I bet it wasn’t hard to find a 70s office block to film this episode in. For all the fuss about how the Ashes to Ashes researchers had trouble finding filming locations in London that haven’t changed beyond recognition since the early 80s, I bet they too had no trouble finding dingy mildewed offices.

Anyway, it’s Ray’s birthday and Sam’s not invited to the party. He’s not making an effort to fit in, you see, and the ‘Happy Birthday Ray, you poofter’ banner almost seems designed to purposely offend a 21st century PC PC.

Of course, not fitting in won’t get him out of there any sooner. so his subconscious decides to tell a tale of another misfit.

On arriving at the hostage scene at the local newspaper offices, Sam approaches Reg’s van with extreme caution, almost as you might a suspected terrorist’s holdall. This kind of stakeout looks completely at odds with 1973. Sam suggests that the team form a ‘donut’ around the hostage location, to everyone’s amusement.

Jackie Queen, later to reappear in Ashes to Ashes, is far softer and professional in LOM. What happens over the next 9 years? Is there more to her relationship with Gene than we think? Is she the reason his marriage falls apart? Or the reason he moves to London? She clearly becomes fond of Sam, when he ‘dies’ does she blame Gene and force him to relocate?

Reg quotes the Connecticut Yankee – ‘A man out of time, stranded in a heathen world.’ Then exchanges a knowing look with Sam. But which world is he referring to? Surely not tame old 1973? This is the first point in the series where I wonder if Sam is really from 2006 after all. And how does Reg know? Like Martin Summers, he seems pretty keen to get out of there…

The handling of the hostage situation invariably results in Sam, Gene and Annie locked in a room, awaiting their fate. They share the images that they think will flash before them as they die, fearing the worst. Sam’s flashback is his most recent birthday in 1973. Is that the reason he’s ended up there after all? Is he just caught in a never-ending flashback?

3-Twatz

I must confess (or alternatively – I’m rather chuffed that…) I’d never heard of them until some time ago, when one of our long lost blogging friends, Woman in Black, featured them in one of her excellent posts. I seem to recall making a less than appreciative remark or two about them in a comment on the post; most unlike me, I know.

Following that, I looked the buggers up on both spotify and youtube, and with a wry grin and a shake of my suddenly elderly feeling head, confined them to one of the darker and smellier corners of my memory.

Anyhow, t’other day as I was giving Lovely Daughter a lift somewhere, she announced that N-dubz had turned up at her school earlier that day, as some of the third years (or whatever it is now…year 9, I think…) had won the dodgy looking buggers in a contest. Having won them, they were unsure what to do with them, and invited them to play a swift gig one lunchtime before they did the decent thing and had them put down.

Apparently the gig was a major success, and that most august of news organs, the Manchester Evening News was in attendance to take a few of their traditionally blurred photographs of the proceedings.

Lovely Daughter, being in the Upper Sixth (errr…. that’ll be Year 13…), and above such childish things as kiddie bandz was involved in making a poster that got hoisted behind the trio of Dubettes as they posed for the MEN photograper while he rubbed the obligatory sweaty thumb across his lens, and proceeded to snap away.

The poster was a tribute to the band, and proclaimed proudly “We love M-Budz”.

It’s a real shame that some unsporting editorial bugger chose not to use that photo; It would’ve made the article worthwhile.

Oh.. by the way; they decided not to have the trio put down after the gig, but instead released them into the wild.

I’m off to get my gun.

Manchester, England — Advanced Telecom Services’ London office provides its newspaper voice personals program to the Manchester Evening News, along with many other newspapers in the United Kingdom.

Voice personals provided by Advanced Telecom Services

NHS campaigns have a habit of catching people’s attention by creating harrowing scenes, using powerful imagery or landing a shocking message. But while browsing the Manchester Evening News’ website I came across this piece of advertising from a coalition of Greater Manchester PCTs that caught my eye.

The NHS flash ad on the MEN website (left turns into right)

The advert is promoting the supposed benefit of introducing a minimum price on a unit of alcohol and links to this website (which bizarrely has no mention on minimum alcohol pricing). This is a strange piece of NHS advertising as it’s political. Should the NHS be advertising to try to promote a change in the law? They have strayed into political advertising and this is not the kind of stuff we usually see from them. Their advertising is normally limited to public health advertising and the occasional recruitment campaign. 

I suppose it grabbed my attention after the all the commotion the British Medical Association created last month by calling for a blanket ban on alcohol advertising in the UK. The BMA want two things – marketing alcohol to be banned and a minimum price per unit of alcohol.  

