Blog: particle acceleration and The Daily Mail

Like many people my age, given a college computer and five minutes before my next lesson I will aimless read and re-read various pages on the BBC News and Sport websites. Why I assume that a story concerning Roald Dahl’s shed being moved will have updated after a minute of reading about the Rugby world cup that I haven’t watched any of, I don’t know, but I refresh the page anyway. 

As dull as my existence may seem in the light of that previous paragraph, aimless browsing in fact led me to read a really rather interesting article about the CERN tube thing that lives underneath Switzerland this week. Apparently some particles travelled faster than the speed of light, which, to physicists at least, is the equivalent of finding out that two plus three actually equals Al Jazeera. If proved reliable with further testing this finding also means that Einstein (or one of his theories) was wrong. Surely then if Einstein can’t be trusted on physics, other previously universally trusted resources such as textbooks, head university lecturers and Wikipedia are in fact as reliable as the moral compass of a Daily Mail journalist. Speaking of which, I took a look at what the Mail online had to say about this scientific discovery, only to find myself distracted by the column of tit-related scandal that runs down the side of the page, drawing my eyes and soul into a murky world of the x-factor and cancer. 

Anyway, the BBC article essentially puts into perspective how apathetic we’ve become when it comes to the kind of news that really should be shaking the foundations of what we know as reality. We’re so used to this kind of headline, that if it became clear that all mass, time and existence led directly back to Fred Dibnah then we’d wait for the relevant satirical reference on ‘Mock the Week’ before forgetting all about it. 

We’re lucky in this country though, as it’s not everywhere that often confusing and sometimes nihilistic physics theories actually make the mainstream. The highly successful ‘Wonders of the Universe’ is a good example, although it and Brian Cox’s popularity are a slight mystery to me. Cox seems so smiley and relaxed when he speaks it’s almost as if he’s receiving an amazing massage from an out of shot koala bear. He also uses the words billion and trillion with such regularity that they quickly lose all sense of being amazing and huge- as result, by the end of the show the only way to make the universe seem anything but tiny is for Cox to use made-up numbers like a dillion gajillion.  

Yet despite all this Cox has (apparently) become a bit of a sex icon. In the same way Elvis inspired a generation of teenage girls to live the rock and roll dream, Cox has inspired a generation of women approaching middle age to contemplate the relative position of dark  matter in the universe in terms of time and gravity. This can only be a good thing for physics, and it also means it no longer relies entirely on the jokes in the CGP textbooks to make itself seem interesting. 

Before I go I should mention that this blog almost definitely contains numerous physics-related inaccuracies. So if you notice one, please just lower your personal opinion of me without letting me know, because editing is just effort.

Blog: Personal statements

A while back I said to myself that I was going to spend a couple of hours a week attempting to furiously mock whatever had been on TV in the recent past. Unfortunately this week I’ve essentially not watched enough TV to fulfil this remit, so I don’t have any particular programme to make fun of via humorously constructed similes.

I need something else to write about. But to be fair, as far as I’m aware only about two to five people actually read what I write. I could then just take the liberty of choosing a subject extremely specific to my existence; for instance I might spend a few paragraphs ranting about how ridiculously full the bike racks at college are now that the first years have all decided there is literally no alternative to cycling. But because I’m kind, and also because I can’t think of that much bike-rack related material, I’ll write about something a tad more broad.

It’s heading towards that time of year when the majority of seventeen and eighteen year olds all suddenly realise for the first time in their lives that they have great leadership skills. That’s right, the few months where everyone attempts to write their personal statement. For those of you who have somehow remained oblivious to such a document, the personal statement is where university applicants spend four thousand characters trying to make it seem like having played football in Year 11 proves that they have the dedication and ability to transfer existing skills to new environments. Basically it’s just a big ‘I’m not as terrible as my grades suggest’ plea, optimistically sent to a bunch of universities.

Unavoidably, such a document will always be rich with exaggeration. Because, let’s face it, saying “I played football a bit because tennis club wasn’t on in the winter” doesn’t sound anywhere near as good as the whole dedication and ability lie I wrote in the previous paragraph. The thing is, universities must know this by now and are probably more impressed when someone claims to have little to no communication ability at all, because at least they know the candidate’s honest.

