Things I’ll miss about West London

When I first moved to London at the very end of 2004, work took me to its West – first of all Ealing, later Chiswick. Next week I’m moving to Crouch End in North London, which might be every bit as distressingly middle class as Chiswick, but feels a bit less suburban than the leafy West. I’m not sure if I’ve come to know West London especialy well; the list of what I’ll miss about it turns out to be a slightly odd read…

Shepherd’s Bush
Although where I live at the moment is in many ways remote from central London, it’s very well connected: you can get to most places from it pretty straightforwardly, even if it takes a long time. It’s only a short bus ride away from Shepherd’s Bush, however, which means that gigs at the Empire and recordings at BBC Television Centre have been within pleasingly easy reach (in fairness, the Hammersmith Apollo is convenient too, but I think I’ve only been about twice).

West London Trades Unions Club I may well come back here fairly regularly, as I only visit it once a month anyway, for the Off The Page writing group. The building itself has a rather nice bar downstairs, with internet access and real ale, and although the toilets have seen better days it’s overall a rather nice facility. There are newspaper clippings on the walls of the building’s opening by Ken Livingstone in his GLC days, upstairs in the theatre space.

Turnham Green The Green itself is famously (ish) nearer to Chiswick Park Tube station than Turnham Green itself, and the open space and church make it arguably the nicest stretch of the Chiswick High Road, although it contains undoubtedly its least interesting selection of shops. That said, they do include one of the post-Fopp record stores than have sprung up using the old racks and so on from the branch of Fopp that used to serve the area… but curiously not actually in the same building.

London Overground My closest station isn’t on the Tube at all, but is South Acton, now part of the Overground network – specifically, on the North London line that arcs from Richmond, up through Camden and into Stratford. Typically, the improvements to the network are coming on-stream just as I move away from it, with some rather snazzy new trains replacing the creaking old units I’ve been crammed into for the last few years. Crouch Hill station is in fact on a different part of the Overground network, but with even less frequent services, apparently, and no new trains (yet). Still on a transport tip, the London Transport Museum Depot is the only tourist attraction in walking distance of where I currently live.

The Swan A gastropub, but a nice one. Closest thing I’ve had to a local.

Heathrow Airport? When I lived in Ealing, the flightpath was neatly positioned to give me enough noise to drown out the telly at some points. From my front room now, I can see the planes go past at some times of day, but not particularly hear them. I still get caught out by A380s – I always think they’re flying really low, but in fact they’re just really big. Despite over four years working next to the airport, that’s about as far as my aircraft recognition skills have got.

The Cunnington Street Mosaic The whole of the back of this house is decorated in a garish mosaic, as is the owners’ pick-up truck. Click through to the Flickr page for a fuller explanation, but I must have walked past it several hundred times and still missed a lot of the details on this section on the back wall in particular.

It’s a short list, and perhaps an unkind one. There are lots of other notable things about this part of London, but they are ones I’ve never had much involvement with. Ealing film studios (I’ve walked past them), Kew Bridge Steam Museum (never did visit it), Brentford football club (went to a gig in their bar once). Eden Studios was just round the corner from my current flat – I must remember to try and find its exact location before I move… The BBC’s Windmill Road storage facility was located just round the corner from where I used to live in South Ealing, but I don’t think I ever saw it – it must be situated back from the road, or just inconspicuously signposted (indeed, West London is littered with BBC heritage, including TVC, the formerly BBC-owned Ealing studios, the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, formerly the BBC Television Theatre, the “Acton Hilton” rehearsal rooms…). I’m sure there’s more to list… but I won’t.

That about wraps it up for West London, I think. I can’t claim any special kinship of sense of belonging to the area… But I’ve got used to it and come to feel comfortable round here, which is something. Confusingly, several of the bus routes through Crouch End have the prefix “W”, which I’m sure will remind me of West London post codes for years to come.

This will be BRILLIANT!

For those based in London, there’s a “rehearsal” at The Lamb on July 7th, and official preview on July 21st – details here. See you there!

Stephen Fry’s armpit

The announcement of Karen Gillan’s casting in Doctor Who effectively announces that filming is due to start shortly on the first full Moffat series, we are less than a year away from its broadcast, and that’s an exciting thought.

I’m also reminded of one of the best magazine columns I’ve ever read, also from the pen of the Moff. It’s from a few years ago, before David Tennant had even made his full on-screen debut. I particularly sympathise with the views on hugging – confronted by a looming Stephen Fry, I imagine I would have done much the same…

hug in a moff

101 uses for Twitter

I had a rather staggering exchange at work the other day with normally level-headed colleagues dismissing the suggestion that the organisation I work for should use Twitter in a very grumpy-old-men fashion (sorry guys, if you’re reading, but be honest – I’m not being unfair!).

