Bank Cock Up

Sometimes I wonder with banks, whether one hand knows what the other is doing. Earlier this week, my mother bought something on ebay. When she tried to pay for it, through paypal, she found that she couldn’t. She tried with my dad’s account, then mine and my best friend’s. All were refused. Turned out that they had taken it upon themselves to decide that it was fraudulent, and block all four cards! It wasn’t until over twenty four hours later, when my card was refused as I was paying for petrol, that I found out they’d blocked it.

Now, I understand safeguards, but to block someone’s card for making an ebay purchase, and then not tell them about it, I think is ridiculous and irresponsible. It was only after forty minutes on the phone that I was able to resolve this. It made me ask whether this would happen every time I made an online purchase for a larger sum of money. It made me question my banking choice. How dare someone decide that a purchase of mine was fraudulent, without even informing me.

While I appreciate vigilance, this purchase was not for a huge sum of money, and was to be shipped to the same address as the account. Surely it wasn’t likely to be that much of a fraud risk when considering this.

A First Review

I thought I’d try and change up this blog a little and scatter some reviews of books, tv, movies, music etc throughout the entries. Starting Now!

 

Last week, I had the displeasure of watching a two part BBC drama called ‘Dive’, directed by Dominic Savage. Described as a contemporary love story about two teens growing up in modern day Britain, this show starts out with a girl, Lindsay going to train at the pool, with a view to joining the 2012 olympic team. On returning home, she discovers that her parent’s marriage is over, and not only has her dad moved out, but her mother has moved her new boyfriend in on the same day! Thus starts a sequence of events whereby Lindsay goes off the rails, ends up partying and having sex with one of the popular boys, Robert. Conveniently, another girl in the popular crowd does not like this and slashes Lindsay with a blade, thus leading Lindsay to the emergency room where she is suddenly changed from a closed down, sullen teen who barely says two words, to a more talkative person who tells the nurse that she has been bleeding and that she thinks she might be pregnant. Cut to the olympic team selection meet, where Lindsay finds out that she has made the team. Robert, in the meantime has said that he doesn’t do relationships, but makes a sudden turnaround when he finds out that she is pregnant. A tentative friendship and sexual relationship develops, with Robert then attending the first scan with Lindsay. The second part of the drama follows Robert as he tries to decide whether to be there for Lindsay or not. This scenario is complicated by Robert’s brother who appears to be clinically depresses, having returned from Iraq.

The storyline is patchy, with very little continuity, with the writer having tried to pack far too much into the two hours allocated the show. The ‘brother returning from Iraq’ storyline is a show all of it’s own, and serves little than to take time away from the main storyline.

The characters are poorly developed, with Lindsay’s character saying very few words. In fact, it is to Aisling Loftus’ credit that she was able to say so much while not actually speaking at all. Both characters seem to have moments of being one thing and then seem to immediately switch to something entirely different, which leads me to believe that the writer was writing a plot, and the characters were just a coincidence of trying to achieve the plot objective.

The only saving grace this drama has is the acting skill of the two main characters, which endear them to the audience. Without this I fear many people would have just tuned out.

British Tv

British Tv at the moment is a dead loss. We have become like all  other consumer markets in this country. There are no longer any more really good, regular British dramas. We instead buy American shows to put on Tv.. Now, I’m not opposed to American shows, they’re great, but Britain has always had a strong showing of dramas on TV, and since the credit crunch, our TV has become a mass of documentaries and reality shows, and while I like these (mostly), I don’t think that British TV should be limited to this just because they think it’s cheap tv. We should push for more dramas on our screens. There are so many brilliant actors and writers out there just waiting for a chance. Perhaps we should start taking some risks, and put something other than the usual things on TV.