Robocop policing: A warning about future riots

Posted on February 5, 2012 by samiraahmed

Image by bitterwallet.com

The  former Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Brian Paddick gave me an interview for The World This Weekend on Radio 4 in which he issued a warning about a fundamental breakdown in the police’s social contract with the public.  Now,of course, he is the Liberal Democrat candidate for London Mayor and is trailing far behind in the polls, so one can be cynical about the timing.

But he had interesting points to make about the way the police are in danger of more regularly retreating  to controlling the streets only in numbers and increasingly by force.  He expressed his concern about the growing number of officers deployed into specialist units, rather than engaged in community policing. Paddick argues that the public increasingly feel officers don’t respond to call outs and use stop and search without care. A few vox pops on the streets of Elephant and Castle near Paddick’s campaign Headquarters (office space in The Ministry of Sound nightclub) revealed men and women to be quick to praise often very good courteous policing. But almost all of those I spoke to had direct or indirectly witnessed unpleasant experiences with callous and sometimes racially discriminatory policing.

At a time when police funding cuts are combined with a government talking tough about cracking down on rioters  it looks like a short term “smart” option to focus resources on force based tactics: The vans (“bully vans” as they’re known by some)  that can be deployed with a number of officers to an incident, more talk of baton rounds and water cannon. Paddick warns that we risk going down the route of nations where the police are feared, not trusted, and policing is done by force, not consent.

Paddick thinks the Force puts rather too much effort into what he called “reputational management”. A timely example? Gwent Police paying out £20,000 in damages to a 71 yr old driver, just a few days ago, whose windows they smashed after he was stopped for driving without a seatbelt. .

It’s also worth noting (as he mentions at the end of the interview) that he’s testifying about police corruption at the Leveson enquiry into phonehacking in a few weeks . The fact that the Metropolitan Police are thus far investigating themselves is one of the less scrutinised   but more remarkable aspects of Hackgate.

The interview is here, 12 minutes in, with the rather thoughtful views of some Londoners, and a response from the policing minister, Nick Herbert.

 

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The Curse of the Typing Pool

Posted on January 24, 2012 by samiraahmed

As new technology promises voice recognition typing software, and icon based texting, could the traditional QWERTY keyboard finally losing its dominance? Taken for granted, the keyboard has played a central role in the empancipation of women, but also in their entrapment in the “typing pool” of secretarial handmaidens. From the Victorian Lady typist, like Laura Lyons in The Hound of the Baskervilles, to Tess McGill in the 80s film Working Girl, I explored the intimate and ambivalent relationship between women and the QWERTY keyboard for The Guardian (link here) and in a discussion on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour.(listen here)




“Did you learn to touch type? Where and why?” A simple question. But when I ask it I am struck by how many people say they learned in secret. Some former grammar school girls over 35, said they were expressly told not to learn. They were supposed to become executives with secretaries. Teaching in schools remains haphazard. Apart from the men who said they learned in the army, many claimed they could “touch type” with 2 fingers, or had taught themselves under a tea towel. One said he was permanently scarred after being forced to type to Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl in ICT. How did we end up with such an odd relationship with the instrument at the heart of most modern jobs and communication? Especially one that was a tool of female emancipation?

In Sherlock Holmes’ most famous adventure, The Hound of the Baskervilles, a mysterious and exciting new independent woman was captured in print: The Lady Typist. The character Laura Lyons, had been helped to set up a typing business after escaping an unhappy marriage.

The modern typewriter Christopher Sholes invented in his Milwaukee workshop in 1866 was transformed by his associate, James Densmore, who designed the letter arrangement of the QWERTY keyboard. Laid out to prevent keys jamming and improve flow rate, it remains the standard today, seeing off its only serious rival the 1930s Dvorak. Women’s expected accomplishment at piano playing was linked from the start to the typewriter’s ten finger flow.

Historian Anna Davin has pointed out that when the British civil service took over operating telegraph and postal offices in the 1870s, the official in charge, Frank Scudamore, sought out women clerks for their typing speed and dexterity. But crucially Scudamore said the wages:“which will draw male operators from but an inferior class of the community, will draw female operators from a superior class.” Women would spell and type better, raise the tone of the office, then marry and leave without requiring pensions.

So the trap of the over-educated, but low-status secretary was born; the typing pool. The BBC’s typing pool may have been the entry point for some breakthrough female broadcasters and executives, (Esther Rantzen trained as a clerk, as well as a studio manager) but in Rona Jaffe’s Mad Men era novel, The Best of Everything, sexual predators prowl its perimeter.  In the seminal 80s film, Working Girl, the secretaries play with the jargon: “I prefer personal assistant”, but the only way to be taken seriously is to pretend to be an executive.

Future-technology entrepreneur, Elizabeth Varley, the CEO and co-founder of TechHub, didn’t see the keyboard as a trap. Her mother, a single parent, used to work from home in Melbourne, Australia as a legal secretary, typing up often complex Dictaphone audio tapes: “I saw it as a tool of empowerment. And it was a fun thing to play with.”

A badly designed keyboard could help kill a computer – most notably IBM’s PCJr in 1983 – IBM’s first foray into the home computer market.  But at the same time IBM office PC researchers found male executives hostile to the “secretarial” word processor image of PCs. (The advent of spread sheet software is what made office PCs acceptable to them.)

