David's Daily Digital Dollop: Dollop 179 – Saved By The cake

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For the last few months, BBC radio 5 Live have been solidly covering the EU referendum, and they’ve been playing out the same trail for ages. It’s a ridiculous trail, as it chooses a couple of clips which don’t at all back up the whole message of the trail, which is around the tag line, “making sense of the EU referendum.” But no one at 5 Live seemed to notice, and just kept playing it relentlessly.

The music starts, and a Voice Over man says, “BBC 5 Live, making sense of the EU referendum.” There is then a few clips of people talking. One of them is a 5 Live presenter, who says, “now, we’ve heard from our panel of experts, let’s hear from some politicians.” I don’t think the presenter said this deliberately or with any sesne of sarcasm, in order to bash the politicians, suggesting that they are ignorant and unintelligent, but surely the people putting the trail together must have realised that this is how it sounded. I suppose, with the benefit of hinesight though, it is a rather fitting line.

The other clip in the trail, is a man saying something like, “the trouble with this referendum is that no one is giving us any definite answers. And that’s what we need. We want to hear people giving us definite answers about what might happen if we stay or go.” This clip makes no sense at all, and is a complete oxymoron – “definite answers about what might happen?” yet it’s been 5 Live’s chosen clip to wheel out every hour for the last few weeks. And then, just to top the whole ridiculous trail off nicely, the Voice Over man comes back to repeat the line, “BBC 5 Live, making sense of the EU referendum.” Hour after hour, day after day, this trail was played, and no one seemed to have realised how ridiculous it sounds.

The Leave campaign have been telling us not to listen to advice and not to heed the doom mongers when making our decision. And now that the decision has been made, you might be worried about the falling value of the pound and our trading. But there is something that people are overlooking, and even Boris, presumably with the chaos of everything, has yet to placate the British public by reminding us of this all important fact: we have cake!

Boris, in his campaigning, has explained to us on more than one occasion that we will still be a valuable exporter to other countries, even if we leave, because we have something that the rest of the Europe wants. We may have lost our iron and steal trade, and people complain that we don’t make things any more, but that is ridiculous, because we make cake.

“We export cake in growing quantities of a particular dense and glutinous chocolate cake,” declared Boris, coming across particularly dense himself. “We export from Walthamstow to France.” And then, just in case there were still any undecided people who weren’t completely reassured by this statement, he added, “they love our cake in France.” And the fears were allayed. They don’t just like our cake, they love it. If the French were merely partial to our cake, then it might be a tad risky to leave the EU. But Boris clearly said that the French love our cake, and so we can rest assured that they won’t be enforcing any trade tariffs on us, lest the French people should revolt.

“Monsieur président, the people are revolting.”

“Let them eat cake.”

“That’s kind of the problem. They are demanding we import the British cake.”

“What’s wrong with our French cake?”

“Well, it’s just not dense and glutinous enough Monsieur président.” We’ve got our most estemed scientists and chefs on the job to try and recreate the amazing British cake formula, but they’re having no luck at all. It’s either too dense and not glutinous enough, or too glutinous and not dense enough, or too dense and too glutinous, or neither dense or glutinous enough. But we just can’t understand how the British have managed to achieve this ineffably perfect dense and glutinous combination.”

“Well, I suppose we don’t have a choice. Lift all trade sanctions. Damn the British and their culinary genius.”

Now you might be thinking that the French surely could in actuality easily make their own particularly dense and glutinous chocolate cake? There is clearly a gap in the market for locally sourced chocolate cake, yet the stupid French won’t cotton onto this gap in the market, because as President Bush sagely pointed out, The trouble is that the French don’t have a word for entrepreneur, Hang on, was that President Bush who said that or was it Stephen Fry? Hmm.

It is drawing close to midnight, and I’m falling asleep at the computer, so I better end this Dollop here and quickly send it, before I fall asleep and miss today’s Dollop deadline. Thanks for reading.