Some people clearly don't have enough to complain about!

Edited Highlights:

THE outlook appeared cloudy for the BBC yesterday as it rode into a storm of complaints about its new graphics-charged weather bulletins. Long-familiar sun and rain symbols disappeared, replaced by computer-generated animations of the elements in a £1 million revolution that the corporation said would provide a much clearer picture but succeeded only in annoying viewers.

“My daughter, who is 8, watched the weather with me this morning and she asked what was wrong with the TV?” began one complaint, typical of hundreds on the BBC website. All that “zooming” under the clouds, which the BBC is particularly proud of, induced “mild motion sickness”, said another.

“Puddles and grey smudges on a brown map are very confusing,” Emma Brady wrote. Others complained that the new three-dimensional representation of Britain was out of proportion, discriminating against Scotland and the North. Owen Smith wrote: “The oblique view of the country massively distorts the overall picture. Are people in the North going to be offered a reduction in their licence fee for this poorer service?

“Do we really want a generation of children growing up with an incorrect idea of the shape of the UK and sizes of different parts of the country?”