Like generations of women before me I learned on a black, spider-like manual machine in a typing school. (Like a manual car, compared to the lazy “automatic” ease of an electric or PC). With headphones to listen to the audio exercises, the letters embedded themselves into my finger muscle memory, ready for a life time of typing scripts and news copy. But for many women, it was a skill not to express one’s own thoughts, but to take down and shape those of one’s boss – usually a man. The “take a letter, Miss Jones” culture that dominated office life till the 1990s also shaped a literary culture in which men thought, and women took down and gave discipline and structure to their ideas.  How many anti-Establishment writers relied on women who could touch type to make their groovy ideas publishable?

Varley temped when she first moved to England in 1999. By then, she says, executives were doing most of their own emails, but were challenged in expressing themselves in the new visual formats, like the dreaded Power Point. “This BBC executive would say, I need to communicate my idea, but I don’t know how to make it look nice.” She felt there was accorded a certain status to secretaries who were  tech savvy.

British tech entrepreneur, Ed Maklouf, arrived at Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley in the mid 1990s to study communication and linguistics. “If I had any lingering idea about the supposed secretarial nature of touch typing,” he says, “it disappeared the moment I walked into a room full of coders all attacking the keys like they were in battle.”

With the personal sec a thing of the past for many executives, is the new roll out of voice recognition typing technology, an attempt to recapture the compliant female for the smart phone generation? Apple’s Siri has a female voice in the US, but a male voice here in the UK. It’s recognition is still pretty crude. And Google’s Majel, due out this year, is affectionately named after Majel Barrett, the actress who provided the voice of the computer in the original Star Trek TV series.

Maklouf, who is marketing the SIINE – a symbol based keyboard app for Android phones – says they’re more about helping people with a lack of time, working mothers as much as young singles. “We’re now expected to respond immediately to emails, wherever we are,” he points out. “People want to be able to reply back from a phone without worrying about being rude or impersonal.” SIINE enables people to programme personal phrases onto keys: “Best wishes” as much as “Whasssssupp”.

Other new technology to try and improve the experience of using keyboards includes  laser-projected keyboards that can be generated onto a hard surface anywhere for instant typing. And Microsoft was 2 years ago experimenting with a touchscreen extension along the top of the QWERTY keyboard, to enable users to scroll through different documents as they worked, without having to open many windows on the master screen.

RSI, notably carpel tunnel syndrome, continues to be reported in much larger numbers by women (Is that because it affects women more, or because they’re better at reporting it than men?)

But until anyone comes up with a genuine alternative to the QWERTY it remains at the heart of our ambivalent relationship with words and work.

Further reading/links

The Early Office Museum – Great online resource on the history of typewriters and other office equipment

Thoroughly Modern Millie — 1967 film parodying the 1920 Stenographer. The Baby Face number features Julie Andrews sitting a shorthand and typing test using a variety of heavy black Edwardian office gadgets.

Historian Anna Davin’s paper City Girls: Young Women, New Employment, and the City 1880-1910 is an excellent resource on Victorian women typists. (You can find it on Google)

IBM Archives History of the Personal Computer

The 10 Worst PC Keyboards of all time (PC Magazine)

Lovely Al Jazeera report on Delhi’s manual law court typists 

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Raise your kids the David Bowie way

Posted on January 7, 2012 by samiraahmed

As a child David Bowie frightened me. I mean, really frightened me. The lyrics to Space Oddity, overheard on the radio,  left me in existential torment for the lingering death of Major Tom. Then there were those creepy emaciated illustrations on his 70s album covers. So how did the Thin White Duke come to be such a central, even homely figure to my own children? In honour of his 65th birthday, here are my ten top tips on raising your kids the David Bowie way.

1. The Laughing Gnome: (Age 0-3) A perfect way in.  The simple joy of silly voices.

 

2. Sorrow: (age 4 upwards)  This cover of an old Merseybeats’ song off the Pinups album offers two useful things. a)A song about long blonde hair, for any girl going through an Alice In Wonderland fixation. b) A useful lesson for boys about the siren power of a beautifully shallow female. (See also the evil Suki in the Cbeebies animated series Binka.)

 

A child's view of a grown up party

 3. Labyrinth: (age 4+) This features a wonderful myth-laden script from Terry Jones, packed with references to Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and the Arthuriad, and Jennifer Connolly in the lead. As my daughter put it: “A goblin king steals a beautiful girl’s baby brother. But he’s really David Bowie!” The party dream sequence is particularly beautiful in an 80′s pop video kind of way.  Combines a useful education in 80s teen culture. Don’t mention the tight trousers, unless you would also like to offer an early lesson in the changes the body undergoes in puberty. Oh, and there is a prequel graphic novel, coming soon. 

4. Berlin: Age 4+ (Geography, Cold War History) Who says children are only ever taught about the Second World War? A trip to Berlin offers the chance of riding the S-bahn, discussing the inspiration for the lyrics to The Passenger, visiting Schoenberg where he lived, discussing the importance of friendship (with Iggy Pop) and the importance of abandoning celebrity to focus on hard work. A discussion about the hard drugs aspect of their sojourn in West Berlin might be best left till later.   

5. Rebel Rebel: (Age 10+) While a useful exposition of inter-generational conflict, we decided to park this song, unless you like your preteens singing raucously along to  ” Hot tramp, I love you so” and asking what it means. 

 6. The Falcon and the Snowman : The Cold War (part 2) The children are still too young to watch the film, but the lyrics to the title track This Is Not America provide plenty of discussion material. 

7. Modern Love: David Bowie’s marriage to Iman is a wonderful symbol of mixed relationships. The one thing my family has in common with David Bowie.

