John Walker's Electronic House

Sorry to sneak up on you, but look, it’s episode 13. We’re going weekly for, well, maybe a week. We’ll see how it works out. Please let us know in the comments below, or to podcast@rumdoings.com, whether you would prefer weekly episodes, or the former fortnightly.

Distracted by a new rum, we take a long time to get around to introducing the topic we’re not discussing: Whatever happened to sitting down for dinner as a whole family?

Instead we find ourselves discussing Scientology, random word snap, and then dive head-first into a chasm of self-indulgence, and discuss the Rum Doings origin story. How John and Nick met, the creation of (the now deceased) Glebe’s Thrift Funnel, and then our dalliance with the stars. As regular listeners will remember, Nick and John have a “no false modesty” rule, and included in this is what so many call “name-dropping”, but we call “talking about people we met.” We relate the stories of our adventures in the nineties in which we met many of our heroes.

Apologies for the slightly annoying hollow mic noise that appears occasionally. You’ll forgive us. Let us know what you enjoyed or didn’t enjoy, either via email or comment below. Or leave a review on iTunes. And please, as ever, retweet and plug this link, help us get heard. We want to be heard by the w-hole wide world.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

The first series of Being Human (BBC 3) made the same mistake in every episode. The tale of a ghost, vampire and werewolf sharing a house began each episode in the manner of the trite sitcom that brief description suggests. Oh, the wacky adventures they must have! But as each hour-long story progressed, it became darker and darker, finishing with a dramatic cliffhanger that ensured you’d watch the next. And yet somehow by the next week it would have reset back to its kooky sitcom cheeriness, constantly betraying its own potential.

The final episode was different. (Spoilers follow.) Enough threads needed to be brought together that writer/creator Toby Whithouse was forced to begin with drama and stay there, and it was a dramatically better programme. Optimistically, the first episode of the second series managed the same.

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In our first Rum Doings of 2010, we don’t discuss whatever happened to Britain’s supplies of salt.

Enjoying a cocktail known as A Snowball For The Year 2000, we begin with an excellent description of Nick from a listener, that sets us off onto a discussion of alternative ways of pronouncing words, and the definition of “enormity”, and why using Windows is like being a tourist in Egypt.

Then, as was perhaps somewhat inevitable, there’s discussion of the weather. And weather forecasting. We’re enormously right. Moving on to thunderstorms, you’ll understand this brings us to discussing the Scouting movement. Which of course leads into a conversation about breakfast cereals. And Victoria Wood. And Armando Iannucci. And Chris Langham. Ending on a teaser for the next episode! We’re a serial drama.

Email us! About anything you like. Who knows, in about two months we may read it on the podcast.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

As ever, we depend on you to promote this. Please, take the time to retweet it, tell friends, or post about it on forums, that sort of thing. Ooh, and write us a review on iTunes. That sort of thing is very helpful. Go on. For the children.

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of text messaging. To me it’s a tool. It’s a way of arranging to meet, or letting someone know you’ll be late. Or sending a pithy, clever insult. And it’s brilliant for that. Phoning someone to say something that can be taken care of in a maximum of two exchanges of 160 characters isn’t necessary. The text message takes care of it, quickly and efficiently.

However, if your conversation requires more than that, then it’s a bane. Having to try to orchestrate a complicated dialogue in minimal chunks is infuriating, and even more so because to do it you’re holding a device capable of telephoning someone. So telephone someone.

Perhaps an even larger issue with the text message is the apparent requirement to reply instantly. I don’t want to turn into some ghastly confused broadsheet columnist (wait, yes I do, that’s exactly the job I want – well, let’s assume I don’t want the ghastly part) who complains about how modern technology is driving us apart, because is it bollocks. It’s uniting us in incredible ways. But I do take issue with the immediacy of communication it’s engendered. If you need to get hold of me immediately, call me. The loud ringing sound will get my attention, and if I answer you’ll get my responses right away. If I don’t answer, you can assume I’m not able to, or don’t want to. For some reason we accept that an email may take a few hours to be responded to. But a text message, perhaps because of its relative informality, combined with its arriving on a device that follows us around (which of course is increasingly the case for email too), seems to come with a weight of responsibility. And one that arrives unsolicited. I don’t like that. While I find myself unable to remember how existence worked when phones were tied to the walls (despite living the first 20 years of my life in such a state – what did we do when we were going to be late for stuff?), I do remember that we weren’t commanded to instantly reply to everyone.

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Last year, when it snowed to any depth for the first time in my adult life, I made this. I don’t think I’ve topped it this year, but I had a good go. He’s a bit more clumsy, a bit less well shaped. But the spirit is there. Big props to Craig for suggesting brain matter and creating wall-based splatter effects. Oh, and coming up with the gun idea, too. I was just going to have his head caved open. Also, I’m sorry.

More angles here.

BBC News is on fire today!

First of all, a story about pi being calculated to 2.7 trillion digits is accompanied by this caption:

“Pi is an irrational number, meaning its digits go on forever.”

Um, not quite. I think you’ll find an irrational number is one that starts crying because the wallpaper’s the wrong colour, or something.

And then follow the headline, “Archbishop urges population cap” and you get this story about a group of MPs arguing for, I guess, culling, that at no point mentions the Archbishop. It’s a bold headline choice, suggesting the Archbishop wants to shut down our borders to all those Johnny foreigners. He might want to ask them about that, since it’s now their 7th most read story.

