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21:43
31 Jul 2006
Charlie And The Chopper
Today's been a day of tidying up after WOMAD and getting ready for August. Typing up the events guide for each month always takes ages but plenty of people seem to rely on it (I've had abuse by email for not finishing it earlier) so it's a must-have.
Also delighted to receive word today that South Reading Vixens, the girls' football team nigh-on adopted by our site, got to the semis of a prestigious international competition held in Manchester last week. They lost 4-0 to the team who went on to win the tournament - Manchester City's U-14 girls side! I don't think I could have asked for much more than the Vixens to do so well and for City to lift the trophy. (Actually I'd probably rather have had Vixens win it, having met some of the team, but they still did really well.)
A man has left a comment beneath one of our WOMAD photo galleries claiming my colleague Linda was the most beautiful woman attending the entire festival - she rather enjoyed that one. No one has, as yet, left a message proclaiming me the most handsome male, but it's only a matter of time I'm sure...
Had Charles Runcie, head of sport for English regions, make a brilliant cameo appearance in my life earlier. He came to Radio Berkshire for half an hour, sat down next to me, discovered he'd lost his diary, decided he must have left it on the train, checked his voicemail, received a message from the train manager - who'd read the diary, found his number, dialled it and said the diary was safe and well - then got up and left the building. Very impressive.
I've got two days off - tomorrow and Thursday - in return for all the WOMAD action. Not sure if they'll be used wisely or not, to be honest I'm just looking forward to the lie-in. I need all the sleep I can get - at the weekend I'm going on an overnight ghost hunt with former drag queen Jamie Wake, which should be as interesting as it sounds, so I'm storing up on kip ahead of that.
Plus in a few weeks' time rumour has it I'm going up in a helicopter to partly re-enact one of the first airmail deliveries every made. I missed the meeting about this through being at WOMAD but note, to my intrigue, that my name is down next to it on the list of who is covering what. Lovely! I'm also on the trail of a Berkshire UFO society who reckon they're seeing lights on the South Oxfordshire border, as though helicopters weren't an interesting enough aerial challenge...
Hello and welcome to the part of WOMAD where I post humiliating photos of myself!
In the first two photos I'm taking part in an Indian dance workshop on the Tri-Span Stage. I've joined Indian dancer Pallavi and a selection of children to, er, 'dance' in front of a few hundred people.
The second image above shows me appearing seductive and lovelorn as I wait for my husband to return home late at night. But I'm sure you'd worked that out from the photo.
Of course I'm more than just an Indian dance expert - I'm also a photographer and a sombrero model. The sombrero is now in the back of the car awaiting its next outing, which I suspect will be some distance away.
My hair and overall appearance deteriorated in stages as the festival went on. In the following photo, taken while on air with presenter Phil Kennedy from the WOMAD fairground, I look uncannily like Fred Flintstone.
There are worse photos than these but I'm not subjecting any of us to horror of that magnitude.
Other WOMAD stuff:
I returned to my car on Saturday to find someone had placed a postcard underneath my windscreen wiper. It was blank on the reverse but the front showed a selection of sunny views with the caption "Around Bognor Regis". I would dearly love to meet the person who put it there and have, to my eternal shame, since lost it somewhere. It was a nice touch though.
It pays to turn up early. I was so early on Friday that the office issuing press passes hadn't opened. They gave me a guest pass instead, which over the coming days entitled me to park in the guest car park, a damn sight closer to the entrance than the press car park in the dim distance. While every other BBC employee had a press pass with their full name and BBC station on it, I had a guest pass which simply read "Ollie". I found that quite cool.
I've bought two CDs on the back of WOMAD - Batucada Sound Machine (they played a track live for me and it was amazing) and Kanda Bongo Man (on the main stage yesterday afternoon, irresistible). The prices in the WOMAD shop are sky high. One CD was £8 for two tracks! Absurd.
Right then. Reading Festival next month! Same site, entirely different line-up. I was working the early shift at WOMAD and saw plenty of great bands without ever seeing an evening act. I certainly won't be going home early at Reading though - not with Muse to see...
If you came here earlier today you might have happened upon a Dayoramoblog post from me - that is, an audio post recorded using my mobile phone at WOMAD.
It has come to my attention that is was barely intelligible. Lesson learned: never use a mobile phone, re-routed via the USA, to produce audio from a music festival. Particularly not when blessed with the professional outside broadcast equipment I had at my disposal.
I'd like to think I did a better job with that. In fact, I had my most enjoyable broadcasting moment to date earlier this afternoon.
I surrounded myself with the fifteen or so members of Batucada Sound Machine, a group hailing from New Zealand with a heavy Brazilian influence, and their assorted horns and drums. Then, after a quick interview with two of their number, they played a live and exclusive track for BBC Radio Berkshire. It was beautiful music and a pleasure to be right at the centre of it.
You can listen back to their performance (including my thrilled "How about that!" at the end) and look at photos from day two of WOMAD here.
One more day to go - I'm worried I might really miss being there. The last two days have been very long but I've loved every minute and done so many things, from taking photos of policemen wearing BBC stickers, to helping our presenter Jules learn to play the didgeridoo, to battling with a strange woman on a walkie-talkie while trying to talk live on air, to interviewing the youngest solo performer at WOMAD, to performing my own little version of Indian dance on stage. All in two days! Who knows what will happen tomorrow...
Well I'm sure you've all missed my sparkling presence. I've been away in Cheshire for a few days, staying with my Aunt. As ever, it was lots of fun and I've managed to come back with a rather nice tan. Some from a bottle, some from the sunshine. Overall the visit was rather "agricultural". We spent an unhealthy length of time judging and dealing with cows - well, heifers actually, of the pedigree Holstein variety (black and white cows) - at the local agricultural show. In addition we looked around the "best farm and herd in Cheshire" and also went to a cattle auction. Immense fun. OK, so not every one's idea of fun, but it was actually enjoyable.
And now it's back down to earth with a bump. Or perhaps a tinkle and a fizz. A fizz, because my wonderful law firm couriered me a magnum of champagne for doing so well in my exams (did i mention I got a distinction.... *cough*) and a tinkle because I'm having piano lessons again. As of about 4hrs ago. I suddenly decided that perhaps I could have a lesson a week for the next six weeks and thus polish my skills somewhat. It's four years since I had lessons and my standard has slipped somewhat. However, I located my old (well, young and dishy actually) piano teacher and I'm back with lessons... and practice! It was bizarre having a lesson again. David (my teacher) looked pretty much the same as he did four years ago. Back then he was aged 24 and had just got married to someone aged 21. When he initially started teaching me he was aged 21. He's an incredible pianist though. So, I am now older than he was when he first started teaching me, and I'm older than his wife was when they got married. Scary stuff. But it's funny how some things just don't change and we slipped back into an easy routine of piano playing, instruction and banter. Let's hope I get somewhere.
