The BBC – an iconic institution among the world’s
broadcasters – has a TV text service called Ceefax. I’ve been using it for
close on thirty years now and it’s always been excellent, until a year or so
ago when standards began to decline horrendously. Here’s one very small example
of its current state:
The Ceefax regional weather forecast for Monday night
begins:
A mainly dry night
with good spells of sunshine.
I suppose you’ve got to laugh at that one, but it’s
symptomatic of what I see happening all around me. It isn’t only personal
standards that are going the way of the Titanic; standards in politics, commerce,
banking, journalism – standards everywhere seem to be sinking to ever deeper
levels. There are even educationalists who claim that, for all the system’s
crowing over record numbers of passes, for all its near-hysterical obsession
with narrowly defined notions of excellence, and for all the pressures that are
driving increasing numbers of kids onto anti-stress medication, standards have
actually declined since I was at
school. I can’t know that one personally, of course, but there are those with
facts and experience at their fingertips who honestly claim that it’s happening.
All I can do is uphold my own standards and be content with
the fact.
And since I mention the Titanic, one of my favourite Gary
Larsson cartoons shows a man accompanied by a polar bear making enquiries at
the White Star Shipping Line office as grieving relatives are being led
away. The man asks the clerk ‘...but is there any news of the iceberg?’
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