A Swift Two-Thirds

I read in the newspaper the other day that Heineken were introducing a new size of glass for their beers.  At two-thirds of a pint, the new size is seen to offer an attractive option to people who don't particularly want the volume of a pint yet dislike the ignominy of being seen holding a half.

A sensible idea.  The glass is an elegant and agreeable design and, I was informed, a legitimate measure for serving beer, as two-thirds of a pint has become an officially recognised capacity for the presentation of alcoholic drinks in the UK in the last year or so. I seem to remember one third of a pint, or a 'nip', as having been around for some time: it was a sensible means of being able to enjoy stronger drinks which if presented in any larger sized glasses would swiftly render the imbiber senseless.

So making a glass twice that volume available for normal strength beers is a good idea, and especially so for those who feel they might wish to cut down their intake. The idea of having three drinks yet only two pints is an appealing one.

In practice though, I'm still undecided whether this glass is better or worse than the others. In order to find out, I had two-thirds of a pint in one, then a regular pint in a pint glass, then a half in a half glass, and I couldn't decide.

So I had another, then a half, and then a pint but sill couldn't make my my up.

After anoth two pines then one of the new thingy ones I think a half but the pine 'cause the two thirty one more the half is pints best.

Two thirs ver good, super ide. Ver good.

Backing a mo. Just going to...

Disappointing Pizzas

The huge black stones from which the walls are built around the old town in the heart of the chaotic city of Naples may well be volcanic.  However, I wonder if their greasy and almost unattractive patina might possibly be down to the fact that they enclose the birthplace of the pizza, and that their glistening sheen might therefore the result of hundreds of years of oil and cheese hissing, spitting and bubbling away as pizzeria ovens carry out their daily work.
 
Yet a visit to the ancient city a couple of years ago was disappointing - on the gastronomic front, that is. The pizza has conquered the world, so one might assume that here, in the square mile of its conception, a definitive recipe may still exist.

Well, it does. Unfortunately.

Extensive research revealed a very limited number of variations.  Trudge the stone-sett streets and peer into the tiny cave-like pizzerias tucked in to the base of those titanic stone colonnades and in the old town of Naples you will find only three kinds of pizza on offer.  Cheese, tomato and (for those who feel like splashing out) cheese and tomato.

And that's it.  Half a mile to the west, the glistening Mediterranean teems with anchovy, octopus and shellfish.  The hills of Campania towering over Italy’s fourth richest city abound with cattle, poultry, fresh vegetables, olives, nuts and fruit, yet none of these make it across the A56 autostrada at Capodimonte and into the city to embellish what is a disappointingly frugal repast.

It has taken the rest of the world to acknowledge that Naples has only created a base (literally) to work from. Wonderful, imaginative and delicious variations crowd the menus of pizzerias around the world, yet Naples is bereft. In some puritanical way, the Neapolitan has eschewed the attempts of incomers to corrupt his staple meal and, as a result, since the dawning of the pizza age, nothing has been allowed to change.  Even in 2004, a law was passed to ensure that the recipe for a true Neapolitan pizza remains constant: wheat, yeast (the law specifies which kinds) tomatoes, oil and salt. The cheese, if added, must be a locally sourced Mozzarella.

Of course, if anyone wanted to change what the Neapolitans started all those years ago, it is not just the weight of the Italian legal system that they would find coming down on them.  The people of Naples can count on some pretty influential cronies to help them preserve their status quo...

So it is the rest of the world that has taken the pizza by the horns and dragged it into the 21st century.

In Rwanda's bustling capital city of Kigali, there is a very popular Italian restaurant which offers a comprehensive range of pizzas on its menu.  Last week, my man there paid it a visit with a group of friends, and they all enjoyed a meal together. However, having glanced through an internationally familiar menu and ordered, he was a little put out when his pizza arrived.  It was of distinctly vegetarian appearance, an attractive presentation of red, yellow and green peppers.  But it wasn't what my man thought he had ordered.  "Where's the sausage?" he wondered.

