Love and Liberty

Last weekend’s Letter from the Leader was Nick Clegg’s boldest email missive for some time: headed “We need to think big,” it turned his speech on Housing last week into a rallying cry to Liberal Democrats. Starting with new Coalition plans to add an extra 50,000 homes, he outlined a vision of new “Garden Cities” adding up to a million in a decade. Nick’s inspired me not just to examine his new big idea, but to come up with hard-headed tests for any major policy proposal – not least ‘Can we get it done?’ and ‘Will we get any credit?’

The text of this Letter from the Leader is not yet available to read on Nick Clegg’s website (though you can sign up there to receive future ones), nor the Lib Dem website, though Lib Dem Voice have helpfully reprinted it on theirs. You can, however, read his speech to National House-building Council on the Deputy Prime Minister’s official website.

The Housing Crisis

Housing has been an increasing problem in Britain for decades, but there’s no doubt that in the last few years the problems have boomed exactly as new houses haven’t. The population is rising; the number of smaller households is rising at a faster rate than the rest of the population; populations are not rising evenly across the UK, but in particular areas, notably the South East; and so house prices and rents are rising way ahead of general inflation, which both denies access to the housing ladder to many and through housing benefit massively distorts the benefits system (as I wrote earlier this year when proposing pilot studies for one part-solution that might be better than the alternatives – assuming no massive new miracle building programme that would drive down house prices and better manage the overcrowding of the South-East, as Nick’s might in a perfect world).

No government in my lifetime has done anything much about housing, save for the Tories’ 1980s plan of selling off social housing – which increased home ownership at the time, but which without replacement stock has long since come to a natural halt as a policy with broad appeal or effect. For whatever reason – ideological, financial, fear of confrontation – no level of government has made housing a priority for a long time, while for a different variety of reasons the private sector has simply not kept up with demand (and not been popular for “sprawl” where it’s tried bit by bit).

Nick Clegg last week made a speech in which he called for a bold turnaround – not just setting out some of the Coalition’s piecemeal policies to help building get off the ground in areas where it’s teetering on happening, but the sort of massive new, planned building programme I simply skipped over when I last wrote about housing because no-one was going to do it. And yet, when our national deficit is still in crisis and reducing ongoing borrowing, Nick proposes all this – surely a far better solution to soaring benefits rates than simply cutting them and hoping people can still find housing, but, as Sir Humphrey would say, bold. Having read Nick’s speech and seen some of the reaction since, I think it could be marvellous if it happened, but were I a betting man I could make more than a property speculator in wagering it’s not going to.

Nick’s vision is of a Britain (though, in effect, mostly the South-East) blooming with dozens of new garden cities – described by commentators who like the idea as new Letchworths, and by those who don’t as an outbreak of Milton Keynes. It’s a clever pitch; you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference between what a “garden city” is and what an “eco-town” is, save that one is couched in language of an older era that sounds traditional and reassuring and for which you can go to poster-towns like Letchworth to show how nice they are, while the other was a despised New Labour eyesore of political correctness and bossy government, so it’s no wonder they didn’t get going. But imagine either actually built and a visit to each, and I can’t imagine they’d look any different. So when the biggest barrier to these new towns other than the immense cost is all the many shades of NIMBYism, it helps that for those suspicious of new ways more than of falling house prices Nick can ‘speak Tory’.

“We Need To Think Big On Housing”

I agree with Nick’s ambition – and sometimes it’s good to take a risk. He does, right from the heading in that email to Lib Dem members that “We need to think big” and the introduction “I want to focus on an issue that wasn’t so high on the radar screen, but matters enormously to me: housing”.

“As a country, we have built too few homes for far too long – and the economic and social consequences are massive. Prices out of reach of too many young families. Our economy vulnerable to boom and bust in the housing market. The housing benefit bill spiralling. Homelessness and overcrowding.
“All these problems are solvable but only if we think big.”

Nick outlines the budgetary and regulatory changes the Coalition’s made to boost housing, and new funding he’s announced to develop nearly 50,000 new homes on top of over 100,000 this year – but he’s clear “it’s nowhere near enough,” with the population growing “by about 270,000 households” (unspecified, but he means per year). Now, I can do the maths, too: the boost he announced this week adds up to slightly less than 5% of the million new homes he’s calling for in the next ten years, and even a million homes in a decade is little more than a third of the number he implies will be needed. Perhaps Nick decided that “a million” was the biggest number he could mention before the fear factor became overwhelming.

“No wonder prices are out of reach for so many families. The average first time buyer is now 35, and home ownership is falling for the first time in a generation.”
“The only way out of this crisis is to build our way out.”
“I want us to go back to some of Britain’s proud heritage of urban development and build a new generation of “garden cities” – places that will grow, thrive and become part of the fabric of the nation.”

Again, Nick marshals a good case here, and it helps, again, that he speaks fluent Tory: he may have sensed a tipping point in ‘Middle England’. It’s no longer just people raising their skirts and drawbridges in horror at the thought of more houses spoiling their view and, worse, lowering their property prices, but that their grown-up children have nowhere to live – and couched in terms of tradition, not scary modernity. And it’s at that point that Nick pivots to anticipating problems:

“Of course development is always controversial. It’s right to protect our precious rural landscape and not let England be concreted over. But the point I’ve been making in government (and there have been some lively debates) is that planning big new settlements is the best way to protect our countryside because the alternative is endless urban sprawl.”

This, I think, is the key passage, which more than undersells one problem – the NIMBYs – and only hints at the other: will the Tories for a moment commit to this? Because the point at which I worry that this grand ambition becomes a house of cards is when it comes to putting the money in. Is this just a message from the Leader of the Liberal Democrats about positioning our aspirations, being on the side of young, growing families (which, to be fair to Nick’s consistency, is pretty much his whole message, whether taking about early education, social mobility or parental leave)? Or is it one from the Deputy Prime Minister that heralds a massive commitment by the LiberaTory Coalition Government? Because I’d expect a bit more of a fanfare if the latter, rather than merely a self-deprecating aside about arguments with the Tories.

“We can’t do this overnight. Scale and ambition take time. But I believe if we put aside partisan politics and think collectively about the housing needs of the next generation, we could set Britain on track for a major wave of new development, new jobs, and new hope.”

So, Nick, does that mean that not just the Tories but the Labour Party – which greeted your words with the mix of shrieking abuse and wanking into the wind with which they greet all your words – would have to be on side before any of this gets done? It seems the bigger the problem, the bigger the vision, the smaller the chance that any of it might ever happen.

This is the point at which I turned to Nick’s full speech to see if it offered anything more concrete (no, not nasty concrete, anything more flowery and trellised). It starts with a decent statement of purpose, on the money, at least:

“I came into this Coalition Government to build a stronger economy in a fairer society, so that everyone can get on in life.
“That has meant immediate action to pay down the deficit and pave the way for growth – of course. But it also means looking further ahead, too: 10, 15, 20 years down the line. And that’s where Britain’s house builders could not matter more.
“Think about where lasting prosperity is going to come from. We need to create an economy that doesn’t rely so heavily on our big banks, where growth is driven by a much more diverse private sector filled with entrepreneurs and small and medium sized firms, spread across the country.
“An economy where people with good ideas have a real chance of starting a business. Where firms seeking to grow can find the staff. Where young men and women can fulfil their potential.
“But, bluntly, no matter what we do, Britain will not finish this journey unless we build enough houses. That’s the absolute basics.
“Our communities will only sustain strong local economies if they can attract and house the employers, high-skilled workers and consumers they need.”

All that is entirely right. But implicit in it is that this is a policy to supply the parts of Britain – the parts of South-East England – that are already expanding. He doesn’t say in so many words that new towns are to follow the money and become handy commuting bases, but that’s the essential message – so the missing figures aren’t to do with not much over 10% of the country being built on now and only needing a couple more per cent with houses sitting on it to solve the problem, but what share of the landscape will need to become town in the areas people want to live to get the jobs. And I suspect those figures will be very much scarier.

Nick goes on to say, too, that:

“now is the moment for politicians of all stripes to get behind a major housing push.
“This will need to span more than one parliament. We need to work together, and we need to be ambitious in our approach.

“Departments aren’t used to thinking beyond the next Spending Review, or beyond the next Parliament – but we need to shift our sights to the horizon.”

Hmm. Good luck with that. On a more practical, deliverable note:

“I want us to make the best offers to the most ambitious proposals. So not just 5,000 new homes, but 15,000, 25,000.
“And what will be crucial in all of this is that while central government provides support, incentives and encouragement, that process will be locally-led.
“I lead a party that is localist to its core. We now have a chance to show that localism can deliver in a big way.
“I want us to prove that, when it comes to major development, we don’t need to revert to central planning, we can embrace a new era of community planning instead.”

That’s the nearest to a specific proposal in the speech, and the first half sounds hopeful – while the second sounds more of a hope than hopeful. I’d love it to be practical, but is it more an attempt to square the circle rhetorically between a localist party and planning running into local opposition than a practical plan to get things done?

I know it seems like I’m knocking the whole idea. But I’m trying to work out what Nick was actually trying to build up: houses, or hopes? Nick is right to come up with big ideas, and to sell them to the Party in the way he did at the weekend. The LiberaTory Coalition needs to inspire Liberal Democrats, let alone inspire voters, with positive prizes, not just restraining Tories. But I worry that this fanfare will only lead to disappointment and greater disillusionment among Party members if action doesn’t follow the call – and I can’t help but notice that this wasn’t a government plan, seemingly, but Nick’s. The government cash was only for 5% of it. Rather than just asking piecemeal, sprawling questions about elements of a speech or email, then, I’d like to propose my own strategic vision of big questions with which to test the big ideas.

Hard-headed Tests For Any Major Policy Proposal

If a speech in which “Nick Clegg calls for…” something is to have a more immediate impact than a Lib Dem motion where “Conference Calls For…”, we need to ask if it’s an aspiration, or if there’s real government drive – and money – behind it. And, for Lib Dems, we should ask something more. On the basis that if an idea’s good enough you should shamelessly nick it – something Lib Dems have long known to our cost – I’d like to focus Lib Dem minds with a message from Conservative Party part-owner Lord Ashcroft:

“Everything the Conservatives do between now and the next election must pass at least one of the following four tests, and it must not fail any of them.

• “First, does it show we are sticking to the right priorities for the country?

• “Secondly, does it show strong leadership?

• “Thirdly, does it show we are on the side of the right people (and, if necessary, make the right enemies?)

• “Fourthly, does it offer some reassurance about the Conservative Party’s character and motives?”

