The idea of Prince Harry having to watch Schindler’s List as an atonement for wearing a Nazi uniform, is the kind of backhanded complement Steven Spielberg deserves. It’s a worthy film, rendered mediocre by poor direction from someone who’s only worth watching when playing with special effects. I suspect it will leave Harry unmoved. After all, as the New York Daily News points out, ‘Prince Harry’s stunning Nazi uniform gaffe is latest in long line of the House of Windsor’s affairs with the Third Reich.’

The longer term plan is to pack him off to Sandhurst for the kind of discipline that would make his mummy faint. The problem has been that protocol demands he enter at graduate level and, despite going to one of the world’s top schools and the government’s commitment to finding a university place for at least half of our school leavers, he was not good enough for university and had to pass a sit-up test to enter Sandhurst. Now he’s on his second ‘gap year’. You get the idea: he’s very, very thick.

So it’s to easy to see how a famously stupid family might find our increasingly meritocratic and democratic world difficult to cope with.

Feudal Creep#4:Knowing our place

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I’m currently spending time convincing myself that I’ve always been annoyed by TVs in pubs and am not losing touch. In fact, I’m pretty sure that my anti-TVs in pubs view has always been there and is not a sign of old age. Having said that, as a former PR man for a great many pubs, I’m a great believer in diversity. Whenever Katharine and I have been house hunting, one location criteria has always been that there should be at least four decent pubs in walking distance. Now we have at least a dozen. You know how it is. Sometimes you fancy washing down a sticky toffee pudding with a Czech lager, other times its good beer in a smoky atmosphere. It’s the best of the latter, traditional pubs, where TV can be a nuisance. A multi-roomed pub can afford to offer a few, slightly different, experiences. But our best trad pub, the Beech, despite having a large screen in the saloon, has an unfortunate habit of putting a TV in every snug. Now that’s wrong.

And in these circumstances, I feel it would be legitimate to deploy a gadget I heard about just before Christmas: TV B-Gone. It’s a universal remote control with just one purpose: switching off. The thing is, the BBC reports they take up to 17 seconds and Wired says over a minute (it has to go through codes in turn). Either of which is a suspiciously long time to be covertly pointing your key ring at the offending TV set. Nevertheless, it might still bring fun and relief. Best not to use immediately, but as someone else enters the bar so as to divert suspicion. Why not pick a victim and turn the football off each time they enter the room? Another tip is to not aim directly at the TV, but at its reflection.

They’re pretty hard to come by as the official US-based website has bandwidth problems. But now somebody’s imported loads and is flogging them off on eBay (you don’t have to wait for the auction to end, hit ‘Buy it now’).

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Following on from yesterday’s blog on world poverty, I’ve spotted self-proclaimed free trade supporters, the Adam Smith Institute, making a rather muddled case for the kind of agreements that most often freeze out the developing world.

‘Let’s say that America can buy radios from two countries’, says ASI. ‘It imposes the same tariff on each country’s goods – a level playing field.’ Well, not with American producers, but hey. In this example, America goes on to sign an agreement to remove tariffs from one country’s radios, giving that country a clear advantage. A good thing says ASI because, ‘bilateral agreements act as a healthy competitor to the World Trade Organisation process.’ Hmpf. In truth such agreements tend to be between developed countries or blocks of developed countries, like the EU, and they’re called preferential trade agreements for a good reason. They put everybody else at a disadvantage, by forming the kind of global cartel the real Adam Smith condemned in his Wealth of Nations.

The ASI answer to that is that the bilateral partners benefit. And they do. But ASI forgets that economic activity produces externalities; real costs to third parties. In this case somebody’s radio industry pays the price. Economist Jagdish Bhagwati has a book out detailing 400 of these agreements, which he calls a spaghetti bowl. A more accurate description would be barbed wire. If we faced up to the true cost of easy option preferential agreements and worked instead to create a level playing field for all – genuine free trade – the whole world would be a richer place.

Jack Nicholson didn’t say it best in Easy Rider; ‘They’ll talk to ya and talk to ya and talk to ya about individual freedom [free markets]. But when they see a free individual [market], it’s gonna scare ’em’

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While our news has always been dominated by what Tony Blair rightly calls ‘the soap opera of politics’, all the stuff about Blair, Brown and the succession is hiding what in the long term will emerge as the bigger news story. We have in our sights an opportunity to make poverty history, thanks to Brown’s determination to ensure the UK’s presidency of the G8 sees that issue on the top of the agenda. Boosted by good will towards the developing world generated by the tsunami, he’s been able to propose a new Marshall plan. This is the sort of politics that should inspire us. And we can all do a little bit to help make it happen by supporting Make Poverty History. They have three aims; to make trade fair, to relieve debt and to provide aid.

