Evening folks.
Well, another week has flashed by and today sees the conclusion to another monumental mission. No, Gordon Brown has not left office yet, but it is the final of The Apprentice series 5 tonight. Who will be rewarded with a £100,000 a year salary and a permanent seat in Sir Alan, soon to be Lord Sugar's empire? By the way, doesn't the boss's new title make him sound like he should be a character in a Roald Dahl book? My prediction on a previous blog that Debra would go all the way has gone slightly awry but to my mind at least, the best two candidates over the whole series will be contesting the final.
Yasmina did not know the difference between a gross and net profit, so probably best that she doesn't end up doing Sugar's accounts! However, she has shown herself to be a determined candidate who is strong on the hard sell and not someone to be crossed. By contrast, Kate is less maverick than Yasmina and tends to go more by the book. I do not for one second believe she is the robot that the press and Sir Alan's advisors would make you believe. She might have the appearance of the dizzy blonde but I think there is a quiet determination to succeed inside and whereas Yasmina's skills lie in her hard selling, direct approach, Kate has a softer set of selling and people skills and she has shown herself to be a consumate presenter. It's going to be a close run thing and by the time you see this blog, the result will probably be known. But I'm predicting Yasmina to edge it by the slightest of slight margins, as Sugar tends to like someone who has a bit of maverick about them.
Well, there are those that think many of The Apprentice candidates are not fit enough to run a railway. Speaking of which, let's proceed to the first topic of this blog.
1. Changing the concept of time
As a regular commuter on one of the busiest rail passenger routes in the country, I am well used to the common problems that come with the territory. Finding a seat on a rush hour train is always a challenge, especially when you can guarantee that in every carriage there will be at least one selfish passenger who is apparently oblivious to the plight of the other passengers on the train. So while you are squashed like sardines in the standing room area with fold-up bicycles and each other for company, at least the rucksacks of the world can travel in comfort with a seat to themselves, despite the fact that there is a luggage rack especially for them.
As if the people aren't bad enough, the trains themselves are often awful to travel on, especially if like me, you have the misfortune of usually travelling on First Capital Connect. For those that are not familiar with First Capital, it would be fair to say that they are the Ryanair of the commuter train sector, with a very definite no-frills policy. Their trains invariably are so old that they would probably qualify for a Saga holiday. Due to their age and the lack of maintenance staff, the trains are usually to be found in a dirty and odious state. Draughts are another common problem. Not people playing the board game you will understand, although the phenomenon certainly leaves commuters in a huff. This is due to the windows often not closing properly, which results in not just a draught when you go through a tunnel but the accompanying hazards of a nasty din and a less than pleasant smell.
If you want to get between the south coast and the capital in a reasonable time, then First Capital is not the service for you. I have not given them my own private epithet of Slow Capital Connect for no good reason. If you get on a Brighton to Bedford service, the train will stop at near enough every station on its route between Brighton and East Croydon. I previously did not realise anyone with a pulse inhabited Wivelsfield or Balcombe! First Capital also suffers for being the least priority carrier on the line. Therefore, if there are train delays between London and Brighton, which is near enough every night, then people catching the First Capital trains will be the ones who ultimately suffer, as the Southern trains are allowed to move on ahead.
So I was rather intrigued and somewhat nonplussed by the news this week that train reliability and punctuality is at an all time high. According to the statistics that have been released, ninety per cent of long train journeys in this country are on time. Apparently, journeys that are classified as short journeys have a higher percentage in the punctuality stakes. If, like me, you found yourself thinking that these statistics could not be plausible, well it would seem that they are. However, it has meant a whole re-defining of the English language in order for the plausibility to be effective.
It was Mark Twain I think who came up with the quote about lies, damned lies and statistics. I wonder what the creator of Tom Sawyer would have to say about these statistics, because they would confirm his point. According to the report, being on time means that trains are no more than five minutes late on a short distance journey, let's say from Brighton to Gatwick Airport, and no more than ten minutes late on a long distance journey, let's say London Euston to Manchester Piccadilly. Now you begin to see how these statistics have been manipulated in order to produce the desired results for the people in power.
Surely there is no grey area in measuring being on time? On time means on time. Therefore, if your train from Brighton is scheduled to arrive at Gatwick Airport at 6:30 and it gets there at 6:34, it is late. I imagine that if the passenger alighted the train at that very destination, hopped on the travelator to the airport departures hall to go and check in only to find that they were late, there would be far less leniency shown for their late arrival. If you or I turned up to work four minutes late every morning, we would soon find ourselves up before the beak and if you turned up four minutes late to school every morning, you would soon find yourself in detention. It does not send out a good message to other walks of life if arriving five minutes after the scheduled ETA is considered to be acceptable.
Rather than trying to spin a yarn by redefining the parameters of time, it would be more effective if those overseeing the running of the transport infrastructure in this country could look at ways in which the railways could be run more efficiently, in order to encourage people away from using their cars for their journeys to work. I think that there are some drivers out there that would consider travelling by rail to work to avoid the daily road rage on the M23 or M25, but who are preturbed by the lack of reliability on public transport. For public transport to ever be a meaningful alternative to the car, it has to be both reliable and flexible to the passenger's needs. Right now, the trains all too often fail on both levels.
There is only a finite amount of track that is carrying a vast number of trains across the network on seven days a week. This causes several problems, it means that track maintenance is frequently needed, sometimes as a matter of emergency and this results in delays to trains. On an everyday basis, the sheer volume of trains on the track can automatically cause delays and especially if one train is running late, it means that an orderly queue of trains will form behind it, all of which will end up getting to their destination late as well.
There are those that blame these problems on the privatisation of the rail service which resulted in separate operators running the trains and another operator appointed to maintain the tracks. While I think that some carriers are more efficient than others, I do not think that the faults of the railway lie with its privatisation. In fact, I think you can trace the seeds of the malaise further back to a time when the railway was completely in the hands of Government control.
Both my parents spent the early parts of their working lives working in the railway industry and from what they told me, the impact of the Beeching Report in the early 1960s was what led the railways towards some of the recurring problems that it now faces. I did not really appreciate what they had said until I found myself watching the excellent BBC2 series fronted by Ian Hislop that looked at the closure of some of the routes in the aftermath of the Beeching Report and the impact that these closures had on their community. The closures of certain lines were made on the basis of profitability, an inevitable decision maybe, but one which you would normally expect from where a model of privatisation exists, which back in 1963 it did not.
In times of economic strife, it is unlikely to expect the Government of the day to invest money into the improvement of the transport infrastructure, especially in terms of developing new track. If, as expected, the Conservatives are in power by around this time next year, then I would expect their policies to be more focused around budget cuts to public services and so I would not expect transport to be any different.
However, with an Olympics in the capital just three years away, a need for a reliable and punctual transport infrastructure running from in and out of the capital is going to be heightened and it would help if the transport network could ensure that passengers in the home counties do not need to travel to the capital first and then change in order to get somewhere else in the home counties. For someone living in Sussex, but wanting to travel to most parts of Kent for example, travelling to a London station and then changing is usually a pre-requisite. The Government in power in twelve months time should at least explore the feasibility of introducing three new lines in Southern England to provide some alternative routes to the congested ones inside the capital.
That way, passengers may start to feel that they are getting better value for money on the often extortionate rail fares and can arrive on time by anyone's standards, not only by definition of a man in a charcoal suit, eating hob-nobs in the Transport Office.
2. Always a frown with Gordon Brown
Continuing the musical theme aluded to by the title to this blog and this sub-heading, time seemingly is running out for Gordon Brown's premiership if the events of the last week are anything to go by. Just as they say that Assistant Managers are not always cut out to be good Managers in football, there is also previous precedent to back up the argument that successful Chancellors of the Exchequer do not make for good Prime Ministers. The very notion that Brown was a successful Chancellor would appear to be subject to conjecture these days given the ramshackle state that the economy now finds itself in, but until recently, Brown's stock from his ten years in charge of the Treasury was at a high level.
The past week has seen a chain of events that even Brown could not have totally foreseen, even allowing for the ongoing furore resulting from the Daily Telegraph's expenses expose, which let's not forget, has not only named and shamed Labour politicians but members of the house from rival parties as well. The resignation of several ministers over three days during the week were not made necessarily as noises of dissatisfaction towards Gordon Brown and his ability to lead their party into an election, but more to do with the protecting of self-interest. The public anger that manifested itself in the aftermath of the expenses scandal breaking was for the very reason that it was transparent that MPs had put their own interests ahead of the constituents they were serving, and yet, still now it would seem that there are so many of Westminster's least wanted that are looking after number one first, second and third.
The resignations of Jacqui Smith and Hazel Blears were to be expected. Neither politician is popular with the public due to their part in the expenses scandal. Smith also has attracted criticism from libertarians for her role as Home Secretary in putting in place the plans to introduce identity cards. In Blears's case, her lack of popularity with the public has been more due to her just presenting herself as a pretty ghastly human being. If I was a betting man, I would make her favourite to have her effigy feature in the Lewes Bonfire procession later this year.
There is a saying that I'm sure many fellow males can vouch is true from personal experience and that is to say be careful of a woman scorned. That is what happened later in the week when former Europe minister Caroline Flint resigned after sending Gordon Brown an open letter in which she said she objected to being used as "window dressing", just a day after having given her full support to Gordon Brown. Leaving an appraisal of Ms Flint's not insignificant MILF qualities aside for one moment, I would think that her decision to resign was more to do with her not benefiting in Gordon Brown's cabinet reshuffle. It is known that Ms Flint is a close ally of both Blears and Smith, which leads me to think she was also trying to strike a blow for the sisterhood, however misguided that was.
There have been accusations that Gordon Brown has chauvinistic tendencies and that has influenced his recent hirings and firings, while his close and trusted male allies have fared best from the reshuffle. I think this trend is a coincidence and the real reason that Jacqui Smith and Hazel Blears left is simply that their positions became untenable and so they resigned before they were pushed. In Caroline Flint's case, her political career is far from outstanding and her previous spell as Housing Minister came to an end when confidential briefing notes for a meeting at 10 Downing Street were captured on camera.
If the Labour Government was in a healthy position, these eruptions would be far less harmful than they are proving to be. But because the foundations have already been shaken by the ongoing economic travails and the expenses row, what should have been a minor earth tremor is more like a full scale earthquake. The Labour administration has been in power for twelve years now and like any Government that has been in power for so long, it has become stale and is making routine mistakes that a Government fresh to power would not be making.
The question of how long can Gordon Brown last as Prime Minister will become apparent over coming days, but it will depend on whether a senior member of his serving cabinet breaks rank and calls for a leadership election. Either that, or another senior member of the party that has previously served in the cabinet puts themselves forward as an alternative leader and attracts enough support from within the party that a leadership contest is triggered. If that happens, then it could result in a similar scenario to the one that occurred in 1990 when Margaret Thatcher was forced from office. Thatcher won the first ballot but did not have quite enough of a majority to prevent a second ballot happening. This lack of a majority was enough for Thatcher to tender her resignation. A similar situation with Gordon Brown should not be ruled out, especially if the European election results are as grim for Labour as the preliminary indications suggest they will be.
Regardless of whether Brown does get a stay of execution or not, I feel that it is unlikely that we will get beyond the autumn without a General Election occurring. Brown's lack of popularity at the moment can in part be explained by the fact that he has never been elected by the British public and it is inevitable that unless there is a dramatic change in the public mood in the coming weeks and months, which given that unemployment is rising all the time would seem unlikely, then Brown would face a heavy defeat at the polls. A change of leader for Labour would only result in a slight reduction in the crushing majority that the Conservatives will surely gain.
The early indications from the European elections, not just in the United Kingdom, but in Europe's other leading countries are that the centre right parties are going to fare best in the polls. There are a couple of things that can be read into this. Maybe that people are voting for parties opposed to a Federal Europe and, using the United Kingdom as an example, are siding with the parties that will favour a referendum on the European Union. It could also suggest that parties that favour tougher policies on immigration are getting favoured over the parties with a more relaxed stance. Hence, the Tories, UK Independence Party and, alas, the British National Party seem likely to gain in terms of their percentage of the vote while the Liberal Democrats and obviously the Labour Party will be in for a sharp fall.
I think on a more general point though it comes down to people making a protest vote and saying "we will vote for anyone but Labour". Having crossed Labour out, they are then looking at which party is most likely to take tough decisions in a time when the political and economic climates demand them. Seemingly, the pragmatism of the Conservative Party is trusted to make the hard decisions more than other opposition parties at the moment.
Interesting thought processes, but David Cameron still has much to prove. Amid all the calls that Cameron has made for an election, he has been far less vocal about his plans for governing the country and as Brown rightly pointed out in PMQs this week, Cameron has done little to challenge him on matters of policy within the chamber in recent times. Cameron's response to this will be that he has been representing the public mood in demanding when an election will be called, but it is also convenient for him in masking his party's policy shortcomings. Cameron will need to get writing his manifesto fast as I expect he will need to jump on the battle bus in late summer.
3. A right royal PR disaster
This weekend has seen the commemoration of the sixty fifth anniversary of D-Day and Operation Overlord with a number of special events and speeches laid on in Normandy. Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown were all in attendance, but it was the one person who was not that generated the most controversy. Her Majesty the Queen was expected to represent Britain at the ceremony, but she was to be found at Epsom watching one of her racehorses on the undercard to The Derby.
The circumstances around The Queen not being in attendance has naturally caused outrage in quarters where outrage is only too easily vented, namely in the editorial offices of the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. Conspiracy theories have been circulated and questions have been asked as to who it was that decide to snub Ma'am when sending out the invites. Whoever it was, it was certainly a very foolish oversight by those concerned.
There are those that suggested The Queen should have insisted that she be allowed to attend. But it does seem absurd to suggest that a serving monarch should go begging cap in hand to be allowed to attend the commemoration. The nostalgia buffs have been quick to point out that the Queen served in the forces towards the end of World War II and so she should therefore be there as the survivors could more readily identify with her. But this is all symbolism really. Yes, if the Queen had been invited at an earlier juncture, I am sure she would have made the trip across the channel. The fact of the matter is that she was not, so should she just wait by a telephone in the hope that she could get an invite right at the last?
It is also worth bearing in mind who ended up going in her place. That's right, the Prince of Wales. First in line to the throne. The next king of England. If he is not deemed ready to represent the Royal Family now on a national duty, when exactly will he be? His mother is 83 years old, his father is 88 years old. Just because they are royalty does not mean they should be immune from slowing down a tiny bit and letting others take on some more responsibility. Let's face it, sending the Duke of Edinburgh on a foreign sojourn is a risky business at the best of times, let alone for such a sombre occasion.
The Prince of Wales will become King Charles III in the not too distant future, you would expect, either as a result of his mother's death or through her abdicating to allow him his chance as he is now 61 years old. It is only natural that there should be some kind of handover period where the future king gets to represent his country on state occasions. His appearance in Normandy might have been an impromptu one, but I doubt it will be the last time that he is asked to go somewhere in place of his mother, and nor should it be. As with everything else right now, let's blame this PR disaster on the Government.
4. Nothing without the product
The business pages in the past week have been dominated by the news of General Motors' bankruptcy. This initially came as shock news as GM have always been regarded as one of the real powerhouses of US commerce and big trend setters for global businesses in establishing a functional organisational structure as a division of labour.
Scratch beneath the surface though and you realise the truth is that GM has failed simply because of one very basic fact. Their products have just not been good enough. That is the bottom line. You could in fact extend that comment to the US car industry as a whole. Whereas once, Henry Ford had been a pioneer in getting the US to lead the way in manufacturing standards and product differentiation for the humble motor vehicle, their cars have faded in popularity as more Americans have switched to driving European or Japanese cars. The Japanese manufacturing principles of TQM and Just-in Time have been instrumental in raising the bar of car manufacturing and their leading brands, such as Honda and Toyota have gone from strength to strength while time has stood still for GM and its compatriots.
There had been suggestions that the US Government should step in and save GM in much the same way that it did with its big insurance giant AIG last year. That was an altogether different situation though, because unless the vast majority of businesses in the United States owns a GM car which is of significant asset value to the future of the business then the impact of their loss to business would not be felt. Without the leading insurance company in the country, it stands to reason that companies would go to the wall because their insurance guarantors would not be in a position to pay out. You can survive without a fleet of company cars, unless you happen to be a taxi company, but without any insurance, you are permanently behind the eight ball. There is no point sustaining a failing company unless there is no-one else out there in a position to do things better and that is why there will be no rescue package for General Motors.
Nonetheless, the impact of General Motors will have an effect on the community within Detroit. What was once the US's motor city is now facing an uncertain future and that is where it needs to be wary of Detroit's other less wanted tag, that of being a city rife with crime, not just confined to bananas being inserted in tailpipes as happened in Beverly Hills Cop which was set in the city. Barack Obama as senator of the adjacent state of Illinois will no doubt be aware of the challenges ahead and the need to retrain those whose jobs are lost, so avoid the temptation of a life of crime in order to make ends meet.
Sunday, 7 June 2009
Friday, 5 June 2009
Hope not hate
I have come across this website, which I thought I would share with you. As you will be aware, given the current apathy there is with the three mainstream political parties and the politicians associated with them, there is a potential for a surge in support for fringe protest parties, not least those parties representing the secular far right views of the misinformed or downright ignorant members of the electorate. At the forefront of this are the British National Party, who will hope to tap into the current waves of self-pity Britain being perpetrated by the written and spoken media.
