Champagne corks were popping in the Radio 4 studios, Hampstead, Islington and Notting Hill as Radio 4 broke the all time record for smugness with their middle class Environmentalist radio play “Getting to Zero”. The lecture, which was erroneously billed as a comedy on a BBC web site, was a fictional account of a regular family trying to reduce their carbon emissions to zero in three weeks, while having every aspect of their lives controlled with obvious relish by a panel of real life environmental gurus and wannabe dictators led by George Monbiot.
High points of the broadcast were the panel’s decision that freezers, TV, Computers and Video games were bad and should be banned in favor of reading books, home cooking, and knitting your own hairshirt, a declaration that saw smugness leaking out of every radio in the land. Electric cars and bikes however were sanctified as good though because they are powered by a special electricity Pixie, presumably one who must make a different sort of carbon and nuclear free electricity, perhaps using the sleepy dust from children’s eyes. This Green electricity was then directed to the family house down a special superconducting wire so that it didn’t touch any nasty yucky chavvy electricity.
Possibly the best gag in the lecture was when the panel decided that the father of the family had too large a daily commute at 40 miles in total. In a vague stab at economics, unparalleled since George W Bush or Leonard Brezhnev, they decided that he should “Give up work”. One panel member did attempt to stick up for the poor commuter until the other chattering class environmentalist gravy trainers beat him back with the argument “But you can choose where you work”.
In response, Jeremy Clarkson has bought part of an oil field in Iraq, which he intends to set fire to, while a facebook campaign is organizing people to gather up as many old tires as they can at a certain location in North London so that they can be burned in a conflagration that will see the skies turn black for weeks.
George Monbiot was unavailable for comment, as he had just flown off to somewhere on the other side of the planet for a conference on sustainable travel.
