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Network Rail say that there should be obligatory questions about level crossings in the driving theory test, due to the number of people making last-minute dashes across level crossings every year.

No, Network Rail, no. The drivers doing the frankly terrifying things on the above BBC report are not risking their lives because they don’t know about level crossings. They are doing it because, pure and simple, they are twats.

These are the same drivers who weave in and out of lanes at 110mph on the motorway; the ones who speed onto roundabouts to nip ahead of approaching cars; the ones who drive at 45mph in residential areas and occasionally kill people.

It’s not that I care if they get hit by a train. It may sound heartless, but it is factually undeniable that they deserve to die. It’s the people around them who don’t, and that’s why the solution has bugger all to do with the theory test. The solution is to make it illegal and take people’s licenses off them when they do it – plain and simple, same as drink driving and for exactly the same reasons.

It wouldn’t sort out the idiotic schoolkids featured at the end of the report, but it would be a start.

A Year 7 group went a little off the rails in a composition workshop I did with them last week, so it was pure joy to turn up today to a heap of letters of apology, apparently written under the impression that I might be too upset to ever come back and teach them again.

It is a glorious catalogue of illiteracy and finger pointing, but a few deserve special mention, like the boy who wrote:

I appoligise for talking when you were talking and to prove i can stick to this appoligy i will not make commentes on anything you say and if someone is talking or doing anything inapropreat i will leave them alone and let them get in trouble

Next up, a fine demonstration of laying the blame elsewhere (a future politician, I reckon):

I am sorry for the very childish behavior (sic) of my fellow class mates. They behaved very silly and I hope they will treat you with more respect.

My personal favourite makes reference to an incident when I was trying to demonstrate how a minor key could make a song sound sad:

…I am also sorry about Matthew saying “Emily said thats the sort of thing emos listen to” and am sorry for that disrupting the class what I actually said was “that sound like he’s realy deppresed”. Then to myself “kind of emo style” (as we were thinking about styles)

Finally, a special mention for the girl who signs her letter “many sinful apologies…”. Wouldn’t expect anything less in a faith school.

Lest this blog become a series of rants about Woman’s Hour, and following another road rage incident this morning, I have decided to set up a different blog exposing the horrific gender stereotyping that goes on for an hour each weekday on BBC Radio 4.

It is here.

I realise that, in order for this undertaking to succeed, I am going to have to listen to Woman’s Hour on a regular basis. Deliberately. And yes, it might drive me actually mad. It might even kill me. But maybe, just maybe, I’ll take this evil fossil of a radio programme with me, and I am prepared to take that bullet for the good of humankind, single-issue male stereotype that I am.

Hurray! I’m a man after all.

I find this story rather wonderful and cheering. Not everyone on the internet is horrible! etc.

I know that publicity tends to exaggerate, but companies ought to know that there are limits. Today a brochure for “haart of bedford” (sic) dropped onto my doormat, advertising their services as estate agents; whichever consultancy firm came up with their slogans made an unfortunate miscalculation with this one:

there’s never been a better time to buy your new home. (sic)

Given how widely it has been reported that the exact opposite is true, I think that could be what we call stretching credulity too far…

One of the problems of driving a car is that I occasionally find myself listening to a radio programme that I would never consider turning on in other circumstances but which is so compellingly dreadful that I have to keep listening. Undoubtedly the biggest culprit, which invariably sees me yelling at my car radio and crashing into road barriers, is Woman’s Hour.

What is this programme even for? Is it there because the rest of Radio 4’s heady mix of politics, analysis, culture, drama and gardening just won’t appeal to the poor dears who stay at home to bathe the children and peel the potatoes? Of course, we don’t need a Gentleman’s Hour – we have The World At One in which serious issues of the day are discussed; but thank goodness that Radio 4 have put aside an hour, at least, for those of lesser intellect to hear about more domestic, frivolous concerns.

One recent edition that nearly made me throw my car off a motorway bridge had Emma Thompson’s mother telling a truly horrendous anecdote about a time she inserted a clove of garlic into her bottom to cure her piles, but – my! – imagine the dreadful smell when she passed wind! Is that really suitable subject matter for daytime radio? Is it? IS IT?

But it’s not the sheer randomness and silliness of the content that drives me up the wall. It is the fact that this programme is habitually sexist in a way that even Jeremy Clarkson couldn’t get away with; even if the programme’s very existence didn’t implicitly reinforce a gender stereotype, its discussions regularly take a whole load other other mythical gender distinctions and shamelessly repeat them as if they’re scientific fact.

