Are the weather men and women at the BBC on something? For weeks they’ve been banging on about sub-zero temperatures, snow and treacherous road conditions that I simply haven’t seen or felt.
I’ve been out there judging dozens of world automobile of the Year contenders on thousands of miles of UK roads. Yet despite my normal 7am starts and occasional late-night finishes, I haven’t once had to scrape ice off my windscreens. My tyres haven’t driven over a mile of snow. My in-car instrument panels haven’t displayed below-zero temperatures. put another way, it’s not been a bad wintertime for this well-travelled pedestrian, cyclist and motorist between December and February. and the same goes for tens of millions of others.
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So why the constant, near-hysterical warnings from the BBC’s weather ‘experts’/comedians who continuously and incorrectly tell the nation our cars, bikes and walking shoes are to be snowed upon and/or subjected to accident-inducing, dangerous sub-zero temperatures? In the main, it’s nonsense.
At best, the BBC’s weather kids and girls have morphed into light entertainers who, er, aren’t entertaining. At worst we’re being subjected to fake weather news.
Last week I heard a Radio 5 live presenter tell the UK that it was cold outside (it’s winter, mate!) and that the inside of his automobile was clad in ice which fell on him as he tried to drive. Really? I’ve driven in Iceland, Greenland, northern Sweden, Alaska, North east Asia, Russia, Canada’s northern Territories and many one-elk towns inside the Arctic Circle – and never experienced interior ice. Yet we’re indicated to believe the bloke from the Beeb suffered it in mild Manchester.
The state broadcaster has a horrible, counter-productive routine of telling the 45 million motorists of Britain that “we” are in for icy, snowy, sub-zero temperatures and treacherous road conditions when the overwhelming majority of us are not. Unless you’re travelling up, down or across the UK, national weather forecasts and reports are a waste of time and money. A motorist in, say, Brighton cares about the snow (allegedly) in the Scottish Highlands as much as a Highlander cares about strong winds on the south coast of England.
It’s time for the Beeb and others to drop their costly, time-consuming, typically scaremongering, mainly irrelevant national weather broadcasts and focus on a lot more accurate, less sensational, comedy-free local bulletins instead. Am I the only one who suspects that our normally anti-car state broadcaster and the motorist-loathing government that funds it are trying to frighten people off this winter’s treacherous, snow-covered, sub-zero roads that are anything but?
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