8. Nutrition: We knew David Bowie had achieved favourite uncle status when, unable to coax our son to eat with a claim that “David Beckham always eats his food before matches”, our daughter piped up that “David Bowie always eats a good breakfast before going to parties.” A falser claim may never have been made, but it did the trick. I still like to think he does. 

9. The Prestige: Science is cool. If Tesla had looked like David Bowie he would have invented the transporter. 

10. Tin Machine: Everyone makes mistakes. Even David Bowie. But we learn from them.

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Why Professor Peter Higgs is Massive: the man behind the God particle

Posted on December 18, 2011 by samiraahmed

Professor Peter Higgs by Ken Currie 2008

This text is Copyright of the BBC. You can listen to this Profile documentary via the BBC website here.

3 years ago when the Large Hadron Collider was switched on at Cern in Geneva, few people had heard of Peter Higgs.  But this week scientists there think they may have glimpsed an elusive particle – the Higgs Boson, named after him. Professor Higgs is now famous round the world. But for him the experiment at the world’s largest atom smasher was about improving our understanding of how the universe works. This quiet octogenarian has waited patiently since 1964 for the world to catch up with his ideas.  This is an attempt to find out what he’s like from friends, colleagues and former students.

Peter Higgs was born in Newcastle in 1929. His father was a BBC sound engineer. When the family moved to Bristol he proved a brilliant student at Cotham Grammar School, winning many prizes, except, oddly enough  in physics. But one day, sitting through a dull assembly, a famous name on the honour board of ex-pupils caught his eye: P.A.M Dirac-one of the greatest quantum physicists who ever lived. Science writer Ian Sample explains:

Peter decided to find out who Paul Dirac was and started finding his ideas incredibly appealing. And Dirac was a very special kind of physicist – he was very good at just coming up with these incredibly beautiful equations that seemed to explain things from out of the blue, and that really appealed to Higgs. One thing that Peter was really good at was reading around the subject. He wouldn’t just go along to lessons and learn what the teachers had to say. So he did a lot of reading just off his own back. And he got into Dirac and he got into what the issues of physics were at the time, and this really fuelled his interest. It was really a kind of self-generated thing from curiosity, and that I think continued on throughout his life.

After school Higgs read physics at Kings College London and took the brand new theoretical option.  He got a first in 1950. Fellow student – and now professor – Michael Fisher remembers him excelling in the first ever exam in the subject:

As I recall he did the problem in quantum mechanics. So it was based on a paper that had been published recently in the scientific literature, you know just earlier that year, and by all accounts he did a better job on the problem that was set to him in his three hours, than the original author of the scientific paper had done, so it was a slightly scary precedent for me when I did the same exam a year later.

While work consumed him, his university friends, like Michael Fisher, helped him meet girls, notably during a road trip to Europe:

We found a very nice girl for Peter and he went and they joined together. And so you could say well that was somewhat of an association of convenience if you like.. Q: You set him up with someone so he wouldn’t be alone on the holiday?! Well roughly speaking, I forget exactly what the details were… that never worked out romantically particularly… so you could say from that point of view he was not as romantically inclined or romantically successful as some of us.

And it seems in the lab, as well as in love, Peter Higgs had a mind for theory, not practical experimental physics. Ian Sample explains:

He would tell me stories about how he would be trying to do a practical with some pretty simple lab kit, and they would have sort of supervisors around the lab. One of them just wandered over and just pulled a stopper out of a tube that Peter hadn’t seen or hadn’t realised was fundamental to the reason why he couldn’t get this thing to work, and the guy just came along and went ‘pop’ like that and it all worked, Peter hadn’t realised. And he was doing another experiment where he was hanging stuff off a wire and the whole thing just collapsed and he just decided that he was a nightmare when it came to experiments, it wasn’t his forte, that he was better off just using his brain.

Random forces were to push Higgs to Scotland. He applied for a lectureship at Kings College London, but his friend, Michael Fisher got the job. So Peter moved to Edinburgh University, where he was to make his career defining  breakthrough.

When he was 31 at Edinburgh, people were calling him a fuddy-duddy because he was working on something that was seen as uncool, it was a type of physics that a load of people had just thought was going nowhere. And he just decided “no, you don’t understand it as well as I do, and I think it’s got something and I think it’s worth pursuing.” And if he hadn’t pursued it – he wouldn’t have got his theory, it wouldn’t have happened, we would never have heard of him.

His theory about the existence of the elusive particle or boson came in 1964, in a moment of inspiration while walking in the Cairngorms. Peter Higgs wrote 2 papers about it. The second was initially rejected by the journal Physics Letters, which annoyed him. He later said they clearly didn’t understand him. But it was published not long after. By the early ’70s Higgs’ name was being associated  in academic papers and conferences with the theories that he and teams in Belgium and London had been researching independently. But the particle acquired HIS name, as Oxford Emeritus Professor Ken Peach recalls.:

There was some sort of meeting or conference and I noticed that you know nearly all of the talks mentioned the Higgs mechanism or the Higgs boson or the Higgs scalar, so that when I got back to Edinburgh and saw Peter in the coffee lounge with colleagues I said “Hey Peter, you’re famous!” and that is when I think Peter realised that his name was being associated with this phenomenon. Q: How did he react? [laughs] Oh with I think a diffident smile, I mean Peter is a very unassuming man and I think for many years after was somewhat embarrassed by all of the attention. I think he’s become over the years more comfortable with it.

