Becoming our parents slowly

Ever since I was young, the sounds of BBC Radio 4 reverberated round the house, mostly owing to my Dad. This has affected me and my siblings in various different ways.

• All of us have developed a pathological hatred of 'The Archers' ("The world's longest-running radio soap" - I know; they're actually proud about it). If you ever want a town massacred, just get us there, make sure there are automatic weapons within a convenient reaching-distance, and start playing any damned episode you like over a PA system.

  I don't know what it is, but you can instantly tell an Archers episode apart from any other radio drama from a few scant nanoseconds of smug, inauthentic, rurality-patronising, middle-class-cosseting audio. I know there are probably some people here who like it. Fuck you. You're wrong.

• All of us have a healthy respect for 'The Today Programme' and 'PM' and tune-in frequently.

• We all play the "Spot the decent 6:30pm comedy series" game.

  For people who don't know what I'm talking about, Radio 4 broadcasts its main evening news programme between 6pm and 6:30pm; leaving the 6:30-7:00pm slot free for radio comedy every weeknight. There are five weeknights a week, which leaves roughly 250 comedy slots per year. If you gave each separate show a 6-part run, you could fit in something like 40 different shows per year. In practise, it never works out quite like this as there are perennial favourites which get longer runs and multiple series, but there are still 15-30 different shows given a chance each year in this spot.

  It sounds like a great idea, doesn't it? and, as an idea, it is indeed terrific. As a finished reality however, it sucks donkey balls. Most of the shows seem to function solely to give put-out-to-pasture comedians a clump of hay for the winter. Those comedic musicians who are nether funny enough to be comedians nor musical enough to be musicians — Let's rhyme 'Blair' with 'bear' to the tune of the Colonel Bogey March or a current top twenty hit — can, apparently, still find work. Incredible, isn't it?

  It's not all terrible, though. Some great comedy has come out of this experiment. On The Hour essentially launched the careers of Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris, leading directly to 'Alan Partridge' (also first tried as radio comedy in the comedy slot), 'The Day Today' and 'Brass Eye'. More recently, Ross Noble's world tours have been chucklesome and 'That Mitchell and Webb Sound' has been enjoying much greater success in visual form.

• We all play 'spot the decent documentary series' for similar reasons. Do you remember the David Mellor sex-in-a-Chelsea-shirt-with-toe-sucking incident? It didn't happen. The article on Friday's 'The Message' show (currently off-air) dealing with intentionally-manufactured tabloid news stories was one of the best, and most chilling, things I've heard in recent years.

As I think you can see, my relationship with Radio 4 is something of a love/hate one. It seems to embody an awful lot of what is both great and fucking atrocious about "mainstream" middle-brow British culture, and perhaps also, in some strange way, my parents. Upon visiting my folks' house, it is not uncommon to pass through empty room after empty room turning radios off, just as my Dad leaves a trail of tinny speakers blaring in his wake; if he had his way, he'd probably get Radio 4 piped throughout the house. To give an even better idea of the addiction, he has waterproof radios in each bathroom and shower.

I haven't owned a radio since I was a child. I've got a number of stereos with radios in them; I've got a CD player in the car that comes with a radio; you can even pick up FM on my mobile phone with the hands-free headphones acting as an antenna, but I've never bought a radio, or can't recall doing so.

Radio 4 (long wave) and Radio 5 Live Extra's Ashes coverage has convinced me, though. As soon as tonight's rush hour dies down, I'm off to buy an old-school analogue radio as I can't shackle myself to a computer just to get the latest live feed coverage; I want to lie in bed and listen to the unmitigated disaster unfolding. They were all-out by 1:30am last night ... ermmm ... fortunately[?].

And my journey towards becoming my dad and/or grandad will be one step nearer completion.

See no evil, speak no evil

Tangentially, Martin Kelner raises a valid point in today's Guardian blogs: Why can cricket commentators seemingly feel able to criticise openly all things surrounding the game in a relatively calm and perceptive manner, yet football commentators cannot?

Is it that footballers and their critics simply aren't as intelligent as their cricketing equivalents? Or is it that the financial stakes are heightened to such an extent (The BBC bid £120million for three years' worth of Premiership highlights, FFS ...) that they feel less willing to slag off their dearly-bought product? Or is it that cricket is vastly more complicated and allows greater depths of lengthy analysis? I'm not sure I buy that — though it's possible — but whatever the reason, the raw fact of the matter seems to be there.

Mountain of the Week #3

We have a winner. TurboThy correctly guessed that last week's mountain ...

... was Denali / Mount McKinley at 6194m (20,320 ft). North Americans; you should be ashamed of yourselves. Denali is a pretty remarkable mountain, but also a pretty famous one, so I'll spare most of the hard-sell, which can be gotten from the wikipedia link above and the summitpost Mount McKinley page.

The main point for doing Denali this week was as an excuse to link to these two images, both taken from the west buttress ridge, which give an incredible sense of raw height, as a result of Denali's exceptional prominence.

A step too far

I am no longer going to watch football matches in or from stadia which have those fucking obnoxious LED-powered advertising boards. It was bad enough when they were those triangular designs which rotated every fifteen seconds, but then it was more to do with maximising space (i.e. charging three times for the same board). The first wave of LED advertisements weren't quite as bad; they just moved in order to change. With the advent of the LED banner, and marketers more familiar with their abilities, they now flash, bounce, jiggle, strobe, change colour and generally do everything possible to distract your attention from the game itself.

It has gotten to the ridiculous point where the marketing is now detrimentally affecting the main product and I can no longer bring myself to tolerate it. Sadly, my absence will make little difference to their all-consuming march.

In truth, I didn't think they would last very long. I've been waiting avidly for the day when a player blamed a critical error on the animated adverts — World Cup qualifier, Champion's League knock-out game etc. — but it's not yet happened. Actually, I've seen a number of incidents — including a wayward Rio Ferdinand pass on Sunday — where I suspect that an advert may actually have been the culprit, but also suspect that, unless the incident is of extreme significance, anti-advert sentiment from players isn't going to find its way out to the public arena. Some grounds, I notice, have gone so far as to have the advertising boards below the level of the pitch, so that the players generally can't see them but the television audience must.

Whatever. Enough.