It is fair enough for the BMA have their say on the issue of binge drinking as they are a pressure group, but the NHS is a government organisation and you would think they would be only allowed to advertise government policy or messages the government wants to promote.

I should have mentioned this sooner on here when I found out over the weekend, but alas, I didn’t.  I was too sad.  However, it seems there is a glimmer of hope for Maggie Jone’s condition at the moment, so I shall blog to celebrate that at least.

Maggie, 75, was taken to Salford Royal Hospital last Saturday.  She had an emergency operation performed for a pre-existing condition.  Of course, that pre-existing condition is a private matter, but honestly, she’s in her 70’s, it could be anything.

More recently, we’ve been informed that Maggie’s condition is looking the better, however she is still critical.  Our prayers are with her.

So bad news: Maggie is ill, and that means no Blanche on our screens for quite some time.  Tragic.  Good news: She’s on the upswing!

Let’s hope they treat Maggie well in the hospital!  We all know what Blanche has to say about public vs. private health care!

Sources: BBC News, Manchester Evening News

As a result of the English Defence League’s recent outing in Manchester:

The M.E.N. has learned that town hall and police chiefs, faced with picking up the bill for looking after the demos, plan to ask the home secretary for a change in the law that would ban protests where violence is expected.

From the Manchester Evening News.

What a surprise.

(Updated Oct 15 to correct link to Manchester Evening News)

On Saturday, I was at Manchester Piccadilly. Lots of police were around, asking questions of anyone under the age of 25. The English Defence League were in town, and with the EDL – there to “fight extreme Islam” – was Unite Against Facism, which was there to protest against the EDL.

My day job at the moment involves spending quite a lot of time working with the web team at the Birmingham Mail, Birmingham Post, Sunday Mercury and Coventry Telegraph so I know quite a bit about the EDL thanks to their two demos in Birmingham recently.  So I went home quite quickly.

The reason I bore you with this story is because I want to join in with the praise being lavished on the Manchester Evening News for its use of Coveritlive on Saturday to cover the protests. And to put forward a rather grand statement: That Coveritlive has changed journalism for good.

Throughout the day, it had up to four reporters on the ground around Manchester firing short Tweets via personal accounts, which in turn were picked up by Coveritlive and published live on to the MEN website. Coveritlive figures on the day reported 17,000 people logged on. According to Keith McSpurren, Coveritlive’s founder, the average liveblog is replayed is watched by an audience 2/3rds of the size of the live audience – which would take the number to nearer 29,000.

As it turned out, the protests in Manchester weren’t as violent as those in Birmingham, but they were frightening enough for those nearby. And certainly they were a big talking point. I’d recommend the MEN’s coverage to anyone who wants see what impact coveritlive can have on websites, journalists and users.

Like many other news websites around the country which have picked up the software and run with it, a combination of local knowledge and instant communication provided a service which was second to none. And plugging Greater Manchester Police’s Twitter feed into the live blog also gave users information from source.

While the communication from reporter to website was one way – by virtue of the fact they were Twittering as they darted around the city centre – the presence of staff in the newsroom to moderate the comments and add in other media – pictures and video for example – enabled users to ask questions and get answers.

Isn’t that what regional media was always meant to be about? Providing information which people want. Often it’s news, but it can also be the information we may not even think is newsworthy. And I’ll bet a pound to a penny that those people who did get their questions answered will remember to use the MEN the next time a big story breaks.

I say that because I’ve seen it happen on websites I’m involved with. At the Birmingham Mail, there was a sharper increase than anticipated in traffic to its sports sections after the title began hosting web chats with the football club writers. For the paper, it’s a chance to assert its position as the primary independent authority on a football club. For the writer, it’s the chance to talk to the fans who read his/her copy every day which may, or may not tell them something new about what fans are feeling. For the fans, it’s a chance to put questions – and get answers – on an issue they’ll happily talk about in the pub.

When it snowed back in February, the Birmingham Mail ran a live blog feeding up instant information on school closures, blocked roads and so on (which I enjoyed reading while on holiday in Egypt!). Thousands logged on for a service which the paper had never been able to provide in so much detail before. Yes, there was spike in traffic, but the “downhill” side of the spike wasn’t as steep, nor did it drop, as far the “uphill” spike had had to climb.