Outside of academic circles, though, Higgs was not well known. For the next 20 years he continued writing and teaching. But there were difficulties in both his professional and his personal life. He had married, but split from his wife a few years after their two sons were born. And some friends feel Peter Higgs didn’t make the kind of impact that might be expected of a scientist of his calibre. Professor Michael Fisher:

You might say well if he wanted a stellar career, was he self-advertising enough? I wouldn’t say he was shy, I might say that he was a little too retiring perhaps for the good of his own career. So you might say that he would be much better known ahead of time if he’d had a little more in inclination.

Author Ian Sample says Peter Higgs was also challenged by the rapid changes in mathematical theory.

Towards the end of the 60s and in the 70s maths was coming along and people were coming along who understood the kinds of things that he actually came up with, they understood them really well, and there were new techniques coming along that he was really struggling to cope with, and he was falling behind. And so he was putting more and more time into trying to understand this work, and that was consuming for him I think. I think that made it even more difficult to have enough time for family and all the rest of it, and that seems to be the point where the two of them separated.

Higgs’ greatest passion was particle physics, but his political convictions were also passionately held. He was an active campaigner in both the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Greenpeace, until they extended their opposition beyond nuclear weapons to all nuclear power. His lifelong friend Michael Fisher remembers how in 2004 Higgs refused to visit Israel to accept the Wolf prize for Physics.

Peter has been politically very active, he was essentially awared the Wolf Prize, but because he has strong misgivings about the nature of Israel, I think he declined to go… so he’s always had a strong conscience, there’s no doubt about that.

 By the early 90s, a strong campaign was underway to raise European government funding to build the Large Hadron Collider to prove Higgs’ theory about particle mass. In 1993, the then science minister William Waldegrave offered a prize to whoever could explain the Higgs Boson on a side of A4. The most famous entry [by David Miller of University College, London] personified its workings in the image of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher entering a cocktail party of loyal Conservatives. Ken Peach had inspired the competition.

The idea is you have a party and there are a lot of people standing around and they’re broadly distributed evenly through the room.

And then there’s a russle and a noise, the PM Margaret Thatcher enters the room and starts to move towards the centre and everyone kind of crowds in around her. So she is a particle trying to move through this Higgs field, so the people in the party represent the Higgs field and as she comes in the Higgs field clusters around her and impedes her progress, so that slows her down from the speed of light and that’s equivalent to giving her mass.

The funding for the Large Hadron Collider was granted, and fame was catching up with the quiet professor. Artist Ken Currie was keen to find out the man behind the science when he was commissioned 3 years ago to paint Peter Higgs’portrait. He stood him in front of a mirror in his flat.

 In the mirror I’ve tried to kind of imagine this moment of the, as it were, the discovery of the Higgs boson – it’s almost like a kind of explosion of particle traces around his head, and it’s like this moment of the sublime really, you know it’s when the universe opens up its mysteries to us. 

I asked Peter Higgs how he went about his work, and I had kind of assumed that he was working in some huge cathedral-like laboratory with all these gigantic machines and everything, and he said to be that all needed was a pencil and paper. Which is why in the painting in his top pocket he has a pencil in his pocket, that’s all he needs to work it out, and I thought that was extraordinary because he was dealing with some of the largest questions imaginable about the nature of the universe and the nature of reality itself.

Peter Higgs’ love of scientific symmetry seems appropriately paralleled in a love of classical music. Ken Currie noticed his extensive collection of vinyl and art books was curated by a deeply ordered mind, in strict alphabetical order.

 He had sort of books on painters which I noticed were arranged in alphabetical order which I was most impressed by.

Higgs’ flat in the New Town area of Edinburgh is, say visitors, like Ian Sample,  a bubble in the space time continuum, where the modern world does not intrude.

It’s nice, you go into his apartment in Edinburgh and it’s all very 70s retro stuff, there are all these lamps hanging over formica tables, and he’s got this amazing sound system but it’s a real sort of vintage job, and a load of vinyl and a lot of the colours in the flat are very 70s colours so it’s like going back in time a little bit.

Peter Higgs retired in 1996. He watches developments at Cern from a distance without a TV or a computer and rarely answering the phone; though keeping himself up to date with the latest physics journals. And he’s always made time to help students and researchers such as Ian Sample, whose book Massive was all about the hunt for the Higgs Particle.

I think he hates the idea of giving anything other than the correct answer. When I was writing the book I sent every chapter I wrote to him and he got back with a phenomenal number of corrections for which I’m hugely grateful. He gave me an enormous amount of time and he picked me up on everything, he didn’t hold back on any kind of criticism at all. Just knowing what he’s like I said look I will send you a whole packet of red biros because I know you’re going to need them to correct what I’ve written because some of it I may have misunderstood and I want you to help me. So I did – I bought a pack of red biros, I put it in there with every chapter that I sent up, and he used them, he used pretty much all of them I think.

And Professor Peter Higgs inspired younger generations of physicists, such as Dr Victoria Martin, who was in his last undergraduate class.

He was trying to teach us a subject called symmetries. You have to think in 4 spatial dimensions, which is obviously impossible for most humans. But as he was trying to describe the way that this worked, I actually got this vision of what this symmetry would look like in these four spatial dimensions. That’s the one one thing I was really inspired about his teaching this very complex subject, it’s a very useful symmetry that we use a lot in my research, so I still think of this to this day.

