Recommendation Time

"How YOU doin'?"

Simon Evans, the only right-wing comedian in the BBC Radio 4 village (and, no, unlike Daffyd from Little Britain, he's probably not imagining that!), has a new series of Simon Evans Goes to Market going out at the moment on Radio 4. It's not your run-of-the-mill, predictable BBC comedy show. I came away having laughed a bit and having learned a lot, this week about the big social media corporations. It was genuinely illuminating. Very good!

I'd also like to recommend this week's The Infinite Monkey Cage on 'The Secret Life of Birds'. (Forget your 'hatred' of Brian Cox and Robin Ince please!). Yes, the 'secret life' turned out to be mainly the 'sex life', but this programme is so valuable for giving voice to some wonderful scientists. This week it was the University of Sheffield's Professor Tim Birkhead, who did himself great credit, especially for his bit on male ducks - particularly the Argentine lake duck (a veritable Peronist duck if ever I've heard one)..

I'll summarise:

Not many bird species have a penis, but male ducks (including the mallard) have. Their penis isn't like ours though. It's a spiral, explosive structure powered by lymph rather than blood. The male Argentine lake duck (about a foot in length) has an 18-inch penis. The female duck has a complex vagina to match - at the most extreme, three side branches and a very vigorous spiral. The female's vagina spirals in the opposite direction to the male's spiralling penis. If a female is forced upon (raped) she can close her ovary duct and send the male's penis off down a blind alley.

One for Jane Gravy that!

Weekend Ramble (I)

As it's becoming nigh on impossible to find the time to watch the BBC let alone blog about it, here are some very random thoughts on things that have managed to cross my increasingly wonky radar over the past few days....

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The Daily Fail (or Daily Heil, to taste) has quite a story today about the goings-on at the BBC Asian Network. 

I don't know whether to laugh or cry about it, so I'll do neither. 

Due to an "accident" a private group conversation on supposedly privacy-guaranteeing WattsApp between a small number of BBC producers, DJs and presenters (somehow) ended up being seen by the very same female BBC Asian Network producer who they (or at least some of them) were lusting after. Their lust for her then (somehow) became public knowledge. As did their lust for a female presenter - and (oh dear!) their private banter about "Pakis" (who they mocked), and their "homophobic" language. 

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!

Naturally, the Daily Mail saw fit to publish a photo of the lust-inducing female presenter in a particularly lust-inducing photo - something that we at ITBB would never consider appropriate. #everydaysexism.

Of course, at one level, it's screamingly funny that there's a 'scandal' about the hyper-PC BBC's Asian Network featuring a bunch of BBC 'lads' being about as un-PC as it's possible to be and landing the BBC in it. But it's also grimly depressing that a purely private bit of un-PC banter that should never have been made public was made public. (Who at the BBC helped make it public?) 

And one producer has been given a written warning, the other sacked, the DJ has been told he can't do any extra shifts, and our old friend Tommy Sandhu (of Sunday Morning Live and The One Show 'fame') is said by the Mail to be fighting for his career at the BBC.

Purely private banter, leaked (somehow), and BBC Asian Network staff are sacked, reprimanded, sanctioned or under investigation, and yet more famous BBC staff, including senior reporters, can publicly say what the heck they like on Twitter regarding matters of political controversy, in breach of both the letter and the spirit of BBC impartiality, and get away with it with impunity. 

There's something wrong here somewhere. 

Should we start a Free the Asian Network Four campaign?

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So the BBC has finally given Alan Partridge a new series. (Hopefully those lapdance fantasies will finally stop now).

In an interview with The New European, his agent Steve Coogan tells us that he'll be returning to the corporation and our TV screens next spring and, yes, he'll be talking Brexit:

Alan would have voted Brexit for sure. Hard Brexit, given the choice. He’s a Brexiteer because the Daily Mail told him to be.

And why does Steve Coogan think that Alan's back on the Beeb?:

It’s conceivable, because in this age of Brexit, they (the BBC) might think they need to get in touch with the ‘Little Englanders’ they ignore.

