Biased or Balanced? Where Does The BBC Stand?

The Tory government seems to have it in for the BBC at present - and for Channel 4 News, The Mirror, The i, HuffPost, PoliticsHome, The Independent among others – with journalists excluded from Downing Street briefings, ministers refusing to appear on the Today programme on Radio 4, and suggestions that by 2027, when the BBC’s charter is up for renewal, the licence fee will have been scrapped and the corporation thinned down to a mere shadow of its current form.

Too right, many of you may say. You may also say that the BBC is a liberal, left-wing, anti-Tory, anti-Brexit organisation – except those of you who think that the BBC is pro-Tory, pro-Brexit, and very much anti-Labour (and particularly anti-Corbyn). But the role of the BBC – and other broadcasters and journalists for that matter – is to question and challenge politicians (and anyone else) and not simply accept what they say and parrot it blindly. I suspect that many people who are critical of the BBC questioning Boris Johnson and his government would be similarly critical of the BBC if it didn’t pursue Jeremy Corbyn or any Labour politician in the same way.

Dominic Cummings – the Prime Minister’s special adviser – is attributed with remarks that No 10 would ‘whack’ the BBC. Mr Cummings is an interesting specimen, for whereas unelected Brussels bureaucrats were considered beyond the pale, he, the unelected bureaucrat that he is, is considered okay – “He may be an unelected bureaucrat, but he’s our unelected bureaucrat.”

There is an argument that runs along the lines that because the BBC is supposed to be balanced and impartial, then every programme, every debate, every news broadcast, has to be. That every report into one claim or another has to include something or someone that refutes that position. On that basis, when they reported the craze for eating Tide Pods back in 2018, they really ought to have balanced the argument that doing so could be fatal with a viewpoint from someone who had survived eating one and promoted the view that it was a harmless piece of fun. Or perhaps not.

If we are talking about a lack of balance, then Question Time is probably the prime example. Nigel Farage – the high priest of Brexit – has appeared on the programme more than thirty times, during which time not a single pro-EU MEP has appeared, yet Farage believes that BBC is biased against him, and against Brexit. By the bye, Nigel Farage has made more appearances on Question Time than anyone else in the 21^st century. Equally, however, I’m sure that there is ‘proof’ that Question Time is a rabidly left-wing, anti-Brexit, Farage hating, Boris baiting, tree-hugging programme full of snowflakes.

My point here is that it is very easy to pick up on something – no matter how rare or isolated – and offer it as proof of one’s own beliefs and prejudices and the media feeds that, because whether we accept it or not, the mainstream media – and social media – have a powerful role in affecting behaviours and attitudes.

The bulk of the newspapers published in England tend to be right of centre, which is scarcely surprising given that they tend to be owned by organisations or individuals that are right of centre. Understandably they will support politicians whose policies and interests are most closely aligned to, and protect their interests, but I’m sure you already knew that. Naturally, consumers of these publications may, having been drip-fed the views and outlooks that those papers support, find their own prejudices and points of view moulded by what they read. And, of course, people will naturally gravitate towards newspapers that support their own point of view or preferences.

For many years I read the Daily Mail, although I haven’t done so on a regular basis since 2012. When I did read it, I often found myself nodding along in agreement with it, particularly with some of the opinion pieces. Now I don’t know if it is me that has changed, or whether the paper has become more rabidly right-wing in recent years (a bit of both I suspect), but I picked up a copy of it in a dentist’s waiting room recently and despite knowing what to expect vis a vis its political views, I was unprepared for the bile, spite and hatred that it spewed: I’m sure it was never as bad when I was a regular reader. Then there is the Daily Express. I’m not sure whether I know any regular readers of that newspaper, but I suspect not, since – if the paper is anything to go by – they would be easily recognisable as being in a constant state of outrage given the frequency with which words like ‘anger,’ ‘fury,’  and ‘rage’ appear in the randomly capitalised headlines on their website (when they are not writing about Princess Diana, statins, or the impending cataclysmic weather we can expect next winter).

The influence of newspapers in forming opinion should not be underestimated. Liverpool, Sefton and the Wirral bucked the trend during the 2016 EU referendum, as these districts were rare islands where Remain was in the majority among a sea of Leave voting areas around them. 

The apparent 'Sun' effect on Liverpool voting Remain may just be that larger, more metropolitan
areas were generally more likely to be in favour of staying in the EU

A major reason that has been cited for this was that these areas had largely boycotted The Sun newspaper following its coverage of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster in which it placed blame on the Liverpool supporters. Researchers at the London School of Economics and the University of Zurich found Merseyside was around 10 per cent less Eurosceptic than the rest of the UK as a result of the boycott. It seems that having shunned the Brexit supporting Sun, many of these readers migrated to the more pro-EU Daily Mirror. This argument carries less weight however when one considers that Manchester (where there was no known Sun boycott) also heavily voted Remain.

