Lloyd George clearly didn't know my grandfather

This is the picture known in my family as grandfather with Lloyd George. Since he's in the top left while the former Prime Minister is trying to get away to resume his pursuit of some young filly we may assume that their legendarily close relationship was going through one of its chillier periods. I don't suppose there's an expert on liveried servants out there who might be able to date or place this picture?

Hur-hur-hur

I don't hold the bien-pensant view of Jeremy Clarkson. If anything I'm a fan but the story about him describing the Prime Minister as a see you next Tuesday during a Top Gear audience warm-up does shine another light on what happens when that unique admixture of money, celebrity and yobbishness goes off as it does all the time these days.I can't imagine any public context in which I would use the c-word about anyone, from the Prime Minister to the lowest in the land. If I was employed by an organisation and used it in front of that organisation's clients I would expect to be fired on the spot and wouldn't expect any redress. If you were in charge it would definitely happen.

So what possessed this educated, upstanding member of the bourgeoisie to drop the c bomb in front of an average bunch of licence-payers, most of whom probably wouldn't dream of using that word even if they hit their thumb very hard with a hammer? It's not a heat of the moment thing or you would hear rock stars use it on stage and footballers in post match interviews. It doesn't escape. It's deployed. So why did Clarkson do it? Was he momentarily struck by the terror of the man who knows he's meant to be funny but has nothing funny to hand? Maybe it's the increasingly desperate pursuit of that low "hur-hur-hur" of (largely male) approval that can usually be elicited without need for material that is actually funny. I was talking to Danny Baker about this very thing earlier this week. He didn't do "hur-hur-hur" because it wasn't his sense of humour and women didn't like it. Nonetheless he noted that it was the easiest way to do material that broadcasting bosses considered acceptably "edgy".

Pets win prizes

I watched a programme on BBC1 last night. That doesn't happen often. It was called "The Rat Pack", about as bog-standard a piece of slice-of-life telly as you can imagine. The BBC may be overpaying certain of its stars but it's good to see that they can still make a series like this for the change they found down the back of Graham Norton's sofa. It was about two brothers whose business was ridding hysterical Londoners of rats. But really it was about their dog Charlie, a Jack Russell who had found, late in life, a true purpose to existence; clamping rats in his teeth and shaking them until their necks broke. The producers made it clear at the top of the programme that this was going to happen and so you had to hang around for the money shot, which came, as ever, near the end. It only worked out because one of the brothers took the precaution of putting the rat in a bucket, thereby making it near impossible for Charlie to fail. You can only conclude that TV viewers have no problem with cruelty to animals, providing it's the right animal dishing out the cruelty and the right one on the receiving end.

You won't believe what happened to me when I called BT

I've been buying broadband from BT for ten years now. During that time they've irritated me by changing the name of the service from BT Openworld to BT Connect to BT Yahoo. Everything, in fact, except BT Meets The Upsetter At The Grass Roots Of Dub. I have three BT lines. A phone line, a burglar alarm line and another number that carries the broadband. Because I have only one point that delivers this last line I wondered if I could transfer the broadband to the main phone line, which has more sockets. I'd put off doing it for a couple of years because I couldn't bear the draining, uncomprehending conversations with distant call centres, the cost and upheaval of engineers or the risk that I would be left with no phone lines at all.

I was talking to Fraser about it. He said it ought to be possible for them to just switch it over. Fearing it couldn't be as simple as that, I put it off for a further couple of months. Eventually, I took my courage in both hands and called the BT Broadband queries line which connected to somebody in Bangalore who gave me another number to call in sales. They then put me on to the change of address section who said they could switch over the line but it might take seven days. Over the next seven days I received a series of automated phone messages promising that the process had been instigated and then a final call noting that the deed had been done. A couple of days later an actual human being called and asked if it was working. It was.

So there you are. The story of something working as it should and good customer service. I couldn't let it go unremarked.

No more heroes

I grew up surrounded by men who'd fought in either the First or the Second War. Some must have served in both. None of them talked about it much, partly because they had the traditional ambivalence of old soldiers and also presumably because they didn't wish to appear to be taking the limelight of somebody more worthy. Old combatants rarely show off about it. If anything they're slightly embarrassed to have survived. At his death at the age of 113 First World War veteran Henry Allingham was widely referred to as a hero. I'm sure he would have been appalled to be called any such thing. It seems that the less experience of military service anyone in the media has the more ready they are to dust off the h-word for anyone who's done what they would have modestly called their duty.

Why is junk always so poignant?

I've spent the day listening to the Test Match and, in a very half-hearted way, trying to throw out a lot of junk. Here, in the words of Julie Andrews, are a few of my favourite things.

The box is one of many packed full of unmarked cassettes. For ten years I did a radio show on GLR. I used to slip a tape into the machine before each one so that I had a record for my own reference. I didn't bother recording the dates. It probably wouldn't have made any difference had I done so. I don't even have a functioning cassette player to play them on at the moment. This is a classic Stuff Dilemma. I can't bring myself to throw them away but I am very unlikely to ever listen to them.

The huge VHS cassette of "All The Presidents Men" was the one I got when I joined one of the first video rental libraries. In those days you had to pay a joining fee, a sum on each rental and you had to buy the first cassette. This cost me £40 and this was in the mid-80s.

The pipes were my father's who died twenty-seven years ago. They've got his teeth marks on them.

The Birds

The only thing I took away from "Jurassic Park" was the advice that if you wanted to get an idea of how prehistoric creatures behaved, look at birds. There are herons living in our very un-exotic London suburb and when you hear their wings beating above, generally early in the morning, it can seem like you're about to get a visitation from the distant past. I snapped this one on a neighbour's roof this morning.

A portrait of the artist

I went to the first day of the Lord's Test today and found myself in a small section with this beautiful view. It was to the side of a balcony on which the photographers with long lenses perch, lining up ball after ball in the hope of getting the one that tells a story. And alongside them in their eyrie was cricket painter Jocelyn Galsworthy who spent the day dabbing away at a canvas. Seems a pleasant way to make a living.

Suffer the little children to come unto me for I've been checked by the ISA

I'm delighted that a bunch of well-known childrens' authors, with Philip Pullman and Michael Morpurgo at their head, are refusing to cooperate with a body called the Independent Safeguarding Authority in being "checked" prior to giving readings in schools. It needs a case like this to draw attention to the damage being done to all of us by the all-pervasive belief that children:
a) survive their childhood thanks only to the ceaseless vigilance of adults;
b) are at most risk from the people who are set in authority above them;
c) can be protected from predators by a cursory records check.

I've been going into schools from time to time over the years in a professional and parental capacity. In the last ten years I've grown sadly used to the feeling that I am likely to be seen as a sinister interloper unless I'm properly badged and certificated and in the presence of a licenced teacher with a stun gun. It's that depressing presumption of guilt that Pullman is objecting to. I think he and his colleagues may bring about some change. Good luck to them.

It's the mothers I feel sorry for

"It rips out my heart a little every time, the sight of those young men’s fresh, hopeful faces, and the knowledge that yet another mother, somewhere, has just had her heart ripped out for eternity," writes
Melanie Reid in The Times of the deaths of young soldiers in Afghanistan. Meanwhile in Muswell Hill the mother of backpacker Jamie Neale must have feared she would never get to know what happened to her son. (Once the relief over his return has flooded through the system I fear he'll get a public kicking for his stupidity.)

Is it strange that we instinctively feel the grief of mothers must be more painful than anybody else's? This is particularly the case with the mothers of men of that age, who seem programmed to put themselves in harm's way whether in uniform or in the fleece of a gap year tourist. Last week I spoke to the 28-year-old Patrick Hennessey who's written "The Junior Officers Reading Club" about his time with the army in Helmand province. He assured me it was common practice to tell one's mother that the fighting was taking place far away from where you were operating. I have a friend whose son is out there now who's probably spinning his mother the very same line.

