You've let Paddington down...

A long time ago, the BBC used to have a show about cars called 'Top Gear'. It was a magazine format programme that covered many different subjects that might be of interest to the average motorist - changes to motoring legislation, reviews of new cars, and so forth. In short, it was primarily concerned with cars, the driving of said cars and all things motoring-related. Fairly straightforward. Somewhere along the way, however, this motoring show morphed into an 'entertainment' brand. The focus became less about seeing the motorist as a consumer and more about entertaining the public with items that were often, at best, fairly tangentially-linked to motoring. In this new model of 'Top Gear, when a car was 'reviewed', it would invariably be a £100K and upwards sports car that was being chucked around twisty roads or photograhed against clouded skies to create an image of brooding power, the curves of wheel arches and sharp creases along the flanks highlighted to emphasise the sexiness of these unattainable beasts. Basically, these 'reviews' became petrolhead porn items. Along with this, the three presenters became hugely successful at (in their own words) being paid lots of money for cocking about. They went on trips to exotic lands to drive cars and 'cock about', not really informative about the cars or the countries, but 'entertaining'. To top it all off, 'Top Gear' was loved abroad even more than it is here in the UK being sold to over 200 television territories around the world and making the BBC a tidy penny or two.

However, this sunny picture is not without dark clouds. Over the years, the main presenter of 'Top Gear', Jeremy Clarkson, has managed to insert his foot in his mouth on numerous occasions and has earned himself several reprimands. The most recent examples were characterising lorry drivers as prostitute murderers and Mexicans as feckless, work-shy poncho-wearers, slyly using the term 'slope' when referring to an Asian person and the one that earned him (supposedly) a final warning, the use of the 'n' word caught on tape. Hence, when Jeremy was reportedly involved in a 'fracas' with his producer, the BBC was left with pretty much no option but to suspend him while they investigate the matter and, presumably, contemplate his future. As the news of his suspension leaked out, the Twittersphere predictably split into two camps: "Thank God, he may finally be going! Deserves everything he gets" and "No! Bring back Jezza! The only decent programme on TV. It's just PC gone mad!". The split seemed (in the main) to follow party political lines with UKIP/libertarians championing Jeremy as a bastion of free speech and common sense while the liberal/left see him as an unreconstructed dinosaur, a boorish oaf spouting views from the 1970s.

Okay, full disclosure here. I am not a fan of 'Top Gear" and I am certainly not a fan of Mr Clarkson. I used to like the programme back in the day when it told me something about cars rather than telling me rather too much about its presenters. Rather like there had to be a cull of the old Radio 1 DJs like DLT because they were deemed to have got too cosy and spent most of their air time telling us about life on their farms or the fetes they had opened, so 'Top Gear' is now mainly about the presenters. We learn more about their preferences and prejudices than we ever learn about Ford's latest release or what the best buy is for under £15K. I see the need for a programme to be entertaining but where has the 'informing' element gone? Make a programme called 'Middle-aged Guys Cock About' and sell that to the world, but give us some journalism related to cars, please! Mr Clarkson, I have never particularly liked. I cannot say with absolute certainty, but I suspect his politics lie somewhere to the right of mine (if not to the right of Ghengis Khan's). His attitude that everything the goverment does in relation to motoring is invariably about taking the fun out of motoring may have some value but I think he overplays it. I realise he is a columnist in a couple of newspapers and is paid to be a little outrageous and to be provocative, so some of what he does is about playing to the gallery although I think he really is pretty old-school in his views. All my dislikes aside, they are not the reason why it is a good thing that the BBC has finally taken some action.