Unfortunately, I stumbled across the link to this site a little late in order for me to post it up here before the European elections, but nonetheless I feel that it is well worth visiting this site to serve as a reminder to us that whatever anger we feel towards the present Government and its most well established opposition, that looking to the BNP is not an alternative that is acceptable to anyone that appreciates the value of a democratic society or who wishes the United Kingdom to be a "free society". Just visiting the site I am linking will provide a number of revelations which for anyone out there that thinks the motives of the BNP have any merit, will have their eyes opened to their real, less than honourable intentions.
The campaign is called Hope Not Hate and the website is found via the following link - http://action.hopenothate.org.uk/content/home/suit . Go take a look.
Unfortunately, I stumbled across the link to this site a little late in order for me to post it up here before the European elections, but nonetheless I feel that it is well worth visiting this site to serve as a reminder to us that whatever anger we feel towards the present Government and its most well established opposition, that looking to the BNP is not an alternative that is acceptable to anyone that appreciates the value of a democratic society or who wishes the United Kingdom to be a "free society". Just visiting the site I am linking will provide a number of revelations which for anyone out there that thinks the motives of the BNP have any merit, will have their eyes opened to their real, less than honourable intentions.
The campaign is called Hope Not Hate and the website is found via the following link - http://action.hopenothate.org.uk/content/home/suit . Go take a look.
Sunday, 31 May 2009
History is not all bunk
Hello again.
Hope you have all enjoyed your weeks and have had opportunity to take advantage of the early summer sunshine that has hit these shores. I get the impression that the beautiful people inhabiting this fair isle must be solar powered, you don't see them during the winter but all of sudden, they are there to be found in droves now that the sun has come out.
Well, my week was somewhat marred by the wrong result on Wednesday night in Rome. It was disappointing to get so far only to fall at the final hurdle, but what made the result harder to take was how United just did not turn up on the night. There is a time to be carrying out inquests into why United came up so short and possibly a future blog will explore that in more detail, but for now, let me just say that it is easy to forget how well Barcelona played because of the tepid performance that United put up on the night. In particular, the possession football that Andres Iniesta and Xavi displayed in midfield was a joy to behold.
Whenever United relinquished possession, I felt it would take five minutes to get the ball back. One of the common complaints of English footballers is that they are unable to keep possession of the ball. Well, a DVD of how Xavi and Iniesta managed it on Wednesday night will be more of an education than any coaching manual, their ability to keep hold of the ball and to change the tempo of the match was what gave Barcelona the platform to win the match. Oh well, one match should not undo a good season's work and I am sure that Sir Alex Ferguson will remind the players of this failure to drive their hunger to go one better next season.
Well, let's not wallow in self-pity any longer. It is only eleven players kicking a sheep's bladder along a cut up pitch, after all. Let's get down to the nitty gritty and consider some of the other talking points of the week.
3. History should be more than just grey text
This past week has seen it reported that History is not being taught adequately in schools and that children are now less knowledgeable about historical events than they have been in previous generations. I am not certain about how this particular trend has been measured unless they have pulled together a focus group of people from different ages and tested them on history questions, such as when was the Battle of Naseby, who was the king at the time of Guy Fawkes's attempt to overthrow the Government and who really won the Second World War. However this insight was gathered, I think that a good point has been stumbled upon.
First of all, as I prelude to everything else I go on to write, can I say that I love history and learning about historical facts. I did study the subject at school and indeed took it for my GCSEs. I thought that the teaching of the subject at my school was first rate in as much as the teachers did their best to facilitate good learning and were enthusiastic about the subject they were teaching, presenting it in a fun way. If you went to my school, you would know that such a teaching approach was not uniform across other subjects. I imagine that is one of the hazards of a comprehensive school education.
However, the one drawback of teaching in school back in my teenage years, and which at a pinch I imagine still applies today, is that the learning was very much dependent on the humble text book. The school history department had its very own resource room full of a plethora of history books, many of which had been defaced and dog-eared over the years by less keen students of the subject, who were only in class as a matter of compulsion. Text is perhaps the easiest way of conveying the rudimentary facts of the subject, but in terms of the audience reading them in order to learn, much of the knowledge the reader is supposed to acquire is lost due to its grey presentation.
If schools want to make history more appealing, and more significantly, of more educational value to their students then they need to get with the times and embrace technology and interactivity. Look at the success of Brainiac in terms of getting children interested in chemistry and physics. It presents the subject in a fun way, conducting experiments and blowing things up, something that tends to get people's attention and crucially, people do learn from the programme. Schools need to follow the lead of Brainiac and expand their resources far beyond books. Visual and audio resources should be available for a far greater part of the syllabus. Expeditions to relevant history museums or places of local historical relevance should be considered, while how about some role playing exercises? I'm sure the average would much rather dress up as a Tudor than have to wear their school uniform for the day.
It is often said that the main purpose of History is that it gives people a sense of perspective and it understands how the world we live in now has come to be as it is. It is also argued that the point of learning History is that we can learn from mistakes made in the past so as to avoid them in the future and this can provide people with more appreciation and enable them to show more humility for what they have. I personally think there is a lot of truth in these schools of thought, although I would say that if you provide that argument to the average teenager then the likelihood is that they will not want to learn.
If you look at the success of a number of history programmes on television, such as any of Simon Schama's series or even Andrew Marr's excellent History of Modern Britain, then it is quite clear that there is a captive audience for learning about history. It is also true, however, that much of the audience that will watch such programmes will have developed a comparatively late interest in the subject and the chances are that when they were at school, this is a subject that they would have shunned at the age of 14 when choosing what subjects to study for GCSEs.
I think there are a few factors that provide reason for this trend. Firstly, I think that as I have sort of touched upon earlier, History is seen as a slightly unfashionable subject at school. As a teenager, anything over two years ago tends to be regarded as ancient and so what happened 200 years ago or longer just holds no appeal. This is a problem that there is no real solution to because the very nature of the subject means that it is essential to deal with events from far back in time. Recalling my teenage years, I can remember that many fellow students chose their options by the not very scientific method of picking the subjects their friends were doing. Due to History having the perception problem of being the chosen subject of the nerds, it did tend to be shunned by the "in-crowd".
There is also another reason that History is sometimes cast aside among the more worldly wide teenager. While there are potentially lucrative careers ahead for those that study Economics, Geography or even Media Studies, the end game for successful students of History presents a much more narrow scope, with the possible exceptions of being a museum curator or an archaeologist, or indeed, a professional historian. In the fifteen years since I left school, I can honestly say that the knowledge that I accumulated from my days of studying History has served no practical use other than in feeding my recall in the pub quiz's History round. There are no real insights that History can offer when you are forging a career in office administration jobs in the voluntary sector.
And yet perhaps we are all missing the point. Maybe the purpose of History lies beyond providing a gateway into paid employment. As discussed earlier, there is a strong argument to suggest that learning History is essential in knowing how we all came to be here today. The skills learnt from this can transcend just one's working life or their future studies, but can provide the insight that enables people to better citizens, plus it provides some background in helping people to provide a considered argument, a skill that is required in many facets of our lives. Surely these benefits go far beyond serving us just in our professional lives and can lead to a more balanced society?
I think that it needs to be accepted that some of the barriers to making History a subject of the teenage masses are insurmountable. Some of the problems of perception are as much the fault of the teenage hormones as they are of the subject or the way that it is taught. People are simply more ready to engage in the subject as an interest in adult life because they have matured and first hand experience has taught them things that history also does and so they can more readily identify with these insights. Nonetheless, History does have a clear reason for being and those that do want to learn should be grabbed at an early stage and so schools should take heed and embrace as many resources as they are able to and not just rely on their printed material.
4. Variety is no longer the spice of life
So, another reality television series is over with Saturday night heralding the final of Britain's Got Talent. Am I alone in noting the irony of this title when the judging panel includes Amanda Holden and Piers Morgan? What exactly is Amanda Holden's talent other than being the obligatory eye candy? Let's face it, her biggest claim to fame is that she used to be married to Les Dennis before giving Les the metaphorical "it-err", as associated with Les's quiz show of many years. As for Morgan, it has long been realised that his main talent is simply his ability to be in the right place at the right time. Otherwise, I suggest he enters the Highland Games this year because although he is not Scottish, he certainly possesses the right attributes to know what to do with the caber!
Sadly, I missed the final of ITV1's Saturday night showpiece as I was out playing pool, but I gather that Simon Cowell's beloved Susan Boyle was defeated by a dance troupe from Essex. In fact, while this series appears to have captivated several million television viewers these past few weeks, I only watched one episode during its run. That episode was one of the heats and it was enjoyable enough fare featuring a bloke whose idea of a musical act was to use repeated flatulence, another young chap who looked like he belonged in the Foo Fighters singing soprano and a David Blaine wannabe who held his head underwater before doing some fire-eating, all the while his wife looked on. It seemed quite formulaic television, it is easy to see why it has attracted high audience figures because the programme is easy to follow and the audience has the ability to ultimately affect the outcome by voting.
I will readily admit that, on the whole, reality television as a genre does not really appeal to me. There are certain exceptions as there always are and I do try and watch The Apprentice and Dragons' Den whenever they are on and I happen to be in, but this is probably more because of my background as a Business Studies student rather than because I enjoy seeing publicity seeking people make an idiot of themselves in an environment that is out of their comfort zone. Programmes such as I'm A Celebrity and Big Brother hold no interest to me whatsoever. Who on earth in their right mind watches the live Big Brother round the clock on E4? In our everyday lives, I can think of nothing more tedious than spending time seeing what the neighbours are saying while eating their breakfast, so why do our attitudes change when watching television? I suppose the truth is that there is a hidden voyeur in all of us that finds it interesting to see what other people get up to in a confined environment and how the confines of that environment affects the human dynamics. Well, either that, or there just isn't anything else on worth watching!
Programmes like Britain's Got Talent and the X-Factor are, at least to my mind, car crash television. Therefore, the only time I really would watch either programme is at the very early stage when you have the preliminary rounds and therefore, the people who are entertaining simply because they are terrible. In particular, I enjoy the sense of delusion that some of the performers have when Simon Cowell and friends send them packing. They are in denial about their dreams being shattered and tell the judges they have made a big mistake and that they just chose the wrong song or the wrong routine. It is never because they simply have no talent because they are so wrapped up in their aspirations. It probably does not make me sound like a very good person to say that this is the most appealing aspect of these types of show, but the proof is in the pudding. These shows get their best ratings in the early episodes and for the final. If this makes me bad, then I am certainly not alone in the doghouse.
One of the interesting points that I heard raised this week is that the popularity of Britain's Got Talent demonstrates that variety performances are much missed on television. This is a complaint I have heard before from people of an era that can remember such spectacles as Sunday Night at the London Palladium. It is an argument, however, that I vehemently disagree with. The success of Britain's Got Talent, far from demonstrating that variety is missed on television, in fact proves exactly why it is no longer shown on television outside of talent shows.
People watch Britain's Got Talent because it is television that is easy to watch as a family on Saturday night and because the show features everyday members of the public who believe they have a talent, but invariably have far less talent than they believe. From what I have seen of the series, it has shown that some forms of entertainment that were bracketed in to the broad category of variety are so old hat in this day and age. Once you have seen one ventriloquist act, you have seen them all. People fire-eating ceased being entertainment when people stopped going to circuses. And magicians performing cheap card tricks is no longer seen as an act of genius, but just some show-off who knows how to bend the rules. In this series of Britain's Got Talent, even a five year old was performing lame magic tricks. The days of Paul Daniels wowing a prime time audience are thankfully a thing consigned to the distant past.
Surely the whole point of a variety show is to see the most talented performers in their own field showcasing their talents to a live audience. But how do you accommodate these performers all onto one stage? The best stand-up comedians and the best family entertainers are unlikely to fit onto the same bill as the best classical and contemporary musical acts any more because people are more picky and choosy about who and what they want to watch. Taking these broad categories of performers as examples, could you ever foresee a live variety performance with Jack Dee, Ricky Gervais, Jon Culshaw, Brian Conley, Bruce Forsyth, Katherine Jenkins, Jools Holland, the cast of Chicago, Take That, U2 and Darcey Bussell all sharing a stage on the same night, at the same location? It just would not happen because the audience that wants to see U2 does not want to see Take That and equally the Take That fans would not want to see U2. The audience that wants to see Ricky Gervais does not want to see Brian Conley and vice versa, while fans of Brucie and Darcey are going to be less enamoured by the Chicago cast's presence.
Cast your minds back a couple of summers to the Live Earth concerts. The audience were waiting for Elton John to top the bill but the floral industry's favourite tantrum throwing ivory tickler was running a few minutes late. In order to fill time, Ricky Gervais was sent out to entertain the crowd. Under different circumstances, Gervais would have been welcomed, but at a live music venue, the crowd came to see musicians, not comedians and consequently, Gervais far from warming the crowd up before Reginald Dwight took to the stage had the effect of de-energising them and was in fact booed by some sections of the crowd. Admittedly, Gervais's set was not his finest comedic ensemble but the main reason for the audience disapproval was that comedy on a music bill mixes as well as water does with electricity. The reverse principle would also be equally true.
The point is that in modern times, people are selective about what they want to see and when they want to see it. There are very few programmes on television that serve to meet the needs of a wide audience. Programmes are more likely to cater for a certain demographic, people of a certain age and with a particular interest. There are some exceptions, with Later with Jools Holland quite deliberately showcasing a wide range of musical talents so that there is a little bit of something in the programme for everyone and it gives people opportunity to go out and make a cup of tea when their less favoured musicians are performing. Above all though, the main selling point of the programme is the amiability of Holland in the role as mein host.
A point that I have made on these pages before and which I adamantly stand by is that people's yearning for nostalgia can be very misleading and some of the things people wax lyrical about now, were not so popular at the time. So when people talk about the good days of variety television, they are remembering Morecambe and Wise performing or Tommy Cooper performing a magic trick going wrong or telling a daft joke or they are remembering members of the Rat Pack performing to a live audience. This is all well and good, but for every Tommy Cooper, there was a Duncan Norvelle or Joe Pasquale. For Morecambe and Wise, the flip side was Cannon and Ball and if the Rat Pack represented the pinnacle of musical talent, the bottom rung was represented by Showaddywaddy.
Variety as a form of entertainment belongs in a different era, an era when people regularly went to holiday camps in Skegness or Whitby for their summer holidays and consequently, the comedians of the day performed night after night at holiday camps during the summer season, before heading back to the smoky working man's clubs for the winter. In this day and age, fewer people holiday at such resorts as they prefer to trust the reliability of the sun on the continent and the top comedians of 2009 perform sell out tours at large theatres across the country rather than small seaside venues. All the holiday resorts get left with are the middle aged comedians who are so down on their luck that they have to supplement their income by doing some window cleaning and a thousand and one Elvis impersonators. Admittedly, the current economic crisis is seeing an upturn in people holidaying at seaside resorts in the UK, but I very much doubt this will result in old school variety returning to popular mainstream taste.
The problem of nostalgia is not just confined to one's memories of variety. It also applies to situation comedies and to remakes of old programmes or old movies. A recent example of this has been shown by the critical response to the remake of Reggie Perrin. Although the programme has attracted good audience figures, television critics have poured scorn on it, saying it is not a patch on the original and that Martin Clunes was not fit to fill the late Leonard Rossiter's shoes.
Admittedly, I was not born when the original series aired back in the 1970s, but I have watched some episodes when they were repeated some years ago. I thought that the programme was funny in places but also rather dated and that essentially it was Rossiter's powerful performance in the lead role that made the programme. I personally preferred Rossiter's performance as the serial miser and bigot Rigsby in the timeless Rising Damp.
In any event, the remake of Reggie Perrin is not meant to be a straight remake of the programme but a modern day version of the tale in which the lead character plays out his existence in a dead end job with a company that makes disposable razors, rather than selling desserts as he did in the original series. What I thought the remake did particularly well was to make the character's experiences relevant to modern times, capturing well the office culture as well as the mundane routine associated with commuting. This is something that I can particularly relate to in my current circumstances, and I feel that the writers and Clunes's acting performance captured this particularly well.
Far from being a sub-standard remake, I think that the new version of Reggie Perrin has been a very good modern interpretation of the story and Martin Clunes once again proves that he belongs right up there amongst the best comedy actors that these shores have produced with a very believable and moving performance in the central role. Far from turning in his grave, I imagine that if Leonard Rossiter was still alive today, he would have marvelled at Clunes's performance in bringing to life his character to a whole new generation.
The ending to this series suggests that the commissioning of a second series is dependent on the ratings, but I really hope that Clunes and the strong supporting Fay Ripley and Wendy Craig will be back to continue the story next year. But this is the thing with nostalgia, people cannot see past what they remember the first time round, even if the passage of time has in fact blurred their take on reality.
5. Shearer might not be the Messiah, but he could be a very naughty boy
Well, reports of a bubble bursting in the North East of England last Sunday teatime were not without substance. Newcastle United's sixteen year stay in the Premier League came to an end after a feeble 1-0 defeat at Aston Villa ensured that the Magpies would be playing their football in the second tier of the English game in the 2009/10 season. The return of Alan Shearer, this time in a manager's suit was not enough to arrest Newcastle's slide, with the team winning just won of their final eight league matches while under their former number nine's stewardship.
In truth though, Newcastle's current plight is not due simply to recent results but more a legacy of a series of bad decisions taken at board level over the past few years, where those in positions of authority have allowed their hearts to rule their head and impair their judgement. Ever since Sir Bobby Robson was removed of his duties just four matches into Newcastle's 2004/05 campaign, the Magpies have lurched from one bad managerial appointment to another and with each poor appointment, they have also wasted an astronomical amount of money on players whose attitude or injury record ensured they were incongruous in achieving the club's set objectives.
