I, like most people I suppose, have my car set up just as I like it. The seat is just so, the mirrors are just so, and the radio rarely needs to be fiddled with bar a change of frequency.
However, t’other day I found myself driving someone else’s car, as my car was getting fixed up. And thusly, the radio was set up slightly differently. One of the differences was the set-up of the NEWS button.
The setting of this button means that the radio automatically changes over to any station that has decided to press the news button. And it makes it difficult to change the frequency until the station releases that button. In general, this means you get either the last minute of a three minute BBC news bulletin, or the preceding ad-break of a commercial radio bulletin.
However, that’s not worst of the offences I’ve seen.
No, the real annoyance was that the only time I heard a station pushing the button for the entirety of a ‘news’ bulletin, it was Radio 1 and their Entertainment News.
Entertainment News is not, for those who didn’t know, news. It is at best gossip. It is a superficial look at which music star is supposedly stepping out which which film star; it is reliant on Perez *spit* Hilton; it does not enlighten the listener to anything about current events or economics. It has its place, but that place is not in a news bulletin.
So I’d like to thank the BBC for interrupting my drive with their take on the things that matter. It gave me the impetus to dig deep into the settings of my sister’s car radio, and ensure that it wouldn’t happen again. Ta.
Did You ask your sister if she wanted it sorted?
Brothers! Who would have them.
No, but I did check with her when I handed the car back. Turns out she’d wanted the settings changed, but couldn’t be arsed trawling through the system.
Brothers, eh? Who’d fix the gadgets without them?
(Full disclosure: I didn’t put the seats or mirrors back. It’s not my fault she’s small…)
If I ever loan you my car (which is currently abandoned in the driveway of a semi-derelict bungalow) feel free to change the radio settings to Radio 4 and keep it there. You may also do an oil change, wipe the dead flies off the windscreen and take that big bag of rubbish in the boot to a recycling depot.
Nelly, disturbingly enough I find myself listening to R4 quite a lot already. So that wouldn’t be the end of the world.
As for cleaning it, sure a dirty car is primarily a security system. Who’s going to steal a car if they can’t see out the windscreen?