I can understand the impulse up to a point: I have been resistant to mobile phones and Facebook in the past, but this has taught me a simple truth: if you find yourself having conversations with people you know about a popular technological innovation, it’s not a fad, in fact it probably has some benefit, and you’re mugging yourself by not joining the party, so stop bloody moaning. Chances are it’s not a matter of if you’ll end up using it, but when.

In the case of Twitter, even if you don’t feel you have anything you want to share with anyone else, being able to access the wealth of information it offers is reason enough to sign up. Here are some things I have got out of it, or seen it being used for, which I hope will prove the point. I’m sure other people have done better versions of this article, and that there are even more innovative uses of the platform out there; but this reflects my experience.

Campaigning
I’ve seen three really good campaigning uses of Twitter so far. The first was the use of blacked-out profile pictures to support a campaign against strong anti-piracy laws in New Zealand. The second was the message of one in ten women being victims of domestic abuse, in which supporters all posted the same message and changed their profile pics to a graphic of a digital clock showing 1:10 at the same time – probably ten past one on January 10th, now I think back. The third was a re-tweet by Graham Linehan of a rather good blog post by him about a particularly obnoxious newspaper story in which Dunblane survivors were vilified for acting in a normal teenage way, using evidence drawn from Facebook accounts. An apology of sorts was forced by that, and an accompanying web petition that I happily signed, having been alerted to it (set up by a college contemporary of mine, Matt Nida).

Travel information
I work in an office very close to Heathrow airport, and get the tube to and from there every day. On the Thursday before Easter, I was due to head up to see my parents, which entailed a prompt getaway from work at 5 to make a reasonably tight connection at Euston. At the end of lunch, a colleague informed me the buses into the airport were all snarled up for some reason – the TfL and BBC websites said nothing, however. Oh dear – could the airport be inaccessible for the rest of the afternoon? A search for “Heathrow” on Twitter found a load of people observing they had just been evacuated from Terminal 3 due to a bomb scare… Happily, half an hour later they reported the evacuation was called off. Phew! More prosaically, Crewe station has a Twitter feed updating every departure – do any other stations do this, I wonder?

Live updates
During the farcical rain crisis at the Malaysian grand prix I compensated for the lack of anything interesting to watch by logging on to Twitter and following posters using the #F1 hashtag. The result was a torrent of interesting opinions from all over the world about what was going on, and occasionally some explanation that came quicker than the TV could manage: it was Twitter that explained to me the reason for the proposal for cars below a certain position to do an extra lap (they had been lapped – obvious I suppose). Getting reaction from around the world in real time added enormously to the experience, which would have been pretty dull otherwise.

Humour
Comedians have found many ways to exploit Twitter. I follow a good number of stand-ups, who offer posts that are regularly amusing in their own right. But there are more developed examples: Peep Show’s characters all have Twitter accounts, and occasional bursts of scripted Twitter interaction are occasionally unleashed, usually to pretty amusing effect. On 6Music, Jon Holmes’s new feature Twitter Sweet Symphony entails a real-time set of tweets as he plays a song, usually one with a strong narrative (Squeeze’s Up The Junction last week),offering a sarcastic take on the song’s events, usually from the perspective of its protagonist and often making jokes he couldn’t get away with on-air. Another of my favourites is the growing grid of fake F1 drivers, offering at times bitingly funny takes on the fortunes of the people they imitate. Fake Mark Webber started it all; but there are more now.

Free advice
Numerous TV screenwriters have blogs, and numerous of them have Twitter feeds. In my slow and occasional stabs at writing TV drama, I occasionally make the odd tweet about how it’s been going, and now and again the scribes are kind enough to respond – in particularly, Lucy Bang2Write gave me an extremely helpful pointer on how to deal with a conflicting load of feedback.

Logistics
I’ve sold a spare gig ticket via Twitter in the past, and the potential for arranging relatively casual meet-ups for the odd drink here or there is obvious (well, it will be to anyone who uses it).

News
I have heard about some big news stories for the first time via Twitter, and some smaller ones that were not reported anywhere else. Among the bigger ones are the McBride affair and the various F1 stories recently (tweets from James Allen and Lee McKenzie are excellent ways of getting an early heads-up on Friday practice form and incident). Among the lesser – did you hear about the bendy bus that killed someone in Oxford Street the other week? No, didn’t think so.

