Woke up feeling grumpy this morning, and as brain kicked in remembered the cause. Last night's Panorama programme 'Why hate junk mail?".
The Panorama team has produced many excellent programmes in its time, the recent episode exposing scandalous behaviour at care homes being one.
Last night's show was not in the same league, rather it was a hotch-potch of ill-informed vignettes. The presenter Tom Heap started off by painting a picture of all advertising mail (naturally he repeatedly referred to it as junk mail) as being some sort of evil that the whole country is up in arms about. Really?
He then went on to SIGN UP for various catalogues and mailings, and proceeded to express outrage about the fact that people had sent him the information he'd asked for. Whaaat??
We were shown a huge landfill tip of household rubbish in Cornwall as if the vast majority of it was made up of mail, when in fact the Cornish councillor said it was about, err, 3%.
Was there any mention of the fact that unlike the myriad plastic bags, also pictured, at least the paper mailings would degrade? No there was not.
The second part of the programme focused on so-called scam mail. This is a topic that is worthy of serious attention, and it was distressing to see footage of vulnerable people who had lost thousands of pounds after becoming sucked in by, and even addicted to, the false promises of the scam mailers.
Why the Panorama team didn't focus the whole programme on this, and do a more thorough and professional job of looking into the related issues more coherently, I do not know. Instead, the programme managed to juxtapose different mail-based themes such that leaflets from the local takeaway were somehow portrayed as equally evil as scam mail.
It was so wrong-headed in so many ways, I wonder whether a grown-up at the BBC actually viewed the programme prior to broadcast. It almost felt as if they hadn't produced the requisite number of broadcast minutes on scam mail, so had to tag some other mail-related stuff on in order to fill up the allotted time, resulting in a confused muddle that jumped from parody to pathos. Or maybe Heap just fancied a trip to beautiful Fair Isle, in order to make the spurious point that 'there's nowhere in the UK you can escape junk mail'.
Nowhere unless one uses one of the various mailing preference services to opt out of it, that is. I can't remember him mentioning that.
By the end of the programme what I really hated was this particular piece of junk TV.