Of course we’re told that those who read our personal statements may be reading hundreds each day, so you have to make yours interesting for it to stand out. In reality, if this is the case these university employees are probably so mind-blowingly bored and alienated that if they read a personal statement that was just a summary of the entire third season of Glee, they’d expressionlessly move it onto the maybe pile without even batting an eyelid (yes, I do imagine they have yes, no and maybe piles).

They don’t just rely on what you say about yourself though: teacher references supposedly have a similar weighting. This is a problem if your tutor is the kind so inattentive that they start a one-to-one conversation with “so you are…?” in the hope that when you say your name and they’ll nod and repeat it quickly enough afterwards to seem like they knew. They look at all your grades as well, which is a shame, because a lot of people I know saw GCSEs as just a glamourized version of SATs in the same way real life is just a glamourized version of playing Xbox. Coincidentally, playing Xbox is just one of the things that many applicants will claim has provided them with an interest in how technology has developed and a strong ability to work alone.

Ultimately though the amount of feedback you’ll get when you write your personal statement will dilute it so heavily that it won’t even be vaguely personal. It’s a bit like a strange, application-based version of Chinese whispers, where what you wanted to write is the initial whisper and what actually gets sent off is the last, strange statement that contains only a few misunderstood fragments of the original and makes everyone in the room laugh when you reveal what you initially said.  

So there you go. A blog thing that isn’t about TV. Now to find somewhere to put my bike.

TV Blog: Formula 1

The coverage of formula 1 is set to slip partially into the hands of Sky next year and somewhat out of the hands of the BBC. This has disappointed many fans of the sport (and pleased many fans of repetitive adverts), but it is important to consider that this deal was finalised by Bernie Ecclestone, and when Ecclestone is involved nothing is ever finalised.

For those of you who don’t know who Bernie Ecclestone is, he’s a hundred and twelve years old (rumoured to be immortal), looks like someone’s started to draw a lasagne and then given up and made it into a person, and enjoys making absurd decisions whenever he can. As the boss of F1 Bernie’s job is to make sure the sport is handled in the most professional way possible. However this remit seems to have passed over his head, which considering his height is not surprising, and instead he has revelled in suggesting a chocolate medal system for drivers, an on-track sprinkler system to appeal to fans of Mario kart, and is looking forward to commissioning a Sudan grand prix. Because of Ecclestone, I honestly expect to be greeted with the news that the UK coverage is to be shown primarily on ‘QVC’, with a highlights package being broadcast every half a year on ‘men and motors’. 

It’ll be a shame to lose some of the BBC’s coverage though, because overall it’s been of excellent quality. Sure, the line-up was never perfect. Eddie Jordan’s rants are absolutely unintelligible: it’s like he starts making a point, thinks of a subsequent point as he’s speaking, and then tries to start that point before finishing the current one, only to revisit strands of the original point half-way through a third point. All of this is interspersed with hand gestures and sighs that suggest he’s just as annoyed as we are that he can’t express what he’s trying to say. 

One the other hand you have David Coulthard, who looks like he was conceived when two cubist paintings decided to mate. DC is rather dissimilar to Eddie in his presentation style, and can eloquently express his Red Bull bias tinted comments with ease. Whenever Eddie is speaking Coulthard always looks highly and rightfully embarrassed, probably in the same way a teenager would look if his mum went up to his friends and asked them whether he’s as sweet with them as he is at home. 

Finally, you have Jake Humphrey, who took the lead role from ITV’s Steve Rider when the BBC started covering F1. This was good because Steve Rider held his microphone like someone had asked him to hold one of their sausages (hold it properly damnit man!). Humphrey used to present the CBBC classic ‘Bamzooki’, which if I remember correctly involved a group of children shouting at an empty table onto which blocky creature things were later superimposed. Clearly Humphrey is good at dealing with children, which is a useful ability to have when working with Eddie Jordan.

The charisma of the three works fairly well, although the jokes about pink shirts and Eddie being old sound like they were lifted from a script to a Spotify advert that tries to be funny. To be honest, I’m not even going to worry about who covers what next year. There are always not at all illegal internet streams, and if Vettel’s current dominance continues then I might as well just listen to the German national anthem on repeat anyway.

TV Blog: Ortis Deley vs. Jonathan Ross

It’s that time of year again when pleasantries are dominated by the lines “doesn’t it get dark early now!” and “the summer’s gone quick hasn’t it!”. At what speed time would have to travel for it to feel like summer has gone at an expected rate I don’t know as I’m not a scientist; unfortunately Stephen Hawking is yet to answer my email on this but I’ll let you know when I can.