I don’t think this is a bad set of questions for us to ask, either – though Ashcroft’s questions show a confidence (or arrogance) that the Tories are leading the Government, can deliver, and will then get the credit (or blame) for any decisions. The last two and a half years have shown us that that isn’t really true – but that goes far more for the Liberal Democrats.

In effect, the only question the Lib Dems appear to have been asking in the first couple of years of the Coalition has been Ashcroft’s first – Is it the right thing to do? Which has led to some good government, some good policies, and many good kickings from voters who don’t see anything specific to give us credit for. Important as doing the right thing may be, if we selflessly serve the country while setting ourselves up for annihilation, we won’t be in a position to do the right thing for very long.

I think there are two key questions Liberal Democrats need to ask on top of Ashcroft’s tests.

Our reframing of “does it show strong leadership?” might simply be ‘Can we get it done?’ And at what price – in political capital, and in actual capital? Is it worth spending so much of either? Considering, too, “does it make the right enemies?” I might add that making the right enemies is all very well, but ‘Are we actually going to be able to beat them?’ Never mind local opposition; not only do we have to reach agreement with the Tory Leadership on the Government delivering anything not in the Coalition Agreement (and, increasingly, all over again on anything that is), but it’s obvious that thanks to Cameron’s “strong leadership” he’s increasingly unable to get his MPs to vote for anything he says. That’s the irony – Nick is seen as a weak Leader, but Lib Dem MPs are exceptionally united in voting for agreed proposals; it’s simply that there aren’t enough of them, and it’s the weak Tory Leadership that lets agreed Lib Dem priorities slide and makes us look a weak part of Government (and, conversely, the strong Lib Dem Leadership that often saves Cameron’s votes from his own rabble).

So, then, our first new question should be: ‘Can we get it done?’

Our second new question should be: ‘Will we get any credit?’

The cynical answer is ‘No’. Note that my questions, or something like them, must have been asked within the Party Leadership. The Lib Dems have clearly been thinking about specific, measurable claims that we might get credit for recently, rather than just ‘doing the right thing’ platitudes: the party slogan changing from “In government, on your side” of early in the Coalition to the much less inspiring but demonstrably true “Fairer tax in tough times”. And even then, with the massive rise in the personal allowance for most income-taxpayers the single policy the Lib Dems most banged on about at the last election and since, at the top of the list of four priorities on the cover of our 2010 Manifesto… Opinion polls show that only about 20% of people give us credit for it. So how wildly distinctive and how loudly and perpetually repeated does any policy have to be before anyone thinks of it as Lib Dem?

To aid any possibility of getting credit, then, there’s more to consider. The party has given precious little thought for many years to communicating our philosophy or core values, but to the extent that people have a sense of them or even vaguely ‘What the Lib Dems are about’, does a proposal arise naturally out of that? Would people think ‘That’s the sort of thing the Lib Dems like’? Is it something that we’ve consistently gone on about? If we adopt this policy and get the Coalition to act on it, will ministers be likely to keep going on about it, and will activists be inspired to keep campaigning on it? If the answer to many (or even any) of these questions is ‘No’, then the chances of it making an impact for the Lib Dems – as opposed to for the country – are practically non-existent.

There are two more big problems with my two more big questions. Firstly, the Lib Dems’ overriding focus on ‘Is it the right thing to do?’ both in Opposition and now in Government means that we’ve been much more willing than the other two parties to consider policies for the long term. The more ruthless ‘Can we get it done?’ and ‘Will we get any credit?’ are enemies of long-term thinking. A long-term plan is much more likely to cost money, and be changed or cancelled by changes in government; a long-term plan that succeeds is much less likely to be noticed in its early stages, or only be noticed for its downsides or not yet delivering, while the eventual credit is, again, something more likely to go to changes in government. I’ve always criticised governments for their short-termism; ironically, I’m now setting political tests that might encourage it.

Secondly, ‘Can we get it done?’ and ‘Will we get any credit?’ also clash with each other. Here’s the paradox of wanting both: the more distinctive a proposal, the less likely it is to be delivered through the Coalition; the more popular and consensual, the more likely it is that the Tories will claim the credit (and get it, thanks to all their friends in the media).

As it happens, I’m working on a Liberal Big Idea, too. Hopefully, I’ll be ready to come out with it in the next week or two. It does comes right out of our philosophy, it’s very distinctive, and it’d save a lot of money – so it sounds like it’d be good for all those tests. But in terms of making the right enemies, it’s a doozy – so the chances of it getting through any Coalition consensus aren’t high…

Nick’s New Big Idea: Will It Get Done, and Will He Get the Credit?

Can Nick deliver on this?

Improbably, the most hopeful straw in the wind in the last week has come from another Nick – Planning Minister and Tory MP Nick Boles. He spoke to Newsnight in a major piece on Wednesday night, complete with a smaller write-up on the BBC website. It was worth a look, and in the main he agreed with Nick – in almost as much as he could without ever once mentioning his speech or indeed his name. Bigging up his own constituency, not exactly a new town, I wondered if “It was not, you know, some grand prince’s design for a new town…” was not a swipe at Mr Clegg’s big vision, though his defence of new building against an array of the usual suspects in the studio sounded more in tune, and as the BBC trotted him off to existing garden city Letchworth to sing its praises the voiceover described such places as “The government’s answer”. So perhaps the Tories might move after all. Of course, I didn’t agree with everything Tory Nick said – the lovely Andy Hinton’s Tweets from the night summarise why succinctly:

“Impressive performance from Nick Boles on #newsnight, except for the pointlessly inflammatory insertion of immigration commentary.”

“Little house with a garden in the suburbs not for everyone. I like my large urban centre with good transport and a vibrant cultural life.”

I like cities, too, and from a party that keeps wanting to do away with the very idea of “human rights”, it was entertaining for Nick Boles to suggest a new human right to a garden – presumably making him so subsumed into the mindset of the typical Tory voter that he thinks everyone wants a nice little duckhouse near no loud noises and reacts with instinctual horror at the very idea of big cities (which no doubt has something to do with the fact that it’s decades since they last won seats in any of them). And I winced as he whistled up immigration, equally by Tory instinct. But on the whole, I saw in his attitude something we could (forgive me) build on, and hopefully the Planning Minister wouldn’t have just gone off on his own without at least some support from the Tory Leadership. Even with that sign of hope, though, watch the studio debate as people line up to attack new housing even when they’re really in agreement (hang your head, Wayne Hemingway) because they assume that it won’t be exactly what they want and so must be opposed until perfection is offered on a plate. Oh, and Paxman’s sneering faux-outrage at someone sounding momentarily more of a snob than he is was beneath contempt, but who didn’t expect that?

Will the Lib Dems get any credit if these new cities happen?

Well, the ‘garden’ part, and Nick taking a lead, might help – I may have characterised his reassuring framing of new towns as tradition as his ‘speaking Tory’, but it’s also true that the environment is among the few sorts of issue that polls suggest people associate us with. So if these massive building projects end up being real ‘garden cities’, that might chime. Unfortunately, along the way, they’re… Massive building projects. As I found above, Nick’s speech itself enabled me to put this grand vision into the context of what he, rather than the Lib Dems in general, has been banging on about for years – though it’s a slight worry that I had to do the contextualising myself, rather than the speech (still less the email) joining the dots.

And never mind the theme: what about who else takes it up? Look at the article on Nick Boles: no mention of “garden cities” from him. Listen to what he had to say on Newsnight: no mention of “garden cities” by him there either, though the framing at least implied something like them, and the voiceover that, hopefully, mentioned them as “The government’s answer”. Within just days of this being Nick Clegg’s next big thing, though, the number of times ‘our’ Nick was mentioned by either Tory Nick (predictably) or by the BBC (also predictably) was… Zero.

Remember, too, that “Of course development is always controversial.” If it’s done by private enterprise, people won’t think of it as a government initiative – unless it’s for someone to blame. And if it’s to be built over ten years, then who’ll remember who started it? Is it something that comes obviously from our philosophy, or that we’ve always been banging on about, then? Basically, no. We’ve not had any big ideas on housing until last week – neither has anyone else (not since the Tories came up with the idea of selling it). Look at the “What we stand for” section on the Lib Dem website: as well as an embarrassing lack of any statement of values or philosophy, merely a set of policy headings, there’s not even any heading for ‘Housing’. So will we refashion ourselves as ‘the party of housing?’ That’ll take an awful lot of doing.


I hope Nick – with help from Nick – does manage to get building. But I’d watch carefully for just how hard and how long he pushes for it, and whether any non-Nicks in Government join the clamour… And until then, I’d hesitate before making it a headline promise on your next FOCUS.

Labels: British Politics, Coalition, Conservatives, Housing, Ideas, Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, The Golden Dozen

Doctor Who was first broadcast forty-nine years ago yesterday. We’ve been celebrating. And that means that this is the first minute of the greatest series ever’s fiftieth year.

So, coming soon… On every Saturday until November 23rd, 2013, I’ll be counting down through fifty great scenes from the show. One a week, starting in a couple of weeks. So how better to whet your appetite for a year of celebration than with a selection of the most fabulous Doctor Who trailers? From BBC1, from the DVDs and from the Internet, from William Hartnell to Matt Smith, here come the teasers…

Doctor Who 50 – Eleven Great Trailers

“The Trip Of A Lifetime!”


2005 – the great return… And Christopher Eccleston invites us into time and space. Still the most thrilling summons to adventure I’ve ever seen.


Next Time – An Unearthly Child

A fan trailer for the very first Doctor Who story. Of many I’ve seen for it, this is one of the better-made and the one that tickles me the most for its spin on modern Who’s “Next Times…”


Daleks vs Mechons

Remember the third Dalek movie from the ’60s? Course you do! Inspired, gorgeous and hilarious in equal measure.


Coming Soon To DVD – Planet of Evil

Well into the Doctor Who DVD releases, in 2007 each release started to feature a trailer for the next. At first, these were rather basic, with the occasional streak of creative fun like that for The Key To Time… But it was on The Key To Time Box Set that the first trailer appeared that felt like it was selling Doctor Who as a great big film epic. It’s a thrilling story to start with, but it had never looked or sounded like this before. And from then on, the DVD trailers were worth watching as works in their own right.


Coming Soon To DVD – The Deadly Assassin

The Coming Soon trailer for the greatest Doctor Who story of them all (or, if you prefer your trailers home-made, here’s Chris Batt’s The Deadly Assassin Trailer: Creepy Version from online).


Doctor Who – Season 26 Trailer

The Internet boasts several fine fan trailers for 1989’s final Twentieth Century TV season of the series – this one’s rather stylish, and the retro BBC logo’s appealing.


