Indoctrinated into a very specific Weltanschauung

Coping effectively with life's problems and failures requires realistic expectations. Psychologists call these expectations and judgements 'appraisals'. Life events (such as traffic bottlenecks or the boss's gruff voice) aren't a problem unless we appraise them as such. Life is never perfect and, to some degree, hassles and problems are a part of normal everyday life. If our appraisals are realistic, we're better able to react to day-to-day life events with a sense of proportion.

BBC Health article entitled Coping Skills

From cradle to grave – starting with the Kim-Jong-Il-Jr-style brainwashing offered by CBBC, moving on to oh-so-hip-Daddy-O pop broadcaster Radio 1, through classical Radio 3 to fuddy-duddily left-liberal Radio 4, not forgetting the achingly worthy and progressive TV channels BBC1, BBC2, BBC3 and BBC4 – the audience for Britain’s dominant national broadcaster is indoctrinated into a very specific Weltanschauung.

That Weltanschauung, you won’t be surprised to hear, does not find much room for concepts like limited government, low taxation, liberty, political sovereignty and accountability. It is extremely unlikely that a Tea Party movement could ever take off in Britain: the main reason being that, unlike in the US, the British simply lack the political vocabulary and intellectual building blocks to demand one.

From a James Delingpole piece entitled The BBC Is at Least a Thousand Times More Evil and Dangerous than Rupert Murdoch

That's right, at least a thousand times more evil. Just like that Kim-Jong-Il-Jr. With all that information about an overarching conspiracy that's a thousand times worse than anything the Murdochs and their underlings ever got up to, James Delingpole should really be following the example of James Murdoch and presenting his evidence to a select committee. That should be a hoot:

Adrian Sanders: Finally, are you familiar with the term "a sense of proportion?"

[Pause]

James Delingpole: Mr. Sanders, would you care to elaborate?

Or, as the Flying Rodent put it:

Children's BBC!  Truly, when you're reduced to arguing with Rastamouse, you've long since lost.

Marvellous stuff. Although, in the interests of strict accuracy, I ought to point out that Rastamouse goes out on CBeebies, (the channel for kids aged 6 and under), not CBBC [insert boilerplate apology for not getting out much here].

Funny how Children's BBC is such a magnet for angry wingnuts. Personally I think CBeebies is quite good; we're happy for our kid to spend most of his telly time watching it, as the programmes are generally quite educational and well-made (if occasionally a bit irritating and/or goody-goody) and the channel scores big time from a parental point of view by not being peppered with adverts aimed at unlocking the potential of pester power. But for some people Children's BBC is apparently the nexus of a sinister cult to corrupt the innocent.

There's a programme on CBeebies called Waybuloo (it's apparently been cut from the schedules until later this year, to the anguish of some young fans and their parents). It's aimed at the younger element of the under 6 demographic and involves four brightly coloured characters who live in a benign never-never land and talk a kind of baby language (any resemblance to Teletubbies is purely coincidental). The characters are nice to one another, play with small children, do a sort of yoga, are rendered in impressively seamless CGI and float around in the air when they're really happy. The programme is inoffensive, maybe a little wet in a Christopher Robin-ish kind of way, a bit dull and repetitive if you're 40-something, but pretty wholesome and entirely appropriate viewing for toddlers, I'd have thought.

Apparently, though, Waybuloo caused something of a panic among evangelical Christian parents, concerned that the series was undermining 'wholesome Christian values' by incorporating that suspiciously oriental yoga-like thing and implying that happiness might be attained without explicit reference to the only source of true joy that can be achieved in this life, Our Lord Jesus Christ.

I would refer these people (and James Delingpole) to the BBC article on coping skills, in particular the bit about how keeping a sense of proportion is good for your mental health, but they'd only accuse me of being a conduit for more outrageous BBC propaganda.

Bonus neologism of the day: guanophenia.