On slow news days, every couple of months or so, you’ll see a story about some out-in-the-sticks town attempting to bolster up its fragile economy by printing its own currency. The theory goes that, by circulating this quasi-cash in the stores of – let’s say, Oswestry, – the town supports itself, and keeps nasty Big Industry out.
But when does this understandable small town support bubble over into a nasty stranglehold?
When it moves to Liverpool. Continue reading
Caution: does not contain ranting
It’s all gone horribly wrong.
I started this blog almost exactly a year ago today. A hundred entries later and I could see the way things were heading. And it wasn’t pretty. I started off, dewy of cheek and pert of ambition – a little review here, a wise askance architectural critique there (who am I kidding?). But soon, the furies set in. Every third day, like some particularly bloodthirsty character in an Icelandic saga, I’d have to spear a little (atomic) kitten or race across the lava flow, astride my trusty steed, to impale a Wag Troll.
Yes. I’d turned into one of those bloggers. And, frankly, I felt dirty. Continue reading
hey, la, you got a bit of beak on yer beak
Those semi-naked Hollister greeters in Liverpool One – you think they’re just a cynical marketing ploy? Think again. They’re simply following Liverpool’s ever more excessive dress codes to the letter. Or, the dress codes from Igloo – another nail in the coffin of the Concert Square/Ropewalks area: once, the most laid-back and welcoming drinking zone in the city, now, sadly, radiating shit outwards in ever increasing circles.
Igloo sits where Chaya used to be, and that, in turn, replaced the original tenants – The Tea Factory. Back in 2002, The Tea Factory (named after the old Mantunna Tea warehouse) was a decent watering hole, complete with huge infographic displaying the world’s tea-trading routes, painted on the wall.
I don’t there’s any infographics on the wall there now. The dress-code takes up too much space. Continue reading
are you sure that was Johnson's Baby Powder, Jemima?
This summer, every country park, every corner of a farmer’s field not propped up by EU subsidies or GM Rape seed is hosting a music festival. Or, as they’ve become known, the Howard Jones pension fund road show.
Of course, there was a time when going to a music festival was an act of rebellion – a statement that you stood firmly outside of society. Preferably in a trench in Gloucestershire, listening to Golden Earring.
Music, these days, is a lifestyle. A pleasant background soundtrack to a long weekend en famille. It’s Centre Parcs for those who get claustrophobic in a water chute. Haven Holidays with Scouting For Girls as the house band (actually, give it a few years…). Continue reading
all the news that's not fit to print
The postman’s just been. And I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.
With a red mist still obscuring my vision, I contacted the BBC Complaints Department last month.
I’d sat through Kelvin MacKenzie calling John Venables “a psycho who’s committed another sex attack” on News 24 (I know Sky News likes to be so ahead of the rest its editorial policy is ‘splash with it now, clean it up later’, but I didn’t expect one of Murdoch’s henchmen to be allowed to turn allegations into fact, live on the BBC’s lunchtime bulletin).
It was when MacKenzie said “the people of Liverpool are still deeply upset about this incident” that I picked up the phone. Continue reading
won by a short head?
It’s not just Heinz who should be boasting about their 57 varieties. Aintree, for all its clever media assaults, is really missing a trick. In the past 20 years, they’ve pulled off an even more impressive feat – by finding 57 ways to kill horses.
Oh yeah, ultimately, they all get shot. But it’s the twists and turns (usually of necks and legs) along the way that really marks our illustrious race meeting out as the most inventive horse-dispatching destination this side of a glue factory in Murmansk. Continue reading
Calm down dear, it's only a model
Just before he became the foursquare mayor of the Second World War (let’s face it, he’s revisited it that often), Stephen Spielberg admitted: ‘Jaws couldn’t be made now. The audience wouldn’t wait that long to see the shark.”
He’s right.
Within ten minutes, focus groups would be demanding a CGI Great White (probably in 3D) skullpunching the teeth out of a hapless cheerleader on waterskis.
Goodbye narrative arc and charater-driven ennui, and hello gratuitous shark porn. Continue reading
...if my calculations are correct...
People who (unlike me) have made it past the “Big Bang” chapter of A Brief History of Time tell me that, way into the future, we’re heading for a Big Crunch
I’ve got news for them. It’s already happening.
