Work ethic: start 'em young

Good to see the BBC doing its duty re the Anglo-Saxon Protestant Work Ethic. The concluding moral of this morning's edition of Chuggington - a train-based entertainment on CBeebies, in front of which I sometimes stick Brit Jnr to divert her while I make our breakfast - was "Remember Chuggers, hobbies are what you do in your spare time. The daytime is for learning and working."

I wonder if they have the same lesson in the Spanish version?

This incessant nagging is, I suppose, why at one time the sun never set on the British Empire, and we must carry the joyless moral from cradle to grave, so that when literally on one's deathbed one should feel vaguely guilty about not being up and about, hoovering the living room or washing the net curtains.

Dear Points of View, I wish to complain....

...about the plummeting standards of journalism on the BBC News website.

One element of my day job (now only an occasional element) is to fire off digestible little daily business news stories for various websites. Coming up with these used to be a cinch because you could simply re-hash the Beeb's efforts a bit. But take a look at this risible piece of 'Peter and Jane' writing posted in the Business section today:

The government will now pocket the money raised instead. The British Property Federation said this was unfair. The government said money had to be raised from somewhere. The scheme in question is called Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC).

Blah de blah. The cat sat on the mat. Then I woke up.

Doubtless this decline in standards is due to the sheer quantity of daily verbiage expected of news websites these days and they're now farming out copy to Indian schoolchildren but really, things have come to a pretty pass indeed when the Beeb isn't even worth plagiarising.

6 Music

The BBC has given 6 Music a death row reprieve but Asian Network is still for the chop. There was a general conspiracy theory around that the Beeb never had any intentions of cutting 6 Music in the first place, but were just using the threat as a smokescreen for getting rid of Asian Network without looking too racist. Quite plausible, as conspiracy theories go.

Hobson’s Choice

For family logistical reasons I have in recent weeks been sometimes required to cadge a lift to work in the morning with either of two colleagues. One of them listens to Chris Moyles on Radio 1. The other listens to Chris Evans on Radio 2.

I really cannot decide which DJ I like less; but I would like to express in the strongest terms my dissatisfaction with the BBC for installing in the breakfast slots of the nation’s mainstream radio channels the two most annoying people called Chris in the history of broadcasting.

Sacred music

Simon Russell Beale’s excellent BBC 4 series Sacred Music concluded last night with John Tavener, a composer whose intimidating, anachronistic religiosity reminds me of Geoffrey Hill’s. Makes you doubt your Doubts. It was nice to watch a whole programme about religion without Richard Dawkins appearing to state the bleedin’ obvious.

Sacred music is about humans, hope and hopelessness; God is the justification. In Dawkins’ and Bjorn from Abba's post-religious world, where middle distance-gazing professionals gather in conference centres to discuss painless suicide techniques, and where reclining in First Class on the Eurostar we eat Asian Fusion food from recyclable boxes and tap secret, bleak poems into our Apple notebooks et cetera, I Know That My Redeemer Liveth will still make perfect sense. More sense, if anything – the poignancy will verge on unbearable. Happy Easter!

Panorama stitch-up

“Tonight’s Panorama,” intoned Jeremy Vine in his Most Serious Voice, “will be an eye-opener for anyone who says that Britain has become a more racially tolerant place.”

Well it was revealing, but not for that reason. Here was the plot: a pair of Mancunian Asian undercover reporters decide to make a Panorama programme about racist bullying, so they rent a house in Southmead, the roughest estate in Bristol, and walk around the streets for two months in full Muslim gear seeking out racist bullies to be racially bullied by, until they have accumulated enough footage of racist bullying to make a half-hour Panorama programme about racist bullying. Cue handwringing headline: Britian is still racist! Or, on our local BBC news: Bristol is still racist! Or in the Community Meeting featured in depth on our local news: Southmead is still racist!

Except of course they weren’t bullied by Britain, or by Bristol, or even by Southmead, all of which are chock-full of non-racists; many, many more non-racists than there used to be 20 years ago. They were bullied by a small gang of vile, feral chav kids. I’ve no idea why the Panorama reporters thought there was anything special about their race or religion in this. Small gangs of vile, feral chav kids will be vile to you and make your life a misery if you’re Muslim, black, Chinese, ginger, disabled in any way, or just vaguely middle class-looking.

The revelation of the programme, of course, was the true depth of the liberal, socialist BBC Guardianista's loathing of the white underclass. The only real-life victims on camera were not the undercover Asian reporters (they were actors from Manchester), but the white kids, born without any sense of self-worth into a system of hopeless, circling welfare-dependency. The undercover reporters have now left Southmead and gone back to their real homes. The chavs are still there, and in a few years they’ll be churning out another generation of self-loathing, vile, bullied, bullying, hopeless welfare-dependent chavs into the system created and supported by the liberal, socialist BBC Guardianistas who will then send spies to make more television programmes about how awful and intolerant they are.