TOT: my afternoon with Radio Four

Noticing that the back gate had come loose in the gale and concerned about a sheep invasion I forsake my afternoon snooze and gathered together the necessary items with which to carry out a repair. I clamped my Bluetooth phones on my head to help keep the wind out of my ears and found myself listening to BBC Radio 4. I had switched on half way through The World at One, and there was an item about a junior school. The school was desperately short of money (because of Tory cuts). It had special problems that money could solve. Half the children were from abroad, and many of them didn?t speak English. There were also difficult cultural issues to contend with. About a quarter of the kids were Special Needs. Nothing was said about the fact that this could have been a perfectly happy school with adequate resources (like most schools) were it not for the difficulties resulting from the excessive and indiscriminate immigration this country has suffered for the past thirty years. And I did wonder how many of the Special Needs kids were the result of first-cousin marriages. So, no background, no research, merely the message that the government and everyone who voted Tory were a set of absolute rotters for allowing this school to be in such a bad way.

Next up was a little programme about GB Shaw?s Pygmalion. As it happens I had to learn about this play for A Level. However I hardly recognised it from this programme, which put a weird 1970s-style women?s lib slant on it. This programme wasn?t really about the work of one of our great playwrights; it was just the vehicle for fifteen minutes of rather stale right-on anti-man claptrap.

I didn?t really pay any attention to The Archers. I haven?t bothered with it since they reduced the farming issues to almost nothing in favour of storylines about homosexuality and global warming and similar inappropriate, incongruous, nonsense.

Next up, Glenda Jackson, wrinkled pin-up of the extreme left, featured in a drama ? which turned out to be a sort of general-purpose, one size fits all, omnibus exercise in left-liberal proslytism. They really did crowbar every woke issue known to man into this three-quarters of an hour. The anti-hero was a male (bad) white (bad) rich (bad) hard working (bad) ambitious (bad) entrepreneur (bad) with a knighthood (bad) who was in oil (bad) and plastics (double bad). Somehow racial prejudice, global warming, pollution, misogyny; the whole gamut of liberal-left sacred cows in fact, were crowbarred into this little drama. I seriously did start to wonder if it was a BBC attempt at self parody. In fact it might have been for all I know because the gate was mended before the programme ended so with great relief I switched off. I must have missed the bit about the glories of veganism.

As a Yorkshireman I hate to think that I?m wasting money, so when I?ve paid for my TV licence I do feel obliged to consume some BBC output. It?s getting harder and harder though. The BBC just doesn?t seem to cater for ordinary guys like me who haven?t swallowed their strange slanted take on life. I dip into Radio Four hoping for something that isn?t riddled through and through with leftist claptrap, and I?m nearly always disappointed. I endure a programme hoping the next one will be better and I?m nearly always disappointed yet again. I can?t take much more. I think I?m going to have to join the ranks of the many who listen exclusively to LBC, Talk Radio, and Classic FM, and who watch nothing but You Tube and Netflix. I?ll just have to accept that the TV licence is an unjust tax that I have to pay on pain of imprisonment, even though it buys me nothing, relentlessly propagandises views opposed to my own, and allows no contrary view.

Bill

Reply to
williamwright
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So, what did you do to fix the gate?

Cheers, T i m

Reply to
T i m

Only 'nearly' ?.

Don't worry, Times Radio is coming soon on DAB. The BBC political correspondent handed in his resignation today, and he is joining them.

Reply to
Andrew
<rant snipped>

Then listen to the World Service. Simples.

I have a (small) amount of sympathy for your view, these days I make sure my phone had downloads of stuff that I actually want to hear from BBC Sounds. Mostly from Four and Four Extra.

Reply to
newshound

Pity. Good question spoilt by your inability to snip.

Bill's right though. Fascist Labour's inability to understand why they lost so badly is matched only by the BBC's tin-ear to anything except its own propaganda.

Reply to
Tim Streater

Everyone I knew back in the UK has done the declaration to avoid needing a licence for exactly the same reasons as you cite. The whole programming output on TV *and* radio is not fit for decent people to listen to or watch. I hope they axe the tax and let it rot.

