http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/5082582/Britains-sexiest-teacher-to-be-disciplined-over-lingerie-photos.html 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1166044/Teacher-faces-disciplinary-action-parent-uncovers-racy-lingerie-photos-online.html 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7974446.stm

Now this woman won a competition on national television and was voted Britains sexiest teacher, which I feel is far tackier than her having a career on the side as a model. Lets be honest here, these pictures are nothing special, they are not pornographic, they don’t involve pupils, they have no effect on her teaching abilities, in fact given she is a PE teacher it could be argued they show the benefits of exercise on the body . I find it sad not that a parent felt the need to complain, but they felt the need to complain anonymously. How do we know it was a parent who complained?

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7965058.stm

Now this joke, not that funny, is just a play on words it probably dates back to the days of Ghandi. Is it racist? Was the reaction of A Mr Mohammed Shafiq, of the Ramadhan Foundation – an organisation which exists to enhance a better understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims in the West -over the top? He even managed to puff himself into such a rage that he accused Sir David of being out of touch with reality in portraying Pakistanis as cloakroom attendants.
‘He should have known better,’ he said. ‘Many top jobs in this country are held by British Muslims. He needs to be careful about what he says. He need to learn about the wealth of jobs held by Muslims.’
Now did anyone mention muslims? did anyone complain to the radio station? No. Was this an example of people trying to make news out of a regretable lack of judgement? More than likely.

Kremlin Rules

It Isn’t Magic: Putin Opponents Are Made to Vanish From TV

James Hill for The New York Times

A talk show host, Vladimir R. Solovyov, flanked by the politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, right, and a professor, Mark Urnov.

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

Published: June 3, 2008

MOSCOW — On a talk show last fall, a prominent political analyst named Mikhail G. Delyagin had some tart words about Vladimir V. Putin. When the program was later televised, Mr. Delyagin was not.

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ATV

In a still frame from video, the incomplete digital erasure of a Putin critic named Mikhail G. Delyagin from an episode of the program “The People Want to Know” can be seen. Mr. Delyagin’s leg and hand remain visible, to the right of the man holding the microphone.

Enlarge This Image

James Hill for The New York Times

Mikhail G. Delyagin, a political analyst, fully visible in his Moscow office, but not on a talk show broadcast last fall.

Not only were his remarks cut — he was also digitally erased from the show, like a disgraced comrade airbrushed from an old Soviet photo. (The technicians may have worked a bit hastily, leaving his disembodied legs in one shot.)

Mr. Delyagin, it turned out, has for some time resided on the so-called stop list, a roster of political opponents and other critics of the government who have been barred from TV news and political talk shows by the Kremlin.

The stop list is, as Mr. Delyagin put it, “an excellent way to stifle dissent.”

It is also a striking indication of how Mr. Putin has increasingly relied on the Kremlin-controlled TV networks to consolidate power, especially in recent elections.

Opponents who were on TV a year or two ago all but vanished during the campaigns, as Mr. Putin won a parliamentary landslide for his party and then installed his protégé, Dmitri A. Medvedev, as his successor. Mr. Putin is now prime minister, but is still widely considered Russia’s leader.

Onetime Putin allies like Mikhail M. Kasyanov, his former prime minister, and Andrei N. Illarionov, his former chief economic adviser, disappeared from view. Garry K. Kasparov, the former chess champion and leader of the Other Russia opposition coalition, was banned, as were members of liberal parties.

Even the Communist Party, the only remaining opposition party in Parliament, has said that its leaders are kept off TV.

And it is not just politicians. Televizor, a rock group whose name means TV set, had its booking on a St. Petersburg station canceled in April, after its members took part in an Other Russia demonstration.

When some actors cracked a few mild jokes about Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev at Russia’s equivalent of the Academy Awards in March, they were expunged from the telecast.

Indeed, political humor in general has been exiled from TV. One of the nation’s most popular satirists, Viktor A. Shenderovich, once had a show that featured puppet caricatures of Russian leaders, including Mr. Putin. It was canceled in Mr. Putin’s first term, and Mr. Shenderovich has been all but barred from TV.

Senior government officials deny the existence of a stop list, saying that people hostile to the Kremlin do not appear on TV simply because their views are not newsworthy.

In interviews, journalists said that they did not believe the Kremlin kept an official master stop list, but that the networks kept their own, and that they all operated under an informal stop list — an understanding of the Kremlin’s likes and dislikes.

Vladimir V. Pozner, host of “Times,” a political talk show on the top national network, Channel One, said the pressure to conform to Kremlin dictates had intensified over the last year, and had not eased even after the campaign.

“The elections have led to almost a paranoia on the part of the Kremlin administration about who is on television,” said Mr. Pozner, who is president of the Russian Academy of Television.

In practice, Mr. Pozner said, he tells Channel One executives whom he wants to invite on the show, and they weed out anyone they think is persona non grata.

“They will say, ‘Well, you know we can’t do that, it’s not possible, please, don’t put us in this situation. You can’t invite so and so’ — whether it be Kasparov or Kasyanov or someone else,” Mr. Pozner said.

