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20 years of New Who

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IT was 20 years ago today - well tomorrow actually - that Doctor Who returned to TV screens after almost a generation off air. At that moment there were plenty of questions marks about whether a show which had a less than stellar reputation at the time of its cancellation could be made a success. I remember reading a Radio Times preview in the school library - at a time when I probably should have been revising for my imminent IB exams - and mostly just being glad that there was finally going to be a British science fiction show broadcast. At that time - before Life on Mars or Afterlife or Primeval or Being Human (many of which were green-lit on the back of Who's revival - genre shows barely got a look-in in this country. CBBC had always done a decent trade, with dramas like Aquila and The Demon Headmaster, but after 5pm the only shows you were likely to see were American imports. And don't get me wrong, Buffy et al were brilliant, but now and then I had a hankering for a show ...
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The only thing worse than a coup is lefty school policy

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IT is fair to say that in the current political climate respectful disagreement has becoming increasingly impossible. In America in particular both conservatives and liberals have come to see one another as an existential threat and the insults exchanged on social media reflect that growing schism When Trump was first elected in 2016 I was at that point loathe to overreach and use the "f" word to describe the US President. I mean, sure, he was a fuckwit - crude, corrupt and corrosive - but that didn't in itself make him a latter-day Hitler. Some of that instinct to moderate my response was probably down to my frustration around that time about the increasingly deranged depiction of Corbyn's Labour as being a party one step away from opening gulags in North London. The hyperbole may have reached its height in a bizarre piece of speculative fiction, printed in one of the grottier tabloids, which had the newly-installed Prime Minister Corbyn skulking behind the curtains ...
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Social media offers power without accountability

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IT has always been the case that those with wealth and power often attempt to exert their influence in politics. In the past perhaps the efforts have not been as obvious because someone like Rupert Murdoch or Lord Rothermere worked behind the scenes. We would perhaps hear of meetings with party leaders and the mogul's worldview was apparent in the stories their journalists would write. But for the most part the media baron himself remained in the shadows. Elon Musk is different in that his increasingly forceful interventions come directly from him; the world's wealthiest man owns one of the biggest platforms on the planet and screams out his inklings and obsessions on an almost hourly basis. Perhaps never before have we seen so clearly how those people with clear agendas and nearly limitless resources bring pressure to bear on elected politicians. He is lobbyist, outrider and donor all rolled into one.  For all the anxieties among the populist right about nation states being he...
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A Ghost Story for Christmas - a tribute

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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...
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Describing a friend

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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 ...
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Tax mother******, do you pay it?

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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...
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Save the West Country, save the world...

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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...
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