This cartoon struck a chord. BBC News is really getting on my nerves these days. Channel 4 News covers issues much more in-depth without resorting to the descent into ‘That’s Life’ (remember that?) style street interviews. Look East is a big culprit in that respect – go into a local town and ask random passers by what they think, ideally showing their complete ignorance of the subject. We KNOW what we think. Hearing what selected other people think or don’t know isn’t going to change our views. We just want to see a report about the issue and know something’s being done about it (or not, as the case may be).

Another thing… Why do we have to vote on TV programs and phone into everything? I know they make money out of our calls, but I thought we paid these guys to make our entertainment for us – they’re supposed to be good at it and shouldn’t be getting ignoramuses (ignorami ?)  like me to contribute to their output.

Oh yeh… Breakfast on the BBC. Why has it become a vehicle for overrated pop stars, actors and authors to peddle their latest outpourings? Why, also, does it insist on promoting other TV programs all the time?

More and more lazy journalism. I dislike it intensely. Bring back news and abolish ‘infotainment’. It’s making people dumber (with apologies to all people who dislike the increasing use of the antithetical Americanism ‘smarter’, meaning more intelligent).

Rant over… for now

Oh look. The BBC news website has had a makeover. More white space. More images. Larger text. More sample items in each section. Looks OK.

I use it all the time, so if anything I spot puts me into ‘grumpy old man wearing trousers up to his chin’ mode, I’ll let you know!

You see, I used to like it, back when Christopher Eccleston reintroduced the character with Billie Piper as his sidekick. It was a bit edgy, fresh and intriguing, with clever twisting plot patterns being woven in the background.

Since then, it has decended into a typical ‘BBC-fest’ of  special guest stars & self-congratulation and has become a back-patting excercise for the Beeb and the writers and producers who are involved. The first series’ success became the actual focus, much to the detriment of the subsequent programme content.

When I went to see Miss Jenkins in an outdoor concert a couple of years back (see – I don’t just like rock music), she seemed to concentrate on her name-dropping and dress-changing rather than the actual content of her repertoire. It was all a big PR excercise rather than for the sake of the music. Style over content. No wonder she’s been signed up for this…

 BBC News – Katherine Jenkins to star in Christmas Doctor Who.

Oh, and did I mention the music in Doctor Who is still way too loud?

Fakenham’s a small town. You’d think it would be easy to let everybody know when you had some news to tell. Unfortunately, I haven’t found that to be true over the years. We all seem to be involved with friends and colleagues in small groups and news doesn’t always escape into the outside world efficiently.

Newspapers like The EDP, Fakenham Times and The Fakenham Sun play their part. In fact they do a really great job in keeping us all informed. Trouble is, they can only ever print a limited snapshot of what’s going on at any one time and they don’t all pick up on the same information.  Also, there are lots of different people you need to contact when you have something happening and need to tell the world - and if your news is business related you may not be able to reach your target audience easily.

When Kick Start Fakenham held its first tentative meeting over a year ago, I mentioned the fact that there was no central point of information distribution. No single place you could go to make sure that your news reached the right people. At the time, it looked like Kick Start might provide that central point, but their website is still to be published and if the truth’s known, they’re probably finding the same old problems themselves when they need to get their info published.

So, I’ve come up with something myself. It will be launching soon