Interaction with the stars!
Famous people use Twitter, and with many you can be exposed to their daily lives in a relatively unvarnished way. I’m not going to laud proximity to celebrity for its own sake, but even so it can be nice to have a casual but honest insight into what people you admire are up to. Occasionally you can even interact with them directly (though I can’t claim anyone massively impressive). That said, some do tweet far too bloody much and find themselves getting un-followed by your humble narrator – stand up, Messrs Linehan and Schofield!

Maintaining friendships
When it comes to tweeting at people I actually know from real life, the great virtue of Twitter is that it is very light-touch. As with Facebook, you can have brief exchanges with people you might not have seen for months or even years, in a way that you simply wouldn’t over email; if you’re prone to letting lengthy periods of radio silence lead to the collapse of an acquaintanceship (which I certainly am), Twitter is your answer.

Multiple platforms
In a rather pleasing Web 2.0 ouroboros, I have automated my blogs to send a message via Twitter whenever I make a new post, while my Twitter feed is displayed on a sidebar to my main WordPress blog. It’s a powerful mechanism for promotion, although it can go too far: some Twitter feeds (such as Charlie_Brooker, not to be confused with the real thing, CharltonBrooker) are just RSS feeds from other websites, converted into a robot. If you want to follow an RSS feed, use a feed reader, not blimmin’ Twitter! Twitter can also be plugged into Facebook status updates, which is handy.

An honorary mention must go to comedian Matt Forde for his occasional, but often amusing and frequently cheery and uplifting tweets – there are some top people on Twitter who simply put up messages that will cheer you up. I don’t see how that can be a bad thing.

Sorry, did I say 101? Typo – I meant 10. Still, that’s good going without mentioning Stephen Fry!

Escalating things

I was on the ground floor of a department store yesterday, and got on an escalator, going up. Immediately behind me, a woman got on who was talking into her mobile phone.

Even though we had barely moved upwards, she immediately said to the person she was talking to: “I’m upstairs now.”

Part of me wanted to turn round and say to her: “Do you think this is a teleport? It isn’t, and there’s a pretty bloody big clue why not. If it was a teleport, they’d have made you turn your mobile phone off, I’m pretty sure.”

A more substantial part of me thought it wasn’t worth the bother.

Totally on the Case

This week started with two wildly contrasting but superb gigs.

First: Neko Case at the Bush Hall. Was it every bit as superb as you’d expect? Most certainly. Is the new album likely to be utterly wonderful? Without doubt. Is she playing the UK again in August for those who unwisely missed out this time round? Happily, yes.

Secondly, Totally Acoustic featuring Tim Eveleigh, Bob Fischer and of course MJ Hibbett. Were all the acts fantastic? Unquestionably. Did Mr Fischer bring a Roobarb’s contingent? I really should have guessed it would happen. Is it amusing to be introduced to fully-grown men by their online handles such as FegMANIA, Mr Magister and Bobby FischFace? You betcha. Was drink taken? I’m shocked to report I rather suspect it was.

Nostalgia’s not what it used to be

Every so often I put a post on here that may well be of literally no interest to anyone but me. Be warned: this is one.

Fact: after Google, the second-most used search device on the internet is YouTube. Partly, no doubt because it’s so addictive: I find it hard to go on there and look up just one video. Among its many possible functions, perhaps the greatest is to re-visit your past: for those of us who were smal children in the 1980s (or earlier) the likes of old kids TV shows often maintain a rarity value – footage from the time can be hard to find any other way, and the amount on YouTube can still be small, but is growing.

But this isn’t just about old telly. Unlike for those raised in the 1970s, we have a possible archive of camcorder footage out there. In fact – my God! – it’s just crossed my mind to go and look for old primary school plays. I’m not sure I dare…  Hang on.

Phew!

Right, yes, camcorder footage: specifically, from places you were taken on days out! Almost certainly there will be a few places you went to regularly, or semi-regularly, right? Well, here’s one I went to as a small child. (don’t worry – it’s not all pink)

Dinting Railway Centre – now long-since closed, which makes the nostalgia trip even more complete: I can’t have been since I was, at the absolute oldest, eight years old. The above clips must have been shot when I was three, so it’s maybe a bit unlikely to see myself among them. But the one below is from a couple of years later:

No sign of me or my brother, but there’s all sorts of things I like about that one in particular. Firstly, the miniature railway – my God, I remember that! And it did seem frighteningly fast when you were sat on one of those little trains, I can tell you.