Anyway, the athletics world championships were broadcast this week, with Channel 4 doing the honours of ruining the coverage by showing adverts at the same rate a seven year old who’s learnt to cartwheel shows his mum. Channel 4 also decided it would be a good idea to get Ortis Deley, a man with no knowledge of athletics and an utter inability to express any strands of understanding he might have, and sit him next to Michael Johnson. The result was as expected: Ortis managed to find awkward pauses in places where David Brent wouldn’t dare look, creating an atmosphere of similar discomfort to when the Prince Phillip greets Barack Obama. Deley was hastily replaced by a trendy indie thing stolen from T4 who is so hip his facial hair is actually an underground band yet to be discovered.

Jonathan Ross has also returned to hopefully unclog the dribble filled pipes that make up ITV’s Saturday night schedule. ‘The Jonathan Ross show’ is essentially the same format as its predecessor except the four poofs have been replaced by a wall and the familiar red and violet of the old studio swapped for a sort of artificial daffodil yellow. Ross has lost none of his touch however; he asked the rather polite Lewis Hamilton the kind of slightly intrusive questions an annoying classmate would ask you immediately after finding out you have a girlfriend. Sarah Jessica Parker (whom I have humorously noticed looks similar to horse)  was another of the show’s guests and provoked Ross to produce a masterclass in talking to someone about their latest, not at all formulaic Hollywood rom-com without accidentally mentioning its terribleness.

Prior to watching ‘The Jonathan Ross show’ I also accidentally caught the introduction to the X-factor, and, before rushing to pour bleach into my ear canals I noticed how the programme pointed out its ‘dominance’ over the UK top 40. The tone of this assertion was one of pride or even mild arrogance, which is strange, seeing as topping the charts in today’s pop scene is like winning a contest to see who can throw up the most loudly on a night out. I know it’s a cliché but how can Simon Cowell actually live with himself? Just food for thought.

Even if the x-factor is supposedly dominating the charts, most of the stars of ITV’s talent shows seem incapable of escaping the clutches of cheap Saturday night entertainment, almost as if they’ve struggled to maintain a career outside the confines of manufactured sob-story drama. But then this obviously doesn’t apply to the rather talented Leona Lewis who strangely appeared on the monstrously tacky ‘Red or Black?’ last night: it’s clearly either part of her contract or Leona just loves probability based Saturday night game shows (probably the former).  

I should probably mention the loss of a truly special programme from Freeview’s screens that occurred this week. That’s right, Friends, the third most shown programme of all time (narrowly beaten by Top Gear on Dave and ‘the news’) came to an end on E4 after over four hundred years of broadcasting. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to miss knowing exactly what the punch line is going to be before a character makes a joke and then still laughing at it anyway. S’pose there’s always the box set.

TV Blog: It’s a conspiracy!

It’s Michael Jackson’s birthday today and it’s also less than two weeks until the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but that sounds MIGHTY SUSPICIOUS to me. No, really, I’m not a conspiracy theorist but it seems with a batch of programmes set to (rightfully) honour the 9/11 terrorist attacks soon to appear on our screens that we will have to endure the ramblings of many who are.

The Conspiracy Files: 9/11 - Ten Years On will be broadcast on BBC2 tonight. An annoying occurrence not just because Shooting Stars is on forty minutes later than usual, but also because it will be filled with the kind of absurd statements that are already appearing on the relevant BBC webpage.  

“There’s no way a tower could collapse like that if it was hit at floor 73!” an internet access and wild assumption expert stated on the recent BBC news discussion. “You would need to hit the base of one of the towers to make it collapse like that!”

How much research this person has actually done is questionable, and I have a sneaking suspicion that they aren’t an expert at analysing the structural integrity of one-off skyscraper projects and how the hundreds of thousands of components in such buildings would be likely to behave in pretty much untested circumstances. Being a conspiracy theorist and so adamantly claiming the opposite to what pretty solid research suggests is like me watching University Challenge and shouting “THAT’S WRONG”, “THAT’S NEVER THE PRODUCT OF THAT REACTION” each time Paxman or one of the contestant reveals an answer. Not only would I be more annoying than usual but I’d also be wrong in challenging the knowledge and authority of people who know a lot more than me, even if these people happened to be wrong.  