Mark Ellen reckons the most poignant song ever written may be Anna McGarrigle's "Heart Like A Wheel". He may be right, just for the line "when you bend it, you can't mend it". I don't know whether the Arabic tongue deals with hearts differently but the other day I read this line in Louise Richardson's "What Terrorists Want". It's the mother of a suicide bomber speaking. She said had she known what he was going to do "I would have taken a cleaver, cut open my heart, and stuffed him deep inside. Then I would have sewn it up tight to keep him safe."

And Deliver Us From Inappropriateness

No single word pops out of the mealy mouth of modern management more frequently than "inappropriate". It manages to avoid being specific about the transgression while suggesting that the person using it has moral standards significantly higher than everybody else's.

And now it's "inappropriate" behaviour involving a researcher that has got Hardeep Singh Kohli suspended from his roving reporting role for BBC's The One Show. Somebody reported somebody else and before anyone could stop it the corporation's disciplinary procedure had swung into action and he's being hung out to dry for six months - and this is where it really sounds as if the captain of the second eleven has got pissed and thrown up at the back of the coach - "to reflect on his behaviour". Honestly. Wouldn't we rather be dismissed in shame than sent off to reflect on our behaviour?

A couple of thoughts occur:
1. In the media the standard interpersonal stuff which makes every work environment interesting is often further, er, enlivened by the presence of fame, money and influence. Part of me thinks that if you don't want to tangle with what's involved when highly competitive show-offs work closely together for long periods of time you should get a job with, say, the Church of England. But then I've read "Barchester Towers" so I know that it goes on pretty much everywhere. And the researcher who was on the receiving end of the "inappropriate" behaviour didn't formally complain. Which makes the whole incident even more puzzling.
2. What with this and the Carol Thatcher case you do wonder who's supposed to be managing The One Show. Local difficulties like these shouldn't turn up on the front pages. In my experience if you have to instigate a disciplinary procedure you've lost control. This particularly applies with freelance contributors. Surely you take them for a walk and warn them how they might be coming over to people. If that doesn't work you just don't ring them any more.

What were once vices are now habits

The 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots provides an occasion to quote from this Time magazine piece from 1966 back when the world was, by repute, swinging.

[homosexuality] is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.

In the 60s the only homosexual I was aware of was our local butcher and that was because he was said to be in court from time to time. On the bigger stage there were certainly no openly homosexual actors or musicians, let alone politicians. Stonewall triggered a movement which eventually arrived here as the Gay Liberation Front. At the beginning of the 70s I was in a scummy flat in Turnpike Lane with a number of flatmates, one of whom had come out in a most flamboyant way. Our flat became a meeting place and crashpad for members of the GLF Youth Group, a movement which combined self-righteousness with copping-off opportunities that guaranteed its success. Within six months I graduated from not knowing a single homosexual to knowing hundreds of them, their language, their hang-outs, their mating habits and quite a bit about the mechanics of sexual congress. Had any of those people at the time been told that the first wedding my youngest daughter would be invited to on her own would be the civil partnership of a gay couple, I suspect they would have been amazed, as much by the fact that the couple were women as anything else.

This is the odd thing about change. It's deucedly unpredictable. We don't march in lock step towards the light. There are all sorts of curious mis-steps and wrong turnings. Gay Liberation was triggered by Stonewall. It might never have happened. Actually, the group who appeared ripest for liberation at the time were schoolkids who were loudly demanding the right to ruin their own lives, marching in the streets and waving the Little Red School Book. That's one emancipation movement that's gone backwards if anything. In the last forty years the argument that children should be shielded from real life has prevailed, often with the happy support of the children themselves who have benefited materially just as their own independence has been reduced.

When I read pieces like the Time editorial above I can't help thinking that some of the opinions held by people who think of themselves as moderate and liberal will appear equally ludicrous in ten years time.

Nobody sings like Mama Cass

Today I am mainly listening to Mama Cass. There don't seem to be any voices that are lovely in the Mama Cass way anymore. I hear belters, divas, the peddlers of empty melisma, the ones who gargle to denote high emotion and faux-naïf pixies by the score, but I don't hear a woman with a voice that can make you sit up straight and take on the day with a smile on your face like Mama Cass did on "Getting Better".

Everybody has to convince us that they're mining some inexhaustible source of inner pain. There may well have been some of that going on with Mama Cass but she didn't let it show. The best thing a singer can do is make people feel better and the first person she needs to make feel better is herself. Nobody did that better than Mama Cass on "Getting Better". It's not perfect. It's got slight slips and even wanders off the note briefly. Nobody's gone back and fixed it. It's the sound of somebody making the best of things, which we don't hear often enough. And what a love song Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill provided her with. Few people can sing the word "groovy" without parenthesizing it. Mama Cass could. Just as great songwriters can pack a line with a lot of syllables great singers like Mama Cass manage to sound as if they're discovering that line for the first time. "Now there's something groovy and good 'bout whatever we've got". Indeed.

It's the Ashes. Look away now.

Everyone above a certain age remembers "No Hiding Place", the episode of "Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads" where they sought to avoid learning the score of an England international until the evening's highlights. It seemed a bit of a stretch even then. Nowadays if you want to avoid knowing what happened in the last minute of a major sporting occasion you have to remove yourself from society entirely. Now that the Ashes has begun it's an all-day hazard once again. During the 2005 Ashes I was working in an office with a window into an adjoining room in the corner of which was a television. That meant I only had to glance up to get a rough idea of what was happening. I couldn't see detail but I nonetheless developed a way of reading the play just from the camera angles the director was selecting. Wide shot with lots of green meant a boundary. Close-up meant batsman was having torrid time. When the games were taking place overseas I followed the ball-by-ball coverage on the excellent Cricinfo. Sinister patterns begin to appear. A dot ball took no time to come up on the screen. If the page was taking a while to refresh that could mean a wicket. The reporter was busy filling out the details. It's like the off-screen yelp of the football-watching ex-pros on Jeff Stelling's programme or Alan Green saying "we're going to go to White Hart Lane in a moment" on Five Live; an entirely new form of the thousand natural shocks that sport is heir to. Compared to all this agonisingly mediated information actually being at a match is a breeze.

Contrast all this with Charters and Caldicott in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes". This pair are trying to get back by train from some unspecified Mittel European country on the brink of war in time to catch the last day of the Test Match. The progress of the train is of course interrupted by disappearing women, the always distracting Margaret Lockwood, shoot-outs with secret agents and regular passport checks by fascist jobsworths. And yet they never lose their faith that they will be returned to Victoria in time to scoot across town to Euston and take the train to Manchester that will get them to Old Trafford in time to see the last day's play.

An Art critic writes

The problem with the whole fourth plinth business is that plinths are traditionally occupied by larger-than-life figures. Once you plonk an actual human being on a plinth - even one dressed as a fish - he all but disappears.

Another internet music play gets a free ride from the City pages

All stories about music companies get disproportionate space on the financial pages because they provide the section editor with an excuse to run a picture of a glamorous woman singer under a headline about being "on song". There was a classic on the front page of the Sunday Times's Business Section yesterday: Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas under "Going For The Big Notes", which announced a story about Spotify seeking to raise another £30m. In this I wish them well but I wonder if a little bit of the page area devoted to Fergie's frock could have been used to ask the odd question.

Spotify costs the end user nothing. Its revenue comes from either advertising or monthly subscriptions. Since it's signed up more than 2m users since last October you might say that the company's proud claim to be doubling revenues monthly is not quite as spectacular as it first appears.

