Fuck you BBC!

For several years now, British TV has degenerated to a mire of shit.

The only dramas that have been worth the attention span of anyone with half a brain have been few and far between, as have documentaries worth watching.

Admittedly there have been some good starts, but invariably these turn into something dismal - usually at the end of the first series.

Let's start with our biggest UK series - Doctor Who. I grew up with Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, possibly the two finest Doctors and positive male role-models. I was horrified when they gave the role to the "wimpy effeminate twat" from All Creatures Great and Small.

A truly wonderful restart with Ecclestone! Then a downgrade to Tennant (well more of a crossgrade), and though superb, Piper sort of became the main star. Smith kept it going and then, in an amazing turn of stupidity they decided to go for another downgrade to Capaldi - reminiscent of whatever idiot decided to employ that "simpering effeminate buffoon" known to my generation as "the gay one" to differentiate between the two Bakers, before COMPLETELY destroying any credibility as a superhero with McCoy and topping it off with a long-standing-series-killing always-looks-surprised-in-fact-he-only-has-one-expression McGann.

Don't get me wrong - Ecclestone, and especially Tennant, managed to restore the image of the doctor as a force to be reckoned with by any(one/thing) trying to destroy good in the universe. It's just that the latest incarnation has turned into another "weak and human" doctor, a bit like Superman losing his abilities and trying to stop a five-man bank-job on his own with normal human strength. Maybe Capaldi will prove me wrong.

There are some mainstays, Waking the Dead, Silent Witness ... can't think of any more. Sky and others made it into the running and some promising starts were made - well, obviously there's Game of Thrones :)

There have been a few good new dramas such as Misfits, Utopia, Broadchurch and a few others, but Utopia seems to be cancelled and Misfits was never the same after the second series. Comedy has died on UK TV. 2 Pints being probably the last good comedy series for anyone under 35 (and some of us over 35 :)

And then came Chris Ryan's  Strike Back. Brilliant! Action, classic British wit, an international stage coupled with a dash of SAS flavouring made it an instant success with me. At last a series with appeal to counter the mainstay of British TV over the last 10 years - American TV! And then they fucked it up. I guess the American backers demanded an American star so the first programme of series two saw them killing off the main reason I watched it (Armitage's character Porter) and for two years it was pretty dismal - this year it has brought itself out of the doldrums and is starting to look good again. It would have been much better if they had told us he had finished his tour and been sent off to the Special Projects team.

And there's the truth. For the last ten years British TV has been in it's death throes - all the reality/pretending to be reality/daytime tits out/night-time big brother/desert island/pretend survival and complete shit drivel soap operas killed it off. I started to watch American (and a lot of Canadian filmed/based) TV. Fringe, X-Files, Voyager, the progression was natural. I was already hooked and it was natural to progress into 24, Justified, Dexter, Reno 911, well - the list could go on for a while.

More recently I have detected a downturn in North American TV as well - their habit of throwing twenty programmes up and seeing which ones stick has led to some monumental cancellation cock-ups.

TV is run by advertising. Without it, there is no TV. The BBC has got by for decades because there was no competition, but now they want me to pay for a TV licence when I don't even watch UK TV. I stopped paying and cancelled my licence, filling in the "I don't watch live TV" form.

The BBC have been making money selling their products through the BBC America company. For years.

We paid for our licences because we wanted quality documentaries and programmes, and they gave us shit. The good stuff they made they sold abroad and STILL took our money for the shit they gave us.

They couldn't afford to pay for F1, but they did pay for football and minority sports, and for Welsh and Scottish programmes that hardly anyone can understand. How the fuck can they still demand money as a permanent tax when they don't even give us what we fucking want? Fuck you BBC!

I have relapsed ...

I used to be addicted to certain TV programs, well, I used to miss them when I could not watch them, and would watch 3 or 4 episodes at once to catch up - as soon as I possibly could. Sometimes that would mean working until 21:00 at the factory, then driving home for an hour, and finally settling in to watch the 3 or 4 programs I had missed. As you can imagine that left little time for sleep. Weekends were spent chatting or gaming online, or editing Wikipedia while catching up on the other 5 or 6 programmes I had missed.

