ARE YOU SICK OF HEARING ABOUT WHAT BRENDA FROM BLOODY BRISTOL THINKS? I CERTAINLY AM.

I don't know about you, but every time I hear the words 'Brenda from Bristol' I feel a near overwhelming urge to put a brick through the tele. As soon as anyone utters words like 'election' or 'referendum', news reporters make like they have been thoroughly brain washed in some North Korean re-education camp.

The very second they hear the word 'election', they hit auto pilot and start prattling on about Brenda from bloody Bristol. "Ohhhhh! Well Brenda from Bristol won't be happy!"

Every sodding time.

I often wonder if things might have been rather different had the sainted Brenda not spoken her words of wisdom in a mildly comical West Country accent. What if she had been bog standard Surrey? I don't suppose the news room editors would have shown a shred of interest in her. What got their attention were dulcet tones which hinted at pasties and scrumpy and 'Ahha Jim lad!'

'I've got a brand new combine harvester and I'll give you the key...'

This is a new favourite when the news covers issues like Brexit or Indyref 2. Send some frantic wannabe reporter out onto the streets of some dismal back water where most of the shops are boarded up and get them to breathlessly interview a bunch of the usual suspects. Not surprisingly, if you pitch up on a high street in Barnsley or Clacton at two in the afternoon on a weekday, well you're not likely to catch hold of anyone who is actually in work. Instead, if a following wind is in your sails, you'll hook some miserable septugenarian racist who is on the brink of having a rant about too many nig nogs before a flustered wife gives him a sharp elbow in his dessicated ribs. Another favourite vox pop is the wild eyed, rattling heroin user who is hoping to extract a tenner in exchange for an in depth opinion on Brexit and the prospect of a free trade deal with Gabon.

Any normal human being doing a normal job is avoided like the plague. They are deemed to be far too boring. Every news editor in the land is frantically searching for the next Brenda.

Of course, most pieces will have a short clip from a business owner who is granted a few seconds to explain why bankrupcy is waiting around the corner. But thirty seconds is more than enough. Balance, right? At the end of the day, businessmen who actually know a bit about what they are talking about are just too boring. I mean, come on. It's the kind of thing which gets people to reach for the remote control and switch channels. No. We can't be having any of that rubbish. So instead we are provided with a constant diet of spitting mad racists on mobility scooters.

I am waiting in vain for some pundit to erupt in righteous rage at being told Brenda from Bristol won't be happy. It would be nice if they just let all the social niceties drop to the floor and scream at the top of their voice 'WHO GIVES A SHIT ABOUT BRENDA FROM BASTARDING BRISTOL!!!!'

Well. OK. Not so very likely. Not the kind of behaviour the BBC would tolerate.

They could maybe point out that Brenda from Bristol lives in a country where she has plenty of choices. If she feels there is too much politics in the air, then she is more than free to switch channels or do some knitting or read a boody book. Bristol is not living in Pol Pot's Cambodia where she might have been required to spend ten hours a day listening to political instruction and getting the soles of her feet smacked about with bamboo canes should she show so much as trace of boredom.

They could point out the simple truth that if Brenda doesn't want to take twenty minutes out of her busy schedule to go and caste her vote then she doesn't have to take twenty minutes out of her frantic schedule to go and cast her vote. It is up to her. She is more than welcome to join the 30% of her fellow citizens who don't bother. Free country, right?

The news could spend a few minutes digging out some archive footage to put Brenda's words into some kind of perspective. Like millions of South Africans queuing up for two days to cast their first vote, a vote Nelson Mandela paid for with thrity years of his life. They could show queues at polling stations in Poland and Hungary and Latvia and Romania in the years after the Berlin Wall came down. They could show the Alabama police beating the living daylights out of any black man or woman bold enough to try and cast a vote.

Last month they had a so called election in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It seems like lots of bad stuff went down as the Kabila regime cracked down hard on the people to make sure the result came out right. All the usual stuff. Murders. Beatings. Torture. We don't really know because the government in Kinshasa blacked everything out. No landlines. No mobile phones. No internet. No Facebook. No Twitter. No nothing. A vast curtain of blackness was thrown all the way from the Congo Delta in the west to the Mountains of the Moon in the east. A thousand miles worth of clampdown.

We're more than happy to wax lyrical about the wonders of democracy when we drop that very same democracy from 30,000 feet on Fallujah or Tripoli. But when it comes to democracy at home, it seems like things are rather different. All of a sudden the most important fact to consider is how Brenda from Bristol will feel about having an open polling station in the primary school at the bottom of her street.

It's beyond pathetic. It took us hundreds of years to reach the point when everyone over the age of 18 has the right to vote. A lot of people got themselves beaten to a pulp before this was the case. Do we ever hear the politicians who are supposed to work for us point this out? Not a chance. Instead they go along with the Brenda from Bristol nonsense and make out that giving people the chance to spend twenty minutes casting a vote is akin to asking them to do a twelve hour shift down a Colombian coal mine.

Once the pundits have run through their Brenda from Bristol speel, they will then move on to worried faces and warning about just how divisive allowing the great unwashed a chance to vote is going to be. My God, there will be marauding gangs of neo Nazis on every High St! And then they will go all pale and horrified at the memory of the near civil war that broke out all across Scotland in September 2014. Oh my God, the sheer horror of it. Burning cars and gun battles on Princes Street and Molotov cocktails in Aidrie.

Well. Jim Murphy was hit by an egg and........

For Christ's sake.

Is it too much to ask for a news reporter to utter a few simple words. Like these simple words.

'Let's face it. Asking people to vote is no big deal. It doesn't cost anything. It takes 20 minutes. The streets will not be set on fire. Oh, and by the way. Millions of people all over the world would give their eye teeth to get the chance. Sorry? What was that ...... Brenda? ... Brenda from Bristol? ... well she's just one grumpy old woman, right? I dare say she spends her days droning about more or less everything from never winning when she spends a fiver on scratch cards to the last episode of Coronation St.....'

Yup.

That would be good.