Reply to
Cursitor Doom

Because I dipped in at random. Which should have a reasonable chance of providing a polymath such as myself with some harmless entertainment.

Bill

Reply to
williamwright

And to be honest I've got so wary of any seemingly innocuous programme turning into leftist propaganda that I even avoid stuff that ought to be OK.

Bill

Reply to
williamwright

Well, there were two problems. It's a steel farm gate 16ft wide. The post where it's hinged is a steel girder set in concrete. The other post is an extremely ancient length of oak, so old that it has none of the original surface. For some time the gate has drooped a bit so it hasn't met the thingy on the post that holds it shut. But today I found the gate ajar (and two big tups thinking about invading my orchard), and on closing it I saw that the spring loaded sliding bolt wasn't meeting the fastener on the oak post. Something must have moved but I couldn't figure out what. The 'hinges' are those long threaded eye bolts, so I loosened them off (with great difficulty) and moved the gate along both, in order to move it sideways so it met the fixture on the post, and also by differential adjustment of the two bolts I raised the latching end of the gate so it met the thingy on the post. The spring-loaded sliding bolt was then working but there wasn't much tolerance so I put a jubilee clip around it so the spring so it had a shorter distance of free travel. I had intended to put a bolt through it but decided a jubilee clip would be just as good and less trouble.

I felt like a proper farmer doing this job. I used my baby tractor to carry all the tools. It was fun.

Bill

Reply to
williamwright

Really? Excellent.

Bill

Reply to
williamwright

For an agricultural podcast, listen to

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I think I?m going to have to join the ranks of the many who listen

I see John Pienaar is following Eddie Mair out of the BBC door, I liked his R5L show, but it tended to get dropped and shunted around the schedules rather too often, and the podcast episodes only showed up erratically after the BBC Sounds/Google spat.

Reply to
Andy Burns

In message snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, Cursitor Doom snipped-for-privacy@notformail.com writes

Despite what you think, there's a lot of good stuff on BBC TV, radio and (now) online. It's unthinkable that the UK should not have a national broadcaster, but it does no harm to challenge its policies, expenditure and direction of travel. However, it's obvious that the now-silly licence should be scrapped, and instead it should be financed out of taxation (even though that does mean I'll be paying for it again!).

Reply to
Ian Jackson

I don't know what the Cabinet papers reveal but the declared purposes of the legislation included "that we should not allow a big monopoly to grow up which, at some time, the State might have to purchase" ;)

Reply to
Robin

Classic FM have blotted their copybook by taking on John Humphries.

I am finding Scala radio quite pleasant.

Reply to
Bob Eager

Oh dear, seems you were very unlucky. I thought myself that the likes of LBC are biased completely the other way, which also irks me. Is there no middle ground objective content any more I wonder? With regard to the ideas you spotted, it is called attention bias. You get so tuned to listening to things that are completely against your view, you tend to hear them more and more. I remember some time ago that a study was done about content consumption where people were given choices of biased news and they tended to go for the presentation that they felt confirmed their views, even if they did not realise it. However when forced to listen to a one size fits all often they found it annoying even though the facts were presented even handedly.

I guess it all comes down to the fact that nobody is unbiased and hence no matter what you do, it is not going to suit everyone. Indeed now we do have so much choice, the danger is that entrenched views get amplified as people never hear the other side. Interesting. Brian

Reply to
Brian Gaff (Sofa 2

With LBC it varies (a lot) based on the presenter, there is no overall station bias.

Reply to
Andy Burns

Aye.

Always good to find an excuse to get the baby tractor out. ;-)

Just what the doctor ordered then eh.

Cheers, T i m

Reply to
T i m

Guilty as charged - sorry!

So basically you only listen to or watch the BBC now just so you can bore us all by complaining about it here !-(

No sympathy - your posting history proves that it is you that are biased, not the BBC.

Reply to
Java Jive

Why? Thank heaven, R4's target audience isn't bigots like you!

Reply to
Java Jive

No - it's bigots like *you*.

Reply to
Tim Streater

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