Anyone would think there's a General Election on the way.

[sensaes]

Aiming for the Nethead vote, Gordon Brown proves for the umpteenth time that he really doesn't "get" what the Web's about, and threatens to turn Great Britain into a half-arsed steampunk/Terry Gilliam's Brazil-style version of China...or something:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8579333.stm (contains embedded scary video).

Once you get past his description of high-speed Web access as "the electricity of the digital age" (I'm not making this up - it's like that scene from Time After Time with Malcolm McDowell as H.G.Wells trying to order a Big Mac), there's some guff about a proposed £30m "Institute of Web Science", headed-up by Tim Berners-Lee (who should really know better than to get conned into jumping aboard the sinking Labour Party ship at this late hour). Honestly, with the annual £6 broadband tax still in place, and a Bill going through the House to initially castigate and then switch off downloaders, this seems to be a government with something of a bi-polar disorder where the Internet's concerned.

Edit 1: Here's Rory's take on it, complete with (presumably unintentional) one-eyed puns...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010/03/browns_digital_vision.html

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Meanwhile, the prospect of that updated Sherlock Holmes TV vehicle (previously covered here - hit the "Doyle" tag) doesn't sound any healthier now that the mainstream media is being inundated with BBC puff packs all about it:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2010/mar/21/sherlock-holmes-modern-london

http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/comingup/sherlock/

Gah.

Edit 2: Let's play "Spot the plot hook from White Collar"...

http://www.tgdaily.com/general-sciences-features/49011-atomic-bomb-tests-help-root-out-fake-wines