Auntie left me gasping in shock

1:50pm Thursday 3rd April 2008

YOU would think that Auntie would know better. Tut-tut is all I can say.

Having no exciting plans for last Saturday night, I settled down on my sofa to watch Love Soup on BBC1.

(This second series isn't as good as the first in my opinion, but it's worth a watch all the same).

So, there I am, in front of my TV chuckling away at the latest romantic crisist/angle the main character and her two friends have found themselves in this week.

Like any self-respecting women, after work on a Friday they'd retired to their local drinking establishment for some refreshments.

Now, maybe the BBC were hoping noone would notice over the flowing vino and male-related gossip, but one of the characters then lit up a cigarette.

In the middle of the bar, in broad daylight.

I was there on the edge of my seat waiting for a barman to come flying across the table with an extinguisher, putting out the fag but igniting the flames of passion in said smoker, but no. It went by without a mention.

As I said at the start, tut-tut.

As licence fee payers, I don't think we should take any excuses.

Okay, so programmes are filmed months and months in advance because they need to be edited (and if the BBC's editing software is anything like the one we use for our videos here at the Adver, I can understand why it takes so long).

But even if that were the case, the smoking ban has been in force since July 1, 2007. It's now the end of March 2008. That's months and months.

They can't even wriggle their way out of this smoky black hole by saying it was filmed before July last year - because we knew months and months before that that the ban was coming in.

People moaned and whinged enough about it - and they still are.

So I think the BBC needs a good old slap across the wrists and sending to bed without any supper.

That will teach them.

I would have put this all in a letter to Points Of View - but I was worried they would just have given me a funny voice.

JOKE OF THE WEEK: TWO men were standing on a cliff with their arms outstretched.

One has some budgies lined up on each arm, the other has parrots lined up on his arms.

After a couple of minutes, they both leap off the cliff and fall to the ground.

Lying next to each other in intensive care at the hospital, one turns to the other and says: "I don't think much of this budgie jumping."

The other man replies, "Yeah, I'm not too keen on this parrotgliding either."

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