It's a funny thing because, especially having watched this morning's BBC Breakfast, this comment at Biased BBC made me laugh out loud (genuinely, rather than in the sarky Twitter sense of 'lol'):
The BBC forced-marriage miscegenation between Charlie Statist and No-go Munch-my-spaghetti are here again to entertain us this morning.
So pleased to see a castrato in a happy pairing with a feminatrix – showing the nation this is a viable life choice. BBC social agendas may well be under attack worldwide from news of hypocritical celebrity shenanigans – but here in little England (and Wales) our quaint laws protect our massive stars from criticism – how’s their tax affairs we wonder, anyone shining a light there? And this on the day I find to my dismay Jackie Chan was named in the Panama Papers – I wish the BBC could furnish us with more names and details. But we digress.
Our dynamic BBC duo reckon the Brexit debate is getting a bit ‘heated’. Strange, I thought the Leave campaign were doing rather well and scoring some good hits. Poor old Obama, it’s diplomacy 101 that when the POTUS visits England he don’t mention the Declaration of Independence. Boris made a barnstorming speech yesterday with many fine soundbites eg. ‘I say British-made French knickers to the Bremainers’ meanwhile the BBC crawling headlines pick out some very staid and bland statements – odd.
And so to the newspaper review. oh dear. As they read a few selected headlines it’s like Charlie and Naga live in a different BBC-approved world of news – scarcely parallel, more like divergent – a BBC universe of news but not as we know it, Jim.
Raise the red flag comrades, ‘Poet’ Ian McMillan is here to review the Tory Rags – “This is an Age of Inequality” is the text for today, you children of the ‘Blair rich project’. Our Ian reckons when the kids pick up the FT (assuming after somewhere north of two dozen years of state comp and uni they can read a newspaper and they actually choose the pink ‘un – a stretch, I know, but go with Ian for a moment) then the FT really ought to use more inventive graphics in their rich list. So we can visualise these rich bastards. You know kids- like the evil gits who brought you your i-phone and cheap air travel. 23 million hedgehogs piled up in a heap would do the job – I’m not kidding, it was Ian.
Then some riff about potatoes on the moon. Was it Attila the Stockbroker who sang about how he kept tropical fish – in his underpants. Now that was poetry. and there’s one for the teenagers!
And we close with our ‘poet’ Ian. Who wandered lonely as a climate skeptic on the BBC. Yes a big shout out for Climate Change and some stuff and nonsense about early daffodils. Come back from Mars to planet earth, Ian. Pop over to the post-Easter weather forecast and some news of late snow on them tha hills.
My main point of dissent here is that I absolutely loved Ian McMillan's contributions this morning.
His half-deadpan/half-broad-and-Northern humour had me laughing out loud several times - and he wore his worthy left-wingery (though unquestionably on display throughout) very lightly.
In fact I'd go so far as to say that this was the best BBC Breakfast paper review I've seen in a long while, at least since...well, since the Bard of Barnsley was last on...
...and I've been trying even since this morning to see if some kindly YouTube user has captured the moment and posted Ian's lovely, hilarious tribute to Phil Sayer, the voice of London Underground's 'Mind..the Gap' (who died this week), as I thought you'd love it too. Alas, no one has done so yet.
Ian McMillan was funnier in just two minutes here than the entirely of the last series of The Now Show...
...and here am I going on about it and you probably didn't see it, and (unless YouTube comes to the rescue) might never see it.. So I should probably shut up about it then.
Though it might get lost in translation (and as you probably had to be there, as it was the delivery that made it so funny), the Bard of Barnsley was commenting on To boldly grow: Nasa puts potatoes on menu for Mars. His suggestion was that Mars Pipers will be the obvious spud of choice and that "these will be anti-gravity potatoes, because there's less gravity on Mars, that will lift themselves from the chip pan up to your mouth."
Well, it amused me.
