A bouquet of prime ministers

There have been twelve prime ministers since Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne.  Churchill was in office when she got there.

In order (source: Wikipedia):-

Winston Churchill  - Royal Military Academy Sandhurst
Anthony Eden -   Bailliol, Oxford
Harold Macmillan - Bailiol, Oxford
Sir Alec Douglas-Home  -   Christ Church, Oxford
Harold Wilson  -   Jesus,  Oxford
Edward Heath        Bailliol, Oxford
James Callaghan - Took the Oxford entrance exam, but didn't have the money to attend.
Margaret Thatcher -  Somervillle, Oxford
John Major -     didn't go to university
Tony Blair - St John's, Oxford
Gordon Brown - Edinburgh
David Cameron - Brasenose, Oxford.

Of that twelve, eight went to Oxford. It was nearly nine but for Callaghan taking civil service exams instead. None went to Cambridge, although it depends on if you include Nick Clegg who was at Robinson, Cambridge.  He's not prime minister but that might depend on whether Cameron has a bizarre accident with a windmill and a bicycle.

Oxford has also supplied us with the current back-ups. Boris Johnson (Balliol ) and both of the Milibands (Corpus Christi) and Ed Balls (Keeble) and Osborne (Magdalen). It's a very long shot indeed, but if you fancy Louise Mensch's chances, she went to Christ Church, which would nudge that college up in to second place behind Balliol, while Michael Gove would be a first showing for Lady Margaret Hall. Probably not in the running, but Theresa May went to St Hugh's and Hague, like Osborne, went to Magdalen.

If BoJo ever gets through the magical door, it will take Balliol's score to 4 which will be very difficult for any other college to match unless Balliol is disqualified for the next sixty years. Yvette Cooper (Mrs Ed Balls) is also Balliol, so the college is uncannily good at spotting potential contenders.

Looking at the two who didn't go to university - Callaghan and Major - the lack of an Oxford degree doesn't seem to have made a difference to their performance as PM.  Both took other professional exams, both were wrong about a significant number of  issues and lost office as a result.

Winston Churchill doesn't really count in this sequence. Since he passed out of Sandhurst 20th in his year of 130, he was no slouch. Luckily for us, since he didn't go to Oxford his idea was to fight Germany rather than defend ourselves by being pre-emptively invaded by Soviet Russia. Sadly, he eventually lost that half of the war but not for want of trying.  Baroness Thatcher went to Oxford but gets a special pass because she studied a proper subject: Chemistry.

Outside of No 10,  a mention must be made of Baroness Shirley Williams (Somerville) and Baroness Mary Warnock (Lady Margaret Hall), architects of the worst aspects of the education system which, sadly, was signed in to existence by Mrs Thatcher who was rather trusting in those days and thought the teachers and civil servants knew what they were doing. Perhaps they did.

So let's hear less about "Oxbridge" as if they were both equally culpable. It's incontrovertibly Oxford which has landed us with the majority of front-rank noodles.  

Or maybe not. 

Part II -  A bouquet of Chancellors

Update: Helen Mirren has read for the part of the Queen, again, in a drama which follows the relationships of the monarch to her prime ministers.

Pretendy government at GovNet.co.uk

Back in September 2009 Witterings from Witney looked at a  body called GovNet Communications which paid various nabobs to be on their 'board'.   There's nothing unusual in this; sometimes the board member makes a useful contribution by way of consultancy, other times they are hired for their contacts or air of respectability and glamour.

Now WfW has received letter from solicitors Turner Parkinson LLP crossly stating that their client is not at all happy with the post. 


GovNet Communiations is a trading style of Partnership Media Group Limited no. 3307092

While the domain name govnet.co.uk is  allowable, the unwary will easily confuse it with gov.uk, and thereby be encouraged to mis-read the website as a government organ, especially with a board studded with lords who used to be ministers and an existing MP. The current key government website is direct.gov.uk but gov.uk is the beta site which may replace it.

It is a hazard of the domain name system that very similar names can be generated but owned by different people. Nominet will resolve disputes of this sort without going to court. Based on a quick reading of the nominet archive, Nominet asks users to make sure that websites are sufficiently different so as not to mislead people and takes in to account whether other intellectual property protections - such as trademarks - exist.  An intellectual property lawyer would have to advise as to whether the government has taken out any protections which would make the domain name 'govnet.co.uk' one they could complain about.

GovNet is proud of its speakers and essentially, sells influence 

Understanding ModernGov draws together a range of senior Government contacts, bringing you the very best speakers and trainers with the most relevant knowledge.

They also have another product called Understanding ModernGov copied on both the moderngov.net and moderngov.com registrations.  Nothing wrong with that, but the unwary might think they are part of the government.  Wording on the website fosters that impression.  For example:

Understanding ModernGov provide a portfolio of highly informative, interactive Government training courses that clearly and concisely explain the mechanisms of government and parliament.

But they aren't 'Government training courses' in the sense of being produced by the government, They are a set of talks about the government which you can pay to listen to. In some cases, from people who you've already paid once to do their job, and who are now selling their arses - or more likely, ours - to the highest bidder.

As the GovNet domain tells us:

Each course is CPD Certified, providing an in-depth perspective of the mechanisms that drive central, regional and local government.

They are certificated in as much as there is an established trade body, the CPD Certification Service, which acts as an umbrella for private training providers.

Membership of the CPD Certification Service signifies the corporate commitment to the sharing of knowledge and enables members to have a wide range of material independently certified by us and to utilise our certified CPD symbol on items promoting their CPD material and on Certificates of Attendance and CPD Self-Assessment Forms.

You must put what weight on this you think fit.  Some trade bodies are stronger than others. In general, the older established ones have acquired legal protections linked with the obligation to enforce minimum standards and the mechanism to do it, and their stamp carries weight, especially if they can exclude other people from using identifying words in that trade, e.g. The Law Society.   However you should never assume a body has any legal authority until you've checked.

Here for example, is an Intellectual Property course, which originates in a specialist body with legal standing and is delivered by recognized training bodies, which is definitely worth the money.  That's the sort of thing to look for when buying training. 

The existence of Partnership Media Group Limited is on the govnet.co.uk and moderngov.info websites but it is gently down-played, directing the attention to the Government Procurement Service logo with "supplier" written under it in tiny letters, misleading the glancing eye as to who is providing the material.

  we are the UK's leading Public Sector publisher and events organiser.

Well, yes, that may be strictly true in the sense of publishing material about the public sector, by it isn't a "Public Sector" publisher and events organizer.

Partnership Media Group Limited says:

The names, images and logos identifying the GovNet News and Events portal and Search the Public Sector (STePS™) , are proprietary marks of the Partnership Media Group Limited trading as GovNet Communications. Copying of our logos and/or any other third party logos accessed via this website is not permitted without prior approval from the relevant copyright owner.

Did they bother asking the UK government if it minded someone taking a domain name so very close to their own?