Liverpool has never forgiven Th Sun for stories like this.

It is easier to destroy than create, easier to criticise than to praise, and the media are hyena-like in picking on the weak and vulnerable. It is nothing new that the tabloid press and the celebrity magazines build people up just to knock them down, and are able to hold two contradictory views about people simultaneously – so long as both are negative views. Thus, Piers Morgan is able to criticise Prince Harry and Meghan Markle for taking money from the crown rather than going out and earning it, and then criticise them for getting involved with bankers Goldman Sachs. Not earning your own money is bad, but equally so is earning it, or so the logic runs.

Celebrity gossip magazines like these are now often banned in various waiting rooms
due to their negativity and celebrity shaming.

Despite the ambiguous evidence as to how influential The Sun boycott on Merseyside was in the 2016 referendum, it seems fairly unequivocal that the mainstream media and social media play a very significant role in shaping public opinion, or in reinforcing it. Even if allegations of bias against the BBC have any basis in fact, at least they rarely – if ever – spew the bile and hatred so commonplace elsewhere, especially in the print media.

Whatever you may think of the BBC, they are actually an oasis of calm and measured consideration of news stories when compared with many of their competitors, and we lose that at our peril. The criticism of the BBC – that it is not as impartial, or unbiased as its charter requires – could not be applied to any news organisation that took its place. Look at Fox News in the USA, or RT International; are these balanced, impartial and unbiased broadcasters? No, they have no need to even pretend to be.

If the day comes and the BBC isn’t there anymore – or is as pared back as some might wish - then our television and radio may be dominated by broadcasters who have no reason to even pretend to be balanced or unbiased and that could not be a good thing.

Who Said Crime Doesn’t Pay?

This is a heavily truncated description of a sequence of events that began a year ago. The full story would fill many blogs, and it is long enough as it is. I have not mentioned the name of the company involved (which has ceased trading anyway), nor its directors in case this may affect any ongoing investigations by the police, although I am not sure that there are any ongoing investigations.

In February 2019 my mother-in-law was scammed out of over £6,000 and the efforts that my wife went through trying to recover that money, and the inefficiency and total inaction on the part of the people that you would think would want to pursue the people who did this, leads me to the inescapable conclusion that in this case, crime - specifically fraud - does pay.

We only discovered that £6,000 had gone missing from my mother-in-law’s bank account when we decided that we really had to deal with the tsunami of paperwork that was all over her living room floor. Our principal concern was that hidden among the mountains of paper was some crucial bill that had not been paid. As it turned out, I did find a cheque that was three years old and hadn’t been paid into her bank account; fortunately getting a replacement turned out to be relatively straightforward.

Having gone through the piles of utility bills and sundry other correspondence, I sorted about four years’ worth of bank statements into date order and started plodding through them in case there was anything dubious. I didn’t expect to find anything but then I came across a debit for £6,100 for a cheque that had been issued.

As luck would have it, I almost immediately came across a Customer Purchase Order, which was for the supposed installation of some loft insulation. This document showed that this was what my mother-in-law had issued the cheque for.

We managed to piece together a few facts, as although Val’s mum could not remember the men to whom she gave the cheque calling, her neighbour did remember them coming and being quite aggressive; she told them to leave, but it seems that they returned and that was when they got the cheque. Of course, we checked the loft; no work had been done – there had never been any intention on the fraudster’s part to do any – and it looked as though no one had been in the loft for decades.

What happened next is a long, depressing story of the frustration that comes dealing with the agencies that you would hope and believe should be there to help people who have been the victims of this sort of thing. It is fortunate that Val and I have the time, the patience – and after a couple of lifetimes working in environments where one has to deal with bureaucracy – the wherewithal of going through the steps to try and recover the money. I am sure that a lot of victims of this sort of crime simply give up and write the money off.

Our first port of call was the local police station, except they don’t accept visitors except by appointment, so we phoned 101, the police non-emergency number. Some seventy-minutes later, when we finally spoke to someone, we were told to contact Action Fraud. We had tried phoning the company, but both of their phone numbers went straight to voicemail. We reported the matter to Action Fraud; to this day, we have not heard anything from them and contacting them for updates is completely pointless. Similarly, Trading Standards are of no help whatever, as we reported the matter to them through the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) and have never heard a peep since, and according to the CAB, Trading Standards do not – as a matter of policy – update them, nor complainants, on any progress that they may make. We eventually did get confirmation – through the county council, and thanks only to the assistance of my mother-in-law’s Member of Parliament - that the matter had been filed unactioned by Trading Standards.

Naturally, we tried writing to the company asking them to refund the £6,100 and we also contacted my mother-in-law’s bankers and requested a copy of the paid cheque. Both the Royal Mail and Barclays Bank performed – or should I say, failed to perform – these tasks with breath-taking levels of incompetence.

