Gary Monro’s blog

Did anyone watch this in BBC1 the other day?

More fly-on-the-wall stuff… I’ve only actually watched one of these types of programmes before (‘Laddette to Lady‘) but I feel like the formula is now ancient. Take a group of people, put them in a new or unfamiliar environment, set them tasks, watch them fight and argue.

This David Dickinson chap I’ve seen before (mostly in television adverts, actually). Basically, he’s big in antiques - an expert, probably - so myself and the Mrs thought we’d try a bit of cultcha to see if we could learn something about old stuff.

I was disappointed from the outset. Seems you can’t make a programme these days unless you’re prepared to swear a bit and so, to show us all how game he is, we’re treated with the intro of a heavily bleeped Dickinson doing what the BBC wants him to do - swearing. I guess this is just so the BBC can demonstrate it’s not grown too high-brow while our attention was diverted. BBC, worry not. We know there’s no chance of you doing that…

Read (more…)

Some woman received nearly £7000 in housing and council tax benefits by claiming she was a single mother with four children.

But when she appeared as a contestant on Channel 4’s Wife Swap programme last November officials were among hundreds of thousands of viewers who saw that she was living with her husband, Michael Litchfield.

Why don’t our officials catch more of these obvious benefit cheats?

(Because they’re sitting at home watching ‘Wife Swap’ on the telly!)

Leesa Morris, of Rainham, east London, admitted falsely claiming benefit when she appeared before magistrates at Havering.

She was told that she could have been jailed but was given a 100-hour community punishment order and ordered to pay £100 costs.

What about repaying the 7 grand she stole?

How come the people who were erroneously given too much tax credit have to repay their money - causing, for some, genuine hardship - while a criminal gets away with a hundred quid fine?

Whoever said that crime doesn’t pay obviously didn’t live in the UK…

Question: what do you get when you teach an ignorant, foul-mouthed, belching trollop how to dress in a corset and walk properly?

Answer: An ignorant, foul-mouthed, belching trollop who, when required, can dress in a corset and walk properly.

I’m not sure how these fly-on-the-wall documentaries normally work but the format for this one - the only one I’ve ever watched - is this: scrape up about 10 crude, low-rent trollops from some gutter somewhere and take then to a finishing school with the hair-brained intention of, in a few weeks, reversing years and years of degradation and creating the polar opposite of what you started with. Put them through a few hoops - speech lessons, cookery classes, flower arranging - and, to add a bit of spice, eliminate one a week until you’re left with the least awful one. Crown that one a ‘lady’. Job done.

It’s not that these girls are common. There’s nothing wrong with being common - I sound like the Londoner I am, have no idea how to use a fish-knife, am totally unfamiliar with formal etiquette in polite company and as for dress-sense, well, just ask my wife. I am also totally uneducated. But there’s being common and there’s being horrible and these girls are just plain horrible.

In tonight’s episode one of them got drunk in a pub and snogged some bloke she’d just met there. This is in full view of her friends - who cheered her on - and the other customers there. Oh, and a television crew. For the same audience she lifted up the front of her skirt for all the world to see.

Next day they taught her flower arranging. Well, that should cure her, shouldn’t it? What she needs is a lobotomy.

One of the central weaknesses of the whole exercise is that the teachers are trying to alter the girls’ characters simply by altering their behaviours. This won’t work. Behaviours - making a souffle, learning to walk up stairs with grace, elocution lessons and so on - follow character. When you’re of the right state of mind then you pick up the behaviours.

And what is needed really is an engagement with their minds first of all. Someone needs to tell them that being a lady is first of all a state of mind, an attitude, a temperament. First and foremost whatever you are is a result of how you think, your beliefs and the attitudes these give rise to. So drinking, swearing, snogging and so on when out of sight of the instructors means that your ladylike behaviours are just a sham. Inside, you’re no different. You just went on a course, that’s all. And knowing which knife to butter your bread with is something you could teach a monkey. But it wouldn’t make the money a lady (or a gentleman).

The truth is, turning any of these girls into ladies requires the skills of an alchemist. The finishing school’s teachers are trying to turn lead into gold. Whichever one ‘wins’ this contest won’t be a lady. She’ll be the one most skilled at suppressing her worst habits and excesses - helped, of course, by the relative inability of her fellow contestants to suppress theirs.

One of the contestants was expelled yesterday. Her attitude all along was poor and she really couldn’t care less. One of her comments as she left was, There’s more to life than this. And I thought to myself, No, not for you there isn’t. The different things you were exposed to - which you could have made use of to expand your horizons a bit - are probably the last chances you’ll ever have of filling your life with something worthwhile. Now you go back to boozing, belching and ‘having a good time’ with your lousy attitude and low behaviour totally unaffected by the experience.

It’s strangely compelling, watching these women - not bad women but simply light-years away form being the ladies they are trying to be - mess it up every week. I find myself pleading, silently, that they behave themselves, that they see the light and really set themselves a standard that they’ll live with even when there’s nobody around to check up on them. But it looks like a hopeless cause. They try - at times - to meet their teachers’ expectations but, in truth, they really need to be meeting their own expectations. But they have few, if any, expectations of themselves. So whatever they do learn in this charade will be quickly forgotten on the next Friday night binge session.

As the saying goes: you can take a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.

Crikey. Even the title scares the life out of me.

It gets worse once the programme actually starts. One of the strengths of good science programmes - like Horizon - is that they manage to turn science into stories. Sometimes it’s a detective story, sometimes a scary story but always a story. And a story that keeps you glued to the very end. Forget tripe like EastEnders - give me something like this:

So these super-massive black holes (SMBHs from now on or my fingers will drop off) - not super, not massive but super and massive - are really very, very big indeed. In fact, they are between 1 million and 1 billion times bigger than the standard black hole.

And the standard black hole is a frightening enough thing. Caused by the ongoing contraction of its own matter the black hole - previously a star, now dead - becomes smaller and smaller and increasingly dense. Its gravitational pull becomes super-strong, pulling in gas from nearby stars, literally stripping them of all substance. Such is the intense pull of a black hole’s gravity that light itself cannot escape - hence its blackness. The more the black hole consumes the more massive - and therefore the more strong - it becomes. For me, black holes are the ultimate nightmare scenario. In my fevered imagination, one could drift by earth and simply relieve it of its atmosphere. That would be the end of us all.

You can’t see a black hole because it’s black. And it’s a hole. But you know they’re where they are by the effects they have on surrounding matter - other stars particularly. What scientists first discovered was a really big one - a SMBH - in the middle of a galaxy and it was quite a find in the world of cosmology. So they decided to look for some more.

(more…)