I can choose not to listen to Mr Clarkson's views on 'anti-motorist' legislation, choose not to watch him and his chums 'cock about' in foreign climes, choose not to see another review of a supercar I will never own. I can do this by not watching 'Top Gear'. However, expressing your libertarian views on motoring laws is very different to using racist language on the show: that has no place on our screens in 2015 just as scrapping with a colleague is not an acceptable way to behave when one is at work. Mr Clarkson's apologists might like to believe that he has been singled out because he is the antithesis of the 'lefty' BBC and the PC brigade have been looking for an excuse to cut him down for some time. The fact is, however, that Jezza, like the employees of any other company, has to follow his employer's rules if he want to carry on being so handsomely remunerated. And that is his problem: he seems to believe that the income generated by 'Top Gear' makes him untouchable. Well, the news is, JC, it doesn't. Schoolboy sniggering at racial epithets among your pals in the pub is crass: doing it on national TV is unacceptable. It's not about being 'PC', it's about being a decent, human being and respecting other races, other people. Similarly, you may be the star of the show, but physically abusing fellow workers for whatever reason is never right. Again, it's not about the politics or what Jezza believes, it's just straightforward decency. Or common sense as Jeremy himself might say.

Unattractive

This weekend, Elaine and I had a few days in Amsterdam. We did several of the things that tourists to Amsterdam are supposed to do - sample the beers, sample the cheese, be amazed by the variety of tulips they grow, buy some cheese and tulips, go to the van Gough museum, visit Anne Frank's house, experience the trams and the bicycles and so forth. To explain - while we used the trams, we didn't try biking in the city, however, I can still say that bikes were a central part of our trip. They are everywhere! It is impossible to walk on the pavements at some points because of the volume of bikes parked up and crossing the road is a dangerous exercise, not because of cars, trams or lorries but because of the cyclists! Man, they take no prisoners! That said, it was nice to see a capital city where so many bikes are in use as each one represents a car journey saved. Especially cute were the bikes that appear to have a large box or small coffin projecting from the front. These represent one way to ferry small children around. Other ways (apart from the traditional child seat behind the adult rider) include a small seat on the crossbar ahead of the adult rider or a small child seat attached to the handlebars. Brilliant! Women riding side saddle on the parcel rack of bikes also reminded me of India where women passengers on scooters often ride side-saddle, looking serene as the driver weaves between huge lorries and overflowing buses.

What we didn't do in Amsterdam, however, was sample the hospitality of 'coffeeshops' or visit the Red Light District. Okay, the second half of that statement is not entirely true, but I'll get to that later. In terms of coffeeshops, these are pretty mainstream establishments now. Guidebooks will list the 'best', arranged, I suspect, in order of tourist-friendliness/least scary rather than in terms of the quality of the comestibles they sell. We had two a stone's throw from our hotel and, whilst neither was listed in the guidebooks we had, they didn't look scary places at all and seemed to be populated by a mix of young(-ish) locals and tourists. Looking at them in comparison to the myriad bars in the city, I got the feeling that I would rather meet someone who had spent a few hours in a coffeeshop rather than someone who had been drinking strong beers for the same amount of time. We had a few dicks staying in the room opposite ours who had been sampling the beer (definitely and in quantity) and (possibly) the weed available. Their drunken singing and swearing at the tops of their voices at one in the morning wasn't great but, hey ho: it's a party town, right? We saw several stag parties (no hen parties) presumably there to get as messed up as possible before visiting the Red Light District.

Ah, the Red Light District. Amsterdam makes no bones about the area: it is a bona fide tourist attraction as it is clearly marked on all the city maps alongside the Museum District for example. We hadn't intended to go there but, on the final day and wanting to kill some time, we decided to go to the Old Church which happens to border the Red Light District. Making our way there, we went through an area that was obviously the epicentre of the 'party' side of the city: bar after bar, the aroma of stale beer and hordes of people wandering the street. As much as I am not a fan of 'tacky', give me touristy, garish tat anytime over the seediness that we encountered as we moved closer to the Old Church. When we finally reached it, we found it was closed and the best we could manage was to walk around and look at the exterior. In street-level, floor-to-ceiling windows of buildings opposite the church, women in stockings and suspenders stood distractedly looking into the distance or openly bored, playing with mobile phones. All were women of colour - Thai, Philipino or Indonesian possibly. I heard one woman shouting to a colleague inside the building and she spoke in a language that was not Dutch. We found ourselves wondering what sort of man would come here, to a place that is the antithesis of 'sexy' to indulge in an act that, given the circumstances, would border on abuse. We got out as soon as possible.

