Puffbox

Delighted to see BBC economics editor Evan Davis entering the world of blogging. I’ve long admired his unique down-to-earth approach to what can be an infuriating subject, and he’s already bringing a similar tone to his blog activity. You won’t find Anatole Kaletsky writing something like this:

Does the world really need a new economics blog? Well: no but yeah but yeah but no, as Vicky Pollard would undoubtedly write if she had a blog of her own. For one thing, Evanomics is not quite a blog. I’m not intending to make entries every day, or to update you with my views on every twist and turn in the financial pages. But Evanomics is designed to have some blog-like characteristics. A place where you’ll find a variety of material, frequently updated, and with plenty of opportunity to comment or contribute.

In fact, Evan was the subject of some conversation last night, as my wife and I polished off a bottle of Stormhoek rosé, whilst watching the first episode of the new series of Dragon’s Den. The previous series had become far too predictable, with only the final candidate in each episode getting a deal. (We used to base our guesses purely on ‘how long is left in the show?’)

But even more annoying, Evan was probably the worst exponent of the growing ‘tell them what they’ve just seen’ phenomenon which is gradually doing my head in. You see it a lot on ITV and Channel4: coming out of an ad-break, they’ll remind you (in some detail) what happened barely three minutes earlier, as if we’d forgotten. But Dragon’s Den was always worse. Barely a second after seeing a man make a pitch for £100k to expand his widgets business, Evan’s voiceover would tell you that he was asking for £100k to… etc etc.

To our considerable relief, both problems seem to have been largely cured. Still some repetition, although nowhere near as bad as before. And, without wanting to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it… somebody in the early part of the show strikes a deal. That really only left us discussing how skinny Evan was looking.

(Thanks to Simon Collister for the tipoff.)