Goodness me, loads to say tonight. But if your attention span won't stretch then I'll start with cute baby wolves, because no one can resist a cute baby wolf:
Look at that. Gorgeous. I spent the morning at the UK Wolf Conservation Trust, near Reading, and enjoyed every minute. The centre had invited children along to learn how to be wolf-keepers - from mucking out to stuffing melons with wolf treats - and I tagged along.
You can read the article here and look at the photo gallery here. You can also access, from either link, a two-minute video of the centre's wolf cubs being taken for their first ever walk with children. It's narrated by one of the senior wolf handlers explaining more about the new arrivals and I think it's a must-see, they're so beautiful.
I went on air twice during the morning to provide updates from the wolf centre and it was great, checking the Berkshire website's inbox just before leaving this evening, to find someone asking for more information having heard one of my reports. It's reassuring to know people do listen, and do take an interest!
Use the audio player below to listen to me signing off from the wolf centre live on air. Henry, our fantastic Irish mid-morning presenter (whom you may remember from Going For Gold), was less than impressed...
Also worth a note today:
A local Berkshire band, The Skies, got stuck on the ramp while arriving to perform on our new music show, The Session. They had two cars and had tried to tail-gate through the barrier. There's a sign outside the barrier warning people not to do this, and to enter individually. The second car got hoisted up into the air. Whoops. At least they can say their music's breaking barriers.
My sat nav died on the journey back from the wolf centre - it wouldn't switch on when I got to my car. Panic? I nearly died. My knowledge of Berkshire is growing day by day but I still didn't feel too prepared to be stuck in the small village of Beenham, needing to get back to the newsroom, with no sat nav. I made it eventually and the sat nav has started working again, a blessed relief for which no words will suffice.
Remember the sheepdog trials last weekend? The shepherd I featured in my article was a man named Colin Turland. The organisers have now been in touch with me to tell me Colin won the competition outright! He and his dog Kelly also won the novice competition. Colin knows how to pick his dogs (he's the one who told me a dog could fetch as much as £5,000) and I obviously can pick a shepherd!
It's WOMAD from tomorrow until Sunday and I fully expect to barely have time to breathe, let alone write much here. You can, of course, follow all the action (and see what I've been doing) on the Berkshire website, and at the moment I'm likely to be on air from the festival at roughly these times:
Friday 10:10am, 11:35am, 12:35pm
Saturday 8:30am, various times 1-4pm
Sunday 8:40am, various times 10am-1pm
Listen live online and get all your WOMAD news and photos here.
I get the feeling I'm very much alone in my family in quite liking some forms of jazz, not that I could name a single jazz musician if I tried. It's just one of those things. I used to do the same with classical music: I'd listen to Radio 3 and enjoy it but I wouldn't have a clue what it was I was enjoying. I just know what I like.
But I want to change that. I want to be able to find some jazz musicians playing locally and playing well.
This all came about because I put together a brief guide to jazz events coming up in Berkshire this August before I left tonight. Two different people sent us press releases about local jazz so I combined them. As I wrote it I realised lots of the events being mentioned sounded great.
So the plan of action is to gatecrash some local jazz events over the coming month and decide what's good, and what's not so good. But I'm not bloody going alone so if you happen to live in Berkshire and feel like seeing some jazz, I want you as a new recruit, two or three nights a month.
Stay tuned here and at the Berkshire site for updates.
Meanwhile, a friend of mine at work told me she went for an interview at the LCC yesterday - to get on my old course.
Sadly she wasn't offered a place (perhaps if she'd bloody told me she was going I could have helped, given interview tips or something) but she did tell me that I am apparently the talk of the interviewees!
According to her, some of the interviewees have been reading a weblog by a guy who used to be on the course but now works at Radio Berkshire, to find out more about what to expect from the LCC.
It hadn't occurred to me when writing about the LCC that this would end up being used in that way, but I have to say it's very cool that it is. And just on the remote off chance that someone's reading this and thinking of applying, by all means drop me an email and say hi. I'm sure that goes for Amy and the LPC, OJ and politics (the man has a job! I'll let him tell you all about it) and any of us for Oxford, too.
Here's an excerpt from a BBC News Online report about the "red mercury" trial involving Mazher Mahmood, the News of the World's infamous "fake sheikh" investigative journalist. These paragraphs deal with a story the NOTW printed last year:
In November 2005, a 27-year-old man was jailed for four months after he admitted selling a fake story to Mr Mahmood and the News of the World about being lined up to be "the fifth bomber" on 7 July.
On 23 October, they printed a story headlined "We expose Brit extremist linked to evil 7/7 monsters".
The article began: "This is the British-born Muslim terrorist who was lined up to be the fifth 7/7 bomber."
It went on to say: "He says he is friendly with another young Muslim who is close to launching a terrorist atrocity here."
[The man who faked the story] was paid £200 for an interview and was promised £5,000 for his story by the News of the World.
I'll declare an interest, I'm no fan of Mazher Mahmood's antics. I don't believe it is responsible journalism, and this is why.
The above excerpt claims the News of the World printed a story about a man they suspected to be the "fifth bomber" on 7 July 2005, having interviewed that man. The man had initially approached them with his story. He said he knew another man ready to commit a terrorist act on British soil.
The excerpt then says the newspaper paid this man £200 and promised to pay £5,000.
Is it our understanding, therefore, that a British newspaper promised to pay a man they thought was a terrorist £5,000?
Does anybody else have a problem with newspapers paying terrorists for their stories?
Yes, the man was later exposed as a fake. But the paper printed his story which strongly suggests that at the time they believed him sufficiently to commit his tale to print. To my mind, journalists paying supposed terrorists in return for splashed front page news stories is horrific.
I don't usually get involved in these things since I'm not good at criticism. Be it a movie, album or piece of art, I'm fairly likely to find something to like about it and settle for that.
But I have to say that if we end up with that thing on the streets of London, I will be absolutely delighted.
If art galleries can't be a bit exotic, then which buildings can be? For pity's sake let's not have another boring brick, cement, stone or other-bland-substance square building. This, after all, is the twenty-first century. Anyone who's played the original Sim City will know that by now all buildings are supposed to be so funky you can barely look at them for the futuristic chill they send down your spine.
That Tate extension will be the very embodiment of our century's architecture embracing its destiny. To infinity and beyond, where our buildings look bloody awesome. If the Jetsons wouldn't be seen dead in it, I don't want to know.
For some reason, whenever I agree with something, or find something I want, I've taken to saying "I'll have that." I can't work out where I've picked it up from. It doesn't beat my friend Becky, however, who earlier said the prices at Madame Tussaud's "felt like rape". Lovely.
Image nicked from Londonist in return for bigging up their usual excellent coverage of these things.
Apologies for my absence over the last few days, I've been quite busy and today's been a productive day off. You know you're enjoying your job when your colleagues practically drag you off the premises for the first time in a month. Alternatively you know your colleagues despise you. I shall optimistically believe it's their concern for my work/play balance.
So, what's been keeping me occupied?
The weekend was all about sheepdog trials near Henley. I've never even seen "One Man And His Dog" so sheepdog trials are new ground for me to cover. The people organising it made me feel very welcome, let me park in a special spot (always a good way to endear me to you if I'm covering your event), provided some great interviewees and generally proved interesting folk.
