I had to transfer some money into my Polish builder’s bank account the other day, so I rang up the Lloyds TSB Execmaster Super VIP service helpline.
I had to transfer some money into my Polish builder’s bank account the other day, so I rang up the Lloyds TSB Execmaster Super VIP service helpline. As usual, I wasn’t permitted just to make my transaction and get on with my life. First, the helpful person at the other end impressed on me, I would really need to sort out my bank accounts. Currently, he had noticed, I held my money in a Greyman Ordinaire Current account and a Crapmeister Lo-Interest Saver account and this was losing me money.
‘Have you thought about transferring your funds into one of our new Spanglo Plutocrat Wealth-Enhancer Imperator accounts?’
‘Not really,’ I replied. ‘Whenever I say “Yes” to these things, I find I spend the next half hour being transferred from department to department, till eventually someone asks me lots of boring, Euro-regulatory due-diligence questions for an account I never really wanted that much in the first place. And, well, I’ve got a job to do.’
‘No, no, it won’t take long. And it really will make a difference to your interest earnings,’ said the man.
So I said, ‘Yes.’ And, sure enough, exactly the thing I predicted would happen happened. Half an hour utterly wasted.
The next week I got a text from the bank’s security department. It seemed that they wanted to verify that I really had wanted that money put in my Polish builder’s account, and until I confirmed it the transaction would be frozen. The text warned me that I might be charged for the call, so I texted them to say they should call me: their security issue, not mine, so why should I pay for it?
They never did call me so, with the builder squealing for his money, I eventually called them. A droney-voiced twenty-something male asked me two questions, first about the size of a bank loan, and second about which Lloyds TSB accounts I had. ‘God, I don’t know. There’s a current account and some sort of saver account, but they keep changing the names. I got another account the other day and I’m still not sure what it’s called. And frankly I think it’s ridiculous you’re bothering me with this quite unnecessary extra layer of personal security questions for a trivial sum of money.’ The man didn’t like my tone and told me I had failed. As, not without a hint of that-put-you-in-your-place-sir, didn’t-it?, did his supervisor.
Not only that, as I discovered the next day when I tried to get some cash out of the machine, but my bank account had been frozen. Because of a problem that essentially Lloyds TSB had engendered for me, they had now decided to deny me access to the money I pay them a service charge every month to look after for me. To unfreeze my account I would need photo ID. And guess what? Being as I was on holiday (in England, not abroad) I didn’t have any photo ID…
If you watched the last episode of the reliably funny Armstrong and Miller (BBC1, Friday) you’ll know why I’m telling you this. It featured an extremely long sketch in which a bridegroom late for church pops quickly into his bank to get some cash out for the caterers. Once he’s done, he hurries to apologise to his bride only to find that five years have passed and she is now married to someone else and has a kid. I couldn’t laugh. It was all too painfully true.
All week Channel 4 has been running a series of brief docudramas on episodes from the life of the Queen, with Her Maj variously being played by Emilia Fox, Samantha Bond, Susan Jameson, Barbara Flynn and Diana Quick. Perhaps I would have been more sympathetic if Channel 4 had allowed me to have some DVDs so I could watch it under normal conditions on TV, rather than under this new system they have where you can only watch programmes on files uploaded to your computer. I spend enough time staring at my computer as it is.
Anyway, I thought it was a nice idea which didn’t quite work. The subject matter itself was very interesting, focusing on the different crises the Queen has had to deal with in her long reign — Princess Margaret’s unsuitable fling with Peter Townsend; the royal family’s financial crisis in the early Seventies; tension with Margaret Thatcher — and a near-constitutional crisis over Britain’s failure to impose sanctions on apartheid South Africa; the Annus Horribilis. But, as so often with this genre, the dramatised scenes were a distraction.
Partly it was a visual thing. You kept going, ‘Are they supposed to be Ted Heath and Harold Wilson? But they don’t look anything like them.’ Partly it was to do with the scripts which, being crammed between the historical exposition of the various expert-witness talking heads and the worthily PC voiceover narrative (‘the black majority had been stripped of their basic human rights…’), had no room for expansiveness and tended towards caricature and cliché: ‘This isn’t about horses, Anne…’
Are we no longer grown-up enough to have our documentaries served up straight?
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