He added: “The thing that nobody wants to talk about is that we do not have freedom of the press when it comes to the television networks.”

Vladimir R. Solovyov, another political talk show host, said Mr. Pozner was complaining only because his ratings were down and he was looking for someone to blame if his program was canceled. Mr. Solovyov, a vocal supporter of Mr. Putin, said he had never been bullied by the Kremlin.

Yet last year, his show, “Throw Down the Gauntlet,” regularly featured members of opposition parties. This year, the only politicians to appear have been leaders of Mr. Putin’s party, United Russia, and an allied party.

Asked why he had not invited opposition leaders lately, Mr. Solovyov said: “No one supports them. They have nothing to say.”

Vladimir A. Ryzhkov, a liberal and former member of Parliament who used to appear on the show, said Mr. Solovyov was covering up for the Kremlin.

“He lies, of course,” Mr. Ryzhkov said. “My programs with him were among the highest rated programs of any in the history of his show.”

Mr. Ryzhkov said he was usually allowed to appear in lengthy segments on only one major channel: Russia Today, the English-language news station, which the Kremlin established to spread its viewpoint globally.

“I can go on Russia Today only because they want to make it seem that in Russia, there is freedom of the press,” he said.

After the Soviet Union’s fall, several national and regional networks arose that were owned by oligarchs. Though they operated with relatively few restrictions, their owners often used them to settle personal and business scores. One network, NTV, garnered attention for its investigative reporting and war dispatches from Chechnya.

Mr. Putin chafed at negative coverage of the government, and the Kremlin effectively took over the major national networks in his first term, including NTV. Vladimir Gusinsky, NTV’s owner, was briefly arrested and then fled the country after giving up the network. From that point on, executives and journalists at Russian networks clearly understood that they would be punished for resisting the Kremlin.

All the major national and regional networks are now owned by the government or its allies. And since the presidential election in March, neither Mr. Putin nor Mr. Medvedev has indicated any interest in loosening the reins.

“Our television is very often criticized,” Mr. Medvedev said in April. “They say it is boring, it is pro-government, it is too oriented towards the positions of state agencies, of those in power. You know, I can say that our television — in terms of quality, in terms of the technology used — is, I believe, one of the best in the world.”

Valery Y. Komissarov, a former host on a state channel who is now a governing party leader in Parliament, said television coverage was a convenient scapegoat for opposition politicians and antagonistic commentators.

“These are people who are not interesting for society, who are not interesting for journalists,” Mr. Komissarov said. “But they want publicity and perhaps they want to explain away their lack of creative and political success by the fact that they are persecuted, that they are included on the so-called stop list.”

While the Kremlin has focused on TV because it has by far the largest audience, many radio stations and newspapers also abide by the stop list, either ignoring or belittling the opposition.

There are exceptions: a few national and regional newspapers regularly publish critical news and commentary about Mr. Putin and comments from those on the stop list. In addition, the Internet is not censored, and contains plenty of criticism of the government.

A small national network, Ren TV, pushes the boundaries, as does a national radio station, the Echo of Moscow, which has become the voice of the opposition even though Gazprom, the government gas monopoly, owns a majority stake in it.

The Kremlin seems to tolerate criticism in such outlets because they have a limited reach compared with the major television networks. The nightly news on Channel One, for example, is far more popular than any of its counterparts in the United States. It regularly is one of top 10 most-watched programs in Russia.

Mr. Delyagin, the political analyst edited out of the talk show last fall, said he was surprised to have been invited in the first place. He said he last appeared on a major network several years ago, before he began attacking the Kremlin and supporting the opposition.

“I thought that maybe she forgot to look at the stop list,” he said, referring to the program’s host, Kira A. Proshutinskaya.

(Last week, after a Russian-language version of this article was posted on a blog run by the Moscow bureau of The New York Times, Mr. Delyagin was invited to appear on a show on NTV.)

Ms. Proshutinskaya’s program, “The People Want to Know,” had been censored before.

Mr. Ryzhkov, the liberal former member of Parliament, went on the show last year, but its network, TV Center, refused to broadcast it.

In an interview, Ms. Proshutinskaya conceded that Mr. Delyagin had been digitally erased from the program. She said she had been embarrassed by the incident, as well as the one with Mr. Ryzhkov, explaining that the network was responsible. The Kremlin had so intimidated the networks, she said, that self-censorship was rampant.

“I would be lying if I said that it is easy to work these days,” she said. “The leadership of the channels, because of their great fear of losing their jobs — they are very lucrative positions — they overdo everything.”

The management of her network would not comment. But the network’s news director, Mikhail A. Ponomaryov, said journalists and hosts of talk shows had no choice but to comply with the rules.

“It would be stupid to say that we can do whatever we want,” he said. “If the owner of the company thinks that we should not show a person, as much as I want to, I cannot do it.”

www.giftsafari.co.uk 

You are the weakest WAG: Footballers’ girls appearance on The Weakest Link makes the (average) mind boggle

By Amanda Platell
28th May 2008

Forget The Weakest Link, Anne Robinson’s special WAG edition of her TV show should have been called Beauty And The Beastly.

Miss Robinson shone a harsh spotlight into the minds of the new princesses of popular culture and found a pea.

