Planks.

I do sometimes think the British media would sink itself if left unchecked. Not that I’m sure who is actually doing the checking.

Vital, dynamic and creative this country’s press and broadcast media surely are. Even world-leading they tell me – and after all, who can argue with Harry Hill’s TV burp? But so many people manning its armada of little ships seem hell-bent on torpedoing the flagship – that big ol’ Thames barge, the BBC.

My phrasing there is something that those with Auntie in their periscope cross-hairs would leap on as illustrating the point – who says the Beeb is Great Britain’s broadcasting flagship?

They must resent the implication – and see it everywhere, probably.

“While we have to lash together ad revenue as creatively as possible to vigilantly tar the decks against sinking, the good ship HMS BBC simply pumps out her bilges with public finance. A huge, fat, free tax on the tuners-in. ..AND, while we’re at it, they can promote cross-platform like no-one else. Bastards. ..Load tubes One and Two.”

You can see their point, though they sound like they’ve been at sea rather too long. A bit like this metaphor.

Any brooding resentment of the corporation isn’t helped by the fact that the BBC does seem to have always reflected the British beaurocracy of its day, like a true institution – middle-heavy, inefficient, even miopically self-cultural. ..And quote me on that, as it sounds dead clever, like what a sniping left-wing critic might column. ..Or is it the right-wing critics who really have it in for the liberal toffs at Broadcasting House? I forget.

Anyway, the point bearing down on us very slowly like a lumbering container ship is that I think this is the wrong way to see the Beeb.

—

The ‘brandross beast’ – which, incidentally, sounds like a new Sherlock Holmes adventure – may have exposed Russel and Jonathan as pratt-liable twits sometimes, but back-of-the-classroom showing off by the two over-confident popular boys is really a matter for the detention hall. Not the Commons.

Make ’em run round the playing field in their pants once or twice, maybe. Make ’em look into the eyes of the sweet old man they’ve been rude to and see the two softies blub, sure. Warm their backsides. But fire them? Fire everybody?

One of the most risible aspects of one of these essentially pointless squalls on the waters of popular entertainment is, of course, the personalities who suddenly clamour for the mic. The Unfunny.

We’ve had a parade of distinctly humourless people passing comment on how to make jokes this week. “A-HA,” they light up indignantly, like Dr Alan Statham waving a triumphant finger at a resentfully witty medical student, “THIS is the problem with smirking and smiling and strutting about in funny wigs – it’s dangerous. It’s uncalled-for. It’s… it’s… funny. ..And this is where funny gets you. Hm? Who’s laughing now? Hm?”

I’ve long thought that comedy is like sex – as soon as you’re trying to describe it, you’re missing the point. And the word ‘responsible’ kills it dead.

—

I think the BBC is an institution, alright. A national one. With all its problems, it’s a bally British cultural cornerstone. Maybe filled with uptight, lefty nitwits who forget how lucky they are – though I doubt that’s more than half true – but a thing to cherrish.

We should hold those who helm the Beeb to high account. Tell them when they get the chance to work there: “This is the bloody BBC, mate. Don’t f**k it up.” It’s a woldwide brand like nothing else we own in the UK – like nothing else in the world, in fact. An idea of altruism. The ultimate service of communication. And it communicates an idea of Britain better than any tourist board campaign or political diplomatic push, by the way.
And radio without adverts? Sport and drama and movies and factual stuff without breaks? Full hours of content, not forty limping minutes? Surely brilliant that they found a way to do this. It matters to a nation’s intellectual well-being that it can access some information without being force-fed consumer society values and pressures.

Adverts help sharpen the creative cutting edge. They’re fun, put simply – and they help busineses sell things and build our once-comfy economy. Plus, ad breaks can be welcome relief, of course. But, chuff. Too much turns your brain to soup.

No, I think the good ship HMS BBC may need a sharp skipper inspecting her every winch and block, but she should sail on proudly. Let her navigate uniquely – she is a beacon of difference. If she should be challenged, let it not be by mean-minded pirates trying to break her up, but by the sheer creative excellence of her commercial counterparts, willing her to perform her best for the sake of the whole flotilla.
However romantic it may be, I just think there’s something about the BBC that somehow sodding matters.

—

Okay, I’ll come clean. The boat metaphor was inspired by an actual Thames barge – one I found myself sitting on, right in the heart of London last weekend.

