Rev review rant

Rev is, by all accounts, quite good. The pre-publicity was promising. Post-performance reviews were upbeat. I would have liked to have seen it.

I have not yet been able to see it.

I didn't watch it when broadcast, because 10pm is a silly time for people who have to get up at 5.45 the next morning. No matter, I thought, I would wait to watch it on Virgin TV catch-up.

Except that the next day it wasn't available on catch-up. And when it finally did get there ... it's in HD.

It's in frakkin' HD.

H bloody D.

Why??

This is a 30 minute sitcom, you morons. What sad obsessives watch a sitcom for the effing HD?

No one, is the answer. No - one. At all. Ever. In the history of the world. Has watched a sitcom and thought: "you know, this would look better in HD."

But I think I have the answer. A sneaking suspicion. It's those TV people again - you know, the ones who work for the greatest public service broadcaster in the world and have no conception of what TV programmes actually are, so doing silly things like ruining the end of Dr Who with a plug for Graham Norton is quite acceptable. Programmes are televisual product, that is all: no finesse or understanding is required. HD is the new technology: it is policy to push the new technology. Rev is a new series: it is policy to push new serieses. Therefore, Rev must be pushed in HD. Stands to reason, doesn't it?

These are the same people who about ten years ago were assaulting our screens with those endless stupid adverts for Comedy Monday, where police pursue some comedian who has made the mistake of being funny on a day that isn't Monday, because the BBC has decreed Monday is Comedy Monday. The logic, in their tiny brains, is impeccable. Two Pints is (allegedly) comedy; Goodness Gracious Me is (very definitely) comedy; therefore we'll put all our comedy shows on Monday evening so that they can all be watched by people who like comedy. "There's a time and place for comedy. Save it for Mondays." It still makes me wake up in cold sweats.

Morons.

Rev is available on iPlayer, so all is not lost. I would have liked to have been able to watch it with my wife but apparently it's not to be. I suppose she could watch it at the same time on the PC in the living room and after we could compare notes. Technology, eh?

Department of Oh Get Over Yourself You Big Tart

From the Beeb:

"A legal battle has begun in an attempt to stop prayers being said before a Devon council's meetings.

The National Secular Society (NSS) is seeking a judicial review over whether prayers said at Bideford Town Council breach human rights legislation."

No. They don't. Legislation, maybe, that being a purely artificial construct. Human rights, no.

The regime currently ruling Burma/Myanmar breaches human rights.

The Taliban breach human rights.

A town council that has voted, twice, to keep the prayers before its meetings start is not breaching human rights. You don't like it, turn up to meetings five minutes late. Or mutter "arse" when everyone mutters "amen". Or whatever. Exercise your own human rights in response. But stop whining when a democratic vote offends you.

And while I'm in full Tunbridge Wells mode, telling a teenager to pull his trousers up doesn't breach his human rights either. I'm reasonably certain my right not to have a human backside thrust into my face takes priority.

End of rant. Resume your lives.

We the undersigned think child abusers should get away with it

An online petition demands the immediate release of Roman Polanski. It has some frighteningly recognisable names on it. Also Woody Allen, which shouldn't really surprise anyone.

EXTREMELY LOUD EXPLETIVE DELETED

What is wrong with these morons? He had sex with a 13 year old girl. Accounts vary, covering all points on a spectrum between "he drugged her" and "she was willing bit of jailbait gagging for it," but the basic fact is undeniable. Over 30 years later, the girl is now in her 40s ... and about the same age he was at the time.

Thirty years is certainly a long time. But lest you find your righteous zeal wavering, today's news also reports the guilty pleas of three people, one of them a nursery worker, involved in creating and distributing child porn. And if they'd got away with it until 2039, that would make it okay?

The gist of the petition is "we all love Roman, it was a long time ago, he's very talented don'cha know and film festivals should be above this sort of thing. Signed, lots of luvvies."

Terry Gilliam? Tilda Swinton?? What were you thinking?

The only names that don't surprise me - apart from Mr Allen - are several crew members from Polanski's latest which has now been left in limbo. Sadly this is an adaptation of Robert Harris's The Ghost, which is a film that badly needs to be made. We may just have to live with that.

One opinion I've overheard is that, since he's in Switzerland, the judges should petition for his immediate transfer to Dignitas. Hmm.

One more reason Skynet won't work

So, I needed to photocopy multiple copies of a manuscript that included blank pages. The helpful photocopier saw that I was trying to copy blank pages and concluded I obviously didn't really want to do that, so left the blank pages out. Result: pagination all mixed up in the multiple copies.

I had to copy another manuscript. This time I was cleverer. I wrote BLANK in large, friendly letters on the blank page. The copier still couldn't quite believe I wanted to waste valuable time, paper and toner on a page with BLANK scrawled on it and so again left the blanks out.

Please will machines stop trying to be helpful. It really doesn't help.

Software development and the democratic mandate

Two facts of life are there that really bug me.