He called the waiter over and asked to see the menu.  Sure enough, my man had made a simple oversight, and not even in reading the small print.  Somewhere down the line into darkest Africa, the transliteration had gone askew.  Yet the kitchen had obediently adhered to what was printed in the menu. 

My man hadn’t ordered “Pepperoni” after all. 

He'd ordered “Pepper only”.

Barry Clayton

My friend Barry Clayton died this morning.

I first tracked Barry down twenty years ago.  Tracked down, because once I’d heard him, I had a professional need to find him  I had heard his voice on a TV commercial for a compilation CD of Heavy Metal hits.  Barry had many claims to fame and in the unlikely field of rock music he was known as the voice of ‘the beast’ in Iron Maiden’s single ‘The Number of the Beast, from 1982. The band’s original choice to read the lines was Vincent Price, who was too expensive, so Barry was selected.  I spent days telephoning around record distributors and advertising agencies in order to track down this voice and eventually I found it.  Barry was booked for my next commentary session - I was producing on-air trails for Bravo at the time - and, six weeks after hearing him for the first time, I met him.

Rather deprecatingly, he introduced himself as ‘Vincent “Cut” Price’, but his voice was so much better than that. It could be seductive, mellow, assured, authoritative and powerful within the span of a single phrase.  I came to work with him on a regular basis, and he became my voice of choice: we both revelled with him grasping, moulding and manifesting the commentaries I wrote, promoting Bravo’s extremely dubious range of movies.  “Wrath of the Wendigo” was the first shlock-horror voice he performed for me, and to this day I am proud to have his mellifluous tones on my showreel, promoting all kinds of films and television series and events.  I love his reading for the trailer for David Kronenburg’s ‘Dead Ringers’, marvel at the build-up he creates in ‘Fear, Fright and Fantasy’ (no amount of alliteration would ever put him off) and immerse myself in his confident, all-knowing delivery of the promos for the MTV series ‘Dead at 21’.  Our work together on ‘Hammer House of Horror’ won the Promax Gold Award for Best Trailer.

Not surprisingly our friendship beyond the audio studio developed, and we began to contrive reasons for lunch together after our recording sessions.  During these happy repasts (“I think we could squeeze in another bottle of Pinot Grigio, don’t you?”) I came to learn of his astonishing life story.

He was born in Sheffield.  Every time we met, he would greet me in a thick South Yorkshire accent, congratulating me on managing to escape from “Oop North”. (I usually did a Rita Tushingham impression in return, dumping my bag down on the busy pavement and staring up at the buildings as I whispered in awe: “Lunn-dunn…!”).  I was surprised to learn that he had been born with a cleft palate - not something one would expect in a successful actor, presenter and voice artist - because you could never tell. As a boy he was exceptionally close to his mother and he recounted to me an incredibly moving tale of how the two of them found themselves at the quayside in a northern French port the days after the Second World War broke out.  They were approached by a young Jewish woman whose only chance of survival was to escape to England.  Barry’s mother gave her her own passport... 

Barry was a socialist and an internationalist: the words probably ran through him like the letters in a stick of rock. I believe his father had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Barry grew up embracing the concept of a world without borders: in addition to an impressive repertoire of  European languages, he was fluent in Esperanto.  He trained as an actor and moved to Poland, where he became the English voice of Radio Warsaw. It was here he met his future wife and, from what I can make out, the fact that she was a nuclear scientist and he wasn’t Polish didn’t fit in too well with the authorities as the Cold War limped impotently forward. 

