Monthly Archives: December 2009

Not the Nine O’Clock News: cult television for Thatcher’s children

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Is it really 30 years since Not the Nine O'Clock News burst onto the scene as Britain's best satirical television show since That Was the Week That Was? 

I turned 16 the year the programme started in 1979. I loved the show's irreverent attitude to the newly elected Thatcher government. I laughed at the sketch about a police investigation into a supposed plot against Maggie: "Forty-seven million people are helping police with their enquiries," – a reference to the deeply unpopular new government, and its deliberate use of mass unemployment to reduce inflation. I had a couple of audio tapes of the show's greatest hits – including the mischievously-named Memory Kinda Lingers….

Watching the BBC's 30 year anniversary tribute to Not the Nine O'Clock News this week, I was amazed how many of the sketches I remembered by heart after all those years. One of the most brilliant was Constable Savage, an indictment of the racism of many police officers in the 1980s. Savage conducted a campaign against a black man, arresting him on trumped up charges, including loitering with intent to use a pedestrian crossing. Eventually, the sergeant, played by Rowan Atkinson, told Savage he would not be tolerated, but was being transferred to the Special Patrol Group – the Metropolitan Police's notorious mobile response unit, which was disbanded a few years later. 

I may have remembered the sketches, but I had no idea that Griff Rhys-Jones only joined the show in its second series, replacing Chris Langham. I could have sworn that I watched the first series – and was disappointed to find the scheduled first show had been replaced at the last minute because of a strike (well, this was 1979). Or was that the first Newsnight edition? 

Satire has a naturally short shelf life. All those Not the Nine O'Clock News sketches taking the mickey out of contemporary newsreaders Jan Leaming and Angela Rippon would mean nothing to anyone born after 1970. And those 30 somethings would wonder who on earth Clive Jenkins was – see this parody of an early Question Time. (Answer: he was a particularly self-loving union baron from the days when the unions and weak management brought Britain to its knees.) Which explains why this classic series has rarely been repeated, unlike Dad's Army, which features in so many modern television schedules.

And finally… the music. The show brilliantly exposed the emptiness of the current pop scene in Nice Video, Shame about the Song. But for me the highlight was a parody of Ayatollah Khomeini, called There's a Man in Iran. It would never win the Mercury prize, but it made fun of this evil man in a brilliant way. The idea that an intelligent country could overthrow a brutal dictator only to surrender to a religious fanatic was almost beyond parody – but Pamela Stephenson managed it. 

A lesson in winter driving: get a Mini, drive slowly

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Tonight, winter descended on south east England and thousands of drivers who had never driven in real snow joined an endless car park. Our friend Jo, who's eight months pregnant, took three hours to drive as many miles locally. 

I was lucky. After a very slow exit from the M40 at Beaconsfield, I took the bold decision to take a narrow country lane, Potkiln Lane, which crosses a very steep Chiltern valley. I figured it could save me an hour or more as the main roads were gridlocked. At first, it looked like a bad move. The cars in front were sliding down the hill. But my luck held. I avoided the patch of ice that caused their slide, drove very slowly – and made it to the bottom. 

But that wasn't the end of the story. The climb out of the valley defeated a series of cars, and I turned round and took the road along the bottom of the valley, Longbottom Lane, towards Seer Green. The next question: would the climb up to Seer Green be passable? I crept up the hill, easing off power when the wheels started to slip. As I reached the top, I knew it was a simple, if slow, drive to our village. 

I'm glad I'm patient. But I'm even more pleased I bought a Mini, which coped magnificently with my biggest winter driving challenge since I passed my test almost 20 years ago.

A good day’s work: the end of the death penalty

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Forty years ago today, the House of Lords voted for the permanent abolition of the death penalty in Great Britain, following a vote by the lower house two days earlier. The decision marked a victory for campaigners such as Ludovic Kennedy, Sydney Silverman and Harold Evans, who had been appalled by the judicial killings of a series of innocent men, most famously Timothy Evans. 

Evans was an illiterate bakery van driver who as hanged in 1950 for the murder of his baby daughter. Harry Evans has recently recounted in his book My Paper Chase the appalling story of how his namesake was wrongly convicted and executed for a crime he did not commit. As Evans says, the sequel to Timothy's killing was as awful as the crime itself. Timothy Evans' landlord John Christie was convicted and hanged three years after Evans after confessing to killing Evans' wife and other women in the same house – the notorious 10 Rillington Place. Still the authorities refused to admit any doubts about Evans' judicial killing. The British establishment and judiciary refused to accept that it could have hanged an innocent man, even as the compelling evidence to the contrary was piling up. Yet the logic of their view was that there had to be two men independently strangling in the same way, in the same small house, with the same fingerprints – a chance of four billion to one. 