I’m not talking about the moment the Universe will contract in on itself, like some cosmic Rosemary Conley hip and thigh diet.
No. I’m talking of a sinister foreshadowing down here on Earth. Like that moment in a Keanu Reeves disaster movie when he notices a little blip on a seismic read-out and his friends in Government tell him that, if he wants to avoid snarl-ups on the turnpike and panic buying of Wonderbread, he should shut the flip up.
Continue reading
...or perhaps none of the above
The BBC is not short of money.
I knew a producer for one of its national radio stations, a high ranking chap. Every year, would take his latest girlfriend to the Monaco Grand Prix. They’d stay the weekend, in a lovely hotel overlooking the course, all on expenses. No one questioned it. If they did, she was a production assistant. And no-one really knew how many of them there were, so it was an easy, er, blag.
These days, they’re not quite as subtle.
They’re currently hawking A Question of Sport around the enormodomes of the UK, to rake in more cash for a project that we paid for. Do we get a cut from their profits for all this real-world commercialism they dabble in at our expense?
Imagine if, say, politicians made hay with the public purse. Imagine what Jeremy Vine’s listeners would have to say about that? Oh, we already know…
So it strikes me as odd that the BBC have gotten away with not having to release the salaries it pays its ‘talent’ (you know, Chris Moyles, Chris Evans and, er, Anne Robinson).
Commercially sensitive, they say.
Dear Auntie Beeb, I’ll tell you what’s commercially sensitive. When you make forays into an already beleaguered publishing world, buy Lonely Planet guides, and release magazines in direct competition with ‘traditional’ publishers (including, oh yes, Lonely Planet Magazine) and Focus (now just an excuse to publicize any vaguely science-related BBC programme within its lackluster pages). That’s commercially sensitive. But they seem to turn a blind eye to that.
Of course, no one minds a company hell bent on making money.
It’s how they spend it that counts.
And when it makes decisions like today’s (to axe 6music and Asian Network) you have to wonder – has it lost sight of its remit?
When ITV made a move to reduce its news output, the BBC were up in arms. No no no, it said – that’s sooo not fair. Why should we be saddled with the boring news?
I’d argue that the BBC has the same duties when it comes to the provision of music, too. Music for everyone.
With Radio 1′s unseemly fall from grace into its present sub-Nuts/Zoo Radio station, and Radio 2 marrying U2 in a civil ceremony on the roof of Broadcasting House last year, 6Music was the only station to promote new bands, play decent alternative rock and pop, and transmit the thousands of hours’ worth of live recording gems they’ve amassed from their Maida Vale studios.
Other radio stations would die for the chance of airing this stuff.
But, hell-bent on pushing DAB (and, of course, the wrong kind of DAB with appalling audio quality and a shit bit rate. Still, that’s what you get when you employ a marketeer (Simon Nelson) to run the stations, rather than someone who knows anything about technical stuff. Like audio quality) they restricted 6music to the few thousand of us tuning in online or on our Pure Evokes.
Now, answer me this. Is that the best way to launch a new music station that has the potential to reach every music fan in the country between the age of 25-45? not currently served by the playlist-centric 1 and 2.
6Music was a public affirmation that, despite all the Simply Come Dancing, Andrew Lloyd Weber Musical Promoting, R’n'B mulch-deifying aural arse it pumped out, the BBC still understood - and supported – exciting new music.
Now we’re left with Moyles.
Still, at least it’s getting its house in order. It’s currently £100 million pounds over budget for its new Broadcasting House extension in London, and is creating Salford’s gleaming Media City.
Oh yeah, that.
Here, rising from the quays, will be the new home of Tony Livesey’s new 5Live show.
Yeah, that’s worth every penny.
Broadband connection lost
Before you reach the oldest village in Europe – at Skara Brae, in Orkney – you have to travel back in time. From the visitor centre, out across the tussocky grass, there’s a waymarked route, punctuated with milestones, taking you on a history lesson back to the beginnings of society. I imagine it’s to help build suspense across what is, actually, quite a bleak, wind-scorched promontery.
“1969, Man Lands on the Moon” declares the first painted boulder. Further along, “1492, Columbus reaches America”. You get the idea. Continue reading