They returned to the UK where Barry joined Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in Stratford East - anecdotes he would recount from this time were hilarious.  He met Lindsay Anderson who recommended he contact Granada Television, which he did: he signed up and worked as a producer with the writer and journalist Brian Trueman and they spent many happy years reporting on the more topical daily life in the north-west of England in ‘People and Places’ the fore-runner of ‘Granada Reports’.  The two of them, tasked with ensuring the viewers saw their own world reflect on the small screen, would pore over the map of the region, identify a locality they hadn’t visited recently and then dig out the Good Food Guide, before setting off to the likes of Kirkby Lonsdale for a couple of hours filming followed by an award-winning and totally disproportionate dinner.  Barry was always impressed at the supportive way in which the Bernsteins took a personal interest in the way Granada's creative staff worked.

Yet London called, and Barry became producer and presenter on Capital Radio’s “London Tonight”, which he co-hosted with Anna Raeburn.   These were the heady days of commercial radio and Capital was the standard by which all other stations were measured.   Only the other day I found recordings of Kenny Everett, another star from the Capital firmament, and was delighted to hear Barry turn up as narrator in Everett’s ridiculously funny space serial ‘Captain Kremmen’.  “Oh yes,” Barry once told me, “Kenny would regularly stick his head around the office door, grab me and drag me behind a microphone to read something outrageous...”.  Barry moved on to BBC Radio London and launched ‘Black Londoners’ with Alex Pascall.  He also produced films on architecture, about which he was passionate, and he subscribed prolifically to a wide range of the arts.

He could not abide politicians and loathed the way the world ran itself.  Our meals together were spent lambasting the status quo, agreeing on the absurdity of people in power making such a mess of the world they contrive to improve.  We put the world to rights every time.

This last year wasn’t kind to Barry.  His advancing illness meant that during a happy and otherwise totally coherent conversation, he would begin to speak on a subject, not knowing he had already done so a few minutes previously.  I didn’t bring this to his attention and nor did I mind, because he was always such fun to listen to.  Perhaps he thought there was a chance he might get repeat fees - voice artists rarely do these days.

Barry died in a care home at 6 a.m., at the start of the shortest day of the year, and I’m terribly upset.  Because of this, I may have confused some of the details in what I’ve written above, but you get the picture.  He was a very special man, a kind and warm character, immensely talented, perceptive and a demonstrator of exquisite taste.  Even better, he cared about the world.

And he was a very, very good friend.

On Street Art

The gathering dusk on Friday afternoon found me walking past the ugly buildings of Nelson Street in Bristol city centre.  I was delighted to discover that the dreary 60s monoliths that once accommodated faceless bureaucrats and now contain students (a nice transition) have been superbly decorated with giant graphic murals.  These dreadful concrete structures, totally without ornament, have their blind and blank expanses now covered with exotic patterns and wistful portraits many storeys high.

Bristol’s reputation for street art appears to have taken another step forward.  What were previously perceived as illicit forays with an aerosol have now been recognised as valid social decoration and, as such, the poachers have now been employed by the gamekeepers in order to brighten up the place they share. This enlightened change of council policy was worth investigation. The people with their finger on the pulse of Bristol’s street art would know.

It was a mild evening in Bristol and, as traffic darted up the atypically clear Cheltenham Road, lights glowed in the shop fronts of the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft. Adjacent to the PRSC headquarters in Jamaica Street, the launch of an exhibition of portraits of local residents was taking place in the old Carriage Works.  In true PRSC fashion everyone was made welcome and, over a free and toothsome pint of Butcombe Gold (generously provided by the brewery), I got into conversation with Chalky, one of the organisers. 

We talked about ‘See No Evil’, the city’s strategy last summer to bring street art to its centre.  Yet I was surprised that Chalky failed to share my appreciation of El Mac’s 10-storey high Mother and Child and its like.  He agreed the initiative had certainly delivered stunning imagery across one of the centre’s grimmest quarters but, for him and the stalwarts of the PRSC, the feast of art down the road left a bitter after-taste.  Apparently, commissioned by the Council, street artists were flown in from around the world in order to participate in the summer event.  Several of Bristol’s street art luminaries were also involved, and contributions of paint and materials were acquired from established practitioners of the city’s street art scene. 