The Parting of the Ways Countdown

2005’s astonishing season finished with the first of many massive season finales… And yet almost the most exciting thing about it was this countdown. After teaser trailers counting down each day, this full version aired only once, immediately before the episode. Not to bring people to the screen – everyone watching had already tuned in anyway. No, just for the sheer joy of it.


Doctor Who 2008 – The Doctor’s Legend

The Doctor had addressed us to camera before; that year, BBC One came up with something different, a tale of the Doctor told round the campfire by a woman watching for him. All to the glorious piece of music we’ll always think of as ‘Dance of the Macra’.


Previously On Doctor Who…

Anticipating many of my forthcoming Doctor Who 50 choices, a rather marvellous (if dazzlingly swiftly intercut) compilation of every Doctor Who TV story in just five minutes. I did something like that once: mine took more than fifty. Funny, that.


Doctor Who: Every Story 1963 to Now – A Babelcolour Tribute

Why stop at one? A slightly longer, slightly more comprehensive compilation that ends with a frankly magnificent delivery of a speech by a different Doctor to the one you might be expecting…


Doctor Who – The Snowmen Trailer

And where else to finish but the future? This trailer for the forthcoming Christmas special aired last week on Children in Need. The fourth Victorian Christmas in seven years? Who’d have thought. While some people say Matt Smith’s Doctor is most like Peter Davison’s, for his portrayal of an old man in a young man’s body, I don’t usually see it – he was inspired by Patrick Troughton, and I find a lot of Sylvester McCoy – but this time I can’t help thinking of Davison’s detective Campion. Isn’t Commander Strax a dead ringer for Brian Glover’s Magersfontein Lugg?



Trailers aren’t everything. So I can’t resist two of the finest other multi-story assemblies online: if you enjoyed the above, why not try Flight of the Darned, which is frankly awesome, or something else which is… Good?

Labels: Christopher Eccleston, Daleks, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 50, Matt Smith, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Sylvester McCoy, Tom Baker, Trailers, William Hartnell

What to do on not blogging much for a few months? Follow the practice of so many worn-out artists and put together a ‘greatest hits’ package! So, below, you can find links to my best six (ish) articles of the last year on politics, Doctor Who and several other subjects. You can scroll straight down to that – but if you’re interested in Liberal Democrat blogs, I’ve also followed Jonathan Calder in developing a few ideas on how to revive the Lib Dem Blog of the Year Awards after this year’s moribund turn. I’ve even, perhaps unwisely, made a pledge…

Brighton and the BOTYs 2012

Cast your mind back, if you were there, to Lib Dem Conference in Brighton this September; if you weren’t, imagine a fluffy Liberal habitat suddenly turned into a big scary security theatre with all the unintended consequences of giving in to police accreditation. No, not all the civil liberties implications or the threat to trans people – we’d all expected those – but exactly what happened to the happy-go-lucky relaxed atmosphere and boosts to the town. Like drunken late-night walkers trying to go their usual way home encountering a wall of steel and machine-gun-wielding police officers barking at them to cross the road, pronto. Or the way that, as the main Conference Hotel was within the secure zone alongside the Conference Centre, suddenly none of the Lib Dem or media bigwigs could bring in their usual outside shags move to insert and renumber by building community relations and stimulating the local economy. For me, I found myself having to hold my tongue as Twitter joke trial-style comments ran through my head on seeing a Famous Media Git being held by armed police ahead of me. Then my shoes – with orthotic soles to help my malfunctioning feet – setting off the alarms and trying not to squeak, ‘I’m not Rosa Klebb!’

But there remained at least one little oasis of fluffitude. Bloggers and blog-readers were to be found attending this year’s Liberal Democrat Blog of the Year Awards, always a highlight of Conference. Well-deserved (if delayed) congratulations to Liberal Youth’s The Libertine and their Bears for Belarus campaign, to Lanson Boy Alex Folkes and to Mark Thompson (and commiserations, particularly, to Caron Lindsay). And a good evening was had by all that were there… It’s just that, in other aspects, this year’s evening felt rather diminished.

It wasn’t those excellent winners, nor the other excellent shortlistees, that gave me pause for thought. The element of disappointment was largely created in advance, and as a result turnout was very low by comparison to other years – not terrible, and worth having, sure, but it looked like less than half the size of previous crowds. The BOTYs have almost always been packed out before, and often in rather larger rooms, while this year the room was more empty than full. There were surely many reasons, but high among them must be the air of ill-preparedness: the late opening of nominations; the near-non-publication of shortlists; the speakers giving the awards giving the impression that they were being asked in the room itself. From the organisers out into the blogosphere and the wider Lib Dems, it was as if everyone was tired of the awards and had simply lost interest. This just isn’t sustainable. Fortunately, there are ways to get them going again.

Jonathan Calder’s Plan For Fresher BOTYs

Lib Dem blogfather Jonathan Calder, of course, beat me to writing about the problem with the BOTYs by a long stretch with his call Time to freshen up the Blog of the Year awards, although he was with the crowd in not being one of the very small crowd at this year’s BOTYs. I don’t agree with every single word – I’m not quite so worried by the declining number of active blogs as a metric, as it’s by a rather smaller share than the party’s membership – but his main thrust is persuasive.

Jonathan argues that there should be awards for Facebook and Twitter use, to reflect changing online activity. Perhaps perversely, I’m not on Facebook (being notoriously rubbish at keeping up with writing or messages, and finding my existing social networking quite enough to fall behind with) but strongly agree with him on a regular Lib Dem Facebook award category, whereas I am on Twitter (short flurries of high activity, long weeks of occasional glances) but suspect that’s not a good idea. Or, rather, that it’s a good idea but a bad practicality. In concept, Twitter use should be recognised, but in practice I don’t see how it could work, even if BOTY judges were involved for a much longer and more active period than they ever have been before.

For me, though, Jonathan’s crucial point is on the “Best Posting of the Year” Award, and what its absence this year meant for entrants. With most categories limited to particular types of blogger, as Jonathan pointed out, “then the Blog of the Year award itself is your only hope”. Like Jonathan, I’ve been nominated for that award a few times but never won it; like Jonathan, I much preferred the award for the best individual post (which I was also nominated for several times, and won last year). As far as I’m concerned, a blog should have to be bloody good to win the Blog of the Year, and it would be daunting to put yourself forward for it. In my own case, the only time I thought my blog worthy of a nomination I wasn’t shortlisted (and on one occasion that I was, I was simply embarrassed, having felt I’d had a weaker year and that much better blogs had been overlooked). But while my blog is inconsistent and often largely inactive for a month or two, I do feel proud of the odd post, and am very happy to put some of them up for consideration. And Jonathan is right that a lot of people feel the same way – not ‘Help! I have to have produced twelve months of reliable production and brilliance!’ but, ‘Phew, I may not always have kept it up, but this one was really good’. This isn’t just an award for ‘lazy’ bloggers – it’s the one everyone could have a shot at (or that critics might argue that’s most obviously about quality rather than ‘my mate’).

And it’s bizarre that, in the week that the Government announced the scrapping of GCSEs and putting every pupil’s eggs in one basket with single exams alone, the BOTYs shifted to nothing but continuous assessment with no room for one-offs. If nothing else, isn’t it easier for judges to read single nominated posts than to study a full year’s output?

I’ve also written this piece because Jonathan names and shames me:

“…the award for the best posting of the year has disappeared. This was, in many ways, this was the best category of all – in particular because every blogger had some hope of winning it. And also because, until a couple of years ago (which appears to be a developing theme in this post), Alex Wilcock encouraged members of an email [list] to which most prominent Lib Dem bloggers were subscribed to nominate their best posts of the year.

“I urge the Lib Dem Voice editors to bring this category back and use their site to encourage all of our bloggers to nominate their favourite posts. This would allow even the newest bloggers to have some involvement with the awards and make it closer to what it should be – a carnival of Liberal Democrat blogging.”

Jonathan does indeed have me bang to rights. I will, however, accept my share of the blame on condition that I can protest that some of the blame lies in the organisation. The Blog of the Year Awards are held in mid-September; in previous years, the shortlists were opened in mid-July. That’s crept later and later, until this summer the awards were thrown open on August 29th. That’s simply too late – and, for me, the biggest single reason why this year’s BOTYs were a comparative flop. Very little time for discussion amid the wider blogosphere; very short deadlines, and very little time for the judges to confer; and then no time at all for the shortlistees to have their moment in the sun.

In previous years, nominations closed at the end of August and shortlists were published in early September, giving weeks for many different blogs to get attention and celebration and, as the BOTYs are intended, to give “a fun way to celebrate the talent in the Lib Dem blogosphere, whilst introducing you to some blogs you might not have read before”. This year the shortlists were published on September 22nd – just two hours before the awards were given out. They may as well have skipped straight to the winners, for all the attention the shortlistees could get. No wonder so few people turned up. Then, after the awards, though this surely isn’t down to LDV, in previous years all the shortlistees for the main award – not just one “Blogger of the Year” – got to interview the Leader. Nick might be happier with a one-to-one, but that’s not the point; that was to engage more people, more styles, more perspectives.

My BOTYs Pledge: Start Early and I’ll Help

I’m not pointing my finger at anyone bar myself for any one particular failure this year. The whole thing looks more like a classic example of organisational inertia, probably coupled with individual exhaustion, in that I’m certain it wasn’t the fault of any one person – though some share of fault may lie with some of the LDV team leaving it to just one busy person to organise everything. Please, all of you at Lib Dem Voice, do a better, wider, earlier job next year. If none of you are going to be able to spare the time, don’t leave it ’til the last minute and produce another disappointment. What’s the point? If you need to, publish an appeal in June for people to help with the organisation and be allocated tasks come July (reader, please make a note in your diary and volunteer).

Another change I’d recommend to Lib Dem Voice is to use your extra time and extra organisers to make much better use of your BOTY judges. In his article, Jonathan explains that, having been a judge, in his year the judges were given no idea how the shortlisting process worked, agreed no criteria and, indeed, had no contact with each other, let alone discussion. Other former judges have told me that their contribution consisted only of firing numbers into the ether by way of voting, which seems to have been an uninvolving and unsatisfying experience. Surely there can be a happy medium between that and having to meet up for a banquet with wigs. If nominations go back to opening earlier, they can close earlier and give the judges at least, say, a week to have a few email exchanges on what they think of different nominations. Perhaps the Lib Dem Voice editors might each month also ask Ryan of Lib Dem Blogs Aggregated to give them a list of the latest people added to the Bloggregator so that a list of eligible “new blogs” can be published when nominations are opened, as that’s the award for which it’s most difficult to spot the potential nominees (and how about giving that category a thirteen-month span each year, from August to August, as people who start their blog while nominations are open tend to get missed out).