Our essentially gorgeous former neighbour, Mary, introduced us to her very interesting new chap, Iolo, when we popped up for a night – and Iolo lives on an actual Thames barge. Big bloody thing. A snapshot of working waterways history from blunt bows to snub stern – and a fascinating new perspective on the capital. London does not look the same from the river.

Can’t tell you how nice it is to meet people who see things differently to you. We seemed to chat constantly for 24hours straight.

Originality keeps us all afloat.

Pep.

Hmm.

Have you seen the new Pepsi rebrand?

Not much fizz.

I like the idea of turning the blue-red wave into a smile – positive story, confident playfulness. Sounds nice on paper. . Just doesn’t look nice on paper. Not to me, somehow. Looks like a student had a worthy go at it – a bit limp for the real world. Yet all at a mind-bending $1.5Billion roll-out. In the, ah, real world.

It’s about execution. Which really comes down to exec caution, I suspect.

I was chatting with Gel over coffee in the Cali this morning, about how recession can claim some good agencies and businesses through really unfortunate timing, but also sometimes through their own lack of proper ideas when it counts. You have to have an idea. Everything is fed by the idea – the message you’re strategising with.

Now, here is an idea that’s falling down in the execution. And I’ll just bet that the artroom guys went through eye-crossing variants on the classic logo to arrive at this boardroom-friendly compromise. They have my sympathy. But the end result – does it add to the brand or detract from it?

As a flat graphic – the core reduction of the brand’s key memory-jogger, the logo – it kind of reduces it for me. Tries to add some pep, but takes away from the integrity of the simple classic mark.

I remember when they radically rebranded in the early nineties. One friend at art college memorably said it looked like “Pepsi from Back to the future”. Kind of space age. Bold.

This one is just a bit… flat.

Now, if it was me. Yeah.

Daft Russian Constructivist, cold war graphics at spikey angles. Nice. All red and white and black. ..No, forget why. Forget the fizz focus groups. Just aim for the post-communist market. Bold move. New opportunities. If Coca Cola is the US dream, flip the appeal. Yeah.

Bear with me.

..Pepski.

No sex.

Not tonight. Not on Channel Four, anyway.

If you missed The Sex Education Show which had been running on Tuesday nights at 8.00pm for six weeks, you’ll have missed some scary pictures of STDs, some scarier stories from teenage Britain and some downright punch-drunk bravery in the face of a relentlessly frightening series of indignities foist on the plucky lads of Long Ashton football club.

Was there nothing these brave boys wouldn’t step up to do?

I can’t even bring myself to list the activities Anna Richardson put them through. Admittedly, I can imagine it would be hard to say No to such a jolly nice lady – but really. After girth confessions, fertility pots, infection swabs and sexual history memoirs, you’d think these Bristol tommies would just stay down. Leave it. Let the bell ring and be done with it. But no.

“Foreskin hygiene, gentlemen – an impromtu inspection with our nice lady doctor specialist here. Who’s for it?”

Dunkirk spirit, lads. It was for the country. Makes my bottom lip quiver.

..Eeew. Leave it.

Anyway.

Well-earned night off tonight for the old chaps.

Drama.

The Southwark Playhouse is a proper London thing.

It’s a kind of post-industrial cupboard space under the tube line, tucked behind an old pub on the corner opposite a shining shard of South Bank offices. Arriving there to meet chums Jules and Angela on Wednesday night, I had no idea what we were about to watch.

How to disappear completely and never be found is the kind of metro theatre that simple shire folk like me imagine everyone in the capital goes to see regularly. Tiny venue, five players, energetic monologues and lots of metaphysical angst over modern city life. “You’ll like this” Angela smirked, “it’s about a brand manager losing his marbles.”

It was, and I did. As I have. Too much of the absurd ad-speak dialogue between wide-boy protagonist Charlie and his cartoon clients and colleagues made some kind of sense. Not just to me with my (patently faux) brand consultant’s hat on – I think to everyone. We all understand a degree of brandspeak; the issues of impression and idea and perceived value. And, though I’ve ended up having many serious conversations about it with clients because I think it’s about helping people communicate more effectively… really. Doesn’t take much to make the real thing sound like a finger-pistoling parody. A bit like Sarah Pallin. Except she uses shot guns.