Prior to the arrival of Coveritlive, newspaper websites did do breaking news, but it wasn’t instant. It was a lot quicker than waiting for the print copy to arrive, but it wasn’t instant. I always felt, as a reporter, that the website was quite removed from what I did. I might write some copy for the website, but it wouldn’t be there straight away. It’d go via a newsdesk or get held in queue. And once it was online, a reader would see it, then move on.

coveritlive changed that for reporters, but the bigger change was the instant feedback. Alison Gow blogged recently about the dangers of trying to second guess an online audience, which is something journalists do as part of the job already: We take a punt at want the reader/viewer/listener wants and serve it up to them. Liveblogging changes that, because we can tell the story as we get the facts, and then get the input from the reader online too.

In short, liveblogging gives journalists, who often complain about being detached from their readers, the chance to interact with them directly. It’s a scary experience at first, but one which, without fail, every journalist I’ve seen take part in a live blog has enjoyed – or, at the very least, seen the benefits of.

For those brands which have traditionally been part of the community, it’s a chance to reconnect online in a way never previously popular. Thousands of people enjoyed a community experience of the Paul McCartney concert in Anfield via the Liverpool ECHO site in 2008, several thousand discussed the results of elections in Tyne and Wear via the Journal website over the summer. Up and down the country, if you’re not at your match on a Saturday you can follow it via your local newspaper website, reading updates from the writers whose names carry so much weight in print.

To me, that instant communication has changed the way we do news online – and as the MEN, Liverpool Daily Post and ECHO, Birmingham Mail, Newcastle Chronicle et al have shown – it’s a change which readers love.

Twitter gets credited, rightly, for changing the way we communicate, while Facebook is praised for altering the way we socialise online. Coveritlive, by my reckoning should be up there for changing – hopefully for good – the way we can involve the user in breaking news and events. The simple changes always seem to have the greatest impact, and Coveritlive is proof of that to me.

The streets of Weatherfield and the sounds of the Rover’s Return should be silenced for the good of Salford, according to a local academic.

Michael Harloe, vice-chancellor of Salford University, told the Manchester Evening News that the soap paints an unreal picture of the city and prejudices people against it.

“We are very closely tied to the image of the area, constant reinforced in the media. If we could remove Coronation Street from the TV, I would cheer because it does more bad for the reputation of Salford than anything else.

“It’s a completely romanticised picture, and wrong.”

The long-running ITV soap , gave an impression more akin to the slums of the 1930s than today, said Prof Harloe. “It’s not like that anymore – we have a different type of deprivation.

“We’ve an interest in the regeneration of Salford, because we have a huge stake in it. Improving the image and reputation of the university is vital.”

Alison Sinclair, a spokeswoman for Coronation Street, branded the professor’s view as “nonsense”.

“It’s not true to say it puts people off coming to Salford. People understand it is a drama, and that there is more to Manchester than back street terraced houses.”

The show helped tourism, with fans coming from as far away as New Zealand and Australia. While it “harks back to a certain era”, Ms Sinclair maintained it did reflect real life. “It is a slightly heightened reality. It reflects parts of the area that do still exist, and it’s there to entertain people.”

Corrie is likely to survive academic barbs. Shown in 25 countries, its peak audience in 1987 saw 26m tune in to see Hilda Ogden depart.

Among a handful enjoying a quiet afternoon pint at the Rover’s Return pub in Salford, opinions were divided. “It should stay as it is,” said Pat Millward, who has watched every episode since it began. “It’s accurate and shows day to day life as it is.” Her companion, Tommy Johnson, was not a big fan, but said: “It doesn’t run Salford down, it builds it up. I think it represents Salford in a good way.”

Dave Miller, a 21-year old accountant,found it “boring and not at all funny”, and should not even be on TV. “It’s not realistic at all. Salford is really rough and nasty. If anything it’s putting a good gloss. That Tricky Dicky is not a patch on people round here.”

• Faisal al Yafai and Chris Campbell
• The Guardian, Friday 11 July 2003 10.50 BST
• Article history
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/jul/11/media.accesstouniversity

Also on Guardian.co.uk: comment on my freedom of information request to the BBC, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2008/dec/08/freedomofinformation-bbc

I had my crucifix for sale outside my studio.  It went missing over the weekend 5-6 Sep 09.

I’ve informed the police, they will be checking the cctv cameras in the local area.  The crucifix is 14”x8” solid wood and would take two men to carry.  I was trying to sell it to pay off an electric bill.I thought somebody might buy it for salvage or novelty value.

Manchester Evening News are running an article this week and the police looking into CCTV footage.

I walked across Manchester a couple of times yesterday, in the pursuit of food and ale.  Nearly every road in the city centre is being dug up, either to replace Victorian water and sewerage pipes or lay new tramlines.  Roads that are normally busy with bumper-to-bumper traffic (like Deansgate) are strangely quiet, devoid of the normal background engine noise but, nevertheless, full of pedestrians.