Now, that may seem like wasted time - indeed if it were XFactor, Dancing with Muppets, or I'm a Twat Get Me Out of Here, I would agree. Unfortunately these were more interesting things, such as science documentaries, the Mars Rover landing live on NASA TV, Historical docs (indeed most docs), with a couple of progs like QI and NCIS for entertainment.

Since the back (well the arthritis) and subluxations took over my life, leading to a gradual loss of the freedoms most people enjoy and subsequently having to retire early, I found myself in a difficult place. Exercise became increasingly more difficult, walking became restrictive, and after I was unable to drive (due to loss of income) I was only left with my bicycle. That was great, because I could ride much further in the ten minutes my back allowed me to move, and riding used different muscles and position, which took strain off my back. Even struggling through things came to a stop as I deteriorated, and eventually I became unable to even ride my bicycle as the pins and needles from the subluxations got worse and worse. My back only went out once every two months, but the time between was getting less and less, and it was obvious that I could not carry on forcing myself to keep going through the pain as it was only leading to quicker deterioration. I ended up spending more and more time at the computer, and mainly laying down on the settee under painkillers so strong that even talking was problematic - apparently I "sounded like you're drunk", at 11 in the morning when I rang my team leader one time.

Laying down for two or three hours twice a day sounds great, and it sort of is for the first three months, especially as it stops the pain - but it was a difficult choice to choose that and lowered pain medication over losing control of one’s life by missing appointments, forgetting to do basic household tasks, and even melting a pan one day because I passed out while waiting for it to boil. So I did as much as I could, I had reduced my meds, lain down for a third of my waking hours to rest my back, which hurt more due to the meds reduction, and stopped stressful exercise. I still had to use my bike for going to meetings/appointments and emergencies like running out of electricity after 22:00, at which point it's either cycle four miles to get some, or wait until the next morning. Not so good when it's -3 degrees and you have electric storage heaters. If I wait until the morning, then that's 24 hours with no heat, as the radiators will be cold until midnight, when the economy7 kicks in and the heaters go on.

And so it was ok for a while. I laid down a lot, it's fucking boring after 20 mins, and I can't hold a book due to my shoulders, so I would just lay there until I was ok enough to try and sit at the pc again, or carry on doing the housework. And so that original time frame got expanded:

2 x 3or4 hrs. x 7 days =  40-50 hours a week spent laid down while awake.

Of course there are never enough documentaries on TV anyway, but definitely not enough to fill that amount of time. I started watching other shows. I would initially give them 2 episodes to see how they did, and then decide whether or not I would continue. My portfolio grew! Within a year I was watching, and had an invested interest in, at least 12 more shows. Suddenly my life was no longer a sponge for knowledge, but a sponge for socio-economic observations. Trends, hopes and wishes of fans, I started to pay much more interest in the links to shows, especially trendings through twitter & facefuck, as well as through fan forums on producers sites (NBC, CBS, BBC, ITV, A&E etc.), as I regard fan sites and MyFavProgWikis as both demeaning and, quite frankly, too anal.

I guess NCIS took hold most at first, I found myself trawling through earlier episodes to get a full list of Gibbs' rules to help a request on the forum, as well as making sure all the progs I was following were accurately portrayed on Wikipedia. It was a difficult time though; I had been spending a lot of time editing Wikipedia in the previous few years, and had made a nice little niche for myself doing things I loved on there for anything up to 7 or 8 hours a day. I was basically working there full-time, and did overtime whenever my back allowed. Having to reduce my time editing, copyediting, working on the robotics project, and looking after the 2000+ pages on my watchlist was a VERY difficult decision to make - I ended up with maybe 4 or 5 hours a week being the most I could manage, mainly after I made an important error on a very important copyedit when under my strong painkillers. 

Boredom sets in ...

