How many footballers are Gay?

One. Anton Hysen is officially the only gay professional footballer currently playing in the world. The 20 year old Swede came out last week. He's a brave young man and I wish him the very best for his career on and off the pitch. Plus I am old enough to remember his father, Glenn, playing for Liverpool.

How to waste public money on public transport

Today the papers report that the BBC has been organising public transport training days for staff who are moving to the new Salford production centre. Apparently the hapless Corporation minions need to know how to use a bus or tram, particularly in the northern wastes of their new homeland. Initially I wondered why the papers hadn't saved this story for April 1st. Then I checked the excellent Tabloid Watch site in case it was a Daily Mail special. But no it hasn't been reported as a fake, yet.

But a moment's more thought and it does sound credible. Firstly there will be a huge "relocation communications" budget within the BBC one billion pound moving costs that has to be spent. Bugger the World Service or local radio, this is the bureaucrats' money so is bound to be safe. Secondly BBC staff above a certain grade believe themselves to be too important to travel on the bus (oh the stories I could tell), so some persuasion and basic training may well be in order. It's grim up north.

 

romantic hero

This is the intriguing portrait I bought last week. It's a small, unsigned work on a piece of hardwood. To my untrained eye it looks genuine. I am now looking for a frame. I can't help wondering who he is. I fancy some romantic hero or artist -- Blake, Beethoven, Byron, that sort of hero. Who knows, I never will.

Marrakech and Essaouira

...here we come.

All booked. Now I just have to think about what I can possibly say at the conference. Anyway have nearly a fortnight to think about it.

Why we need Sky News

Yesterday morning I watched a remarkable TV report from Libya. At peak time Sky News broadcast a 10 minute package from its team in Zawiyah. It was great journalism, great storytelling, great television. The film simply showed what it was like on the ground in rebel held Libya under attack from Gaddafi forces. The team allowed the story to unfold, allowed us to see and hear from ordinary Libyans and allowed the time on screen to create a memorable piece of reportage. Some of it was shocking and graphic, but then so is war.There was no grandstanding ego stuff from reporter Alex Crawford, just enough commentary to keep us on top of fast moving events. After ten minutes I felt that I understood what it was really like in Libya at the moment. It deserves to be nominated for a BAFTA and if it is, it will get my vote.

The future of Sky News has of course been an issue of late and journalism like this demonstrates just why we need it. The sad fact is that the BBC would never have broadcast something like this, at this length, at prime time and in the raw and powerful way that the Sky team put it together. And this gets us to the very heart of the debate about plurality of provision in TV news.

OK first things first -- why wouldn't the BBC have broadcast it? After all there are a huge number of BBC staff in and around Libya serving a huge number of BBC outlets. Surely someone could have filed something equivalent?  There are several reasons. Firstly BBC News wouldn't want a report as long as ten minutes, especially one as graphic, in a prime slot. There is no particular logic behind this, just that BBC News has always done 3 minute reports. To get the necessary swathe of permissions from the BBC hierarchy to upset the guidelines and traditions and banish the running order templates would take until Christmas. But the second reason is more profound in explaining the BBC way of doing things. The BBC could not countenance broadcasting a report that simply showed a slice of what was happening. The news the Corporation produces has to be mediated in many ways before it reaches the consumer. This piece would fail straight away. Where is the correspondent giving context? Where are the experts? Where is the analysis?  Viewers need to have everything pre-digested by that vast BBC news machine.

I happen to like the Sky "raw" approach. So often the experts know, or can say, little more than the blandly obvious, the analysis is banal or pointless and correspondents are stuck regurgitating agency copy from London. Why not, I say, allow us to see the data, watch the footage, feel the atmosphere and make up our minds.

