At last, the BBC admits to being biased – if only on the weather
How’s it looking where you are this Easter Monday? As I write this here in soggy Sussex, the BBC weather app has us primed for rain, rain and more rain, extending all the way into next week, with just a few grudging rays of sunshine in the mix for Thursday. There go the school holiday plans, then.
Or perhaps not. The corporation has finally admitted to being biased – at least where its forecasting is concerned.
Its meteorologists, it confirms, focus on the gloomiest portion of the forecast when selecting the symbol for each day. While hour by hour the picture may be altogether finer, if there’s any chance of teatime precipitation, that’s what they’ll lead with. No wonder tourist attractions say it’s affecting footfall.
Negativity bias is a much bruited media vice, but from our very own public service broadcaster, this particular example feels a low blow. Had Russian hackers been trying to undermine national morale, they couldn’t have aimed better.
We’re British, we hardly need encouraging to take a dismal meteorological outlook. The reason we all flock to the coast the moment the sun is out is that we know it’s unlikely to last.
The BBC’S excuse is that it’s alerting users to conditions that will have the greatest impact on their lives. But given the current obsession with mental health, you’d think they’d consider the psychic toll that comes from seeing an endless procession of black cloud icons.
Anyone looking for a lesson here on the pitfalls of anticipating the worst might point out that anticipated inclemency, even when it materialises, is ultimately no less damp or chilly than any other kind, you’re just stuck indoors, plans cancelled.
With Auntie’s forecast proving so misleading, it might be time to consider folksier auguries. You may still get soaked, but old saws that are based on looking up from your screen, stepping outside and using your senses, can’t help but be life-enhancing.
Right now, I’m going with the consolatory “March winds and April showers bring forth May flowers”.
Lately, the removal of hulking great statues has been a cause for celebration. Never mind decolonisation, aesthetics are at long last being taken into account (so long, faceless Prince Philip). And yet news of another disappearing outdoor sculpture was greeted with universal dismay.
I’m referring to “Henry the Stag”, the life-size bronze beast stolen from interior designer Alison Cork’s Knightsbridge front garden. It has sentimental merit, she’s insisted, and its 20-year tenancy has made it an unofficial landmark for London cabbies.
The fear is that it’s been stolen for the metal and this is what makes the case intriguing. That an artwork could have intrinsic value may sound a philistine notion but it feels almost radical when we’ve become so inured to the notion that an artwork’s merit resides solely in whatever flimsy flapdoodle passes for its underlying “concept”.
Conceptualism explains why public art, invariably figurative in nature, has become so shoddy. How many art schools teach the craftsmanship that for centuries made fine art accessible in a way that insistently skill-less concept art fails to be, alienating the viewer as it does with reams of cut-price “-ologies” rather than wooing the eye with the transcendent magic of artistry?
Seen in this light, could it be that Henry’s vanishing act is in fact an art happening?