Radio Bland

So a network controller and a presenter fall on their swords and their highest paid employee takes a 12 week sabbatical which will cost him £1.5million…and what are we, the customers, left with ?

Bland Radio 2, inoffensive blather coated with politician-compliant news and comments and time delay-protected presenters just in case they slip a “damn” or “flippin-heck” in there.

The weekday BBC Radio 2 line-up reads like the residents roll call at the “Showbiz Rest Home”…

6am – Sarah Kennedy, safe, school prefect, lectures you from a shelf somewhere above your head and shares “in jokes” with the 0.01% of the population who went to the same boarding school as her.

7.30am – Wake Up To Wogan, words fail me, Wogan was quite funny in 1983, just the once, but since then has simply blathered his way to a huge pension plan at the taxpayers expense, same old crap every morning that his handful of listeners seem to enjoy, mainly because it doesn’t test their brain cells – at all.

9.30am – Ken Bruce, words fail me again, Ken Bruce is not past his sell by date, he was never fit for sale in the first place, I just don’t understand what it is that his show is supposed to be doing for two and half hours every morning, I suspect that he’s got some incriminating photos of the Controller of the BBC fingering a donkey as there is no other way that this man should even be on hospital radio.

12 noon – Jeremy Vine, the only shining light in an oasis of entertainment.

2pm – Steve Wright in the Afternoon, see “Wake Up to Wogan”, unemployable anywhere else but the BBC old boys club.

5pm – Chris Evans, pass me my Purdey Jeeves, and write me a suicide note.

Personally I don’t bother with the network now, its Radio Leeds in a morning if only for the fact that they often interview random nutters who are embarking on 80 mile walks, and RTE Radio 1on the AM frequency for Joe Duffy on a lunchtime – afternoon radio is a huge blank at the moment filled only by Smooth Radio if I can get to a DAB set.

Arncliffe Village – 2008 version

Fifteen years after I did this version I had another go – has the style changed ?

I can see where its changed, the technique has changed completely, the earlier one was dry-on-dry, this was mostly wet-on-wet, and I now stray from the “traditional” English watercolour style to now include watercolour pencil highlights.

I like both though.

Climbing the peaks…

Mountaineering is another thing I’m rubbish at, and I didn’t need a particularly big mountain to prove that to myself, in fact it was what most people would call “a big hill”, proper mountaineers wouldn’t even think it was a gradient.

To me it caused the most terrifying hour of my life.

I’m a rubbish mountaineer, there, I’ve said it.

Riding the Honister Pass

Two thousand fell runners missing on the mountain ?
80mph wind, a months worth of rain in one night, the valleys flooded making rescue vehicles impossible to manouvre ?
No sweat, don’t worry, the organisers say, these runners are experienced, they have tents you know.

Full story

Er, Frank, I’ve lost me car…

News this weekend that the former colliery site at Prince of Wales in Pontefract is to be cleaned, graded and then redeveloped for housing and other good stuff brings back a story from the days when the Prince of Wales pit was the biggest in the UK, and also the filthiest place you could ever wish to visit

My dads company consisted of him and his business partner Michael, my dad did the inside work, Michael travelled the county’s broad acres in his little Nissan sports car doing the outside repair work, it worked well, when Michael had his thinking head on.

Unfortunately sometimes Michael made some silly, nay, downright stupid mistakes mainly through his ability to carry out an action without any forethought for the consequences.

Video Saturday – Northern Soul

Seeing as I upset our Al last week I’ll use some old Northern Soul clips this week as Wigan Casino was a haunt of his back in the day. The 1970’s clips of those young kids dancing still look great but, erm, the same people doing the same steps 30 years on don’t look right – too much “yer dad and uncle dancing at a wedding” about them – its why I don’t dance, I’ve looked like “yer dad and uncle dancing at a wedding” since I was 15.

One for Auntie Joyce

You know those Aunts and Uncles that aren’t really Aunts and Uncles but are actually your parents friends, you grow up calling them Auntie and Uncle through your childhood and then when you’re all growed up you still call them Auntie and Uncle ?

Well one of ours died yesterday morning.

Auntie Joyce was closer to us than some of our actual blood relatives,  we never spoke to our barking mad Auntie Phyliis for decades for instance, and she was our dads sister, mind, she was barking mad.

The dancing boys

“Programmes!” I’d shout, just that, just “Programmes!” on its own, short and sweet, sort of self explanatory it was being that I was selling programmes, “Programmes!” seemed to sum up the whole thing and my clients were left in no doubt as to what it was they were transacting with me for.

“Programmes!” as another couple of people came through the turnstile shed, they looked up, it was a father and son, I could tell because the son was the spitting image of the father, and I knew the son.

He was the same age as me, 12 years old, he was in my year at school, not in my class but in my year and I knew him because he was loud, brash, and did something that none of the other 119 boys in the year did.

There was another one…

Yesterday I mentioned in dispatches Brian, the “one” in our gang, “Theres always one…”, that sort of “one”, the idiot who doesn’t actually know he’s an idiot, that sort of one – you know there’s always one…

Well we had two, because we had Martin as well.

Martin had been a jockey, or at least thats what he liked to say when asked, he’d actually been a stable lad and may at some point in time have actually been invited to ride some of the racehourses in his care (god help the horses), but whether or not he actually held a licence to race professionally is something that we daren’t contemplate, if he did he would probably have fallen off in the starting stalls – or before they got there, for Martin was/is the unluckiest person in the world.

There’s always one …

There’s always one in every gang, the one who tries too hard, tries to be funny too many times, repeats punchlines a hundred times because he still thinks they’re funny months after everyone has moved on, the one that everyone else in the gang tolerates only because there has to be one and if they kicked him out then it might be them.

Our gang had two.

We had a Brian and a Martin, I have had a problem all my life in meeting Brians who weren’t terminally stupid, i’ve met several and they’ve all been terminally stupid – sorry any Brians who are reading this, but thats a hard fact, sorry.