I’m notoriously disorganised and unable to meet deadlines, so you might think I’m calling for volunteers in the sure and certain hope that I shouldn’t be one of them. But I will make one pledge by way of help.

If Lib Dem Voice gets its act together and opens nominations at least a week before the end of July, and if they reinstate the award for the best individual post, then I will write a piece for them publicising it in the first week of August. I will pick at least a dozen articles from at least a dozen different blogs from across the year that I think are among the best and plug them in the style that I pick my own below. I will include an appeal for everyone else to come up with their own suggestions, both in the comments and by email to me. And a week before nominations are due to close, I will write another article for LDV, this time rounding up everyone else’s suggestions. Though obviously it would mean I’d be less likely to be shortlisted – gasp – it would be one way to celebrate the talent in the Lib Dem blogosphere and introduce people to more blogs.

In the last month so far, though several posts have stuck with me, the one that I’ll definitely put up for an award is, ironically, one that I’d recommend not in the best individual post category but The Andrew Reeves Award for Best use of social media/campaigning by a Liberal Democrat: Jennie Rigg’s outstanding effort in putting questions to over a hundred candidates for this year’s Liberal Democrat Federal elections. Even if LDV ignores everything I’ve written, I will be nominating Jennie.


Now on to my own choices for my own best posts from September 2011 to September 2012 – which the eagle-eyed reader will realise are all ineligible for next year’s BOTYs even if they take my advice and bring back the individual post award, so read them for fun, or for thought, but not for any awards…

Six of the Best 2011-12: Politics

Happy Birthday to the Libera-Tory Coalition?

Last week we hit the half-way point of this Parliament (fixing that was at least one piece of constitutional reform); back in May, I looked back at the first two years of the LiberaTory Coalition, and how even at its founding we expected to have a terrible time of it. I called it “the worst possible time to take power”; Vince said “It’s going to be bloody awful.” So it’s not been fun, but it’s not been a surprise.

“I am a Liberal and I am against this sort of thing” – Time To Remember What We Stand For

Rising up against Labour-style cyber-snooping powers from the Coalition – otherwise, what’s the point? There’s a big difference between having to choose painful cuts because Labour destroyed the economy, and choosing authoritarianism (which is more expensive, too). With some necessary reminders of our Liberal history.

Government Porn Filter Collapses In Security Nightmare

Few things make me more likely to despair of the Coalition than when they come up with authoritarian bollocks like Labour never lost. This summer they proved why they shouldn’t be trusted with controlling the internet: even the consultation was a disaster.

A New Purpose for Politics? Is It Bollocks

A revolt against Lib Dems who think our big idea should be Blairite micro-managing people’s lives for their own good. No, no, and no.

Never Mention “STV” Again

After the disaster of the AV referendum, to prepare for the fight on the real thing, why not champion “British Proportional Representation” and make a broad appeal beyond Lib Dem wonks?

Things To Remember About Labour

I remember so many things to dislike about the last Labour Government that it comes as a surprise how many people imagine it as some noble fantasy. Ever eager to help, I wrote five mostly short pieces on Things To Remember About Labour. I might even return to the series at some point… After all, I’ve not even written about their destroying the economy yet. Or their obeying every order from Rupert Murdoch. Or Iraq.

• Anything new the Labour Party claims they’d do if only they were in government now? It’s a great big lie. They had a booming economy and absolute power for thirteen years – so if they gave a flying fuck about it, they’d have done it.

• In thirteen years of authoritarian government, the Labour Party inflicted 4,400 new laws on the UK – more than any other government in British history.

• Labour opposed every single move towards Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender equality before they were for it.

• Labour sucked up to the super-rich, took bribes from the super-rich, and slashed taxes for the super-rich – while doubling tax on the lowest-paid.

• The Labour Government promised Lords reform, but delivered a House of Cronies stuffed with Labour appointments, and ignored House of Commons votes for an elected Upper Chamber.
  

Since then: while Lib Dems are in Coalition with the more moderate part of the Conservative Party, Labour went into coalition with the frothing far right of the Tories to be anti-Europe, just as they did over Maastricht twenty years ago, just as they did over Hong Kong, just as they did over Lords reform, and so on, and so on, shameless opportunist knee-jerk authoritarians that they are; John Kampfner, too, has noticed how Labour is to the far right of the Coalition; and Mark Pack has pointed out the biggest difference between the Coalition and the Labour Party – when the USA asked the UK’s help in arming up for a potential war on another Middle Eastern country, this government said no.

Six of the Best 2011-12: Doctor Who

DVD Detail – Doctor Who: UNIT Files Box Set

I’ve not written many DVD reviews in the last year, but this one’s a doozy. Taking on Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen in two very flawed but strangely moreish stories, complete with the deepest political analysis they’ve ever been subjected to and my own exclusive, ambitious (and absurd) photos at the original locations. KKLAK!

DVD Detail: Doctor Who – The Trial of a Time Lord: The Mysterious Planet

Now that Colin Baker’s a TV star all over again, take another look at one of his finest performances as the Doctor. It may have seemed like a trial up against Michael Jayston, but it could have been worse – it could have been Nadine Dorries…

DVD Detail: Doctor Who – Paradise Towers

Traditional Doctor Who often includes fascistic guards, killer robots and ancient evil struggling to awaken, but the brilliance of this 1987 Sylvester McCoy tale was to combine these elements not on a shiny spaceship or in a stylised English village but within an insane sit-com run by Richard Briers, clashing youth gangs against Mary Whitehouse types and bureaucracy gone mad in a run-down tower block. Result!

DVD Detail: Doctor Who – Kamelion Tales

Peter Davison’s Doctor battles Anthony Ainley’s Master in this DVD box set of two Doctor Who stories set in the gorgeous locations of a medieval castle and the island of Lanzarote. Which of the Doctor’s companions will remove the most clothes? Which of them will announce that he’s not a naughty boy, but the messiah? And will Magna Carta die in vain?

Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons

Celebrating Doctor Who novelist supreme Terrance Dicks with one of his earliest and best-loved books, introducing the Master and bringing back the Autons. And deadly daffodils.

Doctor Who and the Dæmons and Barry Letts

More Master, more Pertwee better on the page, and this time looking at Terrance’s partner in crime, the late Barry Letts and his gorgeous novelisation of the Doctor versus the Devil (or is it?). Complete with an argument about science. No, religion. No, science!

Six of the Best 2011-12: Other Reviews

The Avengers – My Wildest Dream

Marking the passing of marvellous actor Philip Madoc and brilliant director Robert Fuest, I took a look at their work together in this outstanding Avengers episode of mind-bending murder for The Manchurian Capitalist (also featuring Peter Vaughan, Edward Fox and John Savident). Not the comic-strip, billion-dollar movie The Avengers, by the way, though my next two choices are – sort of – movie crossovers…

Judge Dredd – The Complete Case Files 01

Celebrating 2000AD’s thirty-fifth birthday by going back to the start with this chunky 300+ page reprint volume, taking in the whole first year of the grim future law officer who’s still their star, Judge Dredd. I thought the movie worked, too. If you feel like picking up one of these volumes, Judge Dredd The Complete Case Files 02 and 05 are probably the best, though biased towards ‘epic’ stories.

Wholly Unavailable On DVD Batman!

Batman going all fascist at the box office this year may be true to the character, but I prefer Adam West’s camp mid-’60s TV version. Shame you can’t get it on DVD, but I took a look at its high and low points in ITV4’s constant repeat rotation. Try it today!

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen

On the publication of Boneland, Alan Garner’s return half a century later to his writing on Alderley Edge, I looked back at what his first book meant to me. Since then, I’ve been inspired to read many more books touching on the legend of King Arthur, and might even write about some of them…

Sherlock Holmes – Murder By Decree

Who couldn’t love a Sherlock Holmes–Jack the Ripper conspiracy theory mash-up? Well, that would be me. Going into just why this still critically acclaimed movie doesn’t do it for me (give me the schlockier A Study In Terror any day).

Why The Avengers Matters

Celebrating fifty years of the most Sixties show of the Sixties, not just because it was fun but because, unexpectedly, it mattered – from the day it introduced viewers to Honor Blackman as an intelligent, independent woman who flung men over her shoulders. And proving that not all the best ones are big ones.



I hope you enjoyed all of those (or at least some of them). I’d also like to thank Stephen Tall for doing a better job plugging my writing than I did. Not only did he label my Happy Birthday to the Libera-Tory Coalition? a “must-read” post, but he turned one of my comments on Lib Dem Voice into a post of his own:

The Alex Wilcock Realpolitik argument for Nick Clegg staying as Lib Dem Leader





Richard also follows on with a plea for well–thought-out blogging in Don't Dumb Down Our BOTYs!



NB Blogger, frustratingly, converted my line breaks past a certain point into simple spaces. If the formatting looks a bit dodgy, I edited the html by hand several times and it wasn’t having it. Even splitting the post in two didn’t help. Pasting in break commands everywhere, and multiples between sections, eventually stopped the last third being one giant splat of text – and though the gaps don’t look regular, though they should, now I don’t dare touch it again.

Labels: Batman, Best of Love and Liberty, Blogs, Coalition, Colin Baker, Doctor Who, Judge Dredd, Liberal Democrat Conferences, Personal, Reviews, The Avengers, The Golden Dozen, Things To Remember About Labour

For some people, it’s ‘Danger: high voltage’; for others, ‘This won’t hurt’, or ‘For the children’. For me, the most threatening three-word combination in the English language is ‘New and Improved’. Usually, it heralds that sinking feeling when you return from your local Giant SupermarketTM to find your favourite korma sauce, scotch eggs or even shower gel suddenly cheap and tasteless, with whatever it was you liked about them jettisoned to cut costs.

After five decent-ish years with Waitrose Broadband, Richard and I returned from Brighton to the new and improved John Lewis Broadband. Can you guess what happened next?

John Lewis Broadband Plus Plusnet Equals No Internet

I remember the shopping around we did after several terrible ISPs to find Waitrose Broadband, and it had mostly worked for us since, the odd problem and the odd oh-dear-we’ve-gone-over-our-download-limit-and-it-costs-how-much? aside. But it couldn’t last. They’re winding up the service into a new one. Improved, of course. And who are the new providers for our forced upgrade to an alleged cheaper, faster, unlimited service?

John Lewis Broadband, the epitome of respectable reliability, actually supplied if you look carefully at the small print by Plusnet, which claims to be good, honest broadband from Yorkshire. What could possibly go wrong?

Everyfuckingthing.

