Watch the whole episode on BBC iPlayer (UK only).

It was a nice way to start (link works in the UK only), as was his apology, unnecessary as it was — seriously, if you doubt that statement, listen via YouTube (Warning: Daily Mail readers may find this offensive):
Part 1:

Part 2:

I recently checked my Virgin Media’s hard drive to see which channels I had recorded television from. There was one programme not from the BBC — and that was a football match on Setanta. The hard disk shines a light on the quality of the BBC’s programming at the moment and shows, actually, that its content is great while that of its competitors is apalling.

To be fair, my opinion is not enough to justify the tone of what I have said. But a completely unscientific straw-poll shows that the only non-BBC viewing of anyone I know has been of football — Sky Sports during the weekend and on Thursday last week for domestic and European football and Setanta Sports.

The BBC has excellent programmes including Eggheads, The Tudors, Only Connect, The Story of Mathematics, Bruce Parry’s Amazon, Harry and Paul, Mock the Week, Live at the Apollo, Heroes. And that’s to ignore the improving output of BBC Radio 4. This with BBC HD (the only HD channel on Virgin at the moment) and, most importantly, BBC iPlayer (which I am now smugly using on my Nokia N96) make the BBC a force to be reckoned with.

In 2003/2004 when the BBC was preparing for the renewal, things needed to change and many people questioned the value for money of the license fee. In fact, I carried a link on this blog to a campaign to remove the privileged position of the BBC. But it’s done good. It is now amazing value for money.

The reviews have worked and the BBC deserves praise. I still hate the bias of the BBC’s news and reporting, but the bias appears to be in favour of the party I support now, rather than in favour of the party I do not, so it’s difficult to summon quite so much concern… how terrible of me to think that!

One final thought for Robert Peston: Tonight’s BBC Four programme, The Greed Game was an excellent piece of work. It explained, clearly, how and why the credit crunch came about. It was, if you’ll excuse the gushing, the sort of programme that the BBC was made to make. Robert Peston’s name has become synonymous with the Credit Crunch as his excellent reporting has clarified the whole issue for the masses; this programme made sense of an extraordinarily complex subject. My only question is why, with his clearly great grasp of finance, he works as a relatively low-paid journalist!

Over the last few weeks we’ve been subject to so-called scandal after so-called scandal and yet none of them much matters. People don’t care, for example, whether a wealthy man gave a lot of money to Labour, only whether he sought to gain influence by doing so. To my mind, giving the money through friends suggests that no influence was so sought.

The same is true of Ian Lucas’ request to have a debate about a Welsh component to a revised Union flag. I suspect not a single academic child has grown up and not asked the same question. The absence of a Welsh flag can be explained by a little studying of history, but it still seems odd that it has not been added in retrospect.

Again, though, the Welsh flag issue is not the one that the MP for Wrexham ought to be worried about. What about Welsh people having to suffer the indignity of being represented by an Assembly which has lesser powers than the Scottish Parliament? Why do the Scots deserve preferential treatment?

And while we’re talking about constitutional settlements, what has happened to devolution for England? The Campaign for an English Parliament has been complaining for nearly ten years, the Labour party has been threatening to break England up for more than ten years and yet the BBC give news-time to a minor issue like what the flag looks like.

I completely agree, as I said, that the Union flag is an anomaly, but surely the bigger anomalies ought to be cleared up first — let’s give Wales and England the parliaments they deserve, and let’s cut the British parliament down to size (given it’s purely federal role after the institution of the Welsh and English parliaments).

It’s not by mistake that the Welsh calls for an Assembly upgrade are so largely ignored, though. The turkey chicken-politician isn’t likely to vote for Christmas Winterval unless the people who vote for them make them feel they have to.

So I’m at-first heartened to see this on the BBC’s Magazine today about Honesty Boxes and then, when you get to the end, dismayed at the cynicism that suggests it is peer pressure and/or a fear of being caught that makes some people honest.

Oh well, so long as many continue to be honest and so long as society and its governors take action when honesty is absent, we can live in a more peaceful world.

But when will our governors punish those who harm others? And when will they stop imposing draconian surveillance measures while utilising a proven failed process that is called ‘rehabilitation’ in place of punishment?

I cannot find the good and great Alan Drew’s Prison Works website at the moment, but I’ll add a link here later.

And we have Jeremy Paxman who, for all his critics, does it to every political wing!

The Hamster’s Dragster crash video:

Hat-tip to: The England Project