One is the way that over time each release of a particular type of software becomes bigger and bigger, more and more bloated. I can remember (children) when a perfectly reasonable Windows-based word processor would install off floppies - floppies! - rather than a minimum of one CD. Exactly the same Word file can weigh in at approx. 30k (if I work on it at home) or 45k (if I work on it at work), due to the different versions of Office used. And so on. Fill in your own examples.

The other is the way that the longer a government stays in power, the more it has to fiddle with what already works perfectly well. And when you have what was already a pretty fiddlesome government by nature right at the start, 11 years later its fiddling is endemic. As m'friend David recently pointed out, Labour is now driven to fiddling with its own previous fiddles, so urgent is their need to appear to be doing stuff. But they're hardly unique in this. Just cast your mind back to the last days of Thatcher.

And therein lies the problem. It's not what needs doing, it's what they think it would be nice to be doing, and what they can do, so hey, let's do it. Look busy! In the fifteen or so years that I have been a Word user, I don't think there is a single feature that I regularly use that wasn't available right from the start; whereas, I can't think of a single new feature that I use at all. No, I tell a lie. The ability to have more than one document open at once is useful. But that's all. And I cannot think of one way that New Labour has improved my life.

All this comes from having downloaded Firefox 3 yesterday. I'm sure it does everything it says on the packet - makes my computer more secure, opens web pages quicker, etc. It also has - wait for it - a "back" button that is bigger than the "forward" button! Because - wait for it - users use the "back" button more! Gee-whillickers! This is as revolutionary, and as necessary, as increasing the size of the door handles on doors that I use most often. Thanks, I really feel I can work this out. The human brain is meant to have vast areas of unused memory so I might as well apply all that processing power to something.

Click on the address bar to enter a new URL and instead of what you used to get - a list of previously entered URLs, in declining order of likelihood - you get the URLs, plus their page titles, plus some kind of star rating that I'm sure I'll work out. Thanks again. I was the one who looked at those pages, I know what they are, I don't need their titles and I certainly don't need to know what my computer thought of them.

And meanwhile, to counter all these "advantages", when Best Beloved or I try to use our work webmail accounts, the screen now displays the messages in some ghastly unicode lookalike rather than a decent typeface. I would gladly trade all the star-rated URLs for the ability to check email without my eyes watering.

Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle.

How crime proceeds

Back in 2002 one day the front page of the Daily Mail fulminated about drug criminals profiting from their illegally gained fortune. Whichever vindictive bastard we then had as a Home Secretary (I know, doesn’t narrow it down, does it?) read his Daily Mail over his breakfast, choked, and hurriedly scribbled down an Act on his napkin that would remedy the situation. He was able to courier it to the House, fast track it through the committee stage and it was law by elevenses.

Or something like that. I may have glossed over some of the details. The point is, we now have the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, a.k.a. POCA, which says that offenders convicted of a drugs-related offence can have their assets seized. And why not? What could possibly go wrong?

Well, this could. The Times reports that a man with a drugs record was suspected – only suspected – of having gained his £4m fortune illegally, and so his assets were frozen. Obviously it went to court and he needed a defence, but because his assets were frozen, he couldn’t afford a decent barrister skilled in drugs law and no such barrister was prepared to work for the legal aid rate. So when it came to court, on the one hand we had the full might and majesty of the Crown Prosecution Service and on the other a financially embarrassed millionaire with no qualified representation. And so the judge halted the proceedings as an abuse of process – there was no chance of the guy getting a fair trial under English law. Whether he was guilty or not we will never know.

Yeah, go POCA!

Alternatively, chalk up one more victim to New Labour’s smugly self-righteous delusion that the affairs of man can be micro-managed by legislation, and if only everyone would apply the law exactly as it was meant to be applied when it was rushed through Parliament then everyone would be better off. I’m sorry, examine the legislation? Think ahead, try to predict and head off the unintended consequences? How could there possibly be unintended consequences? Look, we’re fighting the bad guys here. What is your problem?

Even Thatcher was never so smugly self-righteous as the current shower. Self-righteous, yes, but as far as she was concerned, if you didn’t agree with her then go screw yourselves because she was going to do it anyway. Which ultimately was her downfall. Thatcher, strange to think, had a certain minimal faith in human nature - that people could at least think for themselves (which they did, hence why she got chucked out). But Labour now has no faith in you, me, or itself, and certainly not the courts, which is why it has to fiddle and fine tune the law at every step. We’re all morons, needing legislation to guide us through every moment of our lives. There is no spirit of the law. Just the letter.

If Labour was an author, it would write a fairly decent and digestible 80,000 word novel, then gradually crank it up to about 500,000 words with endless explanatory paragraphs, adjectives and changing points of view so that at no stage was the reader’s imagination challenged, or indeed, exercised.

If Labour was a band, it would start as a bunch of mates in a garage with guitar, bass, drums and keyboards. It would then spend the next ten years over-producing an album in which every instrument (having gradually worked their up to a full orchestra, multi-ethnic choir and musique concrète) was balanced at exactly the right output for optimal listening on one particular highly specialised make of speaker, but rubbish for more popular brands that people actually use.