Now, yes, the BBC may well be making the anti-farmer, climate-change-believing Norwich celebrity who holds impeccable BBC-friendly views on other things too ("Never, never criticise Muslims. Only Christians. And Jews a little bit") into a Brexiteer rather than a Remoaner, and it's more than likely that the programme will mock Brexit supporters without any counterbalancing mockery of opponents of Brexit, but that's BBC comedy for you! It's nothing if not impartial, except for not being impartial.

Anyhow, what struck me about the second quote above is that even Steve Coogan appears to believe that the BBC are out of touch with Brexit supporters. Back of the net!

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Oh, and talking about BBC comedy, there's a funny and spot-on TCW piece, a kind of moral fable, by Nick Booth about the kind of comedians who litter the BBC's schedules, doing the same old routines about Trump and the Daily Mail. (You might call them 'BBC comedians'). It's well worth a read.

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James O'Brien was a big surprise to his parents. They found him on the doorstep. They were expecting a bottle of milk.

Evan Davis went to buy some camouflage trousers the other day but he couldn't find any.

Ian Katz sleeps like a baby. He wakes up screaming every morning around 3am.

Emily Maitlis was a dancer once in Swan Lake. She fell in.

Kirsty Walk goes into a pet shop. She says: ‘I’d like to buy a wasp please.’ The shopkeeper says: ‘Sorry Ms, but we don’t sell wasps.’ Kirsty (interrupting) says: ‘But you’ve got one in the window!!’

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Alan at Biased-BBC is perfectly correct about this being a misleading headline: 

It makes it sound as if she's making a positive statement. When you listen to the interview though it's clear that she's not making a positive statement. Far from it. (The opening word "Unfortunately" is a big clue). No one watching it could doubt that she'd much prefer to be performing under the Russian flag. 

The blurb below the headline is just as misleading, and even manages to slightly-but-tellingly misquote Miss Klishina. She doesn't say, "It doesn't matter about the flag". She says, "Everyone who's coming to compete here in London from Russia, we know where we're from. And everyone knows that we're Team....erm...It doesn't matter which flag they will see in the stadium, so....inside, and I'm sure that all spectators they know where we're from."

The lads from the Asian Network would probably have had something to say about Darya on WattsApp, poor things.

P.S. My friends have a dog that looks exactly like Vladimir Putin (except that the dog has bigger ears than the Russian leader). True story. 

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Brian Cox (the pop star professor turned BBC presenter rather than the actor) believes that the idea that we - you, me, Sue, Brian Cox, everyone alive on Earth, the whole solar system, the Milky Way, every other galaxy, our entire universe indeed - are, logically, more likely than not to be part of one giant simulation created by and run by a superior civilisation. He really does. 

We learned that from this week's edition of The Infinite Monkey Cage, where the theme was: 'Are We Living in a Simulation?'. It was absolutely fascinating, but it was proof positive to my mind - and, though he didn't say it explicitly, to one of the programme's guests - that such thinking is no more and no less logical than St. Anselm's or St. Thomas Aquinas's proofs for the existence of God. 

It also suggested to me the truth of the famous saying of G.K. Chesterton's that when people stop believing in God they'll believe in anything. 

I'd amend that, however, to "when some people stop believing in God they'll believe in anything" - case in point, Prof. Brian Cox (if he really exists). 

Naturally, being the BBC, Robin Ince & Co. repeatedly joked about the superior civilisation having a laugh by running the 'Trump wins' simulation of reality - a simulation, Robin & Co. didn't add, where comedians like him might well have been programmed by our superior virtual reality creators to crack nothing but jokes about Trump (or the Daily Heil) and, thus, be condemned to a virtual eternity of being a Radio 4 comedian. 