To be honest, you’d have needed an air-and-sea searchlight to find anything between the diamond-studded ears of these young women.

So, here we have it. Lined up were Alex Best, ex-wife of a deceased football drunk; Charley Uchea, a Big Brother contestant, whose cousin is a footballer; Danielle Lloyd, Teddy Sheringham’s ex; Linsey Dawn McKenzie, who married footballer Mark Williams; Amii Grove, who dates footballer Jermaine Pennant; and Michelle Marsh, Lucy Pinder, Cassie Sumner and Lauren Pope – who are still looking for their princely footballer and kissing a lot of frogs on the way.

Some of these girls weren’t even trophy girlfriends, they were consolation prizes.

Anne Robinson could match any WAG million for million. The only difference is, love her or loathe her, she’s earned it herself. In terms of intelligence, the lot of them put together would not have added to the first digit in their host’s IQ.

Miss Robinson was magnificent, almost motherly in her concern.

The Weakest Link presenter Anne Robinson seemed to have more intelligence than all the WAGs put together during Saturday’s TV show

Well, more Mommie Dearest to be honest. Winston Churchill would have been proud of her put-downs, Margaret Thatcher of her withering glances.

But she was provoked. When you have in front of you a young woman who thinks the politician who delivers the Budget each year is not the Chancellor but Tony Blair, when a birdbrain ‘absolutely knows’ the name of the Greek goddess of love is Viagra, Robinson can be forgiven a blow-torch look or two.

You could just see her thinking, so this is what the sisters fought for, a generation of young women who think Sense And Sensibility was written by Jane Hawkins.

For a moment, I thought I was watching a David Attenborough special on the Darwinian theory of the evolution of man, or woman in this case.

But it wasn’t the ascent of woman, from ape to primate, but the descent from able to Primark. These young women are regressing at a frightening rate.

They pride themselves on their stupidity. Which is all the more galling as none of them, well hardly any of them, is really stupid.

But we are right to have tears of laughter and despair in our eyes when a young woman demonstrates she doesn’t know the difference between a boutique and a boudoir.

Well, I guess you can just about understand that, because for them to get in to the boutique with their footballer’s credit card, they have to go through the boudoir first.

Thinking I was tuning in to the Six O’Clock News, I was taken aback on Monday night to see Anne Robinson and nine very polished young women.

And I don’t mean nicely dressed, good manners, conversant in several languages. Not that kind of polished.

The nine women were as pink and transparent as a set of highly buffed acrylic false nails.

Sweet girls, but with ‘desperate to hook rich footballer’ stamped all over their decolletage and, no doubt, their St Tropez tans.

Such is the desire to be a celebrity that even girls so intellectually challenged they think ‘hello’ is spelled with an exclamation mark are prepared to put themselves forward on a national TV quiz show to be humiliated.

But in the world of Big Brother fame, even to be known as the dimmest twit on the show is a badge of honour.

Who can forget the heroines of this generation? Celebrity Big Brother’s Chantelle was the daft gazelle of a monosyllabic girl who knew only three words, ‘Oh my God’, wasn’t a celebrity and went on to make millions out of a sham marriage to that even dimmer pop singer Preston, and then sold the divorce story for more mega-bucks.

Or Jade Goody, the woman who thought Rio de Janeiro was a person and said: ‘I’m the 25th most influential person in the world and I don’t even know what the word means.’

She’s been branded a fat pig, a slob, a bigot, a racist, and each label has made her more millions. Her capacity for crassness knows no bounds.

When we live in a world where the educational sub-class worships at the altar of OK! magazine and Coleen McLoughlin is its high priestess, it can come as little surprise that these girls will do anything to become someone.

And their fast-track to achieving this is by TV humiliation.

We’ll all remember Amii not for the silly spelling of her name but that when she was asked if her relationship with her footballer boyfriend was ‘ tempestuous’, she said wide-eyed: ‘Wot does that mean? Does it mean up and down?’

Still thinking about sex, eh Amii? She’ll be taking over from Carole Vorderman on Countdown next.

The disparity between the footballers’ wives and girlfriends and Anne was staggering.

The WAGS versus the old bag, beauty versus brains. The only similarity between Anne and at least some of the group was plastic surgery.

Yet Anne was at her sarcastic, sardonic best. I would say for 50 minutes she was the mistress of irony. ‘But who cares?’ say the WAGS. ‘We’ll get our cleaning lady to do the irony.’

At the beginning of the show, Anne told the nine women that one of them could leave with £50,000 for their favourite charity.

OK, so she had to explain to a couple of them first that Versace wasn’t a war-torn country neighbouring Zimbabwe, and that Dolce & Gabbana wasn’t a children’s orphanage, but their intentions were good. ‘

Eight of you will leave with nothing,’ she warned.

This turned out to be false. Nine of them left with nothing. But in these days of austerity – when it costs a family £70 to fill their car with petrol for a week – perhaps the sight of these primping, preening wannabes, who spend more on one handbag than many families do on groceries in a month, will not inspire, but irk.

