Wings Over Scotland

It happens at 2m 30s, if you're in a hurry.

Seriously, all those millions in development, all the hundreds of pounds people have spent buying the PS4 and the VR headset and the game and the upgrade – how hard could it be to have it detect when you'd gone seriously off track and have the navigator go "ARGH! SHIT! OW! BLOODY HELL, GET BACK ON THE ROAD YOU MORON!", so as to not completely ruin the whole thing?

How dull-witted do you have to be, how far have you missed the point by, to obsess over every last wheelnut in the name of "realism" and then sit the player beside a virtually-real companion who keeps calmly reading out directions even as the car he's in plummets down a mountainside on its roof? For God's sake.

I despair, I really do.

This is Spectator columnist Alex Massie reacting earlier this week to the news of Alex Salmond doing a show for Russian news channel RT.

Alex Salmond is these days a private individual with no responsibilities to anyone, and RT is a legal, Ofcom-licenced UK broadcaster whose output is beamed free into every home in the land.

The first episode of The Alex Salmond Show featured guests from both Labour and the Tories, opened with lengthy discussion and advocation of women’s and LGBT rights, followed by a 15-minute interview with deposed Catalan president Carles Puigdemont – something which has proven beyond the capabilities of mainstream UK news outlets despite the remarkable events currently engulfing an EU member state.

(BBC Scotland, we should perhaps note at this point, does not currently carry a single dedicated political TV show from a Scottish perspective at all and hasn’t done for more than a year.)

Massie used some slightly more measured language when it came to writing about the show in the Spectator, merely describing Salmond as an “idiot”, a “fool”, a “chump”, “pitiful”, “embarrassing” and “disgraceful”. But when it came to another former Scottish party leader, he was for some reason in a rather more forgiving mood.

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We’ll be honest, readers – if this doesn’t make you want to leave the UK all by itself, it may be that there’s nothing that ever will and we should just give up.

(Alternative titles considered for this piece included Live And Please Let Die, Doctor Oh God No, The Barely-Living Daylights and Quantum Of Bollocks.)

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This documentary starts a little slowly, but becomes an eye-opening case study of how Labour steamrollered through crippling PFI contracts to build public infrastructure on the never-never when they ran the Scottish Executive from 1999-2007.

We highly recommend giving it a watch.

Since David Torrance shows no sign of being willing to retract the falsehood below that he tweeted earlier today despite our requests, we’ll have to address it here. Apologies for the indulgence.

We can find nowhere that we made any allegation of Torrance being “paid” by RT. We tweeted that he’d “worked for” them, and said he’d “simply appeared on” the channel. Neither of those statements claims that any money changed hands. If Torrance says that he worked for RT for nothing purely in order to get some free publicity for his book, we’re happy to accept that at face value.

(Although we’re not sure if that makes it better or worse, to be honest.)

But that’s not really the point of all the outrage over “The Alex Salmond Show”, is it?

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Yesterday’s Daily Record (which would increasingly be an accurate three-word name for the paper) ran an innocuous piece of page-filler fluff rubbish, and for once we’re not talking about a David Torrance column.

It featured the “psychic” predictions of a man who, the Record told us – no fewer than FIVE times in the opening few lines – previously predicted Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, and who had a track record of “incredible accuracy”.

Sounds pretty spooky. Maybe he’s got the gift.

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Mainstream and social media alike are now well into their second day of an absolutely epic meltdown at the news that Alex Salmond is to broadcast a chat show on RT, the Russian equivalent of the BBC.

It really is almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of the shrieking fit the decision has produced. Addled old Lords with criminal convictions for violently and drunkenly assaulting Her Majesty’s police have with an audacious lack of self-awareness decried the immorality of one of HM’s advisors going on TV to talk about stuff, and one Lib Dem MSP has even gone so far as to raise a Holyrood motion demanding that the state interferes with the lawful employment choices of a private citizen.

We imagine that RT will be beside itself with joy at the avalanche of publicity the UK press and political sphere is giving it. We’d be amazed if the hysterical brouhaha didn’t double or treble the audience figures that Salmond could otherwise have expected.

It’s just that it’s all a little, well, sudden.

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Today’s Cairnstoon will be along a little later. But in the meantime, if you’re anywhere in the vicinity of Glasgow (or if you’re not, but hurry), today offers a rare opportunity go along and physically touch the magical drawing fingers of the artist himself, as Mr Cairns takes time out from his busy schedule of holidays to launch the second volume of his splendid sketchings, alongside other beloved Wings contributors Greg Moodie and the esteemed Wee Ginger Dug (plus his human butler Paul Kavanagh).

(Please note that Mr Cairns is currently carrying a rather painful spinal injury probably incurred during an an overenthusiastic golf swing, so we respectfully ask any readers who may be planning particularly expressive bearhugs or backslaps to ca’ canny.)

Series 3, #1.

No, it’s not her.

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Wings Over Scotland turned six years old this week (on Tuesday, to be precise). We didn’t make any fuss or hoopla because we didn’t have anything particularly interesting to say about it, although we may as well note in passing that average monthly unique readership for 2017 to date has been 316,015 – that’s 24,000 up on the same period in 2016 and 16,000 higher than January-October 2015, despite this being the dullest year in Scottish politics since the site began.

(We did enjoy the replies to this nice tweet.)

But it’s just been brought to our attention that on our birthday the Scottish Government happened to publish its response to an FOI request from a notoriously mad and creepy Yoon troll who’s been repeatedly banned by Twitter but keeps coming back with new accounts. We thought you’d be modestly amused by it, because the Yoons are raging.

It’s been a difficult few months for a variety of reasons (although some of the technical aspects of that should improve in about a week’s time), but we’ll keep on keeping on.