Archive for December, 2008
I was sitting watching Strictly Come Dancing on Saturday and a thought suddenly came to me. What happens if all 3 or all 4 couples end up with the same number of points?
It’s not such an implausible scenario and one that Bruce and Tess never allude to, which leads me to believe that there could be the potential to rig something.
Here comes the anorak part of this post, but please bear with me.
For argument’s sake, let’s say that next week Rachel and Vincent come top (3 points), Lisa and Brendan are second (2 points) and Tom and Camilla are bottom (1 point).
Now the rules say that the other half of the score is made up of public vote, so if Tom Chambers is most popular he gets 3 points. I have a feeling that Rachel Stevens is least popular so she ends up with 1 point and Lisa Snowdon 2 for being in the middle.
Now my maths isn’t up to Calculus level, but even I can work out that all 3 couples then end up with 4 points each. That’s a 3-way tie, isn’t it?
Surely they can’t have a three-couple dance-off, can they? How do they separate them? I can’t believe this has never happened before or that the BBC haven’t thought about it. I think we must be told…
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No matter how many adverts I see on TV, how many times radio stations play Wham!’s Last Christmas or the number of presents I have/haven’t bought it never really feels like Christmas until the tree is up.
Yesterday, we tootled down the road to a man selling trees from the car park in the local pub. There was no variation in price depending on how much taller some were than others, so we had a look round and, amazingly, found one very, very quickly.
C was happy because it was the tallest one we’ve ever had, A was happy simply because it was a Christmas tree and I was happy because it was a good deal!
Back home, the decorations came out, the lights went up, baubles were hung – much to A’s excitement (see photo) and suddenly it was Christmas in our household.
I even spent an hour or two making some Christmas cards last night – a first for me! Roll on the 25th…
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The ongoing saga of topslicing the TV licence fee to help prop up the likes of Channel 4, but at the expense of the BBC, has been a thorn in the side of Ofcom and the government this year.
No-one in power wants to rule out topslicing, but no-one wants to come down heavily on the side of the BBC either. Even David Cameron is only ’sceptical’ about it now, having previously endorsed the concept.
In spite of all the problems the BBC has been through recently, most recently the Daily Mail-led witch-hunt of Messrs Brand and Ross, many people in the corridors of Westminster don’t believe that it should have its own power diluted.
In this month’s The Word magazine Andy Burnham once again throws his support behind the BBC, saying:
People like to kick lumps out of [the BBC] but I do think we do that at our peril. It’s the backbone of our broadcasting system and, going forward, it should be more important, not less.
Not exactly the most impartial of comments, I’m sure you’d agree. And although he’d hate to confirm, Mr Burnham is clearly not going to be pressing very hard for topslicing, but as Steve Hewlett pointed out in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago, ‘after the next election… it may be a very different situation’.
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Sometimes I wonder if the head honchos at The Guardian have their own little in-jokes and like playing tricks on their readership.
How else to explain their current bizarre promotion of celeb-designed wrapping paper. So far the likes of Johnny Depp, Jonathan Ross, Paul Smith, David Bailey and Sophie Dahl have leant their considerable talents to the idea.
Seriously, is anyone going to buy the newspaper purely because of this? I mean, it’s basically a large piece of newspaper with a slightly different design on it.
How delighted would you be if you got a present wrapped up in a Johnny Depp-designed piece of newspaper? Would you even notice, more’s the point?
OK, so I know they’re raising money for their Katine appeal and readers are being encouraged to bid for the original version of the design, but it’s all a bit shit that apart, isn’t it?
Wallcharts with birds on are good. Mini-booklets about card games are great. Celeb wrapping paper? Not worth the paper it comes in!
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