This was shot on a completely typical day: I remember the two engines Tiny and Nunlow. I went in the cab of Tiny, which was exciting – it was small enough not to be terrifying to a tiny child. But Nunlow was my favourite because it was green.

I also like how the restoration of the locomotive Bahamas has clearly progressed very slowly since the previous clip: it mostly seems to be sitting in much the same set of bits, in much the same place as two years previously.

Plus there’s the obvious things: hairstyles, fashions… Watching this, you almost expect Anneka Rice to come into land in a helicopter. But it all seems very fresh and immediate because it was shot on videotape: both clips must have been shot on what was expensive kit at the time.

Rather sadly, Dinting Railway Centre – though my brother and I always called it simply “Dinting” without realising Dinting is an actual place in its own right – is now derelict, as you might be able to tell from Google maps:

The smudgy triangle at the bottom is where the platforms used to be, that you see the trains trundling in and out of. The white-roofed building on the right is the shed Bahamas was being restored outside, and seems to be the only building still standing. The larger shed has been completely demolished – I suspect the track-bed that can still just about be seen running past the Bahamas shed runs into where it used to stand. The miniature railway was in the area north of the Bahamas shed, which was on raised ground, now apparently completely overgrown. The railway tracks you can still see are the normal rail network, and still in use – services run along them into Manchester Piccadilly.

But what the hell, let’s finish with some old kids’ TV. Many of the old Broom Cupboard links no longer exist: they were considered to be between-programmes continuity, and so were not recorded by the BBC (the same goes for the daytime magazine slot Pebble Mill).

Here’s Debbie Flint filling in for Philip Schofield: I have no memory of Debbie Flint at all, but I do remember the time before Neighbours was on immediately after CBBC, of which this is an example.

Blimey – Jossy’s Giants, eh? Not actually filmed in Newcastle, but in Stalybridge – only about five miles away from Dinting, as it happens. Plus you can still see from this Blue Peter were doing reports on film, not videotape. Makes it seem ancient, doesn’t it? Mind you, at 23 years, I suppose it is.

I think Debbie Flint was mentioned in the Tribe of Toffs song John Kettley is a Weatherman. As was Simon Parkin – remember him?

OK. Enough now.

All aboard the Common Sense Bus!

Try it.

Snow joke! “Snow joke”, y’see – “it’s no j-” oh, please yourself

I suppose I was naive to expect the trains would still be running to Heathrow. And I suppose I should have checked before I left the house.

The picture above shows what should have been the first clue: it was taken on a level crossing on the North London line round the corner from where I live: very plainly, no trains had passed over those rails since the snow started to fall. That said, the bridge across the tracks carries the District and Piccadilly lines, and trains were running across it, albeit slowly (squint at the pic, you’ll see one).

But not as far as Heathrow, it seemed. So having trudged up the hill to Acton Town – and I mean trudged, through virgin snow at least some of the way, which was satisfying – I had to trudge back down it again to work from home.

But this is not one of those articles that says “why can’t we cope with a bit of snow! Berlin and Paris manage it! It’s like a Third World nation!” Look, you stupid man who has had a BBC camera thrust in your face, the reason we can’t cope with this sort of weather is that we hardly ever get it and investing in the infrastructure to cope with the kind of bad weather you get for two days a year just isn’t worth it. And I’m quite sure if you put snow in Berlin that was the worst in twenty years, they’d struggle too. So enough of the Daily Mail whingeing already.

Lovely noise

Here’s a smart deal, in the ever-evolving world of music, record companies and how the hell do we actually make any money from music?? Fight Like Apes have hit on a neat offer – I’m sure they’re not the first band to do it, but it’s the first time I’ve considered taking advantage of it. Album plus gig ticket for thirteen quid: job’s a good ‘un!

Two drawbacks. Firstly, it makes it a bit harder to arrange a group of people to go to the gig: it’s one thing for one of you to book however-many tickets, but it’s another for that person to have to dish out a load of CDs subsequently.

Bigger problem still: their London gig is at the Camden Barfly. Now, Camden is easily my least favourite part of London, and the Barfly probably my least favourite venue (now the wretched Astoria has been rightly condemned to demolition),  so it has to be a gig I’m really really keen to see before I’ll even consider going there. I’m looking forward to hearing the album, but I’m not going to commit to the gig before I’ve got to know it. Actually, there’s a third problem: what if loads of people buy the album and gig tickets, but the album’s a disappointment and the gigs are officially sold-out, but half-empty in practice? I suppose they’ve got the cash by then, so it hardly matters.