You really don't need a weatherman

An economist on the Today programme just apologised in case he and his fellow professionals are confusing us with the latest round of figures about public spending. How could we possibly be confused? We don't know the numbers. We don't need to know the numbers. It's quite sweet that politicians of all sides think it's about the numbers, as if we can be dazzled by a little book cooking, or "re-prioritising" as some government spokesman had it the other day. If you want to know how it's going you don't look at the figures. You look at their eyes.

My grandmother was no economist but even she could have told you that when the government has borrowed as much as ours has, unemployment and its attendant costs are rising steeply, the pound is in bad enough shape to frighten anyone who buys a bottle of Chianti, let alone goes on a holiday abroad, almost a million young people are not in work, education or full-time training, the one source of taxation income, financial services, is on the bones of its arse and according to the World Bank and the ratings agencies Britain is getting a reputation among the lenders of money of a particularly bad-risk sink estate, then the fantasy that public spending won't have to be reduced and taxation won't have to rise is one that you couldn't get past Pollyanna, let alone the supposedly sensible British public.

When every business or household in the UK is planning for no-growth, decline or armageddon, the idea that the present government is going to have a leetle bit of a look-ette at the figures after the election gives you an idea of what an empty charade that's going to be. Either they think somebody else will be looking at the books after the election (which is certainly what the polls believe) or their research has told them that we'd prefer not to have our pretty little heads clouded with the awful truth. I find this kind of collective delusion a lot more frightening than the truth could ever be.

You can call me Al

There was an interesting exchange on the radio yesterday between Jack Straw and Ann Widdicombe about the rights and wrongs of releasing Ronnie Biggs. What made it interesting was that they were referring to each other as "Jack" and "Ann". This is the first time I've heard British political adversaries address each other in such familiar terms without one of them being at death's door. Perhaps they're both retiring at the next election. It was made even more unusual by the way they referred to the subject of their discussion as "Mr Biggs", which must be an indication of just how ill he is.

Mrs Slocum: the joke goes on forever

I don't suppose I've actually watched "Are You Being Served" for many years. The beauty of this kind of comedy is you don't really have to watch it as long as you carry it around in your head. It's like the Carry On series. The predictability is what makes it work. The plot is only there to provide excuses for the characters to behave in stereotypical ways.

Mrs Slocum (what a wonderful name that is) embodied a stock character that you can find in English literature as far back as Chaucer. She was the lady of a certain age who kow-towed to her superiors, lorded it over her underlings and yet remained immensely vulnerable to flattery, particularly of a romantic nature. Mollie Sugden was a master of this kind of characterisation. Her lines came front-loaded with flowery pretension before souring into fish wife abuse at the end. She was high and low in a very English way. You could smell the face powder and the "products" in her hair but she could probably look after herself in a scrap in a dockside pub.

Of course a dockside pub is as much of an anachronism as Grace Brothers itself, which had probably gone out of business by the time the series was first launched. If there are any Mrs Slocums still around they're not wearing corsets or sitting at home with their pussies. Nonetheless the joke embodied in that character, just as the joke attached to the characters played by Charles Hawtrey or Sid James, chuckles on down the years.

The banality of evil (a continuing story)

The horror of last night's Dispatches on the massacre in Mumbai didn't come from shots of the station concourse covered in brains, first-person accounts of those who were lucky to escape with their lives or even security camera footage of the gunmen cutting down guests at the luxury hotels. It came from recordings of the phone conversations between the murderers and their controllers back in Pakistan.

The squaddies with their fingers on the triggers may have been country boys who were temporarily distracted from their bloody work by the size of the computer screens in the buildings they moved through but they were being issued with their instructions by people far more frightening. Anyone inclined to believe acts like these are organised by people temporarily setting aside their finer feelings in pursuit of a sane political goal should hear this monster as he choreographs each move in his own personal festival of carnage. A slit throat here, a bullet in the back of the neck there, capricious mercy for a Turkish muslim followed by words of comfort for a Jewish woman (each Jew, he tells his team, is worth fifty ordinary corpses) who in due course he intends to have despatched.

He's sitting in a room with a bunch of fellow mobsters who are watching the events on live TV. Occasionally he has to seek advice from the rest of his management team and we hear him calling over his shoulder "should they kill them now or later?" At one stage a gunman answers the phone with the words "peace be with you." It's the kind of thing no scriptwriter would dare hand in for fear of vulgarising an event so terrible and writing a role no actor would dare play.

Are top tennis players actually tougher than the rest?

I used to play a lot of tennis. I used to play all the year round, Christmas Day included. The only time of the year I didn't play was Wimbledon fortnight. That was partly because the sight of the top pros would make me want to throw my racket in a skip. The same TV action that was making me feel like giving up was having the opposite effect on people who never played. They were burrowing under the stairs for their equipment, racing down to public parks to give it a go as if their tennis ability was just an old muscle that needed to be re-awoken. Presumably some while later they were wondering why their slice backhand didn't go within an eighth of an inch of the net and then dip sharply before hanging a sharp right like Roger Federer's did. Then they'd give up again until the following year. And they still didn't realise just how mind-bogglingly good the best tennis players are. I know Tim Henman never won a grand slam but the abuse he came in for in this country came mainly from people who staggered down the park once a year rather than the people who knew just how tough it is to prevail in the upper reaches of this sport.

Watching Murray only just overcome Wawrinka last night was a salutary reminder that there can't be many sports that require more of the competitors than men's professional tennis. It's you and you alone, using personal reserves of stamina, concentration, athleticism, touch, power, nerve, cussedness and geometric aptitude that most of us couldn't summon for three minutes, let alone four hours and more. I've hit maybe twenty tennis balls in my life that connected with the sweet spot and went not just roughly but exactly where I wanted them to go. These people are doing it ten times a minute. There's not a split second for coasting or allowing their brain to switch off and their body do the work. They have to be pushing the other guy back a millimetre at a time, putting his feet in slightly the wrong place, forcing him into the tiny hurry that will produce the crucial error. If they don't do that he will do the same to them. And when you don't win, as happened to Stanislas Wawrinka last night, you just put your racket in your bag and go back to the dressing room, vowing to do better next time. He'll probably be out playing doubles today. Remarkable, as Dan Maskell was wont to say.

A man of property

I've just found this. It shows my grandmother Lois (left), my great-grandfather Smith Taylor and a cousin who used to live with them.

It's unusual in that it's not a studio picture but it seems too good to be an amateur snap. Obviously whoever's taking it has had instructions to include as much of their house as possible. What I don't understand is that the back of it is a postcard with a space for "a half penny stamp". They must have been posted to friends and relatives to show off.

Let us now praise Another Nickel In The Machine

Jude Rogers, fellow member of the Society For Mooching Around Old London Pubs With Literary Associations, sent me a link to Another Nickel In The Machine, one of the best blogs I've seen in ages. It combines three of my favourite things - London, history and serendipity - in one endlessly browsable package. I've just been looking at the piece about Errol Flynn and his 15-year-old girlfriend Beverly Aadland at the Lido Club in Swallow Street. It also shows you the house in Castelnau in Barnes where he went to school and a YouTube clip of him on a panel game with Neil Young's father. How could anyone resist?

Is death just the start for the Michael Jackson industry?

A few hours after the death of Elvis Presley in 1977, as his family were sitting around Graceland shocked and weeping, Colonel Tom Parker turned up. He hadn't been closely involved in Presley's affairs at that time, preferring to spend his time gambling. It was Parker who galvanised the shattered family with the words "this changes nothing".

