Words Dept.: entry

While it’s probably advisable not to get sucked into the largely fatuous online “debate” Channel 4 is trying to stoke up, I found it a bit daft that Manchester was rated the 17th worst place to live in a “Best and Worst” list on Channel 4 last night.

As is usual with this annual feast of Phil ‘n’ Kirstie-fronted utter guff, a bunch of affluent boroughs in the south east – and Edinburgh – filled the top 20 “best” places to live, while Middlesbrough was rated worst. A job lot of poor northern shit holes (to paraphrase) such as Doncaster, Knowsley, Blackpool, Grimsby and Hull made up the bottom 20 with a couple of London boroughs and depressed former Welsh mining towns thrown in for good measure.

I’ve looked at the website and I can’t find any proper explanation of how these conclusions were reached. It seems various crime, health, social and economic factors were considered – alongside the weather. (I don’t know about you but I always think about how often it rains before choosing somewhere to live.) But I can’t figure out what weighting was given to each factor.

And what’s the point of the exercise? It’s fairly obvious that Manchester is going to have a worse crime rate (and worse weather) than Epsom and Ewell but, all factors considered, I’m 100% sure where I’d rather live.

It was also somewhat excruciating to see Phil Spencer‘s smug bit of Merthyr Tydfil-bashing. “The locals are all fat, which is a miracle because most of them have hardly any teeth” was about the size of it. What price the residents of Merthyr phoning Channel 4 with the unbiased observation that Spencer is a bald, talentless idiot with a speech impediment and is obviously in need of a decent tailor? (For anyone interested, the number is 0845 076 0191.)

So congratulations, Channel 4, for a well thought out, useful and not at all discriminatory run down of the UK’s richest and poorest places to live. Twats.