The Royal Mail delivered our Recorded Delivery letter back to us instead of to the addressee, and when they resent it and had it refused at the address, promptly lost it for a number of weeks. It has to be said that our writing this and subsequent letters were just us going through the motions, we actually delivered letters in person, but as the company’s address was at a self-storage unit, it is improbable that anyone from the company ever saw them.

It took innumerable phone calls and letters to get a copy of the paid cheque from the bank – in the end, we had to raise a formal complaint – and when we finally got it, showed that although my mother-in-law had signed the cheque, had been completed by one of the men who scammed her.

We did make contact with the police again and eventually made it to the police station where we spent three hours giving a statement. That was in September 2019; we’ve heard nothing since.

We instructed solicitors to try and recover the funds, albeit that we were reluctant to throw good money after bad, and they had no more success in contacting the company or its directors than we did.

There is a happy ending to this story, for us at least, although other similar victims may not have been as lucky. In an act of desperation, we wrote to the bank at the suggestion of a social worker and suggested that my mother-in-law may have been a victim of an authorised push payment fraud (APP), although these are more normally associated with bank transfers than cheques.

The bank then phoned us and took some more details and decided that, without any admission of liability on their part, that they would credit Val’s mum’s account with the full amount of the cheque, plus £150 for the less than efficient way they had dealt with our request for the copy of the paid cheque. This they said, was in recognition of the lengths to which we had gone in trying to recover the money ourselves.

While this ended happily for us inasmuch that we did get the bulk of the money back (there were some solicitors fees that we obviously did not recover), a lot of people in similar circumstances would not have been so fortunate.

Investigations at Companies House (their website is a mine of information), showed that the directors of the company that scammed my mother-in-law have set up and dissolved a good number of companies in recent years, companies that I imagine they set up with the express purpose of committing similar frauds.

Action Fraud were worse than useless in this matter, although having seen the expose that The Times ran on them, this is scarcely surprising, as it seems that by and large, they do little more than record incidents of fraud that the public report to them, and collate the information. Cases that are passed on to the police seem to have a limited chance of being investigated, let alone being resolved. The Times reports that a review conducted by former Metropolitan Police deputy commissioner Sir Craig Mackay showed that only one in 200 officers were dedicated to investigating fraud even though there were nearly four million incidents per year in England and Wales, which is more than one in three of all crimes.

The report said that fraudsters were able to ‘operate with impunity’ and that millions of victims were being failed as cases were being handed to ‘unskilled investigators’ and that the police could ‘no longer work effectively to identify criminals and help bring them to justice.’ That definitely tallies with our experience.

We did contact my mother-in-law’s MP, although there is little that he could do, even as a member of the party that tags itself ‘the party of law and order.’ He said he would write to the Home Secretary, Priti Patel about the matter, or at least the general principle. If he did, she doesn’t appear to have responded. Her boast at last October’s Tory party conference that the government was "coming after the thugs, gangs, and criminals who make law-abiding people's lives a misery" rings pretty hollow, I’m afraid.

Priti Patel 

Bizarrely, we received a letter from Brandon Lewis in his capacity as Minister of State for Security and Deputy for Eu Exit and No Deal Preparation: your guess is as good as mine as to how Brexit connects with the fraud against my mother-in-law. The letter says that Mr Lewis was sorry to hear about the fraud, but then rambles on for several paragraphs generalising about the government’s response to fraud, but stating that although Action Fraud did pass the information on to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, they decided not to pass it on to the police and that Trading Standards were the people through whom a claim against the fraudsters should be pursued. As we know, Trading Standards filed the matter unactioned.

The conclusion that I have reached is that if you are a fraudster, or plan to be one, your chances of getting caught are slim; if you are a victim, you are pretty much on your own. In this case, and no doubt in many more besides, the agencies that one expects to help – Action Fraud, the police, Trading Standards – take the information and simply file it unactioned.  Since there is no point in relying on them, then it is clearly essential to be careful and avoid being scammed, but if you are old and vulnerable, that may be easier said than done.

It's Good To Talk

In 1990, BT launched an advertising campaign featuring Bob Hoskins, star of The Long Good Friday, Mona Lisa, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? to name but three of his big-screen successes, with the tag line “It’s good to talk.”

At a time when mobile phones were in their infancy, and BT had a monopoly on the landline market, this campaign was less about generating new business and more about getting existing consumers to use their phones more frequently. And the existing customers it targeted were men, hence the choice of Hoskins to front the campaign, because of the sexes, men – despite the fact that it was they who by and large paid the bills – made fewer phone calls.

