Saturday, March 05, 2011
Pet hate
My brother used to go to the length of pinning up hate lists and love lists on his living room door. I do not go that far, but I certainly do have hates. Fairly high on the list are those very highly paid people who read the news on television and who seem to think that they are terribly important. Another hate group are television interviewers. But today's hate group is television cooks, in particular Jamie Oliver who, for some reason really annoys me. And this without ever having watched any of his programmes or ever having set foot in a restaurant involving him or his name.
I understand that his work with Sainsbury's is regarded as a great success and has made both him and Sainsbury's a great deal of money - although I do not take my hate to the point of avoiding the place altogether. That would really be letting him get to me.
A different sort of hate is the television which goes under the name of reality television - which, to my mind has very little to do with reality and would be more honestly named low budget television. Cheap television is another candidate name; 'cheap' capturing nicely both the low cost and the tackiness, but neither will really do as both include far more than reality. So I guess we are stuck with this last; at least we know what sort of programme is so labelled even if we object to the implied link with the real world.
And now we can have both hates in one package as I see that the great man now has the arrogance to think that he can turn around a bunch of educational no-hopers by having a bunch of celebrities play teacher on them, on camera. Even supposing that it turns out that he has done some good - which we would not know for sure for some years and which in any case strikes me as rather unlikely - what relevance can such a circus have to the not too clever state of the bog-standard end of education? What do the team of celebrities which our Jamie has put together think that they are playing at?
Let's hope that he has not done too much damage to the no-hopers. And in fairness, they are volunteers. They don't have to do it, any more than those legions of adults who are so eager to makes prats of themselves on the box.
I find the popularity of this sort of thing most depressing. What is the world coming to?
# posted by Jim @ 8:21 AM 