Us having made the shift in early September and them having taken a few weeks to action it, despite promises (warning signs there), we got home from Conference to eight days of zero internet and increasingly weary phone calls to find out what the hell was wrong. And they don’t even play Heaven 17 on hold.

As it happened, Richard had become very ill while we were away at Conference in Brighton, and once he’d recovered just enough to drive us home, I came down with it and was, as my rather too frequent saying goes, much more ill than usual. So things were quite fraught to begin with (and not being able to get online to NHS Direct. Obviously).

Imagine, then, the timbre of our phone conversations when we rang them three times on our first day back, for a total of two and a half hours, including the 45 minutes on hold after which they just hung up and made us go back to the start.

Imagine doing that – ringing them every single day for the next week for between one and three hours – each time having to slowly explain the problem all over again to a new munchkin, and do exactly the same tests because obviously it must be us, and not them… Until they admitted that they’d detected 2361 rejected (by their end) attempts by our correctly programmed (by us) router to connect, not all of them manual but by God it felt like it, and that it was in fact their fault after all.

They just couldn’t identify that fault correctly. Worse, they kept making promises. Here are just a few of them that we made a note of:

• Switch your router off for 65 minutes and it will reset, after which you will be able to connect. No, that was a lie.

• We have reset your details at our end and it will be ready in the morning. No, that was a lie.

• Our faults team has identified the fault and I have actioned a modify order that will apply the fix and have you fully online in exactly 24 hours. No, that was a lie.

• That modify order was incorrect, but I have actioned a new modify order that will have you online in the morning. No, that was a lie.

• It is your fault after all – our faults team has identified that you can’t receive Broadband on your number. In that case, can we have a full refund for all the money we spent on what was therefore imaginary Broadband from you for the past five years? No, because that was a lie.

• We will ring you within 24 hours because I have personally made sure it will be corrected with the faults team and my line manager. No, that was a lie.

• I apologise that you’ve had to ring because we failed to call you back, and I won’t lie to you, I can’t fix it myself because I can see that they’ve been making the change you need on our server and for some reason our server won’t accept it, but I will call our faults team if you will wait on hold for just two minutes. Seventeen minutes later: no, that was yet another lie, probably not best for our blood pressures after using the words “I won’t lie to you”. At least on that particular day we were only on the phone for 47 minutes, because we were weary and fatalistic rather than icily polite in a furious way.

• And, of course, when I staggered out to our local library (which, being a Labour-and-Labour-Splitters Council, randomly blocks most of the sites I read) in a vain attempt to plough through hundreds of emails that were backing up, finding daily “Your broadband service is ready” emails from John Lewis Broadband. No, that was, very demonstrably and supremely aggravatingly, a lie.

At long last, Richard got a short and sheepish phone call to say that they’d found a workaround that involved reversing several things they’d said they’d done and that they’d told us to do from the start, and that it would be working in the morning.

Imagine my genuine gobsmackery when, at long last, on merely the ninth day, this turned out to be the truth.

We’ve now had a connection back for a week, and I’ve caught up with most of the things I wanted to catch up with; it’s remarkable how something as simple as being internetless makes me feel crazed, depressed and as if I’d been exiled to Flatland. And I’m still physically very washed out, but mostly only as ill as normal.

Now I just need to gather my strength for the bills, and to ask, ‘Shouldn’t you be paying me?’

New and Improved Labour

On the bright side, during our week of never-ending phone lies, at least we weren’t at the Labour Party Conference in which they attempted to rebrand themselves as Nineteenth Century Tories. Well, I can see a direct line in my own party and philosophy from the ones who were opposed to the Tories in the Nineteenth Century and are still, despite everything, far less conservative than Labour, so I can’t say I was impressed. Still less that it wasn’t even genuine Disraeli, who despite being an utter shit at least paid lip service to “One Nation” meaning that everyone had to get on: only the hollow marketing exercise that is today’s Labour Party could rebrand as One Nation founded on class war and hating the rich and not spot the contradiction in that.

But what do you expect, with Ed Balls boasting on the Today Programme that thirteen years of disastrous Labour Government left literally no economic problems at all? Or with Ed Miliband calling the Lib Dems “accomplices”, an accusation so ‘brave’ (as Sir Humphrey would say) that it would be a delight to see Mr Miliband’s face when charged as an accomplice to the Labour Government’s illegal war, illegal war crimes, illegal rendition, illegal collusion with Murdoch, and mostly legal but amazingly stupid total financial collapse. Accomplices? Bring it on, Inspector Knacker.

None of which meant there will ever be any chance of me switching to New and Improved Labour.


This morning, to come briefly up to date, I see that the Tories are out to demonstrate that they have not improved, and that they’re still at their old tricks. With the Conservatives having teamed up with Labour to protect the interests of the Tory Nineteenth Century and stop democracy coming to the Lords, the Lib Dems told them they could go fuck themselves over their preferred changes to Parliamentary Boundaries. This morning, it’s reported that the Tories have a brilliant idea to get the Lib Dems to change our minds: no, not actual democracy. That would be madness.

That Tory plan in full: ‘We’ll slip you a few million quid, and you change your vote. Deal?’

That’s not new (and certainly not improved). It’s exactly the way the crooked Tory Government in the Nineties – and the crooked Labour Government in the Noughties – were open for business, but unlike the other two, Lib Dems have never been for sale. If we move an inch on this, I’ll eat my blog.

Labels: Conservatives, Corruption, Customer Service, Labour, Lords, Personal, Technology

Doctor Who’s back on TV in half an hour, and to celebrate, Richard and I have put up our questions and answers about the first of one of Doctor Who’s greatest eras – the New Adventures. So, click here to find out more about Timewyrm: Genesys, and reviews are likely to follow within the next week.

We’re also celebrating the 33rd anniversary this evening of the first broadcast of Destiny of the Daleks, the last story written for the show by Terry Nation and the first script-edited by Douglas Adams. Of course, back in 1979 Doctor Who was very different.

At the end of the previous season-long story arc that threatened time itself with disintegration, the Doctor had randomised the TARDIS’ journeys so that his enemies could never, ever find him in all the infinite Universe – then, starting in Destiny of the Daleks, turned up straight away on the two planets he visits most often. Tonight, in a completely fresh twist, you will remember that at the end of the previous season-long story arc that threatened time itself with disintegration, the Doctor had faked his own death so that his enemies could never, ever find him in all the infinite Universe – and now, starting in Asylum of the Daleks, gets picked up straight away by the enemies he’s run into most often.

Still, at least the plot seems completely different: in 1979, the series was back with a bang in an attempt at a Dalek epic in which they face their greatest threat and have to seek out the one individual in the Universe who can help them, someone who’d tried to destroy the Daleks before and who they, in turn, had tried to exterminate, whereas tonight, er, er…


Later: Of course, where Destiny of the Daleks is different is that the writer, who should have known better, visually established the organic Dalek mutant and then u-turned the Daleks into dumb robots that are easily programmed (and so beaten) en bloc. Thank goodness we didn’t have anything so stupid today.

Labels: Daleks, Doctor Who, Matt Smith, New Adventures, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Tom Baker

Tomorrow sees the publication of Boneland, Alan Garner’s second sequel to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, a novel that puts “long-awaited” into perspective: half a century. Of the many fantasy books I loved as a boy, the Weirdstone perhaps always felt closest to home, and in the last year I’ve found myself rediscovering it – as has our friend Nick, who’s encouraged several of his friends (including author Paul Magrs) to re-read the originals in preparation for tomorrow. He interwove our views last week, including a few of mine, and this is the full stream of consciousness that I sent him. Nick’s is rather a lovely piece – as is his new one returning the favour for our Time’s Champions blog this morning – and Paul Magrs’ thoughts on Atlendor and Durathror’s Capulets and Montagues (or is it Sharks and Jets?) relationship are particularly enlightening. Look out, though; if you’ve not read the Weirdstone, there are spoilers below, even if only about the end itself and not how to get there…

Childhood

I grew up with several fantasy books – first my Dad reading them to us, then reading them for myself – but I think The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was the one that felt most personal. I was born about ten years after it was written, and raised about ten miles from where it was set, in a town at the top of Cheshire or the bottom of Manchester… So more than any other story I knew, this one seemed to have an immediacy, one that was almost familiar, only just out of reach in space and time. There’s something about a lot of adventure stories that grab you as a child, the feeling that it could happen to you, in a place you know – one of the reasons I have a soft spot for little-loved Doctor Who story The Android Invasion is that it felt, watching it, like the sort of village Mum and Dad might drive us to on a Sunday – but this was different. I think we only actually went to the Edge a few times when I was a child, but knowing that it was there, and real, almost close enough to touch, gave this tale a special magic. So many of the stories I loved, even if they were set in our world, seemed distant from us: the mystic fringes of Wales, Scotland or Cornwall; England always somehow meaning ‘South-East England’ on the page or on TV. But no legend was as powerfully evocative as that of King Arthur (greatest of our four great national myths), and to find that he was buried not at the other end of the country somewhere but in our own North West, now, that was marvellous.

For Richard, who I met in London and fell in love with half my life ago and only then found he’d gone to school not much of a walk from my parents’ and grown up almost on the edge of the Edge, the book is even more powerful. As a boy, he’d lived not ten miles away (close, but beyond the travelling power if not the imagination of a child), close to Lindow, not quite in one of those “mean dwellings” that Cadellin disparages but only just up the road. So if it was special to me, it was literally close to home for him – and, building on that strange coincidence into sheer improbability, for the lovely Nick’s other half Jon, who Richard knew as a boy and who Londoner Nick met quite separately long after we had, in turn, become friends.

I read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen many times when I was a boy, and it stayed part of me – instinctively, getting the train up north to see family I always look out for Shuttlingslow as I get towards the end of my journey – but I’d not thought consciously of it for some years, despite having discovered Mr Garner’s Red Shift in a peculiarly vivid way in the early ’90s as a relationship of mine was nearing its end (with his even, improbably, taking me to visit Mow Cop for the only time in my life). Then, in the last year, it’s strange – first I felt the Weirdstone pressing on my mind, with details suddenly flashing back to me, and then almost as if it was intruding insistently into reality. For the first time in decades, I re-read it and its first sequel, The Moon of Gomrath, last September, a little before turning 40, still thrilled.

Then I discovered CDs of both books read by Philip Madoc, always a favourite actor of mine, and gave them to Richard for his birthday early this year. I’d not anticipated just how thrilled he would be, and we listened to them swiftly, enraptured at Madoc’s marvellous voice telling such marvellous tales (and, after a lifetime for each of us pronouncing “Gowther” with a hard ‘th’, changing our minds).

