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Yes, we are weary of all politics and elections,
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Talking Balls: A Masterclass

Well, here you are... the slightly less scary half of the 

pair of Balls that are perilously close 

to being part of the next UK government.

 

Forgive me

 I

 

Can't

 

help

talking

Balls

  ...and here is a home movie from the last time the
UK people we daft enough to trust me and theLabour party...

Weary already?

This election marathon is going to test the stamina of everyone in the country.The election debates before "selected" audiences have done little but keep the media excited and confused. So here is all you need to know...

Nigel Farage - the most direct

Dave looking Prime Ministerial

Scary Scottish Dominatrix and Big Spender of English Cash

The Biggest Loser: Ed "Talks in Slogans" Millband

Australian Woman Who Wants to Spend Your Money

Hi de Hi! hwyl fawr a phob lwc

"Just like that" - an excellent audience participation moment

Pritti by name: clear winner of the Political Totty Challenge

Brave face: half of Labour's pair of Balls

Future of the BBC: An opportunity not to be missed

The BBC review held by the DCMS House of Commons committee published its report.

No politicians dare tell the BBC where to get off, for the obvious reason that they have carelessly allowed the BBC to gain huge influence (if not control) of the UK's cultural (and political) agenda over the past 20 years.
 
We appreciate a lot of worthy work went into this document (and not a few "field trips" to gather facts in war zones like Denmark) but it is at least 3x longer than it needs to be. If we have to be charitable and avoid the temptation to summarise the future of an anachronism like the BBC in a single page, then we would start with the conclusions as an executive summary and let the readers delve in for the detail. We lost the will to live around page 70... but forced ourselves...

But this is a document focused on the care and feeding of a dinosaur that is facing a slow but certain extinction at the hands of a (fascist) liberal elite that knows better than the paying customers what the paying customers want to watch and hear.

The report dutifully repeats the deferential self interest of its various "witnesses". Mandy Rice Davies would have had a field day. Excursions down memory lane are inevitable in a report on a once-indispensable national institution that has been overtaken by evolution, and has been run aground by evidently the wrong people pursuing their own personal political agendas. Would the public rather have "Jeremy the nemesis of PC Clarkson" in charge - or a well meaning but aged opera buff, Lord Hall? 

The fact that the "save Jezza" vote is running at well more than 100:1 ahead of the prissy "Sack Jezza" North London media mafia and opera-loving numpties, seems to make the point rather well.

There is nowhere near enough rationalisation proposed in the report; it is another fudge, when in this period, the technology will completely outpace any decisions made at the next review, unless those doing it are VASTLY more radical than a bunch of the usual luvvies exhumed from the fossils of the Great & Good can ever envisage.

Most depressing of all is that amongst endless concern expressed for the support of the "creative industries" is that there is no reference to the priceless and shameless patronage afforded by the BBC to Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft (especially Skype) etc etc.

Although that said, it is arguable that YouTube provides the crucial clues to the future reality, since that contains all the grass roots content addressing every conceivable minority interest in politics, religion, society, sport and education that the BBC with £50bn pa could not possibly create and distribute. 

So maybe one answer is for a New BBC (NBBC) to provide a grown-up framework of regulation, review and recommendations for a UK devised (and owned) version of YouTube (let's call it timefree.tv for the purpose of argument) which of course allows viewers to contribute, vote and comment on absolutely everything.  Just as the theatre critics used to be the real arbiters of entertainment back at the turn of the last century, so it will be again as trusted critics acquire genre followings.

Jeremy Clarkson's anointed choice of viewing will be golden for advertisers. David Beckham's sports night will have a global following and advertiser base. It will tell his faithful following what passionate blokes want to watch.  Danny Cohen's coterie will hang on his personal viewing choices, and no advertisers will be in the least interested.

John Whittingdale,
DCMS Committee Chairman

Another opportunity that the report might have addressed was the growing contradictions of 18th century copyright in a globalised world of 21st century content. The BBC with a vast amount content under its copyright control enjoys a unique opportunity to try and lead with ideas about reform in this vexed area - before the US lobby manages to extend copyright shackles on its interests beyond the Second Coming. The idea that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs should still be coining it in for Disney after getting on for a century is interesting; but is it conducive to new creative activity?

This "winner take all" effect of copyright does not do a lot to develop the broader creative industry.

How about 50% of all royalties collected on works over 25 years old - especially where the original creator no longer exists as a person or corporately - should be paid to a creative innovation fund to be administered like the lottery "good causes fund" ? Morally, those works only remain valuable thanks to unanticipated innovations in storage and delivery which amount to "accidents of birth", so some of that windfall income should also go towards improving universal broadband access - along with all the other savings that can made from the ending of the BBC's creative ice age ..?

The recent Marvin Gaye Blurred Lines music copyright case will only unleash hordes of legal trolls with software that compares sound tracks and looks for similarities. I imagine Shazzam and its sound fingerprint technology is in a perfect position to make the lives of many musicians who may have "paid inadvertent homage" very difficult.

All the savings from the ending of BBC ice age should be spent on improving universal broadband access in the UK, and getting the grisly cartel of brutish mobile service providers back in line.

