Artificial life

I was that desperate for something to watch on TV the other night that I actually sat through half an episode of Outnumbered. This is the highly rated comedy series, now in its umpteenth season, in which children say implausibly clever, sassy things much to the bemusement of their hard-pressed parents.

Why do I not share in the general adulation of this comedy? First, to misquote Homer Simpson, it isn’t funny because it isn’t true. I say this with confidence having personally bred and raised two of the most brilliant, witty and incisive children ever created. Maybe once or twice in their entire lives have they said anything as clever as the kind of one-liners those smartarse — and supposedly typical — brats on Outnumbered come up with every two seconds. So, no, I don’t buy it.

My second problem with it is that like most of the BBC’s output it is so gag-makingly PC. In this particular episode, a neighbour comes knocking at the family’s door to ask whether they will sign his petition not to have speed bumps put in their street. To any sane person this would scarcely sound an unreasonable proposition: speed bumps waste loads of council taxpayers’ money, they drive up your garage bills by ruining your suspension and your tracking, they increase noise and pollution by causing all passing traffic dramatically to slow then accelerate right outside your front door…

But, of course, being a product of BBC land — where everyone reads the Guardian and believes passionately in recycling, state education and bicycles — the man with the petition has to be portrayed as an utter loon. We can tell he’s a loon because — choice comedy moment coming up! — he’s actually gone and sketched an artist’s impression of what the speed bumps will look like.