T'Northern Powerhouse?

A bod who was captioned as ‘Minister for the Northern Powerhouse’ appeared on a local TV programme the other day.  Perhaps the BBC were having a laugh or maybe it was some sort of prank where someone wins a bet by pretending to be someone that doesn’t exist in order to get on the telly.  The brief was simple enough in this case it seems – being a bloke with nothing to say.  Might try it myself at some point.  The subject might have been railways.  This is the place where there are hardly any trains and hardly anyone can afford to use them but it’s OK because they’re about to spend x pounds on station improvements.  Mm…at least there’ll be a tram running down the bottom of my road by 2007.  Though that’ll be in the same world as the one where they have a Minister for the Northern Powerhouse…

News from the future...

Got cross with the Blathersphere and its madness again on Friday to the extent that I bothered to complain to the BBC's 'Feeedback' programme yesterday...

Dear BBC Feedback,

Re reporting of Ed Miliband and the deaths in the Mediterranean...

Yesterday the Today programme spent some time reporting on something that a politician was apparently going to say later in the day.  It then went on to report on the reaction from the other parties to the thing that the politician was apparently going to say later in the day.  Later in the day other BBC news programmes reported what the politician had said and the various reactions to it.  Apparently the politician didn’t say exactly what he was expected to say (and that we’d been told he would say) and there were therefore further reports about the fact that the politician had said something slightly different later in the day to what it was said he was going to say when reported earlier in the day.

Might I suggest that news should perhaps be about things that have actually been said or have actually happened?   Or would that be a bit stuffy and old fashioned?

Yours sincerely

John Parkes