And finally, please pop along and sign this magnificent petition:  this is a not a vote on the vague facts of punch up case; this is a much more fundamental point that the BBC's medialand executives cost too much and listen too little.

Interesting times...

The 2015 election is set to be the most intersting and unpredictable in most living memories.

It's not just that UKIP has become credible, but also that the influence of duplicitous global corporations is greater than ever this time around - and has been called out many times for the negative contribution this makes to all our lives over the past 5 years.

And what a shabby bunch they all seem to be, united in their efforts to trick and exploit their customers at any cost to their integrity, and old-fashioned ideas of customer service.

TMP just got a trial phone SIM with EE (27m customers!)  in the effort to escape the awfulness of Vodafone. And another saga of custiomer woe  has commenced: £11.50 quoted overon the phone, turns out to be £17 in reality.

At least the call centres are all in the UK – for business users. Which is a pretty bald declaration that Indian call centres are for the lower classes of punter! The duplicity about availability of thr signal box local femtocell is also bordering on criminal deception, but I did enjoy this comment in the EE forums:

 

And although a SureSignal device uses the consumers’ own boadband  bandwidth to backhaul to Vodafone, they still charge any minutes used against your phone allowance! 

People who live in glass houses, etc.

The UK manifestations of these global organisations all have elements that function just barely enough to stay in business. But that’s about it – we seem to have lost the skills in this benighted country to get and keep any sort of “complete act” together. It seems to be a combination of the import of workers that barely speak English, the export of call centres to lands where they barely speak English, and the import of foreign senior managers. With most big UK companies now under foreign ownership, maybe that’s because imported CEOs that are willing to desert the land of their birth are sending signals that the job and the money is their allegiance and motivation, not local loyalties?

Why did the BoE have to import Mark Carney (although that presently looks like a good move) – maybe because he had not spent the past 15 years being smothered in the politically correct BS of the UK and Blair’s Stepford Civil Service.

But the totality of the present situation is that government (US and UK especially) has done deals with the various behemoths and allowed them to operate as cartels, and then agree amongst themselves to reduce customer service to a production line of barely functional web forms – where the victims usually get tripped up by inept web design and grim phone service. You know the sort of things – endless tedious forms that time out before you can finish them…

Once the almost universally deficient corporate support policies are exhausted, then the “official” complaints and ombudsman procedures slow everything down to a glacial pace - using excuses ranging from health and safety to data protection to try and shoo away as many potential complaints as possible.

And it works!

Most people now realise after a few encounters with call centres that they must be grateful for whatever crumbs of relief they can get, and accept that the full service as advertised is simply never going to happen. Although probably 99% of consumers wll regard formal complaining as futile... a tweet can help let off steam...

The way that phone companies like 02, EE, Vodafone and Three refuse to operate a 24x7x365 service can only be the result of collusion not to raise the industry bar on customer service. They all operate with call distributed centres in many time zones anyway. When TMP is in power, all "out of hours" service calls will be automatically routed to the private numbers of the Chairman and Dorectors.

And just as most people now believe that all professional politicians  are as bad as each other, so we believe that these corporate vampires are all as bad as each other, and that there is little to gain from shopping around.

The brazen way that cellphone companies use social media to pretend they are doing a great job mostly serves to raise blood pressure. The back-banter from customers who disagree is amusing, but confirms that many users are not impressed. The use of freefone numbers to call sales, and chargeable calls for support simply ought to be outlawed; I rate it as an abomination that is well up there with Wonga and other sharks.

This piece by Assange on Google is interesting reading, and has many current Ukraine overtones: https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

Assange and his various issues aside, Google is plainly acting beyond the remit the “public” imagines it patrols, and like the rest of the US tech behemoths, beyond the reach of anything approaching democratic accountability.

In the bigger picture, the main thing I detect is that “we the people” are becoming exhausted at the futility of trying to deal with the cynicism and indifference of these apparently unaccountable “computer says” operations in a very similar way that we are fed up with politics, politicians and bankers.  The famous Peter Finch “Mad as Hell” scene springs to mind. You might want to remind yourself…  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS4aiA17YsM  (George Carlin was a great act with a similar dystopian theme that spans both sides of the Atlantic very well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi6XV8yBFoU – well worth watching his entire canon, if you can get it onto your iPhone to watch on a plane.)

The nearest we presently have to a leader with the charisma and the bottle to go “slightly postal” is Nigel Farage, and despite being rounded on by a curious alliance of the media, even with hardly any policies, he is going from strength to strength. The prospect of a steady drip feed of more defector by elections to pave the way to next May, is doubtless not very welcome at Conservative HQ.

If Alan Johnson ever changed his mind and replaced Milliband, then it would be “end of days” for DC and his youthful coterie. Surely Labour’s death wish is not as inescapable as they make out?  And then I can see someone (presently most likely Boris Johnson?) feeling obliged to rescue the remnants of a post apocalypse Conservative party, and cutting the almost inevitable UKIP deals.

The fact that UKIP is doing this well with precious few policies on view ought to further unnerve the establishment. This is proof of the disconnect with established politics and the emergence of “none of the above”, where the disenchanted masses are prepared to back little more than an idea that has found its time, and is resonating.

So things could get quite exciting by next May; this is not going to be a boring election.