Snow event

We never have snow in Woking but we did today, lots of it, more in fact than I can remember falling over a single night when we lived in Yorkshire, apart from in 1963 and in the winter of 1979. It hung around a while those years.

We took Doug the dog for a walk this morning but had to bring him back as so much snow was clinging to his fur, he could hardly walk. He wasn't amused. I must have spoken to more of my neighbours in half an hour than I usually do in six months. Everyone was saying hello to each other. It was like Christmas.

One of my neighbours was on the hill trying to clear a path for cars. He had been there nearly three hours since 7 am when I strolled past. It didn't look great weather for cars but Gill needed to work this afternoon so I ran her in to work and the car cleared the hill just fine, the hill-clearing neighbour having thrown in the towel.

It seemed that everyone with a four-wheeled drive car was out on the road, looking smug, whether or not they had anywhere to go. It's better when the snow fall is so bad that most people leave their cars at home. The worst is when the snow comes just before evening rush hour and everyone is trying to drive home. That can be a nightmare.

A big snowfall like this is fun for about a day and then you realise that you can't hibernate for ever although I don't have a pressing need to go out for a day or two. I suppose that this kind of weather is a good opportunity to test the merits of home-working. I notice that the BBC weather forecasters were calling it a "snow event." It looked to me very much like a snowfall.

I did a bit of snow-clearing, not that I needed to do so, but because it felt good. I noticed other people doing likewise for the same reason. Odd, that.

George, meanwhile, made a snow man in the garden which has lasted a little bit longer than the last one he made(OK, it does sometimes snow a little bit in Woking). His school was closed and he's hoping it will be closed tomorrow. If it is we might venture over to Box Hill, my favourite sledge run.

It's brightened up an otherwise dreary winter. You have to make the most of snow like this. It's an event.

The peasants' revolt

Woah! The ship just settled further in the water. Perhaps we have been sailing on a financial Titanic after all.

Justin Webb, the BBC's man in Washington called the House of Representatives' rejection of the Paulson bail out plan, a "peasants' revolt." That's just the kind of high handed remark that is inflaming public opinion.

I'm a little bit sick of economists describing the bail out plan as a "sophisticated response" as if the opinions of ordinary people should count for nothing in the financial system.

It is not just the banks that have lost trust in each other. The electorates are losing trust in the banking system. But people are not stupid. The anger has been directed at those who have played fast and lose with our banks, not the banks themselves.

No we can't afford the banks to topple like dominoes. If the financial system grounds to a halt then so does most economic activity. Businesses will struggle to get credit, more will go bust, jobs will be lost and we'll all end up planting carrots.

But will it be the end of the world as we know it? So we might not be able to buy MFI kitchens, so what? House prices will no longer dominate dinner party conversations and within the industrialised nations we might all need to get used to the idea that we are not quite as well off as we thought we were.

But wealth is relative. The definition of poverty is not a Wall Street investor down a few million dollars. It is, as it was before these past three weeks, the lives of people struggling to survive in the Eastern Congo, Darfur, Zimbabwe and other stricken parts of Africa. A failing bank means nothing to those with nothing to lose.

Hiding the naked truth

You, like me, have probably been listening to the Pogues' Christmas song, Fairytale of New York, for years without noticing the words very much. But the BBC takes lyrics seriously and, after taking its time about it, decided to bleep out the word "faggot" from on-air transmissions. The censorship was short-lived since listeners complained and the BBC did a sharpish U-turn so that we can all enjoy the f-word once more.

The BBC has form for this kind of thing. I remember when it banned Je T'aime in 1960s, the Sex Pistols' rather disrespectful God Save the Queen in the 1970s, and Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood in the 1980s.

But I had not realised until reading about it the other day that George Formby had upset the BBC censors with his Little stick of Blackpool rock. It came as quite a shock.

Given this history of British prudishness I don't suppose we should be so surprised that the National Health Service is canvassing people about its plans to feature some lifelike naked images of men and women in an online diagnostic service. It has two versions, one with all the reproductive organs where they should be, and one where the man looks as if he's wearing some flesh-coloured Calvin Klein's. I had thought this "fig-leaf mentality" had died with the end of the Victorian era. Not so.

Water blogged

I couldn't help noticing while watching both ITV and BBC news reports on the flooding last night that both news channels seem to be trying to outdo each other in "total immersion" TV coverage.

If they weren't up in their helicopters they were thigh deep in brown water. Wellies and a mac simply aren't enough for the intrepid flood reporter. But why stop at thigh waders? I'm surprised that a BBC requisition for breast waders hasn't gone out yet to get its news teams even deeper in to the story.

