Twenty-Twenty Vision

Last week I went to The Oval to watch Surrey play Essex in the NatWest T20 Blast; it was the first cricket match I had been to since 2006 when I was coincidentally at The Oval for the Saturday of the England v Pakistan Test match. I used to be a regular cricket watcher many years ago, but like a lot of things in life, my habits and circumstances changed - as did the other people I used to watch Essex with - and I stopped going.

A packed Oval (eventually) under the lights for the T20 Blast match between Surrey and Essex.

When I did watch Essex play, back in the 1970's and 1980's, it was normally one-day games in the John Player League or Benson & Hedges Cup, with occasional forays into the County Championship to watch a day's play at grounds like Valentines Park in Ilford, sadly no longer used by the county side who now rarely venture away from their headquarters at Chelmsford. Essex concentrating matches at one ground rather than taking games around the county is just one of many, many changes that cricket has seen in the years since I stopped going to matches. Grounds generally have improved beyond compare, for instance, the facilities that Essex offered spectators forty years ago would not be acceptable today, indeed many would breach Health and Safety regulations. And on the pitch, the game has changed immeasurably as well.

Valentines Park in Ilford now plays host only to club cricket.

The short form of the game - the matches limited to 60, 50, or 40 overs in competitions such as the Gillette (later NatWest) Cup, Benson & Hedges Cup, and John Player League respectively- has always had its detractors: there have always been people who see the four-day County Championship or five-day international Test matches as the 'proper' format, and view the limited overs game as an entertainment rather than proper cricket. But at least the 60, 50, or 40 over matches gave teams and players scope to build innings, to shape matches by switching tactics and with bowling changes: the Twenty20 game is to many people, just not cricket.

What is indisputable is that Twenty20 cricket has required players to be fitter, more athletic, stronger, and with better reactions. You only have to compare the running between the wickets and the fielding in modern day cricket - especially the Twenty20 game - to the pedestrian performances of thirty or forty years ago to see the benefits that the short-form of the game have brought; even the mundane act of returning the ball to the bowler is conducted with a speed and ferocity that a 1960's cricketer could not have achieved fielding in anger. But Twenty20 cricket demands that as many runs as possible are scored as quickly as possible, and inevitably such an objective means that technique is sacrificed. The debate about the pros and cons of Twenty20 cricket as it affects the standards of play will doubtless rumble on for some time, and by more expert commentators than me, but it is not just at the wicket and out in the field that the Twenty20 has generated discussion, and will continue to.

Off the pitch, Twenty20 cricket has, like other limited over formats, been a hit with the spectators. In 2014, over 704,000 people watched Twenty20 games, compared with just over 510,000 who watched County Championship games in  2015. The game I saw at The Oval was sold out, as are many Twenty20 games, yet many in the crowd - and I'm more inclined to call them an audience - seemed less than entirely focussed on what was going on in front of them. Many people have said that Twenty20 cricket is for people who aren't interested in cricket, (in fact, someone said it to me just last Saturday), and from my own observations, that is pretty close to the mark.

Last week at The Oval, by 6.30pm, when the first ball was bowled, there were rows and rows of empty seats in front of me. They filled up - eventually - with groups of people who seemed equally interested in eating, drinking, and chatting as they were in the cricket, perhaps more so in fact, given the frequency with which they disappeared to replenish their supplies of nachos, cheeseburgers, and beer. On the one hand, there is nothing wrong with that - if that's what they want to do, who am I to object? - but conversely, while nipping off to get a snack or a drink occasionally is almost a necessity if you are watching a whole day of a Test match, where play may run into seven hours or more, doing so in a Twenty20 game - which lasts less than half that time and is a lot more fast paced - means missing a fairly big chunk of what you primarily paid for.

I would surmise that for many in the crowd at The Oval, the evening was as much a social occasion as a sporting one. Looked at that way, a warm summer evening spent outdoors in the company of friends, with virtually limitless food and drink, is a lot of people's idea of time well spent. And it comes with the added bonus of being in pleasant surroundings - The Oval is attractive and ticks all of the boxes, in terms of facilities - and the cricket gives you something to watch when the conversation runs dry, even if you are not an enthusiast.

