No, this is not another doom and gloom Covid-19 article. We've had more than enough of those in the last nine months. However, the BBC has decided that we could do with a bit more of a fright, so they are asking a difficult question - courtesy of national treasure David Attenborough. At the risk of sounding controversial, the answer is obvious and does not require a full-length TV series. We'd be extinct, so there wouldn't be much more to worry about...
There is a radio advert doing the rounds on TalkSport just now. It is for BT, who suggest that it's not possible to know how to cook a chicken without having powerful WiFi. Essentially, the scenario outlined is one in which a woman needs to search for information on how to roast a chicken but because she doesn't have WiFi that extends to her kitchen she can't do this. Given that most supermarket chickens come with a label that tells you how long to cook them for - and at what temperature - and, I presume, that you wouldn't buy a chicken without knowing how to turn on an oven, it does strike me that BT thinks all of us are a bit thick.
On the subject of adverts, am I the only one who thinks that the ads on Sky inbetween the football are totally unrepresentative of the world I live in? The gulf between rural Ayrshire and the politically correct creatives who tick every box in their desire not to upset anyone is as wide as the Atlantic. Doubtless, I need to be sent on a course of correction. Rural Ayrshire is not so much woke as fast asleep. I quite like it like that.
There is always someone getting upset about things on Twitter. Of necessity, I am on Twitter for my work, yet it has become increasingly clear that there are two groups of users. There are those who use it to communicate information about things they are interested in yet are relatively uncontroversial and those (often politicians and the loony fringe who follow them) who use it to hurl abuse at anyone with whom they disagree. The latter group tend to get the publicity because the media reports their tweets and every controversial issue becomes a circular and cumulative spiral of bile that fans the flames of hatred emanating from those with unhinged opinions. I'm afraid Twitter is largely a sewer nowadays and the world would be better and happier place if it did not exist. Similarly, Facebook, while better than Twitter in many respects, is also a channel for a lot of vile stuff and their customer service is non-existent in that you can't speak to anyone if anything goes wrong (which it does from time to time). The answer is simple: make Facebook legally a publisher, responsible for the content which appears there, as is the case with the press. They would scream, but the entire advertising world would have to change tack and other means of communicating to your friends would come into being. Goodness knows, we might even start to speak to each other again.