Despite the people of Manchester returning a resounding “no” to the proposed congestion charge, the city centre is certainly less congested as motorists can no longer drive through it.  As my second husband’s grandmother used to say “there is more than one way to kill a spider than pull its legs off” (apologies to insect-lovers).

There is a very healthy debate going on about whether more of the city centre should be car-free on the Manchester Evening News website.  Feelings run high on both sides, from comments such as ”why not go the whole hog and ban cars from the whole of the city centre? Then businesses can go to the wall and maybe that’s the only way to get rid of this anti car council” to “women like to totter about in uncomfortable shoes especially in pleasant surroundings free from noisy diesel engines with plenty of restaurants, cafes and bars to visit” (apologies to practical shoe wearing women).

Nevertheless, at the moment these additional pedestrian areas are only temporary and because of the construction work going on, they certainly aren’t particularly attractive. I fondly remember walking through a major German City a number of years ago and being amazed by the floral mosaic on massive sheets of plywood straddling a major thoroughfare. My companion informed me that German city councils insist that if you are performing construction this ‘cover up’ has to be in place before you start.  I am not suggesting that we should have our construction done under cover of darkness; but could we devise a similar method of adornment of ongoing works?

Most places are in a constant state of change.  New developments are introduced and existing buildings and infrastructure has to be maintained and updated. Not too far away from where I’m typing I can see out of my 11^th floor window a building site of magnificent proportions. I am referring to the Media City development out in Salford Quays, where the BBC and a host of other companies will relocate and change the industrial focus of the area from logistics to media and technology.

Their website has a decent collage of images of the area over the years, however, an IT company situated across the water has been cataloguing the development process in a number of weird and wonderful ways. My particular favourite is this 360 view.

With a bit of imagination I think you can see some aesthetics in the site, from the vivid use of ’safety’ colours, such as bright orange and yellow and the contrast of the activity with the calmness of the canal maybe there is some beauty even in this beast.

My dear brethren and sethren…

It has come to my attention that a story has this week been published in that slanderous rag Private Eye concerning a notable higher education institution in leafy Salford. Yes I refer to the ongoing public humiliation of the anointed head of this venerable institute, my namesake the dear Professor, and the wholly self-effacing and pious assemblage known as the Tactical Leadership Squad, who dwell in this university of a Third Encounter, by that lamentable commoner and sartorially-challenged Wellerian  pretender Mr Gary Duke.

I find it somewhat irksome that this rather pitiful now historical appendage, who clearly emanates from the lowest and basest orders, much like the most odious and malevolent stench charged from the sulphurous depths of a biblically Luciferian  anality, can engender such a  prodigious amount of publicity at no cost. It is clear that this spurious individual, in his unconcealed and vainglorious quest for self-aggrandisement, has shown complete disregard and utter disdain for chivalric honour and the law of international free trade. I exhort my dear colleague, nay friend and comrade-in-arms to put matters to right on behalf of us all and bring this charlatan before a further tribunal, this time at the epicentre of arbitration for international commerce, the World Trade Organisation.

The argument for this is simple. In our widely regarded and accomplished subservience to market forces, we here at the University of Sulfide must regularly disburse extortionate quantities of legal tender to the Fourth Estate in order to avail ourselves of their unholy and oft pornographic scandal-ridden pages. Indeed, the question has many times been asked of myself, “Martin why ply this filthy rag-trade with so much of our hard-earned lucre?” Yes indeed it is a most vexing and onerous incongruity, particularly when one acknowledges that we are furnishing this diabolically depraved alcohol-sodden journalistic industry with our badly needed capital. And for what end? To find ourselves and our institutions pilloried and discomfited by this tabloidographical industry at the apparent behest of this barely-human anachronism, this appallingly unctuous personification of calamitous tomfoolery. Yes the machinery of international market-driven jurisprudence will make short shrift of his kind.

And to those of you whom produced the defamatory and malicious pamphlets here in my own venerable institute, and most assuredly I have evidence that more than one of you were involved in their authorship and distribution, these Caxtonian abominations, that sought to cast me in the mould of a punctilious perverse reverse-Midas, suggesting that I was responsible for turning our ‘gold’ into tomorrow’s noble tabloid arsewipe, destined for the shit-houses and the weary terraces of Sulfide, which cast me as singularly responsible for steering our glorious and historic institution into the downward spiral of the maelstrom more commonly referred to as the University League Tables, take heed. Vengeance will be mine.