The debate about plurality in news often diverts straight to an amorphous discussion of political bias, more often perceived than real. But plurality means much more than that. As I hope I have shown, it is also about the type of stories that are covered and the way in which they are told. The Zawiyah report is just one example. Another is apocryphal but worth telling. It's an old hack's tale of  terrible floods somewhere in  middle England. The news teams turn up and set to work. The newspaper boys and ITV and other TV crews start filming and photographing the floodwaters, interviewing the victims, looking for the drowned teddy bear or the sodden kitten or the tearful householder. The BBC team however makes its way straight to the Town Hall to get official confirmation that there has been a flood.

Not true I know. Nor do I want to denigrate the great and brave work of many BBC journalists. After all I have been one myself. However, unlike any other news organisation, the BBC is saddled with a massive  unwieldy bureaucracy and like all bureaucracies it has to exert control. Good journalism involves a high degree of entrepreneurship and that sits ill with multiple layers of management. The results of this seep through to very fundamentals of BBC reporting, everything has to be controlled, filtered, explained, processed  by the those who know best. What the work of Alex Crawford and the Sky team shows is how powerful television reportage can be when journalistic enterprise is given its head, the controlling bureaucrats keep out of the way and the audience credited with some intelligence of its own. That's why we need more than the BBC providing our news and why Sky is doing a great job.            

How to bake bread

... Sourdough Saga...Part 94

After a careful upbringing Dough Bro, my sourdough starter, is ready to unleash himself on the wider world of bakery products. I have been feeding, nurturing, sniffing and, yes dear reader, talking to my little creation for what seems like weeks. Now like a proud but bereft parent at the school gate on the first day of term I have to leave little Dough Bro to make his own way in the world of kneading, rising and ovens.

He made an enthusiastic start, nearly taking over the kitchen when I left him to form a sponge last night -- maybe doing that critical stage of breadmaking after coming home from the pub was a mistake.

Now floured and kneaded to perfection he is out to prove himself by the wood stove. I will have to go for a walk or something as the suspense is killing me...I can only hope that he develops a thick crust to defend himself from a cruel world.

Yes

The people of Wales have voted yes. Decisively, thank God. I had been worried the Tea Party style non-politics campaign of "True Wales" -- the no supporters -- might have led to a disastrously low turnout, or less than decisive result. It didn't on either count.

Pleasure somewhat diminished by some very poor reporting in the media, particularly the BBC. One that sticks out was from a BBC reporter speculating that the (relatively) low turnout was down to the fact that ordinary Welsh people didn't really understand complex constitutional matters. Frightfully complex things like whether their decisions should be made in Westminster or Wales. Whoever gave them the vote...?

Perhaps a first move for the newly empowered Welsh government could be to restrict the franchise to those who do understand complex constitutional matters, perhaps confine the vote just to the clever souls who work  in the  BBC Wales political unit. Hey ho democracy.

Foreign Office

150 people arrive back in UK on rescue flight from Libya...hurrah...but was that plane organised by the government? No by BP. Already perilously late Government charter stuck on tarmac at Gatwick for 10 hours.

Polish President's plane managed to take Brits.

Turkey, well known for efficient logistics, has got all its people out.

Libyan airport security firing automatic rounds to "calm" chaos -- does the FCO advice for British nationals to go to airport with lots of money still hold?

HMS Cumberland "waiting for permission" to dock at Bengazi. MMmm.

Cameron still poncing around the the Middle East as chaos reigns. Surely he can ring up the FCO and give them a rocket, after all he must have been at Eton with a fair number of the chinless wonders.

Foreign Office Advice ...continued...

Very interesting interview on WATO just now with woman who went to Tripoli Airport and was helped out of Libya by Portuguese Embassy staff on a Portuguese plane -- no sign of HMG's representatives at airport or before.

FCO clearly too busy supporting Cameron's ludicrous grandstanding tour of the Middle East.

Nul points to the chinless wonders.

Foreign Office advice on how to escape from a danger zone

You have to ask on which planet the chinless wonders of the Foreign Office reside. "Planet Common Sense" it ain't.