Rediscovery

And then, astonishingly, after so many years, Alan Garner announced that he was writing the third – and not just that, but around Jodrell Bank. Alderley Edge was a magical place from Richard’s childhood; both of us had always admired Jodrell, a marvellous scientific achievement of the area; but even more, over the last couple of decades my Dad’s worked there, deploying his natural charisma in public speaking (something I’ve always had to work at) in enthusing and informing people at the Planetarium. Last month I visited my parents; my Dad had just glimpsed an old gentleman who he thought was Alan Garner being shown around, ready for a big event there on the release of Boneland. I found a picture online: “Oh, yes, that was him.” It was all I could do not to squee. And “Do you know the Wizard?” asked my Mum just last Monday. They’d just been to the Inn for a wedding reception at the weekend, for an old college friend of mine for whom Richard and I had attended a very different dedication ceremony some years ago. So it’s as if the trilogy is closing in around me, slipping through the interstices of folk memory to press on my reality.

I’m hugely excited by the looming Boneland. My one regret is that poor old Philip Madoc passed away this Spring, and will never be able to gift it his marvellous voice.

I’d meant to write about The Weirdstone of Brisingamen itself. I haven’t. I’ve always been one for plot, but somehow this book’s always been most present for me in feelings, in moods and mental images. Just as I felt on the edge of its world, it feels between ours and somewhere else, and not just because of its plot, that like much of the best of Doctor Who it’s not about a great event but on the fringes of it, seeing the knights of one war and preserving them for the next. Think of Selina Place, both something like the Cailleach of legend and a modern woman using the highest technology in the novel – a car – and at the heart of a witch brood that’s also a conspiracy of ordinary blokes you might meet down the pub (or be listening in one as the local gossip gives you away). Think of Gowther and Bess, earthy, reassuring, thoroughly normal… But, into the ’60s, almost the last time you can imagine it in ordinary life (I can just, just remember a rag and bone man calling at our road when I was very small), still driving a horse and cart, as if for all their ordinariness they’re half in a time of legend and not awake to the fact.

And the moods and images are because the story deliberately takes you into fears and places that a child could or would get into, of course. The cause of a Wizard’s sorrow may impress itself into ordinary people naming it a “Tear,” and the hooded one in his mist may be right out of a horror film and a pleasurable thrill of fear – with what’s under the hood always staying with you as worse than all the horrors you imagined, because you imagine your own – but it’s the fears of things that could get you playing out in the woods, or the mud, or in caves, even under skies of birds, that strike at the familiar and make your own life feel claustrophobic. Though almost everyone feels utterly claustrophobic after Plankshaft. Throughout my childhood, I loved, but also somehow felt threatened by, winding my way through tiny caves and passages. I’ve been a fat man for a long time, but I was a very thin and gawky boy, and I found a strange satisfaction in twisting my way through places that I couldn’t really twist through. I still have vivid memories of trying to get around a ‘chimney’ in an educational museum that I was really too tall for, or my parents wearily calling me to give up as I forced myself around tiny, chilly cracks between caves in the Peak District. I suspect all that, both fun and fearful, something I enjoyed but dreaded, was a child’s way of dealing with that extraordinarily long, unforgiving account of Colin trying to make it through the dwarves’ improbably horrible tunnels Where no Svart will ever tread.

Coming back to the book as an adult, many of the people and images are still as powerful as ever – putting your trust in Cadellin, being unable to forget being part of his world, the black and terrible storm of the climax as the Morthbrood fly from something greater that we only have a whisper of. I can also feel things to kick against, and wonder if I’m meant to, torn between agreeing with the condemnation both spoken and metaphorical of pollution, and thinking that if elves and dwarves shut us off from magic and then slag us off when we find other ways to live, aren’t they just insufferably up themselves (oh, just wait ’til the sequel)? And the most distinctive, most jarring thing structurally about Alan Garner’s writing, that you’ll find here and throughout his early children’s books: where you might expect a moment to catch your breath after the climax, a coda, some resolution that takes in the aftermath of the grand adventure and adjusting back to our world, for both the children taking part and the children reading… None of that. Every time, within a few short lines of the big finish, the book simply stops – the wrath of Nastrond is coming, it’s coming, it’s nearly here… Firefrost withstands it, it blows itself out, and seventy words later all the bodies have been swirled away,

“And this tale is called the Weirdstone of Brisingamen. And here is an end of it.”

I’ve never known if that abruptness was a deliberate choice, an unpolished craft before books on storytelling structure abounded, or a sign of an author exhausting himself. To me, such Garner books feel like they finish before their time, almost a slap in the face, yet it’s that very incompleteness – a sense of certainty about the big things, and merciless uncertainty about everything else going back into ordinary life – that’s a strangely powerful signature, telling us that, no, people don’t live happily ever after, or if they do, it’s no business of ours, and not easy to find out. The end of the book, like Colin and Susan being separated from the magic, feels like loss rather than comfort in victory. And if anything I’ve heard about Boneland is true, it sounds like Colin’s felt as unresolved for several decades as the readers.

Labels: Alan Garner, Books, Fantasy, King Arthur, Personal, Philip Madoc, Richard, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen

After two decades in limbo, Dallas’ new series will get its UK premiere a week tonight, in what is surely the third-most-anticipated return of the next week, and probably achieve the impossible – get people watching Channel 5. Tonight, John Barrowman meets the cast for an exciting advertising feature; the trailer gives the best line, of course, to J.R.; and now seems the moment to confess that I’ve been watching the old series on the even more obscure channel CBS Drama, where it’s now back in 1986-7 and in the middle of the supersoap’s most turbulent, improbable and infamous stretch.

Dallas’ most famous moment? The end-of-season cliffhanger: who shot J.R.?

Dallas’ most infamous moment? The end-of-season cliffhanger: how showers Bobby?

Famously, Patrick Duffy having decided to leave the series and insisting on Bobby Ewing being killed off in front of so many witnesses that he couldn’t possibly be brought back, ratings dived for the following season… So they brought him back. In that most disappointing of all narrative devices, ‘It was all a dream’ (don’t tell Mr Moffat). So it’s generally said that the series has a problem with its ‘Dream Season’, which everyone now has to ignore. The problem for me is that the season that never was was rather more fun than those either side… And that it’s really all three of those seasons that look shaky as a result. Never mind Bobby; two years earlier, his mother Miss Ellie went on honeymoon with Clayton at the end of the season, and came back a new woman. For the dream season, the gaping void of a screen presence that was Donna Reed vanished with as little explanation as she came, with Barbara Bel Geddes returning to the role that rarely gave her any decent lines or character beyond looking a bit forlorn, but that at least she managed to give a bit of oomph to. So was that all a dream, too?

With CBS Drama currently about half-way through the series’ tenth season, the one that started with the morning after, it’s clear that you can’t just go right back and pretend a season never happened. You’d have to assume viewers remember where every plot had got to and then make each of them go in a different direction so as still to be a surprise, and to undo a year of characterisation, in itself more jarring to many viewers than the plotting. So what we get is an uneasy mix that picks up some strands, drops others and generally ties itself in knots.

A Dream To Some…

The 1986-7 season’s first episode a couple of weeks ago had a big job to do, and was in its way one of the funniest pieces of television of the ’80s, as everyone but Bobby (who wasn’t in it) and Pam (who, waking to find her year-dead lover in the shower, dreamt it all) struggled not to mention anything about the previous year, while the writers threw in masses of exposition and randomly chose which plotlines to carry on with or go back to. So, to match his brother Bobby in the shower, we first see J.R. naked in bed with Mandy explaining at length how Sue Ellen is back to being a hostile drunk he wants rid of and not the love of his life she was last time anyone tuned in, as you know, mistress of mine; cousin Jack and J.R. share exposition about how Jack owns 10% of Ewing Oil and he’s not evolved into being a part of the family that J.R.’s gone through hell and several assassination attempts with, just a con-man; but Bobby’s ex Jenna, having slowly deteriorated over a full year from capable, independent woman into helpless hysteric, now manages to take exactly the same fall in approximately three minutes to get her to where audiences expect her to be. Pam, on the other hand, was a bit stronger than usual the previous year, but has now instantly turned into blancmange who can only say “Oh, Bobby!” in tearful soft focus (that’s nothing to how ‘Pam’ will be at the beginning of the next season, in the series’ most breathtakingly out-of-character plotline). Other cousin Jamie, on the other hand, is back to being the one despicable turd Cliff only married for two-thirds of Ewing Oil and now finds is the only Ewing without any of it, so he’s putting her down at every opportunity. More of that story later.

Three lines stood out for me.

While Pam is gushing and crying about her horrible nightmare in the first scene (“And there was so much more! It seemed so real!”), wet Bobby – who may be just out of the shower, but is far, far less wet than his fully-clothed fiancée – holds her at manly arms’-length, looks compellingly into her eyes (which is the only reason he’s not holding the camera at manly arms’-length and looking compellingly into our eyes, possibly with a wink), and says, with the heaviest emphasis on every word of a sentence ever uttered by an actor:

“None of that happened.”

J.R., having been told by Bobby that he’s remarrying Pam:

“You are the dumbest brother any man could ever have.”
[Pause, considers]
“Aside from Gary and Ray, of course.”

And Pam, in her own little palace, having been railroaded by Bobby telling everyone she’ll live at Southfork, and even her ugly little son Damien Christopher asking excitedly if they can, because he can play with John Ross and the horses and it’s got so much… Victoria Principal, bless her, having talked a few minutes before about the reactions of Bobby’s brother J.R., who hates her, and her brother Cliff, who hates all Ewings, manages to put a lot of meaning into one line, as she answers her son:

“Yes,” she says. “It has everything.”

The Biggest Losers (apart from the viewers)

The biggest immediate change for me was in the feel of the characters and their relationships; while the writers did their best to have Jenna disintegrate on cue, they don’t seem to have thought so clearly about everyone else. With most couples by the end of the previous season having grown together as characters as far as soap couples ever do, all they could do was mark a right turn on each of them by everyone instead getting nasty with each other.

The second-biggest loser, character-wise, is Pam, who it’s difficult to take seriously when one potential husband had improbably returned from the dead only for her to wake up and find it was the other one who’d done it. This leaves the dangling plot of two years’ earlier – that terminally ill fiancé Mark Graison might not in fact have killed himself in an air crash in massively ambiguous and bodiless circumstances, particularly with mysterious people obstructing Pam’s search for him in sinister-but-compassionate ways – forever dangling, and only minutes of screen time after they had for once ponied up for a Southfork wedding rather than it happening, as was the usual custom, between ad breaks, with the minister blessing the happy couple, ‘I now pronounce you moustache, and beard’.