We all laughed knowingly at the well-trodden themes of work pressures and self worth and public transport in 21st century London. After all, who isn’t lost property? Who doesn’t feel the ringing in their ears behind everything? The constant eye-twitching throb. “There’s a blue sky over me, but the fear is on me” Carl from Underworld drones on their new album as I type. The intermittent grumble of underground carriages passing overhead just added to the performance as I sat there, also simply pondering how the fevering players each remembered so much script. The art of the ack-tor, darling.

It was the gala evening show, and as I sat in the intimate audience and watched the spotlit ideas unfold, grateful for an impromptu seat, I reflected on the shared pains of metro life and the coke-addled pressures of managing ideas – brands – at the expense of managing your own. ..Though chiefly, of course, I reflected on going back to sunny Bournemouth after just one night playing the metro life and feeling the coke-addled pressures of managing blah blah… I live by the seaside and I’ve never not been VERY grateful.

—

At the after-show reception, I found myself being remarkably restrained. Or perhaps even adult.

I didn’t stop conversation with my friends mid-sentence with the words “screw you – there’s a bloke off the telly”. Nope, not me. I didn’t even stop the conversation at the end of a paragraph with some lie about needing the loo. No. instead, I just kept talking to my friends ..and didn’t run over to character acting star Andy Serkis to cover him in enthusiastic spittle with my Gollum impression. I didn’t do it.

We’d all blagged tickets to this version of writer Fin Kennedy’s play because of Julian’s friend Kath, who’s been a stalwart trustee of the Southwark Playhouse for years. The guys have mentioned trying to catch a production there a few times. I’d written some music for Kath’s partner Steve some years back for his London Wall photographic exhibition – culminating in whistly Momo favorite, Metrophilia – and I keep trying to make it to one of their creative social events, often without success. Since Jules finds it hard to out-compliment Kath and Steve after fourteen years of mutual lovelyness, it’s always nice to see them all together. Kath’s energy at all she does is something Julian has long admired.

“I did well meeting them when I first came to London” he said quietly over a champers flute. I smiled. “Yes, you did.” I paused, pursing respectfully – then chin-chinned: ” So did they”.

As we queued for complimentary scampi and chips, I added in a trying-to-seem-offhand voice: “Like the play pretty much spelled out, we need eachother, mate” ..also successfully not adding, in a bubbly blather, “- so let’s hug it up, big boy. C’mon. No, no – c’mon…”

For various reasons, anyway, it turns out that Jules is on teasing terms with Andy.

“So,” he apparently grinned at the Lord Of The Rings legend, “the new Tin Tin movie you’re shooting – had to do much doggy method prep to play Snowy?”

Mr Serkis obviously knows Jules alright, as he merely shook his head – without saying: “you know it’s Captain Haddock…”.

I missed all this of course, as I was faithfully chatting up Angela.

—

I came home after a subsequent morning trying to frame a brief with Jules for a mutual client – a brief with no parameters, goals or current information, all of which we had to try to commission a PR guy with – to find a little drama had taken place back home.

The new porch guys have taken away our desperately tumble-down old porch. We’re porchless. The house looks like its being demolished, with the sun-tan marks of absence on the exposed brickwork. Poor thing.

It’s disappeared completely, never to be found. Thankfully.

Town and country birds.
I seem to have spotted a number of interesting specimens recently.

Putting them eagerly into my enthusiasts scrapbook I notice a subsequently intriguing cross-breeding of influences forming. Here then, without any in-the-field sketches, sadly, is a short list of birds that have caught my eye.

—

Bird #1

Helena.

Lovely girl. Risen to fame from nowhere, to become every politico-financial analyst’s go-to gal. Everyone says we’re going to her, apparently. Inevitable, they say.

Yes indeed, Ms Handcart is very popular right now.

So, amid the shrieking hair-pulling, the goggle-eyed blaspheming, the chicken gizzards-reading and mindless fax paper-throwing-around going on in most important office buildings and newsrooms at the moment, we’ve been looking for a little escape.

—
Bird #2
Andrea.

Another nice lass. Bit artificial.

Geek partner in crime, Chris, bought me – or perhaps the group – a desperately pleasing birthday gift this week. A box set of Star Trek. The original series, with Captain Kirk and pals – but super-geekily remastered with NEW special effects, so the Enterprise doesn’t look quite as grainy and wobbly. I love the jobs some people find for themselves in uncertain times.