A smug ITV reporter stole a march last night, however, by reporting from his canoe. I'm wondering, given the BBC's reputation for honesty, whether there might be extra crew among the outdoor units with wind makers and buckets of water to ensure weather extremes on camera.

The BBC even had its weatherman out on the streets of Gloucester yesterday. Is this a kind of punishment, the sort that shoots the messenger? I can imagine the producer saying: "You gave us this bloody weather so get out and get under it."

Give us a break BBC

One of the great joys of watching the BBC in the old days was viewing programmes without commercial breaks. Not any more. Today every programme break is filled with trailers for other programmes and other BBC channels.

Yesterday these trailers were considered more important than the scenes in the House of Commons as Prime Minister Blair left office.

These BBC advertisements cost licence payers' money to make and we don't need them. All the information is in our newspapers or online. If the BBC is not allowed to run advertisements by its charter, then it should not run in-house ads either. They are just as annoying as those for Daz and cheese spread which at least bring in revenues unlike those for BBC programmes.

Once there was just a revolving globe on our screens for a few seconds. I could handle that. I don't like all this twirly logo stuff either with red dancers and swimming hippos. Neither do I care much for the Lambie-Nairn BBC 2 logos. In fact Lambie-Nairn has a lot to answer for since the branding company has made a pretty penny from the licence payers, care of the BBC over the years.

The sad thing about its involvement, if you look at the site, is that it seems to have worked.

Maybe this is why the BBC has become branding-obsessed. I say bring back the world.

And another thing - why do we need three commentators these days for every Wimbledon match? Isn't that overkill? No wonder our third-rate tennis players do so badly; they can't wait to hang up their rackets and get on telly.

Accidental angling

I had a good chat with Charles Rangeley-Wilson this morning. If you saw any of his excellent TV series, The Accidental Angler, on BBC 2 earlier this year you will understand that his mission is to tell stories - or let the stories tell themselves - through fishing in different parts of the world.

He tells me he didn't feel comfortable with the BBC format for this kind of thing where everything has to be thoroughly researched and scripted with producers going out on "reccie" trips beforehand.

"I like the idea of turning up and seeing what happens, letting things unfold for themselves," he says.

A case in point was a record Mahseer, seen in the programme mounted on a museum wall in India. "Only the fish hadn't been on the wall until the researcher arrived. It was stuck down the back of a filing cabinet and only brought out when they knew we were making a programme. Wouldn't it have been so much better if the cameras had found it where it had been stored originally?"

Charles did well to get backing from the BBC for the original series. But plans for a second series have been dropped due to lack of funds. This seems ironic given his argument that a series could be made more cheaply with less time spent on the preparation work.

Anyway, now he has taught himself to use a film camera, learned the editing software and has set about making a one-off film about bone fishing in the Bahamas. It's deliberately raw. But then, that's real life. Real life is not about contrived meetings and well-worn anecdotes. It's certainly not about Victoria Wood - fine actor, writer and comedian that she is - wandering the globe on some pretty flimsy premise to make a series about the British Empire.

This is format TV of the worst kind. You can just imagine someone at the BBC saying: "It worked well with Michael Palin so let's get another comic to front up a travel series." They tried the same with Alan Titchmarsh believing, erroneously that they could transfer him from his gardening slot on to a much bigger landscape to present a nature series. It didn't work.

People are getting fed up with format TV, just as they are tiring with format journalism. Congratulations to Rangeley-Wilson for going his own way. I hope he succeeds.

NB. Have just finished my latest column for the FT and will be publishing it in the fishing section of my website on Saturday. It's about mayfly and museums.(Note added later: If you wondered where this column had gone so did I. Apparently coverage of the Chelsea bloody flower show pushed it out so it is the following Saturday. In the meantime will all mayfly please take note and delay their hatch).

The way things have changed

Readers of the BBC website magazine have suggested various way that Britain has changed in the past 10 years. Among the 3o suggestions featured here my favourite is the one that says: "people go to hospital to become ill."

I have ten others:

1. A single man can no longer enjoy watching children playing in the park.

2. You no longer have to breath cigarette smoke in railway carriages.

3. Fun has been abolished for fear of personal accident injury claims.

4. Everyone has grown allergic to the inside lane of the motorway.

5. The weekend newspapers have outgrown most dustbins (which now have wheels).

6. Two people read the TV news.

7. Schools have discovered lettuce.

8. Asian teenage boys can't carry duffel bags.

9. Art galleries have turned in to fun parks (a caveat: see point 3).

10. You have to dress like an Eskimo to survive a supermarket shop.

Does anyone have any more?