Strictly after Forsyth

The relief when Bruce Forsyth said he wasn’t going to do any more Strictly Come Dancing was huge.  Then he threatened to come back as a guest; but maybe the producers will decide that he should stay gone.  Inevitably there is a great deal of speculation about who should replace him, and it’s all based on the assumption that another “star”, a big-name presenter, is needed.  Graham Norton has been mentioned frequently.  Anton Du Beke was the assumed successor for many, but there is opposition to that.

In the last series, the three shows in which Forsyth was absent were ably presented by Tess Daly and Claudia Winkelman.  There were no jokes, the show went smoothly and everybody was happy.  Some fans believe that this format should now be permanent, and I would be happy with that.  In those countries which have bought the Strictly franchise they haven’t felt the need for a star presenter, just a presenter who lets the dancers have all the limelight.  Why can’t the BBC do the same?  I suppose it’s asking too much for the producers to break out of the lazy thinking which assumes that a mature man has to be in charge, with a glamorous female assistant.  But why not have Tess in the lead with a male second presenter?

Whatever they do, the producers must avoid the mistake which crippled Strictly from its beginning.  It must not be the vehicle for another dominating ego on huge pay and a 5-year contract.

Amazon confusion

I switched on yesterday morning to find three worrying emails.  I had apparently registered with a website selling pet products, then bought goods from it; and I had bought similar products from Amazon.  I quickly checked my bank account; nothing had gone out of it for these goods.  So I went to the pet company site and emailed them through it to cancel the order, since it wasn’t from me.  Later on I phoned them, not hopeful since it was a bank holiday.  But they answered and said they had already cancelled the order.

Amazon was a different matter.  My Amazon account didn’t show the order in question.  But I use a different email address for that account from the one on which I received the confirmation.  That didn’t occur to me, or to the young man who answered my call.  He just said the order would be cancelled.  It wasn’t.  In the afternoon I got another email saying that part of the order had been dispatched.  I rang again.  A woman this time, and she was hard to understand because English obviously wasn’t her first language.  But she was much more thorough than her colleague had been.  Had I ever had an Amazon account with that email address?  I couldn’t remember, but if I had I certainly didn’t remember the password.  She sent me another password.  And, sure enough, there was an account.  Two names and addresses were attached to it.  The woman (in Manchester) who had done all the ordering; and a woman with the same name as me in Cambridgeshire.  I was told to delete both, and to delete the bank account (not mine) which was set up for the account.  Fine.  An hour or so later I got an email telling me that the confusion was due to a mistyped email address, and was now all sorted.  It did occur to me that there couldn’t be two identical Gmail accounts.

Early this morning I got an email to say that the order was on its way; and, later, one to say that they hadn’t been able to deliver it.  None of this will be known to the woman who placed the order, since she is not getting the emails!

It’s still a mystery.  A woman with the same name as me set up an Amazon account; or was it that another woman, in Manchester, set up the account using what she thought was the other’s email address but getting it wrong?  And then used the same wrong email address to order from another site?  How does that happen?

“Free boiler” calls

I keep getting phone calls – several times a day for days on end – which come up on the display as “international”.  Normally I just cut these calls off, but I’ve taken recently to actually listening to the first part to see where they come from.  It’s the same call; silence until you trigger it by saying something, and then a recording kicks in.  I definitely qualify for a free boiler, it tells me, in a crackly recording.  All I have to do is press 2.  I haven’t done that.  But I have googled to see what I can find out about what seems certain to me to be a scam.

There are free boilers on offer for pensioners under certain conditions.  The government’s “green deal” means that energy companies have to achieve targets for these or lose the money, so they may well be pushing these at the moment.  But would they be pushing them via an anonymous recorded voice from outside the country?  Probably not.  And it’s that “you definitely qualify” claim which is suspicious.  Because I don’t have the power to change my boiler.  Like lots of people in similar circumstances, I have to leave all such matters to the owners of the property – in my case, an almshouse charity.

Perhaps the next time I get a phone call (and I will certainly get another, in an hour or two) I may press 2 and see if I can learn any more.  But that’s what they want me to do.  I am angry and helpless.

The BBC has lost the plot again

Nelson Mandela has died.  You may not have heard.  He was genuinely a great man.  But once again the BBC has lost the plot with its coverage.  Something else happened yesterday.  A storm surge created havoc for thousands of people along the coasts, including, I gather, a few hundred yards from where I live.  But it’s impossible to find out about it because the news has only one story.

Last night thee BBC was shambolic.  Programmes were cut off to bring news of Mandela’s death, and then it was in to saturation mode.  Anyone switching on for Question Time found that it was postponed but the schedulers appeared to have no idea what the producers were doing, as times came and went.  Apparently it started at 11.55, but I’d given up by then.  This morning, on TV and radio, the coverage is again wall-to-wall.  There is nothing left to say, but they’re dragging in anyone they can find to say what a great man Mandela was.  Meanwhile the only source of other news is the occasional local bulletin, and I’m waiting for that now.

The BBC got it horribly wrong over the death of Thatcher.  But they’ve learned nothing from that.