Then of course you get those who deny that the moon landings happened, who tend to be American men in their 60s or 70s who’ve spent a fairly little amount of time studying rocket psychics and slightly too much time studying their cousins. But they’re wrong of course, as the moon doesn’t actually exist: it’s a fabricated light beam created by the Russians during the cold war to make the Americans spend money on space technology rather than weapons technology. I mean, it’s supposed to be orbiting the earth and also rotating on its axis yet we only ever see one side of it and it’s always there and not on the other side of the planet so it obviously isn’t real!!!

It’s a shame that the internet was invented really, because it’s such an incredibly effective platform for stupid people and their terrible creations to slither their way into the mainstream (insert Justin Bieber joke here). I could quite easily create a video claiming that Bobby Moore is actually made of pasties, and assuming it avoids being taken down due to a copyright claim by West Cornwall Pasty Co, such a video could be watched by millions of the willing to believe and possibly make its way onto TV. Broadcasters who commission conspiracy programmes don’t seemed to have realised that the correlation between having a YouTube account and being a credible analyser of camera footage is about as weak as that between being  Jeremy Clarkson and owning a solar panel.

Anyway, if you aren’t at all interested in conspiracies but are somehow still reading this, also on this evening is Channel 4’s ‘Stephen Fry’s 100 greatest gadgets’. I can only assume this will feel like a shortened and less hellish version of that segment in the Gadget Show where the presenters read out a list of every piece of electronic equipment ever sold as part of the competition prize. If this programme doesn’t do it for you either then there’s always ‘Jamelia: Shame about single mums’ on BBC3, but you’d be better off beating yourself in the face with a frozen loaf of bread if you want the hour to be at all intellectually stimulating.

TV blog: X-factor and Big Brother return

Before I start, congratulations/commiserations on your A-level results! I’m sure you got what you deserved/were ripped off by the exam board and want to remark at least two of your papers.

Even if you didn’t get the required nine A’s to pay £9000 a week for university in order to earn a good wage which will mostly be paid as tax, TV’s latest offerings may have cheered you up. Firstly, after a twelve and a half week goodbye on Channel 4 which ended with Davina being sacrificed by fire to appease the head of Endemol, Big Brother has reared its head again on Britain’s favourite, sorry, least favourite terrestrial channel, Channel 5.

Apparently the overall consensus concerning this newly polished Big Brother was that it had failed to draw in any A-listers to participate. Some would say that this is because it’s a dying format that’s been acting as a metaphorical nail in the coffin for the careers of washed up media garbage for years and is about as good at revitalising popularity as releasing a world cup single duet with Gary Glitter. However I beg to differ. The main reason Big Brother has no-one interesting involved is probably to do with a limited budget: in order to have enough people in the house for the programme to last its desired duration, the money available has to be spread across the wages of multiple D-listers. I sort of think Channel 5 should’ve done the opposite and just blown it all on one A-lister. They could’ve bought Will Smith and sent him into the house alone, only for him to become more and more bored and end up begging to the cameras for eviction as the nation watched on.

Sadly Channel 5 didn’t adopt this strategy and went for the usual ‘multiple housemate’ approach this time. Among these housemates this series were Britian’s favourite, sorry, least favourite entity, Jedward. I always assumed Jedward would slip down the media ladder towards the rung upon which Chico still clings but apparently their popularity is genuine and particularly strong in Ireland. Hilariously, Ireland actually got Jedward to meet Obama when he visited earlier this year, an act almost offensive to poor Barack as if the UK had got Richard Dawkins to greet the Pope on his visit to Britain.

Along with Big Brother, the programme that gave birth to the Jedward abomination also returned this week: the X-factor. But this time round the evil yet camp Simon Cowell decided not to bother judging and also banished his female compatriots; their replacements include a sort of borderline chav (Tulisa), a man who speaks exactly how you’d imagine a sloth to speak (Gary Barlow) and Kelly Roland (head of Roland Mints ltd.).

No doubt the X-factor will produce another terrible and pointless addition to the already congested wall of non-talent known as the UK Top 40. In fact, based on the usual low quality of winner on the X-factor, I’m starting to wonder if Cowell is merely using the franchise to highlight how a liberal democracy will always produce flawed results and to build support for a forthcoming attempt at a totalitarian regime:

“Look what happens when the people are allowed to vote!” booms Cowell, pointing towards Leon Jackson as he rallies further popularity for his fascist campaign in the year 2019. “The democratic system is flawed and always has been!” he barks as a crowd provide a wave of applause.