Maybe in the end, the new vulgarians, the footballers and their vacuous wives and girlfriends past and present will prove to be the weakest link in society. And not before time.

Indiana Jones should be banned in Russia for being ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’, say communists

He’s battled with Nazi soldiers, escaped from an Egyptian snake pit and seen off a Bedouin swordsman.

But Indiana Jones didn’t reckon on his latest challenge –after riling Russian Communists with his new adventure film.

Controversial: Harrison Ford, as Indiana Jones, swipes at a Soviet soldier in new movie, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which Russian communists called for to be banned

They have condemned Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as crude anti-Soviet propaganda and want it banned from the country.

The movie stars Harrison Ford as an archaeologist in 1957 competing with an evil KGB agent, played by Cate Blanchett, to find a skull endowed with mystic powers.

Cast: Front, from second from left, Ray Winstone as Mac, Harrison Ford and Cate Blanchett as Agent Irina Spalko

Communists, however, say the actors are serving as the ‘running dogs’ of the CIA.

Party member Viktor Perov said: ‘ What galls is how together with America we defeated Hitler, and how we sympathised when Bin Laden hit them.

‘But they go ahead and scare kids with Communists.’

Communist numbers have dwindled since Soviet times, but its members see themselves as the defenders of the achievements of the old Soviet Union.

They fear Russian children are being fed revisionist Hollywood history and have appealed to Russia’s culture ministry to ban the Indiana film to prevent ‘ ideological sabotage’.

Action: Indy escapes from a damaged Jeep

BBC survival expert Ray Mears dismisses rival Bear Grylls as ‘just a showman’

By Paul Revoir
on 19th May 2008

It is one handy hint which does not feature in the TV survival expert’s handbook.

What do you do when under attack from another TV survival expert?

This is the quandary facing Channel 4’s Bear Grylls following a vitriolic onslaught from his BBC rival Ray Mears.

In an interview, Mears dismissed the former SAS man as nothing more than a ’showman’ and ‘boy scout’.

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Ray Mears: ‘I’m the boss’

Bear Grylls apparently chewing raw fish on his show

He also attacked TV directors for trying to ‘hype’ things up, after Grylls was said to be surviving in ‘hell holes’, while staying in a motel for his show.

According to Radio Times, 44-year-old Mears laughed out loud when asked if he watched his opposite number’s programmes for tips.

He said: ‘Do I look for tips from Bear Grylls? Yes – on how not to make television programmes! As far as I’m concerned, these people are just showmen.

‘I think the viewer knows that if you want to really know how to take care of yourself in the wild, I’m the person to talk to.’

The presenter, whose new series Ray Mears Goes Walkabout begins on Sunday, added: ‘I welcome competition, but I want to see real experts, not boy scouts pretending to be.’

Mears claimed his shows, which have also included Wild Food and Extreme Survival, have helped save lives.

‘You can take short cuts if you want, but we never have.

‘I’ve had many arguments with directors, telling them, “We do it the right way or not at all”. That caused a problem in the old days, but now directors see what happens if you cheat.’

Last summer, 33- year- old Grylls was criticised over revelations that his existence during filming his series Born Survivor had been more comfortable than the programme suggested.

The Old Etonian’s escapades attracted 1.4million viewers as he demonstrated gruesome survival tips which included sucking the fluid from fish eyeballs and squeezing water from animal dung. But an adviser to the programme claimed that much was not as it seemed on television.

Viewers were not told that, far from roughing it, Grylls was spending some nights in the Pines Resort hotel at Bass Lake, California, where the rooms have Internet access and it is advertised as ‘a cosy getaway for families’ complete with blueberry pancakes for breakfast.

In another episode when Grylls declared he was a ‘ reallife Robinson Crusoe’ stuck on a desert island, he was actually on an outlying part of the Hawaiian archipelago and retired to a motel at nightfall.

Mark Weinert, a survival consultant brought in for the programme, said one show also wrongly gave the impression that the adventurer built a Polynesian-style raft using only materials around him, including bamboo and palm leaves for a sail.

Mr Weinert had in fact led a team that built the raft, which was then dismantled so that Grylls could be shown constructing it on camera.

‘If you really believe everything happens the way it is shown on TV, you are being a little bit naive,’ Mr Weinert told the Sunday Times.

Invited to respond to the attack by Mears, Bear Grylls was unavailable for comment.

Ant and Dec want to give back award after phone vote was rigged because Robbie Williams wanted them to win

By PAUL REVOIR -  9th May 2008

Comedy duo Ant and Dec have vowed to hand back a prestigious award after they found themselves at the centre of a television phone-in scandal.It emerged that singer Robbie Williams was told Ant and Dec would win a British Comedy Award weeks before a “live” viewers’ vote was carried out.

In fact, the public voted for the BBC’s Catherine Tate Show as its favourite.

But the award duly went to the Geordie presenters.

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Wrong gong: Ant and Dec receive the People’s Choice prize from Robbie Williams only after he was promised the comedy duo would win

Two devastating reports into rip-offs by ITV also uncovered that viewers of two of their shows were conned in separate incidents.

Last night the pair said they would give back the award – but only as ITV was fined nearly £6million.