It’s possibly as true today as it ever was that men are generally less inclined to pick up the phone – whether it’s a landline or a mobile – and call someone up for a chat. Perhaps I am perpetuating stereotypes, especially since my wife is not especially inclined to call anyone simply for a chat either, but generally it is my experience (based on an admittedly very small sample), that women are more inclined to use the phone for casual conversations than are men.

Whereas my mother would phone friends and family members regularly, and my first wife would do the same (I never understood why she saw the need to phone someone and chat with them for ages when she had already arranged to meet them that same day, but she did), my father seldom made calls to anyone other than – infrequently – to his brothers or sister. Even after I married and moved away from my parents, I can only recall him phoning me once, and that was for the very practical reason that my mother had recently become afflicted by tinnitus, and was driving him mad with her complaints about the noises in her ears that she thought were cars, lorries, or machinery outside the house.

I don’t recall my father ever calling any friends, although that was largely due to the fact that I don’t remember him ever actually having friends and I definitely don’t recall an occasion on which he went out with friends. That isn’t to say that he didn’t enjoy talking – getting him to stop was more often the problem - and whereas most people are ever keen to shoo away Jehovah's Witnesses when they call at the door, when they spoke to my dad it was more likely that they would make excuses and leave!

While BT were telling us, and men in particular, that it was good to talk because that would be good for their profits, the idea that it is good to talk is otherwise rightly based on the fact that it’s good for our mental health. I realise that I am stereotyping wildly (again), but generally, a group of women gathered together will have conversations much different from a similar group of men. Men don’t generally talk with each other about their feelings, their emotions, their fears or their needs. It is possibly a contributor to the alarming statistic that suicide is the biggest killer of men under 45 in the UK, and is responsible for 18 deaths every day.[1]

I admit that I am as reticent as the next man when it comes to expressing my feelings, but I really appreciate the benefits of doing so. My sole experience of professional counselling, which came back in 1993, proved immensely valuable, and while it may not be for everyone, it is definitely something which – if the need arises – should not be written off.

There’s an old saw that suggests that while men utter somewhere in the region of 7,000 words per day, women speak an average of 20,000 although research undertaken in 2007, and published in the American journal, Science suggests that this is way off beam. A decade’s worth of data collected by the University of Arizona in Tucson produced results that had women speaking 16,215 words and men 15,669 per day. I would be interested to know how many words I speak daily; there are many days when I reckon my total would be way below 15k.

A few weeks ago my wife and younger daughter went away for a few days, and although I spoke to them daily on the phone, it quickly dawned on me that barring the odd exchange with someone serving in a coffee shop or the supermarket, I went somewhere in the region of five days without having a face-to-face conversation with anyone. Did that bother me? No, not at all. Being an only child, I have always been comfortable in my own company; I think that I would have been ideally suited to some solitary profession – lighthouse keeper, perhaps – as on balance, I am an introvert. Of course, I knew that at the end of the week, my family were coming home but there are many people for whom a week - and longer - without a face-to-face conversation is the norm, for them it is no trivial problem.

I never considered lighthouse keeping as a career, but I reckon it would have been right up my street.

I Googled “am I an introvert” and the definition is me to a tee. Apparently, there is a seemingly paradoxical personality type, the talkative introvert; at times I think that is me, too, but only when there is something worth talking about!

Conversation for the sake of it – what one might call idle jibber-jabber – is sometimes almost physically painful in my experience. That isn’t to say that I can’t yabber on with the best of them (my wife would probably say that, like my father, there are times when it’s difficult to shut me up, and especially when she is talking; she calls it interrupting, I call it joining in – we’ve agreed to differ), but I don’t have a problem with silence, even in company. Companionable silence is, in my view, preferable to inane chatter.

The crux of all this though is that it is good to talk, but like so much in life, it’s about quality, not quantity, about making words count, and while I don’t entirely subscribe to the theory that a problem shared is a problem halved, sharing a problem can at least put it into perspective.

---

[1] Source: https://www.thecalmzone.net/

Finished With Aplomb

I started this blog back in 2012 with the intention of publishing something every week, which I managed to keep up until 2017 when I missed a few weeks. 2018 was less productive still, there were more weeks when nothing appeared than those when something did. There are two obstacles to my publishing something every week, a lack of inspiration and a lack of time (if I’m honest, sometimes a failure of will to make the time).

But just because there isn’t a blog every week, it doesn’t mean I’m not writing anything. I’ve been writing articles for Romford Football Club’s matchday programme for longer than I’ve been blogging, and that means between forty and fifty pieces of about 800 words each between August and April each year. And this season I have ended up with the task of writing match reports for the programme and website, and for Saturday home games at least, for The Non League Paper. In a recent programme, I found that I had contributed seven of thirteen pages of text, or somewhere approaching 5,000 words. In what I hope is an instance of justifiable self-plagiarism, a somewhat cut-down and revised version of this blog is scheduled to appear in an upcoming issue of Romford's programme.

