Author Archive
UEA Offline To Email
Leaks like A Sieve
We all know how indiscreet certain people at the University Of East Anglia’s Climate Change Unit were recently. Not only was the content of their emails outrageous, dishonest and reprehensible but their email system was so insecure that it resembled a sort of digital colander.
Now, in a classic, public sector, knee jerk overreaction, it is virtually impossible to get an email through to UEA. My son, Richard, is there doing a law conversion course after graduating in PPE last year. Every email I send him is bounced back to me as “unacceptable content”.
It’s only the sort of correspondence that might pass between any father and son. There’s no cocaine deals, terrorist plots, child porn, not even any attempt to falsify information on which the future of the world might depend. I did send him the latest draft of my novel which I think did have the odd swear word in it. Dear me, I think that must be it! Trouble is I don’t think Amazon or WH Smith accept novels these days without swear words in them.
Fortunately, Richard and I are super-duper, super-sophisticated hackers right at the leading edge of technology. We had a bright idea and used a different email address. Now why didn’t the Climate Change Unit think of that?
Paradise Valley
Heaven On Earth
You can read my latest Paradise Valley story here
…and all the other Paradise Valley and Walking The Dog stories.
Wenlock Mandeville Disaster
Child's Play
The most obvious explanation is that someone at the Olympics Committee has been horizontal jogging with someone at the design company.
What else?
There has to be a rational explanation for one of most ridiculous, badly-judged communications campaigns I have ever seen. The Wenlock and Mandeville mascot idea is third-rate, junior (bad) art school nonsense.
I first worked on ideas like this more than 30 years ago. I stake all my experience on this, I stand by every ounce of this assertion – it is NONSENSE, shocking NONSENSE and I am dismayed to see it. If it gains any traction then it will only be because of the money spent on it. Almost anything else would be better!
Lord Coe and other talented individuals on the Olympics Committee have made a mistake here. This is a serious error of judgement.
The Young Apprentice
"It's not my fault!"
Doesn’t this programme reveal the real truth about “The (Grown Up) Apprentice”?
All those retarded, celebrity-wannabees who would never have lasted five minutes in a real business were children themselves. The very idea that any of them had any idea what they were talking about was just a hugely patronising insult to the viewer. Incidentally, I’m reserving the title “The Adult Apprentice” for a really innovative little idea that’s on my very top shelf.
It’s an indictment of the researchers that work on this sort of lowbrow dross. They chose the idiot contestants on “The (Grown Up) Apprentice” to fail and to indulge in all sorts of puerile angst and confrontation. I prefer “The Young Apprentice”. It’s much more honest, more amusing and entertaining without making the contestants look like idiots. This is the way I would expect children to behave!
I can’t wait for one of the kids to call him Lord Suralan. Seems to me he’d make a perfect chairman for the FA, which is just another load of nonsense for spoilt kids.
Anyway, in “The Adult Apprentice” you won’t get fired but you will be punished.
Nick Clegg – The Boy’s Own Politician
"Is it a bird? Is it a plane?"
It’s a film script, a comicbook cartoon, a dazzling adventure story. It lifts the spirit and refreshes the soul. It’s a politician you can believe in! It’s Nick Clegg!
I hope so. I really, really do. I hope I am living through a huge moment in history when two bright, inspirational leaders take the helm of HMS Great Britain and steer us through the storm to calm waters and the broad sunlit uplands beyond.
Nick Clegg’s speech today was as inspirational as they come. If history views him kindly then this speech will rank with Churchill, Disraeli, Martin Luther King, Obama. He deserves our trust. If he has got it wrong or can’t deliver there will be plenty of time for recriminations and to return to dull cynicism.
For now, let us believe.
The Pacific
Until more than three-quarters of the way through, I was so, so disappointed in “The Pacific”. Of course, it had an awful lot to live up to. “Band Of Brothers”, its forerunner, although produced as a TV series, has to be one of the very best war movies of all time. “The Pacific” doesn’t even come close. That’s not to say that it isn’t excellent in its own right because it is but it isn’t in the same league, battalion or regiment as “Band Of Brothers”.
It’s a ten part series and until epsiode five I was bored. That’s not just because there’s a lack of action – there is – but there’s also very little characterisation or story. In “Band Of Brothers” you feel like you’re part of the platoon yourself. You grow to know and love each individual and you experience fear, grief, tension, terror alongside all of them. It wasn’t until epsiode eight of “The Pacific” when Sergeant Basilone falls in love with Lena, marries her and is then shipped to Iwo Jima that I felt the same searing emotional intensity. I remember when I first watched “Band Of Brothers”, each epsiode was like experiencing an intense personal tragedy. I would feel drained, exhausted and traumatised. It was almost too much but although it finishes well, “The Pacific” is not quite enough. Perhaps the most moving scene of all is in epsiode nine when Eugene comforts a dying Japanese woman. This is magnificent film making.