 So, life became watching a lot of mainly American TV - NCIS, NCIS:LA, CSIs, The Simpsons (really? u need a link?), Family Guy, American Dad, the list goes on. At one point I had 72 programmes I was trying to watch, but British TV is so shit at continuity. One minute Kate was alive, then she was dead, then she was alive again, just like the 90s when Picard would reference something that had happened and it would happen three episodes later, or when you would watch the first part of a two-parter and have to wait up to as many as 6 episodes to see the second part - indeed sometimes it would never be shown as it had already been on but I had missed it. Showing things out of order because of slack in other areas, or keeping an exciting episode for a time when it wouldn't clash with a football match was a BBC, and indeed most of them in the end, classic cock-up.

Oh, the disappointment! So many shows cancelled, so many petitions to sign, so much hatred towards TV executives and writers ... people are so amusing. And then I thought "You know what, let's take this experiment a little further, get involved!". I started with a programme I was invested in already, NCIS. Gibbs. (Oh, sorry that was the answer to "Why?" that you were asking) If there is one character that I know would rescue Chuck Norris when the shit finally hits the fan and he gets in too deep, it's Gibbs (time would reveal another, but I will get on to that later).

I started by involving myself in the CBS forum, as I have mentioned previously. I made a couple of posts, looked around and then started to join in some of the ongoing shenanigans - some wordplay game and then the post came calling for us to try and assemble as many of Gibbs' rules as we could. Not an easy task I might add. They are few and far between, maybe one or two per season, and only mentioned in one line of dialogue. I got into it, watching old episodes, trying to find as many as I could. It was surprisingly fun.

So there I was, two years ago, losing all that. I couldn't watch TV as much, I had to stop editing Wikipedia, I couldn't cycle, my friends stopped visiting and involving me in events, I had no transport, I had lost my job, and I was spending hours laying down bored shitless, or watch TV. I realised that I had become so involved in my experiment that I had stopped experimenting and had just become part of it all. I started to get excited when programmes were coming around, and was even sad and disappointed when things got cancelled, their season ended, or went on hiatus mid-season (as a lot of American series do now).

Addiction sets in ...

In hindsight, I really should have known I was turning from experimenter to addict when I filled in the petition for Firefly to not be cancelled, or the other one I signed for FlashForward. I should have realised, when I started to watch hundreds of old documentaries, black & white films, and even got to the stage where I had watched so many films, I started to watch batches of speciality topics, Kurosawa, Eastwood, Stephen Chow, Film Noir, the list goes on. I even started to watch old TV series to fill in gaps, Star Trek (all), Smiley (and Le Carre in general), even The Goodies and Dad's Army.

TV is addictive, but I guess like an undercover policeman if you stay in it for too long you can end up finding it difficult to get out. It becomes part of your raison d'etre and the withdrawals are immense. I went to visit family three years ago, and was taken off-guard with swollen legs after flying. It was bad enough that I was cut off from TV for that time, and would not be able to watch much TV whilst there as it was the USA - all the programmes would be the latest episodes, and UK TV is usually six months behind. NCIS, Person of Interest (and John Reece, the only other person who could rescue Chuck Norris, as mentioned earlier), CSI, all would be out-of-sync. Not only that, but when I got back I was going to have to watch two and a bit weeks of catch up TV - and then I had to extend because my legs were still not right before flying again and risking them swelling again. Person of Interest was new, and was proving to be one of the best TV shows I had seen in the past ten years. I was gutted, and I also realised I was an addict.

So, I have admitted I am an addict, the next step is obvious. Enjoy It! My back is never going to get right, I have accepted I am somewhat disabled and adjusted accordingly, and so I did with my TV. I have it back to just watching, and I can go without it for weeks without it affecting me. I do get distracted from time to time, and this week has been one. I have broken my vows, lost my token, re-offended, relapsed, call it what you will.

This is not the same as when Michael Schumacher (get well soon) returned to F1. That was different, it was like a long-lost friend returning to the fold, and it made F1 worth watching again for a couple of years - as well as putting my decision on hold while I tried to decide who to take up the banner for (Button and TBA [either Raikkonnnnennn, Massa, or maybe Grosjean) - and there is just ONE thing to blame:

Relapse!