Add to that another new responsibility – I’m now jointly running the club’s website, for which I’m writing content such as match previews and news, in addition to the match reports – and I seem to be constantly pecking away at my laptop's keyboard.

Does all of this mean that I can call myself a journalist? Possibly, yes, if one uses the commonplace definition that journalism is writing for newspapers, magazines, or news websites. Having work published in a national newspaper, even if it’s a niche publication like The Non League Paper counts, surely?

The wordcount - 120 - means that the report in The Non League Paper is very much
a cut-down version of the one that appears on the club website or in the programme.

Like a proper journalist, I’m not averse to using a bit of journalese. Read any newspaper and you will come across examples of it, words and phrases rarely used outside their pages. Only in newspapers are small children ‘tots,’ experts – especially scientists – ‘boffins,’ and any dubious activities that involve alcohol ‘booze-fuelled.’ The sports pages use expressions that the average fan rarely – if ever – utters, and football reports are no exception.

Match reports, including those that I write, have their own particular jargon, so teams that hold a three or four-goal advantage have ‘an unassailable lead,’ while their hapless opponents have ‘a mountain to climb.’ Some of the terms favoured by sports reporters are increasingly anachronistic. Strikers are sometimes deemed to have ‘turned on a sixpence’ before scoring, despite the fact that the old tanner probably went out of circulation before the forward in question – and probably the reporter – was born. 

A sixpence, forwards for the turning on of.

Shots that rebound off a post are normally said to have ‘struck the post’ as though there was only one, rather than two, or ‘hit the woodwork’ despite the fact that few goalposts outside public parks are actually made of wood anymore. 

Another somewhat inaccurate description used when a shot strikes the frame of the goal – another phrase rarely employed outside the sports pages – is that the forward was ‘denied by the woodwork’ as though the post or bar had made a conscious effort to prevent the ball entering the goal. Meanwhile, ‘aplomb’ – meaning composure or assurance – is a word that hardly ever makes an appearance in ordinary conversation, but features regularly in match reports, and on occasion on Match of The Day, when describing a confident finish.

How appropriate is aplomb in this report, I wonder? How hard did the writer have to try to get it in?

My first encounter with the word aplomb came in my childhood while reading one of the Jennings books by Anthony Buckeridge. In Jennings Goes To School, the eponymous hero is called upon to summon the fire brigade by using the telephone. The headmaster, while making it clear that boys may not usually use the telephone without permission, praises Jennings, saying that he rose to the occasion “with exceptional verve and aplomb.” I immediately filed that away for future use, and am always pleased when an occasion arises to use it.

Another word which one seldom encounters these days outside of reports of football matches is the preposition, cum, used to join two nouns. Most often in match reports it will appear between ‘cross’ and ‘shot’ to describe a ball driven in from the flank that either ends up in the net or forces a save from the goalkeeper over and above a routine catch, and its use indicates that the reporter, and quite likely the player who delivered the cross-cum-shot, is unsure which it was intended to be. Cum does of course have another, rather more earthy use, hence when it appears in print it is likely to provoke some sniggering from readers, especially those not of the vintage for whom the word, in the context of a football match, is wholly unremarkable.

Good to see The Mirror keeping the traditional use of the word cum.

I confess  that not only do I find journalese fascinating, but that I resort to the odd example of it in my scribblings, thus ‘much-travelled’ is employed to label players who have had more clubs than Gary Player (one for the youngsters there), and ‘won’t live long in the memory’ is often used to describe games that fail to rise above a certain level of mediocrity. ‘High, wide, and none too handsome’ gets the occasional outing when describing a wayward shot at goal, while ‘we’ve all seen them given’ gets wheeled out when a penalty appeal is turned down, and mass confrontations are inevitably ‘handbags.’

A problem with writing match reports is the unavoidable need to refer to one team or the other frequently without simply repeating their name. A similar issue is faced when referencing certain players – particularly goalkeepers. Here, the reporter tends to resort to what is referred to as ‘elegant variation.’  It is my convention to refer to Romford as Romford in the first instance, and then Boro (the club’s nickname) in a single sentence, and similarly Romford’s opponents first by their given name and then by some alternative. In this way, Felixstowe might be The Seasiders when mentioned a second time, and then the visitors. In desperation to avoid repeating a team name, this may mean resorting to something as hackneyed as ‘the men from Suffolk,’ or -in desperation - ‘the team in stripes.’ Variation it may be, but elegant? Not always.

While reporters are resorting to well worn, tried and trusted expressions to describe events in games, the subs (sub-editors) on national newspapers are more inclined to look for new, memorable, and pithy, headlines. Except there is rarely anything new under the sun (or should that be under The Sun?). When Celtic were beaten at home in the Scottish Cup by Inverness Caledonian Thistle in February 2000, one headline writer came up with what he thought to be a new, Mary Poppins based gag, to wit, ‘Super Caley Go Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious.’ Original, one might think apart from the fact that back in 1960s, the headline on a report of a Liverpool match against QPR in which Ian Callaghan scored a hat-trick read, 'Super Calli Scores a Hat Trick, QPR Atrocious.'