I think war is the ultimate movie genre. It describes the human condition at the very edge. Like all men, I am fascinated with horror, doubt and uncertainty about how I would behave in combat. I deplore violent films but when the story requires it, realism is essential. A war movie should make you understand the reality in detail, explicitly and make you turn away from violence.
My old friend Bruce won an Emmy and a Golden Globe working as a producer on “Band Of Brothers” and I remember talking to him about the sound of gunfire. He explained the effort involved in achieving a more realistic sound than ever before. You can hear how in every movie thereafter it’s been picked up and enhanced.
“The Pacific” does take realism even further. The spray of blood that bursts from a soldier’s body as he is hit, the red mist that appears around a group of soldiers as shrapnel lacerates them is horrifying. The graphic dismemberment and vile, grotesque injury that nowadays we see soldiers survive is beyond words. At times the cast is wading through a sea of body parts, of arms, legs, hands, feet. I think we now accept the shocking reality of this because today we see the survivors of such injury. At last, in the battle for Iwo Jima, “The Pacific” begins to communicate the deeply distressing heroism, the humbling, horrifying courage that these young men, our forefathers, summoned up to free the world from tyranny and allow us to enjoy the freedom that we do today.
There is a real mistake in some of the earlier episodes when many of the scenes are just too dark. There isn’t even the excuse of it being made for the big screen. It’s just wrong. Also some of the CGI, particularly in wide shots of amphibious landings for instance, doesn’t work. It’s not as convincing as the more primitive, model based effects in “Band Of Brothers”
There is one part of “The Pacific” that deserves the very highest praise. The titles are quite simply one of the most beautiful things I 
have ever seen on television or at the cinema. They consist of extreme close ups of an artist drawing battle scenes with charcoal. As the charcoal disintegrates into dust and splinters on the page it mixes through to become the detritus of battle, the dirt, dust and shrapnel of combat. The backgrounds merge with finely textured, laid paper, with live action, graphics and animation. It really is quite breathtakingly, achingly beautiful. All the more so so because its subject is precisely the opposite. The wonderful, haunting theme music is the same as “Band Of Brothers”. At least that’s the way I hear it. If it isn’t then it’s been composed to be so similar that they might as well have stuck with the original.
All in all, I did, eventually, greatly enjoy “The Pacific”. Most of all though it shows just how bloody marvellous “Band Of Brothers” is.
Unite Against Unite
Punks
Isn’t it wonderful to see the preposterous Unite and its two Marxist agitators, Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson, getting smashed back by the Courts?
This is exactly why we elected a Tory government.
But is it justice?
My Deep, Dark Secret
I have a deep, dark secret. It’s something I keep to myself. I haven’t told anyone, not my friends, my parents, certainly not my sons.
Every Saturday, early evening, for about the past six or seven weeks I’ve been indulging myself in something that I’m little ashamed of. I don’t know why (well, I do), as on the face of it it’s wholesome and innocent but, the truth is, they all drag thoughts and feelings out of me that are far from wholesome, far from innocent. All of them.
They all care about it so much. It means so much to each one of them. Each of them puts every last part of their heart and soul into doing the very best they can. I sit through the whole show weeping gently at their sincerity, their effort, their charm, how pretty they are.
Quattro Formaggi
Yes it’s true, it’s truly pathetic. I am besotted. Each one of them is truly delightful, one minute ingenue, next minute vamp, all so very, very talented.
They are the girls of “Over The Rainbow”, Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s latest audition show to find Dorothy for The Wizard of Oz.
They are all gorgeous and I think I must be a dirty old man!
Eenie, Meanie, Minie, Mo – Drugs Policy? That’ll Be Lib Dem!
Only now is the depth and breadth of David Cameron’s coup becoming clear. He has swept aside all the old politics and we voted for exactly what he has given us. Hail to the Chief!
It’s true that now he can dump those old Tory policies that no one really wanted and we can take the good ones from the Lib Dems –
God's Herb
none more so than their drugs policy.
The Lib Dems are very, very close to the Transform Drug Policy Foundation which, however it describes itself, promotes a radical right wing solution to the drugs problem – legalise, regulate, tax.
This might seem a second tier, lower priority issue until you consider that most organised crime and virtually all street crime is caused, promoted and maintained by the illegality of drugs.
Legalise all drugs, regulate and tax their supply. You pull the rug from under organised crime and you take away the need for nearly all street crime. You massively reduce the harm caused by drugs. You take perhaps £10 billion out of the black economy. You save several billion more on law enforcement costs.
It’s a no brainer for anyone who has the courage and common sense to think about it. I hope Theresa May is listening – and thinking.
An Obama Of Change
What extraordinary times. An Obama of change. For my father, myself and my sons, across three generations, British politics has never been through such drama.
Everything now remains to be seen but these are the “broad, sunlit uplands”. I think it is crucial that we have faith in the good intent of the government. A spirit of optimism, trust and co-operation has characterised these last few days. Let’s hope it continues.
Now the work begins.
Peter Reynolds 