I was pretty damn cross about last week’s “why women want a bigger kitchen” discussion (why, pray, am I not allowed a bigger kitchen too?) but yesterday went a whole step further in a discussion of “why women don’t write as many letters to newspapers as men do”.

First up with a neat answer was Sarah Sands of the London Evening Standard, who explained that “time is a big issue”. Apparently, women don’t write letters to newspapers because “they’re just too busy”.

Doing what, exactly? At no point did Ms Sands stop to explain what it is that means that men are so much less busy than women, except in a vague sentence that seemed to imply that all men are students or retired. She clearly has an unquestioningly Wodehousian world view in which women do all the work while men sit around writing letters to the Telegraph.

Without pausing to justify her illogical theory, she went on to add that with women “there’s this innate modesty” which means they’re less prepared to mouth off about things which annoy them. Which is so laughably inaccurate that I might have chuckled heartily, but for the fact that the Observer‘s Stephen Pritchard leapt in to agree that “women have a natural desire to be more considered and reflective”, a brazen fallacy compounded by the patronising edge in his voice which suggested that he was prepared to tell the little ladies what they wanted to hear if it kept them out of the way while us men got on with running the country.

Not one to make a sweeping generalisation about women without modestly dragging his own gender through the mud, Pritchard added: “men are single-issue people… we tend to be incredibly blinkered!” Unlike, presumably, Sarah Sands of the London Evening Standard who believes that women do all the work in the world. In the same simpering tone which, horrifically, seemed calculated to forge a path into Jenni Murray’s knickers, he went on that “women have this tremendous ability to do half a dozen things at once which men certainly don’t share!”

How bloody dare he!!! I couldn’t do my job if I wasn’t able to do half a dozen things at once! Besides which, if women are able to do half a dozen things at once, why aren’t they writing letters to newspapers at the same time as doing all those other things they’re so busy with?

I’m the last person to advocate equality as sameness and know that, broadly speaking, men and women have important physical and emotional differences. But if you were to believe the sweeping, self-contradictory, discriminatory, patronising crap spouted about men and women on Woman’s Hour you would form a view of gender that was last fashionable around the beginning of the 20th century, the very thing that women chained themselves to railings to escape from in a brave yet apparently uncharacteristically single-issue manner.

The feminist in me is half-inclined to chain myself to railings outside Broadcasting House until Radio 4 pull the programme from the airwaves, but time is an issue as I’m so busy, so instead I have written a considered, reflective blog about it (I’m too innately modest to write to the Telegraph).

Shit – I’m a woman.

I am not entirely surprised by the success of Fox’s celebrated, Golden Globe-winning series Glee, merely rather depressed. For those of you who have been spared it so far, the concept is this (imagine it scribbled on a napkin): a Spanish teacher takes over the school’s Glee Club (that is what Americans call a school choir) which includes a group of misfits who argue, make up and then, to round off each episode, sing.

The same napkin would certainly also have had space for the everso predictable character breakdown – there’s the cool kid who plays football but deep down would rather be singing, and the pretty girl who’s a bit individual so gets picked on by the sporty girls; then there’s the sassy, streetwise girl and the nerdy-boy-who-gets-bullied. And just to make sure a few minorities are covered, there’s disabled boy and Asian girl (“what’s your skill?” asked cool kid at one point; “er…” she stuttered in broken English. “Never mind,” he interrupted with a patronising grin, “we’ll find something!”)

But it isn’t the cynical, school-drama-plus-music-by-numbers formula that depressed me. It is the fact that the series has not one iota of wit or irony. For example, in an early scene we saw the Spanish teacher sit up in bed with a big grin as he had a flash of inspiration for the Glee Club’s new name – “Of course!” he gasped, “New Directions!” – and I laughed out loud because I thought it was a deliberate joke that the character had just uttered a name unfortunately close in sound to “Nude Erections”. I was already imagining the hilarious results that were about to ensue when the hapless teacher announced his Nude Erections to the football team.

But no; having no sense of irony (and in this instance self-awareness), the programme evidently expected us to share the teacher’s eureka moment and gasp in delight at his perfect idea. Gee! New Directions! How… fresh!

In another scene, the newly-reformed and unfortunately-titled Glee Club performed a pretty decent rendition of Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat; as it finished, nerdy kid announced without irony, “we suck”. And instead of leaping in and reassuring them “no way, most schoolkids would kill to be able to sing that well together, in tune and with so much energy on no rehearsal!” the Spanish teacher just nodded with a wry, disappointed smile and said that they would get better.