Anyway, as frightening and real as that image may seem, the X-factor’s popularity is still as strong as its ability to make fame without achievement seem worthwhile. So many people watch the final these days that channels like BBC3 that cater for a similar audience could literally broadcast nothing but hardcore pornography and subliminal messages for the entire evening and get away with it. They may well have during last year’s final; we’ll never know.

So, forget about those A-level results and go and watch reality TV shows- nothing cheers me up like laughing at the deluded and desperate, LOL!

TV Blog: Riots, Nick Griffin and Shooting Stars

It would be very easy this week for me to write an article condemning and mocking last week’s London rioters. So here we go.

Yes, London caught fire last week when thousands of morons decided that Carpet Right would look better drowning in smoke and with no carpets in it. The scale of the uprising was relatively huge, and, to me, the whole thing looked a bit like a sci-fi film where the robots suddenly fight back against society when a chip inside them instructs them to on a specific day. Except instead of robots, the uprising consisted of a group of people whose main aspiration is to learn how to write so that they can one day  fill in a benefits claim form; a group who look mainly to the Jeremy Kyle show for some moral guidance (although usually only through the window of Dixons).

Some have spoken out over how many, if not the majority of rioters will go without prosecution. But I’ve cleverly come up with a plan to solve this issue: send out a form asking respondents about the extent to which they were involved in the riot. Those that tick the option ‘i didn’t do nuffing you cant proof it’ are put on trial.

Perhaps though rather than looking at the actions of the rioters we should be looking at the lack of action by the police (or the influence of society as a whole but that’s too much effort). Many of the officers involved practically let the looting take place, almost as if they were within a nightmare where they’d been demoted to the rank of community support officer and were restricted to the authority of shouting “stop that please!” and “I’m concerned that you may be causing disruption!”. Hitler’s other testicle, Nick Griffin, stated that ‘we need these people to be charged and in prison in hours’. But that’s really a case of easier said than done. I mean, he could say we need a system where everyone’s happy all of the time and no-one ever dies, but throwing union flags at mosques probably isn’t going to help, is it Nick?

Coincidentally, on the day the riots started comedy acid trip ‘Shooting Stars’ also returned for a new series. Watching it last Monday evening proved even weirder than ever, in knowing that while James Martin cooed down the dove from above, that multiple JD Sports were under severe threat from being ransacked. This eerie juxtaposition between the delightfully absurd musings of Vic and Bob and the devastating nature of the riots was carried over to Twitter, where ‘Angelos Epithemiou’ contested ‘#londonriots’ for the top trending spot.

Shooting stars really is excellent though. It’s easy to accuse it of just trying too hard to be ‘random’ and ‘weird’, but where this description could apply fittingly to Noel Fielding stating that an outfit looks like a platypus crossed with an embarrassed inhaler, I’m not convinced it applies to Shooting Stars. The jokes are weird, but the scripting is good:  references to ‘trouser cress’ and Angelos’ abstract sketches are more than just funny sounding words strung together and contain a level of intelligence below their absurd nature. It’s great that the BBC isn’t too embarrassed or conservative to commission such a programme and doesn’t just falter and go with another antiques based celebrity cook-off presented by Richard Hammond.

It would be nice to be able to close by saying that Shooting Stars is good enough to keep some of the population in and away from rioting for at least one night a week. But sadly not only is the humour far too complicated for any of the rioters, none of them had TVs until after the main riots took place.

TV Blog: Dragons’ Den (and other scary judging panel programmes)

The title sequence of Dragons’ Den starts off like some scary corporate adaptation of all of the SAW films: an aged warehouse surrounded by signs that say ‘danger’ is filmed from scary angles and a thick layer of dim clouds tears across the sky to the sound of even scarier guitar music. But just when you think you’ve accidentally switched over to ‘Hell Tv+’, Evan Davis ruins the mood by saying “these are the dragons” with the tone of an estate agent saying “this is the bathroom”.

Yes, Dragons’ Den, one of a select few programmes that gets repeated on Dave so often that buying the series 1-8 box set would be like paying for music rather than stealing it off the internet. I don’t usually watch it, but chose to this week because the new dragon Hilary Devey looks like if Anne Robinson mated with a haunted tree and I wanted to laugh at her. HAHA, you may be richer and more successful than I will ever be but you are not necessarily conventionally attractive. There we go.

