As we go to press at the beginning of the last quarter of February, the phoney spring is over. Mid-January to mid-February was the warmest it's been since 1659 (which is when records began), foxing unwary plants into flowering prematurely, to give the frost something to kill. My feelings about the weather are not put into any kind of perspective by the stoicism of Mark Blumberg, a psychologist at the University of Iowa, who says in his new book, Body Heat: Temperature and Life on Earth (due from Harvard in May), that 'Pluto is cold; Chicago in January is merely inconvenient.' For those of us still languishing in the dark ages of terrestrial analogue TV, the gloom is deepened by the fog that currently envelops BBC2's schedules: the Winter Olympics. The last three episodes of season five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer have been postponed until the fog disperses. Buffy is routinely displaced by what passes for sport on the BBC these days: now it's the Olympics, which even the Duke of Edinburgh has given up pretending to be interested in; in the autumn it was the snooker. On Sky, by contrast, not only is there plenty of proper sport, but Buffy season six is well under uninterrupted way, as is the nth season of The Simpsons, the other best thing on TV, which BBC2 has just lost to Channel 4. (It should not go unremarked that Buffy and The Simpsons are both owned by Twentieth Century Fox; Fox, like Sky, is a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Channel 4 is said to have paid £15 million per series - £700,000 per episode - in the Simpsons deal. Murdoch's British enterprises continue to enjoy generous tax breaks.)

LRB 7 March 2002 | PDF Download