A spokesman for Ant and Dec said the duo were “appalled” they had won an award which had been fixed.

The spokesman said: “They are so upset and completely appalled.

“They have been lucky to win many awards and would never want to win an award in this way.”

Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway and Gameshow Marathon were among several programmes found by the television watchdog Ofcom to have fleeced viewers out of millions in faked votes.

Real winner: Catherine Tate received the most votes

Ofcom said ITV had shown “total contempt” for its audience and fined it a record £5.7million.

Politicians branded yesterday’s revelations the “final straw” in TV fakery, saying the British public would not accept any more cons by broadcasters.

There was also anger that ITV has still not fired anyone for the shabby treatment of its viewers.

The first report was carried out by the law firm Olswang into the apparent fixing of the British Comedy Awards on ITV in 2005.

According to the independent report, Robbie Williams said he would be prepared to appear on the show only if it was to hand an award to Ant and Dec, with whom he is friends.

Organisers of the televised awards made the deal with Williams weeks before the public voted on it.

On the night the pair were handed the People’s Choice prize, which rightfully should have gone to Catherine Tate, before the public vote had even been concluded.

Organisers of the event gave the award during a news break, but did not tell viewers who thought they were still influencing the outcome.

Olswang’s report found that Williams and presenters Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly were all unaware of the situation.

The second investigation was by Ofcom into a string of phone-in scandals.

It found that viewers of ITV hit shows including Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway wasted almost £8million on some 10million telephone calls.

They had no chance of winning as competition finalists were repeatedly chosen before phone lines had closed.

Winners were chosen on the basis of where they lived or how they would appear on screen.

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ITV fixed the result after Robbie Williams refused to turn up at the show unless Ant and Dec won the comedy award

Ant and Dec’s programme Saturday Night Takeaway was one of the shows that took money from callers after competition lines had closed

Ofcom said programme makers had “made money from misconduct” and their actions had been “absolutely reprehensible”.

The broadcaster will now be forced into the humiliation of broadcasting the watchdog’s findings numerous times in the coming weeks on ITV1.

By far the biggest culprit was Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, which was responsible for half of the wrongly taken cash, about £4million. It was fined £3million.

Another show from Ant and Dec, Gameshow Marathon, was hit with a £1.2million fine, and Soapstar Superstar, a celebrity singing competition, was fined the same amount after it finalised results before lines closed.

Viewers’ song choices were overidden by producers and viewers’ votes were ignored. Wrong participants were put forward for eviction.

The digital channel ITV2+1 was fined £275,000 after it repeated programmes an hour later without telling viewers the competitions had closed.

Other shows found to have breached rules, but not fined, included I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! People’s Court and ITV Playalong.

Ofcom’s report criticised ITV for failing to take “significant” disciplinary action against staff who were involved in the scams.

Junior members of staff on Soapstar Superstar were said to have been “firmly sat upon” by executives after raising concerns about manipulating votes.

The executive producer of Saturday Night Takeaway was said to have “turned a blind eye” to the deception.

Conservative MP John Whittingdale, chairman of the culture, media and sport select committee, said: “It is extraordinary that they ever thought this type of behaviour was acceptable.”

Liberal Democrat Culture spokesman Don Foster said: “To hear that a major awards show has been potentially fiddled comes as the final straw with the public’s confidence in broadcasting.”

Ofcom’s findings came after city firm Deloitte was called in by ITV to carry out an audit of its programmes. Its findings were published in October.

ITV chairman Michael Grade restated the channel’s “unreserved apology to the public for breaches that took place between 2003 and January 2007″.

He added: “For anyone who cares about British broadcasting, the Ofcom findings and the Deloitte review make for sorry reading.”

Mr Grade said ITV had “gone further than any other broadcaster in instigating an independent, systematic and comprehensive investigation into all allegations around premium rate services in its programmes”.

The latest findings come after a year of revelations and admissions that have disgraced the broadcasting world.

Last year GMTV was found to have duped viewers out of up to £40million over four years and was fined £2million.

The BBC is facing a hefty fine from Ofcom over a dozen phone-in rip-offs involving shows such as Comic Relief, Children in Need, Blue Peter and Sport Relief.

It has already been fined £50,000 for a previous incident on Blue Peter, in which it faked a competition winner.

Benighted BBC needs Wogan’s Euro vision

Thanks to broadcaster scheduling, Euro 2008 is being recast as a tournament we can actually win

Marina Hyde

May 8, 2008 12:44 AM

From the minute the BBC announced it had secured the services of Steve McClaren as a Euro 2008 “expert analyst”, the tone for our thrilling non-involvement in this summer’s tournament was set. It was as though Five Live had successfully fought off bids from a host of national and international broadcasters to sign the former England manager, as opposed to pulling off a coup on a par with getting Homer Simpson to present a series on particle physics.

Now, hot on the heels of this triumph, comes confirmation that the Beeb and ITV are legally bound to screen practically every minute of a tournament in which England will play no part, across more than three weeks of the primetime schedules. A certain mental adjustment is required by all those who had pencilled in a summer of pretending it wasn’t happening, all those who regard every group as the Group of Indifference, and all those who like Albert Square’s cavalcade of misery to proceed uninterrupted.

