Televisual headaches!

Elections are coming up in the UK in May and so there is a lot of talk on TV about the format of a televised debate between party leaders. I was amazed to hear someone on the radio talking about our "traditional" televised debate. "Traditional revised debate"? When did that become a tradition? I thought there had only ever been one. Clearly it doesn't take much to create a tradition these days. 

Anyway, David Cameron is being accused of cowardice for refusing to have a one-to-one debate with Miliband. He prefers a debate involving all parties at once. That sounds ok to me, except that if UKIP is going to involved then so should the Greens and so on. But I don't want to get started on UKIP. It'll give me a headache and a pain in the neck. 

Which brings me to Nurofen, the painkiller people. In Australia, so I have read, they are taking the producers to task because they market Nurofen Back Pain, Nurofen Period Pain, Nurofen Migraine Pain and Nurofen Tension Headache. The problem is that people think these are different products but in fact they are all the same. Shock! Horror! Maybe if we ask them nicely, they will produce a Nurofen Party Political Broadcast Debate Pain! 

Or perhaps it's too complicated. Someone called Brian Millar was explaining in he newspaper that if things are designed to be easy we stop thinking. Thinking is good for us. Who knew? 

He wrote: "We live in a world where almost everything is designed to be simple. When I work with designers, I often come across a kind of religious belief summed up in the mantra: don’t make me think. Slick web design keeps us in a kind of unthinking trance, where we buy things on Amazon or post photos on Facebook without ever having to stop and consider what we’re doing. While this is great for retailers, it’s also good for fraudsters. Phishing scams rely on our trance-like state: please reset your password. Follow this link. Enter your password. Thank you. Click, click, click, oops. 

Something similar has happened to driving. It’s possible to hurtle down a road at 50 miles an hour without thinking at all – until it’s too late. One of the most successful safety design campaigns of recent years aimed to tackle this. The shared space movement puts ambiguity back into road use, for pedestrians and drivers alike. In South Kensington, all street furniture and crossings have been removed and replaced with ambiguous regions where it isn’t clear who has right of way. Drivers and pedestrians snap out of their trances, cars slow down and the accident rate has fallen by 43%." 

I don't know about making everything complicated. Personally I like my camera, my iPad, my washing machine and other such appliances to be as simple as possible. Our television is immensely complicated and no amount of

 thinking about it stops me needing Nurofen Electrical Appliance Headache painkiller. However, I am all in favour of anything that will make our roads safer!