Vice Chancellor  St Martin Chambers

A university lecturer at the University of Sulfide or Sulfide University, has been sacked for producing a series of spoof bulletins that pilloried the now obsolete Vice Chancellor Marcel Challot and other senior grandees at the university. The bulletins it is claimed, derided and lambasted the defunct el Supremo over his extraordinarily pitiful yet colourful attempts to re-moralise staff through his own personal efforts at pumping-iron and his lasciviosity with a particular Dean of Faculty. With remarkable similarities to recent singularly parallelalagous contemporaneous events at the University of Salford but unconnected,

(see ‘A university lecturer sacked over leaflets ’singled out’ at http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/education/s/1131672_a_university_lecturer_sacked_over_leaflets_singled_out )

Loser Gareth Duchy

it was said in a bespoke disciplinary hearing, that the continual human trespass by Vice Chancellor Challot into the private sphere, in interleaving the discipline of remorseless yet melancholic exhortationality, intended to instil in subordinate university staff the values and  the potentiality to ‘raise the bar in student-based income value generation through stealth’, provided lecturer in International Events, Gareth Duchy with the ammunition necessary it is said, “to have brought the university vilely into disrepute”. It is alleged that he did this through the production and distribution of several badly written and interminably malevolent meanderings. He has also been accused of gross mis-spelling.

The bulletins, said by Mr Duchy to be “wildly popular among staff and students but not senior managers”, poked fun at Professor Challot and other management elders. Mr Duchy of no fixed PhD, is also accused by upper management of being “very nearly the worst kind of dirty sexist pervert” and of “hinging on racism in his pathetic attempts to smear the well-respected but deeply balding Hood of School of Enterprise and Go-Getting, Professor Sir Johann Wilford and his female companion, who used to be a student but now works for the University most of the time.” Official sources refused to comment.

Mr Duchy has argued quite heavily that the oblique literary contraptions are solidly rooted “in the tradition of Indian lampoonery – ‘sitar‘, and are therefore immune to the vagaries and finer points of legal consistency”. This has been rejected by Dr Ariadne Groves, Fellow of the Charlie Cairoli Institue of Cavalierism and Slapstick, Registrar at Sulfide, who has through her administrative collaborators, sought to ensure complete impartiality in the process of Mr Duchy’s inevitable professional excoriation. Dr Groves has been able to bring her own unique and considerable talents to the inquisition through recourse to her own field of research and specialism which lies in the study of abstract French Tomfoolery and benign foam-related Cornish Jestorialism.

The Registrar

Dr Groves, who largely shuns the daylight hours,  has she believes, single handedly helped undermine Mr Duchy’s defence via remote managerial conspirator. Yet despite the apparent coup de grace, there are reports emanating  from the Old Fuherer Station that suggest upper managements’ case against Mr Duchy is about as firm as the flockular rectal emanations of a herd of diahhoreal pigeons on a diet of Ex-Lax and prunes.

The excessively desperate and strident claims of the skittish investigating officer and blood-relation-by-marriage to Dr Groves, Scat Muse-Amsterdam, that he ever suggested that “all managers were fair game for a good kicking through the selective and surgical use of ’sitar’ and I want it put on the record all official like”. This is despite the official minutes showing otherwise and provided as evidence in the trial by the pitifully clammy Muse-Amsterdam. This procedural sleight-of-hand is this reporter suggests, akin to a one-legged man trying to steer a straight route along a crazy-golf course uphill in a hurricane whilst strapped to single paddled piss-porn pedal-lo.

The panel, comprised of independent “good and fair men”, all teetotallers and dressed in traditional Welsh formal funeral attire, yet employed directly by Vice Chancellor Challot and Dr Groves, found Mr Duchy ‘completely guilty by default’.

Mr Duchy is now considered appalling.

By chief reporter for TheHallsofStMartin’s

We’ve not been posting much the last two days because we’ve been busy getting the word out, with great results. It’s been a crazy couple of days, but here are the results:

• 13th Aug. 2009  Family digging in for the Good Life – Manchester Evening News [link]
• 12th Aug. 2009  Sale home to be transformed into eco-house – Messenger Newspapers [link]
• 12th Aug. 2009 featured on BBC Radio Manchester Breakfast Show with Alan Beswick at 7.20, 7.50, 820, 8.50

Normal service will resume shortly. We’re about to order the polytunnel and have been busy mulching trees, changing energy suppliers, and other exciting tasks.

The British press [sic] has belatedly noticed the Welsh debate about charging for plastic bags, as Disgusted noted yesterday. There’s further mining of the topic today:

• A cryptic rant from a blogger at a Manchester-based paper
• A Guardian piece that confuses ‘Welsh Assembly’ with ‘Assembly Government’
• A predictably frosty reception from Packaging News.