The campaigners finally won a degree of justice for Timothy Evans with a free pardon in 1966. By then, the death penalty had been suspended in Great Britain. Three years later came the end for good. (Note: Northern Ireland didn't follow suit until the 1970s, and technically the whole of the UK retained capital punishment until 1998 for a small number of crimes such as treason. But there was no prospect of those powers ever being used.) 

There are still those who call for the return of the death penalty. But for any right-minded person, the idea of the state killing anyone in cold blood is appalling. How can you condemn murder but then demand the right to kill someone yourself? And more seriously, if murder is a dreadful crime, how more chilling is the idea of the state killing innocent people? As the Evans case showed, the very finality of capital punishment made the state utterly refuse to contemplate that it might have made a deadly mistake. One of those stone-walling home secretaries described the idea as a fantasy. 

There have been a string of miscarriages of justice since 1969, including the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four. The victims spent years in prison for crimes they did not commit. But at least they weren't killed by the state, thanks to the efforts of Kennedy, Evans and Silverman. 

Back to the future: a world before the web

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Walking through Marylebone station today, it struck me that a visitor from just 20 years ago would be puzzled by the web address emblazoned on this train. What does it mean?

It just shows how commonplace the Internet is in our world. I’ve just Googled a taxi firm’s number on my mobile. And I’ll then see what’s happening on Twitter. All a mystery for our visitor from 1989.

It reminds me of something my grandmother said to me when I was about 12. She explained how my grandfather (who died in 1942) said one day there would be radio with pictures. I suspected at the time that he had probably heard of the early experiments in television, which led to the BBC’s tv service in 1936. But if he hadn’t, he was a true visionary. I wonder what he’d think of the X Factor – or the web?

Back to the future: a world before the web

The end of the cheque is nigh(ish)

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Britain's Payments Council today announced that the humble cheque would be consigned to history in 2018 – provided suitable alternatives are available for the elderly and others who cherish this 350 year of method of payment.

I did a couple of television interviews with Sky News on the subject today. (Sky called me after reading my article in the Observer on cheques last February.) I was up against Stephen Alambritis from the Federation of Small Businesses in the first, live interview. 

I'm surprised by the FSB's fierce support for cheques. If I was running a small business, the last thing I'd want is an payment method that takes days to clear, requires visits to the bank to deposit – and are increasingly shunned by consumers. True, many small traders rely on cheques, but by 2018 I suspect many will wonder why the fate of the cheque had stirred such controversy. True, it's easy to be cynical about the motives for the banks ditching cheques, but it's not just the banks who stand to gain time and money. To quote my sister, who runs her own business:

"I think I've only written 3 company cheques in the last 3 months – but we do receive a number. They are a pain in the backside – not only do they cost more in bank charges, they take forever to clear (one took 6 working days) for no reason that I can see. Plus the fact that we then have to drive 5 miles to the nearest bank to pay the damn thing in."

By contrast, I can understand why the elderly struggle with the idea of finding another way to pay. The Payments Council is right to say it will need to show there are suitable alternatives for them before the cheque passes into history. But let's put this into perspective: my grandmothers, born in the decade before Queen Victoria died, coped with a far more dramatic change: the switch from pounds shillings and pence to decimal money. You can't help thinking we'd still be using the groat if the naysayers had their way!

Remembering Sam Salt, Falklands war hero

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The news of the death of Rear Admiral Sam Salt recalls memories of one of the most dramatic weeks in recent British history. In May 1982, Salt had the misfortune to be the captain of the first British warship to be lost in action since the second world war. The loss of HMS Sheffield during the Falklands war stunned the nation, as I described in my blog post, the Falklands war 25 years on, in 2007. 

Salt's distress at the loss of Sheffield – and 20 of its crew – was plain for all to see. Yet his personal history gave him the strength to recover. He was just six months old when his father died serving on a Royal Navy submarine during the 1939-45 war. His mother later married another naval officer.

Sheffield was hit by an Exocet missile fired from a Argentinian Super Etendard aircraft. It was the first time most people had heard of the Exocet, yet the expression 'faster than an Exocet' soon entered the language. Whenever I hear my wife use it, my mind goes back to the night we heard that Sam Salt's ship had been lost.

NB: I have updated this post to correct a reference to 'the 1939-56 war'. No idea where that howler came from! But my mother, who was a wartime schoolgirl, has a certificate  from the Red Cross that refers to the 1939-46 war…

The people’s champion: Wall Street Journal’s Patience Wheatcroft tells bankers to get real

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The rebellion against bankers bonuses claimed an unlikely champion today as the European editor in chief of one of the world's most iconic business newspapers said bankers just didn't get it and needed to get real. 

Patience Wheatcroft was speaking at the latest Gorkana breakfast briefing, along with WSJ Europe's new deputy editor Iain Martin, who vividly compared the RBS directors' rhetoric with 1970s union leaders, who were similarly accused of holding Britain to ransom. The two WJS journalists regarded the bankers' tactics as disastrously misjudged. Martin said he had far more sympathy for taxpayers than bankers. 