So what lies ahead? A Nobel prize, possibly. But fellow academics say he remains calm about world honours, judging by his reaction to the discovery at Cern earlier this week. Dr Martin, was with Higgs, when Edinburgh University staff gathered to watch the announcement on a screen in a lecture hall:

I was sitting just in front of him and he seemed to be quite pleasantly happy with the news that was coming out of CERN. I was probably more excited, as an experimentalist that’s been looking for this for a long time. He was kind of quietly pleased. He went and talked to one of my colleagues afterwards who came and reported that he wasn’t going to crack open a bottle of champagne to celebrate because it’s too early, these are just hints that the Higgs boson exists. On the other hand he wasn’t going to open his bottle of whisky and drown his sorrows

Ian Sample says:

 You never get a sense of real excitement or real ‘they must find it, please let them find it!’ from him, you don’t get that. He says things like “I have to hope my doctor keeps me alive long enough for them to find it”, “If they don’t find it I’ll be surprised.” He’s very self-effacing in this whole thing, I mean he still sometimes squirms when you just call it the Higgs Boson in his presence. He refers to it sometimes as “the boson that takes my name” or “the boson which bears my name”, you know, almost in an apologetic way, that he realises that his name has gone onto something that was really the result of many people’s work.

Nearly 50 years after the paper on what was to be the Higgs Boson particle was rejected, Professor Peach sees a happy symmetry for Peter Higgs – the passionate peace and green activist – in seeing the world’s largest laboratory prove what he knew was right all along:

You know one of things I would say about Peter is that his character is completely consistent and I think the science, the mathematics, the drive to understand how the universe works is also consistent with the desire to make sure that the universe itself is a fit and decent place to live.

Further reading

Professor Peter Higgs on the University of Edinburgh website

Peter Higgs explains how he came up with his theory of the Boson field and Higgs particle (Stockholm University lecture 2009 –transcript and video link by Tommy Ogden)

Margaret Thatcher explanation of the Higgs -Boson and Higgs field (1993 University College London)

 

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Lessons from the Cabinet Room: An Interview with Gus O’Donnell

Posted on December 4, 2011 by samiraahmed

The Camerons and GOD (Gus O'Donnell) far right (photo AP)

My interview with Gus O’ Donnell — his first in depth interview as he prepares to retire as Cabinet Secretary and head of the Civil Service is here in today’s Observer. Partiularly noteworthy is his strong opposition to aspects of the Freedom of Information Act.

His departure marks the end of an era in unexpected ways. First there’s his striking lack of a privileged background. Some civil servants have told me they fear a return to a more privileged Sir Humphrey style of management, especially as his role is being split 3 ways. Sir Gus’s warm personal style has seen him work successfully and provide valuable continuity between 4 very different Prime Ministers and in the period establishing Britain’s first coalition government in decades.  But of greater concern to many is a sense that a major political battle is only just getting underway about the future size and structure of the Civil Service. Sir Gus leaves with a gold plated final salary pension, exactly the kind being abolished for everyone else.

What fascinated me most looking back was that this valued economist was at the heart of not one but both of the worst economic crises in recent years — the 1992 ERM crisis and the 2008 banking collapse  both of which precipitated major recessions. These are the lines that didn’t make  the final version of the article:

On Black Wednesday 1992 and its aftermath:

“When I look back on the ERM — we embodied the right things in the 5 tests for joining the Euro. As an advisor I am please with the evidence based advice work we did. It was better that we were not in the Euro.”

On whether the meritocracy he values so much in the Civil Service is under threat with the new tuition fees and higher education changes:

“Of the top 200 civil servants only a quarter went to independent schools. The concern is if people don’t understand the system. I’m only worried people may be put off if they don’t understand how the fees system works.” Gus O’Donnell insisted someone like him (first in his family to go to University) would be able to make it today.

And on that infamous “game, set and match” phrase supposedly used to brief journalists about the success of Britain’s strategy in  the 1991 Maastricht treaty negotiations, Sir Gus says he never actually said that.

 Further reading

No wonder they call him God — Independent profile (March 2011)

The ongoing investigation into HMRC’s failures in corporate tax avoidance

Appointment of  new head of the Civil Service (Guardian Nov 15th)

Letter to the new head of the Civil Service (Guardian November 2011)

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Natalie Wood’s last film: How Hollywood tried to wreck Brainstorm

Posted on November 19, 2011 by samiraahmed

This week the Los Angeles Police Department reopened enquiries into the death of Natalie Wood. Many people will not be aware of her work. She had been making the film Brainstorm (1983) at the time — and it’s such a remarkable project that I thought it worth drawing attention to.

Best known for her anguished teen roles — Rebel Without A Cause, Splendour in the Grass, and a pivotal part in The Searchers, Brainstorm was a mature film and potentially the start of a revived starring career, after Wood had lost her way in poorer roles and personal difficulties.  Douglas Trumbull, who’d pioneered the remarkable  special effects in 2001 A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner had previously made the thoughtful eco thriller, Silent Running. Brainstorm had fully developed characters and dealt with bold scientific and ethical ideas, about experience and memory. Wood and co-star Christopher Walken played scientists battling their fears (and the industrial military complex) in pursuit of scientific truth when they invent a machine that can record and replay memory into other minds.

When she died during the shoot the studio tried to shut down the production and cash in on the insurance. Trumbull had to fight hard  to complete the film, even rewriting scenes and using a body double to deal with his star’s absence. It’s said that the experience ended his Hollywood directing career. When I interviewed him last year for Channel 4 News we talked off camera about the film. He spoke with real sadness of how talented Wood was, the impact of studio pressure on the final movie, and the fact that her film was regarded with mawkish interest because of of her death, rather than on its merits.

