Thursday 19 July 2018

Love Island Idiocy

It's still a bit busy in Puddlecoteville, but things are clearing so I may be able to write more on issues I have wanted to for quite a while .. perhaps.

As a quickie, though, this is a gobsmacker.


Remember that the UKCTAS is funded entirely by your taxes. And they believe a good way of spending your money - so much so that they are boasting about it - is ensuring that people watching Love Island don't see anyone smoking.

Can you think of anything more utterly pointless than that? Because I can't.

What's more, these highly-paid people sat down and watched 21 episodes of the show to count how many times someone smoked a cigarette; catalogued the brand used; and spent time on an exercise to work out how many "impressions" were created as a result. So we appear now to be paying organisations out of taxpayer funds to spend time and our resources on stopping reality shows showing reality. Seriously, this beggars belief.

I would ask UKCTAS how many people, exactly, they have stopped smoking with this brave new idea, because it hasn't even stopped the contestants. I don't know what the show is about, but - yet again - it seems tobacco control is having a harmful effect on people's lives. Here are some quotes from the show's fans.
“Am pretty livid the smoking area has been banned in #LoveIsland Thats where all the kick offs, strops, bitching and secrets come out.” 
“Not seen a single person smoke yet. I miss the chain smoking and gossiping area of the villa #loveisland,”
I love the justification for this too.
The reason that the show no longer airs people smoking is that the islanders have been banned from smoking in public areas due to the barrage of complaints the show received last year.
Oh really? Well UKCTAS just claimed credit for that. Do you think that they are claiming credit for this massive upswell of outrage from concerned private citizens or - as I think is more likely - the "barrage" of complaints came from UKCTAS and their equally miserable state-funded allies?

This is the state of affairs right now, it seems. We've seen recently how health extremists - and health extremists alone - attacked adverts for chocolate by demonising the Easter Bunny and complaining to the ASA. And now we see UKTCAS boasting about how they got smoking banned in Love Island and it being passed off as some kind of public movement.

It's not. There is no public movement. Just about no-one cares about smoking in Love Island and some fans are pretty pissed off that it has lessened their enjoyment of the show.

I'm sure UKCTAS could have some use somewhere, but paying for researchers to watch TV for hours on end, before sending staff to a conference - on taxpayer funding - in order to boast farcically about how they got smoking banned on Love Island, I would suggest, is a fucking shit waste of our money.

Still plenty of cuts needed. We've barely scraped the surface. 



1 comment:

Gray Cooper said...

May and any other politician cannot preach"inclusivity and tolerance".