Making others’ lives better is a nice to do, but it’s not a luxury. The right sort of aid is an essential investment. Globalisation is an irresistible force and we need to act to make it the force for good it can be. As poorer countries develop and stabilise, our security will improve and our own economy grow through increased trading opportunities. And it’s the kind of investment the private sector cannot make because providing schools or healthcare to poor people doesn’t generate returns that can be directly collected.

Trying to collect debts that, more often than not, have been built up by now deposed, corrupt and grossly undemocratic regimes is foolish and undermines that investment. Lenders need to come to terms with the fact that all loans carry risk and that in this case, the dice has come down against them. They need to accept they’ll never be paid and cancel the debt so we can move on.

We also need to stop pretending that trade rules are there to free benign markets. They clearly are not. That free markets always produce ‘good’ outcomes is, of course, a myth (outcomes can be good or bad, the market isn’t a moral creature). Yet even if it were always good, current rules reengineer markets in a way that keeps the poor poor and the rich rich. We have the power to change that.

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I’ve long suspected that staying in is the new going out. Not so much round here, you’ll understand, where we have so many bars and restaurants of all sorts, but for much else of the country which is either anonymous dormitory suburb or even faux countryside. People like to go on about their ‘busy lives’, but in truth it’s too entertaining at home. When you can pick up an okay multi-region DVD player for less than £30 and a pile of DVDs for less than a tenner each, its not that people are really busy it’s that they’ve only time to sit around. And I don’t think that’s healthy. It makes me wonder how people can know much about the world they live in when they don’t properly interact with others.

And of course singles now face added risk of ridicule. I’m on about Scott Mills Flirt Divert. For non-Radio 1 listeners the idea is that should you find yourself on the receiving end of unwanted attention, you offer the Flirt Divert number instead of your own. When the amorous stranger thinks they’ll calling you, they’re actually leaving a message for broadcast. People arrange dates, stand-up the victim, then laugh when their ‘Where are you?’ call’s broadcast to the nation. That’s a little too cruel. I think someone taking an interest is a complement and suspect those who succeed in humiliating people this way probably deserve to be single and shut in their boxy homes watching DVDs while growing fat on ice cream.

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I only blogged on the Jerry Springer thing because somebody asked me to and couldn’t be bothered to watch it myself. So I don’t know how blasphemous it was, but then I’m not against a bit of blasphemy. However, some the stats that have been bandied about caught my eye. First off there’s the 50,000 complaints. This is arrived at by adding the 45,000 who contacted the BBC to the 7,500 who contacted Ofcom (okay, that’s 52,500 but we media times like to round). But contacting the BBC isn’t the same as complaining. I contacted the BBC in support of broadcast and received a standard reply as if I were a complainant, so that figure’s inflated. And the 8,000 swear words? Well that’s only true if you multiply by 27 each time the chorus sing.

Evangelical blogger Adrian Warnock, claimed the high complaint level was thanks to Christian bloggers. Yet his own straw poll reveals just seven blogs against broadcast, with eighteen in favour. He doesn’t say how he did his poll and he doesn’t include this blog, even though my earlier post was trackbacked to make sure he knew about it. Warnock claims his analysis ties in with the BBC’s break down of telephone contact post-broadcast. So using the complainants’ figures, implies the 52,500 contacts included just 14,700 complaints and 37,800 messages of support. My media maths tells me that a victory for Springer of 40,000 to 14,000.

Anyway. Here’s some more spin: Springer beats Anglicanism in the popularity ratings. Around three per cent of the population tuned in, while only two per cent of Mancunians could be bothered to go to an Anglican service over Xmas.

PS Mr Batty at the ever comical Adam Smith Institute says we wouldn’t have these problems if the BBC was private; like Sky.

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Raising £100m for the tsunami appeal is an incredible achievement and a very good thing indeed. But today I was struck by a newspaper advertisement from the Iranian Association, which represents immigrants and refugees who left that country after the Islamic Revolution: ‘On behalf of the suffering people of Bam, the Iranian Association warmly thanks everyone who generously donated to the Bam Earthquake Appeal. £10,000 donations received are being passed to reputable organisations in Iran to be spent urgently reconstructing the people’s ruined infrastructure.’

The Bam Earthquake killed 26,271 almost exactly a year before the tsunamis hit Asia. I think it would be crass to say we should have given them, say, £17.5m which would be roughly proportionate to the death toll. But it does remind me that Guide Dogs for the Blind, which does wonderful work, finds it so much easier to raise money than the NSPCC, which needs so much more. The lesson has to be that private charity is good thing, but it’s too emotional to ever develop a strategy that would enable it to be most effective. In the end, it’s the actions of government – which can take an overview and plan – that have the greatest potential to facilitate real long term change in an ordered manner.