The ASA and judicial review

There have been updates in the tale of Cranmer and the Advertising Standards Authority, (ASA)  where Brer ASA punches the tar baby Cranmer for not raising its hat to him, only to find that he gets stuck in a worse mess than being offended.

It is not clear why the ASA decided to have this fight which is a political one disguised as being about an advert.  What little authority the ASA has has arises from the willingness of advertisers to accept its rulings rather than risk having a statutory body created. It is industry-funded which is better than taxpayer-funded.  There are plenty of firms who just ignore the rulings; presumably they are not worried about whether the ASA can lean on publishers or search engines to restrict access to their material. Here is a list of them.

The eminent blogger Guido Fawkes says this in a comment to Cranmer:

The reason I ignore them is because they have no power. No statutory basis. They are a self-appointed, self-regulatory organisation ............. no different from the green ink loonies who write to me every day apart from the fact that they have a letterhead.

 Which prompts the question:

If judicial review is the process for reviewing the decision-making process of  public and quasi-public bodies, is the ASA the sort of organisation which can be taken to judicial review?

There has been at least one judicial review which by the very act of being heard bolsters the view that the ASA is a quasi-public body doing public work and, besides, people keep responding to the ASA as if it had Authority. 

In an earlier case the ASA investigated whether quoting passages from the bible can be an advert which causes offence and concluded that they were and should not be used again. Instead of pointing out that ASA is not the first body in history to have suggested that Christians can't say what they are going to say whether you like it or not, the Sandown Free Presbyterian Church (SFPC) took the ASA to judicial review. (This was a Northern Ireland case).

Mr Justice Treacy found for the Sandown Free Presbyterian Church:

Mr Justice Treacy accepted that there had clearly been an interference with the applicants’ right to freedom of expression [Art 10] since the effect of the ASA’s decision was to prevent the applicant advertising in similar terms in the future.  

He accepted, however, that the ASA had a legitimate aim of maintaining a system of self regulation in the advertising industry which provides adequate controls against the publication of material that would cause widespread or serious offence, including offence that interferes with the rights of readers of a particular sexual orientation to respect for their dignity and private life. 

 (Summary of judgment here.   Full judgment here.)

Mr Justice Treacy appears to have accepted that the ASA is a quasi-public body doing public work.  The ASA aren't about to contradict him. They engaged the experienced  Dinah Rose of Blackstone Chambers and she doesn't appear to have argued for dismissal on the grounds that the claimant could not bring her client to judicial review. That would have been to argue that the ASA has no legal standing and isn't a quasi-public body.

The Sandown Free Presbyterian church brought the case for its own purposes so it didn't ask that prior question. The reviewer of the case - because there were internal challenges first - also thought the ASA had authority.

I consider that the ASA has a duty to weigh up the arguments and counter-arguments and decide whether the advertisement has, or is likely to have, caused serious or widespread offence. That decision must be taken with due regard to the context, medium, audience, product and prevailing standards of decency.

My emphasis on "duty".  Does it have a duty?  It certainly can give whatever opinions it likes, but then so can any club on the behaviour of its members.

In paragraph 53 the court makes explicit its belief about the status of the ASA;

1. Moreover, seriously offensive advertising attacking a particular sexual orientation may interfere with the right to dignity, and the right to respect for his or her private life, of the reader of the advertisement. This right is itself protected under Art.8 of the Convention, and the ASA, as a public authority, has a positive obligation to protect that right.

By paragraph 66 the judgment implicitly accepts the ASA as an emanation of the state even though it is in the form of a private company, industry-funded and cannot compel compliance. In paragraph 73 he considers that although this isn't an example, there could be instances where the ASA would be entitled to order the church "You can't say that".

But surely that depends on establishing whether the ASA have any power to order anybody around who doesn't want to be?  Making an assumption doesn't deal with the prior legal question: can the ASA be brought to judicial review?  

This is not the first time the question has been raised since governments began to set up private agencies to do quasi-public work.  In 1987 that question was asked about the Panel on Takeovers and Mergers. The discussion involved looking at the reality of regulatory power being distributed in a world which was changing.

There is no hard-and-fast rule about this; the court reserved the right to decide to hear a case because nobody can foresee exactly how administrative structures will be in the future.  However, strong guidelines emerged for when a body's decisions can be reviewed: (note: my summary, not definitive)

- the body has to be producing effects in public law

- the body does not need to have statutory support but it ought to be able to point to something official from which it emanates, although that might be a convoluted route as a result of other acts which does not set it up directly.

- the body's rulings cannot be ignored, that is, if it has enforcement power such that when it gives a ruling, it is only fair that it should be reviewable by the courts.

Not all of these have to be in place to bring a case. Their Lordships tried to differentiate an argument between members in a private club with situations where that club has public law effects.

Applying that to the present example, the first is arguable. The ASA has some effect on advertisers but would you call that public law? It involves cutting off the access to revenue by telling publications not to accept advertising, which is definitely an exercise of real power.

The second is also arguable. The ASA keeps saying the government recognizes it but do they have a duty to undertake investigations.  What power compels them to do an investigation when they are unwilling?

But, as Guido Fawkes demonstrated at the very beginning, the third ground is the weakest. If you have a choice whether to take any notice of them, at least in certain media, then how are they a tribunal or a public body?

If  the ASA is not a public body because it cannot enforce its rulings, why is it being taken to judicial review?

If the ASA is a public body, can the Freedom on Information Act be used to prise open its secret complaints procedure?

A little more about the ASA

Cranmer has published the response he has given to the ASA.

The ASA has issued a pompous statement which seems to miss the main point: they haven't got any grounds to investigate and even if they had what they think of as a right to investigate, they still haven't got any power to do anything except, maybe, to hand it to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) who are most unlikely to want to tangle with this one. The EHRC prefer to stick to beating up fond old couples such as Mr and Mrs Bull down in Cornwall (and then claiming they didn't mean to launch a second attack for more money), and calling Christianity an infection.

We can all investigate. A little more about the ASA is useful to collect.

Firstly, it's not an "authority". It's a company as registered at Companies House, specifically:

ADVERTISING STANDARDS AUTHORITY LIMITED (THE)
MID CITY PLACE
71 HIGH HOLBORN
LONDON
WC1V 6QT
Company No. 00733214

The members of the council are all listed on the website with short clickable biographies.  The best known are Lord Smith - that's Chris Smith who, although gay, has never made any secret of it and has never allowed it to be an issue in any of his work, at least as far as I know, Professor Andrew Motion best known for his poetry (some of which is OK but not as good as Pam Ayres), and Martin Narey, best known for heading up Barnardos and signing-off the sort of ads which stigmatize white men as child beaters. 

The people who run the organization day to day include 
Miles Lockwood, Director of Complaints and Investigations

Miles joined the ASA in September 2010 and is responsible for leading the complaints and investigations teams, the core function of the ASA, who dealt with over 28,000 complaints last year. He studied History at the University of Nottingham and then obtained two post graduate certifications in Law at Nottingham Law School. Qualifying as a solicitor in 1998, he worked in commercial legal practice and specialised in general litigation and dispute resolution matters. 

