The Griper's Times

The very first entry was 1970's The Stalls of Barchester NOTHING says Merry Christmas like spiders the size of kittens - plump and mewling - scuttling up the boughs of an ageing ash and in through a bedroom window.  The nightmarish experience of a country squire is one of the stand-out moments of the BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas strand. Elsewhere in its annals, a terrible vengeance is visited on a treasure-hunter whose night-time dig disturbs more than just the earth, and an orphan boy wakes in darkness to hear the horrid sound of music and laughter. It was 2004 when I came across the long-running series via a set of late-night repeats on BBC4. In fact I was steered that way by my Dad, who had watched the episodes on transmission 30 years earlier. Somewhat scarily several decades now stand between me and my sixth form self tuning in to watch The Ash Tree for the first time. Interest in the episodes from the 1970s was enough to persuade the BBC to commission a brand new in...

PETER Kennedy - or simply PK to many in the newsroom - was the very definition of an old-school journo. He'd cut his teeth as a cub reporter on the Solihull News in the early 1960s and by the time I started my own traineeship almost 50 years later he was back on his old patch having seemingly seen almost everything during a career in newspapers and BBC Radio. Having someone of this experience sat opposite you was a rare thing in this era of the local press, most others from my particular cohort of trainees usually shared a desk with a senior who'd started a year to 18 months before them.  Peter was in many ways the sort of reporter who if I'd really stopped and thought about it would have persuaded me that there was no way I was cut out for the profession; he was fearless in his questions, shameless in his anecdotes and would wash down his lunch with a mini bottle of wine. Frankly I should have been terrified but strangely having this imposing industry veteran sat opposite ...

IT appears that at last the right-wing press has found some compassion for minorities - it's just a shame that they're hurrying to help the affluent rather than the embattled.  Consider  The Daily Telegraph  rushing to the defence of an elderly couple who had assembled investments in 60 buy-to-let properties, but because of Labour's tax plans now faced "selling their boat". Call me old-fashioned, but people whose retirement plans to sail the world are built on the back of buying up half the Monopoly board are not exactly the epitome of being on the breadline.  The same paper also splashed on the fact that the government's move to close a death duty loophole on agricultural estates had been met with disapproval from the world's richest man - Elon Musk. What to, misquote Mrs Merton, first attracted the multi-billionaire to opposition to redistributive tax policy? I haven't yet seen reports of a "war" on those hard-pressed passengers facing a hi...

THE North Cornish coast in the early 1990s seems, on the face of it, a rather unlikely place for a revolution... But the end of an old world order has to start somewhere - why not the small village of Delabole? It was here, 33 years ago, that the UK's first commercial windfarm was built. My earliest childhood holidays were just a couple of miles away; the turbines - china white against the skyline - visible from the front of the bungalows. The structures were the legacy of local dairy farmers who, having lost a barn roof in stormy conditions, began to consider if they couldn't in fact harness "the damn wind" for good.  And in doing they were not just entering a new UK industry, they were starting one from scratch. Back then this technology was new and strange enough to attract visitors - 100,000 in just a few years. I still remember standing outside the site's tourism office, staring up at the giant blades with a sense of awe.  Fast forward three decades and there...

IN order to finally turn the tide on the dangerous populists whose influence is ever growing we need to assert a simple truth - the past was pretty shitty for almost everyone. A sort of hazy nostalgia for a time not so long ago is a powerful tool for extremist parties such as the AfD, MAGA Republicans and the UK's own Reform. If only, they argue, we could get back to when our countries were simpler, quieter and (let's be honest) whiter. A period sort of around the late 1990s but without Tony Blair in charge. When we could have a touch of the Blitz spirit without the actual bombing. Indian takeaways but rather fewer actual Indians. A green and pleasant land but none of that green transition nonsense. And maybe a bit of childhood meningitis (because no vaccines, obviously). You swiftly get the whiff of wistfulness in Facebook heritage groups when a picture of an old high street conjures up memories of an era when kids were safe to play out, men whistled on their way to work and i...

DURING the grimmest period of Covid I took a call from my then news editor asking me to investigate reports that the local ice rink was to be used as an emergency morgue. The claim was one of many circulating during a time that was, much as now, rife with anxiety and fast-spreading rumours. As it turns out the ice rink story was entirely untrue, although I was able to confirm contingency planners had indeed earmarked a hangar at Birmingham Airport for a similar purpose.  During the often chaotic weeks and months that came after I also had to investigate reports of army helicopters conducting flights over the borough, plans to bring the area into local lockdown and care workers without PPE using bin liners for protection. Some claims were true, others were partly factual but perhaps exaggerated or distorted and some proved entirely bogus. The job of any responsible reporter when alerted to a whisper on Twitter or an anonymous email is to establish quickly whether there's anything to...