October 2008 Archives

You know, no matter what happens, there is always a silver lining if you look hard enough - even for Jonathan Ross. He might be losing £16,000 a day and have been given a 12 week ban by the BBC . . . eventually. . . for what turned out to be a red card offence - but at least he'll be off for Christmas.

I was up at the Lichfield Garrick again last night to see Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for a second time and it is fascinating to see how the same play, same cast and same script evolve over a one month run.

It is not something you often have a chance to witness in the Midlands where a one week run is the norm apart from panto, which is hardly the same, and, to be honest, there are not that many productions you would want to see again so soon.

The layers of emotion in Edward Albee's classic are peeled away one by one during the performance and a month on from the opening night more layers have been exposed and more shades of dark and light added to the palette. When I reviewed it at the start of the month I predicted an excellent production had all the potential to become a play that would be remembered for years to come - just now and again I am right. Like fine wine the play has matured over its time in Lichfield.

The play ends on Saturday November 1 and there are a few tickets left for the final few performances. Click here for details.

Meanwhile my own thespianesque venture, the other RSC, the pub theatre I have started at The Station pub in Sutton Coldfield, opens its doors again tonight with an Open Mic evening - a sort of stand up acting night, although you can sit down if you want. Anyone is welcome to come along and watch or bring along monologues, sketches, poems or whatever and perform them themselves or we can find someone what can read and has trod the boards in anger for them to give their work an airing.

To save me typing loads of stuff out - idleness being a particular interest of mine - click somewhere around here for the story on our Birmingham Mail site or mouse your way here to be taken to the to the other RSC site.

What on earth would make a well known high street store believe that employing a disgraced former newspaper editor, media whore and smarmy self publicist to utter a few words and add a signature to their ads would encourage anyone to buy their food? Pass the sick bag more like.

Anyone remember way back in 1984 when Tony Butler got sacked from BRMB after a row with a disabled colleague? I'm not going into the ins and outs of what Butler always maintained was something blown out of all proportion but it does serve to illustrate that a quarter of a century ago we still had some standards, particularly regarding those in the public eye, which were maintained.

I must admit I am not a Russell Brand fan. I think he is the ultimate alternative comedian, a complete alternative to funny but that is hardly the point. That he and Jonathan Ross could believe that their bad-taste joke at the expense of Andrew Sachs and his granddaughter was acceptable brioadcasting shows a monumental error of judgement both on their part and on the BBC staff who put out what was after all a recorded show.

There must have been at least one producer who knew the content of the calls and should have had enough instinct of self preservation to have passed his concerns, and with it the responsibility and sackability, up the line to his boss. In the time between recording and broadcast one would have thought that even Brand and Ross might have thought that perhaps the line which they have stretched further than most had finally been snapped. But no, in a celebritocracy, the words of such highly paid stars as Ross and Brand are sacred texts so common sense and decency goes out of the window.

Mistakes of that magnitude in most professions would bring at the very least some sort of serious sanction and more likely a P45 but although the BBC might find some lowly technical type as a scapegoat, the chances of senior heads rolling, at least very far, are slim while a bunch of flowers and a sorry seem to be all that is required for the rehabilitation of Ross and Brand.

Anyone else getting fed up with the obsession our TV stations and national papers have with the financial meltdown? The lives of the vast majority of us do not revolve around the square mile of the City and, let us be honest, we would be quite delighted to see the red braces brigade, the hedge fund bosses, smarmy bankers and short sellers reduced to selling Big Issue accompanied by the obligatory docile dog.

OK, pensions might take a hit for a while, but most people who don't have director after their name, will be screwed in that department even in the good times. As for falling house prices and share prices, negative equity and all the other portenders of doom being gleefully seized on by the London based media as they predict Armageddon, they only really come into play if you have to sell investments or property this afternoon.

It is not as if negative equity is anything new - it happens every time you buy a car. Once you start the engine you have paid more than you will ever get back even if you sell the next day. In general most people buy property to live in, a long term purchase, with an increase in value a bonus often to be handed on to children when the old mortal coil gets shuffled.

And if greedy fingers were burned buying property to let relying on rent and rising values to pay the mortgage - the same sort of leverage, albeit on a smaller scale, that got the banks and hedge funds in such a mess - then once again there is always Big Issue.

I just have a feeling that our national media with their City editors and prestige offices, friends in high places and vastly overpaid executives with investments and share options and seats on a dozen boards are making things worse. I have said it before that our media are rather like obsessive children. They find an interest which takes them over until they find a new one so we had a spell of dog attacks filling front pages for a summer or so, a summer of Maddy madness, a knife fest and now global economic crisis. When they get bored with that they will move on to something else whether US elections, obesity, binge drinking or cheese rolling . . . who knows. In the meantime the rest of us will just get on with our lives.