Lockwood's top-class biography continues. It is hard to believe that he signed off a poorly screened complaint which is not within the scope of their own code, so perhaps he didn't know about it.

It isn't the first time that the ASA has had a spat like this with Christians.  At the end of March 2012, the ASA took issue with a standard  Christian leaflet where they offer to pray over you in the belief that this can promote healing.  The group who gave out the leaflet also included a sensible health warning about visiting your doctor.  There was no suggestion that they tried to coerce belief, cozen money out of people or prevent people getting proper medical attention.

This didn't stop the ASA sticking their noses in, attempting to make themselves arbiters of the printed material which barely qualifies as promotional.  There's nothing unusual about healing services; the ASA appears to be trying to claim the right to tell churches they can't use the word 'healing' at all.   

Since Christians have the unfortunate trait of often being irritating they don't get the support they deserve when their right to freedom of expression is infringed.  Blogs which should have known better failed to identify this as an freedom of speech and religious expression argument, thinking this was about a literal interpretation of what everyone with a scrap of education knows is poetic language and religious belief, both of which are entitled to protection and are matters of opinion, not fact. Why isn't Andrew Motion doing something brave like protecting freedom of speech?

The ASA used its considerable industry funding to lean on a bunch of harmless street pray-ers whose earnest desire is that my knee will be fixed without surgery by divine intervention.  Let 'em try, I say.  If it works, I'm better off, if it doesn't I'm no worse off and I'm still on the waiting list.  How strange that the hedge-witches, shamen and priests all accept that it is my choice whether to go for surgery or not but the ASA thinks it knows what is best for me.

The disputes over faith healing and what can be said about it stem in part from the antagonism in the alternative health-care field.   This was foolishly increased when the chiropractors decided to try to use lawfare (good word, I just heard it) to silence their critics. 

They attempted to sue Simon Singh for libel and such is the state of our laws that they were able to be a significant nuisance until finally dropping the case in April 2010.  It went all the way to the Appeal Court, though, before they were told that Singh's original article was comment, not fact, and that he was entitled to express his opinion.

There is a suggestion from one blog campaign that the ASA isn't up to much, but  it is confusing because it attempts to be over-clever and simply does not understand the ASAs limitations.  Then again, the ASA doesn't understand its limitations.

The website asa-rocks.org  has a series of pages expressing its rage over quackery and the apparent inability of the ASA to do anything about it.   I share some of their anger but they don't seem to understand how difficult it is to draw that line, especially since some medical doctors have engaged in quackery and misrepresentation, often in places which do matter such as when they are expert witnesses in court.

In climate science we've had the epic quackery of Global Warming but so far the ASA hasn't sent any letters to UEA asking them too explain themselves or tear out pages of their undergraduate prospectus which presents them as having a science faculty.

The bugaboo of asa-rocks is asa-sucks, the defunct campaign which noticed that the ASA was not sticking to the process of receiving a complaint and investigating, but instead had got in bed with another campaign, the Nightingale Collaboration, to systematically challenge the alternative services sector.   When this was revealed, the ASA dropped the association.

The Nightingale Collaboration makes some good points, but as it was fuelled by reasonable outrage at the use of the libel laws against Singh, its main  purpose was to return-volley lawfare against the Chiropractors by finding something they can't substantiate then reporting them to the Trading Standards which does have some legal standing, unlike the ASA. This summary gives a fair over-view of both sides.  The chiropractors should not have played rough if they didn't want the same level of response.

The other alternative care providers generally took a robust attitude to the ASA, advising that on receipt of a letter you should consider binning it as junk mail or perhaps making a complaint to the ASA that you have been contacted by an organization which misrepresents itself as having legal authority.

Technically, the ASA could take issue with every beauty parlour whose facials claim to rejuvenate the skin. That is an impossible claim to substantiate for prior reasons based on entropy.  However, the ASA would find itself even less popular if it decided to go after Madame Rene; do they seriously think her customers expect her to do miracles?  Her customers are not interested in hearing they look like WH Auden and there is little she can do about it; they expect Madame Rene to get on with the aromatherapy massage and for the ASA to mind its own beeswax.

I will decide for myself what I think of god-botherers and beauticians.  

Update:  In which Cranmer fisks the ASA interim statement and it emerges that the group who were supposed to have complained are very cross because they didn't, although one of them complained about about a separate magazine.


Update: Bucko points out that the ASA fail to comply fully with company law.

8 out of 10 cats prefer Cranmer

Do 70% of people think marriage should be left as it is: one of each sex?

A ComRes poll said so, and that's what the Coalition For Marriage (C4M) are quoting. 

This took approximately five minutes to find out, but rather than exercise their fingers and brains the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) have written pompously to Archbishop Cranmer demanding that he explains it all to them as they are far too fick to bother to to check out a complaint about whether that figure could be substantiated.  It's not secret - the source is listed on the advert.

This, they think, shows them doing a good job.  I think it shows people whose jobs can be cheerfully cut. Luckily, it looks like the public aren't paying for once, so it's up to the advertising industry if they want to keep funding these idlers to provide free copy for bloggers. 

As His Grace politely points out, it isn't up to him to evaluate the original research. If the ASA want to challenge that, they must go to ComRes and C4M.  But we all know it isn't really about the opinion poll. Rather, it's an attempt to control what can be said politically in the context of an advert.

In this case, it is a Christian-led resistance to the re-definition of marriage which some people find  objectionable. They roped a trade-body in as arbiters of what can and cannot be said publicly.

I don't like C4M and Andrea Rose Minichiello Williams. I don't approve of the way the groups to which she is connected allow ordinary people - such as Mr and Mrs Bull of the Chymorvah Private Hotel - to get in to fights where the law is already weighted against them.  There are civilians and combatants, and you should be wary of  encouraging the former to become the latter.  Luckily the ASA have picked on someone their own size in Archbishop  Cranmer, who knows what he has signed up for.

This illustrates the point which Christian groups and Cranmer have previously claimed: that when a Christian expresses a view, not only can they expect that view to be challenged rightly in debate but that law, or quasi-law such as trade bodies claiming 'codes', will  try to stop them expressing a view at all.  

Checking the ASA's own code, it appears they don't have any remit to deal with editorial content so the following is run in the context of editorial material to further inform public debate about what it is attempting to suppress as offensive.

No permission has been sought from the originators nor has payment been received.

I 'ad that Barbara Streisand in the back of the cab once.

Update: Linkage -
Ministry of Truth - best formal analysis (as ever)
Ambush Predator
The Engineer
Peter Ould
Dr Jim West
Max Farquar  - best graphic
Anna Raccoon
Tim Worstall
Longrider
Orphans of Liberty  
Samizdata
Raedwald

Boiling Frog 

Counting Cats 

Harry's Place 

Moonrakers

The illustrator Karen Davis has been out and about in Wiltshire taking weather pictures to show how they are up to their knees in drought.   She has a new painting out, Moonrakers, so the first part of the blog is about that, then she moves on to the local news. 


