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Rover Game Over?

 

It has been effectively for the last three weeks anyway. My Rover was over heating big time - on the A3, the temperature gauge was going off the scale, and the sounds of the engine were increased by the cacophony of the cooling fans working flat out. The garage diagnosed a blown head gasket, so for the last three quarters of a month, I have been at the tender mercies of public transport.

As experiences go, it has proved to be pretty uninspiring - it was quickly apparent just how rubbish the Rail and Bus systems are when you have to travel from Zone Four and beyond. It takes over double the drive time on the South West Trains service to go from New Malden to my workplace in Leatherhead, and even going short distances by rail to locales such as Kingston and Norbiton are subject to complications, as the frequent delays and cancellations make a relatively straight forward journey become, to use a technical term, a royal pain in the butt.

If the powers that be are in any way serious about getting people out of their cars and back on public transport, then some joined up thinking is required to make the public transport links outside of London Zone Three more effective. The evidence of such co-ordination between central government and the local authorities is pretty scant, so the only hope for me is that my car is repaired real soon.

Tweet-tastic!

Most radio can usually be categorised as either 'talk based', for example LBC, or be 'music based', like Virgin Radio, but all that is set to change as the dawn of the Digital Era has spawned a new style of radio broadcasting - there is now a digital station that broadcasts nothing but bird song!

It may sound like a load of old bird droppings but it is actually true, and what's more, the audience figures show that its popularity is spreading faster than Avian Flu. It seems that there is nothing more the general populace loves than hearing the sound of twittering through their Hi Fi Tweeters. The programming potential for this kind of thing seems to me to be kind of limited though, for example, would a chart show have things like;

"...and new in at number five, it's...a sparrow!"

The only other features they could usefully do would be in the 'Nigella's worm feast' or 'Jamie's Bird Seed Bonanza' type of vein. As you can tell, the possibilities are not endless.

The popularity of this station has been attributed to people finding bird song soothing and relaxing, which is something that is not true in my case. Whilst I have no serious problem with our feathered friends, their habit of dumping on my car is not very endearing, and the only memory associations their warblings invoke in me is the task of cleaning my Rover.

Broadcasting bird song is basically a creative cop out, as it is very easy to do - it literally is a case of doing radio on the cheep.

March of the Muppets?

Is it me, or are this year's crop of contestants in the BBC1 series 'The Apprentice' even more Muppet like than usual? As well as exhibiting the usual traits of self delusion, megalomania and egomania, quite a high proportion of this years selection of business hopefuls seem to be, in politically correct terms, common sensually challenged, or if you want to be blunt about it, as daft as a brush.

                                               Muppet master?

For those of you unfamiliar with the programme, the wannabe apprentices of the title fight it out for the hallowed prize of a six figure salary, working in the organisation of the famously forthright entrepreneur Alan Sugar. Sir Alan, as he likes to be known, sets them goals in a business related task, in which two teams of contestants compete, usually to return the most profit. Failure is definitely not an option, as one of the losing team is fired each week. As you can probably guess, the last person standing gets the job.

This weeks episode showed evidence that muppetry was indeed afoot. The teams had to use their combined business acumen to successfully provide the food at a local pub for a day. The Project Manager of the boy's team, a hapless guy called Ian, demonstrated very ably that he couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery, let alone sort out the food for one, and when he smugly announced at the start of the show that the word 'loser' was not in his vocabulary, the writing was on the wall. It came as absolutely no surprise that his team kind of ...er...lost. To be fair, he was not the only one. A fellow team mate believed that just because he had eaten out in a few Italian restaurants, he was a renowned expert in Italian Cuisine. The girls team, although slightly more organised, were not much better, muddling through despite loads of bickering and back biting. Basically it was a case of muppetry of the heinous.

As is the case with most of these shows, the contestants are probably not chosen entirely for their business ability - every show needs that element of entertainment value, and that is something that 'The Apprentice' provides in spades. The heady mix of failure in the face of adversity and the judgement day styli of the boardroom scenes make it compulsive viewing indeed, making it probably the best reality show on the TV at the moment.

Pub Price Polarisation

Price rises, as anyone but the most naive will tell you, are a fact of life, and the cost of drinks in pubs is no exception to this rule. Whilst not claiming to remember that halcyon period when you could buy seventeen pints, all the Pork Scratchings you could shove in your cake hole, a slap up fish and chip supper, and still get change from half a shilling, the level of prices charged for booze in our public houses seems to me to be veering towards the excessive.

                                                      

Yesterday evening at the pub, after buying the first round of drinks, I was surprised to find that the cost of my favourite pint had gone up to £3.00 exactly. Logically, this should not have been such a big deal, as I had been effectively paying £3.00 pounds a pint for quite a while - the price crept up from £2.65 to £2.70, then up to £2.75, and so on, which in practical terms, is an approximation to the 300 pence mark. Now that the £3.00 price has been hit, things start looking very different, as psychologically, any further price increases start the build up to the £4.00 milestone. As I was going for a beer, and since the pub was located in Wimbledon, £3.00 was probably relatively low when compared to the price of lagers and to the charges made in other boozers closer to the centre of London, but it still bumps up the cost of buying a round.

If the cost of a pub night out carries on increasing at the rate it is now, going out for a couple of pints will soon become a luxury that few people can afford.