Daily Mail Readers

How stupid are Daily Mail readers? We already know they're filled with hate and bigotry thanks to the bile it pumps out through most of its pages. It's often said that a fool and his money are easily parted and if the Daily Mail's current offer for a digital radio is anything to go by you'd have to be a fool to sign up.

By collecting sixty tokens between now and September you are entitled to claim a digital radio worth £35. But taking into account the amount you have to spend on the copies of the paper plus the cash for post and packing you've parted with far more than £35. Can Daily Mail readers not add up? I'd rather just buy the radio and not have to be subjected to the vile small-minded writing that fills its pages to get my hands on the digital radio.

Or better still I'd splash out on an internet radio which is far better anyway!

When local radio works

Local radio is actually bloody good. Sometimes. When it's allowed to be local usually. And before I go into my reasons why, I need to declare an interest. While I do still do work for Real Radio, this post isn't just an excuse to blow their trumpet. It really is credit where credit is due.

If you, like me, are a news junkie, then last night would have been your idea of heaven. The breaking news coverage of the end of the Raoul Moat saga was gripping. I had Sky News and BBC News on picture-in-picture split screen with the radio on in the background flicking between Five Live and Real Radio North East. And Real Radio's live phone-in with coverage of what was happening in Northumberland was superb.

It's no secret that usually the Real Radio's English stations, along with Wales, all take a thinly-disguised network show from Manchester in an evening, but thankfully the infrastructure and staffing still exists to ditch the generic programme and replace it with local content and that's what Newcastle did. They went live with an entirely speech-based rolling news format throughout the evening, on several occasions getting eyewitness accounts faster than colleagues on Sky News who quoted what they were hearing on the Real Radio programme on air.

The highlight had to be Paul Gascoigne calling in when he turned up, sounding rather worse for wear, at the police cordon with a chicken, lager, dressing gown and a fishing rod for the fugitive who he used to know. Again this exclusive was quote extensively elsewhere.

At a time when so many radio groups are shutting down entire stations and buildings and so losing the infrastructure to ditch the piped network show when necessary, it's worth looking at this potentially award winning example of why local radio should exist and be invested in, not cut to its bare bones by money men obsessed with chasing profit but cost-cutting rather than by providing compelling content to drive up the audience.

And while the owners of Real Radio are themselves preparing for more networking on their Smooth  stations, at least the ability to still opt out of the networked programming will still largely exist for those occasions it is needed. I only wish the rest of the country on the Real network had been able to hear this great programming last night. It truly was a fantastic team effort.

I'm not fit to live here

We're constantly being told that the country is on the brink of being bankrupt. Public services are going to be cut. People are going to lose their jobs. We all need to save money.

Well here's my suggestion ... scrap the ridiculous citizenship test. I don't know how much it costs but a single penny spent on this worthless waste of time is too much. It's the test which people wanting to become UK citizens have to take to make sure they understand more about the country. Now in principle it's a great idea. But having just taken and FAILED the test I've got to question its validity.

I like to think that after living here for all of my 30 years I have a good grasp of the country and how it works. Working as a journalist I often pick up various scraps of knowledge that might pass some other people by, so I would have thought I'd have stood a good chance of passing the test. But no. I failed. Not just failed ... I failed by some margin.

Silly me. How foolish of me not to know in what year in the 1800s women got the right to divorce their husband, or what percentage of people (to one decimal place) were Muslim in this country in 2001. I jmean good grief, what absolute tosh. This is absurd. What are we trying to create? A nation of encylopedic bores who recite facts learnt by rote? Go on ... give it a go. See if you, like me, are also not entitled to call yourself a UK citizen ... http://www.ukcitizenshiptest.co.uk/