Still, both are better than The Observer’s effort after England beat Spain in a penalty shoot-out at Euro 96 – ‘Seaman Sinks Armada,’ and infinitely preferable to the Daily Mirror’s ‘ACHTUNG! SURRENDER! For you, Fritz, ze Euro 96 Championship is over!’ employed before the semi-final against Germany, although they might have got away with it had England actually won.

I have not yet managed to emulate Martin Lawrence, who once wrote match reports for Romford’s programmes and managed to include the word ‘crepuscular’ (relating to twilight) in one many years ago, and to date, ‘aplomb’ is not a word I have managed to incorporate into any of the reports that I have written, although I live in hope!

Meanwhile, my wife has recently started a writing course; she asked me if I would like to do it as well. I declined, “I’m writing enough as it is,” I said.

From Outer Space To The Centre of The Earth

In the last couple of years, I have seen more gigs, shows, concerts, and other types of performances than I probably had in the previous forty, and 2019 was another bumper year, with 23 shows, featuring 35 different bands, orchestras, and solo artists, at 17 different venues.

Rather than review each event, here’s a sketch of the good, the bad and the indifferent.

Best show:

A tough choice this. Marillion were a surprise delight, as was Howard Jones. Tubular Bells for Two – whom I saw a couple of years ago and were delighted by – were excellent, and Steve Hackett was – as usual – brilliant. But for best show it’s a toss up between RPWL, the German prog rockers who started life as a Pink Floyd covers band, but in 2019 toured in support of their new album, Tales From Outer Space, and Steely Dan at Wembley Arena. Playing at the tiny Boston Music Room in Tufnell Park, RPWL performed a masterly collection of songs old and new; a really great show. Steely Dan, however were on another level. The death of Walter Becker in 2017 means that Steely Dan are now effectively Donald Fagen plus backing band, but what a great show they put on! And supporting them was another of my long-time favourites, Steve Winwood: truly a great night’s music.

RPWL

Marillion

Best venue:

In recent years I have developed a preference for standing at gigs, and the Islington Assembly Hall has become a great favourite of mine. I saw no shows there in 2019, so it’s another old favourite, the Hammersmith Apollo that tops my list this year, with a more than honourable mention to The Coliseum in St Martin’s Lane, where I saw an opera (Jack The Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel), a musical (The Man From La Mancha), and a recording of the BBC’s Friday Night is Music Night featuring a host of artists who first found fame in the 1980s

Rick Wakeman performing Journey To The Centre Of The Earth

Biggest surprise:

I haven’t seen Marillion since the 1980s, when Fish was still with them. I’ve not listened to a great deal of their material since Steve Hogarth took over singing duties, and I’ve been fairly ambivalent about what I have heard, but I saw them with an orchestral ensemble at The Cliffs Pavilion in Southend and they were quite superb. I confess that a good deal of the material was new to me but it was almost immediately familiar, and the song they closed with – This Strange Engine – has to be not just one of the best tracks they have recorded, but one of the top prog songs of all time. Howard Jones was a similarly surprising delight, as his show featured old stuff – much of it reworked, with Jones accompanying himself alone on piano – and new material from his latest album, Transform which impressed me to the degree that I immediately bought it. Another surprise was a ballet. My wife has become a bit of an opera and ballet fan in recent years, and I’ve seen a few with her, one of which was the ballet Don Quixote which we saw at The Royal Opera House, and which I found enchanting. A problem I have with operas is the surtitles at operas, which tend to divert my attention from the stage and give me a bit of crick in the neck; no such problem with ballet where I can give the dancing my undivided attention as there’s no singing in a language I don’t understand!

Howard Jones, with guitarist Robin Boult

Best support:

Support acts are a mixed blessing; I’ve seen some great one’s over the years and some that have been dire. Kanga, who performed a set of electronic stuff in support of Gary Numan at The Cliffs Pavilion, was ok for the first five minutes, but then I grew steadily more and more bored. The Temperance Movement, who supported Blue Oyster Cult, were ok, and China Crisis (supporting Howard Jones) were better than I’d expected. Most times at gigs, the support act is someone I’ve never heard of, such as Harry Payne, who opened for Marillion and was excellent – I could have done with another half-an-hour of his material. He would have been the best I saw in 2019, had it not been for Steve Winwood, although I would have enjoyed him even more if he had performed more of his solo material.