I see that the Government has finally decided to do something about the abuse of the Blue Badge Scheme.

With a son who is entitled to the badge I see at the first had the sort of problems the disabled face. First is the problem of able bodied people who park in a disabled spot because it is nearest to the entrance of a supermarket or pub or whatever and their disability is easy for all to see - they suffer from complete idleness and total disregard for others.

They won't risk parking on double yellow lines in the street or not paying in parking bays or in council car parks but in private car parks, supermarkets and pubs, disabled spaces are fair game and even have the advantage of being much wider for easier access.

If the disabled spaces are full of course then there are always the mother and child spaces which are also wider and nearer the entrance.

Stolen and forged badges are another problem. With scanners and colour photcopiers so affordable these days then it is easy for the less scrupulous to knock up dozens of badges which, once disguised by a plastic wallet, are difficult to spot from the real thing and it appears that the real thing is going for up to £1500 a pop on the black market - a bargain when they give you free parking and exemption from congestion charging in London.

IS it just me or are standards in English not just falling but in free fall.

I have already had a go at the current crop of semi-literates who have come out of our education system with their goody bag of buy-one-get-one free A-levels and GCSEs who think that any plural of any word has to have an apostrophe.

But this lack of respect for what is after all our mother tongue, the basic tool of communication on which everything else is based, goes much deeper than that. For example onto is not a word, despite its regular appearance in advertisements and even newspapers, it is two words, on and to, just as alright does not exist within the English language - all right? And while we are at it, into and in to mean different things. If a magician turns in to a petrol station he has probably gone for fuel. If on the other hand he turns into a petrol station then that really is magic.

And as for text speak or whatever it is called, the language of mobile phones. When youngsters think they can even apply for jobs using a language which has all the subtlety, nuance and flow of broken lager bottles then hope is close to being abandoned.

Mind you I seem to remember that the Scottish Qualifications Authority, one of the several million quangos we seem to be lumbered with, was prepared to allow text speak in exam answers a couple of years ago as long as the answer, according to them, was correct. It is all a bit like the old Eric Morcambe line about all the right notes but not necessarily in the right order.

A rather worrying feature of the Government's anti-terror proposals, the six weeks in prison without being charged or even accused of anything, is the bit about secret inquests under the catch-all national security banner. And who is it that would decide whether it was in the national interest to have an inquest without jury, family, Press, observers or even a coroner? Why that most honest and trustworthy of creatures - a Government minister.

We have already seen what can happen when the Government thinks it can get away without an accountable inquiry into a suspicious death. In the Dr David Kelly affair the Government decided that an exercise in spin and whitewash was sufficient and no real examination of the death. an inquest by a coroner, a title dating back to before the Magna Carta, was undertaken, to the everlasting shame of the Fourth Estate who allowed the state to get away with it.

The proposal on secret inquests has been shelved for the time being but like 42 days detention, or the European Constitution, it will come back essentially the same but under another guise tacked on to another bill for another compelling reason.

Give the state the chance to hold secret investigations into deaths in custody, the shooting dead of Brazilian visitors or innocent bystanders or a senior scientist found dead in the woods and, as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, the state will grab it with both handsl - all in the national interest of course.

We are losing freedoms every day and if we don't stand up and fight then before long we will find even that right denied to us.

Now we all know that if the banks go belly up then we could all find ourselves back in the good old days of trading animal pelts for turnips to get by. If you have no animal pelts or don't like turnips you starve - it is a simple system.

So to avoid that the Scottish one and his Darling go rushing off to the City with containerloads of cash to bale out the banks, who let us be honest, got themselves into this mess in the first place. How anyone can lose money when that is what you are selling beggars belief but there you go.

Doesn't it remind you of when Rover was on life support and the Government came galloping in like knights in shining armour armed with oodles of cash to save Longbridge and thousands of jobs in the West Midlands and beyond - as well as ensuring, of course, we still had a home produced car industry - just like Citroen and Peugeot in France, or VAG in Germany.

Probably not. In they came with just enough cash to keep it afloat until the local elections were over to dilute the news until the votes were counted and then the car workers of the West Midlands were left to the chill winds of market forces. I am not saying that banks should not be shored up - as long as those in charge of the disaster are sacked - but there do seem to be dual standards at work here.

As for the Financial Services Authority? This is another one of the Scottish one's creations and is supposed to regulate and monitor the financial markets, spotting and ending any dodgy dealing before it becomes a problem. Well that worked out well didn't it?

Where do they get these wimpy blokes from on X-factor? Say good morning in a loud voice and they burst into tears. Not much chances of this lot trashing hotel rooms and driving rollers into swimming pools. What is the world of pop coming to?