Walken and Woods in Brainstorm

Trumbull was and is an engineer. He was devising an immersive cinematic format at the time (Showscan) and was to go  on make the pioneering Back to the Future Ride at Universal Studios in LA. Brainstorm, like the several minutes’ long timewarp travel sequence near the end of 2001, went where no other filmmaker really could go — engineering to take the viewer into the film and on that cosmic journey

Suffice it to say, that the final sequence of Brainstorm is one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever seen on  film. A humanist’s film about playing God. For all that’s dated about it (analogue tape technology) the references to the government’s finding torture uses for the memory capturing machine and the battle over ethical scientific boundaries, seem rather relevant to a world where politicians debate waterboarding and  stem cell research.

This is the summary of Brainstorm on Douglas Trumbull’s website:

First developed at Future General Corporation as a vehicle to launch the Showscan process of high speed 70mm photography and projection, the project foundered at Paramount under new management. Picked up by MGM under David Begleman, the film starred Natalie Wood, Christopher Walken, Cliff Robertson, and Louise Fletcher, under the direction of Douglas Trumbull. MGM was unwilling to make the film in Showscan, so a compromise was reached by using both 35mm and 65mm formats, alternating between mono and stereophonic sound. The story of Natalie Wood’s tragic death during production will never been fully known, and the challenge of completing the film against the will of MGM was one of Douglas Trumbull’s greatest triumphs, while also revealing to him the worst of Hollywood machinations. For this reason, he moved to the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts and began working outside the Hollywood feature film community, soon to land the very exciting project “BACK TO THE FUTURE – THE RIDE for Steven Spielberg and Universal.

Further reading/viewing

The full Trumbull interview about Silent Running and his patented idea to solve  the BP Oil Rig disaster. (Also viewable on the Featured Video page of this website)

Douglas Trumbull website

Guardian feature on Trumbull’s work on The Tree of Life (July 2011)

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Shows and No-shows: The London Mayoral Candidates’ feminist debate

Posted on November 13, 2011 by samiraahmed

L to r: Livingstone, Bennett, (me), Paddick Photo copyright: Rania Khan

More than a thousand women and men attended Uk Feminista’s conference at Friends’ House in Central London yesterday. I was asked to chair a hustings style debate for the invited Mayoral Candidates. At a time when the government, and local authorities are being accused by organisations such as The Fawcett Society of making funding cuts that disproportionately harm women (pension changes, public sector job cuts, cuts in child care and social care services) it seemed an excellent time to have such a discussion.

London Assembly candidate Natalie Bennett came on behalf of the Greens’ Jenny Jones. Labour’s Ken Livingstone (and 2 term former Mayor) used the date to put out a press release announcing he planned to introduce a new equal pay commissioner  to get London companies to close the pay gap. The Lib Dems’ Brian Paddick, a former Deputy Assistant Met Police Commissioner spoke with breathtaking honesty about his own experience of being subjected to domestic violence in the past. The current Mayor, Conservative Boris Johnson, had said he had a diary clash, but did not respond to a request to send a representative.

As a national conference, many of the questions reflected the topics that had been debated over the day, such as  concerns over the sexist treatment of women in the news media and advertising, which are not issues that fit easily into the remit of the Mayor. Several questioners challenged the candidates over  programmes to tackle gang activity, worried that sexual violence in gang culture wasn’t being addressed adequately. All the candidates promised to back secured funding for the capital’s Rape Crisis Centres.

Some of the strongest practical discussion came around personal safety. The candidates were strongly opposed to reports that Transport for London plans to cut staffing at some London Tube stations. Ken Livingstone claimed TfL has built up a massive cash surplus which meant the cuts were not justified.

Westminster Council’s plans to extend parking charges till Midnight and all day Sunday have, according to the Evening Standard, anyway, formed an unlikely alliance between Tom Conti, Mumsnet and Stringfellow’s lapdancers, all of whom claim the safety of night workers and the freedom of family visitors are being blocked.

The last questioner pointed out that nearly every cyclist killed on London’s streets this year has been a woman. Brian Paddick said he would commission research into why.

Much has been made of the fact that Boris Johnson didn’t show. Certainly you needed to be ready to be confronted by some very full on feminist ideas. But mostly, you needed a sense of humour, which he has. After the hustings, two UK Feminista campaigners came onstage wearing fake muff wigs, urging the Candidates to wear them too to join a forthcoming march. (Paddick asked if his could be ginger). A question about putting more focus on respect  and consent into sex education saw Ken Livingstone end up talking  quite amiably about the importance of nice sex; a subject one would have loved to see Johnson discuss.

It’s become clear that Johnson is a terrific public performer except in certain situations, which he will always avoid. (Like a feminist conference). While there was plenty of humour and banter at Fem11, Johnson would have been well out of his comfort zone. To be fair the strongly anti-Tory mood among most of the conference participants makes the decision to stay away perfectly logical, and yet it’s hard to think of anyone else in the Tory party, who has the ability to take on such a challenge.

LibDem Peer Floella Benjamin told me last year that she decided against entering the Mayoral race because standing between the egos of Johnson and Livingstone would be like standing between “two battling peacocks”. Paddick’s frankness about his experience of domestic violence may have been honest, but as he contests London for the second time, I wonder what effect it will have on how he is perceived, even subconsciously; both by political commentators and voters.

