To the Albert Hall night on a freebie - a former colleague invited me along to the Classic FM 15th Anniversary concert. It was a lovely set-up: a box (which is called “loggia” in the Albert Hall, didn’t know that, philistine that I am), lots of wine and nibbles, and a great view right in front of the stage. As we sat there listening to a programme that included what I assume to be archetypal Classic FM material (In The Hall Of the Mountain King, Vaughan Williams, Elgar and, of course, O Sole Mio), my mind occasionally wandered in the way it doesn’t do at a rock concert. And in its wanderings, it pondered such things as:
- Is Classic FM the last national bastion of 80s style DJ worship? Ten Classic FM DJs were introduced to the audience at various times as if they were movie stars; far more name-checking for them than for the orchestra or choir (no-one even introduced the lead violin). In fact, Simon Bates, the sine qua non of talentless DJ superstardom, even forgot to thank the choir who were massed behind him and had to come on later to do it again. All the DJs arrived on stage with a lame quip which they expected huge applause for, and one (introduced as “unique and inimitable”) actually appeared to be rather drunk. The players are the stars, not the hyped-up bingo callers who introduce them.
- The Classic FM audience is very odd, kind of a mixture of caravanners and further education lecturers. No-one looks in anyone else’s eye, it’s all very passive-aggressive. The atmosphere of pent-up tension in the men’s toilets was almost unbearable.
- The Albert Hall, which I hadn’t been to for years, is memorably and weirdly extraordinary. To look up and see people wandering the gallery at the very top of the building while the music is playing gives you a sense of being outdoors, and the organ is a thing of wonder.
- Ideal evening: a box at the Albert Hall with some fine wine, watching Nick Cave. If Nick could arrange this, I’d be most grateful.
- John Williams’ Star Wars Suite sounds naff on paper, but played by a proper orchestra in a proper venue is proper music.
13,384 days. That, after reading Kevin Kelly and playing around with some actuarial charts, is my best guess at the number of days I have left on the planet. Unlike Kelly, I don’t find this information very empowering, thanks.
Soooo exciting. Today, my new company MessyMedia is launching its first title: Westmonster. It’s about politics. Obviously.
Check it out: the editor, Sadie Smith, is currently live-blogging Gordon Brown’s speech in Bournemouth. The announcement on our Messy Media site is here, the press release is here, and you can find out all about the title and about Sadie here. And, finally, if you think you can write like Sadie and would like to do so for MessyMedia, find out how to get in touch here.
Today Bournemouth, tomorrow, ze vorld!
Michael Atherton: Andrew Flintoff’s stock now falls into the red - Telegraph:
Andrew Flintoff is the Northern Rock of cricket. A once-powerful brand built from humble and parochial beginnings, now undermined by questionable management strategy with his stock currently in freefall and his future uncertain. Unlike the account holders of Northern Rock, Flintoff’s fans and sponsors have not withdrawn their support – after all, such sportsmen engender deeper feelings of goodwill than mere financial institutions – but they are beginning to feel a little short-changed. Flintoff hasn’t played a Test match since January and the chances of him playing Test cricket this winter must now be slim.
Rapidly emerging as the new Richie Benaud, is Athers.
I know Wikipedia is largely written by geeks with brains the size of a planet. The trouble is, said geeks are often such sticklers for detail that they’re unintentionally comic. Take the More cowbell entry (just the fact that this entry exists demonstrates Wikipedia’s hive autism):
The sketch is presented as though it is an episode of VH1’s Behind the Music. It begins with what is said to be film from the 1976 recording session that produced the band’s biggest hit, “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.” The producer (Christopher Walken) introduces himself as “the Bruce Dickinson” and tells the band they have “what appears to be a dynamite sound.” The band members are impressed at this compliment because of Bruce Dickinson’s supposed high standing in the music industry (note that “the” Bruce Dickinson is not Bruce Dickinson, lead singer of Iron Maiden - see below).
Marvellous: so Bruce Dickinson is not Bruce Dickinson. Are there any other Bruce Dickinsons that he’s not?
Tens of thousands of CCTV cameras, yet 80% of crime unsolved| News | This is London:
• There are now 10,524 CCTV cameras in 32 London boroughs funded with Home Office grants totalling about £200million.
• Hackney has the most cameras - 1,484 - and has a better-than-average clearup rate of 22.2 per cent.
• Wandsworth has 993 cameras, Tower Hamlets, 824, Greenwich, 747 and Lewisham 730, but police in all four boroughs fail to reach the average 21 per cent crime clear-up rate for London.
• By contrast, boroughs such as Kensington and Chelsea, Sutton and Waltham Forest have fewer than 100 cameras each yet they still have clear-up rates of around 20 per cent.
• Police in Sutton have one of the highest clear-ups with 25 per cent.
• Brent police have the highest clear-up rate, with 25.9 per cent of crimes solved in 2006-07, even though the borough has only 164 cameras.
$400 million spent on CCTV. How many of them are monitoring parking offences instead of violent crime? I reckon they’re probably cost-neutral overall (the cost defrayed against revenues from fined offences), but I would like to know the answer to a simple question: when a crime happens, and it’s on camera, how are the chances of capture increased?
John Lewis to use size 14 mannequins | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited:
A leading department store plans to introduce size 14 mannequins to display its women’s clothes.
The high-street retailer John Lewis has announced that from the end of this month shoppers at its Peterborough store will be able to view items of clothing on display whose sizes are a little closer to their own. The average size worn by British women, though the recent London fashion week may not have reflected as much, is 16.
Simon Dickson’s had a bad morning - his proposal to build a government environment in Wordpress MU has been knocked back for being too “out there”:
How many organisations do you know which are happy with the big, ugly content management system they spent hundreds of thousands (or indeed, millions) on? Not many, I’ll bet. Yet we keep doing and re-doing it. Meanwhile, millions of bloggers prove how much you can do with an open-source tool, a few community-derived plugins, and a genuine desire to communicate.
Amen, brother. As I’ve posted before, the standard of thinking behind many public sector CMS installations is criminally bad and, in fact, a potential threat to the business of good government.
Two views of the British media and how they treat the public. First, in last week’s Guardian Mediatalk, which I’ve only just got round to listening to, Emily Bell and Janine Gibson rightly lay into the BBC for their pandering to the need for people to pontificate on the McCanns and their plight. They both articulate why, in some cases, it’s just wrong to ask people for their opinion, and that this is a fairly obvious editorial decision most of the time. I can’t recall the exact words Emily used, but it was something like “it’s not always in the public interest to show the public’s opinion.”
And then David Hepworth on What Cookiegate tells us about the meeja:
People who work in the media have a very curious relationship with their listeners/viewers/readers.
When they’re getting in touch to congratulate you they’re fine upstanding citizens, individuals of great taste and discrimination. When they’re complaining about anything, expressing an opinion which doesn’t chime with yours or otherwise failing to behave, they are dangerous lunatics with too much time on their hands and you are free to make as much or as little of their contributions as you choose.
Why? Because at root people in the media think they’re clever and cooler than we are. It’s the new British class divide. On one hand the people with the cool toys. On the other the hapless consumers of pablum.
