Government property

This is what David Tennant v. John Simm should have been like…

2008 is officially A Good Year

Why? Half Man Half Biscuit are releasing a new album!

CSI: Ambleside, due on April 28th.

Normal service is resumed

Note: the following comments are made in a purely personal capacity.

It has been an interesting week in Formula One. Nothing to do with the dull-as-ditchwater Malaysian Grand Prix, which like most of the supposedly “exciting” races of last year was a procession that hinged on pit stop strategy – interesting enough if you like that sort of thing, but nothing to get excited about. Rather, the surprise news that the BBC will be showing the sport again next year has proved one of the best F1 stories for months.

The BBC presented this as Bernie Ecclestone approaching them, asking for a better set of coverage across numerous platforms than ITV provides. In truth, it seems this approach was made only after ITV decided to terminate its contract: football is proving far more lucrative, with live England games, some Premiership matches and now also Champions League matches secured for the network. The F1 sponsorship deal with Sony was reportedly disappointing from ITV’s perspective given the increased audiences brought by Lewis Hamilton’s ascent last year. The froth about the BBC being able to “service F1 better” is just spin: in truth, ITV provide excellent coverage and a very good website – only the radio link is missing, really.

So Andrew MacKinlay’s comments in Parliament were largely misguided: it is not the case that F1 coverage, “could be provided, and should be provided, on commercial television.” The thing about commercial operations is that they operate commercially: in other words, they pursue the courses of action that will be most profitable. Surprising though it may seem, it is clear that F1 no longer fits that description: the commercial sector had access to it, and decided to drop it – indeed, having invested heavily in touring cars and GP2 coverage a few years ago, they seemed last year to be backing away from motorsport generally, shunting the lower-profile series onto the digital channels.

There’s no point saying the commercial sector “should” provide it: if you want it to do that, you’ll have to give it a reason to, like giving it public money – which is no different from the BBC option. Bless their hearts, but even the more intelligent Labour MPs seem not to be able to get their heads around basic concepts of commerciality. (I wish they could – that way, they might be able to criticise the worse aspects of commercial life in Britain more intelligently and actually make a difference) Though MacKinlay was probably right to say that the BBC’s news coverage of the development was insufficiently questioning – but this is BBC News we’re talking about, it’s hardly a shock.

Far more interesting to consider is what the BBC are likely to do with F1. I can see several pluses immediately: speculation in The Time suggested that James Allen and Louise Goodman are unlikely to move across, and I would have thought the same will go for Ted Kravitz. Now I’ve nothing against Louise Goodman, but I remain unconvinced by Kravitz’s mistake-strewn reporting. As for James Allen, I don’t feel as strongly as some on the subject, but I’m glad he has stopped saying things like “Rock and roll in Monte Carlo!!!” Or rather, shouting: a major weakness is that he cannot convey excitement without yelling. All told, it would probably be a good idea to seek another commentator. That said, I like both Allen and Kravitz as writers, and enjoy their columns on the ITV F1 website.

The key question, however, is: will they keep Martin Brundle? His loss would be a serious detriment to coverage of the sport, and if they only retain one element of ITV’s coverage, it must surely be Brundle. Marc Blundell, on the other hand, should never even have been hired: someone teach the man to speak English! He adds nothing other than to repeat Steve Ryder’s questions back to him. Awful.

But initial reports are not encouraging: the BBC’s big idea seems to be to tie it in with Top Gear and have it presented by Richard Hammond. Now, Charlie Brooker once said something like, “I can’t drive, I’m quite worried about the environment and I don’t particularly like Jeremy Clarkson, but even I enjoy Top Gear,” so maybe it’s not too bad. But from what little I’ve seen if it, it is boorish, irresponsible and mindless television: I fear we may find ourselves yearning for the halcyon days of Blundell, what, to be fair, would be criminal.