Even he can't have known how right he was. When Presley died there was no etiquette for handling the death of a rock superstar. The media weren't sure if they were dealing with a washed-up has-been or a figure who was still relevant. I don't think Downing Street felt the need to make a statement. "People" magazine, America's foremost title about entertainment and celebrity, could have put his face on the cover but didn't, reasoning that he no longer meant that much to the average American. I happened to be in Memphis that year and visited Graceland to look at the grave. You could just walk into the grounds. There were no conducted tours and very few souvenir shops. The massive resurgence of interest in Elvis took some time to gather. The Elvis impersonators in their white suits took a while to get their act together. Dead Elvis was eventually more popular and more profitable than Live Elvis but it wasn't immediate.

When John Lennon was shot three years later the news organisations were primed by the Presley experience. The wall-to-wall coverage of his death was encouraged by the fact that he was both British and American, therefore both nations claimed some kind of ownership of him, politicians and public moralists could persuade themselves he was a key thinker for our times, his murder threw up all kinds of questions about random violence and the levers of the media were being pulled by people who had grown up adoring the Beatles and everything they stood for. At the end of December 8th 1980, after having gone through a day of hacking out tributes, a remark of Annie Nightingale's on the TV set me bawling. I wasn't crying for John Lennon, of course. I was crying for myself. Lost youth, good times, perspective, all that kind of thing. These things trigger something in us that needs to come out eventually. The Princess of Wales was not a rock star but the reaction to her death was on the scale of Lennon's but this time with a previously unfamiliar hysteria thrown in. Even the people who were flinging roses at her hearse in the Finchley Road on that mad day probably think better of it now. But at that time there was a pent-up desire for an extravagant, apparently un-British show of emotion. It was the kind of thing that used to be sublimated via religion or dancing round the maypole. In the TV age it was delivered via the box.

Judging by the way that Google almost broke yesterday under the strain I think it's fair to say that Michael Jackson's was the first death of a massive star in the internet age. TV and radio suddenly look and sound very quaint, huffing and puffing in the wake of the story, trying to assemble talking heads to say anything meaningful; even as they are talking people are coming up with new angles and implications. What happens to the kids? Where does this leave the London shows? Are his mother and father speaking to each other? Do you think these shows will actually happen in some strange animatronic form? How long will Sony leave it before the TV ads start? Bet they're glad they didn't auction the personal effects a month or two back. Does McCartney get the ATV catalogue back? I hear the funeral is going to be Muslim. What religion was he? Will Neverland be reopened to the public? How many people are working on one-shots right now? And so on.

Is there anything wrong with that? Well, it doesn't represent us at our most worthy but it does represent us at our most human. In the wake of any death in any family human beings have a huge desire to just sit down and talk about it. They may be talking about the deceased. They may be grasping the opportunity to talk about something they rarely talk about, which is life. They may just want to gossip. Thanks to the internet you can now take a seat in the world's largest living room with millions of souls who are similarly fascinated and listen to discussions you might not wish to instigate yourself. Because a lot's changed since Colonel Parker's pronouncement in 1977. Parker was essentially a small-time thinker. Thirty years later, with the technology at the disposal of the entertainment industry, death can be just the beginning. I'm sure there are people working on it right now.

This post is also on The Word site. I've written a piece about Michael Jackson which is in today's Independent.

Why I don't use book shops much

I usually buy books online. I tend to get scolded at dinner parties for the damage I'm thereby doing to my friendly neighbourhood bookstore. I fear that bookstores, friendly or otherwise, may be damaging themselves without help from me. On Radio Four this morning I heard an extract from a book called "The Junior Officers Reading Club". Having your book read on Radio Four is the publishing equivalent of a Radio One record of the week and therefore you'd expect the trade to be at least slightly poised.

Finding myself in the King's Road this afternoon I went into a branch of one of Britain's biggest book retailers, a place I might reasonably expect to find such a book. I enquired on the ground floor. Years working on the other side of the counter have taught me how to be a good customer. My presentation goes like this. "They're reading a book on Radio Four this week. [I'll confess, I half anticipated that I wouldn't have to go any further than this. I was wrong. ] It's called something like The Junior Officers Reading Club." There's a slight flicker of recognition on his face but he has to look it up on their computer system (which probably means he's looking on Amazon). He tells me it's downstairs in History. Obvious place, really, for a book about serving in the army in contemporary Afghanistan. The tyranny of categories kicks in, which is half the problem for book retailers, as it is for record retailers. You don't just have to work out where it is. You have to work out where they think it is which is based on what they think it is. These are not problems for you and Google.

I go down to History unaccompanied. If I'd asked after the Bovril in my local Sainsbury the assistant would have taken me to it. That's how they roll. Seemingly this does not apply to the spending of £16.99. I look – and bear in mind I'm a world-class looker – on the table where the big-selling military books are displayed. No sign. I ask another assistant. I've been sent down from upstairs etc etc. Again there's that faint gleam of recognition from him. I'm starting to wonder if they coach that gleam. He looks on the system which assures him that the book is present in the store. He takes me over to the place where it is assigned to live. He looks without success. He goes back to the desk to check whether it's actually been "put out" (because there's a whole world of difference between in-stock and on-sale). As he does so I look down and see the book. One copy, which means either there have been lots of sales and the staff haven't noticed or they have ordered one copy which suggests their buying could be keener.

Then I thank him. How English am I? What am I thanking him for? He didn't know what I was after or help me find it. In fact most of my time in the shop I was dealing with the difficulties of being in the shop. In a shop they've often hidden what you want behind lots of things they think you want. It's a bit like going to the office. Most of the time in the office you're dealing with problems that only arise because you're in the office. On the occasions I complain in a shop I invariably end up saying "you are confusing your problems with mine. If you hadn't introduced a system to make your life easier you might be making my life easier." Anyway, I bought the book. More fool me. I should have just ordered it on Amazon. It would probably have been home ahead of me.

A few years ago I did a presentation at a meeting of the Institute of PRs. Don't laugh. I concluded by saying that in the near future all providers of information would be replaced by just two things. One was Google, an unparalleled way of pulling information towards you. The other was what I like to call the House Hippie. House Hippies know everything. They are Google with skin. When I worked in retail there were a few House Hippies. They were often terrible with customers but they knew more about the stock than the most sophisticated retrieval system. If something was a Radio Four book they bloody well knew. I stand by what I said, particularly when it applies to PRs, who seem to recruit a remarkable number of people who have a passion for anything but communication. They long ago stopped informing people of anything. In this maybe they are just recognising the reality of the world against which I came up this afternoon. Any information of any interest you find out yourself. The only people worth consulting are experts. And if a shop has a range of stock which is so wide that the staff can't be expert in it, they mustn't be surprised if we go to the digital shelf and help ourselves.

(This over-long post was written in a hospital corridor waiting for a family member's x-ray to come back. Slight fracture.)

I love radio. Why doesn't it love me?

I love radio. If I was going to do away with all media but one it would be radio I'd hang on to. Over ten years ago in the vanished kingdom of more money than sense I felt I ought to get one of these new fangled digital radios. I went to John Lewis where they had a couple of tuners on sale. Things hadn't yet reached the stage of portables. I bought a Technics tuner for what I think was the best part of a thousand pounds. Yes, you read that correctly. I'm not a complete dolt when it comes to setting up audio equipment but I could never entirely get it working to my convenience. I quickly gained the impression that the stations had been clustered for the convenience of the media owners rather than the listener. Later on I realised that the government were flogging off so much "spectrum" that the signal was getting worse all the time. Many hi-fi people say it's now actually worse than FM. But just as they were going quiet on the subject of audio quality they were starting to talk up the range of radio services that were going to be offered. However no sooner had these stations opened up than they were cutting back or closing. There was not enough advertising around to finance niche services and so everybody had to cluster in the middle of the road or go out of business. The promised internet radio revolution never happened either because the more popular sites became the more they had to pay for bandwidth and music rights. Then the recession gave Channel Four an excuse to change their mind about launching a radio station and suddenly a medium which was positioning itself for dramatic advances was abandoning its weapons and tiptoeing away in the dead of night.

