“There’s one born every minute” — so the snide saying goes. But a British television channel has turned it to a positive use. Channel 4’s One Born Every Minute programme, according to its website, is “focused on providing helpful insights into the realities of giving birth, especially in a hospital environment. The intimate footage gives parents-to-be (or anyone thinking of having children) a unique inside view of what it is really like when life begins…”
I’m not sure that I want to investigate these “realities” too closely, but I do like the Birth Radar page, which tracks birth announcements on Twitter. The Twitter icon jumps from city to city as tweets are picked up using by selected phrases (e.g. “was born weighing”).
“It is not intended to accurately count and report on all new births across the UK or beyond. For accurate data on UK births visit UK National Statistics,” says Channel 4. One per minute would be 1440 per day, but actually “there are around 2,000 births a day in the UK, and over 380,000 across the globe (that’s 264 every minute!)”
I can’t vouch for the quality of their TV programmes, but they seem to have hit on a winning idea here.
