I'm a rat, get me out of here

'Gino and the Rat' sounds like a good title for an age 4-8 story book, but followers of celeb events in the UK will realize immediately that we are dealing instead with an incident important enough to make it onto the main news bulletins. Rumour started spreading yesterday that TV chef and winner of I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here Gino d'Acampo was in jail for the terrible crime of killing a rat. Immediately the political correctness hackles rose. After all, rats are vermin. Killing a rat is our right - and in his case he killed it to eat it, so it's doubly okay.

When the initial panic settled down it turned out that the effervescent Gino was not in jail at all, but on his way back home to the UK. However the Australian authorities were considering charges. Still enough to get those hackles up? I'm not sure. In fact, once you look beyond the over-reaction, it's a good spotlight to throw on the nature of reality TV shows.

On the one hand, what d'Acampo did doesn't seem particularly bad. After all, I'm sure those same Australian authorities merrily poison rats, as a result of which they die a much more horrible death than the rat that became supper in camp. But when we defend the TV company (and it's the TV company that's at fault, not d'Acampo) we are falling for an illusion. The illusion that these people are out in the wild, dealing with the wild animals they face.

Instead what we're talking about is a bunch of celebrities on a TV set. Okay, it's an open TV set, but it's not the wild. Specifically, the encounter with the rat took place when a group of celebrities had been sent to an intentionally down market second camp. And the chances are high that the rat was there because the TV company put it there. So rather than a chance encounter with wild game, what we have is a TV set to which an animal (quite possibly bred in captivity) has been introduced for a celebrity to kill. Suddenly it doesn't sound right.

I'm not a rabid animal rights person. I'm a meat eater, and I accept what that implies. But in a civilized society I expect people not to hurt animals for entertainment. There's rather too much of this on the programme. It started with horses, clearly distressed, being forced to swim across a river with people on their backs. It continues with a whole range of 'jungle critters' from bugs and spiders to rats and eels being trampled on, kicked, rolled on and generally damaged in the 'bush tucker trials'. The rat incident just brings it to a head.

Fine, let your celebrities abuse themselves for entertainment - but there's no need to make other living things suffer in the process. I have nothing against people killing rabbits, pigeons or rats to eat them. But there's a difference between going out in the countryside with a shotgun and stabbing a rat that has been dropped onto a film set by the crew.

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense

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