There are maybe ten radios in our house. That's not counting the devices we've got that are capable of receiving radio signals. Some are portable. Some are fixed. A handful are digital. Most are analogue. Because of the digital delay it is impossible to do what I'd like to do, which is listen to the same programme while moving from the kitchen to the dining room. The only solution to that is to switch the digital radio to analogue. Because some clown is promoting club nights on pirate radio from the top of a nearby tower block it's difficult to get proper FM reception on Radio Four in my area. To get round these problems, and to save my family anguish, I decided to listen to the Twenty20 World Cup Final on the internet via my iTouch. I fired it up and tuned it to Five Live only to be told that (presumably because of rights issues) this was one broadcast they were not able to bring me. Since last year we have been trying to turn off anything in the house that uses "stand-by" power overnight. This applies to digital radios. It means that every morning when I make my way downstairs in traditionally fragile state I have to bend down to the plug to turn on our very lovely digital radio at which point it emits a piercing "meee" sound to announce it is ready to be switched on. This lowers my scene somewhat.

I realise that the proposed "digital switchover" ought to save me at least some of those problems but there's a part of me that agrees with Libby Purves's scorching column in The Times in which she lays into the radio industry and the government for a succession of blunders, technological letdowns and high-handed digital decrees that have left people with the feeling that this is an industry that only enters their life in order to take something precious away. (I might also bundle into this battered parcel of discontent the fact that Simon Mayo will no longer be on Five Live because the latter is moving to Manchester, as perfect a case of tail wagging dog as I can call to mind right now.) I also agreed with my old friend Trevor Dann of the Radio Academy when he said on this week's Broadcasting House that the radio industry needs to come up with a product that adds something to people's enjoyment rather than curtailing it. How it's going to happen I have no idea. Identifying with the listener (make that "customer" for a while) might prove very difficult. What we don't wish to hear any more of are their problems.

A thought about speeches

In the course of attending a lifetime of speech days I have finally realised you can tell a good speaker from a mediocre one without actually hearing a word of what they're saying. The poor speaker looks at their notes. The good speaker looks at their audience. The poor one thinks you're listening to hear what they're going to say. The good one knows you're listening to them because they're interesting to listen to.

Let us now praise "A Point Of View"

A Point Of View is one of the best things on Radio Four. It consists of wise old heads talking about current affairs. Because they're wise old heads, what they generally say is a variation on a theme of "this is not so new" or "pull yourselves together".

It's on early on Sunday morning, thereby ensuring the wisdom never reaches anyone under the age of 35. In the past it's featured the likes of Brian Walden and Katherine Whitehorn. The series that finished recently was done by Clive James. In the last one he managed to involve Kim Jong Il, MP's expenses and the botched election for the Oxford Poetry Professorship. You can read it here and even listen to it here.

I listened to it for the fourth time while walking home from the Tube last night. What's refreshing, particularly amid the humbug and prudery of our present media, is his recognition that God-given talent can reside alongside tawdry behaviour and that many of the great poets of yesteryear were imposing themselves on teenage girls even when they were at the age when they might have been better off delivering "A Point Of View". That in itself should not have disqualified them from lecturing on poetry because, as he points out:

good poets are often frail people, and people who are not frail are seldom good poets.

Is this why footballers always take the money?

It must be odd being a professional footballer at the best of times. It must be even odder when they're on their annual holidays, knowing that at any time a phone call may come with the news that in a couple of weeks they're to report at an entirely new place of work. This may even be in a different country. There will be no time for a fond farewell to erstwhile team mates. This isn't just an upheaval for the player. It probably involves their wife, children, parents and courtiers in tearing up roots that have barely had time to bed down.

I've had a distant glimpse of this since a young family friend joined the fitness staff of a major football club. Promotion or relegation at the end of a season means that the manager moves. Depending on the budget at the new club or the disposition of the incoming manager at the present club the fitness staff might find themselves staying or moving, sometimes hundreds of miles, sometimes to a different country, always at a few day's notice. Nobody, of course, is complaining that this makes the job intolerable but it might help explain why whenever football people are offered a large amount of cash they tend to take it.

How much does it cost if it's free?

This American Life is an excellent radio programme/podcast produced by Chicago public radio. This is popular all over the English-speaking world. But the more popular it is, the more it costs Chicago public radio. This is a classic example of the economics of the web, the exact opposite of the economies of scale that we traditionally believe in. Now they're having to make appeals like this one.

This is what you can do with your 39th game, Scudamore.

In case Richard Scudamore is thinking of reviving the idea of the 39th game, may I make a suggestion. As I understand it, the idea behind the 39th game was to access previously untapped markets, encourage valuable shirt sales and stay one step ahead of the NFL, the IPL and the other competing leagues across the world who are after the same leisure pound and big TV rights deals. When he suggested it at the beginning of last season he was shot down in flames. One of the many sound objections was that teams couldn't waste their time flying halfway round the world in the middle of an already hectic season.

I have a plan which gets round that problem and puts the Premier League in touch with a section that their whole future depends on. The 39th game should be played in England in front of under-18s only. Just kids. No corporates, no season ticket holders, just the young people that everyone professes to be so worried about.

Nobody who's seen that stat about the average age of a supporter at the Stretford End rising from 17 to 47 in the last forty years can doubt that the people the Premier League has lost contact with are young people who no longer go to top rank games unless they've got a wealthy and/or indulgent parent with a season ticket.

In the past few years under-age club nights and rock gigs have proved a massively popular boost to the live music business, putting artists in touch with their most passionate fans and planting the seeds of a lifelong interest in gig-going. Surely football would reap even more benefit from under-18s Saturday. It would look and sound totally different on TV, do more good than all those embarrassing football in the community photo-calls we see on MOTD2 and might even turn our current feelings about top footballers from seething envy to something approaching affection.

What could possibly be wrong with that? It ticks every box. All except the one that says football's highly paid bureaucrats should get an all-expenses paid jolly-up to somewhere warm where their sponsors wish to interest the locals in their lager and internet gambling.

Open University Cricket

I've been quite enjoying Empire Of Cricket, the BBC-2 Sunday night series, for the clips of Bradman's final duck, Botham's Headingley innings, the tie between the West Indies and Australia and old faces like Shane Warne, Clive Lloyd, Richie Benaud, Neil Harvey and many others. What's quickly become tiresome is the narrative spine of the series, which seems to have been cobbled up by a sociology lecturer looking for a way to justify his grant for a planned jaunt round the cricket grounds of the world. Each episode is devoted to a country and each country becomes an example of a theme. In England it's class distinction, in the West Indies it's racial discrimination, in Australia it's nationalistic self-confidence; presumably the series will continue in this vein. Those are obviously powerful elements of the story but the focus on them, which no doubt ticks a box somewhere, comes at the expense of any feeling for the things that interests me far more. How does the game operate in all those countries? What does amateur cricket feel like in Antigua or Sri Lanka? Is it taught in schools? What kind of status do the great heroes of the game enjoy in those places? What's it like to go to a game of cricket there? What does the grass smell like? Are they as sentimental about it as we are?

This Old House

We'll have lived in this house twenty-one years on Saturday. I'm not a big one for birthdays and anniversaries but I'm feeling oddly sentimental about this fact.

We were telling somebody about it yesterday. "Do you like your house?" he asked. Well, it has one unique feature. It has been Our House so long that it ceased being something you could assess the likeability of decades ago. After twenty-one years we are intimately familiar with its every noise, creak, sticking door, loose tile and eccentric flushing action. We can find our way around it in pitch darkness.

