UnNews:The county of Gloucestershire is “utterly useless” says committee

This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation.

11 September 2007

DEERHURST, Gloucestershire, England - A report published today has painted a stark portrait for the utility of the county of Gloucestershire in South-West England. The report, which was made public by the Gloucestershire Utility Sub-Committee in a grand unveiling today in London, stated that "as far as we can tell, Gloucestershire is utterly useless, and completely boring as well". The committee members all then went off for a well-earned round of Golf, followed by a very good dinner at an excellent restaurant, which your reporter also attended. The dessert was fabulous.

The chairperson, Dr Jonathan Prettier, MP (himself an MP for a Gloucestershire constituency), said that the committee had worked long and hard, but had been unable to find anything much useful or productive in Gloucestershire, with the possible exception of the Forest of Dean, and maybe Berkeley Castle. Economically, the county gives almost nothing to the United Kingdom in taxes, and also culturally, no stand out high-flyers have emerged within the past hundred years. While productivity in the area has been improving over the last decade, this was well under some of the more popular counties such as Oxfordshire and Kent.

The report discovered that since the city of Bristol became a separate county in 1973, the productivity of Gloucestershire had fallen by approximately 621%, when the vast majority of the population of the county suddenly realised that they had actually been doing absolutely everything in Bristol, and just liked to pretend that they found their county interesting. Many MP’s from the region strongly denied this fact, although they offered no information to verify their claims.

The recent flooding of the county has done nothing to improve the morale of the populace. A survey conducted as part of the report showed that Gloucestershirians had the third to worst life expectancy for mainland Britain, just in front of Greater London and the Isle of Wight. Attempts have been made to make the county more productive, including the film Hot Fuzz, set in the fictional town of Sandford, Gloucestershire, after the town of Ashchurch turned the producers down.

The Prime Minister, Mr Gordon Brown MP, commented on the report that he personally had never been to Gloucestershire, and that he had no plans to do so in the foreseeable future as he found the prospect "boring". He then proceeded to talk lightly about the weather in Derby, saying that it was "pleasant".

No one from Gloucestershire was available to comment on the contents of the report, although a yob did throw a fish at Lady Olivia Oldman, the committee vice-chair. The committee is now engaged investigating the utility of Hertfordshire.

Sources

• Dr Patrick Fortheringhay "[ Can Gloucestershire work with nothing in it?]" Sub-Committee on Experimental Works, 02,10,1989

• Martha North "[ Now can Gloucestershire stop being so mind-numbingly dull?]" I Hate Gloucester Society, 09,17,1998