The big sheepdog news is that these trials might not be around for too much longer. Okay, there were quite a few kids there with their families and that was good to see, but how many of them are going to take up dog training when they're teenagers? My guess is: none. There were no shepherds there under the age of 40 and I'm told no one in Berkshire even trains dogs like this any more - all the competitors were from surrounding counties.
There are many reasons for this decline and most of them are part of the wider problems farmers face. During my visit I was told there's no money in farming, kids don't want to stay in farming because they can be better paid for easier work elsewhere, farmers are now little more than glorified park-keepers in some instances, and training dogs can take up to three years - far too much dedication for younger people in the 21st century.
So if farmers' sons and daughters are your most likely candidates to become future sheepdog trial competitors, and none of those sons and daughters are sticking with farming, there's your problem. But modern technology is also making sheepdogs redundant (what an odd plural "sheepdogs" is).
I'm told most farmers now use quad bikes: they pop a collie on the back, drive up to the sheep, let the collie off now and again to round up a stray sheep, then toddle off back home. Previously you'd need multiple dogs to keep all the sheep in check - now you can cover miles in moments with a quad bike so, like a put-upon parent, you can ferry one collie from sheep to sheep as the day goes on.
This means there are fewer collies knocking around now. Guess how much money you could fetch for a top-of-the-range sheepdog?
£5,000. That's according to Colin, a shepherd I met at the trials. He's no farmer - he worked in factories until he retired and then took up dog training by purchasing a puppy, renting two acres of land and borrowing half a dozen sheep. 18 months later he was competing and now he says he averages just under £1,000 for each dog he sells on. The top ones go for five times that amount.
Read my full report here and look at a photo gallery here.
Finally we've got a mention on journalism.co.uk - "the essential site for journalists", no less. Click here to read their feature about blogging. It mentions BBC blogging expert Robin Hamman's recent meeting with the BBC Berkshire team, and the subsequent story I unearthed from a local weblog (including quotes from my blog entry about it here!). Very nice.
Oh yes! I admit to being rather proud of myself. The exam which was a "b*tch" (see post on 19th June) was actually my best - so it just goes to show how you can't always be the best judge of your own abilities. I'm so pleased that my results have arrived (and they are positive of course). It's been a rather strange period of tme in the last week or so: course over but results not yet out - am I starting work in September or not? Can I plan everything or is that tempting fate? Can I buy that reduced suit in the hope it will be useful for work, or should I wait until results? Do I want to start work? Do I even want to do law? Do I want to crawl into a ball and hibernate aka the world's most efficient hedgehog? What do I want to do with my time off in August? Can I properly relax? A horrid, insecure, emotional few days. But that's over now. So thank you everyone for sticking by me through the LPC, through the exams (you know who you are) and expecially over the last couple of days! ...back to that fizzy grape juice stuff now...
Why would you ever want to go to a normal gig, packed into some dark, dingy, nondescript building in the middle of a city centre, after going to a gig in the middle of a forest?
Watching the Pet Shop Boys in Thetford forest was an amazing experience.
It's the first time I've properly seen them in concert (they played three tracks at T4 On The Beach) which immediately makes it special, and they played two of my favourite songs - Left To My Own Devices and Suburbia - in the early stages of the gig, so I was sold from the start.
But the venue. Wow, the venue. I demand more gigs in the middle of forests! Look at it, it's such a great idea, especially on a gorgeous summer night like last night. It took a good few hours' driving in pretty bad traffic and unbearably hot weather to get there and back but it was all worth the hassle to see such a great gig in the middle of a clearing.
After all, how many gigs hosted by the Forestry Commission have you been to? Trust me, you should go to more. People brought chairs, rugs and picnics, there was no queue for the ample supply of toilets and the bar was, if anything, over-staffed by helpful people who had your drink ready and waiting. "Ideal" is a word often used to mean something of a watered-down version of its actual definition. Last night was ideal.
How many times do people strike up bloody irritating phone conversations on trains about the most boring topics, refusing to be quiet or shut up? Well, this one was different:
That's my fellow online team-mate Linda, sat in Coach F of the 16:45 service from London Paddington to Swansea, speaking live on Radio Berkshire and perfectly audible to the entire carriage.
At 4:40pm each day one of us goes on air to explain what we've been doing on the website, and since we were both on the train one of us had to do it down the phone line there and then. Linda was the unlucky one who got the call. The rest of the (packed) carriage listened in:
"We've spent the afternoon in London working out how to cover Reading Festival with Radio 1 and 6 Music..."
"Yes, it was all about the caviar and champagne..."
"I'm so hot and sweaty, I really need a shower..."
Just three choice clips of the live-on-air conversation she had. Of course the rest of us could only hear her and not presenter Phil Kennedy drawing daft answers out of her by pretending all BBC meetings involve caviar. All credit to her for having the confidence to go through with it in front of a captive audience like that - I had been praying it wouldn't be me...
Also spotted during today's excursion:
Yep, it's a simple ice cream vending machine, but look at the 'Reject button'. How brilliant is that? If you're feeling like a reject, alone and unwanted, cast out by the rest of society, press the special button and get a free 'sympathy' ice cream. Or something like that I'm sure.
The meeting itself went really well. One lady is essentially in charge of getting a special website for the BBC's Reading and Leeds festival coverage off the ground, and she appears thoroughly well-prepared and enthusiastic about the project, which is exactly what we wanted to see. There is potential for it to be a great little site and it looks as though I'll have loads of fun gathering content for it over the festival weekend, from photos to audio to reports by text message from around the festival site. I'll let you know where it is when it's ready.
Off to see the Pet Shop Boys play in Thetford forest tomorrow - yes, that's right, in the middle of a load of trees just outside Thetford. Last time I was in Thetford the locals were just heading off to start burning those trees for kicks (no exaggeration), so it could be an interesting experience. We are also forecast a lot of rain tomorrow night, which had better hold off til the end of the concert or I'll be annoyed. Audio report to follow from the venue on Dayorama tomorrow evening.
Mark Thompson spoke to everyone today about the BBC's "Creative Future" and then moved a lot of things around into different places which make a bit more sense.
Stay here for discussion of the restructuring and my last day on the UpFront induction course, or click here for the tale of Öscar the Crapping Guide Dog, which follows.
Previously there'd been a 'petal' system with around 17 different petals in it. This was alright on paper but in practice it was, for me at least, tricky to even remember which petal I belonged to, let alone where everyone else was.
This much was evident on the first morning of UpFront this week. The hostess went through each petal one by one and asked the 80 or so of us present to raise our hands according to which petal we were in. I could have reasonably been in at least three: News, New Media and Technology, and Nations and Regions. Other people had the same problem.
Now it's a hell of a lot clearer. Look at the diagram above: I am pretty damn sure I fit under 'journalist'. (This is where I discover I actually don't and am crowbarred in somewhere else.)
I like this restructuring. I've not been working with the corporation long enough to really know how it will affect most people I work with or any other departments of the BBC but, applying what little knowledge I have, I like it.
