Opinion: It’s sad but the Beeb is going down the YouTubes

It could be aboot guitar playing or Buddhist meditation or kittens jumpin’ aboot or plants for your garden or making your own vegetarian black pudding. I’ve learned tai chi off YouTube videos, though I usually speed them up to make them get on with it.

I’ve learned that I should just give up the guitar. And, as someone who dislikes travelling, I’ve visited many parts of the world and laughed at them without leaving the comfort of my armchair. Marvellous.

Compare all that to checking the schedules and hoping a TV channel will cover your subject in a documentary … one day. Such a lot of nonsense.

This week, Ben Mcowen Wilson of YouTube claimed the social platform served Britland better than the BBC. Indeed, Mr Mcowen Wilson went further, saying it was poised to overtake the BBC, at least among the 16-34-year-old demographic, with which middle-class executives in both broadcasting and social media are peculiarly obsessed.

Playing to the Covid-emptied gallery, the YouTube boss said his platform offered “different races, genders and regional diversity that just isn’t available in traditional media”.

Gallery-playing or no, this is correct. No longer do all British creative people have to live in London. They can just make their films wherever they are, sometimes even in Scotland.

Further afield, I watch lovely films from northern Sweden (Jonna Jinton) and rural Washington State (The Cottage Fairy; check this place out – gives even Skye a run for its money in terms of stunning mountain beauty) that I would never have seen before.

For people stuck in cities and dreaming of rural tranquillity, these channels are a boon. And the presenters are genuinely nice, open, honest, down-to-earth and passionate about what they’re doing. They’re not just professional talking heads “fronting” a programme.

I know I’ve mentioned some of them before, and it hurts my dignity to come across as a fan-boy like this, particularly since you regard me as an icon of respectability and circumspection.

But if you check out the comments under Jonna Jinton’s videos on YouTube, where she now has 2.16 million subscribers, you find a complete antidote to all the hate on social media. There are hundreds of testimonies from people about how her love-infused films of Swedish rural life alleviated their depression and gave them hope

Her viewers come from all over the world, perhaps even most furth of Europe, it seems. It’s an extraordinary phenomenon.

As for quality, I was just thinking the other day: “This stuff is easily as good, just as professional, as anything you get on the BBC.” It’s cleverly edited, often using drone shots to stunning effect, and features tasteful music.

Back to YouTube generally, you can find what you want as regards “diversity”, without having stuff rammed down by your throat by our woke overlords. You can investigate other cultures, on your own terms, maybe even learn from them.

I guess that, being young, most of the YouTubers I follow are woke, or at least liberal to a fault, but they’re mature enough to keep their politics out of it, apart from the occasional aside in Instagram posts.

For the BBC, alas, the situation has become so serious that even influential Establishment newspaper, the Daily Star, thundered in an editorial that Mr Mcowen Wilson was “on the money” about the “old-fashioned relic”.

It’s a shame in a way. But life never stands still. The BBC certainly hasn’t. It is running into a brick wall.

A tub of dubs

LEADING complainers online have accused Marks & Spencer of “insulting Northerners” (north of England, not north proper) after its grocery section started offering chip shop scraps – apparently known as scrumps, dribbles or dubs – for £1.05 a tub.

I’d never heard of the practice whereby chip shops offer bits of batter that has fallen off fish to punters for free. Maybe that’s just me (mostly Edinburgh, where we were told we’d have had our broon sauce).

Punters claimed Markies was “gentrifying scraps”, and complained: “Scraps aren’t scraps if you have to pay for them.”

While Markies makes a bags of appealing to the proletariat, offensively posh supermarket Waitrose has revealed its Christmas range for the bourgeoisie, including châteaubriand with porcini & truffle butter (£38), lobster thermidor vol-au-vents (£9 for 10 pieces), and “Heston from Waitrose” chocolate candles (£9).

Personally, I’d be happier with a bowl of dribbles and a Viennetta.

Folk foaming at the mouth

WHAT is it with foreign persons and teeth? They’re forever mouthing off about the calcified protuberances, using them as a stick with which to beat innocent British people.

Speaking as a “proud Brit but …”, I was unsettled to read that people in Outside World associate bad teeth with our loosely confederated countries.

Research for OnBuy shopping website found Americans were obsessed by British teeth and why they were “so bad”. But Spaniards, Canadians, Portugese, Italians and New Zealanders also expressed fascination with the slums in our mouths.

I’ve never understood this. Most of these Third World countries live in dire poverty, so how can they afford to have their teeth whitened? It costs a fortune just to have a filling in Britain, where dentistry is on the NHS but you pay for it.

Is it related to diet? Have these starving wretches been forced to eat palate-cleansing fruit to survive? An inquiry added by Australians was: “Why are British people ugly?” This is caused by the weather. We start off fine but the elements cruelly tear at our features.

We’re more to be pitied for this than badmouthed in such an appalling fashion.

A quiet word

MUMBLING has never been appreciated in modern society, which is a loud place where the assertive bellow and the meek mutter.

I’m with the meek. My voice is rarely heard. That’s why I took up writing. Here, I can SHOUT and pretend to be better and brighter than I am.

Here, I’m more self-confident, preachy and – yes, madam – ballsy than in reality-style life, where I keep myself to myself and flee the mob instinctively.

In writing, I try to stir up mobs but always, on turning around, find myself standing alone at the front, with my pitchfork tangled in my cardigan and sparks from my burning brand setting fire to my woolly hat.

Now, with Covid, mumbling has been made respectable and even compulsory. At funerals, mourners have been banned from saying the Lord’s Prayer (“Our Father, gie’s a brek”) out loud because it amounts to “chanting”. So mourners have taken to mumbling it instead.

Question: will the Lord hear them? He’s never been a great listener. All the same, this is a welcome development in the growing (well, just me so far) campaign for quiet in the world. Eh? What?

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