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It looks like everyone’s going to be watching Jerry Springer the Opera on BBC2 this Saturday following a major anti-campaign by Christians. It’s fronted by the same Bishop of Manchester who recently complained that just two per cent of Mancunians would be turning up to a service over Christmas. Now his fan says the BBC is out of touch… oh dear! It won’t be that close as BBC2 normally gets an audience share a little over ten per cent and this is a big one.

A lead campaign group is what’s now called Media Watch UK, they used to be the Viewers & Listeners Association, the personal campaign vehicle for Mary Whitehouse. Whitehouse was a legendary Christian and nutter and when she died the organisation lost its way somewhat. I remember seeing her interviewed once on GMTV by simpleton Fiona Phillips. Fiona asked, ‘So what do you to say in response to your opponents?’, to which the sinner replied, ‘I don’t know. What to my opponents have to say?’. This stumped Fiona who said she didn’t know. And that was as tough as it got. In my imagination she produced the type of gun Arnold Schwarzenegger uses and pumped several hundred rounds into the old battleaxe.

Anyway. There’s the inevitable e-mail campaign to the Beeb, but why not click here to send your own message of support? You can do this even after broadcast.

UPDATE: Dodgy stats in the Jerry Springer Opera debate

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Ad: uSwitch now offers credit card and personal loan comparisons too.
I’m not one for New Year resolutions. But last year ended with an energy bill that came with an invitation to sign up for a capped tariff that would lock me in for eighteen months; so not a cheaper tariff, but a promise not to put my bill up too much. I suppose that’s not such a bad offer if comparing gas and electricity suppliers is such a chore, you really don’t care if you’re not on the cheapest tariff. However, as things have settled down quite considerably since energy suppliers embraced competition (and lowered the cost of power) it looks like the only way for gas and electricity prices is up. So it’s time for a supplier comparison.

Which brings me on to uSwitch.com, who I’ve mentioned before, re best buy internet, and which is now the UK’s busiest utility related website after British Gas. You really can place an order with a new cheaper energy supplier in just a few minutes. You don’t really need to have recent bill handy, as they’ll tell you who’s cheapest anyway and they looked up my gas and electricity supply numbers without having to ask.

It’s odd that people don’t change energy supplier more often. After all, electricity’s electricity wherever it comes from; like gas, it’s a product to which suppliers can’t easily add value, working just as well whoever it’s bought from. And you don’t have to buy on the basis of price. uSwitch.com rate suppliers on data supplied by Ofgem, the independent regulator of the gas and electricity industries.

More interestingly, they also allow you to shop by a green energy rating provided by Friends of the Earth, the largest international network of environmental groups. uSwitch.com itself is regulated on a voluntary basis by Energy Watch, the independent watchdog for gas and electricity consumers, which means they have to include up to date information on all suppliers in their comparison tables, not just those who pay uSwitch a commission. (When I did the broadband internet comparison, the cheapest supplier was one that doesn’t pay commission and so needed to be contacted direct.) It looks like I’m going to save around £60 per year, but uSwitch.com reckon the average household could save £140 on their energy bills if they changed supplier, not bad a few minutes work.
AD: The average household could save £140 off their energy bills if they changed supplier. Click here to find out how much you could save.
uSwitch Vs Which?: Best buy broadband internet……uSwitch to renewable green electricity… or go nuclear

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The increasingly desperate state of Celebrity Big Brother is revealed in Brand Republic’s writing off of contestant Mark Bosnich as, ‘famous for being model Sophie Anderton’s ex and [testing] positive for cocaine’. And I know plenty of people who’ve no idea who Sophie Anderton is. They’ve got Caprice though, who’s famous in these parts for flying into Manchester from London on a sunny day and exclaiming, ‘Ooo. Nice here. It was raining in England you know’. Rating hopes seem pinned on Brigette Nielsen (who must be getting on a bit), as she enjoyed stripping off on a stateside reality show. Otherwise it’s people coming to terms with their has-been status. Like ‘former singer’ (don’t you love the bitchiness) Myleene Klass, who’s been offered what’s likely to be her last £100,000 pay cheque.

Meanwhile, I’ve added Jude & Trin & Clazza’s Reality TV Blog to the blogroll. They’ll watch sleb BB, so we don’t have to.

Selling out British TV……Who killed (Saturday Night) TV?……Rubbish message from rubbish TV……Wife Swap: defying the snobs on good TV……Killing British TV… again

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