Maybe I am a boring old fart (OK, I know I am), but a lot of TV advertising is either perplexing in its opacity, or just plain annoying. I shan't list any particular ad - but cars are a good example of what I mean: by the time you get to the end, you often can't even remember what they are trying to sell, which seems like a basic failure.

So, I was quite tickled by this ad for Big Yellow Storage, which uses stop-frame animation to show the way our possessions change as life changes. It is witty, nice to look at, and reminds me of being in one of my favourite places - the seashore.

The web site is rather pedestrian by comparison, but functional.

Heard on the BBC1 teatime news programme yesterday:

Female interviewer to Lewis Hamilton: "Young, good-looking and single - the girls must be throwing themselves at you - how do you cope?"

Talk about double standards. If a similar question had been asked of a female sports celebrity, you can be pretty sure the feminists would be jumping up and down saying "what sort of a question is that?". And if I were Lewis, I'd be sorely tempted to punch the interviewer squarely on the nose, 'lady' notwithstanding.

And anyway - what were they thinking of, asking Hello-style questions that have nothing whatsoever to do with news in any commonly-accepted sense? This is what I pay my TV licence for - aaaaargh.

I have previously reported how bits of old programmes are recycled, so that the Beeb has lots of money for reality TV shows and other similarly worthy projects.

Yesterday, BBC Countryfile was based in Scotland, around Glencoe. The presenter, Adam Henson, said (I paraphrase* as I forgot to wrote it down at the time) "John [Craven] isn't with us in Scotland this week, but down south", implying strongly that the feature following was contemporaneous with the broadcast. Actually, it was yet another of their tedious repeats stuffed in to stretch the programme out to an hour. Even if I hadn't seen it before, the time of year was clearly not mid-June. Newborn lambs are not completely diagnostic - but budding trees and wild garlic flowers in Somerset sure as hell are.

It's bad enough reusing stuff, but to pretend it's new is plain dishonest as well as patronising to our intelligence. Shame on you, BBC.

* If anyone recorded the prog. and can supply a transcript of the link, I'll be very grateful.