If you like whimsical paintings and a touch of hippiedom then you'll enjoy the graphics.  If not, scroll down and compare weather notes with where you are. 


N.B. She has romantic music playing in the background automatically.

Magazine prosecuted for stating the bleedin' obvious

The Spectator is to be prosecuted for breaching a court order which banned anyone from writing about the defendants in the Stephen Lawrence case lest they claim they could not receive a fair trial because the jury had been influenced.

This a fair argument in most cases; you don't need to be a lawyer to assent to the common sense of wanting an unbiased jury, without getting fetishist about whether the jury have ever heard of the defendant.  However it was pointless in a case which already had billions of words devoted to it and had begun life as an attempt very publicly to force the CPS to bring a case, then gone on to a high-profile inquest, press campaign, an investigation by the Police Complaints Authority (as it was then) and a major enquiry, and then another investigation by the IPCC in 2007.    The original trial collapsed; this meant some defendants could rely on the old double jeopardy rules to avoid a second trial, so hallowed law was changed to put them on trial again.

Whether they could ever have received a fair trial after the papers had tried the old "sue us for defamation if you aren't murderers" gambit is open to debate, and must raise issue of whether the inquest and three further reports were entirely without influence. If we refused to try everybody who was already known in the public press, then Jeffrey Archer would never have gone to gaol.

Besides, if this Spectator article could have prejudiced a jury, it would be against the Crown, not against the defendants.  As an article it offered little further damage to those on trial; its ire was directed at the court system by pointing out what everyone already knew, i.e. that in the intervening years there were other prosecutions all fully covered in the press, by the BBC and by the law wire services.   It wasn't secret.

Neil Acourt and David Norris were jailed for racially abusing a police officer, Detective Constable Gareth Reid, in 2001.  They were convicted and appealed on the grounds that they hadn't been able to receive a fair trial due to being repeatedly condemned in the papers since 1993. 

No, said Lord Justice Mantell, sitting with Mr Justice Wright and Mrs Justice Rafferty, just because you've been criticised in the press is no reason refuse to bring a trial.

However, they slightly reduced their sentences which they felt to be out of line with other examples of similar offences, which caused Sergeant Ravi Chand of the National Black Police Association to complain that judges didn't understand how serious this was. In other words, their original sentence was tainted by being an interim attempt to payback people who were felt to have got away with murder. The Sun was explicit in this "Lawrence thugs jailed at last" it said, glad that the CPS had finally got a conviction to stick against them.

So one of the defendants  in the 2012 murder trial, David Norris, had already had the issue of prejudice against him answered in the courts. On the day that the Spectator was supposed to have distorted the very fabric of the space-time continuum, that information was available all over everywhere, including the BBC, the Daily Mail, and a solicitor's news service which was open to the public at that point and has since gone behind a paywall. 

Later, the officer who alleged racial  abuse by Acourt and Norris, DC Gareth Reid, alleged that he had been the subject of racial discrimination, losing an employment case against the Metropolitan Police in 2010.  He had brought previous discrimination cases in 1997 and 2001.

Eventually, convictions for murder were brought in. The evidence looked poor but these are not the defendants one goes to the barricades for, and they have been convicted by a jury of their peers.  Possibly the grounds for appeal will mention The Spectator and will make as much as they can of the fact that if it was worth prosecuting the publication, that must mean it had some influence. So the defence must be pleased that they've been handed an extra argument to use by the legal machine which was so keen to see the clients jailed.

The Lawrence case has  always been choked with people trying to use the murder of  one young man as proof of racism in the police.  Neither the collapsed trial, the inquest or the PCA investigation delivered the conclusions which the press and campaigners wanted.  Eventually,  the Macpherson report got us decades of political correctness and which resulted in the police being  too scared to take on child abusers who instantly play the race card.

This time we are going to get the show-trial of a publication because the courts think this will demonstrate who's in charge and stop the pesky press reporting things or even mentioning what they already reported a decade earlier. Shush, someone in the jury might have heard of Stephen Lawrence.

It won't be much of a show; editor Fraser Nelson has already said they will not contest the case and will just pay the fine, which is a wise call.  But note, the original piece wasn't about the guilt or innocence of the defendants; it was criticising the justice system. However, Mr Justice Treacy thought the jury weren't influenced by two decades of media coverage and they said they hadn't read the Spectator,  and he met them so he should know.

Here's a useful timeline to help keep track of all the things other than a couple of lousy paras in a patrician house-mag, which might have come to the attention of anybody conscious since 1993. 


Stephen Lawrence has been held up as a martyr for 20 years, and so he is; but if there is one thing any averagely-educated person can see it is that martyrdom can swing round unpredictably.  Keep going with the prosecutions of the messengers and the political correctness, and we yet might see scumbag David Norris carried out of court, re-sanctified and wearing the white robes of a poor misused victim of the justice system.

Dinosaur farts

Everyone, even the normally open-minded Longrider,  is poo-poohing  this idea for why the climate changed but they haven't looked at the evidence.   I've seen filums with dinosaurs and they are always growling as if their bellies hurt, which is only to be expected if you try to eat whole trees, other dinosaurs and ladies wearing fur bikinis. 

It's all true and here's the film to prove it.  Note they have actually photographed the gas.  This explains megafaunal extinction.



Please can I have a PhD from UEA now for this valuable piece of conclusive research?

Re-engaging with politics

Mr Raft has an intriguing idea.  Everyone is used to casting one positive vote but what if they also had one negative vote to cast?  A vote which expresses your attitude towards the person you'd least like to see anywhere near the levers of power.

A candidate's final tally would be their positive votes minus their negative votes, which would deny some of them the smug comfort of their wide majorities.  It would make visible those who care enough to cast a vote but whose opinion is that they are all rubbish. At the moment, these voters have little option but to stay away or spoil a ballot slip, neither of which have an electoral effect. Now they have a reason to turn up.

There would be no obligation to cast both votes. You could leave it at who you really, really hate and know that your little vote helps make sure they can't easily get in.


It might be that no candidates end up with a positive tally.   A wannabe could get a seat by being the least-hated contender  which should stop them comforting themselves that they have 'a majority' or that they 'won' the seat.  


Admittedly it would cost more to administer and take longer to count, but it's worth thinking about.

Are you looking at my bird?

Police are arranging protests about cuts to the front line which they say will make their job impossible because they already have far too much to do.  Strange then that two uniformed persons - thought to be officers - were dispatched from Harrow police station for a word with a gallery owner.  (Note: contains an image some people may find shocking. Report: Evening Standard)

An officer happened to see a picture he disapproved of - apparently while he was on a bus - and was able to divert two of these furiously busy personnel from their normal work of catching murderers to argue about classics, or rather, to lean on the gallery owner to take down a picture of Leda and the Swan.  As it happens, they were packing up for a new exhibition anyway.

