Haven’t watched the Race thing, but heard an excellent comment on it in Gogglebox, one of my favourite TV programmes, along the lines of ‘so you spend months getting stressed out running everywhere, for the chance of £20k. Might as well just go to work’.
I recommend Hans Rosling’s ‘Factfulness’ as an easy but illuminating read. On one level it’s about how on almost every measure (except the environment) the world is much better (though he is at pains to point out this doesn’t mean it’s good) than we imagine it is - poverty, health, education, population growth etc all statistically the reverse of what the vast majority of us, even the most expert and educated, believe. More interestingly, for me, he also identifies why we tend to assume the worst about everything and works through ways to avoid this.
Ben Elton is on some talk show on the wireless now. He’s been involved in some classic comedy and also some dire crap. I’ve never warmed to him and from every contribution he makes on this show it’s become clear to me why. Almost every utterance he makes is a didactic shouted challenge, even if he’s talking about something really banal, and has a chip the size of Uranus on his shoulder, smothered in poorly disguised self pity.
