TV Related Musing
I was watching "The Route Masters", the Beeb's new fly-on-the-wall documentary about Transport for London, the other night.
One of the undoubted stars of the show was the Gurkha-turned-road-mender, who trotted around with his mate, cheerfully filling potholes and carrying stranded pedestrians through flooded tunnels, whilst commenting that he liked working in London because it was "better than the back streets of Kathmandu", and who happily observed that the UK was "the best place in the world" to bring up his children.
I can't help thinking he must have got certain sections of the press, not to mention parts of the political scene, very confused. Is he a "hero" (standard Tabloidese for anyone who either is serving or ever has served in the armed forces), or an economic migrant flooding into the UK to steal British jobs?
(Edit: amusingly, the Daily Mail seemed to go for the former option: "...possibly the best Prime Minister this country will never have..", gushed its reviewer, in a not at all hypocritical display from the paper that usually loves immigrants so much.)