From the perspective of the clubs, the income that one-day games generate is crucial to their survival. The eighteen First Class counties had just 80,000 members (akin to the football club season ticket holder) between them in 2016, so Twenty20 cricket, with its sell-out crowds and significant income from peripherals, keeps the County Championship game afloat. There is nothing wrong with that, even if the majority in the grounds are casual supporters at best, it does no harm:  I am a great believer in the principle that any club, be it a cricket club, rugby club or football club, should maximise their income from people who have little or no interest in the club itself.

A fairly typical attendance at a County Championship match. Photo: Andrew Fox

Twenty20 cricket is a world away from the game I first watched. The pyrotechnics, the white ball, the coloured kits complete with shirt numbers and players' names, the music that greets a boundary or a wicket, it's all a whole lot of razzmatazz that a spectator from a 1960's County Championship game would barely recognise as cricket. In some ways, Twenty20 cricket is emblematic of today's society, where attention spans have been shortened as the internet reduces our consumption of news and current affairs into increasingly bite-sized chunks, while watching a film, or a show, or a sporting event has to be accompanied by food and drink in increasingly industrial sized quantities.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed my first experience of Twenty20 cricket - even if my team did lose. It has made me more interested in the game than I have been for a while, to the extent that I have bought a ticket for one day of a County Championship game at Chelmsford next month. Fingers crossed that the weather is kind.

From Behind The Sofa

Apart from the occasional close-up scenes of surgery, which I may watch through my fingers or turn away from completely, I haven't been forced to take refuge behind the sofa while watching television since the early 1960's. The shows that had me cowering behind the furniture back then, were Fireball XL5 and Dr Who, although while the former only rarely had me doing so - I seem to recall some skeletal robot from one episode that scared me, although I may be confusing it with the show's resident robot, Robert - Dr Who frequently had me torn between watching the show  and finding sanctuary from it. The Daleks and the Cybermen, two of science fiction's most iconic monsters - equalled only by the Borg in Star Trek for my money - were the creatures that terrified me the most, although the Yeti ran them close.

I grew out of Gerry Anderson's creations with Thunderbirds, although I did watch a few episodes of UFO, but I cannot now recall when I stopped watching Dr Who, although I do know that it was long before the BBC stopped making the show in the 1990's. When it was revived in 2005, with Christopher Eccleston taking the part as the ninth Doctor, I gave it a spin, but frankly, it did not pique my interest sufficiently to carry on watching it. There are, however, plenty of people who are fanatical about the programme, and as with many shows, they will drill down into the minutiae, picking up on any errors in continuity or plot, speculating about the actions - past, and future - of the characters, in short treating it almost as seriously as real life. Now, I am not decrying them for their enthusiasm and devotion, far from it, as I have been the same with other programmes over the years, and one part of Dr Who that always has fans and the media agog, is the speculation over who will be the new Doctor.

Christopher Eccleston was the ninth Doctor when the show rebooted in 2005.

The regeneration of the Doctor is a useful device enabling the producers to make a virtue of replacing the lead actor rather than risking the sorts of disappointments that have arisen in other series when a new actor has taken over an established role. I'm particularly thinking of  Alias Smith and Jones, where Roger Davis replaced Pete Duel as Hannibal Heyes after Duel's untimely death and the show never recovered.

Alias Smith and Jones never recovered after the death of Pete Duel (left).

Inevitably, each new Doctor has their fans and their detractors, but never before has there been the sort of outcry we have seen in the last few days since the BBC announced that the new Doctor would be Jodie Whittaker, principally it seems because she is, err, a woman. I'm not especially familiar with her work (the only thing I can think of that I have seen her in was Attack The Block), but she appeared in the highly acclaimed Broadchurch, and no doubt she is an accomplished actor, however it is the mere fact that she is a woman playing a role that had previously only been played by men that has exercised many people. Whether you see the move as bravely challenging gender stereotypes and encouraging more women and girls to watch the show, while creating a role model for female fans, or an attempt by the arch- liberal BBC to pander to the PC brigade, depends on your preconceptions and how dedicated you are to the show, I suppose. Or perhaps, given the gender pay gap that has become apparent following the announcement of BBC stars' salaries this week, this is an economy measure.