When we moved in the two kids were small enough to have barely any recollection of the previous place and the third had yet to come along. There's a lot taken place under its roof, whose slates, I note, could do with a little attention. I note also that a digit has dropped off the house number, meaning couriers have to use their powers of deduction. There are many improvements we would make if we were in the first flush of ownership. But it's strange how your view of house ownership changes in twenty-one years. We don't cast envious eyes on anyone else's pile or think life would be better if we had more space or a rural address.

Somebody asked the other day if we would ever move. While I was thinking about it, the GLW issued a statement on our behalf. We would only move, she said, if the neighbours moved out and were replaced by people we didn't get on with. She's right. Of course.

Where the media is not going

Rupert Murdoch has said he can see a future without printing presses. He's already planning to charge in some way for access to some of News International's websites. Does he know what he's doing? I would guess that he doesn't entirely but he knows he has to do something involving revenue rather than expenditure. The alternative is watching his print business drain away.

The reactions of the digerati are predictable, whether they're represented by Michael Wolff on his news aggregator (polite way of saying leecher) Newser or Jeff Jarvis on the Guardian Media Talk Podcast. It won't work, they say. If Rupert would only hang on a year or two, listen to his users and change his corporate culture a new dawn would eventually break in which News International would no longer be looking at a declining market.

I can't get over the blithe confidence of these guys. It's the same airy faith that it will all work out I find in anyone who works for a publicly-funded organisation or gets their money from a very large vault rather than from customers or advertisers. You can't help but think that if they really knew a radically new way of doing things they would be out there raising the finance to launch the big game-changer. Because if they're right there must be an enormous opportunity.

Rupert Murdoch probably doesn't know what's happening. I certainly don't. I am however prepared to stick my neck out and say what I'm pretty sure is not going to happen.

* "New models" are not going to be cooked up in universities or think tanks.
* The decline in ink and paper advertising revenue is not going to be replaced by digital advertising revenue. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever.
* You can not blame this crisis on the short-sightedness and penny-pinching of all newspaper proprietors large and small.
* Since the internet abolished scarcity you can not get a premium on advertising revenue in premium environments.
* If users don't eventually pay in some way there will not be anything worth paying for.

Now tell me what is going to happen.

Joining the unprofessionals

On Friday night we watched "My Life In Verse" in which comedian Robert Webb "went on a journey" in search of e.e.cummings. This search brought him to the feet of Clive James, who used to present this kind of thing himself. Webb is no doubt a talented guy but he suffers from the same affliction as all funny guys when called upon to present a TV programme; he's not comfortable sitting and listening.

On Saturday afternoon former jockey Willie Carson was sent into the weighing room to interview the jockeys before the Derby. Clearly heartsick that he was no longer competing himself, he struck an uncomfortably chippy note so pronounced that one of his interviewees asked why he was shouting at him.

On Saturday evening former footballer Steve Claridge had the job of anchoring Five Live's football phone-in "606" and experienced such difficulty managing the callers that in the last fifteen minutes of the programme the switchboard was jammed with people having a go at him.

Are we living through an experimental period when nothing is presented by anyone who knows about; a) the subject; b) presentation; c) ideally, both?

Or is this the shape of the BBC to come?

A vinyl weekend

When records were rare and precious and the concept of replacing them utterly foreign, every scratch, every cigarette burn on a cover, every mark that the spindle made on the label (above) was like a dagger to the heart. Now that any record can be replaced with a few clicks, it does the heart good to see each ancient bruise.

Tapping up a rich Auntie

I'm sure there's never been an ideal time for the BBC to reveal how much it's paying its top radio talent but right now must be the worst time of all. The argument about having to pay top dollar in order to compete with offers from commercial rivals never did hold water. Where else could John Humphreys and Chris Moyles hope to earn a fraction of what they do presenting daily shows on a publicly-funded national broadcaster? But now that the commercial tide has gone out their, er, packages are going to look even more anomalous.

So who else are they going to give a whistle to?

In Saturday's Cup Final Chelsea's Florent Malouda let go a shot that hit the bar, bounced down over the line and then back into play. Neither the ref nor the other officials thought it was a goal and so they carried on. TV replays showed that it was a goal but thankfully it wasn't controversial. Chelsea held on to their lead and won the cup. This gave rise to the usual arguments about "modern technology". (Football people's belief in "modern technology" is about as well-grounded as 17th century villagers' belief in witchcraft.)

It works in cricket and rugby, they say. Well, in those sports it works far from perfectly and both games have one characteristic that football doesn't. When a decision needs to be made in cricket and rugby the ball is dead. In the Malouda case play was continuous and the only person who can stop play is the ref, who saw nothing wrong with it. So who would stop the FA Cup Final so that a TV replay could be consulted? Guus Hiddink? Roman Abramovich? One of the players? A representative of a Chinese gambling syndicate?

The technology may well work but somebody has to provide the interval for it to do that work. If you allow anyone other than the ref to be the arbiter of all decisions about how play is conducted you're letting in all manner of madness.

We hate it when our friends become successful, particularly in magazines

To the Museum of London at the Barbican last night for a party to mark Time Out's donation of forty years of its archive to the Museum. The public will eventually be able to search every back issue over that period. As Tony Elliott, the founder of the magazine, pointed out, there are whole areas – pub-rock, fringe theatre, alternative education – that have waxed and waned over those forty years and would have no historical record at all were it not for their coverage in the pages of the magazine.

To celebrate this occasion Tony Elliott had invited many of the people who had contributed to the magazine's glory days and played a part in shaping the city's view of itself. I spotted Miles, Jeff Dexter, Alan Parker, Pearce Marchbank and there were many more I wouldn't recognize. On one level it was AbFab come to life. Maybe I've just got an acute nose for this but I also caught the whiff of mild resentment that always seems to hover over any reunion of media people; no matter how graciously the boss behaves, somebody still thinks their contribution was never properly recognized, their byline hijacked, another stood in their precious ration of the light and they were condemned to a life of obscure jobbing while somebody else got his place in the sun.

If the enterprise didn't work they all seem satisfied that it didn't beat the odds. To bend a line from Alan Bennett, they are united in the magnificent equality of failure. But if it succeeds they never ever forgive.

In praise of Mollie Panter-Downes

Before this week Mollie Panter-Downes was just a name I noticed in the footnotes of books about the Home Front in the war. She was an English writer whose wartime despatches to the New Yorker have proved invaluable source material for historians trying to pin down the mood of daily life in those days. She also wrote short stories. Sometimes very short stories. These are collected in two fondle-worthy editions from Persephone that I've devoured in the last few days.

Apparently she was one of the few writers whose copy that magazine's fastidious style police never had to change. Her style is as easy to read as magazine fiction ought to be but manages to be haunting and picturesque at the same time. Whether or not she knew it, she was describing the lives of her subjects at the same time as they were undergoing permanent change. People were moving out of houses they could no longer afford, finding themselves living cheek by jowl with people they would never normally encounter, enduring the terror of the Blitz (she talks about a bomb on its way down as making "a hole in the air") and later in the war missing the companionship it provided. She's particularly good on the fact that the English class system is sustained as much from below as it is imposed from above and what she calls in one story "the dignity of all human affection". Marvellous stuff.

Working outdoors

Today's the day I moved that old card table down to the bottom of the garden to see if I can trick myself into working like Somerset Maugham or Roald Dahl.

Cripes! Publicity! I'll be unbearable

Mr Hepworth's blog, "and another thing" (www.whatsheonaboutnow.blogspot.com) is an excellent glimpse into world-class thinking about music, business, publishing and the general world of media; supplemented by excellent jokes and observations about a professional life lived adjacent to celebrity culture.

More here.