Everything that is wrong with Newcastle's recent setup was demonstrated with the recent revelation that defender Sebastien Bassong was earning just £5,000 a week and has been offered a pay rise in order to persuade him to remain at the club next season. That Bassong was offered a pay rise is not the contentious point, what is shocking, however is that Bassong was earning so little all the while the permanently injured Michael Owen has reputedly been picking up a pay cheque of £115,000. By common consent, Bassong has been Newcastle's best player over the course of the season (admittedly he did not have much competition) while Owen is now living on past glories due to the ravages of injury and lost motivation. This extraordinary discrepancy in Newcastle's wage structure demonstrates an alarming absence of meritocracy and serves to prove where everything has gone wrong at St James's Park and also why their demise has received so little sympathy, as it has been self-inflicted.
Newcastle's supporters will now look to Alan Shearer to stay on and manage the club in the Championship next season, but as the banner on the final day of the season at Villa Park so pointedly said, who is Newcastle's next Messiah, Ant and Dec? This is where Newcastle have continued to go wrong and while you ultimately have to blame the board for making the decisions, the Toon Army support have to take some of the blame for their constant insistence that being "one of us" is a pre-requisite for taking on the Newcastle job. The continual championing of former Newcastle players to be managers of the club has done little to help the club's cause in recent years and what does it really mean to say that the next incumbent needs to "bleed black and white"? Surely, the most crucial aspect in appointing a manager is that they need to be experienced, be able to handle the pressure and know how to get the best out of players. At Newcastle though, there appears to be distrust of anyone coming in from outside the area.
The recent turnaround at Fulham, whose victory at Newcastle in the penultimate week of the season ironically did so much in consigning them to Championship football next season, is testament to what making the right managerial change can achieve. Midway through the 2007/08 season, Fulham were in the Premier League's relegation zone and looked certainties to drop to the Championship. They sacked their manager and replaced him with Roy Hodgson, a 60 year old Englishman who spent his formulative years managing on the continent with spells in charge of the Swiss and Finnish national teams, as well as having a short spell in charge of Inter Milan. Hodgson would not have been many people's first pick as the man to keep Fulham up, especially as his only previous Premier League experience had been over a decade earlier with Blackburn Rovers.
Yet, Hodgson confounded the critics by inspiring Fulham to an astonishing end of season recovery which culminated in the team winning on the final day of the season to stay in the top flight. Hodgson has subsequently transformed the West Londoners and in the 2008/09 season, Fulham have finished a full ten places higher than last season by attaining their highest ever league position in the top flight of seventh place. In achieving this, Fulham have also qualified for European football for next season, which goes to show that if you make the right managerial appointment, you can make such a difference and in a relatively short space of time.
These are the lessons Newcastle need to take heed of if they are to return to the top flight and are to re-establish themselves as a team with aspirations of winning honours. In the short term, they need to solely focus on returning to the Premier League at the first attempt, an accomplishment that all connected with the club would be well advised to not take for granted as the Championship is always an unforgiving division and looks likely to be very competitive next season. Newcastle will need to get some of their mercenaries and over the hill players off of their wage bill and will need to bring players in, but they will be signing Championship level players as reinforcements and there is no guarantee they will sign players any better than those playing elsewhere in the division.
The 64,000 dollar question is whether Alan Shearer will be persuaded to stay for another season. I expect ultimately Shearer will drop his excessive wage demands and will take on the job permanently. The irony, however, is that the manager Newcastle should have appointed two years ago and who may well have kept them in the Premier League, looks likely to be unveiled as the manager of their deadliest rivals Sunderland within the next day. The man in question is Steve Bruce, who is well known as a lifelong supporter of Newcastle who would jump at the chance to manage his hometown club. Instead, in taking the job at Sunderland, he would effectively be ruling himself out of ever managing the Magpies.
If Shearer does stay on at Newcastle, he will need to pick up the ropes pretty quickly and I think the club would be well served in bringing in an experienced manager or coach to work alongside him who would be able to challenge Shearer's thinking. Shearer's existing sidekick Iain Dowie is unlikely to be the right man to perform this role over the longer term as firstly he is likely to go back into club management himself, but I also sense that he is too chummy with Shearer and will therefore find it hard to question his authority. A more senior figure who has seen it all and bought the T-shirt is what is required to help combat Shearer's managerial greenness. Unfortunately, I doubt Coach Carter would be enticed by a cold winter on Tyneside!
I fully expect Shearer to be given the Newcastle job permanently, but ultimately only an immediate return to the Premier League will ensure that Shearer retains his status as Messiah on Tyneside, and is not just a very naughty boy.
6. Debra looks favourite for The Apprentice, but Kate to be the real winner
The hunt for Sir Alan Sugar's fifth apprentice is entering the home straight now with just a quintet of hopefuls remaining with this week's penultimate episode of the series seeing the obligatory interview process with Sugar's merry band of Rottweilers and Jack Russells. Imagine if any of his heavies were conducting a real life job interview, they surely would be contravening employment law with some of the questions they are allowed to ask. It is not so much an interview as a character assassination in some instances.
I have not watched this series as avidly as the previous series, due to the unfortunate scheduling of this series on the same night as Champions League football. Memo to the BBC, please air the next series on a Thursday night when I will be able to guarantee my viewing. However, what I have seen of this series, I would have to say that the male candidates in this series have been a disgrace to their gender. Only James remains of the male folk that started the process, and he really lacks the business acumen to stand any chance of getting beyond the interview stage.
To my mind, the most talented Apprentices this year have been the blonde bombshell Kate and the feisty, fiery saleswoman Yasmina. If the hunt was for my apprentice, these two would indisputably be contesting the final because they have demonstrated the best array of skills, have responded the best to pressure, have led their teams well when asked to and always contributed when amongst the ranks, but are also just very presentable people.
Despite this, however, I have a sneaky suspicion that Debra, the Alan McInally lookalike with a voice like Stacey off Eastenders is going to walk off with the £100,000 job in Sir Alan's corporate empire. She is younger than either Kate or Yasmina at just 23 and although she has shown negative character traits on the tasks during the series, she has also shown good business instincts and has fought her corner well in the board room. These are qualities that Sir Alan Sugar admires and I think he is suspicious of people who come across as too eloquent. Although Debra is raw around the edges, because of her relative inexperience, I expect Sugar feels he can smooth out these edges but can also leave her to get on with doing the job. In a time of financial uncertainty, more than ever Sir Alan is looking for a doer who is capable of the hard sell.
Yasmina to me looks like the stereotype of the common Apprentice runner-up. Consistently good all the way through and a very tough, headstrong cookie who is not afraid to say what she thinks, but ultimately someone Sugar might overlook because of her feistiness. He would be afraid that she would upset people in what tend to be male dominated corridors of power within his organisation. For Yasmina this year, read Claire Young twelve months ago or Ruth Badger back in series two.
In Kate's case, she almost suffers for being so photogenic. People I imagine look at her and think that she is just a dizzy blonde, whereas in fact, I think they might overlook her qualities. The Birmingham lass is a very presentable woman and I am not just talking in terms of aesthetic qualities, but she also has good communication skills and has struck me as being good at dealing with people throughout the process. It would not surprise me if she ends up the real winner from Apprentice series five as if her performance on the home shopping task is anything to go by, she looks a natural in front of the camera and so failure to win the series could prove a blessing in disguise, as a career in the media is surely more lucrative in the long run than managing Sir Alan Sugar's property portfolio.
Hope you have all enjoyed your weeks and have had opportunity to take advantage of the early summer sunshine that has hit these shores. I get the impression that the beautiful people inhabiting this fair isle must be solar powered, you don't see them during the winter but all of sudden, they are there to be found in droves now that the sun has come out.
Well, my week was somewhat marred by the wrong result on Wednesday night in Rome. It was disappointing to get so far only to fall at the final hurdle, but what made the result harder to take was how United just did not turn up on the night. There is a time to be carrying out inquests into why United came up so short and possibly a future blog will explore that in more detail, but for now, let me just say that it is easy to forget how well Barcelona played because of the tepid performance that United put up on the night. In particular, the possession football that Andres Iniesta and Xavi displayed in midfield was a joy to behold.
Whenever United relinquished possession, I felt it would take five minutes to get the ball back. One of the common complaints of English footballers is that they are unable to keep possession of the ball. Well, a DVD of how Xavi and Iniesta managed it on Wednesday night will be more of an education than any coaching manual, their ability to keep hold of the ball and to change the tempo of the match was what gave Barcelona the platform to win the match. Oh well, one match should not undo a good season's work and I am sure that Sir Alex Ferguson will remind the players of this failure to drive their hunger to go one better next season.
Well, let's not wallow in self-pity any longer. It is only eleven players kicking a sheep's bladder along a cut up pitch, after all. Let's get down to the nitty gritty and consider some of the other talking points of the week.
3. History should be more than just grey text
This past week has seen it reported that History is not being taught adequately in schools and that children are now less knowledgeable about historical events than they have been in previous generations. I am not certain about how this particular trend has been measured unless they have pulled together a focus group of people from different ages and tested them on history questions, such as when was the Battle of Naseby, who was the king at the time of Guy Fawkes's attempt to overthrow the Government and who really won the Second World War. However this insight was gathered, I think that a good point has been stumbled upon.
First of all, as I prelude to everything else I go on to write, can I say that I love history and learning about historical facts. I did study the subject at school and indeed took it for my GCSEs. I thought that the teaching of the subject at my school was first rate in as much as the teachers did their best to facilitate good learning and were enthusiastic about the subject they were teaching, presenting it in a fun way. If you went to my school, you would know that such a teaching approach was not uniform across other subjects. I imagine that is one of the hazards of a comprehensive school education.
However, the one drawback of teaching in school back in my teenage years, and which at a pinch I imagine still applies today, is that the learning was very much dependent on the humble text book. The school history department had its very own resource room full of a plethora of history books, many of which had been defaced and dog-eared over the years by less keen students of the subject, who were only in class as a matter of compulsion. Text is perhaps the easiest way of conveying the rudimentary facts of the subject, but in terms of the audience reading them in order to learn, much of the knowledge the reader is supposed to acquire is lost due to its grey presentation.
If schools want to make history more appealing, and more significantly, of more educational value to their students then they need to get with the times and embrace technology and interactivity. Look at the success of Brainiac in terms of getting children interested in chemistry and physics. It presents the subject in a fun way, conducting experiments and blowing things up, something that tends to get people's attention and crucially, people do learn from the programme. Schools need to follow the lead of Brainiac and expand their resources far beyond books. Visual and audio resources should be available for a far greater part of the syllabus. Expeditions to relevant history museums or places of local historical relevance should be considered, while how about some role playing exercises? I'm sure the average would much rather dress up as a Tudor than have to wear their school uniform for the day.
It is often said that the main purpose of History is that it gives people a sense of perspective and it understands how the world we live in now has come to be as it is. It is also argued that the point of learning History is that we can learn from mistakes made in the past so as to avoid them in the future and this can provide people with more appreciation and enable them to show more humility for what they have. I personally think there is a lot of truth in these schools of thought, although I would say that if you provide that argument to the average teenager then the likelihood is that they will not want to learn.
If you look at the success of a number of history programmes on television, such as any of Simon Schama's series or even Andrew Marr's excellent History of Modern Britain, then it is quite clear that there is a captive audience for learning about history. It is also true, however, that much of the audience that will watch such programmes will have developed a comparatively late interest in the subject and the chances are that when they were at school, this is a subject that they would have shunned at the age of 14 when choosing what subjects to study for GCSEs.
I think there are a few factors that provide reason for this trend. Firstly, I think that as I have sort of touched upon earlier, History is seen as a slightly unfashionable subject at school. As a teenager, anything over two years ago tends to be regarded as ancient and so what happened 200 years ago or longer just holds no appeal. This is a problem that there is no real solution to because the very nature of the subject means that it is essential to deal with events from far back in time. Recalling my teenage years, I can remember that many fellow students chose their options by the not very scientific method of picking the subjects their friends were doing. Due to History having the perception problem of being the chosen subject of the nerds, it did tend to be shunned by the "in-crowd".
There is also another reason that History is sometimes cast aside among the more worldly wide teenager. While there are potentially lucrative careers ahead for those that study Economics, Geography or even Media Studies, the end game for successful students of History presents a much more narrow scope, with the possible exceptions of being a museum curator or an archaeologist, or indeed, a professional historian. In the fifteen years since I left school, I can honestly say that the knowledge that I accumulated from my days of studying History has served no practical use other than in feeding my recall in the pub quiz's History round. There are no real insights that History can offer when you are forging a career in office administration jobs in the voluntary sector.
And yet perhaps we are all missing the point. Maybe the purpose of History lies beyond providing a gateway into paid employment. As discussed earlier, there is a strong argument to suggest that learning History is essential in knowing how we all came to be here today. The skills learnt from this can transcend just one's working life or their future studies, but can provide the insight that enables people to better citizens, plus it provides some background in helping people to provide a considered argument, a skill that is required in many facets of our lives. Surely these benefits go far beyond serving us just in our professional lives and can lead to a more balanced society?
I think that it needs to be accepted that some of the barriers to making History a subject of the teenage masses are insurmountable. Some of the problems of perception are as much the fault of the teenage hormones as they are of the subject or the way that it is taught. People are simply more ready to engage in the subject as an interest in adult life because they have matured and first hand experience has taught them things that history also does and so they can more readily identify with these insights. Nonetheless, History does have a clear reason for being and those that do want to learn should be grabbed at an early stage and so schools should take heed and embrace as many resources as they are able to and not just rely on their printed material.
4. Variety is no longer the spice of life
So, another reality television series is over with Saturday night heralding the final of Britain's Got Talent. Am I alone in noting the irony of this title when the judging panel includes Amanda Holden and Piers Morgan? What exactly is Amanda Holden's talent other than being the obligatory eye candy? Let's face it, her biggest claim to fame is that she used to be married to Les Dennis before giving Les the metaphorical "it-err", as associated with Les's quiz show of many years. As for Morgan, it has long been realised that his main talent is simply his ability to be in the right place at the right time. Otherwise, I suggest he enters the Highland Games this year because although he is not Scottish, he certainly possesses the right attributes to know what to do with the caber!
Sadly, I missed the final of ITV1's Saturday night showpiece as I was out playing pool, but I gather that Simon Cowell's beloved Susan Boyle was defeated by a dance troupe from Essex. In fact, while this series appears to have captivated several million television viewers these past few weeks, I only watched one episode during its run. That episode was one of the heats and it was enjoyable enough fare featuring a bloke whose idea of a musical act was to use repeated flatulence, another young chap who looked like he belonged in the Foo Fighters singing soprano and a David Blaine wannabe who held his head underwater before doing some fire-eating, all the while his wife looked on. It seemed quite formulaic television, it is easy to see why it has attracted high audience figures because the programme is easy to follow and the audience has the ability to ultimately affect the outcome by voting.
I will readily admit that, on the whole, reality television as a genre does not really appeal to me. There are certain exceptions as there always are and I do try and watch The Apprentice and Dragons' Den whenever they are on and I happen to be in, but this is probably more because of my background as a Business Studies student rather than because I enjoy seeing publicity seeking people make an idiot of themselves in an environment that is out of their comfort zone. Programmes such as I'm A Celebrity and Big Brother hold no interest to me whatsoever. Who on earth in their right mind watches the live Big Brother round the clock on E4? In our everyday lives, I can think of nothing more tedious than spending time seeing what the neighbours are saying while eating their breakfast, so why do our attitudes change when watching television? I suppose the truth is that there is a hidden voyeur in all of us that finds it interesting to see what other people get up to in a confined environment and how the confines of that environment affects the human dynamics. Well, either that, or there just isn't anything else on worth watching!
Programmes like Britain's Got Talent and the X-Factor are, at least to my mind, car crash television. Therefore, the only time I really would watch either programme is at the very early stage when you have the preliminary rounds and therefore, the people who are entertaining simply because they are terrible. In particular, I enjoy the sense of delusion that some of the performers have when Simon Cowell and friends send them packing. They are in denial about their dreams being shattered and tell the judges they have made a big mistake and that they just chose the wrong song or the wrong routine. It is never because they simply have no talent because they are so wrapped up in their aspirations. It probably does not make me sound like a very good person to say that this is the most appealing aspect of these types of show, but the proof is in the pudding. These shows get their best ratings in the early episodes and for the final. If this makes me bad, then I am certainly not alone in the doghouse.
One of the interesting points that I heard raised this week is that the popularity of Britain's Got Talent demonstrates that variety performances are much missed on television. This is a complaint I have heard before from people of an era that can remember such spectacles as Sunday Night at the London Palladium. It is an argument, however, that I vehemently disagree with. The success of Britain's Got Talent, far from demonstrating that variety is missed on television, in fact proves exactly why it is no longer shown on television outside of talent shows.
People watch Britain's Got Talent because it is television that is easy to watch as a family on Saturday night and because the show features everyday members of the public who believe they have a talent, but invariably have far less talent than they believe. From what I have seen of the series, it has shown that some forms of entertainment that were bracketed in to the broad category of variety are so old hat in this day and age. Once you have seen one ventriloquist act, you have seen them all. People fire-eating ceased being entertainment when people stopped going to circuses. And magicians performing cheap card tricks is no longer seen as an act of genius, but just some show-off who knows how to bend the rules. In this series of Britain's Got Talent, even a five year old was performing lame magic tricks. The days of Paul Daniels wowing a prime time audience are thankfully a thing consigned to the distant past.
