Pete Cashmore: The Harborne Ultimatum

Petitions. Since the dawning of the internet age, online petitions have become so commonplace that they're not worth the paper they are no longer printed on. When it's so easy to draw up a petition on any given subject and whack it up online, the very act becomes meaningless, and the end product all too easy to ignore. This week's marquee petition (is that even a thing? It is now) is trying to browbeat the BBC into going back on its plans to trim 11,000 recipes from its website. Honestly, they serve up The Great British Sewing Bee as an acceptable allocation of licence fee funds, employ Paloma Faith as a talent show judge and talk about bringing back The Vicar Of Dibley, and THIS is what earns the angry petition?

There's one online petition that you could actually readily persuade me to sign, and it would be one calling for a cap on online petitions. Say, a maximum of five a year. That one, I'm happy to put my John Hancock on.

The recipe one does baffle me, I have to say, since it's not like you can't find alternatives to the ones that the BBC are talking about deleting on what technology experts call 'the entire rest of the internet'. Also, I'm pretty sure if you lumped every BBC cookery show doing the rounds, every Bake Off, Creme De La Creme, Saturday Kitchen – which has just lost tis host James Martin, Hairy Bikers and their innumerable spin-offs, together, you'd be getting in the region of 11,000 new recipe ideas every single week of telly.

Anyway, enough bashing of the BBC, they're having a bad enough week as it is, and besides, it's much too easy. I had a day off this week (I say it was a day off, I was invited not to come in after being caught trying to break into the office snack machine with a crowbar) and so spent a productive day watching daytime telly. And I think I have discovered on Channel 4, for whom I normally have the greatest respect, possibly the worst TV show in all Christendom. It's called Shipping Wars and it is, in a nutshell, based around a lorry driver competing in delivery challenges. That's it. That's the show. A trucking contest, ladies and gentlemen. What next? Paper Round Challenge? Britain's Fastest Milkman? Actually, to be fair, I would definitely watch that last one.

Another thing I saw during my day off was an advert for an album release on which the adult Aled Jones performs duets with old recordings of his pre-pubescent self. Am I alone in finding that really unnerving? And how weird must it have been for him?

Even so, in a similar vein, I thought it might be fun to make this column a mixture of my current writing, and some of the poems about dinosaurs that I was writing when I was eight years old – my mother insists on keeping them, you see, and reading them out to my potential girlfriends. The experiment didn't work as planned, though, as the stuff I was writing when I was in primary school was just far superior.

From small screen to big. The West Midlands seems to have suddenly become a go-to location for film-makers, with the sequel to the action hit Kingsman currently being shot in Birmingham, not long after the post-apocalyptic epic The Girl With All The Gifts. This got the sharp minds of the E&S team thinking of blockbuster films given a Midlands twist – The Lunt For Red October, for example. The winner so far is Newsdesk Leigh with his 'The Harborne Ultimatum' – I now throw the floor open to you, my devoted reader(s), to try and do better. Winner gets the greatest prize of all – my eternal love and respect.