Wheatcroft supported Bank of England governor Mervyn King's view that 'casino' (investment) and high street banks should be separated, adding that it was a very strange business model to combine the two. 

Neither journalist had much sympathy for the government, arguing that it largely has itself to blame for allowing the bonus fiasco to develop. The saga simply showed that Labour never decided whether it had truly nationalised RBS and Lloyds Banking Group, or was merely the largest shareholder, allowing the banks' boards to operate at 'arm's length'. 

Google's news?

It's not every day that you get the chance to ask Rupert Murdoch's editors about their boss's battle with Google. But I got that opportunity at today's event when I asked about Google's unexpected partial retreat this week. I wasn't surprised that Patience and Iain took the Murdoch line. ("We don't like people giving away our content for nothing", as Patience put it.) But Iain was clear that newspaper management across the world had got it wrong from the start, giving content away in the hope that "something would turn up" in the shape of a revenue stream. But it simply hasn't happened – for most media owners. 

The Wall Street Journal is different. It's the only significant part of Rupert Murdoch's newspaper empire that successfully charges online readers. Its business readers value its content – even if they get their companies to pay the cost of getting past the paywall. It's not the best indication of whether other papers will successfully follow its lead. 

By a strange coincidence, today's WSJ included Google chief executive Eric Schmidt's op ed piece countering Murdoch's charge that Google is stealing content. Schmidt pointed out that Google sends online news providers a billion clicks a month from Google News. That's 100,000 opportunities a minute to win readers and generate revenue, he added. Google News only shows a headline and a couple of lines from a story. If readers want to read on, they have to go through to the media owner's website. I'm with Google on this. The search company may have blinked this weak, and made a concession to make it harder for users to bypass paywalls. But it has a greater intuitive understanding of how business and consumers thrive in an online, connected world. The media's rage against Google has echoes of luddites smashing machines in the early industrial age. The reactionaries want to return to an easier, gentler time. But none of us can turn the clock back. Not even the bankers. 

Fog in the channel…

Once upon a time, a British newspaper supposedly ran a headline, Fog in channel, Europe cut off. It was probably an apocryphal story, but summed up Britain's parochial view of the world. Iain Martin described how the British media fell into a similar trap this week by getting worked up about the threat to London's financial centre from the EU's new single market commissioner Michel Barnier. Barnier was chosen as part of the deal that made the unknown Briton Baroness Ashton the union's new foreign minister. As Martin says, the British media were so obsessed about the possibility of Tony Blair becoming Europe's so-called president they missed the idea that Barnier's role was the more significant. And, more to the point, were two weeks late in creating ludicrous headlines about a Frenchman destroying London's dominance in financial services. Still, we can probably rely on Britain's home grown bankers to achieve that. 

When news and views merge

Patience Wheatcroft made a telling point in favour of the American way of running newspapers. As Harold Evans and others have long argued, the serious US papers cherish a clear distinction between news and opinion. It's the American way, with the two parts of the paper edited separately. By contrast, too many British newspaper owners have used their papers as a mouthpiece, from Northcliffe and Beaverbrook onwards. For them, the whole paper was propaganda. The most blatant current British examples are probably the Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Mirror. But even the Independent, which for many years boasted it was as independent and reasonably minded as its title suggested, came to use its front page to shout its opinions from the news-stands. 

Patience also argued strongly in favour of 'double sourcing' the validity of stories. This was a timely reminder of the importance of being right, not first. Just this week, the world's media fell for a flawed attack on Microsoft from an obscure tech company. The Guardian's Technology section amongst others ran a story claiming a new 'black screen of death' in Windows 7. In the same edition, the paper's corrections column carried a grovelling admission that the story was groundless. This kind of reckless disregard for checking the truth is legion in today's media. 

And finally: the poacher turned gamekeeper turned poacher…

It was fascinating to hear Patience Wheatcroft talking about her 18 months as a non executive director at Barclays. A recent profile in Guardian said she had wanted to understand better an industry she had covered for so long. As she explained today, she saw 100 years' worth of banking dramas in her 18 months on Barclays' board. But she also saw the failings of her old – and future – trade. "One edition of the FT carried the headline, 'Barclays fails FSA stress test'. The next edition's headline was 'Barclays passes FSA stress test'. The next day, the paper had the cheek to boast that it had exclusively predicted that Barclays had passed the test!" 

Gorkana's breakfast briefings are well worth the early trek to London. You get the chance to talk to the top names in Britain's media industry. 

PS: if you're wondering where the name comes from, Gorkana commemorates a Gurkha soldier who saved the life of the firm's founder, Alexander Northcott when Alexander was serving with the Royal Gurkha Rifles.