Surely the whole point of a variety show is to see the most talented performers in their own field showcasing their talents to a live audience. But how do you accommodate these performers all onto one stage? The best stand-up comedians and the best family entertainers are unlikely to fit onto the same bill as the best classical and contemporary musical acts any more because people are more picky and choosy about who and what they want to watch. Taking these broad categories of performers as examples, could you ever foresee a live variety performance with Jack Dee, Ricky Gervais, Jon Culshaw, Brian Conley, Bruce Forsyth, Katherine Jenkins, Jools Holland, the cast of Chicago, Take That, U2 and Darcey Bussell all sharing a stage on the same night, at the same location? It just would not happen because the audience that wants to see U2 does not want to see Take That and equally the Take That fans would not want to see U2. The audience that wants to see Ricky Gervais does not want to see Brian Conley and vice versa, while fans of Brucie and Darcey are going to be less enamoured by the Chicago cast's presence.
Cast your minds back a couple of summers to the Live Earth concerts. The audience were waiting for Elton John to top the bill but the floral industry's favourite tantrum throwing ivory tickler was running a few minutes late. In order to fill time, Ricky Gervais was sent out to entertain the crowd. Under different circumstances, Gervais would have been welcomed, but at a live music venue, the crowd came to see musicians, not comedians and consequently, Gervais far from warming the crowd up before Reginald Dwight took to the stage had the effect of de-energising them and was in fact booed by some sections of the crowd. Admittedly, Gervais's set was not his finest comedic ensemble but the main reason for the audience disapproval was that comedy on a music bill mixes as well as water does with electricity. The reverse principle would also be equally true.
The point is that in modern times, people are selective about what they want to see and when they want to see it. There are very few programmes on television that serve to meet the needs of a wide audience. Programmes are more likely to cater for a certain demographic, people of a certain age and with a particular interest. There are some exceptions, with Later with Jools Holland quite deliberately showcasing a wide range of musical talents so that there is a little bit of something in the programme for everyone and it gives people opportunity to go out and make a cup of tea when their less favoured musicians are performing. Above all though, the main selling point of the programme is the amiability of Holland in the role as mein host.
A point that I have made on these pages before and which I adamantly stand by is that people's yearning for nostalgia can be very misleading and some of the things people wax lyrical about now, were not so popular at the time. So when people talk about the good days of variety television, they are remembering Morecambe and Wise performing or Tommy Cooper performing a magic trick going wrong or telling a daft joke or they are remembering members of the Rat Pack performing to a live audience. This is all well and good, but for every Tommy Cooper, there was a Duncan Norvelle or Joe Pasquale. For Morecambe and Wise, the flip side was Cannon and Ball and if the Rat Pack represented the pinnacle of musical talent, the bottom rung was represented by Showaddywaddy.
Variety as a form of entertainment belongs in a different era, an era when people regularly went to holiday camps in Skegness or Whitby for their summer holidays and consequently, the comedians of the day performed night after night at holiday camps during the summer season, before heading back to the smoky working man's clubs for the winter. In this day and age, fewer people holiday at such resorts as they prefer to trust the reliability of the sun on the continent and the top comedians of 2009 perform sell out tours at large theatres across the country rather than small seaside venues. All the holiday resorts get left with are the middle aged comedians who are so down on their luck that they have to supplement their income by doing some window cleaning and a thousand and one Elvis impersonators. Admittedly, the current economic crisis is seeing an upturn in people holidaying at seaside resorts in the UK, but I very much doubt this will result in old school variety returning to popular mainstream taste.
The problem of nostalgia is not just confined to one's memories of variety. It also applies to situation comedies and to remakes of old programmes or old movies. A recent example of this has been shown by the critical response to the remake of Reggie Perrin. Although the programme has attracted good audience figures, television critics have poured scorn on it, saying it is not a patch on the original and that Martin Clunes was not fit to fill the late Leonard Rossiter's shoes.
Admittedly, I was not born when the original series aired back in the 1970s, but I have watched some episodes when they were repeated some years ago. I thought that the programme was funny in places but also rather dated and that essentially it was Rossiter's powerful performance in the lead role that made the programme. I personally preferred Rossiter's performance as the serial miser and bigot Rigsby in the timeless Rising Damp.
In any event, the remake of Reggie Perrin is not meant to be a straight remake of the programme but a modern day version of the tale in which the lead character plays out his existence in a dead end job with a company that makes disposable razors, rather than selling desserts as he did in the original series. What I thought the remake did particularly well was to make the character's experiences relevant to modern times, capturing well the office culture as well as the mundane routine associated with commuting. This is something that I can particularly relate to in my current circumstances, and I feel that the writers and Clunes's acting performance captured this particularly well.
Far from being a sub-standard remake, I think that the new version of Reggie Perrin has been a very good modern interpretation of the story and Martin Clunes once again proves that he belongs right up there amongst the best comedy actors that these shores have produced with a very believable and moving performance in the central role. Far from turning in his grave, I imagine that if Leonard Rossiter was still alive today, he would have marvelled at Clunes's performance in bringing to life his character to a whole new generation.
The ending to this series suggests that the commissioning of a second series is dependent on the ratings, but I really hope that Clunes and the strong supporting Fay Ripley and Wendy Craig will be back to continue the story next year. But this is the thing with nostalgia, people cannot see past what they remember the first time round, even if the passage of time has in fact blurred their take on reality.
5. Shearer might not be the Messiah, but he could be a very naughty boy
Well, reports of a bubble bursting in the North East of England last Sunday teatime were not without substance. Newcastle United's sixteen year stay in the Premier League came to an end after a feeble 1-0 defeat at Aston Villa ensured that the Magpies would be playing their football in the second tier of the English game in the 2009/10 season. The return of Alan Shearer, this time in a manager's suit was not enough to arrest Newcastle's slide, with the team winning just won of their final eight league matches while under their former number nine's stewardship.
In truth though, Newcastle's current plight is not due simply to recent results but more a legacy of a series of bad decisions taken at board level over the past few years, where those in positions of authority have allowed their hearts to rule their head and impair their judgement. Ever since Sir Bobby Robson was removed of his duties just four matches into Newcastle's 2004/05 campaign, the Magpies have lurched from one bad managerial appointment to another and with each poor appointment, they have also wasted an astronomical amount of money on players whose attitude or injury record ensured they were incongruous in achieving the club's set objectives.
Everything that is wrong with Newcastle's recent setup was demonstrated with the recent revelation that defender Sebastien Bassong was earning just £5,000 a week and has been offered a pay rise in order to persuade him to remain at the club next season. That Bassong was offered a pay rise is not the contentious point, what is shocking, however is that Bassong was earning so little all the while the permanently injured Michael Owen has reputedly been picking up a pay cheque of £115,000. By common consent, Bassong has been Newcastle's best player over the course of the season (admittedly he did not have much competition) while Owen is now living on past glories due to the ravages of injury and lost motivation. This extraordinary discrepancy in Newcastle's wage structure demonstrates an alarming absence of meritocracy and serves to prove where everything has gone wrong at St James's Park and also why their demise has received so little sympathy, as it has been self-inflicted.
Newcastle's supporters will now look to Alan Shearer to stay on and manage the club in the Championship next season, but as the banner on the final day of the season at Villa Park so pointedly said, who is Newcastle's next Messiah, Ant and Dec? This is where Newcastle have continued to go wrong and while you ultimately have to blame the board for making the decisions, the Toon Army support have to take some of the blame for their constant insistence that being "one of us" is a pre-requisite for taking on the Newcastle job. The continual championing of former Newcastle players to be managers of the club has done little to help the club's cause in recent years and what does it really mean to say that the next incumbent needs to "bleed black and white"? Surely, the most crucial aspect in appointing a manager is that they need to be experienced, be able to handle the pressure and know how to get the best out of players. At Newcastle though, there appears to be distrust of anyone coming in from outside the area.
The recent turnaround at Fulham, whose victory at Newcastle in the penultimate week of the season ironically did so much in consigning them to Championship football next season, is testament to what making the right managerial change can achieve. Midway through the 2007/08 season, Fulham were in the Premier League's relegation zone and looked certainties to drop to the Championship. They sacked their manager and replaced him with Roy Hodgson, a 60 year old Englishman who spent his formulative years managing on the continent with spells in charge of the Swiss and Finnish national teams, as well as having a short spell in charge of Inter Milan. Hodgson would not have been many people's first pick as the man to keep Fulham up, especially as his only previous Premier League experience had been over a decade earlier with Blackburn Rovers.
Yet, Hodgson confounded the critics by inspiring Fulham to an astonishing end of season recovery which culminated in the team winning on the final day of the season to stay in the top flight. Hodgson has subsequently transformed the West Londoners and in the 2008/09 season, Fulham have finished a full ten places higher than last season by attaining their highest ever league position in the top flight of seventh place. In achieving this, Fulham have also qualified for European football for next season, which goes to show that if you make the right managerial appointment, you can make such a difference and in a relatively short space of time.
These are the lessons Newcastle need to take heed of if they are to return to the top flight and are to re-establish themselves as a team with aspirations of winning honours. In the short term, they need to solely focus on returning to the Premier League at the first attempt, an accomplishment that all connected with the club would be well advised to not take for granted as the Championship is always an unforgiving division and looks likely to be very competitive next season. Newcastle will need to get some of their mercenaries and over the hill players off of their wage bill and will need to bring players in, but they will be signing Championship level players as reinforcements and there is no guarantee they will sign players any better than those playing elsewhere in the division.
The 64,000 dollar question is whether Alan Shearer will be persuaded to stay for another season. I expect ultimately Shearer will drop his excessive wage demands and will take on the job permanently. The irony, however, is that the manager Newcastle should have appointed two years ago and who may well have kept them in the Premier League, looks likely to be unveiled as the manager of their deadliest rivals Sunderland within the next day. The man in question is Steve Bruce, who is well known as a lifelong supporter of Newcastle who would jump at the chance to manage his hometown club. Instead, in taking the job at Sunderland, he would effectively be ruling himself out of ever managing the Magpies.
If Shearer does stay on at Newcastle, he will need to pick up the ropes pretty quickly and I think the club would be well served in bringing in an experienced manager or coach to work alongside him who would be able to challenge Shearer's thinking. Shearer's existing sidekick Iain Dowie is unlikely to be the right man to perform this role over the longer term as firstly he is likely to go back into club management himself, but I also sense that he is too chummy with Shearer and will therefore find it hard to question his authority. A more senior figure who has seen it all and bought the T-shirt is what is required to help combat Shearer's managerial greenness. Unfortunately, I doubt Coach Carter would be enticed by a cold winter on Tyneside!
I fully expect Shearer to be given the Newcastle job permanently, but ultimately only an immediate return to the Premier League will ensure that Shearer retains his status as Messiah on Tyneside, and is not just a very naughty boy.
6. Debra looks favourite for The Apprentice, but Kate to be the real winner
The hunt for Sir Alan Sugar's fifth apprentice is entering the home straight now with just a quintet of hopefuls remaining with this week's penultimate episode of the series seeing the obligatory interview process with Sugar's merry band of Rottweilers and Jack Russells. Imagine if any of his heavies were conducting a real life job interview, they surely would be contravening employment law with some of the questions they are allowed to ask. It is not so much an interview as a character assassination in some instances.
I have not watched this series as avidly as the previous series, due to the unfortunate scheduling of this series on the same night as Champions League football. Memo to the BBC, please air the next series on a Thursday night when I will be able to guarantee my viewing. However, what I have seen of this series, I would have to say that the male candidates in this series have been a disgrace to their gender. Only James remains of the male folk that started the process, and he really lacks the business acumen to stand any chance of getting beyond the interview stage.
To my mind, the most talented Apprentices this year have been the blonde bombshell Kate and the feisty, fiery saleswoman Yasmina. If the hunt was for my apprentice, these two would indisputably be contesting the final because they have demonstrated the best array of skills, have responded the best to pressure, have led their teams well when asked to and always contributed when amongst the ranks, but are also just very presentable people.
Despite this, however, I have a sneaky suspicion that Debra, the Alan McInally lookalike with a voice like Stacey off Eastenders is going to walk off with the £100,000 job in Sir Alan's corporate empire. She is younger than either Kate or Yasmina at just 23 and although she has shown negative character traits on the tasks during the series, she has also shown good business instincts and has fought her corner well in the board room. These are qualities that Sir Alan Sugar admires and I think he is suspicious of people who come across as too eloquent. Although Debra is raw around the edges, because of her relative inexperience, I expect Sugar feels he can smooth out these edges but can also leave her to get on with doing the job. In a time of financial uncertainty, more than ever Sir Alan is looking for a doer who is capable of the hard sell.
Yasmina to me looks like the stereotype of the common Apprentice runner-up. Consistently good all the way through and a very tough, headstrong cookie who is not afraid to say what she thinks, but ultimately someone Sugar might overlook because of her feistiness. He would be afraid that she would upset people in what tend to be male dominated corridors of power within his organisation. For Yasmina this year, read Claire Young twelve months ago or Ruth Badger back in series two.
In Kate's case, she almost suffers for being so photogenic. People I imagine look at her and think that she is just a dizzy blonde, whereas in fact, I think they might overlook her qualities. The Birmingham lass is a very presentable woman and I am not just talking in terms of aesthetic qualities, but she also has good communication skills and has struck me as being good at dealing with people throughout the process. It would not surprise me if she ends up the real winner from Apprentice series five as if her performance on the home shopping task is anything to go by, she looks a natural in front of the camera and so failure to win the series could prove a blessing in disguise, as a career in the media is surely more lucrative in the long run than managing Sir Alan Sugar's property portfolio.
Tuesday, 26 May 2009
Power, glory, blood, sweat and tears
Hello everyone.
Well, I'm back again to write another blog after a short hiatus. Not of the hernia kind I am pleased to report, but of the not in front of a PC kind. I trust you are all enjoying the spring finally having sprung and the start of the barbecue season after yet another Bank Holiday weekend. Sadly, there's only one more Bank Holiday to come before Christmas.
So since I was last here, the Daily Telegraph has exposed the earth shattering news that not all of the 659 elected members of Parliament in this country are strong, upstanding citizens and that some of them have been fiddling their expenses. I can report that in next Tuesday's Telegraph, they will be running a world exclusive informing the nation that the world is round, pigs do not have wings, the Pope is a Catholic and that 30 per cent of Katie Price's body sets off airport metal detectors. It does beg the question though as to whether there is a niche market for start-up moat cleaning businesses in these times of financial uncertainty.
More on this nonsense later on. But first of all, even the non-football fans among the parish will know that there's a big match on tomorrow night.
1. All roads lead to Rome
So, tomorrow night is Champions League final night. This author's beloved Manchester United take on Barcelona in club football's blue riband event. The match promises to be a classic showdown between two teams with proud footballing principles, some of the finest footballers on the planet and plenty of goalscoring power. None of this guarantees a classic match, however, and the intangibles such as nerves and the pressure of the occasion could afflict the ability of the match to live up to pre-match expectations. Nonetheless, the occasion should ensure that even the most fairweather of football supporters will tune in to watch the theatre unfold.
As you will know, I will have a vested outcome in the match and although I love watching the Champions League final regardless of who is playing, when the team you support are involved in the final it is a mixture of unbridled joy but also that little bit of trepidation too. Joy that they have made the showpiece and have the chance to win the trophy, but trepidation that they have come so far but could fall at the last hurdle. After all, popular belief is that everybody remembers the winners but no-one remembers the runners-up. The philosophy is not far from the truth. This year though, the sense of anticipation is doubled because United have a chance to make some history by successfully defending the trophy, which if they accomplish, they would become the first team to win back-to-back Champions League finals since the format of the competition changed in the 1992/93 season.
United's success in the Champions League final last year was particularly sweet for me. Firstly, their victory in the final came against Chelsea and I count among my friends quite a few supporters of the Blues from SW6 and so it was good to exchange some friendly banter in the aftermath of United's penalty shoot out victory. Secondly, and from my personal standpoint, even more significantly, the only previous occasion that Manchester United had contested the final in my lifetime, back in 1999 when they defeated Bayern Munich with two goals in injury time to complete their unprecedented treble, I did not get the opportunity to watch the drama unfold.
This is one of those slightly embarrassing stories for me and which when I recount it to some of my friends, they think I must have been mad to foresake watching the final knowing what an ardent supporter of United I am and think that I should have disowned the other parties involved that prevented me from giving the match my undivided attention. But anyway, the story goes thus.
Back in 1999, I was coming towards the end of my second year at university and there were a couple of pieces of coursework that needed to be handed in at the end of that week. These were all of pieces of group coursework that I was working on with 3 or 4 other students. I recall that the three week Easter holidays that year were largely spent in the university library and so quite how this coursework had not got finished before then is something of a mystery. There was also the added difficulty that some people on the course were looking for a job to be doing in the third year which was spent in the workplace. Earlier on that day, I vividly recall going to a job interview with Family Assurance, whose offices are just up the road from the Odeon cinema in Brighton and in fact I remember one of the interview panel pulling my leg about the match saying that United would lose.
After the interview and after I had nipped home for some lunch, I had to find out where my group were and sure enough, they were convening around one of the group's house just down the road from where I now live, but which was over the other side of town back then. My hopes were that the assignments would just need a spot of tweaking and a couple of hundred words added and then everything could be put to bed in time for me to go down the pub and watch the match. Nothing could go wrong surely? Yeah right. What actually happened was that we spent an hour or so on the computer before one of our number decided he needed some fresh air and that fresh air would be achieved by taking an early walk to the pub for a quick pint. With the best will in the world, the man in question does not know the meaning of a quick pint and in the end, we probably spent a good couple of hours in the boozer before heading back to his place.
