Bicycles on Nugent Hill. Again.

One day in the week, our drive up Nugent Hill was interrupted by this woman pushing a bicycle with a small child on it up the road.

Madam, if you are going to push the bike up a hill, could you make it Ninetree Hill, which, having already been closed to cars, is not disrupted by a cyclist walking up it.

Later on in the week, something worse. The entire road closed while officials -in hi-viz- make some film shoot which apparently required no adults in the shot, and cars blocked from this road while these teenagers pretended to play.

Such media coverage will only reinforce the myth that teenagers should ride bicycles and roads are a safe place for them to do it. It is a an affront for our TV licensing tax to be frittered away on pro-cycling propaganda!

Still, if there is one thing that takes the edge of this offence, it's the Copenhagen Cycle Chic people complaining their roads were taken away for car adverts.  That evens things out.

The source of all evil

There are two 9pm+ TV series filmed in Bristol running right now, Mistresses and Being Human.

Mistresses is set in Clifton and Redland; Papadelli's delicatessen pops up regularly, and the program focuses on the day-to-day problems of residents of this part of the city, namely who is going to jump in bed with whom while their respective spouses aren't looking. Except. It's just not realistic is it? You don't just drive round on a weekday afternoon for a bit of awayday fun with at at-home wife while their husband is out at work. Not in Clifton, not unless foreplay consists of 15 minutes driving round in circles looking for somewhere to park followed by 10 minutes of complaining about the traffic on the way there. The only way they'd be able to do it would be if the wife's house had a driveway, and she pulled her car out the previous evening or before 0700 -but she'd be left explaining to her husband why she's doing that. No, not realistic. Now, if they cycled round to their liasons, it would be a cycling-city showcase program. And a good use of showers.

Being Human is much better. It is funded by the South Bristol Marketing Board, an organisation sponsored by two estate agents, a gastropub, and some of the warehouse-sized shops in Bristlington. The purpose of the SBMB is to remind people that some of the more interesting parts of the city are south of the river and people are usually friendlier to their neighbours, even when they are in fact vampires, ghosts or werewolves. In the series, the characters all live in Totterdown, not far from the Shakespeare pub.

As part of the plot -approved by the South Bristol Marketing Board-, the enemy is a group of vampires based in a building. The building is in Alma Vale Road, Clifton, a road most well known for the Alma Tavern, a pub with a theatre attached, and just round the corner from Papadelli's, the delicatessen in mistresses where some of the characters work.

In the program, the building appears to be a funeral parlour, but in reality is something else

It is a closed down car showroom.

As far as Being Human is concerned then, the enemy of humanity are car dealers. Hmmm.