When I buy a pint of milk

There’s some interesting architecture where I live: it’s a substantial patch of Edwardian or late Victorian brick terrace houses. Unremarkable in many respects, but here and there newer houses or small post-war three-story blocks of flats have sprung up – filling gaps caused by bomb damage, perhaps. A small set of industrial units exists, overshadowed by an even more incongruous Victorian warehouse, now converted into flats of course. But most pertinently, the corners of most of the terraces, and some short stretches of houses in-between, have houses with built-up frontages that were evidently once shops. Many look long-closed, though some have awnings on them and large, modern-ish windows: perhaps restaurants until a few years ago.

In the whole area, there is now only one corner shop, which looks a little bit Open All Hours. I don’t generally use it: while there’s something to be said for supporting local communities and all that, the fact is that supermarkets offer superior choice and value; and the range of big-name brands stocked by the corner shop suggests there are no ethically superior choices to be made by shopping there. Supporting local shops can wait for a set of shops that is more distinctive and provides books, records or something else interesting.

I generally only buy two things in there: stamps and milk, the latter only when Sainsbury’s is closed. Like today. Now, it’s partly my fault: when I was there on Friday, I mis-read the opening times outside the store, although why they felt the need to put Sunday March 16th on the poster, when the shop was open as normal, is beyond me. But I wasn’t alone: even as I walked past today, a steady trickle of bemused looking people (in fact, I’ll give you this: mostly men) were wandering up, looking quizzically at the sign and then peering desperately into the store as if they couldn’t quite take it in. Sainsbury’s. Shut. For the love of God, why?

Well, obviously I know why: it is indeed, very literally, for the love of God. It’s Easter Sunday. But that begs a further question: why close on Easter Sunday? It’s not as if they’re not inconveniencing a lot of people – the flow of willing punters wandering up to the doors and nearly walking into them before realising they weren’t actually about to slide open attests to that.

Would it be going too far, I wonder, to see this as just another incidence of political correctness – indeed perhaps a rare instance of genuine political correctness, and not the sort of “political correctness” that racist comedians complain about for deservedly ruining their careers? Supermarkets fearing a backlash, rather than actually being unwilling to open for religious reasons?

Personally, I can’t see any justification for the closure. We live in an essentially secular society: were all the people who weren’t at Sainsbury’s down the church attending services instead? Of course not – I don’t know what proportion of the population attends Easter services, but I’d be surprised if it was as high as 10% (if anyone has any figures, I’d be interested to be pointed towards them). While a majority of people in the UK still style themselves Christian if presented with a blunt choice, the proportion of people who rely on religious belief to frame their view of the world is low, and shrinking. Those who see themselves as Christian often adopt the style in a cultural sense, not on the basis of their beliefs: would they take a sufficiently strong view that they would object in large numbers to a supermarket opening on Easter Sunday?

Of course, the shops close on Christmas and Boxing Day, but I think there is a clear contrast. The nation has largely embraced Christmas in a secular way: it is a generally-celebrated winter holiday. There’s no need to call it Winterval or any nonsense like that: it is a winter holiday called Christmas, and there is no need for excessive political correctness in relation to it, any more than there is for religion. But Easter is not so widely embraced; it’s nothing more than a double bank holiday, and all the guff in the shops is bought generally by families with children. There seems to me to be no justification for the Easter closure.

But I was left recalling Arkwright’s complaint about Christmas as he ruefully shut the shop for two days: “Lord, why did you have to be born on a b-b-ber-bank holiday?” Bloody inconvenient time to rise from the dead too.

Alley boogie’ll carry me to my grave

WARNING: this post contains a spoiler about the third episode of Love Soup – don’t read if you haven’t seen it but intend to watch it!

Two things I forgot to mention in my last TV post. Firstly, another great strength of Skins is its unpredictable choice of music: Laura Cantrell has been used to great effect, while cuts from Pavement and Mogwai recorded in the late 1990s, when the characters in the series would have been about eight, have cropped up in series two and one respectively.