The biggest loser as a character is J.R., who in his brother and rival’s absence had had to become a more rounded individual than the clichéd pantomime villain, however enjoyable; his meanness and petulance in the first episode post-Dream came across as a real let-down after he’d really stretched his impressive acting chops in depth the previous year, despite Larry Hagman as a person being far happier with his friend to spark off against than in carrying the series on his own. One scene since, at least, has stayed with me as evidence other than merely Larry Hagman’s charisma vs Ken Kercheval’s weaseldom that J.R. is a better man (rather than just a better operator) than Cliff Barnes; in one of last week’s episodes, two scenes following close on each other showed both Cliff and J.R. being whining sexists to their estranged wives. Except that when Jamie was clearly proved right, Cliff doubled down as an objectionable jerk. But when Sue Ellen revealed that she was in fact a devious Machiavellian and business genius rolled into one, the person behind a long-laid plot that both despatched J.R.’s mistress (and Mandy being by far the most memorable of those, to boot) to Singapore and made a ton of money… For a few seconds, Hagman looked mean, and sullen, and angry. Then he gave a slight smile and, for the first time all season, quietly congratulated her as being quite brilliant. Then absolutely beamed, simply appreciating her achievement. He’s had too few moments like that since his brother and rival got better from death. Linda Gray really shone, too.

In the meantime, I became suddenly very aware of this season’s main plot arcs and coming mad guest star with bomb – I’m only surprised they didn’t get Barbara Carrera back to play the psychotic mercenary. Or have her as Jock, and Steve Forrest’s Ben Stivers Wes Parmalee as the villain. I miss her – she was so much fun last year, making such a little Fatima Blush go such a very long way, in costumes by TRAVILLA (probably Travis in huge red shoulderpads and a diamanté eyepatch). Anyway, at that point we’d not met this year’s loony yet, to be played as you’ll know if you’ve been watching since by an actor who rejoices in the name “Hunter Von Leer”, but everyone’s talking about how low the price of oil is, and how it’s all OPEC’s fault. Tedious tosser Cliff has been saying how there’s nothing anyone can do about it; Jamie has a brilliant idea; Cliff pours scorn on her as an idiot who knows nothing; Cliff then nicks the idea and has a big press conference with the Cartel. And this brilliant concept, that nobody says ‘Hang on…’ about? Protectionism. She wants all the Texas oil businesses to get the US government to put tariffs on foreign oil so that they can sell at the price they want and not be undercut. How clever! To which no-one, oddly, says, ‘But won’t that mean counter-tariffs that will hurt our trade back the other way, and surely Congress isn’t going to vote to massively increase the pump price for the gas-guzzling ordinary American anyway just so the oil barons can rip them off some more?’

J.R. stands at the back and says what a stupid idea it is, but only because it’s come from Cliff, before finding someone competent to run it instead (and, coincidentally, to get them out of his hair). Shame. I’d have liked him to say some of the above, because he’s meant to be the bright one. But no, it was merely because a/ it was Cliff's (nicked), and b/ do you think he might have some slightly more direct action in mind that could go disastrously wrong?

Back From the Dead – Haven’t We Already Done This (in two ways)?

And the final arc plot to be crippled by the missing season involved… A much-loved member of the Ewing family returning from the dead. I wonder why they eventually decided people might not swallow it? You get the feeling they only decided to bring Bobby back at the very last minute, as only in the last couple of episodes of the Dream Season were we introduced to rugged old oil-and-cattleman Ben Stivers, played by grey-white-haired Steve Forrest, who everyone is strangely drawn to but who hides an enigmatic secret (or does he?). Pam may be wetter than a very wet thing, but she has at least gained psychic powers: for into this completely different and not-dreamed season comes rugged old oil-and-cattleman Wes Parmalee, played by grey-brown-haired Steve Forrest (no relation), who everyone is strangely drawn to but who hides an enigmatic secret (or does he?). Well, if you’ve been watching, you’ll have found out that he doesn’t, but several of the conflicting reports of what the writers had been planning suggest he really was going to turn out to be the long-lost and heavily plastic-surgeried Ewing patriarch who was not in fact killed in an air crash in massively ambiguous and bodiless circumstances some years earlier. His storyline has been chuntering along for a dozen episodes or more, making it increasingly likely that he was Jock (and with Forrest’s gravelly timbre and manner at times capturing something eerie of Jim Davis, even if his slighter frame never did)… And then, suddenly, it stopped, with a tedious three episodes of exposition afterwards proving that, in fact, the only thing less credible than having someone suddenly return from the dead with minimal explanation is having him suddenly turn out not to have done. Every awkward exposition piled on makes it seem increasingly and incredibly unlikely that he’d ever have been able to pull it off in the first place (he just happened to be there and taking notes while Jock told him his life story in a fever! And so on through all the uncanny physical similarities) and more unlikely still that he’d have thrown it all away.

I suppose we were at least spared Donna Reid crying out in torment to Steve Forrest, ‘But you don’t look like Jock!’

Sue Ellen Predicts New Dallas

One other scene stays with me eerily from early on in this season. With Pam and Bobby remarried and Christopher back at Southfork too, naturally by this week’s episodes J.R.’s son John Ross was beating up the smaller kid. While viewers across the land reeled at how such ugly children could ever grow up to be such buff adults (they crashed into Desperate Housewives and had plastic surgery), Pam became massively overprotective and accused John Ross of becoming just like his father. Later, Christopher asks Bobby if he can teach him how to use a gun. Now, that’s more like J.R. (are we quite sure the abandoned plotline in which Christopher was J.R.’s son as well – no, I won’t go into it, things are complicated enough – truly expired?). But Bambi-eyed Pam’s bouncing from insane optimism to molly-coddling could never compare to Sue Ellen, whose own psychic powers came to the fore a fortnight earlier. That scene had Sue Ellen pouring cold vodka on Pam’s plan to remarry in lines that should surely make the trailers for the new series:

“You’re even moving back to Southfork!”
“Christopher can hardly wait. You know, he and John Ross are going to be great friends.”
“Another generation of Ewing boys. What a picture. Maybe the oil industry will be just a memory by the time they grow up – there won’t be any competition. Miss? Would you bring me another, please?”

Labels: Dallas, Reviews, Soaps, Tax

Something exciting came out of that Olympics closing ceremony after all! Kate Bush re-recorded her second-biggest hit for the event and, astonishingly, Running Up That Hill shot up the charts to become her fifth-biggest hit as well, zooming in at Number Six, with lower but still improbable chart placings for the likes of the Who’s Baba O’Riley, the Kinks, ELO and Annie Lennox Vs Cthulhu (all discovered last week while laid up with painfully inflamed ligaments in my left ankle, a change from the occasional tendonitis: running up that hill? If I only could). But what’s the song about? Well…

All right, so she’s now running down the charts again this week, but it still seems miraculous that a twenty-seven-year-old song from Kate should suddenly be a smash all over again. And, this time, making a point of subtitling it “A Deal With God,” the original title refused by the record company for fear of airplay-death back in the ’80s, when it was the lead single from what turned out to be Kate’s most critically and commercially successful album, Hounds of Love.

Hounds of Love

Now, I have to admit that Hounds of Love isn’t quite my favourite Kate Bush album – I’d put The Sensual World ahead of it – and nor is Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) my favourite single from that album – I’d put Hounds of Love itself above it. All right, so Hounds of Love is a less complex, less ambiguous track, but its melodrama always thrills me, and between Kate’s famous two ’80s Doctor Who TV scripts and all her New Adventures it has more than a little Doctor Who feel, too – quoting from an old horror film, not entirely convincing monsters out to get you and an awful lot of running. Listening to her more recent work, I do wonder if Kate’s a particular Troughton fan, doing the Yeti with King of the Mountain and Wild Man, and on her Fish People label, to boot. But that’s another story. And Running Up That Hill is still a terrific, and a very powerful song.

Another minor miracle is that Kate’s new vocal on her remixed Running Up That Hill is a change from but if anything more gripping than the original; I’ve been a bit disappointed with most of her recent Director’s Cut revisitings of old songs, feeling they lack the power and excitement of the previous versions – and, heretically, I’d have said that the harsh, bombastic, very ’80s production on the Hounds of Love might have stood more revisiting than the more inviting sound of The Sensual World (though I don’t know how she’d unpick any of her Arthurian odyssey The Ninth Wave, a continuous piece making up the whole second half and a tour-de-force, much like her later Aerial’s A Sky of Honey).

Ironically, Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) may have had so many requests from people who weren’t born when it first charted and become a hit all over again because its powerful beat and chorus sounds like it symbolises the Olympics. I say ironically, because such a prosaic explanation runs against arguably Kate’s most layered and ambiguous lyrics for one of her hits.

Deeper Understanding… Yeah, Right

On the surface, it might sound like it’s about athletics – and it might be, of a sort – but Kate’s previously said when pressed for an explanation that it’s about a wish for a woman and a man in a relationship to reach greater understanding by literally changing places, and that she went for a deal with God rather than the traditional deal with the Devil because, obviously, that would be more powerful. So the meaning presented at the time, to ward off music-burners outraged at the mention of God, was a tender prayer for a more perfect union between a man and a woman. What could possibly be more praiseworthy for lovers of traditional values?

And yet… Some of the words may say that, but the music doesn’t. I’ve read people saying it’s an even more tender wish for a partner, that the “bullet” is about taking on his pain, a song of self-sacrifice. But it doesn’t sound like, say, Deeper Understanding or This Woman’s Work. This isn’t Kate in her tender, frail achingly beautiful mood; this is Kate sounding raw and powerful, and all the more so for not being as fabulously bonkers as she often seems in that style (though bonking may come into it). No – this isn’t a love song, but a march. Listen to those drums, banging away; watch the video, where Kate and a male dancer writhe hip to hip while miming shooting a bow and arrow. If the meaning’s what Kate said it is, then read between the lines and listen to the music: it’s Kate saying ‘How would it feel for me to fuck you for a change?’

“Come on, angel, come on, come on, darling,
“Let’s exchange the experience, oh…”

That’s the less ambitious version. But with Kate being so insistent that she wanted it called A Deal With God, and the ambiguity of some of the lyrics, on top of the pounding music…? This is about power. And it’s not just saying, ‘If I were a man, I’d make so much more use of that power than he would,’ though the physicality of the lyrics might well stand in for other goals. No, to me some of it suggests that Kate merely wanting to take a man’s place would be a chronic lack of ambition. You can read the chorus more than one way – is the “our” referring to an ‘us’ of Kate and her partner, or just Kate and the Almighty? It’s always sounded to me that Kate’s fed up with the lack of ambition on a cosmic scale, and if she only could, would swap places with God.

