The Thamesmead Grump

LOVE ISLAND

Unless you've just come back from Mars, you cannot have failed to notice that a long running "reality" TV show called Love Island has just ended. I understand that it was about a group of young people who were deposited on some desert island and then supposed to find their ideal partner from the other competitors? on the island and that the public would vote them off one at a time until only one couple was left.

As far as I can tell, it's a sort of cross between Big Brother and a Wife swapping party.

I have never watched it so cannot comment regarding its content but I can have some things to say about how a hysterical news frenzy has grown around it. All the news media is full of it, with headlines screaming at us about how the nation has been following every episode and the  (apparently) outrageous antics of the contestants.

The way all the news channels have been bleating on about it, you would think it had the sort of audience reminiscent of a 1970s edition of the Morecombe and Wise Christmas Special: nothing could be further from the truth. 

After a bit of research, I discovered that the average episode had an audience of around 2.9 million, with the final episode attracting what the Sun called a "staggering" 3.6 million viewers.

The current UK population is 65.64 million according to official figures, that means by my calculation, around 5.5% of us were watching it on the best day it had. Put it another way; Bexley Borough has a population of 218,100. Of that 218,000, 10,900 were watching it while the remaining 207,100 were doing something else.

To me, this looks like a good example of how something can be blown up out of all proportion by the media who make it appear that an event is more significant than is actually the case.

I haven't included any pictures from the series because most of them feature large breasted young women and who wants to look at that sort of thing?

Now, about Game of Thrones....................................

SPEAKING OF OUTRAGEOUS ANTICS.......................

I wrote about this story recently in my excellent Facebook blog which supplements this page. It's about FIFA in the doo-doo again; this time over a claim that Qatar ran a "black ops" campaign to rubbish bids to host the 2022 World Cup competition by other countries.

Why should anyone be surprised by this. It's football; it's rotten to the core and always has been. Governments, especially ones run by dubious regimes want the kudos that go with hosting a major sporting event and are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to secure selection. Outside of the Olympics, football is an easy target to choose because it is just as corrupt and its officials as easy to bribe.

Governments bribe FIFA officials; FIFA officials are largely a law unto themselves (even the mighty American litigation machine seems to have ground to a halt).

The refereeing of matches themselves are full of highly questionable decisions. (Who can forget when in 1986, the Argentinian player Diego Maradona punched the ball into the England goal and out of the 500 million people watching, only three of them missed it - the referee and the two linesmen). This is not a rare event.

The national league game is no better with managers expecting their payers to cheat to gain an advantage and players only happy to oblige; rolling about on the grass, clutching some limb or another and pretending they have been fouled. 

And as far as many of the supporters are concerned; any weekend will find terraces full of pot bellied gammons chanting racist slogans.

FIFA has been "urged" to conduct an "independent investigation" into the Qatar claims. Don't make me laugh. 

NOW FOR SOME 

IMPORTANT NEWS

Weetabix is (according to its manufacturer) a whole grain wheat breakfast cereal. If you put it into a bowl and pour milk over it, you get a disgusting soggy mess that's about as palatable as cat litter. 

Many people like this.

It's apparently a British version of a popular Australian breakfast cereal called Wheat-Bix and this has caused a problem in New Zealand where an enterprising British ex-pat shop owner decided to import some of it for her home sick British customers. Wheat-Bix are not very happy about this and have managed to persuade the NZ government to impound the shipment pending the outcome of a court hearing.

Shop owner, Lisa Wilson is hoping that common sense will prevail. We wait with baited breath.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHINGCOMPLETELY DIFFERENT

I've just realised that I've just done a whole blog without a single picture so here is one from the archive. It features the entrance to Battle Abbey and shows the phone box William the Conqueror used to call his Mum to tell her he'd won.