The Captain's Blog ™

OK, so there’s an election just around the corner, a continuing aura of uncertainty engulfing the UK economy and countless other important things that I could and should be thinking about and doing.

Which is why I’ve been browsing entertainment news online. I’m sure you’ll agree that entertainment news can usually be relied upon to deliver trivial, banal and entirely unimportant news. It offers a kind of mental “time out”, providing a temporary distraction from whatever you should really be doing.

As certain previous posts will confirm, I get quite annoyed by shoddy reporting - especially when the publishers at fault are relied upon by consumers as authoritative sources.

So there I was, distracting myself with mindless trivia, when I was suddenly confronted by incontrovertible proof that we now apparently can’t even rely on the BBC to be able to count!

The article in question reported how Ricky Gervais had turned down a six figure sum to perform for a bank in Hong Kong, the sum in question being £1m.

Hang on – let’s check that together, shall we? £1,000,000 is made up of a one, followed by a zero, another zero, another zero, another zero, another zero, then a final zero. That’s, wait, yes, SEVEN figures!

The BBC can't count

The offending page has since been corrected. This must have come as an especially welcome relief to schoolchildren, who were surely banging their heads against walls in frustration at the BBC’s idiocy and wondering whether they could ever believe Newsround or Blue Peter again.