If the gallery manager, Jag Mehta, gives an accurate account, the visitors claimed that 'condoning bestiality' was illegal, which sounds more like a PCSO making something up on the spot. 

In general, you can condone what you like, providing you don't mind what people think of you. What you can't necessarily do is is carry it out (Sexual Offences Act 2003), distribute it (Obscene Publications Act 1959), or possess a depiction (Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008) without the law imposing a penalty. 

The legislation is dotted about rather than consolidated, but luckily the Crown Prosecution Service has written a  useful guide to these offences.  However, there have been cases which alter the matter, which means their guidance cannot be a definitive. Also, the 8 page pdf the Ministry of Justice wrote has vanished, or at least the online copy has. [Update: having trouble with this link which worked for a while and now does not:  Here it is,  maybe it will come back.  Many thanks to the researchers at Backlash.]

The following relies on the CPS guidance on extreme pornography.  They know all about Leda and the Swan

The painting "Leda and the Swan", another example raised during debates in Parliament, would also not be caught by the new [2008] offence, because it would not meet the "explicit and realistic" test.

Established photographer Derrick Santini was sailing very close to the wind under this definition.  His portrayal of the myth may explain why somebody going past on a bus may have got all hot'n'bothered.

Santini’s use of the lenticular process involves photographing a sequence of still images, using live models, which are layered and printed using a special technique, under a ribbed plastic sheet acting as a lens.  This results in a hologram-like effect where the figure within the frame moves as the viewer passes, although not an actual hologram, it is a form of animation where an illusion of depth is created.

Makes a change from those old nudie cards where if you tilt the picture, the lady's clothes jump off.

I'm assuming that the swan and the woman were photographed separately otherwise the RSPCA might have something to say about it - and I'm guessing that what is depicted is impossible. You try training a swan to land in that space.  There isn't a Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Models. It says something that given a picture of a naked lady and a migratory bird, apparently in the act of congress, the police are worried about the one with feathers.

If you want to see the full set of pictures, they are on page two of Santini's gallery under the heading "lenticular artworks".  The website is full of slow-loading animations.  It might not be easy to explain them if somebody were to ask so they shouldn't be regarded as safe for work, which is a different question from whether they fit within the definition of an offence.

There are plenty of legal disputes to be had here; for example can a theme such as Leda and the Swan come within the second CPS heading?

 That the image is extreme namely grossly offensive, disgusting, or otherwise of an obscene character;

A little offensive, yes, particularly if it is the rape version of the myth but in general the theme of humans and swans getting it on is common. But one of them is only disguised as a swan i.e. at various times in the past it is more acceptable to show a human and an animal rather than two humans.  There are always  people who worry about the sexual nature of the motif in showing any intimacy but only the ignorant have ever misunderstood that it is about sex with animals.  

Besides, it is neither reasonable nor possible to go back through the museums demanding that all the Leda and the Swan versions are hidden in the archives, trying to decide which ones are merely ecstatically affectionate. 

In addition, it was only in January 2012 that a conviction was denied by a jury in R v Peacock.  The material being supplied by Michael Peacock was nasty and fitted within the guidelines of what could be regarded as obscene, so the CPS brought the case under the Obscene Publications Act. The jury did not accept the prosecution case.  Since we can never see in to the jury room, we don't know exactly why, but we do know that this signals that the CPS are mistaken in what the public are prepared to regard as likely to deprave or corrupt.

However, Alex Antoniou of the City Law School points out that all this means is that the Obscene Publications Act may be undermined.  The CPS now uses the newer extreme pornography charges as these are about possession of an image rather its than publication:

prosecutions under the new sections introduced in January 2009 (ss 63-7 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008) related to extreme pornographic images have dramatically increased in the last two years: according to the CPS, in 2009-10 prosecutions were brought in respect of 213 offences, whereas in 2010-11 the number of offences reached 995. It is noteworthy that these latest figures released relate only to possession of extreme pornographic images portraying bestiality.

A prosecution under s.63 requires the permission of the Director of Public Prosecutions.  An officer could be in a great deal of paperwork if they didn't check first that the CPS wanted to use a classical theme as a test case - especially the exact one which was quoted in Parliament.  This artwork tests the boundaries of realism by using photography but on the other hand, a moment's thought about swans tells you that you can't be looking at something realistic.

It is reassuring to know that when the Home Secretary cuts the number of police officers, it won't matter because we can just get rid of the two spare ones who go round wrangling with art wallahs. Until then, don't tell them about Europa and The Bull.

Here is a Leda and the Swan pas de deux. There are two things to note: firstly that the male often holds his arm in a swan form. This is to signify that Leda sees a swan but we all know he's really supposed to be a god in disguise.  Secondly, that the bodies echo each other the way birds court.

Happy St George's Day

Others:

A Day for England

That Darn Cat

SBML at Anna Raccoon

Max Farquar 

Brian Sibley 

Cranmer

The Police State of Norfolk

A fracas has broken out over pictures of football strip which got out ahead of the PR gig, and the story is now running in the Daily Mail and on regional television. A fan found pictures of the new strip on an authorized website and re-tweeted them, 12 hours ahead of the official  launch.  The club noticed and was annoyed.  It called the police.

I can understand that the PR wallah who was arranging the jamboree was miffed at having their thunder stolen just before they hawked their wares, but what I can't understand is why the police thought that they had to involve themselves in a civil matter by trying to classify this as within the scope of the Computer Misuse Act 1990.

The essence of our computing legislation is that, like much modern legislation, it is drawn widely because it is impossible to predict the situations in which it might be needed. The onus is on the police and then the CPS to not use it unless they've got a case which is in the public interest.

The wording was deliberately vague; the security services pushed for the Act in 1990 following the quashing of the Gold and Schifreen conviction, so that unauthorized access would be criminalized rather than the method for gaining that access.

The difficulty with this kind of 'no arguments sonny' legislation, though, is the unwritten deal that the state won't use it to get involved in private matters, to settle private or commercial scores or apply it trivially. We don't have a written constitution. Maybe it can't be adequately expressed in writing, but that's the deal and any reasonable grown up understands it. The difficulty is knowing when to refuse to become embroiled because it is just too trivial to be a criminal matter.

Why exactly did the police rush round to a fan's house? This was obviously a case where one is sympathetic then goes to talk to the lawyer before getting involved.   Possibly there was a matter of copyright infringement, but that's a civil matter, not for the police.

The allegation of a hack doesn't appear to have any substance; Norwich FC themselves put the pictures up via the intermediary promoter Emmerson Marketing, who didn't lock the pictures off properly and were amazed when the fanboi found them by looking at their HTML code and seeing the links there, although they were not yet revealed (reports El Reg in the comments).  Whoops.