One thing is increasingly clear: for these benighted souls it will not be Euro 2008, but Euphemism 2008.

Press releases describing the most unappetising ties as “hotly anticipated” are already doing the rounds and, in many ways, recasting the tournament as such is a stroke of last-ditch genius on the broadcasters’ behalf. It has turned Euro 2008 into a competition that we can actually win. As far as demented, let’s-take-the-positives delusion goes, there is quite simply no one to touch the English. It is the national speciality, and not having an overrated team on which to project this lunatic brand of optimism is already proving no impediment whatsoever for some.

“It just goes to show how lucky we are,” opined Alan Shearer at the launch of the Beeb’s coverage, “to have the likes of Fernando Torres, Cesc Fàbregas and Cristiano Ronaldo in the Premier League and be able to watch them every week.”

Well quite. In fact, were you to submit fully to this version of our good fortune – and submit you must, even for Switzerland v Turkey – you would think the forthcoming Champions League final between two English clubs was just something that had to be got through. Whatever happens in Moscow will be merely the equivalent of a cinema advert for your local tandoori before the opening credits of the main feature get under way.

With amusing optimism, both the BBC and ITV have been at pains to emphasise that a complete lack of home nation involvement will give us an intriguingly different sort of take on proceedings. So we can look forward to the likes of Steves Rider and McClaren surveying the action with a kind of wry, professorial detachment – a pose that in the Beeb’s case will be all the easier following the departure of Ian Wright to take the emeritus chair at Gladiators.

Indeed, if it is a semi-detached charm the Match of the Day lot are after, who better to fill the third chair than Terry Wogan, whose long years of dispensing weary putdowns to European nations in the service of the Eurovision Song Contest make him the obvious choice to step into Wrighty’s sadly-vacated pointy jester’s shoes. As things stand, all the line-up lacks is a quite reasonably refreshed Sir Terry muttering about Warsaw Pact conspiracies, or glossing a defensive error by France with a sardonic: “That’s the same defence the French have been playing since they hung the washing up on the Maginot Line.”

That said, some things do not need euphemising and it is disappointing to learn that the BBC is bracing itself for viewer complaints on, for example, June 12, when EastEnders will have to make way for Austria v Poland. On what grounds? Surely EastEnders could do with a spell of having to play for its place in the schedules, and it seems wildly unlikely that even the latter tie could be any more tedious and depressing than another trip to Walford.

But it’s those all-important extras that can lift a major sporting event from the magnificent to the sublime, so it remains to be seen what sort of support programming our terrestrial overlords have devised. It would be nice to think they will play to our other national strength, and that a press of the red button will avail viewers of the rules of the Great Euro 2008 Drinking Game – the perfect accompaniment to the tournament. In order to get the best out of the event, participants must drink once for a yellow, twice for a goal, and until well past the point of nausea for every newspaper photo of an England player mooching around Dubai, published beneath the headline: “Wish you weren’t here?”

The sexist, the violent and the racist: The most complained about adverts of last year

30th April 2008
Sex sells when it comes to advertising, but that doesn’t mean customers are particularly happy about it.

In fact, the sensitive masses complained about more adverts than ever before on the grounds they were violent, racist, sexist or showed gratuitous sexual images.

A growing irritation among potential customers has been firms who make over the top claims about their “green” credentials.

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Distressing: This advert warning about the dangers of smoking received more complaints than any other

These prompted a surge of complaints to advertising watchdogs, according to a new report.

There a total of 24,192 complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority last years – an increase of 7.9 per cent from 2006.

A Department of Health anti-smoking campaign showing people with fish-hooks in their mouths was the most complained about advert of the year.

It drew 774 objections from viewers and readers who found them offensive, frightening and distressing.

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Rude: This advert for the British Heart Foundation caused some upset

The top 10 most complained about adverts, which included MFI and Quorn, sparked fury over themes of violence, sex and race.

Violent imagery appeared in two of the most complained-about ads other than the DoH fish-hook campaign.

An MFI television ad showed a woman slapping her husband while a TV ad for Quorn included a teenager threatening her brother with a fork.

A Cadbury TV ad for Trident chewing gum drew complaints that it stereotyped and ridiculed black people, while another by Kepak UK showing a woman in her underwear on a rotating sofa attracted objections that it was offensive, sexist and demeaning to women.

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Racist: An advert for Trident chewing gum was the said to promote negative stereotypes

Misleading ads accounted for nearly half of all complaints, while offensiveness was the main reason for complaints about broadcast advertising.

Anger over green claims shot up by over 50 per cent from 2006 to 556 objections about 408 ads as advertisers try to cash in on the environment.

Household names such as Ryanair, easyJet, Npower, Citroen and Shell all fell foul of advertising rules over claims about the environment.

Airlines were criticised for claims about C02 emissions as were car manafacturers.

Conservative MP John Whittingdale, chair of culture, media and sport select committee said of the green claims: “Plainly the reason they are doing it is because they believe that they need to demonstrate this. But if they are going to make claims they have to make sure they are correct.”

The ASA also said in its annual report, released yesterday, that a record 2,458 ads were changed or withdrawn last year.