I remember that we must have got back to my mate's place around 6:00 pm, maybe just afterwards and we spent a solid hour to an hour and a half working on the assignment but there was still some dispute over trimming the assignment down. It will not surprise you to learn that yours truly had a fair chunk of his contribution to the assignment that needed to be left on the cutting room floor so as not to go over the word limit. We ordered pizza and sat and watched the match up to half time, a half which Bayern had the better of and they went into the break leading 1-0. Then when the whistle blew for half time, my friends headed back upstairs to the computer and that left me in the cusp of a dilemma. Do I stay and watch the rest of the match in somebody else's house and leave my friends to soldier on upstairs without my input, or do I make the big sacrifice of foregoing watching the second half to ensure that we get the blessed coursework finished?
The truth, my friends, is that I chose the second option although I confess that some of the reason for me following their lead wasn't my D'Artagnan one-for-all and all-for-one philosophy, but partly for reasons of cowardice. It seems strange to think it, especially given what Manchester United had achieved up to that point in that season, but I did not want to sit and witness us losing the game and the way the first half went, for one of the few times I can remember, I did not think we would get back in the match. Thankfully, the folly of my decision making was shown up and United ended up winning in such dramatic fashion. I have watched the finale to the match several times since but obviously it does not compare to the feelings I would have experienced if I had seen things unfold when they did.
I do recall looking at my watch at about 9:20 that evening when I was on typing duty on the computer and thinking that I would quite like to get up and go downstairs to see what the score was. I did get up and went down and with 10 minutes left, Bayern still led 1-0. I stayed watching the game for a couple of minutes but again I had this nagging feeling that it was not going to be United's night and so I walked back upstairs and continued typing. Not long after, I remember my friend whose house I was in going down to check the score. He had a vested interest in the final as he had bet a tenner on Bayern Munich winning the match 1-0. As things stood, he was quids in. What I should have taken into account was that the previous time he had bet on Manchester United to lose, he came very close to winning his money only to have it snatched from him right at the last.
Five weeks previously, Manchester United had played Arsenal in the FA Cup semi-final replay and my friend had stuck either £10 or £20, I cannot remember, on Arsenal winning the match 2-1 in normal time. As the match entered the 90th minute, the score was 1-1 and with United down to 10 men, Arsenal were pressing for a winner and they seemed to be on the verge of a date at Wembley when Manchester United conceded a penalty in the last minute of normal time. Arsenal's brilliant playmaker Dennis Bergkamp stepped forward to take the penalty and surely a player of his quality and coolness under pressure would not pass up the opportunity. Images of my friend kissing his winnings flashed through my mind as Bergkamp stepped up. And then, it did not go to script. Peter Schmeichel saved the penalty and against the odds, Ryan Giggs scored a wonder goal in extra time to give United the victory. And my friend's winnings went up in smoke.
The knowledge that the contents of my friend's wallet were going on United to lose should have consoled me that things would work out in our favour, but in the end I missed the key moments that saw United turn a 1-0 deficit into a 2-1 victory and instead I had to make do with my friend's miserable facial expression when he returned to the room after the match finished. "They've won 2-1" he said in the tone of someone telling you that your cat had been run over. That was one consolation I could take from the night, that facial expression will stay with me forever. We also did get the assignment finished that night and drinks were consumed into the small hours to celebrate this achievement, as well as United's, even if my friend's drink probably tasted a little flat.
So with all this in mind, I eagerly wanted United to make it to another final so that I could enjoy the occasion and finally be able to say I had seen them properly play in the Champions League final. It would take another nine years for United to get to the final again, but last season's final against Chelsea was a fantastic night, although the margins between success and failure and happiness and sadness in football was demonstrated in microcosm on the night. John Terry's banana skin feet which saw the ball hit the post rather than the back of the net turned out to swing the pendulum in United's favour and away from Chelsea's grasp. The match was one kick away from turning my evening into a wake, but in the end, it turned out to be party time.
So to tomorrow night. I would say that I am quietly confident of United's prospects, but although Barcelona will have key players missing, they have such a number of match-winners at their disposal, that they must not be under-estimated. This is a team that have scored over 100 goals in their 38 game domestic league campaign. To demonstrate just what an extraordinary haul that is, by contrast, Manchester United needed to score only 68 goals in retaining the Premier League crown over the same number of matches.
The match has been billed as a straight battle between the world's two best players in Lionel Messi of Barcelona and Cristiano Ronaldo of Manchester United. Fantastic players they both are too. However, it is too simplistic to think that a match of this magnitude will just be decided by two players. United have a strong team and squad and it is likely that there will be heartbreak for someone in their squad who will not even make the substitutes' bench. The performances of United's back four and goalkeeper and also the battle in midfield will be key to determining the match.
Barcelona will be missing key personnel in defence with three of their defensive mainstays, Eric Abidal, Carles Puyol and Daniel Alves all being suspended as a result of indiscretions in their semi-final away goals win over Chelsea, although Abidal's red card that keeps him out of the final was a gross miscarriage of justice. There are also possible doubts over the participation of Andres Iniesta, who scored Barca's late equaliser at Stamford Bridge and Thierry Henry, who United will remember well from his glory days at Arsenal. From United's side, Darren Fletcher will be suspended for the final after his unjust red card in the semi-final although his absence will still mean United have a surfeit of players to fit into three midfield positions. Sir Alex Ferguson will be more concerned by Rio Ferdinand's fitness, particularly as he did not feature against Hull on Sunday, having said he would need to play in that match to stand a chance of selection against Barcelona. If Ferdinand does not make it, the relatively inexperienced Jonny Evans will take his place.
On paper, the match looks like it has the potential to be an open, attacking spectacle and the attacking philosophies of both teams suggest that neither team will be backward in coming forward. As said at the top, however, European finals rarely result in open, high scoring fare. Liverpool's 3-3 draw with Milan in 2005 is a rare exception, although in that match, Liverpool's comeback came from them having to throw the kitchen sink at Milan, trailing as they did 3-0 after 45 minutes.
For United to prevail, they need to try and play the game at their preferred tempo rather than see the game slowed down to favour Barcelona's considered possession play. There will be a temptation for United to load their front line with pace and possibly go with near enough the same players that tore Arsenal apart in the 2nd leg of the semi-final and so that would mean Cristiano Ronaldo playing up front, Wayne Rooney playing on the left and Carlos Tevez and Dimitar Berbatov remaining on the bench. I think that the idea behind this strategy is a smart one, but I think a player of Berbatov's subtlety and craft will have a role to play at some point in the final.
I am not going to tempt providence by offering a prediction on this match. Last season's semi-final between the two sides saw United prevail 1-0 on aggregate despite an edgy second leg at Old Trafford where Barcelona came close to scoring a precious away goal. Both teams are not short of match winners, but in finals sometimes the hero turns out to be someone you least expect. Wes Brown crossed for Ronaldo to score in the final a year ago and in this year's semi-final, United's first leg win over Arsenal was secured by their stand-in right back John O'Shea. I hope the game lives up to expectations, but above all, I hope at 9:30 tomorrow night that I will be toasting a United victory.
2. The danger of protest voting
Well, you would have needed to have been on Mars for the past fortnight to have not heard of the extent to which the reputation of MPs have been dragged into the gutter over the catalogue of expenses misuses which a number of our elected representatives have perpetrated. In a normal week, any of the stories that the Telegraph have brought to light would have been headline news in isolation, but the Telegraph has almost printed an anthology of misdemeanours and even now, the wrongdoing that has occurred seems to be showing no signs of abating.
There are a few things to be said here. First and foremost, surely this whole embarrassing episode is the biggest argument against self-regulation that you will ever find. You will have heard the MPs constantly complain in the aftermath of the expose that the fault did not lie with them, but in instead lay with the system. There was no mention that it was these very same MPs who voted for the system and who had responsibility for its policing. So in essence, the system that failed was their doing. What they were really saying was, "it's a pity you found out".
The next thing to say is that the expenses process in Government should be the same as it is in any workplace. That being that you can only claim on legitimate and essential work related items and not on any items that were expended whilst not on company business or which have no relevance or benefit to the job. The new policy introduced on this is a step in the right direction, but it is still not watertight enough. Quite how having a moat cleaned, having two toilet seats replaced or having twenty-five light bulbs changed by a professional electrician can be seen as work related items is a mystery that only messrs Hogg, Prescott and Willetts respectively can answer. At least in the case of Chris Huhne, he could argue that the £120 he spent on a trouser press would ensure that he would present a smart appearance in the Commons.
In my job, I can claim on work related travel, refreshments for the workplace and overnight accommodation if my journey would require setting off before 6:00 am on the morning of the day that I need to reach the destination. And that is pretty much the extent of what I can claim for. That is also what it should be for MPs, but you get the impression that there are those who feel that because they are reputedly serving for the greater good of the country and for their consituents, they are in some way entitled to a free meal ticket and having a butler provided at the taxpayer's expense.
What the expenses controversies has highlighted above anything else is that rumours of the death of the class system have been greatly exaggerated. You have had Tories claiming on moats, duck ponds and electronic gates at their mansions and stately homes. Meanwhile, the champagne Socialists among the Labour Party have claimed on posh furnishings, lampshades and dry rot repair. Incidentally, I hear that Esther Rantzen will be standing for election in the Luton South constituency against Margaret Moran. I imagine Ms Rantzen's manifesto will be the only thing toothless about her.
Because of the current disdain for MPs, there appears to be a groundswell of disdain towards our elected members and consequently there are calls for an election to be called immediately and there are plenty of independent moralists such as Rantzen and the sanctimonious, permanently white suited Martin Bell who have come out of the woodwork to put themselves forward as credible alternatives. Strangely, Bell had not been seen publicly for quite some time until this controversy broke, yet now he has surged to the top of the minor celebrity ubiquity league, a position that Myleene Klass presumably felt was hers for keeps at least until some time in 2014.
I am not saying it is wrong for good, upstanding citizens to throw their hats into the ring as possible independent candidates, provided they are doing it for the right reasons and are not doing it as part of some ego trip, which unfortunately I believe that both Martin Bell and Esther Rantzen are doing. If people are going to put themselves forward for election, they need to have a range of policies that make them stand out from the crowd, rather than just standing up for one relatively hollow policy, namely that there should be no sleaze in politics. Of course, in an ideal world it is thoroughly commendable that there should not be any corruption or misuse of power, but just as there is a common held belief that world poverty is bad and that disease needs to be cured, it does not make it any easier to achieve. No man is an island I believe the pub sign once said.
What would concern me if there was a snap election held within six weeks or indeed in the autumn this year is that the biggest beneficiaries would be the protest parties. Good thing, I hear you say. That will teach the main parties that they can't take us for granted I expect you will add. Well, maybe. But it will come at a cost because the main protest parties likely to gain some support at a time when confidence in Government and in the main opposition is at a very low ebb will be the British National Party and UK Independence Party. This cannot be good news in any shape or form.
The BNP have changed the way they deliver their message over the years but the actual message remains the same as it always was, however much they try to filter the poison it contains. Their idea of an ideal Britain is a Britain that doesn't evolve and which does not contain foreigners or any immigrant population and where the only thing that is cosmopolitan can be found on the magazine shelf in WH Smith. Their very mantra is British jobs for British people and their message will appeal to down on their luck, structurally unemployed people living in industrialised parts of the country who feel that the world owes them a living. As if that wasn't bad enough, the BNP has recently introduced a new youth wing of the party that is going to encourage people to be good citizens and teach them "nationalistic principles". Sadly, I can't confirm whether this new wing is called the Hitler Youth or whether the nationalistic principles include being able to recite "No Surrender to the IRA" verbatim, but I suppose neither possibility can be ruled out.
Far right protest voting has been seen to increase at times of crisis before and especially in countries with a complex immigration population. In France, a country that is not far behind the UK in the insularity stakes at times, just in recent years the far right party led by Jean-Marie La Pen has enjoyed an increase in popularity and I gather it has been the third largest party in France. France is a country with a significant population of Afro-Caribbeans who are first or second generation immigrants from some of France's current and former colonies in Africa and the West Indies and as such there are some less forward thinking natives who feel that they should not share the Tricolore with these "Johnny Come Latelys".
Of course, more people from foreign shores are living and working in the UK as a result of the freedom of movement of labour that is allowed across European Union state borders as a result of the Maastricht Treaty. This imposition on British law is one reason why a good number of the protest voters would like to see the UK withdraw from the European Union and no doubt would like to see the UK return to conquering the world all by itself, trading with whoever it pleases and turning the atlas into a flurry of pink again. Yet, we need to remind ourselves that we are in 2009 now, not 1909. Freedom of movement is a two way thing. As much as we may resent people coming here to better themselves and seek self-improvement and sample a different culture, why are we not receptive to going abroad ourselves in search of work and seeing how the other half live. If you can't beat them, join them. I guess it is the old story of always wanting the easy life.
The opportunists among the protest parties are really trying to tap into the sea of self-pity that they see in this country at the moment as a result of a Government that has been in power for possibly three years too long and due to there being a lack of credible and scrupulous opposition. I notice today that David Cameron has announced his bold plans of getting the public to trust politicians again and they include updating people via text about any news on bills that have been passed that affect them. Another example of the Conservatives coming up with empty gimmick gestures, it would seem. I mean, it is bad enough having to delete drunken texts that we receive from some of our less well constituted friends, but now we might have to put up with spam from the Tories telling us that the bill to reintroduce fox-hunting has been approved. No-one surely is sufficiently interested.
The upcoming European elections will serve as an interesting trial for what lies ahead with the General Election which must be held within the next year. I would imagine that turnout for the elections will be pretty low and so this will be further good news for the protest parties who are bound to attract a certain niche percentage of the vote. My hope, however, is that the likes of the BNP and UKIP do not gain a sufficient amount of the vote to exercise any power, but that with the slice of the vote they do get, the main political parties see the danger that is presented if the public are not convinced that they can get their act together.
When it comes to the election next year, I expect the Conservatives to be overwhelming favourites to get elected, but in some ways I think it would be no bad thing if there was no overall majority and we ended up with a hung parliament. None of the main parties at the moment are outstanding and at least if you had a no overall majority Government, you would hopefully get the cream of the crop from each of the main parties elected to a position in which they have particular competence. Coalition Government has not been altogether successful in Italy, but I think that is partly due to the volatile nature of their electorate allied with having certain politicians there whose morals make many of our sinning MPs seem like Cliff Richard by comparison. I would not want to see an election every eight months, but there does need to be a change from just leaving the decision on when an election takes place to the Prime Minister of the day. This loads the dice in the Government of the day's favour, regardless of whether it is serving the greater interest of the country and its electorate.
Politics and politicians are currently in the doghouse so far as many people across the country are concerned, and they only have themselves to blame for the current low perception that people have of them. We should be mindful, however, that not every MP is a bad apple and there are those who do a great job in serving the interest of their constituents and who would never take advantages of loopholes around expenses. It is just that these MPs do not court publicity and so their good work is not highlighted. For those that have given their profession a bad name, then repercussions need to be served out and wherever fraudulent activity has occurred, particularly with mortgages on second homes, then criminal proceedings should be brought where there are proven transgressions. That would be a good start in getting the public onside again, although I think in Hazel Blears's case, only a public hanging will suffice. Let's face it, her crime isn't so much that she is slippery, but that she is slippery, scary looking and ginger and has the personality of a jellyfish. And let's face it, she has gone and ticked the boxes on most things that riles a typical Brit there!
That's my lot for tonight. I'll be back at the weekend for a bit more football chat concerning depressed Magpies and a couple of other general bits and pieces. Arrivederci for now.
Well, I'm back again to write another blog after a short hiatus. Not of the hernia kind I am pleased to report, but of the not in front of a PC kind. I trust you are all enjoying the spring finally having sprung and the start of the barbecue season after yet another Bank Holiday weekend. Sadly, there's only one more Bank Holiday to come before Christmas.
So since I was last here, the Daily Telegraph has exposed the earth shattering news that not all of the 659 elected members of Parliament in this country are strong, upstanding citizens and that some of them have been fiddling their expenses. I can report that in next Tuesday's Telegraph, they will be running a world exclusive informing the nation that the world is round, pigs do not have wings, the Pope is a Catholic and that 30 per cent of Katie Price's body sets off airport metal detectors. It does beg the question though as to whether there is a niche market for start-up moat cleaning businesses in these times of financial uncertainty.
More on this nonsense later on. But first of all, even the non-football fans among the parish will know that there's a big match on tomorrow night.
1. All roads lead to Rome
So, tomorrow night is Champions League final night. This author's beloved Manchester United take on Barcelona in club football's blue riband event. The match promises to be a classic showdown between two teams with proud footballing principles, some of the finest footballers on the planet and plenty of goalscoring power. None of this guarantees a classic match, however, and the intangibles such as nerves and the pressure of the occasion could afflict the ability of the match to live up to pre-match expectations. Nonetheless, the occasion should ensure that even the most fairweather of football supporters will tune in to watch the theatre unfold.
As you will know, I will have a vested outcome in the match and although I love watching the Champions League final regardless of who is playing, when the team you support are involved in the final it is a mixture of unbridled joy but also that little bit of trepidation too. Joy that they have made the showpiece and have the chance to win the trophy, but trepidation that they have come so far but could fall at the last hurdle. After all, popular belief is that everybody remembers the winners but no-one remembers the runners-up. The philosophy is not far from the truth. This year though, the sense of anticipation is doubled because United have a chance to make some history by successfully defending the trophy, which if they accomplish, they would become the first team to win back-to-back Champions League finals since the format of the competition changed in the 1992/93 season.
