How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [41]
It’s the same story with the newspapers and the government. There is much finger-pointing. Blame is flying every-where. It’s the bankers. It’s the Mexicans. It’s capitalism. It’s the price of oil. It’s the Chinese. And, on the BBC of course, it’s global warming. This is all very natural. But it doesn’t really help.
And so it’s up to me to come up with what I hope, for once, is a spot of sensible advice for those who are in the same boat.
Because there is no safe haven for your money, you need to give it to someone else. That way, it becomes their problem. So, why not pay your income tax early? And call your kids’ school to see if you can settle all forthcoming fees in advance. Need a new car? Why not buy one now?
Certainly I’ve decided not to send out any invoices right now. I simply wouldn’t know where to put the cash. And so with that in mind, if you are the accountant at the Sunday Times and you are reading this, the payment I would like for this week’s column is four lamb chops.
Sunday 28 September 2008
Fingers on buzzers, you bunch of ignorant twerps
Current plans to cut ITV’s obligations as a public-service broadcaster would mean it’d have no need to fill the cracks in its open-the-box, come-on-down schedules every night with regional news programmes.
That would be excellent. I loathe regional news programmes. They’re always full of fat women wearing ‘Save our school’ T-shirts that they’ve hurriedly pulled on over their normal clothes for the cameras, and pointless vox pops, and puffed-up councillors and green issues and plans for incinerators and recycled press releases, delivered with a solemn voice by a woman in an ethnic headscarf, in a bid to give them credence and weight.
However, while the demise of Grantham Today is a cause for celebration, I do believe this is yet another rivet removed from the aeroplane wings of civilization, and soon you’ll turn on Newsnight to find Jeremy Paxman in clown shoes urging parties from either side of the political divide to settle their differences in a bout of mud wrestling.
Sadly I believe that television mirrors society. It was in black and white because we were. It made fun of West Indians when we did. It featured Terry Scott because we told lame jokes as well, and when we went to the pub, we didn’t like all that ‘foreign muck’ on the menu either.
This is the problem with what’s happening today. Because anyone with half a brain and speech genes that function properly is derided as a hoity-toity snob, all of television is aimed at the Heat-reading halfwits who literally don’t know anything. We celebrate our ignorance of the Large Hadron Collider, we make sneery noises when someone from Fulham appears on a game show, and as a result, when we tune in to BBC1 on a Saturday night, Vanessa Feltz is being pushed into a swimming pool because she can’t lie on the floor with her legs wide apart.
At the moment, television companies imagine that they must cater to the bovine masses or else their viewing figures and advertising revenue will dwindle to nothing. They know that when Jade Goody gets cancer the nation mourns and when Stephen Hawking speaks everyone laughs. So they fear that if they do not make shows for pig-ignorant northern lard buckets the nation will switch off the set and do something else with its time instead.
But what? The internet? Oh come on. This is a horrible place full of lies, hate, pornography and a billion apostrophes all in the wrong place. What’s more, eventually it will cause you to end up in bed with someone inappropriate, or you will upset a German who will come round to your house and stab you in the heart. Or maybe the television execs imagine that we will all say, ‘Well, Vanessa Feltz isn’t falling into a swimming pool tonight so I shall read a book instead.’ Really? Can you imagine Jade Goody saying that? Or Shannon