I see that they are sending out advice, from the safety of King Charles Street, to British citizens caught up in the crisis in Libya. You must leave, they say, without checking how that is to be achieved. If they had, they would have found that British Airways and British Midland have cancelled their flights from Tripoli. The airlines that are left flying out are all, surprise surprise, full.  Just go to the airport with lots of cash is the next nugget of wisdom, at the same time as reports of chaos at same airport. Well at least they alerted all the thieves and muggers in North Africa to look out for escaping Brits. We have no plans to organise special flights they conclude. No that would be useful.

I imagine this supremely incompetent or at best unthinking advice is a great comfort to our countrymen and women out there.

How to write well

A very well-written piece about writing well from Robert McCrum. I share his agnosticism about the teaching of creative writing.

Not a day goes by without my inbox filling with junkmail about screenwriting courses. If they were all so brilliant imagine what Hollywood or even TV would be like? Of course -- with some honourable exceptions -- they are not good. These courses tend to perpetuate the hackneyed old formulae which blight 99% of film and TV. Particularly TV. Recently a well-know someone was unfortunate enough to have to work on a series  with a TV commissioning editor "graduate" of this type of course . After a barrage of inane edicts from TV exec, my man remarked : "If he mentions F***ing "jeopardy" or C***ing "discovery" one more time,  he is going to discover his jeopardy rammed up his S***ing arse."

McCrum's list of examples may challenge my library but I think they are well worth seeking out. Tonight's task.

Cold Pastoral

I have always found the last two weeks of February the most challenging of the British winter. Even though we have the snowdrops and (so I noticed in Dorset this week) the odd daffodil, it is still chilly and bleak and drab with all the excitements of the cold season long past. My Swahili friends in Zanzibar, Dar and Mombasa are all complaining about the heat. The irony.

This year things seem particularly bad. We have the depressing, overwhelming blanket of austerity, real or imagined, cut thorough with the clear reality that the burden is not being shared fairly despite the bleating of Coalition ministers  I have been re-reading David Kynaston's magisterial Austerity Britain and Family Britain  about the immediate and not so immediate post war years (I have probably mentioned this before but they are long books). Kynaston curates a wonderful selection of first hand descriptions of the time. There is a sense of nostalgic virtue in the process of austerity that was a part of building a new Jerusalem. Some of that Jerusalem we now know failed to deliver but it is difficult to summon the same "dig for Britain" enthusiasm to restoring bankers' bonuses.

Of course the best things in life are free. Perhaps. So this weekend I will be enjoying some walks in the countryside, daydreams, conversation and (not free) beer.

what a performance

I caught "the" Archers episode in the car today. Oh dear. Oh dear dear dear. I don't think they will be having her back in Ambridge.

A million words

A fantastic collection of pictures from the Egyptian Revolution on the Atlantic site here  -- if a picture is worth a thousand words then these must add up to well over a million!

Lizard brains

To the LSE for Paul Dolan's inaugural lecture. Ambitiously he aims to bring behavioural economics together with human happiness. It's a bravura performance to a house packed with people from across the political spectrum. This thinking is, after all, supposed to be one of the engines of the Big Society.

I rather like the fact that Dolan frames his lecture around a song from The Jam -- how young professors are getting, or am I simply getting old? But content wise I am most interested by the insights into how our ancient, instinctive limbic system, lizard brain to me, can be manipulated to any number of ends. He cites a study where a group of human guinea pigs were sent loan offers with randomised interest rates, additionally some of these offers were presented with the picture of an attractive woman. The results showed that people would give up a 1% interest rate advantage to sign up for the loan with the attractive woman. No they weren't all male respondents, nor lesbians, they were a properly balanced sample. The explanation? The lizard brains had taken over matching attractive human with attractive financial deal. So much for the rational decision making of Homo Economicus, much more Homer Economicus. I think this is all fascinating in its implications for economics, for the spurious sciences of consumer research and for the way (as Professor Dolan is working on just now) in which governments influence the public.