Presumably they’re getting a bit confused with a story from last October when the former moron Archbishop George Carey declared his delightful views on immigration. He explained that the reason the BNP were gaining popularity was because of our “open door policy” to immigrants. Never mind that the BNP’s popularity has waned in the last few years (I mean, why let that trouble your ghastly views?), but to suggest that the BNP might be becoming more popular because there’s too many foreigners coming into the country… Um, maybe someone can see the irony here? “If the mainstream parties begin listening to the voters,” he said, “the BNP can be consigned again to the fringes.” That’s right George. If the mainstream parties adopt the policies of the BNP, then we’ll not need the BNP at all!

UPDATE: They’ve now updated the linking headline to read, “Carey in immigrant ‘values’ call”. But haven’t thought to update the article to mention Carey at all. Is everyone at the BBC drunk today?

So in summary, they got absolutely every prediction incorrect, but it did eventually snow.

Yesterday morning the prediction was that Bath would receive an epic dumping of snow. By mid-afternoon this was stepped up to the South West being put on full alert for the most dangerous snow in living memory, with the highest ranking Met Office warning issued (a warning, we were told, they issued before last year’s floods in the Midlands, that rendered thousands homeless). It was going to disrupt power. It was going to close every road. Then about three hours later we had the cough-cough-oh retractions of this, but still with enough grim warnings of snow that we should still worry, and it would all kick off around 8pm. (This was originally 3pm, then 6pm.) At around 8pm we were told the slightly minimized apocalypse would now be occurring at midnight. But it was going to be at least 10cm. At least.

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In case anyone thought I was kidding.

UPDATE! The weatherman on BBC Disappoints West just said, “As for tomorrow, that’s in the laps of the gods.” So there you have it folks.

So after 15 minutes of some very pretty snow about three hours before it was forecast, there’s been nothing. In fact, it’s rained. And then at about 3pm the Met Office issued severe weather warnings for the South West starting at 6pm, Bath to receive 15cm overnight, terrible conditions, all roads and rail to stop.

This is now the revised pattern for snowfall tonight:

It’s actually curling up and around Bath. The previous 6pm blizzard is now showing a forecast for rain.

This is my point. They absolutely, categorically cannot predict the weather. They cannot get it right for three hours in the future. And yet every day they announce what it will be in five days time. It sometimes is, because if you roll a dice you’ll sometimes guess which number it will land on. But they cannot predict it.

Bath was due to be the epicentre for dramatic snowfall. Now we are likely to be rained on.

These forecasters are con-artists, and we should be treating what they do with the same contempt as homeopaths and psychics. And no, if it randomly happens to snow tonight, it won’t change anything. Whatever weather happens to happen, at least one of their rotating forecasts today will have been wildly wrong. They’ve predicted absolute polar opposites (or should I say pole-to-equator opposites) in the last six hours, London receiving four complete 180 flip-flops about whether it would receive any snow, and the South West now apparently safe from what we were warned would be the most dangerous snowfall in decades, er, two hours ago. So can we put an end to this idiocy, and treat those who claim to predict the weather with the same disgust and disdain we we do those who claim to predict the future.

And yes. I’m really bloody pissed off it’s not snowing.

Right, I’ve had enough. There is nothing else in the universe that we would tolerate being as wrong as British weather forecasts.

I recognise the problem. It’s about predicting the events of a literally chaotic system, taking place on a small island surrounded by seas. That makes it incredibly difficult to accurately predict the movement of warm and cold fronts as they swirl in from various directions. It’s so difficult, in fact, that they can’t do it. I don’t blame the weather forecaster for this. I don’t blame anyone for the unpredictability of chaos. (I’m generous like that.) But I DO believe it’s time to stop letting these half-blind soothsayers from getting to pretend it works.

In an age when the terrified BBC can’t put a programme on air before its producers have filled in multiple compliance forms for fear of being caught lying about something, surely the weather forecast should have to have some massive caption running along the bottom of the screen reading: “WARNING: AT BEST THIS IS A WILD GUESS.”

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The one thing Russell T Davies can write is sentimentality. And that’s no small compliment. The word is more often used detrimentally, a way to dismiss something: oh, it was too sentimental. But done well, and consistently when he wrote it was, it can carry an episode just above the mire. There’s a reason why just seeing Rose is a big deal – he wrote his heart out on the Rose storyline, and it still carries an impact now. And while Catherine Tate’s success in Doctor Who was to somehow not be hateful (which offered her a surprising amount of grace), it was only in Wilf that RTD managed to repeat the success of Rose as completely. So despite a story that went beyond all known limits of bullshit, Davies’ final episode managed not to be that bad.

And thank goodness there was the sentimentality, because good grief it didn’t have a plot to carry it. While it at least made coherent sense (in the same way a ball rolling down a hill makes coherent sense – it’s going to keep rolling then eventually stop) it didn’t make any narrative sense. So the Master turned the whole world into himself, but then that’s undone with the magic time gauntlet, never mind eh? In fact, the Master’s attack of all humanity wasn’t to make any clever changes to humans, but simply to illustrate that the Deus Ex Machina Gate works. Donna had her memories come back and was immune to the Master so she could, um, stumble about a bit and then forget? The Timelords are back, but oh, no they’re not. And so on.

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