No more Strictly for me

The spoiler is in: Deborah Meaden is out of Strictly.  And that’s the end of it for me, too.  That she’s out while the wretched Dave Myers goes on is ludicrous.  Myers wasn’t even in the bottom two, so there are lots of idiots voting for him.  And I really can’t be bothered any more.  Having to sit with the remote in hand to mute Forsyth, no thanks.  This series looked very unpromising from the start, and has had all of the show’s worst aspects in spades.  Time to give it up and read a good book.

Strictly fiasco

It all got rather silly on Saturday night.  There we were waiting for the spoiler to come through when Deborah Meaden tweeted her thanks to everybody who had voted and saved them.  She later removed the tweet, no doubt after outrage from the producers; but the “damage” was done.  We still had to wait until very late to discover that Julien had finally got the boot and Rachel had unexpectedly been in the bottom two.  But what Deborah had done (and she’s not the first celebrity to do it) was to admit publicly that the “Sunday” results show is an elaborate pretence.  Tess and Darcy may change their frocks but it’s recorded on Saturday night.  You knew that, of course.  I’m amazed that some viewers still don’t.

It must be crushing for someone like Julien to realise that nobody was voting for him.  His farewell speech was an example of why.  He even forgot to thank his partner.  But, conversely, someone like Deborah now knows that a lot of people are voting for her.  I admit that I’ve warmed to her during this show.  She is not a performer like all the others; used to television, certainly, but as a business woman.  She has stayed completely natural.  She knows she’s past the age when she can really compete and just wants to enjoy herself.  She doesn’t even wear make-up while training.  And she finds the enforced intimacy of the dance embarrassing.  I hope she stays in for a few more weeks.

 

More Strictly

Wasn’t it great last week?  We were able to watch Strictly Come Dancing without resorting to ways of cutting out the awful Forsyth.  The show went smoothly and the competition was excellent.

But he’s back this week.  People who don’t mute his contributions, as I do, tell me that he’s worse than ever, stumbling in his delivery, cringingly unfunny and at times just embarrassing.   Why is he still there?

I’m wondering whether the online voting will make a difference to the outcome.  At the moment the big worry is Dave Myers, and the threat that he could become another Widdecombe.  Let’s have a dance-off tonight between him and Julien, with Myers going out.  Then we can relax.  Except for having to shut out Forsyth.

PS:  Amazingly, I find that there are still people who believe that the results show actually takes place on Sunday night.

Strictly – the worst line-up yet?

So now we know.  And I wonder whether it’s worth a bet that 2013 will be the last series of Strictly Come Dancing.  They are now really scraping the barrel.

It’s not the contestants I’ve never heard of who bother me.  There are always plenty of them.  It’s the ones I have heard of who are so disheartening.  That appalling Julien Macdonald chap, the designer who so annoyed me on ITT that I always switched him off, the chap who is so ludicrously camp that you want to shake him and tell him to grow up.  And Bussell said he used to be a professional dancer.  What’s that about?  Deborah Meaden who, at 54, really should know better.  Mind you, Tony Jacklin is 69.  Dave Myers from the Hairy Bikers.  The only one I said, “Oh good” to was Susanna Reid from BBC Breakfast.  She’s not too old at 42, and she’s proved she can actually dance on Comic Relief.

No current or recent sports stars except Ben Cohen, and rugby players don’t usually do well.  The only star name is Fiona Fullerton, and she has the handicap of being 56.  No, I’m not obsessed with age, and I know that some contestants in their 50s and 60s have done very well.  But it really does seem this year that the producers have had to take whatever they could get.  It’ll be a sad end.

Strictly again

I can’t remember ever being less interested in the start of a new Strictly Come Dancing season.  I think despondency set in a few weeks ago when the BBC announced the departure of several of the best-liked professionals and slipped in the fact that Bruce Forsyth hasn’t gone – we’ll have to grit our teeth, keep hold of the remote with our fingers on the mute button and put up with him yet again.  As the new technology has spread, I wonder how many more people will be using it to get rid of him altogether.

As I write, we’ve heard of three contestants, and it’s far from encouraging; Vanessa Feltz (what’s the betting she’ll be partnered with Anton?), Tony Jacklin (far too old) and a woman from Countdown.  The rest will be revealed on The One Show tonight.  Will there be any real star names?

The fiasco of Forsyth’s continued presence is indicative of a huge problem at the heart of the BBC.  They have someone who, they believe, is too popular to ditch.  It’s too risky.  Never mind that a big chunk of the audience are pleading for him to go.  No producer is going to be responsible for not renewing the contract.  Think what that attitude led to with Jimmy Saville.  Not that I’m comparing Forsyth with Saville, but the attitude is the same.  Nor do I want to compare Forsyth to the Dimbleby brothers, but again they’ve both gone on way beyond retirement age but no producer wants to be responsible for getting rid of them.

 

Tesco – don’t complain to me!

A long time ago I wrote a post about my dealings with Tesco’s customer service department.  I still keep getting comments from people who think I am the person to handle their own complaints.

Look, people, I’m just a customer, like you.  It’s no use telling me about your bad experiences and expecting me to do something about it.  Sorry, but I can’t help.