An Open Letter To The Today Programme

Dear Today

This morning you featured an interview with seventy nine year old Miss Debbie Reynolds. What a breath of fresh air it was. Listening to someone with such joie de vivre was uplifting - inspiring even.

I've been a loyal listener for years but I can't be alone in feeling ground down every day by your constant drip drip drip of doom, gloom and misery that must send many of the country's movers and shakers off to work with a black cloud over their heads. Hardly the stuff to stimulate creativity.

OK you've got a duty to tell things as they are but there must surely be room in your schedule for a Miss Reynolds type character to appear on a more frequent basis. I know that you had a similar interview with the equally upbeat Doris Day some time ago and I felt very much the same then.

Does it have to take septuagenarian and octogenarian American film stars to provide the only infrequent oasis of positives in your Sahara of negatives? Or could you find another antidote to Robert Peston et al on a more regular basis?

I don't want you to patronise your audience and turn Today into Jackanory but I can't have been alone in feeling good listening to Debbie today and that has to be a good thing.

More like it please.

Yours etc


JB

Desert Island Disappointment

We were up and dressed bright and early this morning to make sure that breakfast was over with and cleared away before the much anticipated special edition of Desert Island Discs featuring the listeners' choices came on. We had both been to the website and input eight pieces of music that were close to us and to our lives and many thousands of others had done the same. Indeed Kirsty opened the show by informing us that over 250,000 tracks had been listed.

I wasn't expecting any of my selection including The Pogues,UB40, Bob Marley, Annie Lennox, Steve Harley, Pulp and Run DMC to feature in the top ten although I did think that some of Marion's more melodious suggestions like James Taylor might sneak in. But what we got was a list of eight mainly classical pieces which, though beautiful, could hardly be representative of the general public or even the typical Radio 4 listener. I couldn't help thinking as the show progressed that the public vote had been heavily advertised on Radio 3 or Classic FM as we went through Holst, Beethoven and Elgar with the only nod to "pop" being "Bohemian Rhapsody"(produced over thirty six years ago)and Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb"(a newcomer at 32 years old). This implies that over the past thirty two years at least there has been no music of the moment that has captured the imaginations and stayed in the minds of the great British public.

Being avid Radio 4 listeners who tune in to DID every week we felt that the public vote did not reflect the typical castaway interviewed by Kirsty. OK there are some people in the operatic and classical worlds who choose eight pieces of Beethoven and his ilk but generally speaking the mix is far more eclectic and interesting. In fact the most interesting thing about this week's show was the list from a member of the public who recalled the influx of West Indians into the East End of London and chose some of the Ska music that she had heard at their parties plus other pop pieces that had accompanied her life.

I had to smile at the publics' choice of Handel's Messiah as this had been on my list of potentials not only as it had been popular with my mum and dad when I was a kid but because I can still see my son Paul skipping into the room in his little green dressing gown and singing at the top of his voice "Come For Tea" (Comfort Ye) - (and that was when he was twenty one) - just kidding son. So all in all a bit of a let down from Radio 4 listeners who appear to be a lot less interesting than I had hoped.

There's very little that Marion and I don't see eye to eye on but I do tend to upset her when we go shopping. I tend to chuck everything in the trolley whilst she is very methodical and we arrive at the till with everything neatly segregated into logical places for ease of packing. So I felt a bit like a naughty schoolchild yesterday as I went alone to Tesco and was able to indulge myself and bung it all in willy nilly. And we didn't suffer so much as a squashed loaf - well we did but I managed to squeeze it back into shape.


I'll finish today with proof that the Great British Public was wrong.

Excellent News. I Might Live An Extra Eight Years

I was listening to Radio 4 in the car this morning when I caught a few minutes of In Pursuit Of Happiness in which Claudia Hammond explored the government's plans to measure the nation's levels of happiness. It seems that scientists have found a definite link between optimism and longevity and the expert on the programme concluded that, on average, optimists live eight years longer. This can be nothing but good news for me. 


Just look at my eBay and Twitter id . Who but an optimist could think up"lfcchampions", a name that I came up with over eleven years ago and have stuck with through thick and thin? There's even more of the optimist in that last sentence as my son would say through "thin and thin". And both my kids will vouch for my ability to spot the only patch of blue sky in an ink black landscape and declare that "it's going to clear up" despite them being in the tenth day stranded in a Yorkshire Dales' caravan in monsoon conditions. Many has been the time when I've declared to all who would listen that "we can still win this" despite the odds and the clock suggesting otherwise and once or twice my optimism has been well founded - remember Istanbul.


I'm heartened to hear that I stand a chance of living for eight years longer than the pessimists amongst us but wonder if it is their pessimism that is condemning them to an early grave or do they simply give up the will to live listening to constant quotes from our perky handbook of catch phrases - "cheer up", "it's only a scratch", "we can always get another one", "the next horse is a certainty" to name but a few. Maybe we optimists are to blame for the suffering and early deaths that our pessimist friends and colleagues endure in the knowledge that in reality we aren't going to win, it's definitely broken and there's no chance that we can get there in time. If so. I'm really, really sorry pessimists but never mind, just think, if there's a heaven, you'll get there before us.


Tomorrow I'll be blogging another of my occasional business advice tips. It will have the catchy headline "Small Business Advice Part Four - The Vital Importance Of Your Balance Sheet" If you run a small business or are thinking of doing so please check it out you might benefit from it.


Until then. I'll leave you with the optimist's anthem.