Jodie Whittaker is the new Doctor. Photo: Colin Hutton/BBC

The controversy over Jodie Whittaker's casting illustrates the difference between how fans and writers feel about a show. While the writers may want to innovate, to try new styles and approaches to reinvigorate a familiar favourite, fans want - if not exactly more of the same - evolution, not revolution. Fans of shows like Dr Who - or Star Trek to name but one other - can be quite possessive and proprietorial, and become somewhat distraught when a significant change is made to the style or content of the show,  just as when bands radically alter their musical style (think Genesis or Yes, who became increasingly poppy in the 1980's, much to the dismay of their hardcore fans). What these aficionados crave are variations on the theme that first attracted them, not radical departures from the tried and tested.

Some people were in favour of a female Doctor...

...some were not...

...and some just wanted to point out the obvious.

Film franchises are different. With each new reboot comes a new actor in the starring role, and it is easier to accept a new face in films where either a single film or a few sequels have come before than it is with a long running TV series that is considered to be continuous. That isn't to say we don't have our favourites for a film role, however. My view is that Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy represents the best version of the franchise, and Christian Bale is the best Batman. Other people will have different views.  Sometimes, however, it is simply the first actor you see in a role that becomes the ideal representation of the character; Sean Connery will forever be James Bond as far as I am concerned, however other people will claim Roger Moore, or Pierce Brosnan as their quintessential Bond. 

There was a rumour, and it generated a lot of debate at the time, that Idris Elba could be the next Bond - once Daniel Craig turns in his Walther PPK - which may have dismayed those who could not see past Bond being a white Scotsman as described by Ian Fleming. But just as Dr Who regenerates, a radical change in Bond's appearance could be explained with the simple strategy of making the character a cypher, by making James Bond a nom de guerre. Personally, I could quite see Idris Elba as Bond, although I could not see Bond ever being portrayed by a woman, since unlike Dr Who, Bond is not supposed to be an alien from some distant world where our notions of gender may be irrelevant. But it is conceivable that Bond could be played as a gay man, because in the real world, where homosexuality once automatically prohibited employment with MI5 and MI6, the intelligence services now welcome people from the LGBT community, and so much so that in 2016, MI5 headed Stonewall’s[1] top 100 employers’ list.

Idris Elba. Photo: Independent

If you are a dyed in the wool devotee of Dr Who or James Bond, you may consider my views a tad flippant, probably because I am not an enthusiast of either, but I maintain that the idea that James Bond is a nom de guerre would work well. Once Jodie Whittaker's tenure as the Doctor comes to an end, and whether it is marked a success or a failure, speculation over who should be the next Time Lord will erupt again, and I'm getting in early with my choice for the 14th Doctor[2], and that would be Professor Stephen Hawking.

The Fourteenth Doctor?

And the more you think about that, the more you will think I'm right, after all, who better to play a Time Lord than the man who wrote A Brief History of Time?

---

[1] Stonewall campaigns for the equality of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people across Britain. See www.stonewall.org.uk

[2] Or will it be 15th, since the BBC's numbering seems to have ignored John Hurt's portrayal? There again, other actors who have played the Doctor in other productions made by the corporation have also been excluded from the sequence.

Old Money

It may be the best part of fifty years since Britain switched to decimal currency, but there still remains the odd occasion when I cannot help but look at the price of something, a newspaper perhaps, and convert the price into old money. "Ten bob for a paper!" I will exclaim (usually just mentally, but sometimes out loud). It proves that old habits die hard...very hard.

"Ten bob for a newspaper!"

The conversion from pounds, shillings, and pence (LSD) to decimal currency back in 1971 was greatly facilitated by the short drama, shown repeatedly on television, called Granny Gets The Point, in which Doris Hare played a grandmother who was taught how to use the new-fangled coinage by her grandson. Naturally, this being Britain, embracing the principle of a decimal system could only be achieved by retaining some non-decimal measure as part of the process, hence the retention of the old sixpence (worth 2½p) and the introduction of the decimal half-penny coin. 

While the old sixpence, which remained legal tender until 1980, was held in great affection - I found one a few years ago and came over all nostalgic - the half-penny was universally unloved. It was a nuisance for shop-keepers and bank cashiers,  and it was ignored by anyone who saw one lying on the pavement, yet it remained in circulation until 1984, retained on the grounds that it was an important factor in the defence against inflation.

The old tanner was held in great affection by the British public...

...the same could not be said for the ha'penny.