Secondly, BBC Three’s excellent drama pilot Being Human, shown as part of the same strand that brought us the more-hyped, reasonably likeable but ultimately not nearly as good Phoo Action. Phoo Action has been commissioned for a series, and if Being Human is not picked up as a consequence, it will be a grave injustice. The programme showcased the excellence of Toby Whithouse’s writing: after this, his creation of No Angels and his contribution to Doctor Who (School Reunion) I’m starting to think he would be the best choice to take over from Rusell T Davies when he quits Who. It was funny, warm, touching and at times genuinely exciting, and thoroughly deserves a series.

But the main thing I want to write about is the second series of Love Soup, which is now three episodes into its run. It has undergone two major changes since its first series, broadcast at the end of 2005: it has changed from six hours to twelve half-hours, adding to the list of dramas that have recently returned to this once-unfashionable format (Sugar Rush, Bleak House, Secret Diary of a Call Girl and no doubt others); this was caused by the other big change, which is that Michael Landes was unavailable to reprise his role of Gil.

Now, this latter is a very big deal: the whole point of the first series was that there may well be a perfect partner for everyone out there somewhere, but what if you don’t meet them, or don’t do so until later in life? Gil and Tamsin Greig’s character Alice have both hit their mid-thirties, and the first series followed their unlucky romantic escapades while clearly implying that they were perfectly suited. At the end of the last episode, we see them sat a few rows apart in a theatre, the only two people not convulsed with laughter at a supposedly hilarious play: but they don’t meet.

So when Landes was unavailable, with preparations for the second series well-advanced, this presented writer David Renwick with something of a problem: should they abandon the series, re-cast Gil, or re-write it? Renwick went for the latter: as far as I can tell, a lot of the situations Gil would have got himself into have now been re-worked and inflicted an Alice instead, with increased prominence given to her over-sexed co-workers from series one, Cleo and Milly (played beautifully by Sheridan Smith and Montserrat Lombard respectively).

I was willing to give this approach the benefit of the doubt, but after a few episodes I’m not convinced it has been successful. Because we no longer alternate between Gil’s story and Alice’s, the storytelling feels rather more slight, as we have only 30 minutes of it at a time. The prominence given to Cleo and Milly manifests itself as a lot of discussions between them and Alice, and a lot of cut-aways and flash-backs to embarrassing scenarios. While these are often very funny and acutely realised, at times they seem to go nowhere: in episode three, Cleo’s date that culminates in her locking someone inside a chest at his request does not tie into anything else in the episode (bar possible an allusion in a later dream sequence, but that’s tenuous). The overall effect is to make the programme seem disjointed and aimless.

The end of episode three contained a particularly shocking final few minutes, as we see Alice turn up at a restaurant only to be stood up. As she arrives home she takes a phone call from a character I recognised after a few moments as Gil’s colleague Lloyd from the first series: we don’t get the details, but it’s made clear that the date was to have been with Gil (although he is never named, just shown in a photograph), and he failed to turn up owing to his death earlier that day. It makes for an incredibly downbeat ending to the episode, particularly for those who recognised Gil from the last series, but I have bigger problems with it than that.

For one thing, the date was totally unconnected to anything else in the episode: it evidently arose from Alice answering an ad in a lonely hearts column, but this is implied in the scene immediately beforehand (OK, Cleo and Milly were looking through lonely hearts ads earlier in the episode, but it hardly counts as a tie-in – there’s no direct causal relationship). But more seriously, if Gil was “the one” for Alice, it means she is destined to remain alone, or end up with the wrong person: not only is this bleak and tragic, but it makes the next nine episodes seem rather pointless. All told, they would have been better to take the material for the series and fashion it around a completely new set of characters.

That’s not to say it’s not enjoyable: Renwick’s writing remains pointed and at time devastatingly funny, and the performances from Greig, Smith and Lombard are top-drawer. It is, however, disconcerting and sad to see Verity Lambert’s name on the credits some months after her death. All told, Love Soup remains high-quality television, but it’s one of those instances where, however unfair it might have seemed not to give it a second series, with hindsight it might have been the right decision. I’d still heartily recommend you track down series one on DVD, though.