The number of ads drawing objections shot up by almost 10 per cent last year.

TV was the main culprit being the cause of 9,915 complaints, followed by internet advertising at 2,980 objections.

The internet was particularly singled out by the public over pricing, availability of goods and charges.

ASA chairman Lord Smith said the year had been the authority’s busiest ever and warned that the rising number of complaints about internet content posed a challenge to self-regulation.

The ASA is the independent watchdog for UK advertising. It is funded via a levy charged to advertisers.

Its remit includes paid-for online adverts and “viral” internet adverts but excludes promotions on companies’ own websites which are considered to be editorial.

• The top five

1. ‘Fish hook’ anti-smoking campaign.

• 774 complaints raising objections that it was offensive, frightening and distressing.

2. Trident chewing gum

• 519 complaints objecting to racial stereotypes in the advert.

3. Rustlers burgers and chicken naan

• 219 complaints stating that is was offensive, sexist and demeaning to women.

4. ‘You’ll feel right at home’ MFI advert

• 217 complaints over violence

5. Quorn

• 181 complaints that the advert showed scenes of violence (not upheld)

Why don’t we love science fiction?

The British are sniffy about sci-fi, but there is nothing artificial in its ability to convey apprehension about the universe and ourselves

Bryan Appleyard

In the 1970s, Kingsley Amis, Arthur C Clarke and Brian Aldiss were judging a contest for the best science-fiction novel of the year. They were going to give the prize to Grimus, Salman Rushdie’s first novel. At the last minute, however, the publishers withdrew the book from the award. They didn’t want Grimus on the SF shelves. “Had it won,” Aldiss, the wry, 82-year-old godfather of British SF, observes, “he would have been labelled a science-fiction writer, and nobody would have heard of him again.”

Undeterred, Aldiss has just published a new version of A Science Fiction Omnibus, a fat collection of classic stories. In the 1960s, the original was on everybody’s bookshelves, dog-eared and broken-backed. Aldiss says that was SF’s one golden age, when Oxford dons were happy to be seen indulging the genre. Now they wouldn’t be seen dead with a Philip K Dick, a James Blish or a Robert Sheckley. Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, insists her books are not SF, but “speculative fiction” or “adventure romance”. “She’s quite right,” says Aldiss. “She had this idea that a certain amount of opprobrium always hovered around the title science fiction. You might call it double-dealing, but I can quite understand it.”

I remember, as a young boy, overhearing a neighbour remarking snootily that they were surprised such an intelligent man as my father should read Astounding magazine, the greatest of all SF periodicals. I knew at once that SF was the real deal. Yet it is the embarrassing uncle at the British literary feast. He’s one of the family, but nobody wants to go near him. He has, they say, disgusting habits, and his only friends are sad little creeps who memorise Star Trek scripts. But we need the uncle now more than ever.

“The truth is,” Aldiss has written, “that we are at last living in an SF scenario.” A collapsing environment, a hyperconnected world, suicide bombers, perpetual surveillance, the discovery of other solar systems, novel pathogens, tourists in space, children drugged with behaviour controllers – it’s all coming true at last. Aldiss thinks this makes SF redundant. I disagree. In such a climate, it is the conventionally literary that is threatened, and SF comes into its own as the most hardcore realism.

The British will resist. This is, of course, ridiculously parochial.

No other country is quite so contemptuous of the literary genre, though, in the movies, we happily accept SF as high art: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris is rightly regarded as a great film, as is Ridley Scott’s masterpiece Blade Runner. (If you want to see just how great Scott’s film is, the seventh and “final” cut has just been released in cinemas and on DVD. It’s visually enhanced and, says Scott, “tweaked”. It looks, and is, superb.) The further oddity is that fantasy – Terry Pratchett, Tolkien, Philip Pullman – is not embarrassing to us at all; indeed, it’s downright respectable. Perhaps this is because these are seen as children’s books that grown-ups can read, whereas SF is seen as irredeemably adolescent. This is to ignore the fact that it tends to be much more demanding and much bleaker.

“In a fantasy story,” Aldiss says, “there’s a big evil abroad, but, in the end, everything goes back to normal and everybody goes home to drink ale in the shires. In a science-fiction story, there may be a terrible evil abroad, and it may get sorted out, but the world is f***ed up for ever. This is realism. It’s certainly not beach reading, unless you can find a really nasty, shingly beach.”

The big problem with being sniffy about SF is that it’s just too important to ignore. After all, what kind of fool would refuse to be seen reading Borges’s Labyrinths, Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco, Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World or Wells’s War of the Worlds just because they were SF? These are just good books, irrespective of genre. But they are also books that embody the big ideas of the time – both Wells and Lem were obsessed with human insignificance in the face of the immense otherness of the universe, Huxley with technology as a seductive destroyer and Orwell with our capacity for authoritarian evil. Borges, like Lem, suspects we know nothing of ourselves. Interested in these things? Of course you are. Read SF.

