I'm so glad its over

Yet another reality TV program has now thankfully come to an end.

Britain's Got Talent has just been won by a young girl and a dog - fair play to them, she trained the dog well to do a bit of a walk around the stage and dance up and down and as a result of which she's just won half a million of Britain's economic spondoolies plus the chance to parade herself and the canine companion in front of Queen Lizzie at the Royal Variety Performance but hey at the end of the day its just a girl and her dog.

Are we really driven to watch such "talent" as this? Can we now please stop with all the wannabees who try and fail to impress us on these over the top all singing, all dancing fake tanned fake dance routines fake musical girls and boys. I say bring back Bob Blackman, now he was a guy who really did have a unique "talent". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8IbvVTXOIo 

Wingwalker

Good and Bad

In my last blog I wrote that my partner and I were recently in the news. What started as a tiny article on the inside pages of a free newspaper suddenly became headline media all around the world resulting in journalists and TV companies constantly on the phone wanting to know more. Facebook and Twitter buzzed and before we knew it we were receiving messages from people in New York City, Dubai and Melbourne Australia.

And all because it was something nice to read about for a change.

Far too often you hear about shootings, stabbings, muggings rape and death. We are told about how a soldier is killed in Afghanistan whilst on routine patrol, or how a gang of teenagers stab another of equal age in cold blood, just because they were wearing a certain kind of shoe.

Turn on the TV and watch any scene in any episode of Eastenders and what have you got? Depression, doom, gloom, shouting and an utter contempt for anything that resembles part of the English language with their ever present key phrase of “What’s goin on?”

The residents of the Chatsworth Estate in “Shameless” glorify drug use, sex in public and the knocking back of several pints til they are wasted beyond the point of being able to stand up, let alone have an “intelligent” conversation. If in fact there is any form of intelligence on there.

Computer games promote war, violence is good. Theft and prostitution are now entertainment. Spill the blood, harder and harder like and addict needs their next fix. The scale rises and the killings increase.

So why did we suddenly become the centre of the entire world’s attention? From newspapers to websites everyone wanted a piece of our story. As the world turned and new people were waking up the news continued. We were commented on both good and bad. Our faces were in print, on the web and on TV. We were talked about in offices, factories, schools and on the radio. People came up to us and offered us food, drinks and invitations to events. They were happy, they were smiling and they wanted to meet us. And all this just because someone noticed how my partner and I say goodbye to each other in a loving and caring way as we both go our separate ways off to work every morning.

To coin a phrase, every generation blames the one before. Sadly it would seem that childhood is now lost on the innocent ones and that before the age of just 6 years old most infants will have witnessed enough violence, bad language and sexually explicit material that in days gone by would have lasted someone an entire lifetime. You can’t wrap someone up in cotton wool but you can at least let a child be a child. Life is harsh and can be cruel but is it really necessary to subject someone so young to life in the adult world before their time? Is it any wonder our little darlings are turning into little demons?

In one sense I wonder, is it too late to turn the tables back to times gone by when love thy neighbour meant more than jumping into the sack with the girl next door. Discipline and punishment are now words long forgotten in the English language. The do good PC brigade waded in with their big size 12 boots and told us all to reason with a youngster when they do wrong – send them to a naughty step and let them think about their actions. Well quite frankly I’ve had enough of listening to them as clearly it would seem that their approach to getting a child to understand an inappropriate action is not working.

In the past a child would have been smacked as a form of discipline, before then they would have been sent up a chimney but seeing as most people nowadays use central heating then the chimney option you can sort of rule out. I was smacked as a child when disciplined, as were so many others of my generation and we turned out ok. We learnt the difference between right and wrong, we learnt to respect others and we learnt that if we were good then the chances are you could get into the sack with the girl next door. It’s true that you shouldn’t beat a child – or anyone for that matter to within an inch of their lives but reasonable chastisement to allow the developing mind to understand what is right and what is wrong should in my opinion be reintroduced.

Unfortunately for all the good things that the great big internet has brought to us over the past 25 years the equal and exact opposite has happened too and that imagery which is so readily available to one and all can have a corrupting effect on young and old alike. Maybe one day enough people will think the same as me and start to lobby the politicians, the decision makers and the ones with the ability to make the changes, happen but until then I fear that we may be on an ever decreasing spiral. As Stephen Spielberg’s ET once said, Be Good, so come on people this is the start of the 21^st century, let’s all make a small change to ourselves but a big change to humanity.

Wingwalker.