As for any commercial implications; there aren't any. Norwich got some free advertising for a garment which nobody but its own fanbase cares about.  All the commercial damage came from the police trying to put the frighteners on a customer.

This was a case which was very low priority, and yet the police reacted because the h-word was waved around. Because they are police and not marketing managers it didn't occur to them that if you are planning the launch of a new home strip, in fact quite a lot of people have to know about it - particularly the sponsors, Aviva, who will have approval of everything, the t-shirt printers, the photographers, players and video artists making the promotional material, and the people building the marketing website who need the pictures ready to go.   The idea that a strip is 'secret' is charming nonsense,  a fairy-story which was told to the police, taking advantage of their relative ignorance.

Shirts don't happen by magic. They happen by contract - and contracts are not, in the first instance, a matter for the police.

Let's have a look at the time-line.

April 17 The fan posts pictures on Twitter
April 18 Norwich FC call the fan at 4.30am, then the police.
April 18 The police interview the fan
April 18 PR releases run by interested websites and papers - see below.
April 19 Daily Mail runs the story about the police interview.
April 19 Norwich FC official launch at Carrow  Road, which shows strip with a different style collar and new yellow streak on the shorts

The police seem unaware that Norwich gave the full story and a picture of their director, famous Twitterist Stephen Fry, posing with the shirt on April 18 to the insurance industry website Insurance Times and other websites such as strip suppliers. In order to set that exposure up, they may have given the material to websites on the 17th, who then package it for release on the 18th.

All that happened was a fanboi broke an embargo which didn't apply to him anyway.

Extract:

Aviva extends sponsorship deal with Norwich City to 2016

18 April 2012 |By Newsdesk

Insurer will continue to feature on team’s shirts and sponsor Community Stand

Norwich City director Stephen Fry said: “We’re so thrilled Aviva are with us for another four years. A four years which we hope will see our beloved club consolidate its natural home in the Premier League. “The new kit fitted me like a…football shirt. I was so pleased to be able to launch it, even while 12,000 miles away. You’d be amazed how many Norwich fans there are in New Zealand.”

 ........

As Fry explains he is in New Zealand and posing with the shirt, we can safely assume they've been in production for some time, other wise he wouldn't have one and they wouldn't be available to go fresh on the shelves, would they?  This is not 'secret' - it's just that some advertising material was pointed  out to the target market a few hours before the pr launch was scheduled. It's no more than a sneak preview of a product, the soul of gossip.  Nothing whatever to do with the police, who misdirected themselves as to the nature of this complaint.  It's only a 'surprise', the way a new car or a birthday present is a surprise. Fanboi rudely spoilt the "surprise", which is hardly surprising because that's what fans do - they talk about the club.  Clubs generally encourage this because without fans they are nothing.

The Club initially tried to defend its stupidity, then realized it had got it wrong and embarrassed the sponsor, Aviva, who sponsors them to butter-up the customers, not antagonize them .  The very last thing you should do for someone who just paid you a pile of dosh to be associated with a global brand, is draw attention to a minor stuff-up at a PR launch. Norwich FC made their own patron saint Delia look like a cheap thug.  Given Fry's media sophistication and his own enthusiastic use of Twitter, it is most unlikely that he would have run screaming to the rozzers.

The Police State of Norfolk

Someone with clout at the club called the police - was it CEO David McNally? He would have had to be asked first.  Then somebody with clout in the police responded by sending a constable when they should have insisted on taking legal advice first .  Any lawyer worth their salt would have pointed out that a twelve-hour spoiler was not the end of the world and that the first thing to check - politely -  was how the leak happened. It's not necessarily a criminal matter at all.

The question is why did the police act so swiftly?  Was it an example of funny handshakes, the hospitality box and putting the apparatus of a police state at the disposal of a bezzie mate?

That the police mistakenly thought this might be a hack is just about credible.  However, since it took five minutes to explain that the club's promoter had left live links laying around, the correct response is "Sorry to have troubled you Sir, thank you for being so cooperative".  And then tell David McNally that they are satisfied there was no criminal offence and that they wouldn't be taking it any further.

Instead, Norfolk police have ham-fistedly continued to suggest that there might have been an offence if malice had been present, with the poor fanboi being marched around to say sorry as if he could be guilty of something criminal.  This was not a criminal offence at all.  If it was anything, it was for the civil lawyers and not the police.

Norfolk Constabulary are very bad at these matters. They have just spent months being suckered in to the Climate Change debacle, where people mashing up data to suit their agenda have used - or wasted - police time in trying to control and shut down academic dissent. 

Titanic at the Minack Theatre

 Last week I achieved a lifetime's ambition and finally saw a full-scale production at the Minack Theatre.

The Minack is that most English of things which rooted and blossomed in the magical kingdom of Cornwall; a private obsession which chimed with others and called them to itself. Miss Rowena Cade, an amateur producer, offered the use of her garden to the local players for a production of The Tempest. They had done well with A Midsummer Night's dream in a nearby meadow.  The garden of Minack House, however, did not readily offer somewhere to seat the audience.  Cade looked in to what was then a gully above a rock used by fishermen and wondered if a stage could be built down there, where the sides suggested a natural amphitheatre.   Where better to place Prospero's island but on a rock jutting out over the Atlantic Ocean?

Miss Cade and her gardener set about sculpting the theatre and in 1932 The Tempest was performed - by moonlight.  The Times noted the event and a dream became flesh.

That dream was nearly wrecked by WWII, but Cade, who had by now lived through two wars, set about re-building the theatre. She did not know the meaning of  "Give up" but the phrase "The Show Must Go On" was written on her heart and, in most cases, her own wallet.

The theatre is open air - although Cade had some ideas late on for adding bad- weather covers - and that means that you take your chances. All tickets come with a warning to wear suitable clothes and that umbrellas are not to be put up in the auditorium as it intereferes with the view.  In extreme weather they might cancel but normal rain is ignored.

On Monday 9 April the pleasant Cornish spring weather scuttled off to be replaced with bluster and sudden showers of extra-wet rain.  Stopping to pick up a picnic, the lady in the bakery said her friend was a producer and he had called her to say the Minack was experiencing winds sweeping the drizzle down on to the upper terraces, where by coincidence I had a seat to see "Titanic - the musical".   I bobbed over to the sailing shop and explained the situation to the lady behind the counter. She sold me a showeproof suit  and a Frosty Fox snood in a piratical stripe to keep my hair out of my eyes.

Sitting on a rolled-up mat on the terrace, in my survival suit and wrapped up in a waterproof-blanket, I settled down to watch the matinee performance of a lifetime and got it buckets.

The musical has been performed frequently around the world since its slow start in 1997.  This production was by the local Atlantic Theatre Company.  Using an amateur cast emphasises the ordinary lives of many who died rather than the extraordinary lives of  passengers such as the campaigning editor and journalist W T Stead, who perished on the night he might have written his greatest scoop.