2008 starts here

I always feel the year doesn’t get going properly until mid-March. The first couple of months of the year are just a time you have to get through, but now it’s starting to stay light a little way into the evenings, the weather is turning milder, trees are starting to blossom and come into leaf, and the Formula 1 season has started up.

This year’s Australian grand prix was more like the season-openers of a few years ago: instead of the high-reliability processions of more recent times, we had shunts, reliability problems and significant variation from the expected form book.

The only thing missing was a race for the lead, and that was compensated for by its root cause: a lot of fast drivers having scrappy weekends. So let’s not take anything away from Hamilton: he was faster than anyone else bar Raikkonen, and unlike Raikkonen he didn’t throw it off the road.

But I fully expect Ferrari to recover next weekend: really, their main problem was a slight flakiness in terms of reliability – although Massa spinning of his own accord down into the first corner was not impressive. Also unimpressive was David Coulthard’s finger-pointing after he and Massa collided: at worst it was a racing incident, but if Coulthard suddenly found Massa had vanished from his mirrors, surely he should have reckoned that Massa might be somewhere forward of his rear wheels and left some space?

All told, an exciting race – let’s hope this continues into Malaysia.

It’s a thriller

Been meaning to post this for ages – it tickled me. Who needs thousands of Chinese convicts when you’ve got a train on the Hammersmith and City line?

Lights! Camera! Acton!

The defining moment when you finally realise you’re a grown-up is when you see a miniature railway and realise with a lurch that you’re too old and too big to have a go on it without at best looking stupid, at worst looking like a paedophile and in the nightmare scenario just knocking the train clean off the tracks by sitting down slightly to one side.

I hit this watershed this morning, while visiting the only tourist attraction within easy walking distance of where I live – and even that’s only open twice a year. The London Transport Museum has a depot full of stuff that won’t fit in the main museum at Acton, and from the sheer amount of stuff in there I do wonder what’s actually left over to go in the Covent Garden site.

The tube is a defining part of London life for me, although I know some people who avoid it when it’s possible and grumble like billy-o when it’s not. The fact that it’s self-contained, and has had a continuity of use that means that a lot of it looks and functions much as it did 50 or 100 years ago rather intrigues me. The depot has a range of trains from the last century of the network’s history, and even on the oldest what struck me was, frankly, how similar they are to today: the seats might look a bit more plush, but the carriages feel basically the same. They’re the same size, after all – for obvious reasons, really.

The crowd was interesting: family outings with small children in part, but in larger part… a lot of middle-aged men. Some of whom did indeed have a go on the miniature railway.

You’re not alone, Pedro…

When I used to present student radio shows on CUR1350 in Cambridge, one of the things you had to do if you were first in the studio that day was remember to switch over from the sustaining service (a feed of the national Student Broadcast Network or, latterly, an automated music playout system) to transmit from the studio itself.

Other small stations seem to operate a similar mechanism, which presents a fundamental problem: if you forget to push the button you ain’t on-air, as one poor sod has just demonstrated. I don’t think I ever tripped over that one myself, but several of my former fellow presenters did make that rather embarrassing mistake from time to time…

BBC News makes basic error shock!

I know I shouldn’t be surprised, but the BBC has managed to produce not one but two incorrect maps of where Manchester is situated in relation to the West Coast Main Line.

The one they used for the TV news had the line making an outrageous detour in order to go through Manchester; the one from the website, reproduced here, has the line in the right place but Manchester in the wrong one: the box on the map is probably meant to show Warrington, which is indeed served by the West Coast Main Line.

In short: the WCML goes around Manchester to the West, via Warrington: there are lines off the WCML into Manchester and out again, but Manchester is not on the West Coast Main Line! It’s a complicated route – some would argue the network in and out of Manchester should count as the WCML, in which case I would have grown up less than ten minutes’ walk from the thing, which I definitely did not – but the test is a simple one: if you wanted to travel from one end of the WCML to the other, no sane choice of route would take you through Manchester, any more than you’d go via Cambridge to get from one end of the East Coast Main Line to the other: you’d by-pass it. The same goes for Birmingham New Street: it’s not on the West Coast Main Line.