How were we supposed to know that their runthrough was, within the non-ironic, sugary world of the drama, a disaster? All became clear when, in a totally unforseeable development at the end of the episode, they all sorted out their problems and learned how to sing in a way that didn’t suck. Because then we heard what good singing is meant to sound like: backing harmonies close-miked and compressed to the point that they cease to sound like human voices and undoubtedly supplemented by several professional singers, lead vocals auto-tuned, given an artificial acoustic and mixed as flatteringly as possible with the professional backing group which had miraculously appeared to replace their earlier lone pianist. The kind of sound no school ensemble, however good, would EVER make.

In another context I might have thought it was a deliberate moment of high camp, suspension-of-disbelief silliness and it might have been funny, or at least bearable, but naturally I was meant to be in floods of non-ironic tears and it was all I could do not to choke on my scowl.

No doubt in future weeks the Spanish teacher will find true love, the cool kid will realise there’s more to life than football and get it on with the pretty girl, the nerdy kid will be accepted for who he is, the Asian girl will learn to speak English and the disabled boy will learn to walk. (The sassy girl will stay exactly the same.) I’m going to give it a miss – if I want to watch a genuinely moving people-taught-to-sing drama I’ll watch Young At Heart, and if I want the camp version there’s Sister Act.

And anyone who thinks I’m being snobbish should know that I watched Legally Blonde the Musical last week and loved every second.

I awoke to this rather depressing story about a man who was arrested under the terrorist act for tweeting the message “Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”

Good work, South Yorkshire Police. At least we know that our airports are safe from Mr Paul Chambers in Doncaster. And that police are being paid to interrogate his kind of scum for seven hours. Who needs intelligence when you’ve got the South Yorkshire Police? Good old South Yorkshire Police.

When I read the story, I decided that I would have to leave the country unless all charges are dropped against Paul Chambers – because, cliche though it may be, if we can’t tweet jokes about terrorism, the terrorists have won. Indeed, in a sense the state (and the South Yorkshire Police) have become terrorists themselves.

I was about to tweet something to that effect when I realised it would be much funnier to tweet the following: “Unless all charges against Paul Chambers are dropped, I’m blowing Robin Hood airport sky high!!”

And then it occurred to me that if I did tweet that, the South Yorkshire Police might come down in force to Bedford and lock me up under the terrorist act. I dared myself to do it all the same, because that would be funny, and would certainly draw attention to the sense-of-humour failure that threatens to destroy our country. But I’m a busy person and it would be really bloody inconvenient to get arrested; also, I expect my family would disapprove.

So I didn’t tweet at all. Because I was scared of being arrested.

Darn – the terrorists have won already.

I had a small dinner party this evening and while we ate I put Bill Evans on iTunes as every good host knows to. Then, when we reached the coffee stage, I turned off the computer speakers and we migrated to my (second) living room upstairs.

I’m now turning everything off and paused at my computer to briefly check emails and BBC news, and turned up for the volume for this rather tragic clip of Europe Minister Chris Bryant learning of the Hoon-Hewitt bid to oust Brown whilst talking live on TV.

And I was astounded, but deeply impressed, that the BBC had backed the whole painful moment with a particularly angsty quartet by Webern.

I was equally disappointed when I realised that the music was just coming from iTunes.

I was quite looking forward to The End of Time (part 2); sure, part 1 had been lame and mostly involved running around some docks somewhere while our Christmas dinners digested, but there was the distinct smell of Time Lords about, and Timothy Dalton looked kind of awesome and clearly wasn’t messing around. I’d originally hoped that Russell T Davies would do the honourable thing and not actually write a series reboot as his outgoing story, leaving Steven Moffat the chance to figure out exactly how he wanted things to be, but since RTD has the world’s largest ego there really wasn’t much of a chance of that. So I was confidently expecting him to bring back Gallifrey, kill the Doctor, and then show us the face of Matt Smith with exactly the same characterisation as before. All fine, because come April we’d have forgotten a handful of lines and the Eleventh Doctor could go off in whatever direction made sense.

And of course I was expecting RTD to screw it up. A trainwreck. A disaster. But I had absolutely no idea quite how far he would manage to get things wrong.

Let’s look at the story, half hour by half hour (as I remember it), across the two parts.