An ingenious stripped-down set had been developed to create the bridge of the doomed ship and to focus on the poignant performances.  History records that the night of the disaster was unusually calm; the water was oily flat as the air, although freezing, was static.

The Atlantic was not having this.  This was its big chance to be seen in daylight instead of gleaming in the velvet darkness, and it wanted to be in the performance so it gathered itself in to swollen rollers and flung spray up over the Minack rock below the stage.  The wind hummed loudly over the orchestra,  tugging at our hoods and bringing us a taste of salt.

At the interval the rain started, through which gulls plunged in to the waves, fishing as the incoming tide brought a shoal close to the Minack rock and within reach.   The gulls circle lazily until they see where dinner is, then fold their wings and dive in to the water with a tiny ring of white to mark where they vanish, clean as an arrow.

In the second half the weather threw itself at the performers who continued, cold, soaking wet,  the wind plastering their clothes to their bodies.  This was not historically accurate but it conveyed a sense of impending shipwreck; the sea and the sky produced spectacular special effects but at the cost to the cast of them being only a little warmer than they would have been had they been dunked in the sea that fateful night.

It has been dismissed as grief-porn, this picking over of a century-old civil disaster but that is to miss what even Goebbels - who later commissioned a film about it - realized. The disaster was capable of being read several ways and has been over the century. Jared Poley tells us that in 1912 the dominant theme was that of nature triumphing over man but by the 1940s Goebbels used it to amplify what was true; much British self-confidence had gone down with the ship.

POSH - coming in May

The Royal Court Theatre takes POSH back to the Duke of York’s Theatre, London, from Friday 11 May to Sat 4 August and booking is already brisk for the opening month.

An elite set of Oxford students arrange a private drinking party and startling events ensue.

If staged badly this could be a crude piece of Conservative-bashing propaganda but staged properly it can be a much more complex play, so let's hope the Royal Court rise to the challenge. 

I had the advantage of seeing it at Cambridge, performed by Cambridge students with special insight in to the script. Yes, there is some chippy caricature but they also managed to breathe sympathy in to the behind-each-other's-back stabbing, the ragging - some of it downright hostile - and the insecurity of a generation who cannot rely on the automatic entitlements they once thought the world owed them.   It's also farcically funny at points as this uber-group see their plans for the event work out in a way not necessarily to their advantage. 

An old-money element is the youth who will be expected to take over the crumbling family pile and waste the rest of his life trying to maintain it. "Always the roof" he wails, drawing a sigh of identification from anyone in the audience who has ever had to deal with property maintenance - and that's nearly everybody.

The weakest element of author Laura Wade's thesis is that these students have a unique sense of entitlement, although it was treated as a revelation in 2010 when the play opened.  In fact rather a lot of students think this, Oxford or otherwise. The Cambridge production had an extra edge because of the historic competition between the universities.  They are not the same; not inside and not outside.  Cambridge remains snootier about its intellectual capacities but is otherwise a meritocracy, Oxford retains the underlying tang of social snobbery but has gone to far greater lengths to insist that so long as its entry qualifications are met, all are welcome to apply.

Spoilers sweetie but this is not a comedy. If you haven't seen POSH, grab a seat now and decide whether it is a fair representation of the cabinet, or whether they embody the character traits of the 646 who represent us in the House of Commons, regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum.

Equus

(c) London Classic Theatre

The London Classic Theatre production of Equus  is part way through its national tour; there is still time to catch it.

But has the nearly 40-year old play has escaped its age? Not every play travels through time, the hallmark of a classic.

The horrifying premise is simple: a teenage boy has blinded six horses to which he was devoted and refuses to say why he inflicted this appalling cruelty. The child psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Malcolm James) has to find out why.

Optimistically - or perhaps arrogantly - both he and the referring magistrate think that the psychiatrist can fix whatever has gone wrong in young Alan Strang's head (Matthew Pattimore).

 
The first sign of age is that in 1973 people apparently had faith in psychiatrists, or at least Sir Peter Shaffer wrote it that way.  I doubt if psychiatrists now would see themselves as quite so confident that they could fix behaviour just by unravelling motives and talking about them, if they ever did.  However, in 1973 such theories were achingly fashionable so an audience would not necessarily have spotted this as a theatrical effect rather than an accurate representation of what a psychiatrist does for a living.

The second difficulty is that one of the formative moments in Alan Strang's life hinges on a chance meeting. Spoilers sweetie - you need to see it because the staging is wonderful - but it is a victim of time.  An event which might plausibly have happened to Alan around 1960 could not happen to the infant Alan in 2000.  If it had, the parents would be shouting about something other than class war.  Our reality has shifted  too much in specific aspects to accommodate the assumptions underpinning the play in 1973.

These, however, are minor quibbles which could be got round by simply setting the play in the past, which as we all know, was another country.  It wouldn't take all that much; Alan Strang would wear flares and a hideous acrylic jumper,  Martin Dysart needs a kipper tie and the lady magistrate should wear a skirt rather than trousers.

Everything else works as it stands because the designer Kerry Bradley has done a bang-up job of  producing a flexible but monumental set which allows the meetings to happen with simple movements and careful lighting and not the slightest delay between scenes, whilst still clearly indicating where changes have happened.   These open sets carry a risk that the audience will miss the signal that a location or times has changed; never once does the set, the lighting or the direction trip over itself leaving the audience behind and thinking "Eh, where are we up to now?"  Moreover, the set is in units which allow it to fill various stage sizes, creating the illusion of a classical amphitheater even in a small space.

For the most difficult query I had to seek an opinion from a Yout of Today.  As Philip Larkin pointed out, sexual intercourse began in 1963 so there had been barely a decade of it by 1973.  A play about myths and sex had great power in those days.  Plays about myths still might, but sex? Can it really still be a credible dramatic motive in an age when you can't open an email account without immediately being offered dodgy products?

Da Yout of Today informs me that it can be, and moreover it has to within this play or else Strang won't play-off properly against Dysart who spends much of the time bemoaning his own arid personal life.

Dysart is the heart of the piece. Ultimately it isn't  the psychoanalysis of young Alan Strang which matters; that's only solving the headline puzzle.  The driving complexity is the aging, raging Dysart, chasing himself about the stage, able to see his own difficulties but unable to do anything about them. Malcolm Jones carries the demanding role with honour, never letting it tip over in to a cartoon shrink but depicting a man standing on the edge of insanity for a living.

Equus is already on the list of the 100 plays of the 20th Century as too are Peter Shaffer's "Royal Hunt of the Sun" and "Amadeus".  Both of those are in historical settings in which the audience automatically colludes with creating another time and place. Equus uniquely challenges the director to keep the play current, not let it slip in to a being a period piece.  This production manages that - it was only me who noticed that the audience had changed - and therefore grab the chance to see it in case we have to wait another 40 years for it to be staged competently.

Here is a surviving dubbed fragment of  The White Horses  (1965, aired in Britain in 1968) which the young Alan Strang was not allowed to watch. It gives a flavour of the aspirations of the time the character was formed in.  

