Monthly Archives: November 2012

Don’t Panic! Remembering Clive Dunn

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‘Don’t Panic!’ cried Lance Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army. It summed up one of the greatest characters in post war British comedy, played by Clive Dunn, who has died at 92.

The joke, of course, was that Jones was the first to panic in the face of danger – real or imagined. He personified a generation who served in the last days of Victoria’s imperial army, survived the Great War trenches and ended their military days as a desperate last line of defence in 1940 as the Home Guard.

It came as a shock as a fan of Dad’s Army in the early 1970s to find out that Clive Dunn wasn’t an elderly man but a 50 something actor not much older than my father. (He played on the elderly image in the unlikely 1971 hit Grandad.) He outlived almost all the other Dad’s Army actors.

I remember going to London in 1975 to see Dad’s Army on stage at the Shaftesbury Theatre. We stayed in a basic hotel near Mount Pleasant Royal Mail sorting office. According to Wikipedia, the show was twice disrupted by bomb scares: rather appropriate given the wartime subject of this comic classic.

The wonderful London Transport Museum

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Going Underground: London Transport Museum

The railways created modern London: first the mainline and suburban lines, followed by the Underground.

London was the birthplace of the underground railway in 1863 with the Metropolitan Railway from Paddington to Farringdon. Three decades later the city created the first deep level ‘tube’, the City and South London Railway, which is now part of the Northern Line.

The wonderful London Transport Museum in Covent Garden tells this fascinating story. It’s extraordinary how many relics of the earliest days survive, including a City and South London carriage. The museum is very hands-on: today, Owen, four, drove a Jubilee Line train. (Last year he drove a bus and Met Line train.)

Tube trains have very long lives. This autumn saw the end of the Met Line A stock trains, which replaced steam on the Met LIne in 1961. When I first worked in London in 1987, London Transport had just reintroduced 1938 tube trains to cope with surging demand. They’re still in use on Network Rail on the Isle of Wight.

Highly recommended.

Here’s my video of our visit in October 2011.

Newsstand: another Apple failure

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Apple’s Newsstand application for iPad and iPhone is a great idea. It provides automatic downloads of digital newspapers and magazines. This is a brilliant way of reading content on the go – it’s a lot easier to take the digital edition of the Sunday Times on flight or train than the hefty print version. And the Guardian iPad edition is beautiful as I blogged a year ago.

But in my experience Newsstand is very unreliable. Automatic downloads often don’t happen, leaving me without the latest edition – or frantically downloading it before leaving the house.

Newsstand nonsense

I found a new glitch today. While I watched Owen playing in the London Transport Museum, I opened today’s Sunday Times – only to find this infuriating ‘computer says no’ message. I had to log into iTunes to read content I had downloaded and opened earlier today. Luckily I had internet access – if I’d been on a plane I’d have screamed at my iPad. Can you imagine a print newspaper failing to open?

Scott Forstall, the executive in charge of Apple’s iOS software (the software that powers the iPad and iPhone) lost his job this week for the iOS 6 Maps fiasco. The Maps and Newsstand experiences suggest Apple is far too quick to release software before it has been properly tested.

Wind farms: eyesore or beauty?

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Wind farms were in the news this week. UK government ministers clashed over policy towards renewable energy. A Tory energy minister, John Hayes, said we had enough onshore wind farms. His boss, Liberal Democrat Ed Davey, and prime minister David Cameron disagreed and slapped him down. The argument reflected Britain’s uncertain view of the merits of using wind to generate electricity.

Simon Jenkins in The Guardian expressed one view: that wind turbines ruin our most beautiful landscapes. His article brought an impassioned response from people who thought wind turbines enhance, rather than ruin, the countryside. I tend to agree. My heart warms to the sight of a graceful turbine turning in the wind. (We always enjoy seeing the one on the M4 at Reading on the site of the old Courage brewery.) And we were in awe at the sight of the huge collection of turbines in the desert near Palm Springs in California in 2004.

Perhaps I wouldn’t be so keen if it was on my doorstep. But wind turbines strike me as more in keeping with the landscape than mobile phone masts, let alone electricity pylons. They’re also natural descendants of the windmills and watermills that still grace many of our villages. Today’s eyesore is tomorrow’s historic gem.

The better question is whether wind farms make a useful contribution to power generation. That should be the real influence on government policy.

Denis MacShane: yet another disgraced MP

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Three years ago, Britain was scandalised by the Daily Telegraph’s exposure of MPs’ appalling – and in many cases criminal – expense claims. Duck houses, moats and phantom mortgages featured heavily.

We thought it was all in the past until Labour’s Denis MacShane was forced to resign today after a parliamentary committee found he had submitted 19 false invoices which were “plainly intended to deceive” Parliament’s expenses authority.

Judging from the Parliamentary Committee on Standards and Privileges’ report, MacShane shamelessly used taxpayers’ money to fund his personal and political interests. Bizarrely the police dropped an investigation into MacShane’s deceit for lack of evidence – let’s hope they read the parliamentary report, which will provide the evidence they were incapable of finding.

By coincidence, this week I’ve been reading Robert Winnett and Gordon Rayner’s book about the Telegraph’s 2009 expenses scoop, No Expenses Spared. The story of how MPs tried to keep the scandal secret is as shocking now as it was in 2009. The Telegraph deserves huge credit for the way it investigated more than a million expenses documents in a matter of weeks. My main reservation was that it focused only on Labour ministers for the first few days, giving the impression that this was a Labour scandal.

Meanwhile, here’s my blogpost from May 2009, written the evening MPs were being ripped to shreds by the BBC Question Time audience in one of the most compelling editions of that show. I pointed out that the MPs’ excuses were groundless. And here is my manifesto for a new politics in the wake of the expenses scandal.