Yoicks!

I did ask you to pray for my brother Dan as he seeks to maintain his convictions as his profile increases.  In the last couple of days, Dan has done interviews locally (Manchester Evening News) and nationally (The Sun, of all places), focusing on his Christian convictions.  It’s a rare opportunity, but makes him a target in many ways.

Please do ask God to keep him: Christians will be aware that Satan will try to bring down, by force or by fraud, a man who has taken a public stand like this.  If he cannot batter down the main gate, he will use a sneak attack.

Blears hires Formby to sing for her at her bizarre fetish parties

The MPs’ Expenses Scandal refuses to go away. In a rare interview, the Expenses Scandal said “No. I refuse to go away”. Gadzooks, is the world really that wrong? Well, we will tell you it sometimes is. Let us give you the news other weblogs refuse to publish…

The elfin and former Cabinet Minister, Hazel Blears, has been targeted by vandals in Greater Manchester. A gang smashed the windscreen of her Citroen Xsara Picasso and slashed all four tyres while she was out canvassing in Weaste. The Salford MP, who was at the centre of the MPs’ Expenses Scandal, dismissed the idea the attack could be the result of a vendetta, telling the Manchester Evening News it was “teenagers with nothing to do on a hot afternoon“. A hot afternoon in Manchester? Is the little gnome sniffing pixie dust?

We can reveal that Hazel Blears, or “Tinkerbelle of Fairyland” as she insists on being referred to, is purchasing the luxurious “Duck Island” belonging to disgraced Tory MP Sir Peter Viggers. For those of you who have missed the story, let us enlighten you.

Sir Peter Viggers said he felt “humiliated” after his expense claims were published in the Daily Telegraph. The £30,000 claim for gardening costs included the 5ft Stockholm duck house which acts as an island to protect ducks from being attacked by foxes. Whilst we applaud the man’s compassion for ducks, we fail to understand why this cost had to be borne by the Taxpayer. What the hell was he thinking of?

The new Chez Blears

Mr and Mrs Blears were said to be over the moon about their new abode. Mr Blears added “Our old house was a bit cramped, even for us”.

A very happy Mr Blears

Hazel said “We now have room for our entire family, including the dog. The dog used to have to stay outside all night, as he could not fit through the door of our old house”.

Hazel Blears’ old house

“Now we have the room to spread out. Even Grandpa Blears has the space to relax on the vast decking area that surrounds the entire house. I am as happy as a pig in shite” added Ms Blears.

Hazel and Grandpa Blears relaxing at their new summer house

To change the subject entirely, I must now report a very strange incident. Some of you readers out there will remember the 1988 film version of the classic tale of Baron Freiherr von Münchhausen, entitled “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen”.

Münchhausen supposedly told a number of outrageous tall tales about his adventures. According to the stories, as retold by others, the Baron’s astounding feats included riding cannonballs, travelling to the Moon, and escaping from a swamp by pulling himself up by his own hair (or bootstraps, depending on who tells the story).

Anyway, I digress. The point I am trying to make is that if you intend to watch the film, please ensure that you watch it yourself. Do not get a friend to watch it on your behalf. I did this, and was immediately contacted by the authorities, arrested and diagnosed with Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

Talley ho, I am off to the Blears. I have been invited for canapés and Pimms.

The damage that has been done to Hazel Blears tyres and windscreen on her Citroen Xsara Picasso to many will just be a indicator that the people of Salford do not want her and that she should resign as their Member of Parliament.

But this does seem like a targeted attack on Ms Blears’ vehicle. Cases of slashing tyres in particular are usually committed to target a particular group or person and send out a warning to them. For example, the so called “environmentalists” who are piercing tyres on 4X4 gas guzzlers in South Manchester areas such as Didsbury, to stop the carbon emissions in these cars harming the environment.

Could this attack on her car suggest resentment from a wider demographic? Many teenagers will vote for the first time at the next general election and many in Salford may enjoy overlooking the box next to Hazel Blears name.

Guardian discusses plan to close The Observer
The Guardian Media Group is understood to have given serious thought to a radical plan that would see The Observer newspaper closed as part of an effort to cut costs and secure the future of The Guardian.

Manchester Evening News published a right-objectionable story that’s probably going to get some blood boiling. Thanks to Steve Silberman for alerting me to this via his virtuoso twitter feed (fine editorial nous).