The reason Chalky was so underwhelmed was soon made clear. Four months later, many artists remain unremunerated. Gallons of paint were used, yet bills remain unpaid. Chalky still hasn’t got his ladders back. I was given the impression that the Council appears to want the whole affair swept under the carpet. Yet many dozens of thousands of pounds are involved.

This is a familiar and disappointing tale.  Bristol is renowned for indigenous talent in this field yet, as in much these days, ‘authority ‘ felt it needed to stick in its oar and take over.  For a fraction of the cost, the city’s inhabitants could have authored and executed their own imagery.  Didn’t the Council know the world’s leading lights in street art were their own residents? Why wasn’t the work commissioned from community organisations such as the PRSC?  Was it that the Council wanted to cash in on its street art scene but didn’t actually want to engage with its own residents, with whom it may have endured the occasional skirmish over recent years?

This is a shame.  The self-imposed agenda of the PRSC is “to work with the nature of the built environment, to improve through painting, to act gently and to care for the fabric of the area”. It would have made a wonderful job of Nelson Street, employed dozens and saved the rate-payer thousands. 

And Chalky would have his ladders back, too.

On Where British Radio Went Wrong

In addition to TV, websites, publications etc., the BBC runs around eight national radio services plus a clutch of national, regional and local stations. Its licence fee also  supports the World Service, until recently funded by the Foreign Office, in addition to some of S4C and the costs involved in the switch from analogue to digital broadcasting.

New cuts will inevitably affect BBC radio, but if the Government hadn’t made such a terrible decision 45 years ago, the BBC wouldn’t be facing the dilemma it is today.

I believe that BBC radio was in its heyday back in the mid-60s.  Britain was a liberated, creative cauldron, exciting things were happening across all aspects of society, and the BBC was a means by which the nation could discover and explore what was going on.  It ran three national networks: the Home Service, the Light and the Third Programmes.  Journalism and drama formed most of the Home Service output, the Light Programme thrived on music and entertainment, and the Third Programme studied classical music and the intellectual world.  And that was it.

However, just over three miles out to sea, rusting hulks broadcast pop music to the millions ashore yearning for something different, contemporary and beyond the domain of the mandarins of Portland Place.  It was the success of pirate radio that prompted Harold Wilson to become suddenly aware that people were enjoying something that his Government couldn't control.  In a very British knee-jerk reaction, hasty legislation cut off the revenue stream to the pirate stations around the country, and reconstituted the BBC to serve their audiences.
 
It was a mess.  The Home Service became Radio Four, the Third Programme Radio Three, and the Light Programme an uncomfortable hybrid of Radios One and Two.  Uncomfortable because, in their early years, they shared programming: it was not unusual to find a programme exploring the depths of prog rock followed by 'The Organist Entertains'.  Pop music programming was rationed, because the BBC had no facilities to promulgate it.  Restructuring the behemoth to accommodate it would take time.

When the Conservative Government came on the scene a couple of years later, they opened up the airwaves to operators of local commercial radio stations, the first of which, LBC, opened on 8th October 1973: the first music station, Capital opened a week later.

It was this six year hiatus since the pirates were forced off the air on 15th August 1967 which skewed the development of radio in the UK irredeemably.  Instead of encouraging the commercial talent and opportunities the pirates offered by legalising their services and making them land-based, the Government prohibited them and used the hefty might of the BBC to create its own take on pop music broadcasting.  The innovative edge those maritime stalwarts brought to our transistor radios was lost forever.  Local popular music radio had to reinvent itself over the next decade, and by the time the whole country had its own pop stations in 1980 that fresh edge had withered and died.

Yet there had been a one-stop solution.  Frank Gillard, having exhaustively studied local radio in the US, was behind the BBC developing it in the UK: its first station opened in Leicester in 1967.   But the US model is a commercial one: how on earth did the government ignore this and give the UK local radio network to the BBC?

