Caravanner of the Year on BBC this April!

I confess I saw the appeal for members to enter this but didn't consider doing it myself as we are not active at the moment. Just goes to show the website and magazine are worth reading thoroughly sometimes, I even thought it was mentioned on here too, wasn't it?

Alison

'Twas the mini-skirt that won it!

Seriously people, life is too short to worry about what others think of your hobbies.

Sammy the Snake won it for me! Can't wait for next year's competition! I wonder what excitement is in plan for that?

Write your comments here...reminds me I must go and colour co-ordinate and roll my knickers ready for packing. SG2

Lets be honest, although I had a good laugh at it and it didn't get my shackles up. Serious competitors were not what they were looking for, you would have been dismissed in the first round. Only those with eccentricity and prepared to look daft in front of the camera would have won through. 

The title says different but this was meant to be portrayed as an OTT farce.

And CC fell right into the trap.

Episode 2. Embarassing, the same stupidity, avoid A roads, try to get a Motorhome through a signposted narrow gap !

More crude inuendo. Not much there that sums up our 50 years of caravanning.

It can't have been a coincidence that they ended up with a range of 'contestants' all representing different aspects of our hobby, I would love to know how many applicants they actually got (did it reach double figures??) I was sooo glad that John & Jenny won, just because she actually took the hospitality to its logical conclusion and cooked an actual meal (no, not a fryup or BBQ) wanted to smack Andy Harris for his astonishment that she had cooked a meal FROM SCRATCH...IN A CARAVAN !!! when asked if he cooked he had the nerve to say... yes - toast ! The thing I thought did not represent entertaining honestly was the lack of alcohol (no G&T for Grenville after his comments week one, someone wasn't paying attention !) and only one couple actually laid a table to eat at . 

Enjoyed the navigation challenge sans satnav too  We do that every trip 

Alison

I gave up on this week's when Sammy Snake was giving them a lift with all their OS maps 

Plenty of people have commented that the Club is ignoring this thread, despite nearly 100 pages of almost universal agreement that serious harm has been done to the Club by running the Caravanner of the Year Competition on BBC TV.  There have been lots of calls for both Chairman and CEO to resign; a pretty big fuss is being made and, surprise surprise, the Club doesn’t seem to be listening.  The Caravan Club is supposed to be owned and operated for the benefit of its members so why aren’t the Club’s hierarchy listening?

Club Together is clearly regarded by Club Management as a safe place to allow Members to let off steam but nothing of any other significance.  No one outside the Club reads it (nowhere has the national media taken any interest in this Members’ Revolution) so it can be simply ignored.  All the Club Management have done this time, and all they have ever done in the past, is release an anodyne statement which gives no indication at all that they will listen or learn, let alone change anything unless it suits them.   Their statement saying “we think it was OK” amounts to rejection and denial.  There is no evidence at all that the Club’s management hierarchy have any intention at all of listening to the Members on this issue.

The Caravan Club might be a member-controlled club on paper but in practice, these days, it is controlled entirely by its establishment and the members simply don’t have any real voice or clout at all.  Even if all those who have expressed strong views on this thread turned up at the next AGM to demand a vote of no confidence, it simply wouldn’t happen.  Members cannot propose a motion at the AGM unless the Club Council, part of the Club’s establishment, has approved the motion in advance.

To propose any motion to an AGM you need to get together quite a large number of other Members to support you before your motion can go forward at all.  And you aren’t allowed to use Club Together to exchange personal information, so you can’t use that to form up your rebel group.  There is no facility to gather any sort of revolutionary movement together.  Forcing the Club’s establishment to accept change against its wishes might not be impossible but it is a mammoth task and will requires some pretty clever and sustained political activity.  There might be other ways of forcing the Chairman or CEO out, such as open rebellion to get the attention of the press, but I wouldn’t count on it succeeding.

So let steam off on here if you wish, that seems to be allowed – unless of course it ever starts to look like you are achieving anything, in which case your postings might quietly disappear.  I wonder if this posting of mine will survive for long?

As it happens I doubt if much harm has been done by the Club’s participation in this TV programme, except perhaps temporarily to Chairman Grenville’s hitherto unshakeable self-confidence.  Long before Jeremy Clarkson had a go at ridiculing us, the general public had already learned to hate us for cluttering up the roads so why kid yourself that you could ever persuade them otherwise.  And do we really want to recruit more people to our hobby in this over-crowded Country?  Let them think we’re all eccentric fools, I don’t mind at all.

Write your comments here...  Use a Facebook closed group. We would then control what happened and what was said. However, in reality, even if possible, it is not feasible nor practical to get rid of "the establishment" en mass. There would be a great vacuum (of a physical presence rather than the apparent mental vacuum) which would require filling. And let's face it, we need the club to continue to function. I would like to think that those responsible for this fiasco have learnt a serious lesson.....possibly at our expense, but will be thinking long and hard before they consider such actions in future. Furthermore, they may take time to read these posts (??) in which case they may form a better understanding of how most of us feel.

I live in hope!!

If you read the guidelines etc ,  your post complaining, and  criticizing the club, questioning the community manger, and champions  comments and decision, breaks a number of rules etc  

Be prepared to be  suspended. Hope what ever they suspend you by, it is not to painful 

One the grounds of health and safety. Why was the observer in the motorhome during the "economy run" sitting on a side facing seat without a seatbelt? Riding in the back of a motorhome like this is extremely dangerous and according to my understanding against the law.