So a few minutes in, and I was pleased to see that the format has remained as rigid as the Dragons’ gloomy expressions when a hopeful enters the room. Trembling business owners still have to beg for slightly too much investment in their ideas (which is presumably paid in cash, based on the stacks of money on the dragons’ desks).

The idea of the first group to pitch was basically a van with a sound system in the boot; apparently this meant that children weren’t going to do drugs anymore. Interrogation ensued, and the hopefuls made a common mistake, stating that they’d broken even in the second year, made £40,000 in the third, thus projected profits for year four were £4.6bn (est). The dragons weren’t impressed. However, as the pitch contained the words “youth”, “community” and “passion”, their dismissal of the hopefuls was combined with words like “regret” and “sorry” to make it seem like they weren’t awful, awful humans.

However it was during the third pitch that I started to find Evan Davis’s excessive commentary a tad grating. Davis basically describes what has happened in the previous seven seconds for no reason at all, a bit like he’s catering for the viewers with chronic short term memory loss. I like to imagine that Evan summarises every small event that takes place in TV programmes out loud when he is at home, much to the aggravation of his wife and kids, although I cannot guarantee this is true.

The success of programmes like Dragons’ Den seems down to the fact that they are based on the ‘judging panel’ format. This involves a bunch of scary men and women (although sometimes there is one nice one) sitting behind a desk or in chairs and deciding whether grovelling, deluded mortals should be allowed to continue with their hopes and dreams. The format has been so successful with dancing, skating, business, singing, comedy and other variants, that it seems you cannot pitch a show to a channel that doesn’t conform to it. So, I’ve devised a few judging panel programmes that I hope will appeal to Britain’s top TV bosses:

1.     ‘The Pax-factor’. Members of the public impersonate Jeremy Paxman and are set a series of Paxman related challenges each week before being judged by Nick Knowles and Ronnie Wood. The two finalists will simultaneously interview Paxman himself in a nightmarish vision of a cloning project gone horribly wrong.

2.    ‘So you think you can (play) bassoon’: Britain’s top bassoonists battle it out to win the mysterious golden bassoon. Vernon Kay presents.

3.    ‘Quick! Hide the evidence!’: hopefuls are tasked with covering up the fraudulent and corrupt behaviour of Britain’s top officials. A junior version is in the pipeline.

TV Blog: ‘Olympics 2012: One year to go’

Just one year to go until the Olympic games!!!!! Yeaaaaaaah! OMG not long now! Lol!

Was this your reaction to the “news” that the impending potential calamity of the London Olympics is just one orbit of the sun away? If so, then you would have loved the BBC’s attempt to make it seem like this non-landmark had some significance:  Wednesday’s half an hour cringe fest programme, ‘Olympics 2012: One year to go’.

The show revolved around Jake Humphrey and a smiley woman I don’t know the name of standing on a big, blue stage in Trafalgar square and inviting various officials to come on and make claims about how the Olympic venues were definitely not behind schedule. Being live and in a public place, the announcements of the presenters were regularly hindered by the incessant whooping of young men and women who think they’re in America and don’t know when to shut up. These are the kind of shouty morons who actually never leave Trafalgar square in the hope of being asked to participate in a T-Mobile artificial, feel-good sing-along, where their whooping can be put to good use.

After some short speeches, montage videos (and partially to get away from the whooping morons) the coverage moved over to the supposedly finished aquatic centre. Here, another woman I don’t know the name of interviewed a sort of watery Justin Bieber equivalent, Tom Daley. Somehow the interviewer managed to avoid asking Tom if he was going to “make a splash in 2012”, but the interview was still tainted by Tom being forced to stand in front of a crowd of screaming school children in nothing but speedos. The whole thing looked a bit like a scene from Tom’s recurring nightmare, soon to culminate in him frantically thrashing around the bottom of the diving pool, trying to find his now missing swimming trunks before he runs out of air.

Tom was then invited to christen the pool with the first ‘official dive’. Of course no-one actually knows anything about or watches diving, not even the commentator. Thus, Tom could actually have belly flopped straight in, and assuming he wasn’t screaming in pain, applause would have ensued.