1. Some running around, the Master comes back to life, or maybe not, or something. He can now apparently break the laws of physics whenever he likes, and is stupid enough to think that when he desperately needs lots of energy the best use of what little he has is to repeatedly propel himself several hundred feed in the air. The Doctor finds him by the cunning method of going to his regular quarrydocks.
2. An Evil Plot Device is introduced, which the narrator tells us portentously will lead to the end of, well, everything. They put the Master in it. He turns everyone into clones of himself. Apparently rich black people are crazy megalomaniacs, in the same way that poor black people are into voodoo (in Planet of the Dead).
3. More running around; the Doctor goes into orbit for a while to avoid having to confront the Master, the Time Lords hatch an almost-believable plan to create a link between themselves and the Master as a baby (ignoring that this violates one of those pesky Laws of Time that the Doctor was talking about in one of the other tedious specials). This leads to the best music in the episode, where there isn’t any music and just drums, riffing on the timing of the theme tune.
4. Timothy Dalton sends back a diamond to provide a physical link between him and the Master (while I’ll let slide, but only because I remember The Invisible Enemy), and then uses it to mosey on over to Earth, taking all the other Time Lords, and Gallifrey (only we don’t see much because all the money’s been spent on Timothy Dalton), with him. (At some point everyone clearly forgets that Gallifrey is Time Locked, and that trying to pull a planet through some sort of physical-psychical link created by a small diamond should leave you with, well, a very squished planet.) Timothy Dalton then undoes everything the Master has done (meaning that humanity exists again), the Doctor undoes everything that else Timothy Dalton has done (meaning that Gallifrey is still Time Locked, that the Earth is safe, etc. etc.), and then finally the Doctor realises that the Master (in a bit they didn’t show on screen, or possibly my brain blanked out in an attempt to survive) had made a couple of little death boxes, and Bernard Cribbins in locked in one, but it’s okay because if the Doctor goes in the other one they’ll both live, because the Doctor is a fucking Time Lord and he knows it’s time for him to regenerate because the Ood have been cropping up in his mind for the last year or so telling him.
5. The Doctor goes on a farewell tour all around the galaxy to remind everyone of all the really shit characters that Russell T Davies created, and Sarah Jane Smith. Then the TARDIS explodes to remind you that RTD won’t be writing for the series any more and therefore it will be shitwe won’t have to suffer this shit from now on, and David Tennant becomes Matt Smith.

The End.

I’m not going to lay into the dialogue, the magical bullshit that makes no sense whatsoever, or even RTD’s obsession with making this Big Exit more about him than about the Tenth Doctor (if you don’t believe me, read some of the self-satisfied twaddle he’s said about writing these episodes); what troubles me is his cowardice. There was a beautiful moment (insofar as it could be beautiful with such first-draft writing) where Gallifrey explodes into the Earth’s skies and dooms humanity. Then, five minutes later, he undoes it because it feels all a bit too drastic.

This is the moment where anyone who didn’t already realise it was struck with the realisation that RTD isn’t actually a very good writer. (Except for the ones who are irredeemably stupid.)

If the outcome is too big, dial back the outcome a bit, don’t write it out in the next scene. A better ending would have been for Gallifrey to be brought into the Solar System in a kind of reverse Trojan position with respect to the Earth (we can ignore the problems with the science bit, since earlier in the story the Master shot bolts of electricity from his hands). Then the Earth becomes a subjugate planet to Gallifrey, and humanity becomes a slave race to the rather fun New Time Lords who have given up on the whole non-intervention thing and are out to rule the universe. The Doctor has to choose between joining them in ruling the planet he loves, or being exiled from it, in a nice reverse on the Third Doctor’s punishment, and the Master (who should have been weakened from being resurrected, as in say The Deadly Assassin, rather than being an unstable energy form or whatever) could be marched off to be executed for being a coward during the Time War.

Then the Eleventh Doctor can romp around the universe for a bit, with the aim of getting back and stopping Timothy Dalton; by which time of course the Time Lords will have moved on again, or something. Anything’s possible in this context.

Russell T Davies would still have managed to find a way to make that lame and drag out, but at least I could have respected him for it. Bringing back Gallifrey only to immediately send it back out of the series is a bit like saying “let’s see what you could have won” when you could have won an Aston Martin but you actually won a used tea bag. It’s an admission of mediocrity and of cowardice, at the exact moment you’re trying to convince everyone that you’re awesome. The remaining respect I felt for the man who brought Doctor Who back to our screens died today, killed by his own inabilities.

In case you think I’m utterly down on the story and being unkind, here are some things I didn’t have any problem with at all:

1. The spiky headed aliens. Great fun, and the female one was cute.
2. June Whitfield.
3. The Visionary, telling fortunes for the Time Lord Council. (If you want to believe that she was channelling the Matrix, and driven mad by that knowledge, then feel free.)
4. Mickey marrying Martha (although to be fair that’s because I don’t care about either of them).
5. The Doctor calling The President that R word. He’s clearly not the original, who would have killed the Master as soon as he appeared, and probably the Doctor as well just to be on the safe side. The Wikipedia entry notes that the Doctor might just have been comparing them.

If you haven’t seen it, here’s what is to come. Or at least bits, with some excited singers in the background.