United's success in the Champions League final last year was particularly sweet for me. Firstly, their victory in the final came against Chelsea and I count among my friends quite a few supporters of the Blues from SW6 and so it was good to exchange some friendly banter in the aftermath of United's penalty shoot out victory. Secondly, and from my personal standpoint, even more significantly, the only previous occasion that Manchester United had contested the final in my lifetime, back in 1999 when they defeated Bayern Munich with two goals in injury time to complete their unprecedented treble, I did not get the opportunity to watch the drama unfold.
This is one of those slightly embarrassing stories for me and which when I recount it to some of my friends, they think I must have been mad to foresake watching the final knowing what an ardent supporter of United I am and think that I should have disowned the other parties involved that prevented me from giving the match my undivided attention. But anyway, the story goes thus.
Back in 1999, I was coming towards the end of my second year at university and there were a couple of pieces of coursework that needed to be handed in at the end of that week. These were all of pieces of group coursework that I was working on with 3 or 4 other students. I recall that the three week Easter holidays that year were largely spent in the university library and so quite how this coursework had not got finished before then is something of a mystery. There was also the added difficulty that some people on the course were looking for a job to be doing in the third year which was spent in the workplace. Earlier on that day, I vividly recall going to a job interview with Family Assurance, whose offices are just up the road from the Odeon cinema in Brighton and in fact I remember one of the interview panel pulling my leg about the match saying that United would lose.
After the interview and after I had nipped home for some lunch, I had to find out where my group were and sure enough, they were convening around one of the group's house just down the road from where I now live, but which was over the other side of town back then. My hopes were that the assignments would just need a spot of tweaking and a couple of hundred words added and then everything could be put to bed in time for me to go down the pub and watch the match. Nothing could go wrong surely? Yeah right. What actually happened was that we spent an hour or so on the computer before one of our number decided he needed some fresh air and that fresh air would be achieved by taking an early walk to the pub for a quick pint. With the best will in the world, the man in question does not know the meaning of a quick pint and in the end, we probably spent a good couple of hours in the boozer before heading back to his place.
I remember that we must have got back to my mate's place around 6:00 pm, maybe just afterwards and we spent a solid hour to an hour and a half working on the assignment but there was still some dispute over trimming the assignment down. It will not surprise you to learn that yours truly had a fair chunk of his contribution to the assignment that needed to be left on the cutting room floor so as not to go over the word limit. We ordered pizza and sat and watched the match up to half time, a half which Bayern had the better of and they went into the break leading 1-0. Then when the whistle blew for half time, my friends headed back upstairs to the computer and that left me in the cusp of a dilemma. Do I stay and watch the rest of the match in somebody else's house and leave my friends to soldier on upstairs without my input, or do I make the big sacrifice of foregoing watching the second half to ensure that we get the blessed coursework finished?
The truth, my friends, is that I chose the second option although I confess that some of the reason for me following their lead wasn't my D'Artagnan one-for-all and all-for-one philosophy, but partly for reasons of cowardice. It seems strange to think it, especially given what Manchester United had achieved up to that point in that season, but I did not want to sit and witness us losing the game and the way the first half went, for one of the few times I can remember, I did not think we would get back in the match. Thankfully, the folly of my decision making was shown up and United ended up winning in such dramatic fashion. I have watched the finale to the match several times since but obviously it does not compare to the feelings I would have experienced if I had seen things unfold when they did.
I do recall looking at my watch at about 9:20 that evening when I was on typing duty on the computer and thinking that I would quite like to get up and go downstairs to see what the score was. I did get up and went down and with 10 minutes left, Bayern still led 1-0. I stayed watching the game for a couple of minutes but again I had this nagging feeling that it was not going to be United's night and so I walked back upstairs and continued typing. Not long after, I remember my friend whose house I was in going down to check the score. He had a vested interest in the final as he had bet a tenner on Bayern Munich winning the match 1-0. As things stood, he was quids in. What I should have taken into account was that the previous time he had bet on Manchester United to lose, he came very close to winning his money only to have it snatched from him right at the last.
Five weeks previously, Manchester United had played Arsenal in the FA Cup semi-final replay and my friend had stuck either £10 or £20, I cannot remember, on Arsenal winning the match 2-1 in normal time. As the match entered the 90th minute, the score was 1-1 and with United down to 10 men, Arsenal were pressing for a winner and they seemed to be on the verge of a date at Wembley when Manchester United conceded a penalty in the last minute of normal time. Arsenal's brilliant playmaker Dennis Bergkamp stepped forward to take the penalty and surely a player of his quality and coolness under pressure would not pass up the opportunity. Images of my friend kissing his winnings flashed through my mind as Bergkamp stepped up. And then, it did not go to script. Peter Schmeichel saved the penalty and against the odds, Ryan Giggs scored a wonder goal in extra time to give United the victory. And my friend's winnings went up in smoke.
The knowledge that the contents of my friend's wallet were going on United to lose should have consoled me that things would work out in our favour, but in the end I missed the key moments that saw United turn a 1-0 deficit into a 2-1 victory and instead I had to make do with my friend's miserable facial expression when he returned to the room after the match finished. "They've won 2-1" he said in the tone of someone telling you that your cat had been run over. That was one consolation I could take from the night, that facial expression will stay with me forever. We also did get the assignment finished that night and drinks were consumed into the small hours to celebrate this achievement, as well as United's, even if my friend's drink probably tasted a little flat.
So with all this in mind, I eagerly wanted United to make it to another final so that I could enjoy the occasion and finally be able to say I had seen them properly play in the Champions League final. It would take another nine years for United to get to the final again, but last season's final against Chelsea was a fantastic night, although the margins between success and failure and happiness and sadness in football was demonstrated in microcosm on the night. John Terry's banana skin feet which saw the ball hit the post rather than the back of the net turned out to swing the pendulum in United's favour and away from Chelsea's grasp. The match was one kick away from turning my evening into a wake, but in the end, it turned out to be party time.
So to tomorrow night. I would say that I am quietly confident of United's prospects, but although Barcelona will have key players missing, they have such a number of match-winners at their disposal, that they must not be under-estimated. This is a team that have scored over 100 goals in their 38 game domestic league campaign. To demonstrate just what an extraordinary haul that is, by contrast, Manchester United needed to score only 68 goals in retaining the Premier League crown over the same number of matches.
The match has been billed as a straight battle between the world's two best players in Lionel Messi of Barcelona and Cristiano Ronaldo of Manchester United. Fantastic players they both are too. However, it is too simplistic to think that a match of this magnitude will just be decided by two players. United have a strong team and squad and it is likely that there will be heartbreak for someone in their squad who will not even make the substitutes' bench. The performances of United's back four and goalkeeper and also the battle in midfield will be key to determining the match.
Barcelona will be missing key personnel in defence with three of their defensive mainstays, Eric Abidal, Carles Puyol and Daniel Alves all being suspended as a result of indiscretions in their semi-final away goals win over Chelsea, although Abidal's red card that keeps him out of the final was a gross miscarriage of justice. There are also possible doubts over the participation of Andres Iniesta, who scored Barca's late equaliser at Stamford Bridge and Thierry Henry, who United will remember well from his glory days at Arsenal. From United's side, Darren Fletcher will be suspended for the final after his unjust red card in the semi-final although his absence will still mean United have a surfeit of players to fit into three midfield positions. Sir Alex Ferguson will be more concerned by Rio Ferdinand's fitness, particularly as he did not feature against Hull on Sunday, having said he would need to play in that match to stand a chance of selection against Barcelona. If Ferdinand does not make it, the relatively inexperienced Jonny Evans will take his place.
On paper, the match looks like it has the potential to be an open, attacking spectacle and the attacking philosophies of both teams suggest that neither team will be backward in coming forward. As said at the top, however, European finals rarely result in open, high scoring fare. Liverpool's 3-3 draw with Milan in 2005 is a rare exception, although in that match, Liverpool's comeback came from them having to throw the kitchen sink at Milan, trailing as they did 3-0 after 45 minutes.
For United to prevail, they need to try and play the game at their preferred tempo rather than see the game slowed down to favour Barcelona's considered possession play. There will be a temptation for United to load their front line with pace and possibly go with near enough the same players that tore Arsenal apart in the 2nd leg of the semi-final and so that would mean Cristiano Ronaldo playing up front, Wayne Rooney playing on the left and Carlos Tevez and Dimitar Berbatov remaining on the bench. I think that the idea behind this strategy is a smart one, but I think a player of Berbatov's subtlety and craft will have a role to play at some point in the final.
I am not going to tempt providence by offering a prediction on this match. Last season's semi-final between the two sides saw United prevail 1-0 on aggregate despite an edgy second leg at Old Trafford where Barcelona came close to scoring a precious away goal. Both teams are not short of match winners, but in finals sometimes the hero turns out to be someone you least expect. Wes Brown crossed for Ronaldo to score in the final a year ago and in this year's semi-final, United's first leg win over Arsenal was secured by their stand-in right back John O'Shea. I hope the game lives up to expectations, but above all, I hope at 9:30 tomorrow night that I will be toasting a United victory.
2. The danger of protest voting
Well, you would have needed to have been on Mars for the past fortnight to have not heard of the extent to which the reputation of MPs have been dragged into the gutter over the catalogue of expenses misuses which a number of our elected representatives have perpetrated. In a normal week, any of the stories that the Telegraph have brought to light would have been headline news in isolation, but the Telegraph has almost printed an anthology of misdemeanours and even now, the wrongdoing that has occurred seems to be showing no signs of abating.
There are a few things to be said here. First and foremost, surely this whole embarrassing episode is the biggest argument against self-regulation that you will ever find. You will have heard the MPs constantly complain in the aftermath of the expose that the fault did not lie with them, but in instead lay with the system. There was no mention that it was these very same MPs who voted for the system and who had responsibility for its policing. So in essence, the system that failed was their doing. What they were really saying was, "it's a pity you found out".
The next thing to say is that the expenses process in Government should be the same as it is in any workplace. That being that you can only claim on legitimate and essential work related items and not on any items that were expended whilst not on company business or which have no relevance or benefit to the job. The new policy introduced on this is a step in the right direction, but it is still not watertight enough. Quite how having a moat cleaned, having two toilet seats replaced or having twenty-five light bulbs changed by a professional electrician can be seen as work related items is a mystery that only messrs Hogg, Prescott and Willetts respectively can answer. At least in the case of Chris Huhne, he could argue that the £120 he spent on a trouser press would ensure that he would present a smart appearance in the Commons.
In my job, I can claim on work related travel, refreshments for the workplace and overnight accommodation if my journey would require setting off before 6:00 am on the morning of the day that I need to reach the destination. And that is pretty much the extent of what I can claim for. That is also what it should be for MPs, but you get the impression that there are those who feel that because they are reputedly serving for the greater good of the country and for their consituents, they are in some way entitled to a free meal ticket and having a butler provided at the taxpayer's expense.
What the expenses controversies has highlighted above anything else is that rumours of the death of the class system have been greatly exaggerated. You have had Tories claiming on moats, duck ponds and electronic gates at their mansions and stately homes. Meanwhile, the champagne Socialists among the Labour Party have claimed on posh furnishings, lampshades and dry rot repair. Incidentally, I hear that Esther Rantzen will be standing for election in the Luton South constituency against Margaret Moran. I imagine Ms Rantzen's manifesto will be the only thing toothless about her.
Because of the current disdain for MPs, there appears to be a groundswell of disdain towards our elected members and consequently there are calls for an election to be called immediately and there are plenty of independent moralists such as Rantzen and the sanctimonious, permanently white suited Martin Bell who have come out of the woodwork to put themselves forward as credible alternatives. Strangely, Bell had not been seen publicly for quite some time until this controversy broke, yet now he has surged to the top of the minor celebrity ubiquity league, a position that Myleene Klass presumably felt was hers for keeps at least until some time in 2014.
I am not saying it is wrong for good, upstanding citizens to throw their hats into the ring as possible independent candidates, provided they are doing it for the right reasons and are not doing it as part of some ego trip, which unfortunately I believe that both Martin Bell and Esther Rantzen are doing. If people are going to put themselves forward for election, they need to have a range of policies that make them stand out from the crowd, rather than just standing up for one relatively hollow policy, namely that there should be no sleaze in politics. Of course, in an ideal world it is thoroughly commendable that there should not be any corruption or misuse of power, but just as there is a common held belief that world poverty is bad and that disease needs to be cured, it does not make it any easier to achieve. No man is an island I believe the pub sign once said.
What would concern me if there was a snap election held within six weeks or indeed in the autumn this year is that the biggest beneficiaries would be the protest parties. Good thing, I hear you say. That will teach the main parties that they can't take us for granted I expect you will add. Well, maybe. But it will come at a cost because the main protest parties likely to gain some support at a time when confidence in Government and in the main opposition is at a very low ebb will be the British National Party and UK Independence Party. This cannot be good news in any shape or form.
The BNP have changed the way they deliver their message over the years but the actual message remains the same as it always was, however much they try to filter the poison it contains. Their idea of an ideal Britain is a Britain that doesn't evolve and which does not contain foreigners or any immigrant population and where the only thing that is cosmopolitan can be found on the magazine shelf in WH Smith. Their very mantra is British jobs for British people and their message will appeal to down on their luck, structurally unemployed people living in industrialised parts of the country who feel that the world owes them a living. As if that wasn't bad enough, the BNP has recently introduced a new youth wing of the party that is going to encourage people to be good citizens and teach them "nationalistic principles". Sadly, I can't confirm whether this new wing is called the Hitler Youth or whether the nationalistic principles include being able to recite "No Surrender to the IRA" verbatim, but I suppose neither possibility can be ruled out.
Far right protest voting has been seen to increase at times of crisis before and especially in countries with a complex immigration population. In France, a country that is not far behind the UK in the insularity stakes at times, just in recent years the far right party led by Jean-Marie La Pen has enjoyed an increase in popularity and I gather it has been the third largest party in France. France is a country with a significant population of Afro-Caribbeans who are first or second generation immigrants from some of France's current and former colonies in Africa and the West Indies and as such there are some less forward thinking natives who feel that they should not share the Tricolore with these "Johnny Come Latelys".
Of course, more people from foreign shores are living and working in the UK as a result of the freedom of movement of labour that is allowed across European Union state borders as a result of the Maastricht Treaty. This imposition on British law is one reason why a good number of the protest voters would like to see the UK withdraw from the European Union and no doubt would like to see the UK return to conquering the world all by itself, trading with whoever it pleases and turning the atlas into a flurry of pink again. Yet, we need to remind ourselves that we are in 2009 now, not 1909. Freedom of movement is a two way thing. As much as we may resent people coming here to better themselves and seek self-improvement and sample a different culture, why are we not receptive to going abroad ourselves in search of work and seeing how the other half live. If you can't beat them, join them. I guess it is the old story of always wanting the easy life.
The opportunists among the protest parties are really trying to tap into the sea of self-pity that they see in this country at the moment as a result of a Government that has been in power for possibly three years too long and due to there being a lack of credible and scrupulous opposition. I notice today that David Cameron has announced his bold plans of getting the public to trust politicians again and they include updating people via text about any news on bills that have been passed that affect them. Another example of the Conservatives coming up with empty gimmick gestures, it would seem. I mean, it is bad enough having to delete drunken texts that we receive from some of our less well constituted friends, but now we might have to put up with spam from the Tories telling us that the bill to reintroduce fox-hunting has been approved. No-one surely is sufficiently interested.
The upcoming European elections will serve as an interesting trial for what lies ahead with the General Election which must be held within the next year. I would imagine that turnout for the elections will be pretty low and so this will be further good news for the protest parties who are bound to attract a certain niche percentage of the vote. My hope, however, is that the likes of the BNP and UKIP do not gain a sufficient amount of the vote to exercise any power, but that with the slice of the vote they do get, the main political parties see the danger that is presented if the public are not convinced that they can get their act together.
When it comes to the election next year, I expect the Conservatives to be overwhelming favourites to get elected, but in some ways I think it would be no bad thing if there was no overall majority and we ended up with a hung parliament. None of the main parties at the moment are outstanding and at least if you had a no overall majority Government, you would hopefully get the cream of the crop from each of the main parties elected to a position in which they have particular competence. Coalition Government has not been altogether successful in Italy, but I think that is partly due to the volatile nature of their electorate allied with having certain politicians there whose morals make many of our sinning MPs seem like Cliff Richard by comparison. I would not want to see an election every eight months, but there does need to be a change from just leaving the decision on when an election takes place to the Prime Minister of the day. This loads the dice in the Government of the day's favour, regardless of whether it is serving the greater interest of the country and its electorate.
Politics and politicians are currently in the doghouse so far as many people across the country are concerned, and they only have themselves to blame for the current low perception that people have of them. We should be mindful, however, that not every MP is a bad apple and there are those who do a great job in serving the interest of their constituents and who would never take advantages of loopholes around expenses. It is just that these MPs do not court publicity and so their good work is not highlighted. For those that have given their profession a bad name, then repercussions need to be served out and wherever fraudulent activity has occurred, particularly with mortgages on second homes, then criminal proceedings should be brought where there are proven transgressions. That would be a good start in getting the public onside again, although I think in Hazel Blears's case, only a public hanging will suffice. Let's face it, her crime isn't so much that she is slippery, but that she is slippery, scary looking and ginger and has the personality of a jellyfish. And let's face it, she has gone and ticked the boxes on most things that riles a typical Brit there!
That's my lot for tonight. I'll be back at the weekend for a bit more football chat concerning depressed Magpies and a couple of other general bits and pieces. Arrivederci for now.
Sunday, 10 May 2009
Constructive ranting
Well, I'm back again to finish my ramblings from earlier on in the week. Quite a few bits and pieces to get through so I had better get cracking with some more constructive ranting.