Listening to old interview tapes

I'm very impressed that Lynne Truss is on Radio Four's Archive Hour tomorrow night presenting "Did I Really Ask That?" in which she plays the cassettes of her old interviews with the likes of Arthur Miller and Tom Stoppard. I've never had the nerve to let anyone hear the tapes of my interviews with the members of Racey, let alone Bob Dylan. It would be like hearing your twenty-year-old self trying to talk a girl into coming back to your room. It makes me blush to think of the forced laughter, the exaggerated surprise, the mute toleration of a really boring answer, the agonising, crab-like approach towards a difficult question and the blood pumping in the ears when you finally get a quote you can use. It's not conversation, much as it would like to be. It's more like tickling trout.

There are bargains to be had

Last night I watched "Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor: The Link" on BBC-1. Four thoughts.
1. Fascinating though it was, the amount of actual content in this hour-long programme could have been got through in about ten minutes. The rest was taken up with shots of scientists looking through microscopes and those sudden zooms that are accompanied by "whoosh" noises.
2. This is the most complete fossil anyone's come across ever. It's 47,000,000 years old and they can still tell what was in its stomach.
3. A Norwegian museum bought it from a private collector for just $1,000,000. That's about the asking price of an Edwardian semi in suburban London.
4. I'm always amazed at how "reasonable" precious things can be.

Can editors change their spots?

This piece by economist Robert G. Picard is called "why journalists deserve low pay". The nub of his argument is that journalistic skills are being commoditised out of existence and therefore hacks have to find new ways to add value. He makes the point that in the early days of newspapers journalists were far more involved in the selling of their services than they are today, when most of them like to think that what they do is somehow beyond grubby commerce, even as economic forces indicate that if ever there was a time to get on one's bike this is it. He says:

Journalism must innovate and create new means of gathering, processing, and distributing information so it provides content and services that readers, listeners, and viewers cannot receive elsewhere. And these must provide sufficient value so audiences and users are willing to pay a reasonable price.

I think his analysis is sound - and he's the first person to point out that change is more likely to come from journalists than management - but his proposed solutions are as woofly as, well, everybody else's, inspired by a Micawberish belief that something will turn up rather than a passionate belief that it will. He points to the fact that Newsweek is switching its focus from news-gathering to analysis and suggests that America's big local papers should develop a reputation for covering particular areas. I can't see either kind of change being anything like radical enough.

Editors, who are a form of journalist, have particular challenges in the new dispensation because their historic strength has been a skill in creating a balanced package. Now that people can access elements of that mix, what price the amount of sweat and expense that goes into the fashioning of the package? Magazine editors spend most of their time deciding what they're *not* going to do and trying to arrive at a mix that the majority of people will like. They then find that whatever they've arrived at is too much for some people and not enough for others. This is made more difficult by the fact that their readers, being the most engaged in their particular area, are the people most likely to tap into other sources themselves. The people who value your mix most are also the people who would feel most qualified to mix it themselves.

Every month I get emails from some readers of The Word, who are the most engaged readers of anything in my experience, saying how much their enjoyment of the magazine would have been increased if only it didn't also have a certain element. I can well understand how you might want more of something but fail to understand how you could similarly want less of something, particularly since the magazine operates in a steadily expanding universe of stuff and therefore the chances of one's personal favourites being featured must be getting less all the time.

I subscribe to The New Yorker. One of its chief delights is that it's impossible to predict what's going to be in it. I wonder whether magazines of the future might be more of a mystery tour than they are today. In a sense it seems inevitable. If that's to happen it needs some brave editors and some even braver readers.

Reporting unreported street crime

On my way to a screening in the West End the other evening I stopped for a cup of tea. Looking out of the café window my gaze was interrupted by a young man coming round the corner running very, very fast. I watched as he shouted after a middle-aged bloke walking down the street towards the British Museum. When he caught up with him there was a confrontation that looked for a moment as if it might turn into violence. But then the older man sheepishly put his hand in his pocket and handed over the phone he'd presumably just stolen from the younger. The young man departed, presumably satisfied. Nobody was bothering to alert the authorities. The man in the cafe said it happened every day.

Ten minutes later I was walking on the edge of Covent Garden when a young man came tearing out on an alley, galloped across the road and disappeared behind a council truck. The minute he was hidden from view a young woman came running out of the same alley. At first I thought it must be what they used to call "high spirits" between boyfriend and girlfriend but then I wondered whether he'd just stolen something from her. She ran across the street and went in the opposite direction. Which made me wonder. If she really was pursuing a thief on her own, how was she proposing to regain her property? And if she needed some help, whatever happened to crying "stop thief!"?

When the recession hit the heritage industry in the small of the back

When English Heritage, the four-part series which has recently finished on BBC-2, was commissioned, it was presumably intended as a sceptical look at the heritage industry, enlivened by the eminently lampoon-able figure of EH's boss, Simon Thurley. The arrival of the recession midway through filming proves the great truth of documentary television; what's bad news for the subjects is always good news for the film makers. The series looked at four projects.
1. Apethorpe Hall
A splendid hunting lodge, once used by James I, had been neglected for twenty years and abandoned by its last owner. EH move in and spend £3m getting it ready for sale to a suitable billionaire. The catches? Said billionaire would have to spend another £7m making it habitable and then let the public in 28 days a year. Then the stock market crashes.
2. Park Hill Estate
A huge late-50s council block in Sheffield, which is unfit for human habitation, is deemed of special architectural interest by EH and restored with the services of a trendy developer. EH want to turn it into chi-chi apartments and "business units". People in Sheffield want it knocked down. Halfway through the work the developers can't raise enough money to complete the work because property prices have tanked.
3. The Queen, Her Lover and His Castle
Kenilworth Castle was once the home of Robert Dudley, favourite of Elizabeth I. When she was visiting he spent a fortune building a garden to impress her. No traces of this garden remain. Posterity only knows about it through a description in a contemporary letter. EH embark on rebuilding this garden (including fountain and aviary) on the basis of this description. They are attempting to replicate a temporary structure knocked up in the 16th century to satisfy the demanding safety standards of the 21st. Nobody can decide who's paying for the steel reinforcements on the timbers and so work on the site ceases.
4. Full Steam Ahead
King's Cross station is being restored. For a whole year there is no work on the revised booking hall because EH insist some brackets should be retained from the previous structure. The station is closed so the Victorian pedestrian bridge can be removed. EH want it preserved but they can't find anyone who wants it. Therefore the bridge ends up in a car park in Cambridge.
If any of this sounds remotely interesting I urge you to catch it on the Iplayer. It's brilliant, if slightly bitchy, television. If you're going to watch just one film make it "The Queen, Her Lover and His Castle". Pay particular attention to the scene where, in order to establish the appropriate design for the fountain in the imaginary garden, they hire two male models, wrap them in loincloths, put them on a fork-lift truck and have them holding a bowl aloft. A dozen people stand around, some of them presumably quite well-paid, cooing appreciatively and taking pictures with their digital cameras. This for just one tiny detail of just one of thousands of projects. I think we may well look back at this film in years to come and wonder that public money was ever spent on capricious projects like these and on a scale that would give even Hollywood pause.

You can take the girl out of Blue Peter......

I first met Konnie Huq when she used to come in and work at Q during her school and university holidays. When she turned up at Blue Peter years later it was because she was capable as well as attractive. Being Asian certainly didn't hurt either. The strange mathematics of television means that an attractive woman presenting a childrens programme will acquire an erotic halo they wouldn't have if they were fronting "Fornication On 4". It's the contrast that appeals to the male imagination.

Obviously when she was presenting the programme she wouldn't have been allowed to take up the many offers to pose for so-called glamour pictures. Now that she's on the point of taking up another presenting gig she's been persuaded to do just that for FHM. (Mind you, female TV presenters always claim to have been persuaded. Nobody's candid enough to admit they're flattered.) And, in a major upset to the form book, she finds they've flagged it as a Blue Peter special. "It was so inappropriate," she says, employing the adjective of the day. "I mean, kids can walk into a newsagent and see that and think it is something about the show." Well, that's what's going to happen for the rest of your career, Konnie. Just ask Valerie Singleton or Janet Ellis, both of whom have probably got to the point where they don't mind anymore. Anything that keeps you famous so long is not to be sniffed at.