To me it seems like some basic things have been done right. All the audio and music is now in a section called "Audio and Music"; all the visual stuff is in "BBC Vision". All the journalists go in "Journalism" and all the new technology gets produced in "Future Media and Technology". That makes quite a lot of sense. The emphasis is on what is being called "360-degree commissioning", by which is meant the idea of signing up for a new TV series, radio show and website all at the same time as part of the same deal, rather than one or the other being an afterthought. This I also find encouraging, seeing as I consider it part of my job to bring audio, video, images and text together whenever I have a realistic opportunity.
And speaking of that, it's all being put into practice already. We spent our final UpFront afternoon in groups of 15 putting this 360-degree commissioning into action: five doing visual, five doing audio, five doing online. The idea is to try something you're not used to, so I ended up leading the visual team, which was so much fun and so terrifying that I'd really quite like to do it again every day. We produced a two-minute teaser for a series of three hour-long shows about taking risks with your life - dropping everything and starting all over again. This involved a Syrian man named Mustafa pretending to be a young father of two quitting his job as an engineer at a petroleum company in favour of selling marijuana seeds (quite legally) online. That got laughs. Great fun.
The emphasis there was on convergence and the emphasis tomorrow's on convergence. I'm going back into London in the afternoon to meet with Radio 1 and possibly 6 Music about the Reading and Leeds festivals. We want a mini-website where BBC Berkshire, BBC Leeds, the two radio stations and BBC3 television can all pool their content for maximum impact - otherwise our audience (or to borrow the point of view of the editorial in the BBC's in-house magazine, Ariel, today: customers) will be dragged hither and thither finding the stuff they want. It'll be nice if this collaboration actually occurs. Tomorrow will be the acid test and hopefully we can all work together.
I've gassed on far too much (I promise to cut post length and improve on content as part of a Dayorama creative future restructuring) but one final tale from UpFront: The Tale of the Crapping Guide Dog.
Öscar the German Shepherd lives on the floor where one of the BBC's data analysts, whom I met last night, works. Öscar is the White City on-call guide dog, in that on any occasion a partially sighted individual turns up minus a guide dog, Öscar stands in. This is a relatively infrequent occurrence so Öscar spends most of the time with the data analysts or the Factual and Learning team, eating Haribo (other sweeties are available).
Öscar's digestive system does not respond particularly well to Haribo. One fine and recent afternoon, Öscar's stomach responded so badly that Öscar felt unable to make it out of the building to a suitable piece of BBC pasture. Öscar instead opted to defecate spectacularly on a small patch of carpet next to the chair of a lady in Factual and Learning.
This lady was suitably unimpressed despite Factual and Learning being - allegedly - primarily to blame for the incident, having fed the dog on Haribo for most of the day. She marched over to the data analysts and explained that a copious quantity of dog poo had appeared by her chair, with only one sickly-looking guide dog in the vicinity.
The response she received from the data analysts, I shall not print. Suffice to say I am left with the impression she cleaned the carpet herself. Öscar, meanwhile, has since gone on to greater glory, careering through a glass partition after romping across a wooden floor and failing to create sufficient friction when applying the brakes. Just what blind visitors to the BBC need: a suitably creative guide dog...
Isn't it lovely to see them back again? Maybe OJ will post now? Hmm, it remains to be seen...
I was in Oxford today meeting a friend for lunch, and then went on to Bicester with my Mother. The last time I was there was with OJ's Mum. It was a very very very hot day (and tomorrow is meant to be better... but I'm in the CAB... grr) but very enjoyable. Rather scary though: I started buying my clothes for work in September. Slightly premature since I haven't passed my exams yet, but fingers crossed. Some wonderful sea-island cotton shirts to be worn with cufflinks and a few skirts. The corporate-bitch shoes will come in time. I also managed to pick up a highly amusing hat, the last use of some gift vouchers from OJ about 18mths ago: i'd kept the final £10 in my wallet all that time! That's all I have to report. It's warm, sunny and rather jolly in Kent. Thank goodness for air-con in the car...
So that's the end of day one of UpFront, the BBC's two-day induction course for new employees.
*Quick reminder: comments now working!*
At lunch I was happy enough with it but felt it had perhaps been given a billing by former attendees which it could never quite match. (Certainly I've heard a story from one UpFront alumnus which will not be matched tonight unless I'm extraordinarily lucky.)
Now, back in the hotel room before heading out for a drink with some of my newly discovered colleagues, I'm pleased to report I'm certainly warming to the merits of the course.
Much of that is down to the gentleman from Editorial Policy, whose name inexcusably escapes me, who spoke to us between about 3pm and 4.30pm. He was a revelation, livening up the day with audio clips of great transgressions, e.g. Chris Moyles referring to a mobile phone ringtone as "gay". He opened each one up to the floor for us to debate the rights and wrongs of the individual cases, and let me tell you it felt good to hear 70-odd BBC employees with such a varied response.
I, personally, do not think Moyles should have used "gay" in that derogatory sense. I accept the argument that it probably caused minimal offence and would barely have been noticed by much of Moyles' target audience, but equally it just seems entirely unnecessary. He gained nothing by using the term - he could have used "rubbish" and not one of his listeners would have thought twice. No one is going to stop and think, "Why didn't he call it 'gay' instead?"
Anyway I digress. It was a fantastic 90 minutes of similar discussion and really fired me up about what was acceptable or otherwise in terms of the BBC's output. Obviously I'm familiar with the BBC's basic editorial guidelines but I've not had the chance before to challenge the way I interpret them in a room of colleagues with an expert stood in front of us, and that helped me a lot.
It also reaffirmed my view that the BBC is there to foster my journalism, not hinder it in any way. I may have mentioned it here already but I subscribe to the view that the BBC is not my employer, it is my publisher - it provides me with a reputable outlet in return for the best journalism I can offer. Our man from editorial policy hammered this home. His message was essentially that it is okay to take risks and try new things. First, it keeps our output fresh, stimulating and cutting edge, and second it keeps him in a job when our managers ring editorial policy in a panic. I liked that a lot.
Other UpFront news:
- The hotel had no bedrooms left when I arrived. After 20 minutes and having threatened to kick me into another Hilton over the other side of town, they relented and put me on their "keep" list ahead of someone else. The bedroom is air-conditioned, which is a godsend on the two hottest days of the year so far.
- After about 10 minutes in my room my hotel phone went. Someone asked, "Are you on UpFront?" They were also on the course so we met in reception and went for a wander. It soon transpired that not only had we grown up in the same town, we also had some of the same friends, despite never having met before. What a small world.
- There is a party of several hundred Jehovah's Witnesses staying here. One wonders if their door-knocking policy is vigorously applied in hotel environments.
Tomorrow brings more practical opportunities - it's looking like I'll be part of a team producing visual content, which I read to mean television.
This is a sneaky post from the very heart of UpFront, the BBC's induction scheme for new employees. I and 77 other new or fairly-new BBC folk have been ensconced in matters of BBC values, audiences, editorial policy and more all morning and into this afternoon.
