Light Entertainment

Parminder is sitting down, watching telly. Which part of her body is most in contact with the sofa? Is it:

(a) her arse

(b) her elbow

Only answer (a) or (b) not both.

Now turn over.


I'm pretty much OK with them drafting O Levels so that even the least sentient students are capable of being marked. It's questionable whether they challenge the brightest/hardest-working but still.... that's a whole nuther argument. Why, though, must the BBC follow this trend and make all of its programmes appeal to the dimmest viewer when doing so turns off those who might be worth a Grade C or above?

Cutting edge documentaries, on the Beeb, now go no further than sending some old buffer tootling off along the Wye Valley in a '56 Morris Oxford, grumbling about how much has changed. Rogue Traders, the other night, even had a sidekick for the presenter - a Portuguese bloke whose function it was to act dumb while words of more than two syllables were explained to him ('him' = proxy for the target audience). Oh, how the Diversity Dept. must have agonised before they came up with a nationality it was alright to patronise.

I can't bring myself to watch a whole programme... there was one about Ethiopia the other week that dealt with some fairly deep facts about population growth. But the gushing pubescents presenting it got the better of me before half-way. The one-time 'flagship', Panorama, now fronted by a Radio2 DJ, with its shallow subject-matter, cut-cut-cut photography and that damned ubiquitous low-bass urrrrrrrrr music to ominously underscore every serious point in case we're too thick to get it, is unwatchable.

According to many in the Blogosphere, it's all a plot to avoid letting the populace know how bad things are. That could well be true - that and the fact that "inclusiveness" has to include not only the half-wits but also those in the foreign community who've only recently arrived and can't speak the language.

Years ago (or so it seems) ITV was for the people who loved nothing more high-brow than Coronation Street and Hughie Green, while the rest of us sat nodding at the wisdom of Dr. Bronowski, ogling Joan Bakewell, or getting our kicks via The Old Grey Whistle Test. That was as it should be.... the commercial channels need mass audiences for flogging staples of the poor like Jaffa Cakes, Wonderloaf and Cadbury's Smash. The BBC doesn't. Leave it to them, I say.

I was only following orders

Something I can't get my head around in this Stafford Hospital case. At the top was the CE and his board, never straying from their fancy offices, handing down edicts aimed at satisfying their political masters' desire to see quotas fulfilled and money saved. At the bottom, harassed nurses tried to perform miracles with inadequate resources. But in the middle? Where were the Consultants? What role in this scandal was played by the lofty ones to whom cases are individually assigned who must each have seen dozens of their patients arriving with fairly optimistic prognoses, dying prematurely - often, presumably, through causes capable of being treated with rudimentary care.

Because it's simply inconceivable that these highly paid, highly responsible, senior professionals could have repeatedly swept through the wards, white coats open, their entourages trailing, yet failing to be aware of people slumped for hours in their own faeces and urine, comatose through lack of food and water, denied proper medication or even monitoring of their condition through staff shortages and lack of proper training. They must have known. How could they have kept quiet when this slaughter was going on around them?

Bugger 'lessons being learned' and 'challenges being met'. A full-scale police enquiry needs to take place with everyone who failed being identified and subject to eventual charge. The Nuremburg Defence should not apply.

Mandy's Big Green Lie

The AllShookUp vehicle fleet features matching His and Hers 2litre automatic Mondeos, together worth about £500 if I'm lucky - both 10 years old, both with no service history, but both capable of sweeping me along in considerable comfort and with plenty of oomph for getting past tractors, caravans or dawdlers in Volvos with a minimum of delay. Their thirst for gas is more than compensated for by cheap third party insurance, never feeling the need to wash or polish them, and sheer nonchalance when they get dinged in supermarket carparks. MOTs willing, they will last me until they collapse in a heap of rust.

Mandelson, though, wants to bribe me to swap them for something 'green' - probably a poky little underpowered Kia or something equally lethal to overtake in. He'd have me throw away 10 good tyres, 2 working radios, seats for 10 people, 2 solid engines and gearboxes, miles of cabling, gallons of toxic oil and brake fluid and a ton of painted metal and plastic. And put my village garage out of work while he's at it.... oh and borrow the thick end of £20K into the bargain to buy new sets of tyres, seats, radios, cable, steel, oil, metal, etc. etc,, built in a factory spitting out God knows how much CO2.

The Government doesn't believe in anything - or if they do, expediency and hypocrisy get the better of them. Mandy's offer of two grand to trade in your old motor proves it.

Bunch of liars.

Welcome back to Luton for Royal Anglians

Special Forces in camouflage mingle with the local totty

Baroness Wazzock

I see the Tories' tame Muslim, Baroness Warsi, felt the need to join in the tributes to disgraced peer Lord Ahmed. She sent a message to a campaign organised to show "complete and all out support for the incarcerated Lord Nazir Ahmed while lauding his contribution to the British society in the context of the community relations and his role at the international platform."

The meeting also heard from Mohammed Sarwar MP (himself no stranger to brushes with the law) who said he believed Ahmed's sentence was excessive, and event organiser Abid Hussein, who felt that the punishment was excessive because, "he had ruffled the feathers of the higher authorities because of his strong views and support on various social and political issues notably the 42day detention period, war on Iraq and his pro-Palestinian stance."

Of course, many people would think that six weeks jail time, when the maximum sentence is two years, is too lenient for someone who drove for 17 miles along a dark motorway, sending and receiving texts and eventually killing another motorist. But no.... a bunch of Pakistani Muslims would sooner believe in another shadowy conspiracy to persecute one of their number.

Can't they see.. or do they not care - that outbursts like these only serve to antagonise the indigenous population and further alienate immigrants? Can't the drippy Warsi and the Tories see that there's no point in cosying up to 'moderate' Moslems in the hopes that appeasement will work - when every cause is taken over by those seeking to undermine our state?

Personally, I think that any Pakistani dissatisfied with justice - or anything else for that matter - in Britain should remember that they've always got a ready-made homeland waiting to welcome them at any time. Yes the corruption and poverty there, that are endemic at levels not seen here since the Middle Ages, might come as a bit of a shock... but PIA flights are cheap and frequent. Go. You won't be missed.

Smug and useless

Purnell's rapid rise up the slippery pole to Cabinet is via the typical route of the New Labour ruling classes. Privately educated, he left Oxford for a stint as a researcher at a leftie think-tank. Then, despite having no commercial experience, he joined the State Broadcaster as Head of Corporate Affairs, no less. After leaving for few years in the Spin Dept. at No 10 he landed a safe seat in 2001 and is now our Work and Pensions Secretary.

So he it is, with a working life full of pushing at half-open doors, never knowing dissent, a fully committed apparatchik whose place in the pecking order has been reached through unmitigated success at preaching to the converted... he it is who assures Labour's Black Asian and Minority Ethnic AGM that minorities will not be "left behind" by the effects of the recession.

And to make sure this won't happen, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, under its Chairman Trevor Phillips, has agreed to work with the Government to assess whether any groups were suffering disproportionately in the recession. They talk about assessing the impact on, "ethnic minorities, women, the disabled and older workers and advis(ing) ministers on steps to take."

What a load of bollocks. The clue is in the venue. At best, he's buying votes through cosying up to the immigrant population by reinforcing their sense of victimhood; at worst, he's promising extra help to everybody except fit white men. Either way, this smug, slippery member of the Nu Ruling Elite is so far divorced from reality that he'll say anything rather than do anything. And that's how we got into this whole mess in the first place.