In America there are gangsta’s, crack heads and wild kids. In Britain there are thugs, scallies and pill-poppers – these are broad categories and don’t describe much, but my effort is to say that the two countries have different types of criminal. It is my feeling that the extreme inequalities of American cities breed a certain type of hardened criminal, whereas Britain’s subtler inequalities breed a certain type of hardened idiot.

Few violent offenders have a sociological grasp on why they’ve made the choices they have and often their bare-faced contempt is hard for most folk to stomach. Kane Barratt is a case in point.

This week, after recent sentencing for 5 and a half years, Barratt used a mobile phone to update his Facebook profile from his cell. He changed his staus, chatted with friends and posted two photos. After the Manchester Evening News told the Ministry of Justice about Barratt’s activity the page disappeared from Facebook. The phone was later confiscated.

I don’t want to glorify Barratt’s actions; he is a violent offender who wielded a machete and held it to his victim’s throats. Barratt shows no remorse only bravado in his Facebook antics. Paul Dillon, Barratt’s last victim pondered, probably quite accurately, “He’ll probably come away from this with all his mates thinking he’s some kind of hero.”

That said, Prison Photography’s charge is to discuss all modes of photographic production within sites of incarceration: “If a camera is within prison walls we should always be asking; How did it get there? What are/were the motives? What are the responses? (Prison Photography ‘About’ page)

Well, Barratt’s camera phone got there because it was not confiscated . One presumes he wasn’t searched at a key moment. I’d suggest the motive was to stay in touch with his friends outside, take the piss (to a degree) and generally showboat when oversight was lax. Predictably, victims and authorities were left aggrieved, offended and embarrassed.

In Britain, as in America, mobile (cell) phone use is banned behind bars. Wired with the aid of Andrew Hetherington recently ran an article on the smuggling and underground economy of cell phones in California. As did Newsweek. I theorised that prisoners strategic adoption of cellphones is the most serious threat AND damaging maneouver to decades of prison management policy. Mobile communications render obsolete much of the advantages brought to controlling prison populations by segregation.

I teach at a Washington State prison and I am generally disheartened by the lack of access prisoners have to books. By law, state departments of corrections must provide access to libraries, but opening hours and actual physical access (within the institutional regimen) are not consistent. Even when prisoners can get to the library, nearly all learning is self directed. Prisons offer GED programs but only one prison in Washington State (Monroe) offers college courses. I believe only one prison in California (San Quentin) offers college courses.

Nowadays, access to a computer is as essential as access to a library for learning. So, while I understand the need to confiscate phones, I don’t want to see all internet connectivity denied. Ideally, internet would be available to prisoners without compromising security. Social networking would certainly be ruled out.

But even if correctional departments could tailor their own prison firewalls, the structure of Web2.0 – and its embedded networking functions – would still allow manipulation by the minority of seditious prisoners. The likelihood of widespread internet access in US prisons is very small.

This situation alone is cause for some chagrin. If one accepts that computers and networks are essential components of contemporary life then their absence within sites of incarceration forges yet another chasm between the life inside and the life of anticipated release.

But then again, in a week when I had glue sticks confiscated on entering the prison, speculation on the provision of internet in prisons is far from the realities of prison life and, regretably, far from relevant …

Irony is a double paged feature in the newspaper that wouldn’t give you a job. 

Satisfaction is where that feature is pretty well intact and unabridged – unfettered by the the busy keyboards of sub-editors.

Bemusement is when that double page feature in all its typographical glory is supported by an utterly irrelevant picture.

Student Direct is the paper. This is the paper I recently got a job rejection from for the primary reason that my writing-style was not what they were looking for. That to a journalist, especially from a paper like Student Direct is a bit like being told you’re too fat to join Weightwatchers. That, sadly was the best reason they could give me which I would have to agree with because my style has always been more journal than journalist. 

Despite all this they published a double-page feature I had written some time ago and only thought to send in about a month ago on the ethical dilemmas surrounding interviewing bereaved parents. Its a bit academic but I got some juicy interviews. 

The feature is punctuated with the stories of children dying in tragic circumstances – very hard-nosed stuff. And for the massive background image my feature had been runarounded for, they have chosen a mock-up of a grown man lying in the prone position with a weapon in his grasp in some sort of secure car park. 

Editors, please read the story before you pick an image to encompass its theme. Its very bewildering putting something like that in the portfolio and wondering the rushed though processes behind this mystery gun runner’s demise. A story in its own right, however not mine, sadly.

But then they very well can’t have a picture of a dead child , can they.

