Return of the silly little things that annoy you thread

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Dan Baillie

Location
England
Richard Lodeman said:
If they did he couldn’t be worse than the two muppets that do the BMX and skateboarding. So busy trying to be hip.

But I guess I’m not really their target audience.
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On the other hand, the reaction of the BMX riders has been truly fantastic. Seeing the Colombian lady who came 2nd to Schriever photobombing the BBC interview to acclaim her as No1 was pretty impressive. Ditto the reaction of Kye Whyte to Schriever's gold medal ride. Schriever's story in itself is pretty amazing. All what the olympics should really be about.
 
Steve Slatcher

Steve Slatcher

Location
Manchester
Richard Lodeman said:
Having worked all day what I want to see is highlights of the day and the athletes actually competing. Not, as seems to be currently the case, about 20% competing and 80% presenter / talking heads / social media videos of kids etc, etc.
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Ditto programmes made to celebrate the life of a great entertainer of some sort. 20% the entertainer in action in 10 sec chunks, and 80% random luvvies and clebs saying how wonderful they are.

(Edit: The "they" was meant it to be a gender-neutral pronoun referring to the entertainer, and not that the luvvies and celebs were self-glorifiying, even if it is sometimes easy to forget who is supposed to be the centre of attention)
 
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Tom Cannavan

Tom Cannavan

Administrator
BBC news:

Presenter: "and now over to XXXXX where we can speak to the family of gold medal-winning Horace Walpole"
Presenter "Agnes Walpole, how do you feel about Horace winning gold in the 400-metres pole vault?"
Agnes "we're thrilled."
Presenter: "Did you stay up to watch it?"
Agnes: "yes"
Presenter: "Where you excited?"
Agnes: "very."
Presenter: "How did you react?"
Agnes: "we shouted and jumped up and down."
Presenter: "Amazing."
Agnes: "Yes."
Presenter: "Have you managed to speak to Horace since the win?"
Agnes: "No."
Presenter: "Wonderful. Thanks so much and carry on celebrating!"
Agnes: "Thanks."

BBC, your home of in-depth investigative reporting.
 
Steve Slatcher

Steve Slatcher

Location
Manchester
Just heard an interview with somone who had stayed up to watch a relative get a medal[1]. "So how are you going to celebrate" - "Well, first of all we're going to have a nap."

[1]One positive with these games is that the verb "to medal" seems to have disappeared from English. One wonders how these words can come and go so quickly.
 
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Colin Bradley

Location
Holmfirth
Tom Cannavan said:
BBC news:

Presenter: "and now over to XXXXX where we can speak to the family of gold medal-winning Horace Walpole"
Presenter "Agnes Walpole, how do you feel about Horace winning gold in the 400-metres pole vault?"
Agnes "we're thrilled."
Presenter: "Did you stay up to watch it?"
Agnes: "yes"
Presenter: "Where you excited?"
Agnes: "very."
Presenter: "How did you react?"
Agnes: "we shouted and jumped up and down."
Presenter: "Amazing."
Agnes: "Yes."
Presenter: "Have you managed to speak to Horace since the win?"
Agnes: "No."
Presenter: "Wonderful. Thanks so much and carry on celebrating!"
Agnes: "Thanks."

BBC, your home of in-depth investigative reporting.
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Have a listen to the marvellous Magic Mobile, originally on R4 and currently being broadcast on R4Extra. It’s written by no less than Michael Frayn and produced by the crack team of Jarvis & Ayers, Martin Jarvis being one of the players in top quality cast. Some of the sketches are spoof interviews by “Melinda Twinkle”, a typical vacuous BBC presenter type. They’re hilarious.
 
Richard Zambuni

Richard Zambuni

Location
London and Connecticut
Misuse of the reflexive pronoun. I know this has been mentioned before, but even such literary luminaries as John Fowles and Evelyn Waugh misuse it. It seems that the rot set in long before call centers insisted on its (mis)use.
 
Tom Cannavan

Tom Cannavan

Administrator
Paul Benny said:
To be fair, that could have been practically any news broadcaster. And who amongst us could come up on the spot with more insightful remarks than those of the interviewee?
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Paul, you've got me all wrong: it's the lazy and moronic news media that's at fault, not the interviewees. This all basically stemmed from one of the UK swimmers, whose family posted a video on YouTube of their celebrations at a garden watch party when he won gold. Someone at BBC picked up the idea and ran, and ran, and ran (and ran) with it so it is now the standard: and each morning after interview almost exactly as described in my post above.
 
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Paul Benny

Location
Cheshire
Tom - I rather concatenated the two ideas without making clear the linkage. When media people talk to each other, their eloquence hides the lack of substance. You add members of the public and the vacuous nature of the interview becomes apparent and it tends to make the interviewees look bad.
 
Steve Slatcher

Steve Slatcher

Location
Manchester
Applications and websites that use times and dates, like "1hr ago", "yesterday", or "a week ago". Sometimes it is fine, but on other occasions you want to know more precisely when (e.g.) a message arrived, or you need to know in what order messages were sent and received. Or sometimes you want to take a screenshot of the information, and when looking at the image at a later date "1hr ago" is meaningless.

There is often plenty of space for the full date and time, and that conveys so much more information. I am perfectly capable of figuring out whether it was an hour ago for myself, thank you.
 
Tom Cannavan

Tom Cannavan

Administrator
OK, a new hellish development. Web sites, mostly retailers, with a 'chat function'. But instead of a chat option just sitting there, available for you to use if you wish, it proactively tries to engage you - the tab on your browser suddenly starts flashing "you have 1 new message" which is their f*****g robot 'welcoming' you. You cannot dismiss it without opening it.

Kill the beast, kill the beast!!
 
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Dan Vyvyan

Location
London
A box of 20 units of my children’s preferred post-night out restorative* costs £3. A ‘Big Value’ (sic) box of 30 ditto costs £4.75.

*cheap fishfingers
 
Stuart Peskett

Stuart Peskett

Location
UK
Tom Cannavan said:
OK, a new hellish development. Web sites, mostly retailers, with a 'chat function'. But instead of a chat option just sitting there, available for you to use if you wish, it proactively tries to engage you - the tab on your browser suddenly starts flashing "you have 1 new message" which is their f*****g robot 'welcoming' you. You cannot dismiss it without opening it.

Kill the beast, kill the beast!!
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But that's progress, Tom! ;)
 
Alistair Scott

Alistair Scott

Location
London
I suspect this has been covered before, but I find my Facebook feed is now full of "Your friend So&So likes..." followed by a clickbait sheet where someone has fallen for the "Bet you can't name a fish without an A in its name/Name one sweet they don't make anymore/Give us your security data" type question. One can of course unfriend the person, but there are many of them, sadly, and often old acquaintances from around the world, and no filters available to remove such garbage.
 
George Marshall

George Marshall

Location
Herts
Alistair Scott said:
One can of course unfriend the person, but there are many of them, sadly, and often old acquaintances from around the world, and no filters available to remove such garbage.
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You can choose to mute someone or you can stop following their posts but remain friends. Very useful if you wanted to avoid pruning your friends list.
 
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