24 ... Jack Ryan is Back! Bastard! All those feelings came flooding back when it was announced a few months ago, I got excited when everything had started with the production process, and began to feel a growing sense of joy as the weeks counted down. I was beside myself when the preview was announced, and couldn't wait to watch it on YouTube! Now, I should mention that my TV broke just before Christmas, and I have had to watch everything on my PC. Reduced because of the breaks to lie down due to my back, or stand up every 40 mins to stop my legs swelling up.

"I can watch VirginAnywhere, all the TV channels of my package online - 24, on my PC, simulcast with the US @01:00 BST ! EXCELLENT!" I said to myself ...

DISASTER! Virgin don’t have Sky1 on the package anymore (if they ever did) ! NOOOOOOOOOO! I am desperate to watch the first 2 episodes and then the preview (I don't want any spoilers!). I am disappointed, angry, hurt, a bit lost, sad, an empty feeling inside, feel like I am missing out on something, mind racing on how I can get to watch it ...

I am a relapsed addict without even getting my fix (of 24) - just the thought of it was enough. How bizarre is that!

As Titch would say, eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

With only a few days before the start of this year’s F1 season (Australia 14 March), I am amazed at how car development has progressed.

This year’s changes are so radical compared to previous years, it will be a totally different kettle of rabbits (I know, but how different are rabbits to fish?).

* 8 speed gearbox
* brake and throttle by wire
* V8s -> V6 turbos
* 33% less fuel allowed (now limited to 100kg)
* ERS -> 250% of the last few seasons - from 60kw (max 6.7 sec) to 150kw (max 30 secs)
* Two electric motors, the second is to facilitate heat recovery from the turbo (the first is part of the ERS) and can be applied simultaneously, or directed to be stored in the battery-pack
* single exhaust exiting over the gearbox - no more blown diffusers (Yaaaaay! Red Bull won't like that lol)
* front lowered to prevent driver->car-nose impact (dildo/vacuum-cleaner/U.G.L.Y. noses are attracting attention from some, though Timothy Peter Kimberlin mistakenly claimed it was applied to the whole car "they [the cars] look like dildos")
* 5 second penalties for minor offences (this one is my personal fav)

And lastly, and by no means leastly, the fucking stupid rule about double points in the last race ... Bernie must have been on something that day.

I am also disappointed that Brazil has lost its "last race of the season" status. Brazil was such a nervous time for everyone - rain, crashes, heat, a technically difficult track - which always produced such dramatic season finales over the years, it is a shame that Abu Dhabi is now last.

All in all it is going to be great. I suspect that most races will see at least half the pack drop out with some problem or another during the first four or five races, as there is so little testing that these races will be about endurance testing teams have not been able to do on a completed car. Red Bull have already tried to bring mind games in by only finishing 18 laps during testing, while Mercedes look like their car could go to the moon and back.

My dilemma is who to support. I used to be a Fittipaldi fan until I watched Senna. Michael R. Schumacher driving at Monaco in his first race turned my head inside out and his rainmeister driving had me excited anytime the presenters said "looks like a spot of rain". When he had his 3 year hiatus I felt empty inside watching races, but I would cheer on anyone who looked like they would take out Lewis Hamilton (usually he did that himself tho lol). I guess Button. The cars have changed so much I don't believe any one driver in the current field can make me feel the way Fittipaldi Senna and Schumi did. They drove when cars needed a good driver to make them snap into shape, and watching them always got me excited. Any one of them could take a mediocre car from the middle of the grid and make it act like it was the best car in the race.

And then there is which car/team to support. I do not believe in supporting a team, normally. The only exclusion to this rule was Brawn GP. Ross Brawn made an amazing step in taking that massive risk to run a team, and the car was brilliant. It was like the old days had come back again, and they won!

I suspect I will hear myself shouting these phrases at the TV this year:

Come on Jenson! Go Button! … That’s it Kimi, go for it! ... Maybe I’ll even spare a little bit of love for Lotus, though it is the wrong Lotus I think? (not sure due to the fighting between them all over the team name, and I doubt any of them deserve it!)