Give me strength!!...

Tonight I watched less than half of a new TV series called the Great Model Railway Challenge.  It had been advertised for weeks and I'd had time to ponder how awful it would almost certainly be.  But, Ye Gods I hadn't bargained for the disaster that met me at 8 o'clock on Friday evening.  To think my dear wife had foregone Gardeners' World for this drivel.

Three teams of baggy arsed, pot bellied old farts, recently ( or otherwise) pensioned off from, no doubt, well pensioned jobs got together to be given completely predictably stupid and irrelevant tasks to acheive with an 8x4 roundy roundy train set. I do NOT consider any part of their magnifying headsets, overpriced Noch electro static grass applicators or round ring desk lamps to be anything whatever to do with model railways.No amount of airbrushery where a paint brush would do will make a bodger into a modelmaker.  The one encouraging scene was where one old boy on being shown the scratchbuilding challenge, declared with some disgust that he was a modelmaker, not a clown.
That challenge had to be explained by the producer/presenter so that people knew what was scratchbuilding. It too had nothing to do with modelmaking being the insistence on the use of a high heeled shoe and a lipstick!  An ugly ginger denim wearing token female, more at home on Big Brother, I would have thought, warned she would be looking for creativity.  God forbid!

I have to confess, at that point, I too was missing Monty Don and told my wife to switch back to something realistic and interesting.

This debacle follows another model series that was bloody rubbish, where a team of British (always has to be a team doesn't it?) model flyers challenged a team of German model flyers to relive the Battle of Britain with models. For the most part the models, all built to one standard...low, were appallingly badly flown to the point that one could not discern what was happening, except for one pilot and SHE (HE...IT) was a transgender!  How thoroughly Media of them.  Apparently, on that occasion "we" beat the Jerries.  How would we know.  I have not watched that again, either.

There seems to be a kind of terminal unwritten statement in the Media that modelmaking must be pilloried and ridiculed out of existence and since the screen is everybody's modern bible they will do it by TV.