I have also added a subscribe link to the right hand side of the page that adds this site’s feed directly to Google’s homepage or Google Reader (as you prefer). Thanks to Dave Taylor for that part.

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!

Why does Germany buy fewer games per head than the UK or France:

[Germany] is the third-biggest market for video games in Europe, behind the UK and France, with PC titles dominating the market.

This from a story about the PS3’s new PVR capabilities: BBC News

It would seem to me that Germany’s cultural similarities concerning alcohol and free time would make the number of games bought there similar to in Britain… But obviously not.

Last night’s meeting

Second, at last night’s meeting some more things were said that I didn’t really cover in my post because I was a bit of a hurry. As I’ve said many times recently, one of the items under discussion was key to a merger of services with Worthing and the accompanying savings in salaries which we must find because of the Labour Government’s swingeing cuts to grants and increases in demands on local Councils.

Members of the public are so infrequently in attendance that it is necessary to mention them when they are. Last night former-Councillor Peter Berry was in attendance. He had some questions to ask about the merger and, I quote, said that the Councils were “creating a staff surplus by reorganising the workload”. This, apparently, was supposed to be a negative criticism of the Councils plans whereas, in fact, it was a ringing endorsement of our policy. As a service organisation (as all Councils are) salaries and staff costs are the vast majority of our funding need. So to create staff surpluses is to create savings. To say that we are doing that by reorganising the workload is to say that we are creating efficiencies.

Many people criticise the NHS and other government bodies for ‘having too many chiefs and not enough Indians’; how wonderful then, that I can report that our Council is doing exactly what that adage criticises: reducing the number of managers by sharing managers between the two authorities! It’s really gratifying and a genuine good news story.

SEERA

In my last post I criticised the now dying SEERA for claiming that SEEDA was an unelected quango and I celebrated our Prime Minister’s decision to erase Regional Assemblies.

But I was, not unusually, being naively optimistic. SEERA is, for its faults, at least partially democratic in that some of its membership is Councillors from across the Region. SEERA, because of that, was becoming a thorn in the side of the central government and was likely to refuse to accept the house-building proposals that Gordon Brown recently announced. This would have been [in a fake posh voice] damned inconvenient, what! So in an act of sheer arrogance he decided to give it to the South East England Development Agency instead and close the troublesome assembly which was more and more likely to try to embarass him.

Far from being a positive step for democracy in England it is yet another attack on the democratic will of the people in this area who overwhelmingly do not support the ruling party. As the Tories came to regret using Scotland as a test bed, Labour will hopefully regret pushing the English — and especially those of us in the south — around.

Tonight’s Policy and Strategy Committee…

… was great, what more need be said? Well, actually, it would be nice to have some members of the public at the next one!

If you don’t like your Council tax rises, if you wonder how that hair-brained plan came to fruition, if you watch Newsnight or Question Time (or both!), if you enjoy debate or if you care about your local community then come along. It is really entertaining (normally) and it gives a real insight into how and why decisions are made.

I’m not over-selling it. Really.

No, really.

Here’s the link if you want to try it too: Apple Safari

So, despite my criticism of the modern, socialist green movement, I bought an Electrisave recently and have enjoyed (perhaps too much) seeing what impact each device has on power consumption.

At the rate of 8.192 pence per kWh (kilowatt hour) a 100W lightbulb uses 0.6 pence per hour. A 20″ LCD TV and two 19″ LCD computer monitors don’t register any cost at all. A kettle uses a comparitively amazing amount (around 20 pence per hour) and an electric shower uses 38 pence per hour.

My PC (which is reasonably specced) uses a little less than a lightbulb and when it is on standby makes no impact on the meter at all. Fascinatingly, though, a 20″ CRT computer monitor registers a little less than a lightbulb on its own. And a 25″ CRT TV uses a little more than a lightbulb.

The most expensive things are kettles, electric showers and vacuum cleaners. But the most surprising thing of all was my Xbox 360. While that is running it costs between 1.8 pence and 2 pence per hour. When two PCs, an LCD TV, two LCD monitors, one CRT monitor, the fridge and double-height freezer, two cordless telephone base stations and two cordless telephone charger points as well as all the household’s standby lights and LCD clocks were running, the Xbox 360 doubled the amount of power being used!

So if you have an Xbox 360, and you care about your bills or wasting fossil fuels (or even CO₂ emissions if you’re an extremist) turn off your Xbox 360 when you’re not using it.

Oh, and in case you’re interested, a Wii doesn’t register even 1/10 of a penny while it is running.

The Electrisave is a sinch to install and works beautifully, I’d strongly recommend them to anyone who asked.

Sadly there is no upgrade available there yet, so if you’re champing at the bit but already have Windows, hold on!

You can read it on James’ Nourishing Obscurity blog, although whether I should have linked to it depends on your viewpoint (see the bit about Oliver Kamm).

I’d add that the internet (and society generally) is changing so fast that ‘normal’ people have no hope of keeping up. So if you already knew about Webcameron or knew that Google had paid £900 million to provide the search function on MySpace then you can consider yourself not-normal.

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On Webcameron, I wanted to make this a separate post but it seems pointless now that I’ve mentioned it. I just wanted to observe that, while it may make some people physically sick and while it does seem a little too pink, the whole idea of allowing slightly less polished presentations to be made (no matter whether they’re staged or not) is an interesting path for politicians to take.

I’m going to avoid the obvious reality TV references but I think this really will make people start to question whether politicians are different because they’re different, or whether being a politician makes all observations of you appear as though through a prism. If Cameron can come out of this looking like a normal person who has to do that politician bit, then its been a success.

An interesting video on how contact lenses are made can be found here.

Kudos, then, to John at the England Project for having ‘Add to del.icio.us’ links on his posts.

I have now done the same for you del.icio.us people!

For your information I am Adeling on del.icio.us as that is the Anglo Saxon version of my surname ‘Ayling’ and I felt like making it something interesting (relatively).