Ghosts

This morning's The Infinite Monkey Cage Christmas Special (on the subject of ghosts and ghost stories) inevitably began with a now bog-standard BBC quip from Robin Ince about 2016 being a terrible year (see yesterday), but who couldn't forgive our (Christmas) Robin for that when we also had this kind of thing?:

Neil deGrasse Tyson: But if I may broaden the concept of 'ghost'? As an astrophysicist it's not hard for me to think of stars that have long ago died whose light only just reaches us on Christmas Day telling us that they once did die. And that stream of light is a ghost, a kind of spirit energy of a last gasp of a star's life. So when I look up at the night's sky I know that some fraction of the stars I see are ghosts of a star that was once alive. 

Brian Cox: No, it's just photons.

And Nick Baines, the go-ahead Bishop of Leeds, shared a joke:

I was walking down the road and I saw a baby ghost on the pavement. On the other hand it could have been a handkerchief.

Why people hate the number 745

On a lighter note (and, boy, don't we need it!), The Infinite Monkey Cage returned for its tenth series this week. 

It talked maths, and was funny and fascinating. 

I could transcribe some of the most interesting bits - the mathematical bits - but I won't. Instead, I'll just transcribe a couple of the audience's answers at the end of the programme, both based on the question, "What is your least favourite number, and why?": 

Answer 1: "3.141592653589793238462643383279...because it reminds me of food, and I am on a diet."

Answer 2: "7.45. Thought for the Day".

That last one got the biggest laugh of the entire show.

The Infinite Monkey Cage

I do rather like Radio 4's The Infinite Monkey Cage. 

It's a robustly pro-science programme in the network's overwhelmingly arts-dominated schedule and almost every edition features bona fide scientists sharing their insights with the listening public. The results can often be fascinating and informative and the programme has covered a vast range of scientific fields over the course of its nine series.

Today's edition, for example, featured immunologist Dr Sheena Cruickshank of Manchester University. She specialises in parasitic worms and shared something that I found very interesting - so much so that I'll share it with you here (though not quite as much as I first shared when I posted this piece!).

Parasitic worms are something which we, in countries like the United Kingdom, don't suffer from any more. In the past, however, they've been a significant problem, and even King Richard III suffered from them -  as we recently discovered. 

Many countries though do have a serious problem with parasitic worms and some 2 billion people around the world still suffer from the the little blighters.

Parasitic worms, indeed, are the main reason why children in many countries don't go to school. Deworming in Kenya has, therefore, resulted in school attendance rising by 20% there. 

Intriguingly, according to Sheena Cruickshank, whilst we in the UK (and the U.S. and Europe) may not suffer from parasitic worms any more we do suffer a lot from allergies. In contrast, countries where worms are a serious problem don't have a significant problem with allergies. Why is that? (I'll leave that question hanging in the air).

I suppose the downside with The Infinite Monkey Cage is that its comedy + science format can force some of the serious scientists who appear on it to feel the need to try to be funny, resulting in some of them seeming over-larky - something which can make listeners squirm (like Richard III with his worms). Plus some of the comedians can spoil the programme by being either unremittingly jokey or seriously dull. 

What though of the two presenters, Robin Ince and Brian Cox?

They are, I suppose, a BBC arts graduate Radio 4 controller's dream pairing for such a programme: a left-wing 'Radio 4 comedian' [you know the type]...and Brian Cox [the BBC's go-to-for-everything-scientific man of the moment].

Still, I have to say that I don't have an issue with Brian Cox on The Infinite Monkey Cage. He's quite an engaging presence and doesn't intrude too much. 

Neither does Robin Ince, though he's less to my taste. 

I like his enthusiasm for science, but he rarely makes me laugh. I don't mean to be unkind but his level of humour is on a par with that of Marcus Brigstocke. (Ouch!) Plus, being a Rightie, I always await with a sense of grim inevitability his invariable left-wing/right-on crack, whatever it may be - a dig at Boris Johnson, Sarah Palin or the Daily Mail maybe - followed by the equally inevitable dutiful half-laugh from the audience. (Today we were 'treated' to another time-honoured right-on whinge about girls being given girls' toys and boys being given boys' toys). 

Still, even Robin Ince's 'humour' can be forgiven for the shafts of genuine laughter and scientific illumination provided by The Infinite Monkey Cage.