For this is where it excels. It is the most vivid and direct chronicler of our anxieties about the world and ourselves, what Mary Shelley called “the mysterious fears of our nature”. It was Shelley’s Frankenstein that was, Aldiss argues in his superb history of the genre, Billion Year Spree, the first true SF novel. Her big idea – and it is the big idea that haunts all SF – was that our imperious ingenuity would backfire horribly. Frankenstein’s monster runs amok, the Skynet computer in the Terminator films decides to destroy humanity, Philip K Dick’s robots think they are human, and his humans fear they might be robots. And when the scientists in Fredric Brown’s one-page story Answer ask their new super-computer if there is a god, it replies, “Yes, NOWthere is…”

This is why the genre is called “science” fiction. It deals with the effects of scientific insight and technological application. A new book, Different Engines by Mark L Brake and Neil Hook, makes this clear by showing how closely SF follows scientific developments. The Copernican revolution that displaced the earth from the centre of the universe produced 17th-century space fantasies by Kepler, Godwin and Bergerac. Darwin, by showing how life might evolve anywhere, generated a wave of alien-encounter literature that still submerges us. The weird physics of Einstein and Planck made fictional interstellar travel – such as the “warp drive” in Star Trek – seem possible. And the rise of the computer-inspired “cyberpunk” SF, most famously in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the novel that preinvented the internet in, of course, 1984.

But Brake and Hook go further. They suggest this is a two-way street: SF also influences science. Brake points out to me that it was Wells who invented the atom bomb in The World Set Free, in 1914, in spite of the fact that two of the leading nuclear physicists of the day, Rutherford and Soddy, had said it was impossible. Leo Szilard read Wells’s book in 1932. A year later, Szilard discovered the idea of a nuclear chain reaction while waiting for the traffic lights to change on Southampton Row, in Bloomsbury. “Wells’s fictional bomb led straight to Hiroshima,” write Brake and Hook. I would add that Astounding magazine led to the cold war. Werner von Braun had the magazine smuggled in while working on rockets for the Nazis. His V-2 – a pointy cigar with fins – was plainly inspired by an Astounding cover.

This is not so surprising. SF writers are free to speculate in a way that scientists aren’t, and this can suggest the path ahead. Perhaps the best example of this process is the way the idea of the alien has moved from fiction to reality. The Nasa historian Steven Dick has pointed out that the billions spent by the agency on investigating the possibility or likelihood of alien life is a direct result of the invention of the extraterrestrial in fiction. Furthermore, there is now an entire scientific discipline – astro- or exobiology – that exists to study a so far entirely fictional entity, life beyond the earth. In effect, science has accepted a terrifying, uniquely SF insight that has been with us ever since the fantasies of Kepler and Godwin: simply, that we are nothing special, and that the universe is unimaginably large. There must be aliens out there, said the SF writers, and the scientists now, on the whole, agree.

The point is that SF is, in fact, the necessary literary companion to science. How could fiction avoid considering possible futures in a world of perpetual innovation? And how could science begin to believe in itself as wisdom, rather than just truth, without writers scouting out the territory ahead? Which is why this widely despised genre should be read now more than ever. Unfortunately, as Aldiss and Brake agree, this does not seem to be a great time for the production, never mind the reception, of SF. The classical age – of Wells, Lem and Dick – seems to be behind us, and the emerging genre of New Weird, led by Britain’s China Miéville, shades too much into fantasy and horror to be strictly classified as SF, a genre that must remain true to a certain level of logic and realism. But one can try Greg Bear, a practitioner of old-fashioned “hard” SF, the kind that, like the work of Michael Crichton, sticks most closely to real current science. Bear’s celebrated Blood Music is a brilliantly horrible vision of genetics gone wrong. Or there’s another Brit, Stephen Baxter, who writes hard SF strongly influenced by HG Wells; or Iain M Banks (Iain Banks’s SF guise), who has written a series of novels about the Culture, an alien civilisation existing in parallel to the human. Banks’s emphasis is more philosophical than strictly scientific, and seems to descend from the supreme practitioner of philosophical SF, Olaf Stapledon, a man incapable of writing about anything less than everything.

Aldiss is the great champion of logical SF – with good reason. He worked on the film script of his short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long with Stanley Kubrick for 10 years, much of the time simply trying to persuade the director not to bring in a Pinocchio theme of a robot boy seeking love from the Blue Angel. “But you might as well try to persuade this table to be a chair as persuade Stanley of anything. I should have known better.” Kubrick died without making the film. Steven Spielberg took over the project and made AI, a film that toppled over into whimsy and fantasy. “It’s crap,” Aldiss says. “Science fiction has to be logical, and it’s full of lapses in logic.”

But if new hard, logical, shingly-beach SF is now a rarity, at least there’s a lot of old stuff to read. The literary snobs will say it’s badly written, which most of it is. So is most “literary” fiction. Badly written literary fiction is, however, wholly unnecessary. There’s a lot of badly written SF that is driven by an urgent journalistic desire to communicate. That is necessary. So, watch Blade Runner for the seventh time, or curl up with Aldiss’s Omnibus. And remember, it’s all happening now.

A Science Fiction Omnibus edited by Brian Aldiss is published by Penguin at £9.99. Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science by Mark L Brake and Neil Hook is published by Macmillan at £16.99