Just as the value of the half-penny fell to the point that it was ignored by most people - many were just thrown away - so the penny and two-penny pieces may have outlived their usefulness. It has been reported that prior to the 2015 General Election, the then Chancellor, George Osborne, proposed abolishing the 2p and 1p coins - largely on the grounds that they cost more to produce than they are worth. The plan was abandoned when he was told that similar plans in Australia had met with much opposition from charities who collect a lot of low-value coins. And just as with the half-penny, withdrawing the two bronze coins would inevitably lead concerns about increased prices and increased inflation.

But would it? When cash was king and paying by cheque was rare, and by card unheard of, the argument made sense, but now when the majority of transactions are by card or some other electronic method, it loses some validity. The psychological effect of the .99 price would be a greater driver to keep prices down than the abolition of the 2p and 1p would be to drive them up. Even without the bronze coins in circulation, prices for electronic transactions could remain as they are; only cash prices would need to be rounded up. Ah, but that's unfair on the elderly who still cling to paying by cash, goes the argument, and yes there remains a significant minority of the older generation for whom paying by card for a loaf of bread and a pint of milk remains anathema, but even my old Mum happily embraced Chip and Pin before she died, and would probably have been happy with contactless payment too. And just maybe, retailers would round cash prices down to the nearest 5p or 10p...maybe. 

As the years pass, the number of cash transactions will fall through choice, regardless of what coins and notes remain in circulation. Until just a few years ago, I would draw a sum of cash from an ATM on a weekly basis, but now I find I do so less frequently. Similarly, I used to spend cash every day, now I often go days without using notes or coins. There's the Oyster card for rail and bus fares, an app to pay for food and drink in coffee shops, and the contactless bank card for most other things.  I read somewhere that about two in five British people would be happy to do without cash and rely on the electronic alternatives and in mainland Europe, that figure goes up to three in five, apparently. In April this year, Britons spent nearly £4billion using contactless cards, nearly 150% more than twelve months before, proof that we are moving in the direction of a cashless culture.

In Sweden, cash has become such an underused medium for transactions that some banks no longer accept cash deposits in some branches, and many have no ATMs. In  Swedish shops, cash is now used in only around one in five transactions, compared with the global average of seven in ten, and according to Niklas Arvidsson, an associate professor at Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden is likely to become a cashless society by 2020. Even the homeless magazine salesmen take electronic payments, and church collections are 85% cash free. And removing cash from the economy aids the fight against crime. Bank robberies and ATM ram-raids become a thing of the past, while money laundering becomes harder, although as we all know, electronic payment methods are hardly immune, nor are they safe from other types of fraudulent activity.

In 2016, a Big Issue salesman became the first in Britain to accept payments via Apple Pay.

An obvious concern about the movement away from cash is that the ease of use of contactless cards, Apple Pay and the like encourage binge spending, that the value of the transactions are less apparent, and it becomes easier to get into debt. Clearly, digging notes and coins from wallet and pocket focuses the mind on the price of a purchase more vividly than merely tapping a contactless card on a reader, but the same things were said when cheque cards were introduced, and when credit cards first became popular and more widely held.

More insidious perhaps is the likely growth of surge pricing that is more easily facilitated when payments are made through electronic methods. Sometimes called dynamic pricing, surge pricing is a strategy in which business set flexible prices which are essentially determined by supply and demand in real-time. Football clubs use dynamic pricing in setting ticket prices, for instance with Premier League clubs in particular categorising games in different price bands depending on the opposition. The London Congestion charge and some other toll road charges are another example of dynamic pricing, while taxi firm Uber base their fares entirely on this principle.

And the practice is spreading. Last year, Marks and Spencer ran a trial where the price of sandwiches was reduced in the mornings to encourage people to buy their lunch early. While surge pricing for theatre tickets, concert tickets, and football matches is well understood and purchasers will be well aware in advance, a purchase that is made on a daily basis but which may vary in price depending on what time of day it is made is subtle enough to be missed by all but the most alert of shoppers. It is certainly something consumers will have to be watchful for in the future.

The price of your M&S Prawn sandwich may well be determined by when you buy it.