Johnson’s old fashioned charm-based style could be severely challenged by the kryptonite of a strong female opponent. Yes, the Greens’ Jenny Jones has definitely become a prominent voice, especially over policing, but one wonders what sort of race we’d be having if Oona King had won the Labour candidacy.

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What happened, pop pickers? Teenagers & radio

Posted on November 11, 2011 by samiraahmed

The DJ as teen hero (American Graffiti)

The decline of the teenage radio listener is not unique to Radio 1. I wrote this piece about the demographic challenge for The Guardian this week.

One of my key sources in researching the piece was Will Page, chief economist at PRS for Music, which represents songwriters, composers and publishers. He’s been researching the changing consumption of pop music and put me onto this American response, below. As well as young people turning to free Internet streamed music, such as Spotify (70 such legal sites in the very keen UK market alone), a key factor is how the demarcations between different age groups have broken down.

The BBC claims to reach nearly half the 15 to 24 year old demographic through Radio 1. They’re the target. But is it their job to stop older people listening to it as well?

50 years ago your parents did not do the equivalent of trying to get you into the Beatles or The Clash, or take you to Glastonbury or Latitude. Nor would they sing along to Bruno Mars with you on the school run and go to see Take That with the rest of the class mums. Footloose-style religious fundamentalists aside, musically speaking, adults no longer put childish things aside.

An American industry insider has since offered me some further insights into Radio’s 1 dilemma.

First, it seems most American FM radio stations almost certainly have median listener ages of over 32, but there’s more to it there too, than changing technology. Under 25s today are perhaps the first in the past century to partially embrace, not reject the music of their parents. The success of Glee is testament to that and reinforces it, too.

With parents more eager to share their children’s music, too,
in short, there is so much more cross generational listening to the same music today than 20 years ago. It’s doubtful you could have a major radio station with a median age of 21. Maybe all Justin Bieber all the time, but even in that case one suspects that a stunning number of parents would be tuning in along with their kids. Just like Radio 1, perhaps.

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A Taste Of Honey: 50 years on

Posted on November 3, 2011 by samiraahmed

I’m an extraordinary person! There’s only one of me, like there’s only one of you. We’re unique! Young! Unrivalled! Smashing! Bloody marvellous!” (Jo and Geoff in A Taste of Honey)

 ”Now? We’d probably have to make it via reality TV.” Rita Tushingham and Murray Melvin dive enthusiastically into the idea of looking back at the social and political legacy of their seminal film about troubled youth. Still with their beautiful, natural profiles, you immediately recognise Melvin’s poise and Tushingham’s girlish face-pulling. They often seem like giggling teenagers, recounting sneaking in to try to watch, as director Tony Richardson viewed the daily rushes, and falling downstairs. “We ran away!” Or recalling the time they were invited to the British Ambassador’s residence in Prague, and started impersonating parrots.

Tushingham and Melvin photographed at the British Film Institute, London Southbank Nov 1st 2011 (All photos copyright Samira Ahmed)

But they can be disapproving grownups, too. (Melvin is particularly appalled by the current fashion for pant-baring lowslung jeans among the youth of today). And 50 years on from the seminal kitchen sink drama, they’re scathing about what they see as the corrosive effect of modern consumerism on young people. “Does David Cameron know we’re here?” he jokes.

The tropes of kitchen sink drama – gritty Northern industrial landscapes shot in moody black and white and tales of unwanted pregnancy – have become so clichéd in the years since abortion was legalised, that the huge impact of A Taste of Honey could be forgotten. The original play was written by 18 year old Shelagh Delaney and became a huge hit on Broadway, too, starring Angela Lansbury. The 1961 film was X-rated. Set in Salford, the tale of Jo(sephine) a lonely, neglected teenager, tackled teenage pregnancy, mixed race relationships and feckless parenting (Dora Bryan and her dodgy boyfriend Robert Stephens). The most sympathetic character is Jo’s gay friend, Geoff, at a time when homosexuality was criminal. “But I wasn’t gay,” points out Melvin. “The Lord Chamberlain wouldn’t have allowed it. So it was all between the lines.” Melvin recalls pulling out of a South African production of the play when he found out the part of the black boyfriend was to be played by a white actor in blackface.

Murray Melvin had worked his way up from tea boy at Joan Littlewood’s famous Theatre Workshop Company at London’s Stratford East Theatre to play the role of Geoff on stage, reprising it in the film. Tushingham had similarly joined the Liverpool Rep as a backstage odd job girl after writing many pestering letters, graduating to playing such parts as the back end of a horse and a rabbit. Was it a working class rabbit? “It was a rabbit with a very large arse” she retorts. She turned 19 on the first day of shooting A Taste of Honey. Neither ever went to drama school. The demise of the backstage route is one they believe has eliminated entry to the trade for most working class youngsters.

Both agree that Rita’s character Jo, a lonely girl, who gets pregnant by a sailor, would probably be a lot younger today — maybe 12 — because of the much greater sexual and consumer pressure on children, but they believe the issues are just as relevant. “People still come up to me and ask if I was in A Taste Of Honey,” says Melvin. “People still relate to those class issues.”

“Because the [characters] are not in a time capsule,” Tushingham adds. “Younger people are touched by that now. 50 years ago you wouldn’t have had so many kids in that situation [teen pregnancy]. It’s so sad.”