“And if I only could,
“I’d make a deal with God,
“And I’d get him to swap our places…”

But it’s probably about shagging.

Labels: Doctor Who, Kate Bush, Music, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Olympics, Patrick Troughton, Religion, Reviews, Running Up That Hill, Sex

Yesterday afternoon our router decided it would compete with me for conking out in the heat, so aside from a few minutes this morning this is my first internet access for 24 hours (it’s like a desert, honestly). So here’s a piece of quick news I hope I can get up in time before it rolls over with its tongue in the air again…


Exclusive photos of the bonus shopping frenzy that the Olympics has brought to Central London!


You can tune in to the radio version of the documentary from which these pictures originate at 6.30 and 12.30 each evening on Radio 4 Extra.

In other news, while I don’t do sport, and I don’t do jingoism, long-term readers will know there’s one team I do root for – and another I cheer every time they get smashed. So go Team Beeb, and hurrah for the Olympics giving ITV their worst day ever!

Labels: John Wyndham, London, Olympics, Pictures, Triffids

This week (part of a fortnight of holiday indulgence), I ate for the first time in a Stockport hostelry I’ve been aware of all my life but, I’d thought, never crossed the door of before. And it turns out that the reason behind my always having looked askance at the Bamford Arms is the one time I’d previously gone in and been thrown out… Long before I could remember it. My Mum has a longer and sharper memory, but thirty-nine years and several changes of management later, she’s rescinded her boycott and took my niece and me for dinner there.

The Bamford Arms now has quite a pleasant restaurant. The tomato and courgette soup was thick and tasty (if a bit too much basil), the garlic bread vibrant and crunchy, the steaks and sauce fine, with plenty of chips. A very friendly woman took our orders, offered little Caitlin things to play with while she went for the world title in the slowest-ever ice cream-eating stakes, and generally looked after us. She even put aside the photos Mum left behind and the fairy Caitlin left behind and instantly went to the drawer when she saw me come back for them (though when, suggesting that the family was under a bit of a curse that afternoon, I in turn managed to drop Caitlin’s fairy outside, not notice until I came to give it to her, and have to go back for it again, she didn’t appear like a fairy godmother with it in her hand and I had to look up and down Nangreave Road for it, so clearly her magic powers are limited to within the pub).

So I won’t criticise the Bamford Arms of 2012. The inn of four decades ago, though, is a different matter. I was mildly surprised when Mum suggested we go there, having a vague idea that there was something wrong with the place, but I wasn’t sure why. However, Mum said she’d gone there with friends and it was fine – and it was. I don’t know if she sensed my mild scepticism before or mild surprise afterwards, or just wanted to pass on some up-to-the-minute gossip, but after we left I was treated to just why we spent many years never going there and passing by with a cold stare and a disparaging word.

Back when I was thirteen months old, my Nana and Grandad came down to stay for a couple of weeks while my brother Rory (who long since insisted on Richard and then re-shortened to Rick, much as I shed Sandy in favour of Alexander and then Alex) was born. The day our grandparents were due to drive home, Mum booked a dinner for us all minus new baby at the Bamford Arms, which had been recommended, taking care when she phoned to make sure it was all right to bring my pushchair. So Dad drove all five of us to the Bamford, Mum wheeled me out… And a horrified manager stopped her as I trundled over the threshold.

“You can’t bring that in here!”
“What do you mean? I rang to book and asked specifically. We were told it was all right.”
“Who did you speak to? That’s not our policy.”
“Well, I don’t know her name, but I asked if it was all right to bring a pushchair, and I was told ‘Yes’.”
“Ah, that explains it. You can have the pushchair in here. But we don’t allow the baby.”

And that’s why I didn’t go back in there for nearly forty years, having been barred from a pub at a far younger age than everyone else manages it.

Still, I’ve forgiven them now. But while I’ve not been able to blog while away with very limited internet access first in North Yorkshire and then at my parents’, and must soon work out just how much fatter I am as a result of rather more meals out than just the Bamford, I have to tell you that, shh, while they were all right, they’re not a patch on the Whitestonecliffe Inn, which is an excellent inn and restaurant and serves the finest pâté known to humanity. So it’s a good job that, at 90-odd miles apart, they’re not really in competition or the baby-banning bastards would lose (did I just say that out loud?).

Labels: Food, Personal

Last weekend, the BBC’s new Shakespeare series The Hollow Crown was given a fanfare on the cover of the Radio Times. This weekend, it was given a raspberry as a Sixteenth Century fictionalisation of Fifteenth Century history was sabotaged by Twenty-first Century programming, weather and sport. When these days all you should need to record a TV show is to select its Electronic Programme Guide entry and let your digital device activate on broadcast, the BBC managed to mess up both broadcast and EPG, leaving recordings across the nation as less Henry IV, Part 1 than Henry IV, Part 0.5.

Regular readers may be aware that I’m not exactly a fan of sport. However, I do understand that live sport will occasionally run over time and delay other programmes. In the olden days, when people were out they had to set their own video recorders and hope that the TV schedules advertised might bear some relationship to reality. In theory, these days the channel’s programmers can update the EPG for a delayed programme and everyone’s digital recorders will simply act on the new information.

This requires, as do all computers for the information you get out of them, that the people putting in the information aren’t completely incompetent.

A Dumb Box and Dumber at the BBC

There are many different varieties of digital recorder, so I won’t claim to speak for them all, but ours is fairly standard: it’s a dumb box that assumes its users are dumber, so there’s no manual override. In theory, this is to prevent someone setting a recording going, forgetting about it, and using up all the memory in one great lump. In practice, when TV stations are rarely known for sticking to the precise minute of their schedules, this would usually mean missing the end or the beginning of programmes, as almost all start a minute or two early or finish a minute or two late. There’s no option to press a button that says, ‘Keep recording until I stop, you bastard!’

To correct this obvious problem, the manufacturers do allow you to change the default setting on the machine so as to top and tail your timer recordings with a few extra minutes (ours is set to start three minutes ahead and finish five after; sadly, you can’t set it by channel so that the BBC gets the full five at the end for running over time, while channels carrying advertising finish on time so most recordings don’t end in an extended ten minutes of ads and unwanted programming). But this only applies to shows you’ve checked by EPG in advance; if you simply press “Record” for something going out live, it will stop recording the very second that the EPG (that again) says it’s scheduled to finish, and no amount of swearing at it will extend that.

Last Night’s Stopping and Starting

I tuned in a few minutes before 9 last night to catch BBC2’s broadcast of Henry IV, Part 1. Or not, as they were still showing Wimbledon. Richard was away; I was meant to be, but not well enough; fortunately, this meant I could at least stop our EPG recording from saving us the tennis. So it clicked on at 8.57, and I switched it off, and waited. Within a few minutes, the EPG had changed to indicate a start time for the play of 9.15. So I selected the new EPG, and our machine started again at 9.12. It was still tennis. I stopped it again. Within another few minutes, the EPG had changed again to start Henry at 9.30. By this time, people who claim that live sport needs special treatment were losing the argument: the simultaneous broadcast on BBC2 and BBCHD was showing a mixture of interminable post-game sports babble, bits of game in daylight (and so clearly not live, unless the Isle of Dogs has suddenly switched to a different time zone from Wimbledon) and even minutes-long shots of the stadium in darkness from high above, cars driving away from it. Yet 9.27 and then 9.30 passed, still with no move to the scheduled programme.

By 9.35, the EPG had updated yet again to suggest a start time of 10pm. So I reset my digital recorder yet again… But noticed something was wrong. Henry IV, Part 1 was scheduled to show from 9pm to 10.55; on the first new EPG, all the programme times for the rest of the night were put back by 15 minutes; on the second, by half an hour; but this time, although the start time had been altered to encompass the hour’s delay, the BBC munchkins setting the EPG hadn’t altered the end time, with the next programme claimed to be starting at the original 10.55. Even though this couldn’t possibly be true, unless they were going to play the two-hour Shakespeare at double speed.

So I spent the next quarter-hour on hold with the automatic voices at the BBC, which eventually auto-hung up on me ironically mid-way through telling me for the 463rd that my call was important to them. Because I could see what was coming, even if the people who were paid to couldn’t.

You see, if you set a recording by EPG, then it starts when the EPG tells it to, and finishes when that EPG tells it to. If the EPG changes later, it’s too late – the machine’s had its instructions. So when the EPG changed a few minutes after 9, for anyone who’d set in advance and their machines had started recording at the proper time, it was too late. And the same for when it changed at about 9.20, and then 9.35. Had the people paid to programme the EPGs changed them in advance of the due time, even by a few minutes when it was bleeding obvious that they needed changing, then recorders would have sat patiently waiting for the live EPGs to tell them to start.

And if they’d bothered to put the correct end time for the eventual 10pm showing before about quarter past ten, by which time it was of no earthly use, my recording wouldn’t had stopped on the dot of 11pm, as I’d predicted it would an hour and a half earlier but the incompetents at the BBC hadn’t.

So, despite trying not to watch the play because I was hoping to wait and watch it with Richard, I had to watch half-way through for the moment when it stopped part-way into Henry telling off Hal. Then look again at 11.55 because, of course, it finished 3 minutes late on top of all the other lateness, which meant that the manual recording I’d had to start of the second half had neatly stopped, again, at precisely the moment the EPG said it was due to stop, half-way through Falstaff’s soliloquy. Splitting the play into three separate recordings, all because the EPG programmers didn’t do their jobs properly.

Richard is now home, and we’re now watching the hastily-arranged repeat on BBC4. It was announced immediately after the chopped-about first broadcast. The EPG wasn’t updated until today, of course, so you couldn’t set up for it right then.

Some might say that you can watch these things on the iPlayer. Well, yes, but if I’m going to spend two hours watching something, I’d rather do it on my big screen with no blurring and no buffering, and that’s what EPG recordings are meant to be for. And if you wanted to watch The Hollow Crown in HD, you’re stuffed. If you’re very, very lucky, the BBC might eventually release it on Blu-Ray – but, irritatingly, despite now making so many programmes in high definition, and ‘protecting’ them from copying with signals that mean you can’t back most of them up, those programmes they do release are usually just on DVD and not Blu-Ray. So, congratulations again, BBC, for making programmes in HD and then going to such lengths to prevent people watching them or keeping them that way.

And if you think that’s a rant, you should have heard me last night. Patrick Troughton used to say he didn’t do theatre because it was just “Shouting in the evenings” – I think our neighbours might agree.

After all that, the infamous ‘tennis as insult’ scene in The Hollow Crown’s finale Henry V in a fortnight is going to see almost bitterly satirical.

Labels: BBC, Patrick Troughton, Shakespeare, Technology, Theatre