I will not lie, I do feel that certain people who sold this to me as the best event since the dawn of time may have been a tad misleading. It's useful and good fun in many respects but has yet to escape the bounds of "induction course" to become something more. Tomorrow's allegedly the "action" day though, having a proper go at the exciting stuff (i.e. television cameras and such like), so let us not judge anything just yet.
In any case, more UpFront stories later, including the small world we live in, the small hotel I live in, and the case of the elevator and the Jehovah's Witnesses.
This post is primarily to draw to your attention the RETURN OF COMMENTS! You are now, hopefully, able to click "Comments" below and a page will load allowing you to view comments already posted, and write your own. This is how things used to happen before it all crashed and burned in April. Now things should be back to normal and may even show one or two improvements as I mess around some more in the days that follow.
If you happen to read this and have a moment to spare, do feel free to leave a comment to test the system out. You could even be really clever and sign up for a TypeKey account (link provided on the comments page) to see how that works - technically, if you sign up first, your comment will be approved straight away when you write it. Otherwise we have to go in and do it manually so it won't show up the instant you click 'send'.
After a fantastic four days at the Kent County Show (with a trip to Oxford in the middle) I'm slowly recovering from a combination of extreme tiredness, excessive alcohol consumption, frivolity, lots of driving, being on my feet for 13-14hrs each day and talking to lots of people and probably putting on about 1/2stone in weight. But lots of fun. Today I accompanied my Mum's School on their annual trip. I have to say, I do like taking a bundle of little children around a wildlife park. It's great fun to see their little faces light up and to tell them basic facts that they find fascinating. But after a day of appreciating wildlife, I now feel like a murderer. We've an influx of flying ants in our garden and I was on "nippon" duty, eradicating all in sight. I must have killed hundreds and hundreds of ants. The worst thing is you see their suffering before they die. Horrid. I felt terrible. Never really felt like that before. God's creatures and all that. And if that wasn't enough Daisy caught a mouse. In a bungled rescue attempt my Dad and I managed to kill the mouse - probably heart failure. Feel awful. Poor little things.
You may or may not know that tiny devices exist which will 'broadcast' the output of your mp3 player to any FM radio of your choice.
They only have a range of a few metres, the idea being that you can listen to your mp3 player in the car without having to complete any expensive alterations to your existing car radio. They're really popular in the US and in Europe.
And of course they're not doing badly in the UK either - but the catch is, they're illegal here. For now at least.
According to reports today, Ofcom - the body which regulates anything broadcast-related, including every British radio station - has put plans in motion to legalise these little gadgets.
The initial concern on Ofcom's behalf had been that despite their size, the very nature of these things might mean they interfered with the signals of recognised professional radio stations. However they're seeing sense in acknowledging that with a broadcasting range of a few metres, you would be unlucky to find your radio listening interrupted for more than a split second by someone using this device.
A problem might conceivably surface if a healthy percentage of the British car-driving population adopt gadgets like the iTrip. If every other car you pass on the road is listening to their iPod using a frequency normally reserved for BBC Radio 2 (perfectly possible), the Wogan-time you set aside each morning will rapidly become impossible to endure. However I somehow find this an unlikely proposition.
Radio stations could feel threatened by this development, but equally I don't think they're any more endangered by this than they were by mp3 players in general. True, car radios are currently doing well in the fight against the mp3, given the techicalities involved in listening to an iPod in a car without using earphones and thereby becoming a hazard to yourself and others. But even these gadgets can't actually replicate proper radio, which after all is the reason a lot of people tune in. Sure, some people go for commercial stations where the emphasis is squarely on music, but people listening to Radio 4, Five Live or BBC local radio are usually doijng so because they like the chat, the news and - for some, most important - the travel. No iPod will tell you if junction 11 of the M4 is blocked.
Ooh, hang on though. Imagine when that does happen, as it surely will. The day will dawn when TomTom Traffic, provided by the satellite navigation company, or any other similar service merges with the likes of iPod and iTrip. Imagine having a hand-held device which gives you sat nav directions, your favourite music and your favourite podcasts, plus thirty-second traffic reports - automatically compiled to relate to your current position on the road and inserted every half hour or so in the gaps between your music.
How tempting would you find that? Is most live radio so good that you wouldn't trade it for a morning commute of tracks hand-chosen by you, traffic reports tailored to you and, say, Channel 4's morning news podcast? All that's missing there is the interactive element - texting or phoning a show, being fed "social ammunition" by presenters, etc - but how much do you value that? No wonder broadcasters are so keen on that side of their remit right now, it could be their last line of defence against your ability to broadcast your own 'dream radio station' to yourself.
Alright, I wasn't that bad. I ran half the length of my Sport Relief mile before slowing down, which admittedly is still relatively pathetic but at least I did it. No marathons for me, I suspect. There was a great turn-out though and we also had an enjoyable charity football match - Radio Berkshire vs Calcot Hawks - which we won 3-2 after trailing 1-0 at half time.
Yours truly, having been kicked out of goal by our captain who wanted to play there, had the enjoyable opportunity of playing up front. I did actually cause the opposing goalkeeper mild consternation once or twice, too, although I am unlikely to prove the final piece in the England jigsaw puzzle for the 2008 World Cup.
After finishing my final radio piece of the afternoon a young lady came up and asked for my autograph, which was very nice and not something I had ever been expecting to happen! Apparently she listens all the time and likes to get to know who all the presenters are. Clearly the combination of holding a microphone and standing near the radio car has elevated me to "presenter" status. Result!
Yesterday proved to be a very long day. Having done all that I went on to cage fighting in Bracknell, by now suffering a fairly intense headache as a result of spending the afternoon in the sun. I sat through four hours of cage fighting and I'm still not sure what I think about it. I spoke to lots of people who explained with great passion and clarity exactly why cage fighting is no worse than football, rugby, boxing or any other sport, and how it is a career involving plenty of rigorous training. But even so... I don't know.
I'm starting to see why it might not be the manifestation of evil some people would have us believe it is. Equally, though, there's something very odd about sitting in an arena with a thousand other people watching two people try to do quite serious damage to each other. One spectator, a bald man in a black shirt, kept pressing himself up against the cage and screaming at the fighters, particularly a local hero named Andy. When one fighter lost the plot entirely and did enough damage to his opponent for the paramedics to have to burst into the cage, the latter's partner threw herself at the former, calling him a "f***ing c**t" and forcing the organisers to call for security.
I'm sure that's no worse than has happened at boxing matches before, but it's certainly not pleasant and I can't reconcile that sort of incident with the idea of paying money and enjoying watching it. Another fighter admitted to me that if any government minister had seen that one moment of chaos, it would be enough for the sport to forget any ambition it has of getting recognition and a regulatory board of control. Frankly I think if the argument is that boxing is no better than this, I'd choose to have neither this nor boxing.
I finally left the newsroom at just gone midnight, completing what amounts to a 15 and a half hour shift. What a lovely lie-in it was this morning though. First time in a while I've felt like I actually earned one.