Melvin declares: “If Shelagh’s play arrived on the director’s desk of the Theatre Royal today he’d have a look and say, “Pass it over to social services.” A Taste of Honey was political. The characters were carefully formulated, as you weren’t allowed to be openly gay.” The two exchange a list of homophobic slurs: “It was poof, pansy, queer – awful words.” Melvin recounts with fury a recent homophobic murder in London. His recent role as a villain in Torchwood has led to unexpected revelations about the enduring impact of entrenched homophobic attitudes:  “18 months ago I was at a Doctor Who convention when a teenage boy came up to me and said, “I wanted to come and thank you. You changed my life. I got A Taste of Honey on DVD and watched it and realised, I’m not bad am I?” I was in tears.”

Trailblazers as they were, the journey through the sixties after their acclaimed multi-nominated breakthrough was a challenge: “I was offered so many pregnant roles,” says Tushingham, with humour. “And I was offered so many poofs,” adds Melvin. “I told them all, “I’ve done the ultimate one.””

Tushingham and Melvin got to have some fun in the George Melly-scripted Swinging London parody, Smashing Time with Lynn Redgrave. Interestingly it’s the Cannes-award winning The Knack and How to Get It (which seemed a similar play on her innocent in the big city to ATOH) that now looks like a period curio, complete with jokes about rape.

As for Melvin: “What was I doing in Alfie?!” I suggest perhaps it was deliberately subversive to cast him as the best friend to Michael Caine’s macho misogynist. Melvin credits director Lewis Gilbert for not stereotyping his young actors. “He put me in HMS Defiant with Dirk Bogarde and Alec Guiness,” he smiles. Watching the big historical epic, released just a year after ATOH, gives you a sense of the seismic shift taking place in British theatre and film making.

Would young viewers realise that today? That until the 60s regional and working class actors had to talk with Received Pronunciation on screen and stage?

Melvin says:“[Joan Littlewood’s] Theatre Workshop Company was the first to put working class regional voices on stage. To give the working class back its dignity, so we were no longer just PC Plod or figures of fun.” Tushingham gurns and mimicks a skivvy.

“Joan would not let you put on a [posh] voice.,” he continues. “Because Shelagh sent that play to Joan, [then based in Manchester] they heard that music in the dialogue.”

“Osborne was starting,” says Tushingham. “But something like ATOH allowed us all to happen. When you look back at the 50s we wouldn’t have been in any of the shows. Remember when we did A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Tony Richardson at the Royal Court and the critics were floored by it? All those regional accents, like James Bolam’s.”

In a way both feel they were luckier than young actors starting out today.

“The Establishment have fought back now,” declares Melvin, as we discuss how films like Fish Tank are labelled and confined to the arthouse circuit while middle class TV critics wallow in Downton Abbey’s strange nostalgia. He remains actively involved with the Theatre Royal Stratford East, where he’s currently compiling an archive of its 120 year history, and has arranged screenings of ATOH for local schoolchildren.

Etonian PMs then and now

Tushingham says of the early 60s: “It was a welcoming time. There was an energy. We need to do more to encourage young people to discover what’s inside them. The consumerism is not the point…50 years on we still have the same emotions as we did then, but we are being sold more.”

This post was originally written for The Spectator Arts blog. Photos copyright of Samira Ahmed. No reproduction without permission.

Rita Tushingham and Murray Melvin will be at 50th anniversary screenings of A Taste of Honey taking place in Liverpool this weekend and London’s BFI Southbank  on Monday November 7th. Book BFI tickets here

Further reading:

Stereotypes in Northern working class drama (2009 Guardian theatre blogpost)

 

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St Paul’s can hear the alarm bells ringing.

Posted on November 1, 2011 by samiraahmed

Photo copyright: Jonathan Savage (@SavageLDN)

1pm GMT The latest statement from St Paul’s confirming that they are NOT going to take legal action against the protest camp.

St Paul’s Suspends Legal Action Against Protest Camp St Paul’s, 1 November 2011 (All Saints Day)

The Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral has unanimously agreed to suspend its current legal action against the protest camp outside the church, following meetings with Dr Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, late last night and early this morning. The resignation of the Dean, the Rt Rev Graeme Knowles, has given the opportunity to reassess the situation, involving fresh input from the Bishop. Members of Chapter this morning have met with representatives from the protest camp to demonstrate that St Paul’s intends to engage directly and constructively with both the protesters and the moral and ethical issues they wish to address, without the threat of forcible eviction hanging over both the camp and the church. It is being widely reported that the Corporation of London plans to ask protesters to leave imminently. The Chapter of course recognises the Corporation’s right to take such action on Corporation land. The Bishop has invited investment banker, Ken Costa, formerly Chair of UBS Europe and Chairman of Lazard International, to spearhead an initiative reconnecting the financial with the ethical. Mr Costa will be supported by a number of City, Church and public figures, including Giles Fraser, who although no longer a member of Chapter, will help ensure that the diverse voices of the protest are involved in this. The Bishop of London, Dr Richard Chartres, said: “The alarm bells are ringing all over the world. St Paul’s has now heard that call. Today’s decision means that the doors are most emphatically open to engage with matters concerning not only those encamped around the Cathedral but millions of others in this country and around the globe. I am delighted that Ken Costa has agreed to spearhead this new initiative which has the opportunity to make a profound difference.” The Rt Rev Michael Colclough, Canon Pastor of St Paul’s Cathedral and a member of Chapter, added: “This has been an enormously difficult time for the Cathedral but the Chapter is unanimous in its desire to engage constructively with the protest and the serious issues that have been raised, without the threat of legal action hanging over us. Legal concerns have been at the forefront in recent weeks but now is the time for the moral, the spiritual and the theological to come to the fore.” ENDS

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