One day it may go even further. Not just dynamic pricing, but pricing tailored to the individual, based on their spending habits. Retailers already send us discount vouchers according to our shopping habits based on the data they collect through loyalty cards, so the day when that data is used to personalise our shopping experience to affect the price we pay at the till cannot be far away. We've come a long way since the half-penny was abolished, doing away with the penny and tuppence would be nothing compared to what could lie ahead.

Wish You Were Here

The picture postcard, long the staple of seaside holidays, with its bland coastal view and desperate platitudes about hotel, food, and weather, ought to be one of those long lost reminders of time past, totally supplanted by social media. Yet as recently as 2006, the number of cards being sent in Britain was actually increasing, with the Royal Mail delivering 135 million that year, 30 million more than in 2003. It may be that in the interim the numbers have dropped off somewhat (these were the latest figures I for postcard mailings I could find), and frankly it seems unlikely that anyone but the over 50's are still sending cards, but their longevity and popularity still surprise me, particularly when, now I have thought about it, I have neither sent nor received a holiday postcard for at least twenty years. And when we go on holiday, it never crosses my mind, or Val's mind, to send any cards - and I very much doubt it occurs to our daughters to do so.

Walk along any seafront, at home or abroad, and the souvenir shops are all stocking postcards, and presumably, people are still buying them, although my guess would be that many, if not most, are bought as keepsakes rather than being written and posted. Those who are buying them to send to friends and family are faced with those twin dilemmas; what to write and when to post. As a rule of thumb, the further you are from home, the earlier the card has to be sent, otherwise the chances are good that you will get home before the card does - and clearly, once you get half way through the holiday and no cards have been sent, then you aren't sending any. 

As to what to write, then writing your cards on day one, or day two, means there is little to write about beyond, "Hotel nice, weather nice, food nice. Wish you were here." But leave it too long and a more candid card might reveal, "Hotel full of drunks, got food poisoning from dodgy shellfish, rained three days on the trot, family at each other's throats. You're better off at home!" So uninspired was I when it came to card writing that I seriously contemplated having a rubber stamp made up with some stock phrases that I could emboss my cards with, because let's face it, what people write on postcards is pretty banal.

Plenty of cards on sale on Brighton seafront recently.

Around about the time I last sent a postcard the price of a First Class stamp was 26p, although a postcard had a special rate of 20p. Now it is 65p (no different for postcards) and for the average family, the cost of sending cards to friends, family and work colleagues probably exceeds the price of fish 'n' chips all round, another reason to upload a few pictures to Facebook with some suitably pithy comments instead. Postcard apps like TouchNote - over nine million cards sent since 2008 - have proven that people still like to send a physical card, although such apps represent an awkward half-way house between the technophile and the technophobe and are probably best for the tech savvy to send cards to members of the family who have so far eschewed the internet.

TouchNote is just one of several apps that allow you to send your own photos as a postcard.

Since postcards date back to the 1870's, conventional wisdom might suggest that with age comes value and that a card from the so-called Golden Age (1905-1915) might be worth collecting and, by extension, be quite valuable - except that during that period, Britons sent about 750 million postcards, or about 2 million per day! Hardly worth anything in terms of rarity value, then, with cards from that era typically only fetching a pound or two.  Postcards were, I suppose, the Edwardian equivalent of email. With the Royal Mail offering multiple collections and deliveries every day, (in 1889, Londoners received twelve deliveries a day) it was possible to send a card and receive an answer within the same day; asking for a response 'By Return Post' had a more literal meaning then than it does now.

We may think we live in frenetic times now, but for the Victorian and Edwardian gentlefolk, twelve posts a day - particular for those unused to them - must potentially have been a source of some stress. John Walker Harrington, writing in 1906 about the volume of postcards being sent in America, said, "Unless such manifestations are checked, millions of persons of now normal lives and irreproachable habits will become victims of faddy degeneration of the brain." The Lord alone knows what he would have made of email.

I started writing this with the apprehension that the postcard was in terminal decline, based solely on my own experience, and while the number of cards being sent is clearly nowhere near the peak of one-hundred or so years ago, the medium seems to be holding up well enough despite the obvious immediacy, ease, and versatility of the social media alternatives.

If you are still in the habit of sending postcards when you are on holiday, then good for you. If like me, you are out of the habit, perhaps now is the time to return to the practise, after all,

Facebook and the like are all very well, but a postcard carries a much more personal touch.