Least best show:

I’m loath to categorise any of the shows I saw in 2019 as bad, but there were a couple that were underwhelming. Actually, on reflection one was pretty poor, and that was Jack The Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel. Now, I quite like opera, but I’m no expert and it isn’t my first choice for musical entertainment, although I do like Rigoletto and Carmen (albeit not the performance I saw in 2018, where the set was a minimalist let-down and rather dragged the music down with it), but the Jack The Ripper opera was unremarkable at best. Most operas have at least one piece that you can’t get out of your head afterwards, but The Women of Whitechapel was pretty tuneless in my opinion. It was possibly the longest three hours of my life. If the show is ever revived, take my advice and avoid it. Don’t Fear The Reaper is one of my all-time favourite songs, and I saw Blue Oyster Cult perform it way back in the 1970s at what was then known by its proper name, the Hammersmith Odeon. I saw them again at the same venue in 2019, and quite frankly I think they must have performed the same set as I’d seen last time. According to the website setlist.fm, Blue Oyster Cult have performed The Reaper 2,299 times, and I think it showed. Don’t get me wrong, Blue Oyster Cult are undoubtedly a great band, but at times that evening I felt that they were going through the motions somewhat.

Spookiest moment:

My wife and I are great fans of CJ Sansom’s Shardlake novels, and the most recent – Tombland – is set in Norwich at the time of Kett’s rebellion, and in the novel Shardlake stays at The Maid’s Head, a real hotel that is still operating. Val and I stayed there for a couple of nights in July, and it is a charming hotel, well worth a visit, as is Norwich generally. 

The Maid's Head, Norwich

When we visited the cathedral, we heard some singers; they turned out to be The Spooky Men’s Chorale, an acapella group from Australia’s Blue Mountains, who were performing in Norwich that evening. We went to the venue’s box office, but the show was a sell-out. We loitered in hope of some tickets being returned, and two were – by separate people – and spookily, next to one another. The Spooky Men’s Chorale’s repertoire consists of original songs, Georgian table songs, and what they call ‘inappropriate covers’ which included a highly original version of Bohemian Rhapsody, All in all, a great night, and a surprising delight.

Best t-shirt:

I have mentioned before that I have a real weakness for merchandise at gigs, specifically t-shirts. Merchandise is a major source of income for smaller bands, so I justify my purchases on the basis that I’m really supporting the artists. Eleven were purchased in 2019, with Steely Dan’s offering, and Roger Hodgson particularly good, but the best was undoubtedly the IQ Christmas effort.

This time last year I had 11 gigs lined up and eventually saw 23; at the time of writing I have tickets for 11 more in 2020; I doubt that that will be the final total!

January

La Traviata – Royal Opera House

 BBC Concert Orchestra - Friday Night Is Music Night – Hackney Empire

February

Blue Oyster Cult – Hammersmith Apollo. Support from The Temperance Movement

Steely Dan – Wembley Arena. Support from Steve Winwood

March

BBC Concert Orchestra – Double Acts – Royal Festival Hall

That Joe Payne plus Doris Brendel – Zigfrid von Underbelly

April

Don Quixote – Royal Opera House

RPWL – Boston Music Rooms. Support from Aaron Brooks

Jack The Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel – The Coliseum

May

Tubular Bells For Two – Queen Elizabeth Hall. Support from Gypsyfingers

Roger Hodgson – Royal Albert Hall

Howard Jones – London Palladium. Support from China Crisis

June

The Man From La Mancha – The Coliseum

July

The Marriage of Figaro – Royal Opera House

The Spooky Men’s Chorale – Norwich Playhouse

Rick Wakeman: Journey To The Centre of The Earth – Royal Festival Hall

In Tune (BBC Radio 3) – Imperial College Union

October

Gary Numan – Cliffs Pavilion, Southend. Support from Kanga

Friday Night Is Music Night: The 80s with Carol Decker, Johnny Hates Jazz, Nik Kershaw, Howard Jones, Jimmy Somerville – The Coliseum

November

Marillion – Cliffs Pavilion, Southend. Support from Harry Payne

Steve Hackett – Hammersmith Apollo

IQ – The Garage, Islington

December

BBC Singers: Contemporary Christmas Carols – Temple Church, London

Every Home Is Wired

They say you don’t get anything for nothing in this life, that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Being mindful of all that, you can imagine that I was somewhat sceptical when I received an email purportedly from Google offering me a free Google Home Mini, then retailing at £49.99 on the basis that I was a good customer.

Despite the fact that I, like virtually everyone else, use Google a lot, I’ve never really considered myself a customer, so the email naturally made me somewhat suspicious. My first inclination was to dismiss it as a phishing email and simply delete it, but since it was addressed to me by name and quoted my credit card details, I decided to investigate a little further. It dawned on me that the fact that I rent Cloud storage from Google was what made me a customer, and the fact that they weren’t asking me to subscribe to anything, pay anything, or even provide credit card details over those they had quoted to me, convinced me that this was a legitimate offer. So, I accepted.