2. Let's encourage responsible people
As ever, the media has of late been all too busy to highlight the negative side of youth culture with a series of stories about bullying in schools, news of poor literacy skills amongst Britain's teenagers and the continued spectre of knife crime that hangs over certain inner city communities within the country. All of which are valid concerns, of that there is no doubt. Yet, I do feel that our media is guilty of painting a distorted picture of growing up in modern Britain. Even when there is news of youth achievement, such as excellent grades in GCSEs and A-levels, self-appointed know-alls come out of the woodwork and disparage these achievements and say the exams are too easy, presumably for no other reason than because the green eyed monster has consumed them, reminding them of their inadequacies in their own adolescence.
I feel that sometimes as a society we are all very good at focusing on what people's bad points are rather than what actual positives there are to be found in the vast majority of individuals. That is not to say that there are not certain rotten apples to be found in society, clearly there are. However, a small minority of rotten apples does not make for an orchard that should be condemned. Without wishing to turn this into some kind of Dickensian style nature versus nurture debate, some people turn out in a certain way due to circumstance. This can be due to bad parenting, poverty or poor schooling, possibly a combination of all three. The point is that it is very easy to tar everybody with the same brush.
So I was pleased to hear of a recent development that some secondary schools are looking to introduce a mentoring scheme. The scheme would involve fifth year (or year eleven if you prefer) students having to mentor first and second year students to help them in acclimatising to the big school and supporting them with any issues they may be having, such as being bullied or keeping on top of work. Whether the remit will include the mentor doing the mentee's maths homework on Pythagoras's Theorem is unclear, although I am sure a line will be drawn at the mentor nipping out to buy the mentee's cigarettes.
Facetiousness aside, I personally think this is a very good idea and feel that I would have benefited from this type of scheme being around when I was at school, both from the perspective of being a mentee, and latterly, a mentor. I appreciate that some see it as a dirty word, but I think this type of opportunity offers empowerment to the mentor and gives them a sense of responsibility. I realise that there is the possibility that some mentors will choose not to use that responsibility as it was intended, but that ultimately is their choice. You can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink. If the mentee makes the most of the situation, not only can this help them through their schooling, but it could also give them a few pointers for mentoring three years down the line.
As I said earlier, I did not have access to this type of programme at school, although I latterly was involved in a mentoring programme when I was doing my degree in Business Studies. In my first year, this involved being mentored by a final year student around applying for a notional job and then when I came to my final year, I sat on the other side of the desk and had to mentor two first year students. Although there were certain challenges that I found with mentoring first year students who are making the most of university's social attractions while they can, I got enough from the experience to help me in a professional capacity and I think it is sensible to adopt a similar programme in schools in order to help people to be responsible and accountable at an earlier age.
Back in my days at school, the nearest thing that there was in place to encouraging good citizenship amongst pupils was to appoint school captains and prefects. These roles brought about badges of honour, although in general terms, the responsibilities that came with the role did not encourage empowerment nor did it involve much interaction with more junior peers. A typical day in the life of a prefect would involve standing guard outside the boys' toilets (I think that was done voluntarily if you were a girl prefect!) or apprehending delinquant first years by encouraging them to pick litter. I think the problem with the prefects system is that it encouraged an "us and them" policy, which is perhaps counter-productive in fostering respect.
Giving teenagers more responsibility and autonomy is something that could go a long way to improving the current downsides of youth culture and the negative press that is so prevalent every time one picks up a tabloid newspaper or turns on a shock jock on a talk based radio station that needs to sensationalise to get its audience into a larva. I also think more should be done to help pupils leave school with the level of communication skills required to be effective in the workplace.
It is a common complaint from employers and those representing employers' interests to say that today's school leavers possess poor communication skills upon entering the world of work. It is an understandable occurrence in some respects because verbal communication has become more fragmented as a result of the increased use of non-verbal technologies such as mobile phone texting, MSN Messenger and Facebook in order to communicate with others. There has recently been a campaign to improve oratory among young people and I fully support this idea and feel that the best way of encouraging it is for all secondary schools to have a debating society.
I remember that there was a debating society at my secondary school that ran around once a month at Monday lunchtime and I went along a few times to observe, if not to contribute heartily to the debate. Although the society was never that well attended, it did attract a cross section of students from different years along to the debate and there were some eloquent debaters who made a strong case on a range of issues, such as capital punishment, animal testing and hunting.
Knowing how to present a coherent argument and being able to present in front of an audience are two major skills that useful in spheres far beyond school debating societies. In both an academic and a professional capacity, the need to present in front of an audience of often influential people is a vital skill and presentations are increasingly incorporated into the interviewing stage when applying for a job. Therefore, it makes sense to provide students with a forum at a relatively early age where they can get used to presenting and communicating with an audience, and in giving pupils the chance to present a clear argument, it will also encourage them to develop their command of the English language, which is something that we are informed is a dying art.
As I have said before, there should be a lot of encouragement on people to have responsibility and to be accountable for their actions. This of course, does not only apply to teenagers, but also to adults as well. So with this in mind, I was somewhat disturbed to read this weekend that the German Government is considering banning paintball as it believes that combat games could be contributing to the culture of youth violence and gun crime in Germany.
Now, I do not wish to dismiss this claim out of hand as I suppose there are a small minority of people who can be influenced by combat games just as there is a minority that exists that has played shoot-em-up or beat-em-up games on their PlayStation or XBox and then felt compelled to go out and take copycat actions. There are also those that are influenced by violent scenes they see in Hollywood movies. Just because you or I played such games when growing up and continue to watch movies that contain graphic violence without feeling the urge to go out into the street and play out these scenes does not mean to say that there are those that will. Such people, however, will in all likelihood, have deep rooted mental health issues that impacts upon their disturbed behaviour.
The problem that introducing bans or censorship of this kind is that invariably it is the responsible people that are penalised the most. I have only ever been paintballing once, as part of the day's itinerary for a friend's stag do, but it is one of those activities that I would not mind the opportunity to participate in again at a later date. What struck me from the one occasion that I did take part in paintballing was that there were two distinct groups among the participants, namely those that were paintball enthusiasts and those who were paintball novices, the group that it will not surprise you that I included myself in. The paintball enthusiasts though, did not just derive pleasure from going round firing paint at friends and acquaintances, but also enjoyed the teamwork involved and the strategy of the game.
Introducing any form of ban does not provide any understanding of the types of people that take part in an activity, but it instead imposes a blanket decision on everybody without giving a moment's consideration to who it affects and what difference their sanctions will make. I very much doubt that stopping people from participating from playing paintball will result in a significant downturn in gun crime in Germany because unless the crime statisticians know differently, I would not expect there to be any correlation between people who are participants at paintballing and those that are arrested for violent crime. It might make more sense to impose a lower age ceiling for when someone can start taking part in paintball and other combat games, so to ensure that there is not an effect on more impressionable teenagers and also so people are responsible in handling their guns and ammunition.
This reminds me a little of the handgun ban that was introduced in the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the Dunblane massacre in 1996. The Government was right to move quickly to ban ownership of handguns in the aftermath of a shocking tragedy. However, it is arguable that they went a step too far because the people that were penalised the most were those that were licensed, responsible owners of guns who were no longer allowed to use them. Members of Britain's rifle shooting team were not allowed to train in the United Kingdom ahead of the Olympic Games because of the ban and so had to use facilities overseas. Can it be right that the responsible people are penalised for the actions of the irresponsible and the incapacitated? It does seem that sometimes our Governments are all too ready to use a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.
3. ID advocates have no idea
The activist V, of V For Vendetta fame would be shaking his masked head in disbelief at some of the recent legislative whims that our dearly beloved Government have been stewing over with regards to further removing people's rights to privacy and further down the road of a Big Brother culture.
First of all, it would seem that the Labour Government is intent on pressing on with its compulsory identity cards proposal. Just in the past week, it has been reported that Manchester is to become the first British city where these cards will become available. Advocates of the identity cards believe that they are an essential evil in the current climate in order to track down any potential terrorist threat. There are also the usual crowd of misguided fools who are only too keen to reiterate that if we have got nothing to hide, then there should not be anything to worry about.
But the actual benefits from these cards just do not stack up. One of the key advantages that ID cards will supposedly offer is that it will clamp down on identity theft and credit and debit card fraud. This is an argument that I believe is fundamentally flawed. Yes, it is possible that ID cards could cut down on any "over the counter" fraud where cards could be double swiped, but what it does not acknowledge is that an increasing percentage of personal transactions take place online. Security on the Internet has improved markedly in the past few years with most reputable companies having secure access wherever financial transactions take place online. However, there are hackers who are expert in finding loopholes and there are other ways in which fraudulent activity can take place online, such as fake e-mail messages that encourage the recipient to pass on their bank details to a third party.
My other problem with identity cards is that the data on them could be used for all manner of purposes and there are no guarantees as to who will end up with access to the details on them. Is it really essential for the Government to hold a dossier on every single person that lives in the country and to know what their spending patterns are and what their credit rating is? Quite apart from the snooping aspect to this kind of behaviour, why should we trust the Government with sensitive information when they have previous for mishandling confidential material by virtue of leaving CD-ROMs, USB memory sticks and even laptops on trains or discarded in pub car parks. If there was a real benefit associated with having access to the type of classified information held on an ID card, then I would possibly understand more, but there is negligible evidence that the information held on an ID card would result in catching wannabe terrorists or perpetrators of identity fraud.
The craziest aspect to the Labour Government's commitment to ID cards, championed by their hapless Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is that in all likelihood the Labour Government will be deposed by this time next year by which time a General Election will have to be called and at the moment, the Labour Party is on course for a landslide defeat. If the Conservatives are elected as currently appears likely, should they remain true to their party policy to date, they are likely to scrap the idea altogether. At a time when the Government needs to clamp down on unnecessary expenditure and wastage of resources, surely the best policy would be knock this controversial policy on the head for good.
As if its commitment to ID cards was not bad enough, the Government recently announced proposals where everyone's personal e-mail address can be accessed for legal and policing purposes and that ISPs need to keep a record of every e-mail sent and received. On the surface, you might think that this sounds like a good idea if accessing someone's e-mails can lead to some important clues around solving a crime, or if by looking at the content of someone's e-mails, it can be seen if any inflammatory behaviour had taken place.
However, none of this will be possible because the key aspect to this policy is that the police will not be able to see the content of anyone's e-mails, but will only be able to see who a person has e-mailed and when they did it. Therefore, I do not see how this will be a particularly useful device in solving crime as all that it tells the investigating officer is who was e-mailed and the date when the e-mail was sent. This is only going to be helpful if the e-mail records confirm or disprove a suspect's alibi of where they were on the given date rather than being able to confirm what the purpose of the e-mail was. Call me cynical, but there is the possibility that this measure could enable police to "fit up" certain individuals wherever a prosecution is not appearing otherwise forthcoming.
I realise that actions do need to take place in order to counter the threats of terrorism and of identity fraud and in opposing these measures, I would like to make it clear that I welcome any attempts to reduce these threats that potentially affect us all. However, I feel that the measures that the Government are pushing forward are excessive and there is not any substantive proof that the measures will result in a reduction in terrorist or inflammatory activity, nor will it combat certain types of fraud. All that these measures do is feed the media hysteria and the net result is that we are being led ever more towards a Big Brother state where our every move can be potentially monitored. I do not have any wish for anybody to be voyeurs in my life, least of all a group of civil servants in pinstripe suits with a pocket brimmed full of memory sticks with our life stories on them.
4. UEFA rules do not appeal
As I am a Manchester United supporter, you will not be surprised to hear that I was delighted with United's 3-1 rout of Arsenal in the second leg of the Champions League semi-final last Tuesday. The result ensures that United reach the final for the second year running and the small matter of Barcelona stand between United and their successful retention of the Champions League trophy. Should they be successful, they would become the first club to manage this feat since the Champions League format was introduced to the European Cup competition in 1992. It really is a fantastic opportunity for United to make some history as well as maintaining Sir Alex Ferguson's insatiable pursuit for trophies.
The one blemish on an otherwise exemplary night for United was the red card for midfielder Darren Fletcher. Fletcher was red carded after being adjudged to have fouled Cesc Fabregas as he prepared to shoot, although television replays showed up the folly of this decision as Fletcher clearly toe ended the ball away without gaining an advantage. Having given the foul, however, the referee was duty bound to issue Fletcher with a red card as he deemed that Fletcher's intervention had denied a goalscoring opportunity.
It is a great shame for Fletcher that he now appears likely to sit out the final due to this unwarranted decision. People that say United should not look to contest the decision because Fletcher is not that important to their chances in the final are missing the point completely. Fletcher has been one of United's unsung heroes this season, he has never been one to court publicity and he has carried out a relatively unglamorous but important role for the team effectively. Without Fletcher's simple passes and mopping up in front of United's back four, United's more creative players would be allowed less licence to get forward and attack at will. While players like Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney will surely get plenty of chances to appear Champions League finals again, someone of Darren Fletcher's ilk may only have one opportunity like this in a career. After all, Roy Keane was suspended for the Champions League final in 1999 and never got another chance to play in it. For this opportunity to be cruelly snatched from Fletcher due to a poor refereeing decision is grossly unfair.
What makes matters even worse is UEFA's pathetically draconian attitude to appealing decisions. In any walk of life, be it the workplace, housing or education, not to mention the judiciary, an appeal system is an essential pre-requisite. It is there to ensure that if an applicant or defendant feels that their case was not given adequate consideration or if vital evidence was held back then a decision can be overturned. Sometimes figures in authority do make mistakes and what looks right on first inspection can latterly turn out to be wrong.
However, UEFA do not adopt this attitude because in the immediate aftermath of the game, it was reported that Darren Fletcher had no right of appeal. I found this revelation staggering. Maybe I am exaggerating, but to my mind, the right of appeal is a basic human right, an acknowledgement that sometimes mistakes do happen. For the governing body of football within the continent of Europe to not recognise an appeals process just does not add up and it seems very myopic on the part of those who oversee the rules. Given the presence of the European Court of Human Rights and European Court of Justice within the same continent that UEFA serves, I wonder if anyone has ever checked the validity of UEFA's disciplinary procedure. To me, I would think there would be a strong chance that the courts would tell UEFA that their approach is illegal and could result in them incurring some hefty legal bills at the very least. Surely one day a club will stand up to UEFA on this matter and create a legal precedent. It will be interesting to see what happens when that day comes.
The removal of a right of appeal is the kind of thing I would expect to see in a country that is under the rule of a dictator, such as Zimbabwe or previously in Iraq, but this rule is imposed in the relatively democratic European mainland. Regardless of whether one feels this individual sending off was right or wrong, I would like to know how any fair minded individual could possibly think it right that the person on the receiving end should have no right to contest the decision. OK, I am aware that an appeals process is always potentially there to be manipulated and some appeals would border on the frivolous. But that is human nature at work. Knowing that some people will take advantage of the system is not a reason to not have an appeals process, in fact it is a cop out. After all, an appeal is not a guarantee of overturning a decision, but merely a request that it is reviewed independently by a panel of people that have no discernible link to the original incident.
It has subsequently emerged that Manchester United could be granted special dispensation to appeal the Fletcher red card which would not be in keeping with UEFA's normal policy. Equally, Barcelona could also appeal Eric Abidal's absurd red card against Chelsea where he was adjudged to have fouled Nicolas Anelka when Anelka was stood so far away from the Barcelona left back that while Anelka fell over in SW6, Abidal was located in SW9. I would not be too hopeful of either player overturning their suspension for the final, but at least it is a start. Not having an appeals procedure is an acceptance that every decision made is right, which not only was proved wildly incorrect by the awful refereeing in both Champions League semi-finals, but is also one step away from organised autocracy and Fascism. And that is not the best approach to power in the twenty-first century.
5. What a load of rubbish!
The council elections are once again due to take place across the country and while these will in no small part be influenced by the current dissent and apathy towards the Government at national level, they will for the most part be influenced by local issues, not least how the public services are performing.
In Brighton and Hove, the hot potato in this respect right now has to be the refuse collection. Or rather, the lack of one. Since the working conditions were changed last year, a number of militant binmen have taken it upon themselves to not actually bother to collect the rubbish in some areas of the city. The rubbish collections which originally were scheduled once every week were changed to once a fortnight, although in certain parts of Brighton, my own included, it has been quite some time since a binman was last spotted in the neighbourhood. This lax service has resulted in people having to resort to disposing of their rubbish in communal bins, which is not an ideal method of disposal, not least because of the potential for fly tipping that this offers.
I suppose at this point I should be careful what I say, as it has recently come to light that there is a militant force at work at Brighton's refuse depot that has been sending poison pen letters to anyone that has had the audacity to write in to The Argus newspaper in Brighton to complain about their rubbish having not been collected. The content of these letters has been relatively tame, but it does nonetheless suggest that the people that wrote the letters of complaint have struck something of a raw nerve.
Refuse collectors do not have a job that any of us would envy, if we are honest. However, they are employed to perform an essential public duty in order to keep our cities clean and hygienic. Over the past few months, due to the workers' levels of demotivation, backed by a union that is more interested in its own agenda than that of its members, ultimately it has been the public that has been the biggest loser as this essential service has not been performed adequately across the board. The trouble is that some of these workers are in such a comfort zone through having worked where they have for so long that they do not feel they should be questioned and are not accountable for the consequences of their actions. In the time that the mystery poison pen letter writer took to write their compositions, a whole neighbourhood could have had their bins emptied.
It seems to me that taking pride in their work in that profession is at absolute zero and this has far reaching impacts on everyone that lives in Brighton and Hove.