Sammy Davis Jr.

During the week the name of Sammy Davis Jr. was mentioned and someone said they hadn't realized he was more than a somewhat mannered singer.   This is an easy mistake to make; Britain did not receive the quantity of shows which demonstrated his ability.  Let's put that right now that by thanking the uploaders and his estate who have made  material available so that we can glimpse how this major talent worked and begin to appreciate that he was one of the very best popular entertainers which America has ever produced.

Those who knew him insist that he was in fact the greatest; talented in  an over-arching way that was difficult to see it all at once.

Exhibit one is a section of a 1963 show he did with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.  Despite the natural competition between them, they knew who was the talent on that stage.  Sinatra pleads  "What do you waaaant of us?" They go through their joshing and party pieces in the time honoured "Hollywood Party" mode, then at 6:14 Davis produces Marlon Brando.

He doesn't just impersonate a character; he acts it for both good and ill, showing the power but also the incoherence in that style of theatre. Impersonations, my foot. Right there in a tiny link you have a profound critique of the method school of acting; Davis was never incoherent in his life and he's not convinced that it is of any value.  Dammit, this is supposed to be performing for an audience, not modelling.

The Copa Room, Sands Hotel, 1963 part 3



Item 2.  This interview ought to be compulsory viewing for every grunting youth in the land. Pay attention boy, this is how articulacy makes people forget about the looks of the person in front of them. Although Davis regularly joked about race - it was, and is, a major political consideration which can get in the way of a performance - it is known that what he was particularly sensitive about was the glass eye he was obliged to wear after a car accident.  Although he walked in rhythm, it's observably the case that he was no raving beauty. Perversely, that was lucky. A prettier face might have found it impossible to cope with the disfigurement.  As it turned out, people were not all that bothered; they wanted him to joke, to dance and to sing. Luckily, so did he.

Wogan interview with Sammy Davis Jr. 1989 (part 1 of 4)



His signature song, Mr Bojangles, has many versions available. This one is from 1985 and is remarkable for its simple orchestration which never overpowers the poetry. When lesser performers attempt it they misunderstand it to be a schmaltzy tum-ti-tum.  Davis shows that it is in fact an intimate monologue delivered to you, personally.

Mr Bojangles 1985



A Youtube search now shows the major performances of his life and The Estate of Sammy Davis Jr. has archive photography and further material.   In 1964 Ed Sullivan knew he had created a special moment when Davis and Ella Fitzgerald appeared together for him.  He says that when the audience grows up, it will tell its children they saw them perform.  What Sullivan could not foresee is that the recording survived and is here.

Job of the Month - Ferryman

There can be no finer life than to be a ferryman down at St Mawes in Cornwall, moving people across the rivers of the frilly landscape.  One lucky person will be paid to be the Place Ferry Skipper from April to October. 


They are looking for an experienced boat-handler but will provide training and certification for a local qualification.  All you have to do is steer a little boat safely from one side of paradise to the other, taking account of the tides, carrying the tourists and locals while the money-making season is on. 


To get an idea of the job, this is one of the bigger ferries towards the Falmouth side, with a pod of dolphins playing around it.


If you can't pilot a boat, they sometimes need ticketing and distribution staff.

StageFright

To the Theatre Royal at Bury St Edmunds for the first production of StageFright by Michael Punter, directed by Colin Blumenau.

Set 1894 during the run of Sir Henry Irving's  "Faust", the action takes place on a night with winter weather so foul that it traps Sir Henry and his theatre manager, Bram Stoker, in an attic dressing room in the eaves of the Lyceum theatre in London.

By coincidence, the temperature on Saturday in Suffolk was -7C during the day and -12C at night, so the audience came in having just experienced the sucking cold of an icy grave.

Bram Stoker was writing Dracula in those days, summoning him up from the influences of theatre, religion, secular philosophy and his own Irish talent - under-estimated by Iriving - so that there seems to be another character, one who never appears, threaded through the work.

It is believed that Irving disapproved of Dracula - he is said to have walked out of a reading and never played the part, although it would have been natural to offer it to him. It is also possible that Conan Doyle saw the pair working and fed that in to his own creations, Holmes and Watson, recognizing it to be much more than a case of an employer and a technical manager.

Irving  was a self-made man and he knew exactly what he was doing; creating effects on the stage. Even his name was partly an illusion, re-fashioned because it sounds so much better than John Henry Brodribb.   Michael Punter gives Irving all the doubt and superstition which goes with the job of acting no matter how hard Irving tries to stick to rational responses.  If you spend your working life summoning up illusory characters, isn't there a risk of calling up something real, Irving wonders, of speaking the Devil's name and having him answer. Perhaps he is always listening for the invitation, like an actor waiting for his stage-call on the other end of a speaking-tube?

Stuck for that freezing night in an attic, the pair of them begin to discourse on this - or rather, Irving declaims and Stoker sets up the lines for him, because that is how their relationship works. They think they are alone but an empty theatre is never completely empty; you have to be careful what you do, what you say because you never know who may be listening. Could a building record the events which happen in it, Irving muses.  If you ask the staff of Marks and Spencer just a few yards away in the modern shopping centre in Bury St Edmunds they will tell you yes, and the building doesn't even have to exist any more. They still get half-ghosts of monks wading through their sales floor and sinking down staircases which have not existed for centuries.

The snow falls outside and soon Irving and Stoker begin to suspect they are not alone.

The Theatre Royal is an 1819 building, beautifully refurbished for a modern audience, so that this is the perfect intimate place to watch a play which aims to recreate the conventions of Victorian stage and parlour magic.   The set has been constructed to nudge out in to the auditorium, dissolving the line between stage and seats so that we are invited to float in the dingy cluttered room, a spectral presence, as if hovering at a seance table.  This is the world where lighting is by gas; that is the product of science and an advanced economy but gas light is still soft and variable and is delivered in fittings which resemble the old oil lamps.  We are looking in to a dusty jewel-box of enchantment and treasure.

The director and author were adamant; to capture the rich flavour of  High Victoriana it had to include stage illusions which the Victorians would have expected in a theatre they would have recognized. Drama had not yet reached the naturalistic psychological approach which is most common today.  Stoker and Irving squabble about this;  Stoker has all the best technical arguments but Irving's case is made in the play itself; there's no mistaking the jump of the audience when .... spoilers, sweetie.

The premier run of Stagefright is at the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds
From Tuesday 14 February until Saturday 25 February
Tickets cost between £8 and £20 depending on seat and performance, bookable online (scroll down and select date).

For some locations in Suffolk, the theatrebus deal is available which includes transport, the ticket, a drink and the programme.  All tickets: £23  For under 26’s: £11.50

Concessions are available including the £5 on-the-day for under 26 year olds, but must be booked via the box office: 01284 769505

The performance is suitable for anyone over 8 years old but is genuinely frightening.