Smash the orange
Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, said the government’s Brexit plans could ‘fall apart like a chocolate orange’. But the point of a chocolate orange is that it doesn’t fall apart easily at all. Launched by Terry’s of York in 1932, many of its TV adverts have emphasised this theme:
1978 ‘Tap it and unwrap it’ — yokel shown tapping it lightly against tree trunk.
1998 ‘Whack and unwrap’ — man shown thumping it against a wall.
2010 ‘Smash it to pieces, love it to bits’ — several people struggle to break the orange, including a secretary with a phone and man who whacks it on a glass coffee table, breaking the table.
Porn-watching
The government said porn sites must introduce credit card-based age verification systems to guard against access by children. How many people look at porn online?
— A 2016 NSPCC report said 65 per cent of 15- to 16-year-olds and 48 per cent of 11- to 16-year-olds had accessed it in the UK. In the younger group 19 per cent admitted searching for it; the rest said they had stumbled upon it accidentally.
— A 2015 survey for a women’s magazine found that 90 per cent of women had watched porn, 31 per cent every week.
— A 2009 study to compare attitudes of young Montreal men who regularly watched porn with those who did not was abandoned after the latter group could not be found.
— A 2013 study by an Israeli company found that 8.5 per cent of all web-page clicks are on porn sites.
Byng on target
A study by Michael Byng, who devised Network Rail’s system for estimating the costs of HS2, said the total could rise to £104 billion. How have official estimates of the first London to Birmingham phase, and of the whole project, changed?
| Phase 1 / Whole project | |
| 2011 | £16 bn / £32.7 |
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