This disdain for commercial radio in the UK in the sixties precluded any new local radio stations from effortlessly assimilating the work of the pirates onshore.  The London-based BBC needn’t have been involved and would have continued excelling itself with its three national networks,  expanding over time to provide rolling news and sports services using existing facilities.  Popular music would have been left to the people who did it best.  Specialist stations would have eventually arrived, operated under the aegis of established operators (much as HD stations are in the US today) and accommodated within existing spectrum. 

Therefore, if Wilson’s Government hadn't taken such exception to the commercial sector offering the public something previously unavailable (and at no cost), the state of British radio would now be so much better.

And the hopelessly over-indulged  BBC wouldn't find itself today having to divest itself of 20% of what talent it has left.

The Move to Manchester

Back in 1999 I was the Chairman of the BBC North Regional Advisory Council and, as such, represented the BBC North region on the BBC English National Forum, reporting directly to the BBC Governor with responsibility for the English Regions, Ranjit Sondhi.   Ranjit had mentioned to me in conversation that he and the other Governors were aware that the BBC appeared to be serving its London audience quite well, but that the rest of England failed to be responding to the same extent.  As a previously London-based employee of the BBC, now living in the North of England, I knew what he was talking about, so I suggested that I look into it.

Over a couple of months I researched and wrote a report "Poor Perception of BBC Services in the North of England", examining how the 'non-Home Counties' English audience regarded BBC services.  I found it fascinating.  I was given a lot of anecdotal evidence which, when combined, revealed an antipathy to the way the BBC presented itself.  Everything the BBC did, from assuming that estuary English was an accepted norm to the disgrace of its newsroom handing over to its 'North of England correspondent' (which it still does - one correspondent for 16.9 million people?), left audiences living over 100 miles from London feeling that the BBC was content stewing in its metropolitan juices and, whether they liked it or not, that was the way things were expected to stay.

(A year ago, and to illustrate this to Richard Deverell, the BBC executive responsible for coordinating the move to Manchester, I gave as an example of the BBC's London parochialism their tendancy, when showing what a bus stop looked like, to use one with the London Transport logo and the numbers 72 and 220 on it.  "Good heavens" he said, "I used to get the 72 to work..."  Of course he did: that's the bus stop in Wood Lane outside BBC Television Centre.  I suggested to him that it was probably what everyone in the BBC imagined bus stops to look like because none of them were aware of the world beyond White City).

The BBC was London. ITV wasn't because, even as the network de-federalised itself to become London-administered, the mainstay of its output remained diversely situated - and, also, a high proportion of its air-time (the ads) was local. The same applied to Channel 4.  Satellite television was perceived as having no geographical remit.

My report was circulated among the Governors and brought to the attention of both Andy Griffee, the Head of English Regions, and Pat Loughrey, Head of Nations and Regions.  I was invited to present the report to the two of them and was glad to find them so galvanised to respond to its findings.  Pat Loughrey instigated the BBC Northern Task Force which, with a budget of £24.5m, set about solving the problem of setting the BBC once again at the heart of its provincial audience.

And they completely missed the point.

My report revealed that people wanted local and regional production, which represented local and regional voices, interests and sentiments. Everyone now sniggers at the notion of 'Nationwide' ("Here in Norwich, we can do even better than that!") but, oneupmanship apart, it was seeing local colour make up the mosaic of the country that everyone wanted.  Something relevant to a family in Devon is relevant to a family in Cumbria.  What has happened now is that the BBC has dumped a whole load of departments into one location in Manchester - exactly the same as when it dumped Science Features into Kensington House back in 1970, or News and Current Affairs into Lime Grove a decade earlier.  Worse, and for some totally incomprehensible reason, it has decided to move London-based staff away from the capital to do this.  In possibly one of the BBC's worst-ever examples of metrocentric patronisation, it assumes two things: a) that only London staff can create BBC programmes (i.e. the rest of England lacks talent), and b) that it has solved its problem of provincial representation.