I envisaged an over-the-shoulder shot of a woman in an apron answering the door to two solemn coppers. Or a greasy photographer snapping pictures of the house with a frightened parent twitching at the net curtains. I should be hired for The Sun’s picture stories in the problem pages. 

To be honest, its a subject that has always troubled me. Death-knocks, hacks call them. It is not something I would ever wish to do for money and for a story having known friends who have had such treatment from oily newshounds in their area after a tragedy. And yet it is quite a significant part of local, and sometimes national news. 

There are lots of things in journalism where you have to put the journalism before everything else. Death knocking is one end of the spectrum and keeping you sources confidential at all costs (jail and huge fines being the punishment) at the other. I haven’t got a problem with looking after my sources, after all, it makes you a better journalist in the eyes of peers. Death knocks are my idea of hell. I can’t even VOXPOP without being told to piss off, not that it bothers me, but what would a mourning mother do to me?

My tutor, a very wirey hack, told us that when the widow wouldn’t come to the door, he’d wait for the milkman at the top of the street and tell him he’d take the milk to the door. He’d leave the milk halfway up the garden path so the widow would have to come out and he’d use this opportunity to at least get a picture of her. Imagine that – to a woman that is cruel, a photographer’s exclusive of a mourning woman in her nightie, no make-up and with misery etched across her early-morning face. 

Luckily such practices are now frowned upon in the industry however the Police make life no easier for the reporters out there writing up all press releases on sudden and tragic deaths that the family do not want to be interviewed as a default.

So what about the families who want to leave tribute? It is up to the journalist to more or less flout the guidance given to them by the Press just in case they miss a trick. 

Manchester Evening News reporter, Neal Keeling told us about a case where a little girl had been tragically run over while her mum loaded the car with shopping. The police statement said that the family were not interested in being interviewed but a crafty journo such as Keeeling asked the family if they wanted to contribute to a story about the little girl even though he reasiled they weren’t interested in the press.

To his surprise the family jumped at the chance to have their tributes to their daughter printed in the paper in a way to help them greave. 

Its a sad case of don’t ask, don’t get in this business and one has to be prepared to look like a fool or worse a heartless coward. 

Similarly, I have spoken to members of the Greater Manchester Police who have admitted that some families like to speak to the press to help them greave for instance if a murderer is still wandering the streets, or a hit and run has not been caught. That I can understand and that is what people should realise – that the press can be just as much a tool in finding a murderer or acknowledging the life of somebody. Journalists aren’t just interested in exclusives and in column inches. 

The laws are changing in the UK. Journalists need not feel the Sword of Damoclese’s pointy tip teetering on the top of their heads when refusing work they can justify as being unethical. Is it unethical, however if the Police are lazy in their statements about a family’s position with the media?

What I know is unethical is what these ridiculous subs have done to my very serious feature. I try very hard to be a serious journalist as solemnity does not come naturally to me. Even still – making my article look like a screen shot of a poor man’s Goodfellas does not convince me that attention has been paid and if the article wasn’t read by fellow journos what chance to I have with the general public? Perhaps I should stick to journal rather than journalist if its what I do best.

As someone who witnessed an excellent and believable presentation on service improvment at the DVLA in November 2008 by Tom Benford and has recently had an easy experience of renewing the Road Fund Licence on their car, I was surprised to read in the Manchester Evening News (MEN), 9th April 2009, that John Leech MP, the Lib Dem spokesperson on transport, who was caught with an out-of-date tax disc says that “the systems in place are unhelpful” and also that that the renewal system was a “nightmare”.

The report in the MEN contained the confusing quote from the MP that: “I’d like to think people recognise I’m not just stupid enough not to renew not to renew my car tax.” I’d like to think that those elected to represent us in Parliament are not stupid but like the rest of us have to rely upon postal and other human systems, and when they fail don’t try and blame someone else. 

What this does demonstrate is that we have a leading (?) political representative dismissing a central government administrative system that has seen vast improvements in recent months without investigating it properly. The guy has cocked up, why doesn’t he admit it and give some praise where its due? I think it works well and is responding to public pressures to improve…

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(Source:  Manchester Evening News)

By: Neal Keeling

A FOOTBALL team who tried to put the wind up a penalty taker were left with more than red faces.

One of Chorlton Villa’s players was given a yellow card for allegedly breaking wind as a spot kick was taken.

The penalty was saved – but ordered to be retaken when the ref decided the noise had put the kicker off.

Villa’s goalkeeper was red carded for saying he believed the ref was ‘the worst he had seen in years’. Minutes later another Villa player was sent off for expressing disbelief that his team-mate had been booked for flatulence.

The re-taken penalty was scored by rivals International Manchester.