An evening with the quality

This evening we went to the presentation of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize at Tate Britain. The winner was "The Armies" by Colombian author Evilio Rosero, translated by Anne McLean, who explained that British publishers often have to take a punt on a novel in a foreign language before they've actually read it. This had never occured to me before but is bleeding obvious when you think about it. Hospitality was provided by Champagne Taittinger of which I can't speak highly enough.

Turning the house upside down

The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters is full of laconic zingers. Last night I was reading about the occasion in 1972 when Chatsworth House got a bomb threat. It promised the bomb would go up in half an hour. One of the house guests went and moved their new car to make sure it wouldn't be affected by any blast. Never mind the Velasquez, thought the Duchess Of Devonshire. They evacuated the house and rang the police, who arrived twenty minutes later.
"Do you want us to search the house?" they asked.
"It may take you more than ten minutes," she said.

We just got this email at the office

I can't decide whether it's real or a supremely clever piss-take, possibly written by Chris Morris.

Please sit still while teacher counts you

The story that had my jaw dropping this weekend concerns London Metropolitan University, which could be fined £40,000,000 for overclaiming student numbers in order to qualify for government grants. The Vice Chancellor, who was, incidentally, paid more than the Prime Minister, has taken early retirement, presumably on terms that most of us can only dream of. In the wake of that there's talk of 500 staff redundancies and London Met not being "fit for purpose". There's a massive finger-pointing exercise going on at the moment involving all your old favourites: personal animosity, class war, race, union power and tactical score-settling. When the smoke clears we might just glimpse the real malaise which the figures only hint at.

The Higher Education Funding Council For England found that London Met had a total dropout rate for the year 2006-7 of 30.6%. London Met reckoned it was only 2.3%. Even allowing for accounting disparities that's a discrepancy you could drive a bus through. In 2007-8 the University claimed funding for 15,306 students. HEFCE said there were only 10,613. It further reckons that over a five year period they overpaid London Met £36.5 million. That's one university managing to mislay a third of its student body but still claim for them.

Obviously some inquiry will focus on how these claims came to be made and how many people had to turn a blind eye to them but what we really need to know as a society is this. Who is taking the piss out of the taxpayer most? The students who sign up and then just wander off in increasing numbers? (What is the real drop out rate and what does that mean for "education, education, education"?) Or the academics and bureaucrats who are so focussed on funding that they collude in what in the private sector would be called fraud? Either way it's a bigger scandal than MPs expenses.

MPs expenses: let's hear it for muckraking journalism and ink on paper

Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of MP's expenses, one thing is clear. Without a newspaper, in this case The Daily Telegraph, this story would never have surfaced. The only one of the broadcasters that might have been bothered with it, the BBC, would have required balls of steel to take it on. All the bloggers in the world wouldn't have been able to access the data and, if they had, they wouldn't have been able to make the same splash about it. It's a grubby story but newspapers are, at their best, a grubby trade. Maybe you won't miss them when they're gone. That could be the most disturbing thing of all.

Richard and Judy: we're apathetic as hell and we're not going to take it any more

A few years ago I was rung up by a researcher for Richard and Judy's afternoon show on Channel 4. Would I come on and talk about Live Aid? I said I was busy at the time. They kept ringing me. Eventually they offered payment and a car to take me back and forth. You can always tell a programme's budget by the cars they send. If they're driven by a middle-aged man in a suit, the interior smells of air freshener and today's papers are in the back, there's money involved.

Never having watched Richard and Judy I didn't know how they did things and when I got there I was surprised to find I was one of three people who had been brought in to contribute to an item that was five minutes long at the very most. In the ensuing discussion I managed to get away one sentence and I'm not generally crippled by shyness. Even in that brief exposure it was clear that the show was its own reality. Guests, who tended to be served in batches of three, were there to bolster the main point of the programme, which was looking at Richard and Judy. The outside world existed largely to give them something to raise their eyebrows at. Afterwards I was given a "goodie bag", containing, among other things, an autographed picture of the golden couple. It was like spending an hour on a planet whose hierarchy was completely unfamiliar and yet rigorously observed by the natives.

Six months ago they left Channel 4 and took their programme to digital channel Watch. Noting the weakening of the old channels they obviously felt that the new digital landscape would afford them opportunities to make some serious money as performer/producer/rights owners. It wasn't as easy as they thought. Yesterday they ran up the white flag and tore up the contract six months early, noting that their old audience had found it difficult to follow them to a small channel. In TV circles they gleefully point to one show which only managed 11,000 viewers.

Maybe this proves that while TV fame may spread very wide it doesn't go all that deep. It could also encourage the networks to face down some of their more demanding talent. If these people want to take their talent out into the marketplace and deal direct with the public they may find that they're nothing like as bankable as they imagine. And if they have to go back it will be on much reduced terms.

Is Rupert Murdoch the only person talking sense about the internet?

Rupert Murdoch says he's looking into how he may be able to charge for access to News International's web sites. His experience charging for content on the Wall Street Journal site makes him believe this is possible. The experience of the last year, where advertising revenue on his titles dropped by 21%, probably makes him believe this is inevitable.

I'm sure Murdoch's corporate heirs don't share his confidence but they're too implicated in the policy of investing billions in the internet to be caught blinking first. When they first began building massive newspaper sites and putting all their daily content on to them it was against the background of an expanding advertising market. There were people who thought that print was doomed but Doomsday was distant enough to probably occur on somebody else's watch. Things have changed in the last 12 months. Local papers in major American cities are closing almost weekly. Nothing quite so dramatic is happening here but there isn't anyone in a senior capacity on a British newspaper who believes that they can continue investing in both print and digital. Nor is there any serious person who believes that abandoning the former for the latter would be anything other than suicide. Nor can there be even the most junior contributor who can have failed to notice that budgets on newspapers are being drastically hacked back.

I'm sure Murdoch is old and wise enough to know that if some kind of payment is introduced it will be difficult and painful. He didn't get where he is today without being a realist. He's a sight more realistic than all the people on The Guardian site who have been heaping derision on his plans. Displaying the remarkable unanimity of the truly clueless they stop just short of calling him old and out of touch. Information wants to be free, some of them claim, parroting one of the most popular clichés of this most cliché-rich environments. Well, information doesn't feel one way or another about freedom. It's simply that the self-destructive land grab the newspaper groups have indulged in in the last ten years has encouraged people to believe that they didn't have to pay for information. So they didn't. Once the traditional information providers decide that they can't make any money giving all this away for free they will either go out of business or stop altogether. Anyone who thinks that information vacuum is going to be filled by citizen journalists or the BBC or some unspecified "new model" has their head in the sand.

Thirty-five years B.C. (before computers)

I don't know why I'm posting this. Nobody on the web is old enough to be able to answer the question that occured to me while standing in a bank queue the other day. But anyway.

What did banks do before computers?

Nowadays we accept that the teller will be able to tell everything about us after a few clicks. It wasn't always thus. What did they do in the mid-70s when you wanted to know what your balance was? I remember going into banks and asking that very question. How did they answer it? Did they disappear into the back and come back with the answer on a scrap of paper? I seem to remember that they did. And if so, where did they get that information from? Was there a Sgt Wilson figure somewhere in a morning coat sitting behind a huge ledger recording the comings and goings on everyone's account with a quill pen?

Nowadays we take it for granted that everything that can be recorded is being recorded somewhere, generally without actual human intervention. The idea that there was a time when nothing happened unless a human being was commanded to make it happen is something I already find amazing.