Today I shall rant about responsibility, or the refusal to accept it.  Today, for example, Maclaren (the buggy maker) agreed to pay compensation to [the parents of] children injured by its buggies’ closing mechanisms.  Hmm. Ok, I can just about get by with that, though I don’t really agree with it, it represents the continuing slide towards compensating for everything, but that’s not what annoyed me.  What annoyed me was that on the TV news reports of this, parents were shown whose children had been injured by the buggies.  These parents were (paraphrasingly) saying that they were pleased that they could now stop feeling guilty about harming their children.  I find this attitude of the passing on of responsibility exceptionally sucky.  Maclaren may be compensating, but they are not accepting liability, and that’s the key thing here – it’s still the responsibility of a parent to look after their kids. 

Yes, it’s horrible when you do something or omit something that means your kid gets hurt.  But you have to accept it as being your fault.  You close a door on your child’s hand, it’s not the builder’s fault for putting the door there.  Your child gets hurt on something hot in the kitchen, it’s not the makers of the hot device that are at fault.  Your child gets their finger trapped in a buggy mechanism… Do you see the pattern here?  I really hate this culture that exists of late whereby everything is everyone else’s fault but yours. 

You make a mistake, you suck it up.

Argh.  Rant over.

More nannying today as we are told that Iced coffees are bad. Some of them apparently contain over five hundred calories. Arrgh! Of course they contain a lot of calories, they’re a rich, sweet, treat. How is this news? The charity behind the figures is telling us that we should avoid the sweet, sugary flavours and instead go for the skimmed, unsweetened (and, presumably, less enjoyable) versions instead. Sigh. How about letting people enjoy themselves and, ooo, go on, live a little. Have a sweetened coffee without feeling guilty about it.

So on TV just now in the UK is a talent show called “Britain’s got talent”. On it appear a number of variety acts that have been chosen by the judging panel for the live shows every day this week. Each day we pick two acts by phone vote, and the winning acts will all appear in Saturday’s live final.

Except that this year, we have Susan Boyle. Now, I have to admit that I heard her original audition and I though – as many others did I suppose – that she was pretty good. And clearly it was a kick in the face to all of those who might judge on first impressions, because she wasn’t presented well and noone expected anything of her.

Since then, though, we’ve basically had a media machine backing her every step of the way in this “competition”. She’s now one of the shortest favourites ever with the bookies. She’s pretty much a dead cert to win, and you can’t go a day without hearing something else about her in the news.

When the other contestants go through, it’s “to give her some competition”, but by the sounds of it they may as well not even bother. Likewise it seems that the viewing public may as well not vote for their favourites, as the result is already decided.

The issue I have with it really is firstly, well, when she did her seconds live performance it just wasn’t that great, secondly that the judging panel are doing PR interviews bigging her up, and thirdly that there is other talent that is a lot better than her on the show that’s basically not got a look in. That, of course, and that when she appeared on her semi, she didn’t come across as a particularly nice personality. In fact she came across as cocky and arrogant, and it makes you wonder if the original meekness wasn’t just a device to gain favour – in which case it has worked to a spectacular degree.

I realise that much of the reality TV scene comes across as manufactured, but this just takes the cake. Why even bother making it a competition?