Fifteen minutes in, and the coverage switched back to Trafalgar Square once again. More speeches were made, first from the world’s most successful yes-man David Cameron, who spoke with the conviction of a medium cost after dinner speaker who’d been drafted in at the last minute. Second was Boris Johnson, who added his trademark layer of subtle humour to the proceedings. Boris, I’ve noticed, is the kind of person you find yourself laughing at, only to suffer from a sickening feeling in your lower stomach as the extent of his power and responsibility slowly dawns on you.

Following these speeches, a black and white video montage of various successful Olympic athletes closed the show. Perhaps the melancholy music could have been toned down though, as it looked disturbingly like one of those ‘who’s died this year’ clips that make everyone turn over for a few minutes during the BAFTAs.

Unnecessarily aggressive cynicism aside, London is genuinely a good place to hold the Olympics. There are few cities on earth with such a diverse mixture of cultures combined with such lengthy tradition, and appreciation for the world’s greatest sporting event will almost definitely be bountiful. Sure, this programme was a bit awkward, a bit cheesy, and more than a bit unnecessary. But most people will see the silliness of these kinds of events and embrace it: no-one who lives in a city run by Boris Johnson takes themselves seriously, and that’s exactly why ironic broadcasts that attempt to take British stereotypes and give them a modern twist go down with a rippling of soft laughter rather than a thunderstorm of booing.

TV blog: The ‘real’ housewives of Orange County

After escaping the hypnotic clutches of the strangely addictive Dickinson’s Real Deal this afternoon, I stumbled upon the apparently broadcast worthy ITV2 media abomination commonly known as ‘The ‘real’ housewives of Orange County’.

Set in some sort of hauntingly tasteless, shiny Californian neighbourhood, the programme is in essence an hour long insight into a world littered with characterless, artificial mansions, and the characterless, artificial women they contain. The lives of five or so Barbie Doll shells are followed, and the viewers treated with a portrayal of their endless social dramas and wealth based problems. Sound like a detestable 60 minutes? Well it was.

The first woman to feature on the programme looked worryingly like if Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler finally lost it and started cross dressing, but was apparently called Lyne Curtin. The storyline surrounding her life this week was based around the struggle of her and her husband to sort out all of the expensive possessions contained in their garage. Much drama was somehow drawn out of the banal task of organising numerous symbols of western capitalism into alphabetical order, and the segment ended with Lyne crying on the shoulder of her husband, stating that it was “all just too much”.

This level of indulgence and materialism is of course vile, and the fact that these people’s so called problems (paradise based inconveniences) are humoured by television companies, and presumably the public, is embarrassing. Not only does it make it seem like these waxworks actually provide some true entertainment value, but only reinforces their own belief that their lives are filled with genuine problems (WHICH THEY AREN’T).

Anyway, the next segment followed a half melted Calippo lolly called Vicki Gunvalson, who discussed how she was now having to spend less than $100 on foundation each week and how she’s really having to ‘think’ about finances. It was at this point I realised that my face was permanently holding a pained/disgusted/offended expression. You know the face: the kind of look a teacher would give a student if they didn’t do their homework and then decided to blame it on the Jews. My disgust was then further aggravated by the show’s attempts to reach a moral conclusion at the end of each segment. Vicki’s telling of her son to act like a deeper, more emotional human being produced the kind of irony that could only otherwise stem from Simon Cowell writing an article condemning the commercial nature of modern music.

40 minutes in, and the programme depicted a party inside one of the soulless mansions where the various wives and husbands drank champagne and laughed unnecessarily loudly at jokes that probably really weren’t that funny. In fact, it sort of felt like I was watching a short film at the beginning of ‘The money programme’ parodying the kind of excessive, loan based consumerism that occurred prior and partially lead to the global recession. I half expected the music to stop and a grim faced Evan Davis to come strolling in and begin a “that was then, but now the world’s economic makeup isn’t quite so rosy” style speech.

Despite labelling each woman as a ‘housewife’, the show did attempt to make it seem as though its participants were the kind of strong, independent and not at all shallow women that young girls should look up to. Phrases such as ‘self-made’ and ‘hard working’ for example were thrown around almost as though they had meaning. However, this attempt to conceal the empty nature of the participants was undermined by their spoken taglines used to introduce them to the programme. This included Vicki Gunvalson’s line “I want the power and the money, and I want them both”. Oh Vicki, you and your prose.

So there you go, it turns out that the injurylawyers4you adverts are not the most weird and repulsive items on daytime TV. No, I can safely say that award lies with the awful ‘Real housewives of Orange County’.