The Alternative Angler – Nip and Tuck

Never mind smelling the flowers, don’t forget to take time out to see the satirical side of fishing life and grab a laugh along the way as well. So here’s a regular column from Kevin Perkins to remind us that life is for laughing at, or taking the p*** out of, whenever we can.

Alternative Nip and Tuck

No, being able to respond immediately to fluctuating trends is just one of FM’s fortes, and to that end we start with the home page. First up we have a monthly competition vaguely based on a popular TV programme, and will be called ‘Rig Brother’. The basic concept is that six lucky members are apparently chosen at random, (but they will conform to tried and tested stereotypes), with a chance for them all to be voted off by the remainder of the FM members until a winner emerges.

The money generated by the premium rate voting phone lines will be handed over to the winner, minus commission and expenses deducted by the scrutineer, a certain Mr G Marsden, who has guaranteed a prize pot of at least £ 1.50 every month, no matter what.

The very same Mr Marsden has kindly agreed to act as ‘The Banker’ in another regular spot on FM, to be called Reel or No Deal. Sixteen members are invited to put their best reels in a sealed box. These are then shuffled and one of the sixteen then tries to guess if the reel in the box in front of him is worth more than any of the other boxed reels.

In order to spice things up a bit, the banker will try and tempt the player to sell him the box for a cash offer of up to, but never exceeding £ 5. And at the end of each competition, Mr Marsden will remove the fifteen reels which didn’t get selected and place them all on eBay at his own expense; you can’t say fairer than that.

As if that wasn’t enough excitement a further test of skill and nerve comes with the ultimate game ‘Play Your Mint’. This amalgam of two highly popular TV game show formats is bound to attract a lot of attention, boasting as it does, the biggest cash prize in angling – the entire contents of Graham’s wallet!

Simple to play and yet highly addictive, to get your chance to play you simply phone up to be put on hold on the eye-wateringly expensive phone line. When you are lucky enough to get through, you will be told an amount of money that the wallet might hold. At this point you have your credit card handy, and for only £ 10 a time you can guess whether you think the real total is ‘Higher or Lower’ (you can just hear them all shouting it out in the background).

Every guess you make (pay for) will give you another number to bet on, and so it goes on with the tension building all the time. But don’t forget to factor in the interest that the money in that wallet is accruing all the time you are paying. To help you, for only another £ 200 you can be told the actual interest rate that is being applied, and for a further £ 200 you can buy the priceless bit of information as to whether that is calculated as compound or simple interest, but don’t forget, the longer you hold on, the more that figure will change.

The odds against winning are truly staggering, but there again, so is the prize. Can you really afford to miss out……..!

Forums, this is another area where a number of improvements are planned. To begin with, the topic headings are going to be changed, and will be listed strictly by popularity, with any topic that doesn’t get used for 5 days being deleted.

Forum posters will be graded in future, based on the entertainment or educational content of their postings. ‘F’ symbols will be awarded rather like hotel stars and will appear beside the poster’s names, up to a maximum of five ‘F’s. These highly prized symbols will not be won easily, and can be removed if standards fall below what is deemed acceptable.

An automatic colour coded warning system will appear whilst you are actually typing your posting which will turn from yellow to red if you are breaching the new standards. The use of asterisks denoting swear words will trigger the alert, as will trying to infer coarse language with abbreviations like ‘WTF’ and miss-spelling words like ‘Fecking’ to imply something less savoury. If you go ahead and post whilst the alert is showing, the text of your posting will appear in red. Do this twice in a month, and you will be sin-binned for a week to give you time to contemplate your actions, as well as losing an ‘F’ if indeed you have any. The very shame of it should bring about a much higher standard of postings, we think you will all agree.

Also, it has to be said, that just recently FM has started to become quite ‘touchy feely’ with ever more ‘Fish-ins’ being staged, and given some of the obvious frisson that is generated at these gatherings, all of these events should now be listed under either of the new ‘Lonely Hearts’ or ‘WTLM’ topics that will be appearing soon.