Mediocrity

Thanks to modern technology, I can now receive all the BBC and ITV channels from the UK here on my telly. This is a godsend, as I can now settle down to Football Focus presented by the amiable but bland Manish "Maniche" Bhasin on late-Saturday lunchtimes, and then get bored senseless by Alan Shearer's incisive brand of football punditry on Match of the Day later on that day. What more can you ask for?

Aside from the fact that BBC football commentary and punditry is a joke, why do all the pundits wear the same attire?! Research has shown that friends tend to wear the same type of clothes as each other, and this theory is emphatically proven on the BBC, with Lineker, Hansen, Wright, Lawrensen, Peacock, Dixon, Keown etc. all wearing a suit and an open shirt. MotD is definitely a tie-free zone. Thanks to these clowns (sartorially misguided northern Europeans trying look like Gianluca Vialli), everyone on BBC Sport and throughout UK television tries to look the same. It's the same on Sky at the cricket. Why?! Did they all lose their cravattes? Call me old-fashioned, but....

Grr.

Another bugbear of mine is the style of news presentation in the UK. All the main news programmes on both BBC and ITV have two presenters doing what Moira Stuart and Michael Buerk used to do quite proficiently on their own. Not only that, but every other news piece starts roughly like this: "The Prime Minster was wrong in sending troops to Iraq - that's the view of a confidential report by....." Then the BBC or ITV "analyst" is invited on the programme to "explain" what's going on for the benefit of all the brain-dead out there. It's just wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG!!