Cherryade and Chocolate Eclairs.

When someone you love, someone who’s been a fixture of your life for, well, your whole life, is gone suddenly, it is a strange feeling. For a while, I hadn’t even been seeing granddad with any great regularity, but occasionally we’d go and visit. He was in his late eighties and hasn’t exactly been well lately, but it is still an unpleasant experience. The three grandparents I grew up with have now gone, all in the last five years, and I find the things I retain of them are a collection of memories, triggered by tastes, smells and days of the week.

Any Sunday lunch I eat is judged according to how close it was to my nan’s, and the mingled smells of make-up and cigarette smoke remind me of her. Visits to National Parks would always remind me of the funny stuff my first granddad would sometimes come out with – while on holiday with family to Lanzarote, we went on an excursion to Timanfaya National Park, which is on the site of a dormant volcano. Upon arriving, granddad took one look around and said “There aren’t many people at the park today, are there?” which has always cracked me up. And my last granddad who went just recently? Late Sunday afternoon in Winter, before driving home through Christmas lights, snuggled down in the back seat in my duffel coat, we would go to granddad’s and he would have fizzy pop and sweets for us, my favourite being cherryade and chocolate eclairs.

It is sad that they’re gone, and I hope my parents cope OK with being the oldest generation in our family now, but I’m glad I have these warm comforting feelings to drawn upon and remember them by. After all, that’s what grandparents are for, isn’t it?

A declaration of undying love for the BBC.

I hate BBC’s Question Time. This is an odd way to begin a declaration of love for the BBC, but I do. I used to watch it and try to think of funny things to say regarding it to post on Twitter. This didn’t work for two reasons. Firstly, I can’t think of funny things to say about anything. Secondly, the programme would never fail to frustrate me and make me angry. It’s completely pointless and is a platform for bigots, politicians and ineffective lefties to spout their opinions, lies and misinformed bullshit masquerading as intelligent debate. So I stopped watching it. I watched one recently because someone I knew at college was in the audience. The show is as bad as it ever was, brought home particularly by Theresa May talking about how she thinks our economy works the same way as a credit card debt and the odious Peter Hitchens spouting the same kind of clueless hatred he fills his Daily Mail column with. In my incoherent rage I managed to make myself look like a dick on Twitter. I mean, more than usual. The lighter final question was about what people need to make them happier. Hitchens proclaimed loudly and proudly that faith in god was his particular remedy. Regular readers of this blog (and I have a few, believe it or not) will already know about my strong atheist opinions. I try my best to draw a line at insulting people who have faith – I try hard to only criticise religion itself. My tweet in response to Hitchens looked, frankly, like I thought he was an arsehole for the contentment he gets from his faith. I don’t, I think he’s an arsehole for his detestable and uninformed opinions on everything from immigrants, through those on benefits to scientists who found that second-hand smoke is harmful. That he clearly has so much contempt for those people he considers beneath him (like the poor or the foreign or, whisper it, the foreign poor) in one comment and then proudly declares his faith in god in the next. Now, is it me or is one of the few redeeming features of christianity the idea that everyone should be compassionate towards their fellow human and help those in need? That he failed to recognise the contradiction in what he was saying caused me to tweet without thinking. Hitchens went on to do what many like him love to do and give shit to the BBC. He criticised the corporation for not believing in god. First off, as Dimbledore rightly pointed out, the question related to a survey conducted by the Office of National Statistics and had nothing to do with the BBC. Also, being a corporation, and not a human, it has no beliefs of any kind. Thirdly, did Hitchens forget about Songs of Praise and Radio 4’s Thought for the Day? Of course he didn’t, he was just ignoring them to hammer home his nonsensical BBC-slagging point.

Frankly, Hitchens and those like him can go eat a shit sandwich, for the BBC is no less than the finest broadcaster in the world and is worth the licence fee a hundred times over. Want some examples as to why? Blackadder, Red Dwarf, The Brittas Empire, Not the Nine O’clock News, The Day Today, The Young Ones, Bottom, Alan Partridge, Alas Smith & Jones, Comic Strip Presents, The Office, Extras, Faulty Towers, Gavin & Stacey, Hancock’s Half Hour, Monty Python, Not Only...But Also, Steptoe and Son, The Thick of It, Have I Got News For You, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, QI ,Shooting Stars. That’s just some of the comedy.

BBC 3 recently had The Fades, an outstanding horror thriller in which the dead came back to take over the world and cannibalise the living – not a terribly original idea, but highly original in its execution (although I was slightly disappointed by the last episode it doesn’t change the fact that it was great). In Fry’s Planet Word national treasure Stephen Fry explored the history and possible future of language, and was wonderful, Fry’s obvious enthusiasm for his subject pleasantly engrossing. As a science-nut, Horizon is like catnip to me, as well as recent documentaries on the history of humankind’s discovery of the elements or the current series exploring our origins (I love the fact that the BBC has no problem with shows that present evolution as fact (because it is) and don’t have to compromise by acknowledging the nutty alternative theories of creationism and intelligent design (which are not fact)). Wonders of the Solar System and follow up Wonders of the Universe were each worth the licence fee by themselves, as was the little-seen three part series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, which explored the idea that our economic, environmental and political systems are inspired by the way in which machines work and the disastrous results that have come from it. It illustrated quite neatly how Ayn Rand, that hero of misunderstanding leftists and Silicon Valley moguls everywhere and her flawed ideology (that she couldn’t even live by herself, so frick knows how she expected others to do so) contributed to the recent global economic collapse. It showed clearly how we completely misunderstood natural environmental systems for years but based much of our own social and political systems on our misunderstanding of them and then couldn’t understand how things went so badly wrong. It showed the horrifying human cost that is paid when people who don’t know anything act like they’re experts and meddle. It should be seen. And of course there is Planet Earth, The Blue Planet, Frozen Planet, Life in Cold Blood and all those other Attenborough documentaries that are perfect, wonderful, glorious television.

So, the hateful Question Time notwithstanding, I am proud to love the BBC, and will continue to do so, and will never understand why other people don’t.