Nikki has been evicted from Big Brother and is reacting with predictable bad grace. Spoilt, ignorant, self-absorbed brat. Why it took this long to get her out of the house is beyond me, although most people defended her continued preence on the grounds "she's funny". I have seen funny, and she is not it.
Nikki is now making a noise like a trapped banshee just inside the main door to the building. It is depressing that this is the very fabric upon which British celebrity culture is built. A woman with less backbone than a puddle, less moral fibre than a parsnip and all the creative spark of a comatose panda is the shining, oddly-wrinkly face of Great Britain.
Weigh her achievements up against the stars of this evening's Money programme on BBC2. 17-year-old Oliver runs a business selling shoes in larger sizes to the likes of OJ (they go up to size 18, as Chris Evans discovered on Radio 2, having jokingly asked for size 17s). Sarah runs a company delivering oak furniture. Jake, or at least I think it was Jake, can't have been more than 10 years old but runs a company selling napkins. Nikki, older than any of that lot, is frankly a waste of oxygen by comparison.
Oh God look, someone shoot her. Please. (Don't actually shoot her, I can't condone that, but at the very least tranquilise her and put her somewhere far away from humankind for our safety and hers.) She's gawping around in the studio like a stoned Andrex puppy. If she had character I'd assassinate it. How does someone with the brain and looks of a seven-year-old survive in this world, let alone get themselves on national television for over two months?
God... maybe I should be congratulating her! After all it's a bloody big achievement. The wheel has spun its way across Channel 4 for months despite the hamster inside it having died a decade previous. I reckon there's an entire universe inside her head, a vast vacuum punctuated by tiny specks of matter, expanding all the time.
We'll end on this nice, revealing little exchange. Nikki, having seen highlights of her stay: "I look like a demented f***ing..." Davina: "... yeah."
Right. Let me make this very clear. You are doing yourself a monumental disservice if you do not go out and buy the following two albums, which I could not recommend more earnestly and enthusiastically if I tried.
The first is 'Through The Windowpane' by Guillemots. Back on 15 January this year I tipped them for success so it's good to see them on the iTunes front page and well into the top ten album downloads.
This album is nothing short of brilliant. Guillemots have a faintly exotic, South American sound - helped by song titles like 'Sao Paulo' and 'Trains To Brazil' - but it's tempered by a more traditional British indie feel underpinning the whole lot. If you pumped a bit of the Rio carnival into Keane you might get something similar. Most importantly, Guillemots' musical atmospherics are gorgeous. The band does things with organs, sound effects, vocals and echoes that you would not believe.
I am entirely captivated by this album as both a pool of quiet reflection and an explosion of enthusiasm for life. As lead singer Fyfe Dangerfield (what a name) exclaims at the climax of the wonderful 'Trains To Brazil', a stalwart of my collection since last year:
And to those of you who mourn your lives through one day to the next,
Well, let them take you next!
Can't you live and be thankful you're here?
See, it could be you tomorrow or next year.
The second record without which you should not do is 'The Dark Third' by Pure Reason Revolution. At this point I declare an interest: I work with the drummer's wife. But I declare a second interest: I'd seen PRR twice and bought their EP before ever meeting her, so I'm not being press-ganged into this one, I genuinely love everything this band does.
PRR are prog and entirely unafraid of it. For some reason prog - i.e. progressive rock, the inadequate phrase used to somehow pin down the wildly imaginative, creative, occasionally meandering style of bands like Pink Floyd and Genesis - has become a dirty word of late. It shouldn't be when it essentially stands for rock unleashed, a form of popular music that doesn't respect the place of the three-minute chart-busting single.
And so we find PRR's infamous twelve-minute epic 'The Bright Ambassadors Of Morning' on this album among many other glorious tracks. Once again they're masters of atmosphere, but they also bring a brilliant knack for sustaining epic songs over several changes of mood, tempo and key. It's engrossing stuff, reminiscent to me of a brand new Pink Floyd arriving on the scene just as members of the old one choose to depart this mortal coil. Where Guillemots use doleful strings and jaunty organ, Pure Reason Revolution prefer the blast of synthesizer and guitar, to equal effect.
Finally, on an entirely unrelated note because I've been meaning to mention this for ages but keep forgetting so might as well do it now, to the question of Boris Johnson. The mopped one went mad in the Commons yesterday over the question of the Natwest Three. There's a transcript of some of the debate on his weblog and it just shows what many other politicians lack compared to Boris. When other MPs speak during the transcripted segment of the debate, their contributions are relatively bland and formal. Boris, by contrast, employs the most ingenious turns of phrase at every opportunity. For example:
My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe rightly used the verb - or adjective - poodle. It is, indeed, a noun. It is also, however, a verb: to poodle is a verb - we poodled. We poodled in implementing the treaty before the Americans had even ratified it ...
The hon. Gentleman certainly shows that he has been following the debate keenly and is dead right.
I would say that I was grateful to the Solicitor-General, but I am not really.
As usual, my right hon. and learned Friend is bang on.
Read the full transcript here if you're particularly bored.
Alright, we've heard enough about Zinedine Zidane now. The award for Most Tenuous Link To Zinedine Zidane goes to author Linda Grant who, during a discussion of racist language used by builders at a cashpoint, produced this gem:
Two things have happened here: one is a story about an apparent assault that I've heard third-hand; the second is racist and abusive language, which I have directly witnessed. All kinds of things are going through my head. Zidane's headbutt is one.
Linda there, threatening to headbutt a group of racist builders, an action I cannot believe for one moment she actually considered.
That is lifted from an article of hers that is well worth reading, a) because it's quite interesting and b) because it's oddly satisfying to see the 'C' word in print, several times over, on a website owned by the mainstream media. Giles Wilson may have got Hitler Cats onto BBC News Online, but if he ever gets that word onto it, I'll eat my c***ing hat.
It's been a pleasure to watch Alastair Cook reach his century for England against Pakistan at Lord's in the last few minutes.
I've got a soft spot for him because he's almost precisely my age and it's great to see someone relatively young succeeding on a cricketing world stage which, for all teenage footballers are paid millions, I fancy is a little trickier to master than international soccer.
Not as tricky to master, however, as the language of cricket. Witness a gentleman named Mark, from Philadelphia, who wrote the following on his blog just now:
While reading my daily mini-dose of BBC news, I ran across the following blurb in the sports section.
"FIRST TEST, LORD'S, DAY ONE: England 201-3 v Pakistan
Paul Collingwood and Alastair Cook hit fifties as England recovered to 201-3 half an hour before tea in the first Test against Pakistan at Lord's. Collingwood hit seven fours and shared a vital century stand in 158 balls with Cook, who was dropped on nought and 45. England's openers shared 60 inside 12 overs but both fell within six balls, and Kevin Pietersen was lbw for 21."
Read that paragraph again and you can see where confusion might creep in. Hit fifties? Fifty what? Why are they drinking tea? What are they testing? Which lord? Why not say 28 instead of seven fours? What is a century stand, do you have to refrain from sitting down for a hundred years? If you're dropped then what are you even doing in the team? Why do the team have players whose job is simply to open things? They shared 60, but of what, and what on earth are 'overs'? Can the BBC not spell 'others'? Where did they fall? How do you pronounce 'lbw'? It's a minefield out there.