We’ve watched too many of them already, naturally. Not least because I spent much of yesterday feeling a bit crook.

We took ourselves out to the forest for a Sunday afternoon stroll and found a balmy summer warmth in the middle of October and squadrons of families in pratty safety helmets riding push-bikes very slowly along very very safe flat gravel paths through the trees.

The New Forest being more Walt Disney than Disney, with twinkling, babbling brooks and mossy carpets of green under dappled silver birch woods and golden autumn leaves flickering gently down through sun beams like confetti, we found a suspiciously stage-managed looking grassy clearing to lie down in. Had to shoo away the unicorns and little purring-winged fairy Kylies but it was okay. We slept under the clear blue sky and watched lazy vapour trails high above for a while, before stopping at a leafy evening pub in one of the many pretty villages on the wending drive home.

..Naah, it was okay.

Though I’d left the Mac up to do some work when we got home, by the time all that lovelyness had had a go at clearing my head and somehow failed, all I could face doing was watching another episode or two of daft, forty-year-old sci fi. Which strangely seemed to do the trick, eventually.

Captain Kirk is wedded to his spaceship, they keep telling us. It’s ultimately going to prove to be a giant, alien-chick-porking fib, of course, but you can’t blame him. The 23rd century is incredibly neo-sixties. In What are little girls made of, when apparent robotics genius, Dr Roger Korby, innocently tells former flame, nurse Christine Chappel, that he’s not tinkered in android love with allegedly feelingless but conspicuously girl-shaped artifical companion, Andrea, you can see Mrs Roddenberry’s boof-blonde character none-the-less thinking: “so why’d you give her QUITE so much eye-lash upholstery and heaving cleavage?”

Did find myself humming Everybody ought to have a maid from A funny thing happened on the way to the forum afterwards.

—
Bird #3

Jane.

Now she’s a girl who’s been on my mind a lot this year.

There was a telling moment on The Daily Show last week. A moving one, I thought. “I’m getting a little tired of certain Republicans telling me that small towns are the only places in America with values” said Jon Stuart, with restraint. “Do you know what New York is? It’s ten small towns all piled on top of one another in the same building.”

The battle for America’s evolving identity does seem to pit town against country – small towns are real America, cities are slick, corporate engines of evil.

Well, it’s hard not to scowl at Wall Street right now. And systemic corporate culture is no mere gloss to the American political system. But Jon’s heart-felt jab made me think of one author and her seminal book – which is, in truth, a kind of love letter to the city.

Jane Jacobs was no trained city planner or architect. Just a regular Mom, perhaps not so dissimilarly qualified to Sarah Pallin. But, ingeniously using her eyes to look at stuff, she ended up collecting up what she saw into a book of recommendations to planners and people-space designers in the late fifties – The death and life of great American cities. It shook the establishment.

It was required reading on Caroline’s urban design course. Except I found myself reading it on holiday in Italy – after Caroline had completed the course, and before she’d read it herself. As we bobbed in the Med, I found myself telling her with great authority about numbers of eyes on streets and the importance of mixed usage.

The main thing to have struck me, beyond the specific, embarrassingly No Shit, Sherlock observations she makes, critisising architects’ science fiction daydreams that have little bearing on what people really do in their spaces, is what a love letter to the city it really is. How much the city can support not only life-giving diversity but humanising community. She writes with passion and inspiration. Even pride.

Thinking of all these different ladies here, I guess my point is that when you’ve escaped for a bit, there are real problems to go back and face. You have to find access to a space that effectively recharges you somewhere – so you can deal with real human being stuff more effectively. Find a little fortified courage to see things as they really are, not how we imagine them to be.

Far away from the stage-managed beauty of the countryside – refreshing and life-affirming as it is – the sharp end of modern human politics may find many of its answers in the city, the solutions to some real human challenges of living side-by-side.

That’s Jane’s Star Trek future. Once we’ve all stopped throwing ourselves around at odd camera angles and the financial deck feels a little firmer under feet, I think many American politicians would do well to consult her sooner than Ms Pallin and Helena.

Might stop a lot of us twitching.

—
Bird Appendix

Peregrine falcons.
Did you see the photos of the nesting pair on the Houses of Parliament this weekend?

What they doing there, then?