentaries at the BBC.

“Very intelligent people are operating in a moral vacuum,” he says. “The moral of the tale of Let’s Make a Baby is, sadly, that it is terribly, terribly easy, over only eight weeks, to show how low reality might go.”

So what is the future of reality TV? Will the public lose its appetite for it, will programme makers get a conscience? Neither, and things could get far more extreme, says Professor Wilson. “The limits of this type of TV are limitless. The other year there was a huge web audience for a film on the net of hostages being beheaded. It is about how deep and depraved our imaginations can go.”

And as for Let’s Make a Baby? A Dutch television company is currently making a reality TV show called I want your baby, not your love. In it, men compete to be the one to donate their sperm to a single woman who wants a baby but not a boyfriend. Not quite the same, but close enough.

Let’s Make a Baby will be broadcast on Thursday 26 January at 2230 GMT on BBC Three.

Source: BBC

Current Mood: Bored

Council bans parents from play areas

Score one for Britain in its contest with the United States to create the stupidest fear-based society. The Watford Borough Council took the lead by banning parents from supervising their own kids in public playgrounds, “because they have not undergone criminal record checks.”

The only adults allowed to monitor the kids are idiocracy-vetted “play rangers.” The children’s parents must “watch from outside a perimeter fence.” A council notice to parents explains that: “Safeguarding the children and young people who use the site is one of our top priorities.

“Due to Ofsted regulations we have a responsibility to ensure that every authorised adult who enters our site is properly vetted and given a Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check by Watford Borough Council.”

Council Mayor Dorothy Thornhill argued they are merely enforcing government policy at the play areas, in Vicarage Road and Leggatts Way. She said: “Sadly, in today’s climate, you can’t have adults walking around unchecked in a children’s playground and the adventure playground is not a meeting place for adults.

Current Mood: Aggravated

I affirmed a pledge of allegiance to Her Majesty the Queen yesterday and became naturalized as a British citizen. The ceremony was, to be honest, a bit hokey, but the symbolism of it was nice. It would have been a lot better if I hadn’t been in the middle of a nasty migraine. Afterwards, people were complimenting Katy and I on how well behaved the beastie had been. He, of course, was flirting with everything that would smile at him.

The highlight of the day came when we were making our way to the Cambridge City Council offices and ran into Santa Claus in his off-duty summer outfit. Imagine a fat old dude, with a kick-ass white beard, fabulously working flaming, scarlet red trousers and a buttoned shirt of the same colour. Fantabulous!

Current Mood: Amused

Top Gear may be forced to hire new presenters as part of a government push to make the show more gender and ethnically balanced. This week the Equality Bill was introduced into Britain which encourages employers to take “positive action” to widen diversity in the public sector workforce. Top Gear, along with a number of shows funded by the BBC, now fall under the Bill.

There has been pressure on the boys who review their mechanical toys to change, with a leading academic earlier this month saying that the BBC should employ more women to help make shows such as Top Gear “female-friendly”, reports London’s Daily Mail.

Dr Louise Livesey, tutor in sociology and women’s studies at Oxford, accused Top Gear of “entrenched, institutional sexism”. As well as being hosted by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, the car show has a “boys’ club” production team and fewer female than male guests, it was claimed.

But Top Gear executive producer Andy Wilman claimed it was “utter drivel” to suggest that the show excluded women, saying: “If the show is allegedly female-unfriendly, why is almost half the audience female? Secondly, if we are to have a female presenter just to represent the sexes, then by that logic Loose Women needs a bloke in the line-up pretty sharpish. I actually believe these sorts of mandates are patronising to women viewers, because they assume that women can’t enjoy a show’s presenters on merit, but can only appreciate a program if spoken to by one of their own sex.”

Top Gear is one of the most successful and popular shows on the Beeb. It’s not broken. The formula works. Leave it the hell alone.

Current Mood: Aggravated

I’ve just received a phone call from the lawyer handling my immigration case. I am now officially British^†. I’ll shortly be getting my certificate of naturalization, with which I will be able to apply for a full British passport. YAWP!

This means, of course, that more money needs now leave my poor, depleted account. We’ve just this morning transferred close to £37,000 to our solicitor to cover the house deposit and all the various fees that are the last step before the contract exchange, and then the house is ours.

Egads!

^† Conditionally on calling up the Cambridge registry office and setting up an appointment to take an oath to the Queen, of course :)

Current Mood: Stressed

The Beeb was running an article this morning about how people were bombarding the Imperial War Museum about information on how people coped with shortages and rationing during the war in case there’s the Great Depression, part deux.

Katy said, as a quote of the day, that she liked WWII propaganda posters because they were cheery and colourful. I like them because they’re sensible, down to earth and are a proper example of the British stiff upper lip mentality.

Current Mood: Busy

I know that the PM lives in Downing Street and that Scottish bank notes can be used anywhere in the UK. I know that you can get a national insurance number at a JobCenter Plus and at a social security office. I know that kids in England must attend school between the ages of 5 and 16, generally work in a supermarket or a newsagent as their first job and that women make on average 20% less than men. I can tell you that about 80% of the total population of the UK lives in England, that its patron saint is St-George and that the UK is one of 5 permanent members of the UN security council. I can enlighten you on the fact that 10% of UK Christians are Roman Catholic and that Indians make up the largest minority group. I know that the reigning monarch can only advise, warn and encourage the PM and that civil servants need to be politically neutral and professional. Did you know that you need to be on the electoral register if you want to vote and that you can use a mediation service to sort out disputes with your neighbours? How about the fact that the NHS will treat every UK resident for free but if multiple people are living in shared accommodations, they each need to buy a TV license? I can tell you that you can be dismissed immediately for serious misconduct and that trade unions aim to improve pay and working conditions for their members. I can also tell you that you need to be 21 to drive an HGV, that you can be arrested if you refuse to have a roadside sobriety test and that a non-EU driving license is valid for 12 months in the UK (but then you need to obtain a UK one).

I can tell you all these things because I passed my life in the UK test last Friday. I can also tell you that it took me longer to write this blog post than it did to actually pass the damn test (which took the whole of 3 minutes).

My citizenship paperwork is now on its way to London where my solicitor will look it over and forward it to the Home Office. In the meantime, we had a bonfire last night and to mark the occasion, I ceremonially burned the study materials that had bored me senseless for the past two weeks. This made me happy.

Current Mood: Happy