Sky have recently introduced two fairly nauseating cartoon characters, Willow and Stumpy, to explain cricketing terminology to youngsters watching live television coverage. Today, for example, the pair treated us to an explanation of a 'googly' (sorry, Mark, but it would take forever to describe here). Perhaps Willow and Stumpy need to make the trip over to the US for a while.
And to think that just three days ago Alastair Cook was bowling, according to Amy Watson, who went to watch England A v Pakistan:
Come Sunday the rain came... but when the sun finally broke through England still added to their now unreachable lead of 500 and Pakistan responded (very maturely) by only using their opening batsmen to kinda chuck the ball at Ian Bell and Alastair Cook.
England, in a very mature manner, decided that two could play that game. Come the last 2 hours, as Pakistan batted, the England players were obviously very bored. Rob Key, Captain, brought every single member of his team, including wicket keeper Chris Read on to bowl at least two overs. I seriously doubt Alastair Cook, opening batsman, will ever bowl an over in a Test Match again so it was an absolutely classic moment!
What's also interesting about Amy's blog is her concise yet informative 'about' section, where she explains who she is. Dayorama has one too. Why the hell don't most blogs? When I was putting together a list of Berkshire blogs earlier in the week my task was made incredibly difficult by the neglect of most bloggers to include any guide to who they actually are. Usually I ended up having to trawl the archives to find out if bloggers even lived in the right county, let alone what they did for a living, how old they were, or why they were writing.
Why should this be the case? Earlier this week I received an email from a lady writing an anonymous blog, and in many circumstances I can see why anonymity might be preferred. But lots of blogs I came across were demonstrably not anonymous - containing plenty of personal details from which you could identify the author - while at the same time being utterly impenetrable. Amy Watson's blog, by contrast, has this clearly visible on its main page:
Name: Amy Watson
Location: Essex, United Kingdom
In love with Jesus. Sister of a 6ft-something teenager. Daughter of an ex-pantomime dame and former Avon lady. Owner of the cutest dog in the world. Guitar playing, squeaky-voiced worship leader. Wannabe bass player. Ex-veggie who gave in to the need for tuna and bacon sandwiches. Cricket fanatic. Jelly Bean consumer. Student Youth Worker at Christian Youth Outreach, Colchester. Has an extremely eclectic music taste (from Nirvana to Singing in the Rain). Drinks decaf tea with 2. Hates beetroot. Has dyed her hair 5 different colours. Passed driving test 1st time.
Without going into details, once again I had my eyebrows waxed today. As many of you know, I have a scar on my right eyebrow. An accident when I was 4yrs old. Six stitches on 11/9/88. I know that because I wrote it in my photo album at the time. Yes, I was aged 4yrs, so the writing is large and child-like, but still it stands clear as the day. I've also stuck a sticker next to the photo of "Amy with stitches" which has a little teddy-bear on it and the phrase "I sat still for my x-ray". Fond memories in a changing world. Anyway, the scar. Naturally I've always had a fear of any needles, tweezers, wax, threading by my eyes. I can't touch that area myself. It hurts when I am tired and makes me go queasy if I think about it too much. And yet today I managed to let someone wax my eyebrows. It didn't hurt too much. A sting. A momentary sickness in my stomach. But I faced the fear and I realised that perhaps it wasn't so bad after all. Life is certainly a changing for me at the moment. And it's scary. But perhaps if anything the incident today shows that if you face your fears, they're probably not half as bad as your worst nightmare. I was having a long chat with Joan, my quasi Grandma today. She's ninety next year and has known me since I was five. She was the first person who knew I got into Oxford - she says it was one of her proudest moments when I ran to her flat and burst into tears in her arms - and she was there when I expressed fears about going up for the first time. So it seems natural that today, when I was rather scared and upset about the future, that I turned to her. And she recounted times in her life when she has felt anxious, scared, daunted by the unknown. And she imparted wise words of wisdom that I shall never forget. I suppose that I shall feel anxious many times between now and September. It's only natural I suppose. But in many ways if today's incident with the eyebrow wax showed, I just need to face those fears, and perhaps it won't be so bad after all. We'll see. And as Joan quoted at me, Matthew 8.23-27 has a lot to answer for.
So it's goodbye to the DayoRimet World Cup graphics, and welcome back to the revolving Dayorama banner. There are now fifty, each also now numbered and named, so you can while away your days hitting refresh and completing your set. Try memorising the whole lot off by heart... what's in banner number 28?
My little (half) brother Harry continues to impress me. He's now a fiery four-year-old who barks instructions at me like he's my mother. "Ollie! Tidy this room! Are these your shoes? Where did you get them?" I'll say this for him, he's inquisitive.
I had a great exchange with him earlier today. I've got an iPod Nano sat on my bookshelf. He came in and as per usual started picking stuff up, demanding to know where it came from and can he have it.
Harry: (picking up iPod) What's this? Ollie: It's called an 'iPod'. It plays music. You can put your music into it and then listen to it wherever you go. Harry: An 'iPod'? Why did they call it that? Ollie: Well... (how do you explain the i- prefix, Apple and corporate branding to a four year old?) Harry: But why? It's got nothing to do with my eyes! Ollie: Ah, see, no. You say it the same but "eyepod" would be spelt differently to "iPod". See, peas come in pods too. The idea is... Harry: (with no time for that explanation) But why not call it eye computer? Or eye box? Or eye thing?
iThing. If it doesn't already exist it will do.
Harry also kept me entertained with my pocket London A-Z. He picked it up and demanded to know what the words on each page began with. So he would cram an index page containing hundreds of London streets into my face and demand to know what they all began with or, worse, present me with one of the map pages and demand to know what all those words began with.
He progressed from this to trying to work out the alphabet using the index at the back of the book. He was particularly keen to know what "muh" (i.e. M) looked like. I pointed it out to him. He then shut the book, scampered off and came back a few minutes later. I challenged him to go back to the index and find "muh" again. He found the index alright but when he presented his answer, his finger was pointing squarely at W.
Ollie: No, you're close but not right. That's a double-yoo. It's like an M except it's upside down. Harry: (turns book upside down) Muh!
He may not know what an M looks like, but my word he's good at quick-thinking, logical solutions to problems. Negotiation is also a forte of his. He wanted to play on my PS2 football game. First he asked if there were two controllers then, on being told there weren't, opened his pitch:
Harry: Can I have two goes? Ollie: What happened to one go? Harry: Alright, one go. Ollie: In a minute. Harry: Five goes?
