By some metrics, the Daily Mail website is the most read newspaper website on t’internet. This is a surprise to many. including me; it’s a very strange place to navigate and, if I’m honest, it’s not exactly in possession of the sanest editorial policy in the world. But then I often find myself reading things on it that have been linked to by others. Such as this article, sent by TLW.

If you wash up straight after a meal, know how to bleed a radiator and your mother has started asking for your advice, then you can truly claim to have grown up.

Other key signs of adulthood are more obvious, such as having a mortgage, being married?.?.?.? and wearing sensible shoes.

They are all listed among 50 benchmarks that researchers say mark someone out as a grown-up.

The list is hardly comprehensive, and a lot of them aren’t exactly grown up in their priorities. Budgeting every month is a pretty sensible one, yes, but Being sensible enough to remove make up before bedtime is (a) not relevant to a huge number of people and (b) a sign more of mitigating juvenile behaviour (such as being too tipsy to take off warpaint before sleep) than of being outright adult. But some are quite sensible and the like: keeping track of interest rates, having a joint bank account, owning a lawn mower, all are quite grown up.

Incidentally, apparently I’m 43/50 “grown up”. Any guesses as to which ones I missed?

I’ve tried watching 10 O’Clock Live over the past number of weeks. I’ve really tried. I thought that it would be an irreverent take on the news, with a slight bite to it.

I was wrong. It’s turned out to be a very reverent take on the Guardian, with a lot of bile in it.

The first week I watched it, I tried to see what I’d improve in it.

• First off, I’d drop Lauren Laverne. Or at least have less of her in the show. She’s just not particularly suited to the style I’d like the show to have, and while the others have at least made me laugh once or twice I’ve not had more than a wry grin when Laverne is trying her hardest.
• I’d change the timings considerably. More time for David Mitchell, for example, to do his interviews since that’s really the only time you’ll get a politician saying something they might not on other programmes. Less time for the round-table conference. Less time for Jimmy Carr to do anything other than his introductory stand up routine. One less of Charlie Brooker’s segments from the desk, because he’s clearly a bit of a broken record.
• I’d try and make the audience listen to what some of the people on it are saying. A few weeks ago, for example, Mitchell was going on about how the deficit wasn’t that much of a problem, it being just like a mortgage and everyone had one of those and was OK. The politicio he was interviewing then explained that the debt was like a mortgage and, yes, having a debt is OK. But the deficit is how much we’re adding to the debt every year, and surely that shouldn’t be too massive for too long? Cue moments of revelation that were promptly forgotten when Mr Brooker did his next routine about how cuts are the worst thing ever…

As I say, I’ve tried. Five episodes I’ve sat through. But I think from here on I’ll give up and maybe just catch the Mitchell bits on YouTube after the fact. It’d be a simple way to get the funny hit without all the surrounding shit.

One thing from the BBC webshite that has been interesting me over the last months has been the Go Figure column, wherein a Beeb journalist throws statistics around and shows the reality behind them.

The latest column touches on something that interests me: how the news spends so much time talking about things that are pretty much statistically never going to happen again and ignores things that happen everyday.

I’ve named the phenomenon after the BBC’s Roger Harrabin, who puts it like this: “When considering societal problems over the long term, news-worthiness is often in inverse proportion to frequency. If problems become commonplace, they are not new – so do not qualify as ‘news’. This means the media often guides politicians to focus on less serious acute problems at the expense of more serious systemic problems.”

So we hear lots and lots about strikes and protests at the moment because there are so few of them; we don’t hear about the people saying “well, we have to get on with it because the last government spent our money like drunken sailors” precisely because so many people are saying that.

We hear about accidents in aviation and on the trains because they don’t happen every day, but car crashes do so they’re not newsworthy.

Personally, I think that the news you have to dig for is the interesting stuff: the things that aren’t considered newsworthy because they happen so often. The stuff that’s thrown on every front page is pretty boring after a day.

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The fly in the ointment is celebrity and reality TV coverage, which apparently counts as major news despite proving that talentless oiks haven’t changed. I don’t know how we’ve arrived at a place where that is considered proper news on a daily basis.

Question: do people think that Boris is the way he is deliberately, or is the madcap actually real? I tend to think that it’s real, but that he likes to be a bit mischievous knowing that people will let him away with it.

Hell, I think that most of us would like to get away with double-entendres like that on national TV. But very few people would be given the leeway that Boris is.

Well, isn’t it nice that HBO are doing their bit for the NIrish economy?

US broadcaster HBO is to begin filming its epic fantasy adventure series Game of Thrones in Belfast in June.

The series pilot was filmed at locations around the city.

Nine more programmes based on the first book of George R.R. Martin’s multi-volume A Song of Fire and Ice series have now been commissioned.

Yes, they’re making a TV series of the first of the Song of Ice and Fire books, which could be very interesting. It’s a most excellent (if fucking complicated) series of books, and if any TV company could make it work, then my money is on HBO doing it properly.

The only problem is that if they plan on making the whole series of books into shows, then they’ll have to get Mr Martin to hurry up. I mean, it’s been five years since the last instalment, and he’s running the risk of never finishing the damn thing. Which would be bad. As I’ve been saying for most of those five years:

There’s something about the campaign to save 6music that annoys me.

It may be the way that people keep bringing out the platitude that the BBC is doing things that nobody else does, ignoring the fact that pirate radio is nothing but DJs playing what they want; playlists only happen in the UK because the BBC want them to, so it’s hardly a big thing that one twentieth of their output on one twentieth of their stations isn’t playlisted.

It may be that the people who are campaigning for it to be kept seemingly outnumber the people who actually listen to it; it’s the same as the Daily Mail outrage scandal things where fifty people complain about something that only three people witnessed.

Or it may be that the BBC is going for the Red Arrows defence; when faced with the prospect of budget cuts, the RAF always said that the Red Arrows would be the first thing to go, and no government would want to say that they killed the Red Arrows. So the BBC may be trying to get a big enough momentum in front of them to make sure that nothing is cut in the end.

The thing is, I don’t care about 6music, or most of the BBC stations. I think that out of the five main national BBC radio stations, there is really only enough content for two or three. So cuts need to be made, and someone needs to decide where. In the face of a world where we can all decide when we’ll listen to the radio, having stations that are on 24 hours a day is unnecessary.

So cut something, and stop with the worthy play-acting. It’s getting vexing.