A week or so later, my device arrived and I set it up. Now I have to admit that I feel a little self-conscious about uttering ‘Hey, Google,’ and asking the little grey pebble in the corner of the lounge to provide me with a weather forecast, or last night’s football results – I still prefer to type my question on laptop or tablet - but my wife seems to have taken to it, even if mostly she uses it to set alarms.

Still, whether I use it or not, it’s not taking up much room, and it’s harmless, and occasionally useful isn’t it? Or is it? There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence (or conspiracy theories, depending on your point of view), that all these home assistants, whether it’s the Amazon Echo, the Apple HomePod, or any of Google’s range, are spying on us, that the big tech companies are harvesting data on us.

Rumours have gone around for years that Facebook and others are using our smartphones to listen to us and target us with advertising based on what we are talking about, and conspiracy theory or not, I’m sure we’ve all experienced that somewhat unsettling experience of an advert popping up on our social media timelines for a product that we’ve talked about, but not actively searched for online. Coincidence, or something more sinister? The big tech companies have largely denied listening to users – for the avid conspiracy theory aficionado, denial is proof, of course – but Google have admitted that their contractors have listened to recordings to better understand language patterns and accents. Which makes sense, that to improve their service, they would listen and learn.

Even if Google is listening to me, do I care? I’m not discussing affairs of state, I’m not a celebrity whose gossip might be newsworthy, so if Google, or Facebook, want to listen to me discuss plans for dinner, or attempting to answer questions on University Challenge, then let them listen away.

My Google device did take me by surprise a while back by demonstrating how carefully it listens. I was watching Have I Got News for You, and one of the guests was talking about Google Hubs; ‘Hey Google,’ they said, ‘play some soft rock music.’ Seconds later, my smartspeaker was playing ‘This Is Not America,’ by David Bowie. Spooky.

My Google Home Mini is the closest I have to anything resembling the much vaunted, but seemingly slow to take off, Internet of Things. I see the value of connecting things like the central heating and lighting to a home network, and being able to control them remotely, or verbally, but I’ve yet to see the benefit in food blenders, coffee makers, toasters and fridges that are ‘smart,’ frankly I’d prefer those devices to stay dumb – and mute, for that matter.

Looking back over the technology that has come and gone during my lifetime – the 1980s were full of such items as fax machines, video recorders, compact discs, and the short-lived and ill-fated video disc, all of which have either disappeared from our daily lives or are going that way – and it is now impossible to even attempt to guess what we now think of as cutting edge that will still be around ten years hence. Google Glass came – and went – in the blink of an eye; not all technology is useful, popular, or successful, and even now I can imagine future generations laughing at the idea of speaking to a device and asking it to tell you the time, or what’s on TV.

Spotify, Amazon prime, and Netflix - to name but three such services - now mean that a fast, reliable broadband connection is almost a necessity, and it is difficult to see the day dawn when that is no longer the case, although we said that about fax machines. It’s undeniable though that catch-up and on demand services have supplanted many forms of physical media, although my personal preference remains CDs so far as music is concerned, but there’s a catch with all that and it hits us in the wallet. The TV Licence is £154.50, a cable or satellite package with broadband is say, £90 a month or just over £1,000 a year; add Netflix (a minimum £72 per annum), and Amazon Prime (£79 a year), because there are programmes exclusively available on those channels that you just have to have, and that’s nearly £1,400 for 12 months, just to watch TV.

Think about that: £1,400 per year, to watch TV, and five nights out of every seven you’re sitting there saying there’s nothing on and ending up watching repeats of QI on Dave. Which is why in our house we have just binned the Virgin Media TV package we have. This might strike you as perverse considering the hoops we had to jump through to get it in the first place (see my blogs on the subject, Virgin On The Ridiculous, Parts One, Two, and Three, although there never was a Part Four when I actually got it installed), but night after night I do sit there complaining there’s nothing on and finding myself watching a repeat of QI on Dave, or if not that specifically – and this is the crux – I’m almost exclusively watching channels that are available on Freeview. So, come the beginning of February I’m saving myself £500 a year by reverting to the free-to-air stuff.

Step by step, every home is being invaded; every home is wired. And every home is paying a princely sum for the privilege. It starts off small, a little here, a little there, a little on the things you think you can’t afford to miss, and then suddenly you’re paying a King’s ransom for stuff you don’t use, don’t really want, and definitely don’t really need, and the shocking fact is that a lot of it you can get for free, and the stuff you have to pay for you’d not really miss if you had to give it up.

Google’s decision to give me – and goodness knows how many other people – a free Home Mini may genuinely be a reward to loyal customers; it may just be a marketing tactic to expand their market, or it may be a step in the tech giant’s home invasion.

“This will be the future, Every home is wired” – Steven Wilson