2. Let's encourage responsible people
As ever, the media has of late been all too busy to highlight the negative side of youth culture with a series of stories about bullying in schools, news of poor literacy skills amongst Britain's teenagers and the continued spectre of knife crime that hangs over certain inner city communities within the country. All of which are valid concerns, of that there is no doubt. Yet, I do feel that our media is guilty of painting a distorted picture of growing up in modern Britain. Even when there is news of youth achievement, such as excellent grades in GCSEs and A-levels, self-appointed know-alls come out of the woodwork and disparage these achievements and say the exams are too easy, presumably for no other reason than because the green eyed monster has consumed them, reminding them of their inadequacies in their own adolescence.
I feel that sometimes as a society we are all very good at focusing on what people's bad points are rather than what actual positives there are to be found in the vast majority of individuals. That is not to say that there are not certain rotten apples to be found in society, clearly there are. However, a small minority of rotten apples does not make for an orchard that should be condemned. Without wishing to turn this into some kind of Dickensian style nature versus nurture debate, some people turn out in a certain way due to circumstance. This can be due to bad parenting, poverty or poor schooling, possibly a combination of all three. The point is that it is very easy to tar everybody with the same brush.
So I was pleased to hear of a recent development that some secondary schools are looking to introduce a mentoring scheme. The scheme would involve fifth year (or year eleven if you prefer) students having to mentor first and second year students to help them in acclimatising to the big school and supporting them with any issues they may be having, such as being bullied or keeping on top of work. Whether the remit will include the mentor doing the mentee's maths homework on Pythagoras's Theorem is unclear, although I am sure a line will be drawn at the mentor nipping out to buy the mentee's cigarettes.
Facetiousness aside, I personally think this is a very good idea and feel that I would have benefited from this type of scheme being around when I was at school, both from the perspective of being a mentee, and latterly, a mentor. I appreciate that some see it as a dirty word, but I think this type of opportunity offers empowerment to the mentor and gives them a sense of responsibility. I realise that there is the possibility that some mentors will choose not to use that responsibility as it was intended, but that ultimately is their choice. You can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink. If the mentee makes the most of the situation, not only can this help them through their schooling, but it could also give them a few pointers for mentoring three years down the line.
As I said earlier, I did not have access to this type of programme at school, although I latterly was involved in a mentoring programme when I was doing my degree in Business Studies. In my first year, this involved being mentored by a final year student around applying for a notional job and then when I came to my final year, I sat on the other side of the desk and had to mentor two first year students. Although there were certain challenges that I found with mentoring first year students who are making the most of university's social attractions while they can, I got enough from the experience to help me in a professional capacity and I think it is sensible to adopt a similar programme in schools in order to help people to be responsible and accountable at an earlier age.
Back in my days at school, the nearest thing that there was in place to encouraging good citizenship amongst pupils was to appoint school captains and prefects. These roles brought about badges of honour, although in general terms, the responsibilities that came with the role did not encourage empowerment nor did it involve much interaction with more junior peers. A typical day in the life of a prefect would involve standing guard outside the boys' toilets (I think that was done voluntarily if you were a girl prefect!) or apprehending delinquant first years by encouraging them to pick litter. I think the problem with the prefects system is that it encouraged an "us and them" policy, which is perhaps counter-productive in fostering respect.
Giving teenagers more responsibility and autonomy is something that could go a long way to improving the current downsides of youth culture and the negative press that is so prevalent every time one picks up a tabloid newspaper or turns on a shock jock on a talk based radio station that needs to sensationalise to get its audience into a larva. I also think more should be done to help pupils leave school with the level of communication skills required to be effective in the workplace.
It is a common complaint from employers and those representing employers' interests to say that today's school leavers possess poor communication skills upon entering the world of work. It is an understandable occurrence in some respects because verbal communication has become more fragmented as a result of the increased use of non-verbal technologies such as mobile phone texting, MSN Messenger and Facebook in order to communicate with others. There has recently been a campaign to improve oratory among young people and I fully support this idea and feel that the best way of encouraging it is for all secondary schools to have a debating society.
I remember that there was a debating society at my secondary school that ran around once a month at Monday lunchtime and I went along a few times to observe, if not to contribute heartily to the debate. Although the society was never that well attended, it did attract a cross section of students from different years along to the debate and there were some eloquent debaters who made a strong case on a range of issues, such as capital punishment, animal testing and hunting.
Knowing how to present a coherent argument and being able to present in front of an audience are two major skills that useful in spheres far beyond school debating societies. In both an academic and a professional capacity, the need to present in front of an audience of often influential people is a vital skill and presentations are increasingly incorporated into the interviewing stage when applying for a job. Therefore, it makes sense to provide students with a forum at a relatively early age where they can get used to presenting and communicating with an audience, and in giving pupils the chance to present a clear argument, it will also encourage them to develop their command of the English language, which is something that we are informed is a dying art.
As I have said before, there should be a lot of encouragement on people to have responsibility and to be accountable for their actions. This of course, does not only apply to teenagers, but also to adults as well. So with this in mind, I was somewhat disturbed to read this weekend that the German Government is considering banning paintball as it believes that combat games could be contributing to the culture of youth violence and gun crime in Germany.
Now, I do not wish to dismiss this claim out of hand as I suppose there are a small minority of people who can be influenced by combat games just as there is a minority that exists that has played shoot-em-up or beat-em-up games on their PlayStation or XBox and then felt compelled to go out and take copycat actions. There are also those that are influenced by violent scenes they see in Hollywood movies. Just because you or I played such games when growing up and continue to watch movies that contain graphic violence without feeling the urge to go out into the street and play out these scenes does not mean to say that there are those that will. Such people, however, will in all likelihood, have deep rooted mental health issues that impacts upon their disturbed behaviour.
The problem that introducing bans or censorship of this kind is that invariably it is the responsible people that are penalised the most. I have only ever been paintballing once, as part of the day's itinerary for a friend's stag do, but it is one of those activities that I would not mind the opportunity to participate in again at a later date. What struck me from the one occasion that I did take part in paintballing was that there were two distinct groups among the participants, namely those that were paintball enthusiasts and those who were paintball novices, the group that it will not surprise you that I included myself in. The paintball enthusiasts though, did not just derive pleasure from going round firing paint at friends and acquaintances, but also enjoyed the teamwork involved and the strategy of the game.
Introducing any form of ban does not provide any understanding of the types of people that take part in an activity, but it instead imposes a blanket decision on everybody without giving a moment's consideration to who it affects and what difference their sanctions will make. I very much doubt that stopping people from participating from playing paintball will result in a significant downturn in gun crime in Germany because unless the crime statisticians know differently, I would not expect there to be any correlation between people who are participants at paintballing and those that are arrested for violent crime. It might make more sense to impose a lower age ceiling for when someone can start taking part in paintball and other combat games, so to ensure that there is not an effect on more impressionable teenagers and also so people are responsible in handling their guns and ammunition.
This reminds me a little of the handgun ban that was introduced in the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the Dunblane massacre in 1996. The Government was right to move quickly to ban ownership of handguns in the aftermath of a shocking tragedy. However, it is arguable that they went a step too far because the people that were penalised the most were those that were licensed, responsible owners of guns who were no longer allowed to use them. Members of Britain's rifle shooting team were not allowed to train in the United Kingdom ahead of the Olympic Games because of the ban and so had to use facilities overseas. Can it be right that the responsible people are penalised for the actions of the irresponsible and the incapacitated? It does seem that sometimes our Governments are all too ready to use a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.
3. ID advocates have no idea
The activist V, of V For Vendetta fame would be shaking his masked head in disbelief at some of the recent legislative whims that our dearly beloved Government have been stewing over with regards to further removing people's rights to privacy and further down the road of a Big Brother culture.
First of all, it would seem that the Labour Government is intent on pressing on with its compulsory identity cards proposal. Just in the past week, it has been reported that Manchester is to become the first British city where these cards will become available. Advocates of the identity cards believe that they are an essential evil in the current climate in order to track down any potential terrorist threat. There are also the usual crowd of misguided fools who are only too keen to reiterate that if we have got nothing to hide, then there should not be anything to worry about.
But the actual benefits from these cards just do not stack up. One of the key advantages that ID cards will supposedly offer is that it will clamp down on identity theft and credit and debit card fraud. This is an argument that I believe is fundamentally flawed. Yes, it is possible that ID cards could cut down on any "over the counter" fraud where cards could be double swiped, but what it does not acknowledge is that an increasing percentage of personal transactions take place online. Security on the Internet has improved markedly in the past few years with most reputable companies having secure access wherever financial transactions take place online. However, there are hackers who are expert in finding loopholes and there are other ways in which fraudulent activity can take place online, such as fake e-mail messages that encourage the recipient to pass on their bank details to a third party.
My other problem with identity cards is that the data on them could be used for all manner of purposes and there are no guarantees as to who will end up with access to the details on them. Is it really essential for the Government to hold a dossier on every single person that lives in the country and to know what their spending patterns are and what their credit rating is? Quite apart from the snooping aspect to this kind of behaviour, why should we trust the Government with sensitive information when they have previous for mishandling confidential material by virtue of leaving CD-ROMs, USB memory sticks and even laptops on trains or discarded in pub car parks. If there was a real benefit associated with having access to the type of classified information held on an ID card, then I would possibly understand more, but there is negligible evidence that the information held on an ID card would result in catching wannabe terrorists or perpetrators of identity fraud.
The craziest aspect to the Labour Government's commitment to ID cards, championed by their hapless Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is that in all likelihood the Labour Government will be deposed by this time next year by which time a General Election will have to be called and at the moment, the Labour Party is on course for a landslide defeat. If the Conservatives are elected as currently appears likely, should they remain true to their party policy to date, they are likely to scrap the idea altogether. At a time when the Government needs to clamp down on unnecessary expenditure and wastage of resources, surely the best policy would be knock this controversial policy on the head for good.
As if its commitment to ID cards was not bad enough, the Government recently announced proposals where everyone's personal e-mail address can be accessed for legal and policing purposes and that ISPs need to keep a record of every e-mail sent and received. On the surface, you might think that this sounds like a good idea if accessing someone's e-mails can lead to some important clues around solving a crime, or if by looking at the content of someone's e-mails, it can be seen if any inflammatory behaviour had taken place.
However, none of this will be possible because the key aspect to this policy is that the police will not be able to see the content of anyone's e-mails, but will only be able to see who a person has e-mailed and when they did it. Therefore, I do not see how this will be a particularly useful device in solving crime as all that it tells the investigating officer is who was e-mailed and the date when the e-mail was sent. This is only going to be helpful if the e-mail records confirm or disprove a suspect's alibi of where they were on the given date rather than being able to confirm what the purpose of the e-mail was. Call me cynical, but there is the possibility that this measure could enable police to "fit up" certain individuals wherever a prosecution is not appearing otherwise forthcoming.
I realise that actions do need to take place in order to counter the threats of terrorism and of identity fraud and in opposing these measures, I would like to make it clear that I welcome any attempts to reduce these threats that potentially affect us all. However, I feel that the measures that the Government are pushing forward are excessive and there is not any substantive proof that the measures will result in a reduction in terrorist or inflammatory activity, nor will it combat certain types of fraud. All that these measures do is feed the media hysteria and the net result is that we are being led ever more towards a Big Brother state where our every move can be potentially monitored. I do not have any wish for anybody to be voyeurs in my life, least of all a group of civil servants in pinstripe suits with a pocket brimmed full of memory sticks with our life stories on them.
4. UEFA rules do not appeal
As I am a Manchester United supporter, you will not be surprised to hear that I was delighted with United's 3-1 rout of Arsenal in the second leg of the Champions League semi-final last Tuesday. The result ensures that United reach the final for the second year running and the small matter of Barcelona stand between United and their successful retention of the Champions League trophy. Should they be successful, they would become the first club to manage this feat since the Champions League format was introduced to the European Cup competition in 1992. It really is a fantastic opportunity for United to make some history as well as maintaining Sir Alex Ferguson's insatiable pursuit for trophies.
The one blemish on an otherwise exemplary night for United was the red card for midfielder Darren Fletcher. Fletcher was red carded after being adjudged to have fouled Cesc Fabregas as he prepared to shoot, although television replays showed up the folly of this decision as Fletcher clearly toe ended the ball away without gaining an advantage. Having given the foul, however, the referee was duty bound to issue Fletcher with a red card as he deemed that Fletcher's intervention had denied a goalscoring opportunity.
It is a great shame for Fletcher that he now appears likely to sit out the final due to this unwarranted decision. People that say United should not look to contest the decision because Fletcher is not that important to their chances in the final are missing the point completely. Fletcher has been one of United's unsung heroes this season, he has never been one to court publicity and he has carried out a relatively unglamorous but important role for the team effectively. Without Fletcher's simple passes and mopping up in front of United's back four, United's more creative players would be allowed less licence to get forward and attack at will. While players like Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney will surely get plenty of chances to appear Champions League finals again, someone of Darren Fletcher's ilk may only have one opportunity like this in a career. After all, Roy Keane was suspended for the Champions League final in 1999 and never got another chance to play in it. For this opportunity to be cruelly snatched from Fletcher due to a poor refereeing decision is grossly unfair.
What makes matters even worse is UEFA's pathetically draconian attitude to appealing decisions. In any walk of life, be it the workplace, housing or education, not to mention the judiciary, an appeal system is an essential pre-requisite. It is there to ensure that if an applicant or defendant feels that their case was not given adequate consideration or if vital evidence was held back then a decision can be overturned. Sometimes figures in authority do make mistakes and what looks right on first inspection can latterly turn out to be wrong.
However, UEFA do not adopt this attitude because in the immediate aftermath of the game, it was reported that Darren Fletcher had no right of appeal. I found this revelation staggering. Maybe I am exaggerating, but to my mind, the right of appeal is a basic human right, an acknowledgement that sometimes mistakes do happen. For the governing body of football within the continent of Europe to not recognise an appeals process just does not add up and it seems very myopic on the part of those who oversee the rules. Given the presence of the European Court of Human Rights and European Court of Justice within the same continent that UEFA serves, I wonder if anyone has ever checked the validity of UEFA's disciplinary procedure. To me, I would think there would be a strong chance that the courts would tell UEFA that their approach is illegal and could result in them incurring some hefty legal bills at the very least. Surely one day a club will stand up to UEFA on this matter and create a legal precedent. It will be interesting to see what happens when that day comes.
The removal of a right of appeal is the kind of thing I would expect to see in a country that is under the rule of a dictator, such as Zimbabwe or previously in Iraq, but this rule is imposed in the relatively democratic European mainland. Regardless of whether one feels this individual sending off was right or wrong, I would like to know how any fair minded individual could possibly think it right that the person on the receiving end should have no right to contest the decision. OK, I am aware that an appeals process is always potentially there to be manipulated and some appeals would border on the frivolous. But that is human nature at work. Knowing that some people will take advantage of the system is not a reason to not have an appeals process, in fact it is a cop out. After all, an appeal is not a guarantee of overturning a decision, but merely a request that it is reviewed independently by a panel of people that have no discernible link to the original incident.
It has subsequently emerged that Manchester United could be granted special dispensation to appeal the Fletcher red card which would not be in keeping with UEFA's normal policy. Equally, Barcelona could also appeal Eric Abidal's absurd red card against Chelsea where he was adjudged to have fouled Nicolas Anelka when Anelka was stood so far away from the Barcelona left back that while Anelka fell over in SW6, Abidal was located in SW9. I would not be too hopeful of either player overturning their suspension for the final, but at least it is a start. Not having an appeals procedure is an acceptance that every decision made is right, which not only was proved wildly incorrect by the awful refereeing in both Champions League semi-finals, but is also one step away from organised autocracy and Fascism. And that is not the best approach to power in the twenty-first century.
5. What a load of rubbish!
The council elections are once again due to take place across the country and while these will in no small part be influenced by the current dissent and apathy towards the Government at national level, they will for the most part be influenced by local issues, not least how the public services are performing.
In Brighton and Hove, the hot potato in this respect right now has to be the refuse collection. Or rather, the lack of one. Since the working conditions were changed last year, a number of militant binmen have taken it upon themselves to not actually bother to collect the rubbish in some areas of the city. The rubbish collections which originally were scheduled once every week were changed to once a fortnight, although in certain parts of Brighton, my own included, it has been quite some time since a binman was last spotted in the neighbourhood. This lax service has resulted in people having to resort to disposing of their rubbish in communal bins, which is not an ideal method of disposal, not least because of the potential for fly tipping that this offers.
I suppose at this point I should be careful what I say, as it has recently come to light that there is a militant force at work at Brighton's refuse depot that has been sending poison pen letters to anyone that has had the audacity to write in to The Argus newspaper in Brighton to complain about their rubbish having not been collected. The content of these letters has been relatively tame, but it does nonetheless suggest that the people that wrote the letters of complaint have struck something of a raw nerve.
Refuse collectors do not have a job that any of us would envy, if we are honest. However, they are employed to perform an essential public duty in order to keep our cities clean and hygienic. Over the past few months, due to the workers' levels of demotivation, backed by a union that is more interested in its own agenda than that of its members, ultimately it has been the public that has been the biggest loser as this essential service has not been performed adequately across the board. The trouble is that some of these workers are in such a comfort zone through having worked where they have for so long that they do not feel they should be questioned and are not accountable for the consequences of their actions. In the time that the mystery poison pen letter writer took to write their compositions, a whole neighbourhood could have had their bins emptied.
It seems to me that taking pride in their work in that profession is at absolute zero and this has far reaching impacts on everyone that lives in Brighton and Hove.
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