There are times in life when you really let yourself down. Sometimes this can be laughed off, sometimes you wish to crawl into a ball. For example, over the weekend I was assessing a DofE Bronze expedition. I collected my dinner late on Saturday evening (self-service school-dinner esque food) and selected what I thought was rice, curry and cauliflower cheese. You think? No, it was rice, curry and rice pudding. Naturally I was the last to notice and was mocked tirelessly for my moment of "blondness". Nothing changes there then. I then had to eat the entire plateful, which wasn't a particularly enjoyable experience. I've been mocked ever since. People began to have weetabix, banana and chocolate for breakfast, in honour of me. And then tonight, I really did let myself down. My Mother and I had been doing the quick-crossword in the Guardian. I had filled in a few clues before she took over. One clue, was "threesome". A four letter word. The second letter an "r". What springs to mind? Well I wrote "orgy". The real word? "Trio". Ooops. Needless to say both parents think it is highly amusing.
As the famous Honda advert goes, "Isn't it nice when things just work?"
Yesterday I met BBC blogging expert Robin Hamman. I am wary of blogging experts. Just as some people, deep down, fear that all bloggers have absolutely nothing valid to contribute, so I harbour an irrational fear that all blogging experts are only blogging experts through lack of anything else in which to be an expert. "What am I good at? Hmm. Writing lots and lots of stuff on the internet. I'll be an expert in that."
Robin Hamman is not a blogging expert through lack of alternative, I assure you. He knows what he's talking about, he makes sense, and some of the stuff he had to show was genuinely not what I expected, or what I expected the BBC to be grappling with. In a good way. There was a lot of encouragement for going out and doing things with all the wonderful third-party software the internet can offer, from Google Maps to Flickr, both of which we'll hopefully put to good use soon.
The overall message was: "it's okay to try to be clever with the internet". There was a real sense that creativity is still A Good Thing and will be rewarded as such provided it's focused in the right areas and isn't creativity for creativity's sake.
So that was nice, even if I had just eaten a whole packet of polos washed down with chicken tikka masala, which let me tell you is an explosive combination just before an hour-long meeting.
One of my little plans of campaign following the meeting was to put together a list of all the people I could find blogging in Berkshire and preferably about Berkshire. The latter is a little trickier to find but certainly exists, and by the end of yesterday I had 20 plus Berkshire blogs sat in a Bloglines feed reader, ready for consumption.
Of those twenty - a list which includes Boris Johnson since he occasionally talks about Henley - there was one blog which stood out. It was written by the mother of an autistic child going to a mainstream Berkshire school. You can read it here, although make sure you read this post first to understand her story.
I was captivated by the story of her son, endearingly referred to throughout as "Little Monkey Nut", and the school he attends. He has many problems there, from interaction with other pupils and staff through to escaping the classroom and dashing out towards main roads unaccompanied. I don't agree with every point of view expressed on the blog but it's well written and really conveys the day-to-day stress and strain of caring for, and being, a child with autism.
One of the latest posts to that blog told of how the woman had become so fed up with what she perceived to be the school failing both her and her son that she was taking her story to the newspapers. That was posted yesterday afternoon, I read it yesterday evening.
This morning, when I went into work, I flagged this up to our news editor who immediately recognised it as a powerful story. We were able to establish which school the son attended and Laura, one of the news team, worked wonders getting in touch with his mum.
None of that would have happened without that weblog, and without Robin's visit on Monday to set that train of thought into motion at precisely the right moment to catch this story happening. It's an immediate vindication of a far more active, go-getting, enthusiastic approach to weblogs and the internet - not to be feared, but harnessed. We can marry good old-fashioned newsgathering and editorial judgement with the raw experiences of people who, like me, just like to write about what happens to them on their website.
Within 24 hours of adopting our new approach we were involved in a meaningful, captivating story which otherwise would have reached us via the national newspapers tomorrow morning (look out for it). And similarly within 24 hours of writing her intentions on her blog, a frustrated mother who felt she was being ignored had been given an outlet by the BBC. It's nice when old and new media just work.
Bad news for one This Is Local London sub-editor. Under a headline which rages "POLICE HIT OUT AT BNP OVER FAKED PHOTO" we find the following:
POLICE have slammed the British National Party for "painting a false picture" of Loughton in campaign flyers before the last local council election.
Epping Forest District commander Chief Inspector Jon Hill and Loughton Inspector Denise Morrisey said BNP claims that inner city youths were "invading the town in gangs mugging and attacking local people" were "just not true".
Mr Hill said: "Basically they've been driving up unjustifiably people's fear of crimes which don't exist. You couldn't recognise our area from the picture painted. And it doesn't make the job of police any easier."
Now this is the danger of writing a headline without paying over-much attention to the story (which continues for several more paragraphs in much the same vein). The police say the BNP were "painting a false picture", including the specific quote "you couldn't recognise our area from the picture painted". Look again at the headline. See the slightly crossed wires developing? No faked photo. Just a badly painted picture, and a metaphorical one at that. Silly sub-editor.
(And no, there isn't any reference to faked photographs in the entire article.)
That's that, then. The 2006 World Cup ends in a penalty shoot-out won by Italy (hurrah!), overshadowed by the absolutely inexplicable conduct of Zinedine Zidane.
Just what was it Italian defender Materazzi said to him that led to Zidane headbutting his opponent in the chest? What, after two decades or more of football, innumerable international caps and a career covered in all kinds of glory, could lead one of the most respected internationals on the planet to lose all composure just minutes from a World Cup Final penalty shoot-out? That is the great unanswered question of this World Cup, although I'm sure we'll be hearing plenty more about it, hopefully from Zidane himself.
Of course, there I was earlier saying the Argentinian ref wasn't having the quietest of nights. He'd had to award a penalty and had seen Zidane's spot kick bounce tantalisingly close to the goal-line, enough to give a heart flutter to any official. Then, just when he can see the light at the end of the tunnel, Zidane goes and does that! He gets called over to the touchline by the fourth official, who wants a word:
"Alright, boss. Erm, that Zinedine kid's just gone and headbutted an Italian."
"You what?"
I think he handled the entire game admirably and did not deserve any of the abysmal treatment he received from French fans at the end of the game. It's nice to have seen one of football's showpiece occasions pass with a refereeing performance to match.
Back in the alternate universe where England beat Portugal, all this means England have finally won a penalty shoot-out, Theo Walcott tucking away the penalty which made the difference and sent millions of fans up and down both Germany and England wild. This also means Zinedine Zidane headbutted Gary Neville, a win-win situation for any England supporter.
The DayoRimet goals per game per TV channel widget has now run its course. I'm delighted to report a victory for the BBC, who recorded 2.29 goals per game as opposed to ITV's 2.10. So for every game you watched on the BBC, you saw almost a fifth of a goal's more action!
All good things must come to an end, and that's the end of DayoRimet 2006. Thanks for reading, normal Dayorama service will be resumed from tomorrow. If you're searching for meaning to your life in the wake of this announcement, don't forget to sponsor me for Sport Relief! Many thanks to those of you who have done so far.
So here we go, France v Italy. The World Cup Final. It's definitely Zinedine Zidane's last game and there's a good chance it'll be a fairytale ending for him - personally, I'd rather Italy won, having had a bit of an affinity for them ever since Italia '90. That was the first World Cup I can remember, plus my mum's always had a soft spot for the Italian side, so it's in the family to an extent.