If Labour was a web designer it would start with a few simple lines of HTML and then Flash and Shockwave it out of existence.

Sadly Labour is none of the above. It’s our government.

When good will goes bad

• Update: very pleased to report that while MADD does exist, it disowns this particular poem. They also give good advice on much more constructive courses of action.

I do not forward circular emails, warnings, prayers, or any other of that ilk. Ever. No exceptions.

A recent and interesting essay by Orson Scott Card points out the dangers of doing so. Who among us hasn't received (or, blushingly, passed on) a hoax virus warning that we believed, or a cute little snippet of wisdom that we want to share, or an online petition for something years out of date ...

"... it is my firm belief that the forward button on your email software should be disabled until you can prove you have visited Hoaxbusters," says Mr C. Absolutely right. But he also goes on to point out that very often what you are forwarding is actually copyright to someone, which opens a whole new can of worms. Anyway, read the article. It's salutory, and apart from anything else will give you ammunition the next time someone sends you something that will allegedly amuse you.

But I wouldn't be saying this now if my ire hadn't coincidentally been raised by an online petition recently received. Well, it calls itself a petition, though as far as I can see it it doesn't actually petish anything. It just consists of a poem about someone killed by a drunk driver. At the end of this is:

"MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Drivers) IS HOPING TO GET 5,000 SIGNATURES ON THIS, THEN PASS IT ON TO SIGN."

When it reaches 5000 we are asked to pass it on to the MADD address in Dallas, TX. It currently has 1243 signatures, of which the last is the distant New Zealand (nowhere near Dallas) relative who passed it on to me. Oh, and let's not forget its final parting shot, in 48pt bold red text.

"If you receive this petition and do nothing but delete it, your selfishness knows no bounds.

Signing is such a small effort to make."

Um - I beg your pardon?

Excuse me?

You preachy judgemental sanctimonious smug self-satisfied obnoxious odious conceited little creep, excuse me?? How dare you - how dare you judge me for not sharing your little crusade? Let me not for one second devalue or disrespect the suffering of people who have lost loved ones to the drink-driving morons out there (the ones whose selfishness really does know no bounds, I might add). People who have had the core of their lives ripped out by some fool with an avoidable one too many. But don't you dare judge me for not sharing your values. Especially as, can I point out again, you haven't actually asked me to sign any kind of petition or do anything that will make the blindest bit of difference. You have asked me to add my name after an unattributed, maudlin poem and then clog up the bandwidth of a server somewhere in Texas, breaking the news to some official that I have never heard of and who has never heard of me that I'm against drink driving.

No. Won't. Kindly pull down your trousers, sit on something very spiky - the Eiffel Tower would work, or the Seattle Space Needle - and swivel. Very quickly.

My enemy's enemy

I learnt very early on in life that an easy way to feel morally superior is to be prepared to discuss something when the other party isn't. It can be pretty cold comfort when you're not part of the mob and the mob is following the one who shouts loudest, but in school politics you take what comfort you can. You slink back into your hole with a good book (a proudly intellectual and creative activity beyond the ability of the cretins to grasp) and quietly despise the lot of them in the privacy of your own head.

An advanced form of the game is to award points for every emotive buzzword used by the one leading the shouting down of your rational position to disguise the process as debate, e.g. "If you believe that then you're a bent commie."

I can’t remember when I learnt of the Parliamentary practice of talking out; I do remember a sense of disillusion like a slap in the face. It was so important to me to know that there was a place where grown-up, sensible adults could talk about anything in a grown-up, sensible way. Instead I learnt that sometimes, in lieu of an actual debate where – Heaven forefend – people may disagree with you and have the bad taste to point out your errors, clever tricks are employed to use up the allotted Parliamentary time and thus a bill dies like a fragile flower strangled by weeds. It struck me as being on the same level as people who win arguments on technicalities and with clever words, as if that somehow alters the very nature of reality. An activity that never failed to earn my adolescent contempt, and doesn't do too well with me as an adult either.

(Failing that, you can always just ban whoever you disagree with. Can you tell I grew up under Thatcher?)

Nowadays I'm thicker skinned and a little less starry eyed about Parliament, and sometimes you must sup with the devil. On Friday the amendment to the Freedom of Information Act that will exempt MPs from its provisions is up for grabs again. This was talked out the first time it came up for discussion, so it went to the bottom of the pile. Unusually, however, all the bills that are now ahead of it are incomplete so it gets another chance for debating in the House.

The bill's originator, David Maclean MP, says it's to protect constituents who need to know that their correspondence with their MP is totally confidential. Opponents say that of course constituents need to be granted anonymity, and they already have it under existing rules. Instinct says that Maclean's position may be what it's for, but it's not how it will be used. It will be used to hide as much they can get away with from the public eye, and that is a Bad Thing.

If talking out is the only way to kill it, then talk, my pretties, talk like you’ve never talked before.