It hasn't.  Where are the local voices, the regional issues and the sentiment?  Still out there, one presumes.  They certainly won't be travelling up from W12.

During my research, I spoke to the widow of the drama producer Alfred Bradley who, in our conversation, said "One day, when Alfred was doing a radio play in Leeds..." and I thought that, in that one simple phrase, there was possibly no better way of encapsulating the whole, sad, missed, point.   Media can be produced anywhere these days.  It can be, and should be.  Greg Dyke was Director General at the implementation of the Northern Task Force and, although he stated that the days of the great regional studio centres were gone, he was vehement about modern technical kit and the advantages it would offer local talent and production.  He saw new technology as the catalyst for a resurgence in local and regional production - by any- and everyone, from any- and everywhere.  

Many other towns across the North also provided specific material for my research, yet all except Manchester fail to register on the new BBC radar.  The whole point of the research has been missed. BBC has created another of its distant, self-centred monoliths.  It has totally forgotten what the initial impetus was for its move up north.

Expect little change...

But Is It Art?

It appears that, for a series entitled “At Large”, I’m spending a disproportionate amount of time discussing Art.  The question of ‘what constitutes ‘Art’’ is the basis for a project I am currently developing, so there was every chance that issues arising from the work I’m doing on that will provide the basis for something to talk about here.

We had a day of high culture last weekend, spending Saturday in a rain-soaked Middlesbrough, taking in its exceptional public art, and then visiting MIMA, the town's very impressive Museum of Modern Art.  Way back, around 1970, as a student living there,I remember Middlesbrough holding its first contemporary art exhibition. Radical, different and often unsettling imagery, presented in the converted doctor’s surgery that was Middlesbrough Art Gallery at the time, wasn’t something that this A-level Art student expected, but it was the precursor of a constant, innovative and improving engagement that the town has with contemporary art.  Today’s public art in Middlesbrough includes work from internationally acclaimed artists such as Claes Oldenburg and Anish Kapoor.

Bottle Of Letters

Oldenburg’s Bottle Of Letters (which, in my typically inattentive way, I’ve always known as Message In A Bottle - and you'll see why), graces one of Middlesbrough’s earliest central land clearances, and today is attractively surrounded by a lake and green open spaces.  More recently, and perhaps to create a lure to the proposed dock-side development scheme, Anish Kapoor was commissioned to produced his giant work Temenos, the first part of the world’s largest public art project which will straddle the Tees Valley.  It is huge.



Middlesbrough has always been at home with giant structures.  The famous 100 year old Transporter Bridge and, up the River Tees, the Newport Bridge are surrounded by equally dramatic flare stacks, blast furnaces, cranes and the ephemeral leviathans that make up the hardware of the steel, shipbuilding and chemical industries - massive, intriguing shapes, all of them. And it was these that reminded me of my unanswered question ‘what constitutes Art?’ and prompted me to think further.

Temenos

Temenos is a commissioned sculpture, a work in steel and wire, which are materials indigenous to Middlesbrough.  Yet adjacent to the sculpture is a shipyard's travelling crane. Redundant, and consequently derelict like so many of the tools of Teesside industry, its huge dimensions equate to Temenos, its lines clean and forceful, its effect on those who study it possibly equally profound.

Not Art

But does anyone ever actually study it?  It was never constructed to be ‘Art’: it’s a crane.  If Andy Goldsworthy can make an ordinary tree ‘Art’ by putting a frame around it, why should the crane - designed and crafted out of steel and wire by artisans - not be ‘Art’?   Or is Temenos only ‘Art’ because it set out to be in the first place and someone tells us that it is? 

Our day of high culture ended by savouring Teesside’s contribution to the world of haute cuisine, the Chicken Parmo.

But that's another story...