Amsterdam offers tourists the opportunity to indulge in two activities that, in most other capital cities, are conducted away from the gaze of the public eye, let alone the eyes of the authorities. However, one - smoking cannabis - has been made less sleazy, more open to all-comers. It retains its hippy connections in brightly painted coffeeshops and it feels, frankly, blearily happy and non-threatening. The other - prostitution - remains seedy, an implied violence almost tangible, the very 'openness' only serving to somehow emphasise the dirty reality at the centre of the trade: it's about power and money and the abuse of women at the bottom of the pile. There is no way that you can dress it up and make it an attraction.

First, take some enzymes...

I have just listened to The Food Programme on Radio 4 and I can safely say that I am shocked. Although the ingredients that go into mass-produced food have long given food campaigners cause for concern, the programme demonstrated that labelling regulations, supposedly beefed-up to provide complete transparency for the consumer, are far from satisfactory now that the industry is trying to convince us that ingredients they use are 'natural'. An example included they used in the programme was the presence of "vegetable flavourings (radish)" in some bakewell tarts. Leaving aside the obvious question - what recipe from hell are they following that requires "vegetable flavourings" as well as five types of sugar and water as the fourth of fifth largest ingredient by proportion? - there is a requirement to explain exactly what an ingredient is doing in the food. Now, the industry will claim that they have done this - the radish is labelled as a flavouring. However, if we dig a little deeper, flavourings are often included so that the cheaper, unnatural ingredients that would cause the food to taste 'wrong' are masked. In effect, a plethora of extraneous ingredients may be included to produce a taste that could be achieved by merely making the product with the ingredients it is 'supposed' to contain. 'Orange flavour' may have absolutely nothing to do with an orange. There are many companies that analyse the make-up of flavours, identify the molecular component responsible and then use that to manufacture flavourings on an industrial scale. 'Orange flavour' sounds natural, 'mass-produced chemical that smells like orange' less so. The bottom line is cost: industrially-produced flavourings are cheaper.

Another eye-opener was the extensive use of enzymes in food production. These can be used in various areas of food production but, because they are technically not present in the final food product, they do not have to be declared on the label under current EU legislation. However, their effects on health are unknown and we, the consumers, are not generally aware of their use because of their non-appearance in the list of ingredients. However, if you can use an enzyme to make a fresh, young cheese taste like a mature, aged cheese, it saves the producer the expense of having to actually store the cheese and age it naturally.

The best quote, therefore, came when someone from the food industry said that the majority of consumers are not that interested in the minutiae of ingredients listings or knowing exactly why particular ingredients are in the food we eat and that we should just trust the food producers. Coming relatively soon after the 'horse meat in lasagne' scandal, I think that is a pretty bold statement to make! The bottom line is this: the need to keep production costs low means you and I get what you pay for. If the product is cheap, then more 'flavourings' will be have to be included and strange ingredients will appear on the label. People may scoff at the cost of artisanal foods, but the fact is, they are that price because they really do contain 'natural' ingredients and not some simulacrum of 'naturalness'. Pay for quality or, better still, make it yourself. Then you'll really know what's in your food.

DHSS (Department of Health and Social Services)

It's amazing isn't it? The coalition government came to power with David Cameron's 'promise' of "No top-down reorganisation of the NHS" and, as practically its first act, carried out the biggest reorganisation of the service since its inception in 1948. Despite the deep reservations of many within and outwith the service, the government ploughed ahead with Andrew Lansley's unworkable plans for 'reform'. Eventually, even Cameron realised that the plans were deeply flawed and Lansley was dropped, Hunt brought in and the plan swiftly reworked into the Health and Social Care Act that we all love so much today (the irony klaxon is sounding in the background at this point). The total cost for the non-reorganisation is estimated to be £3 billion, a not insignificant amount for a government imposing austerity measures on the country because of a lack of funds for public services. Still, if it improves the service, it'd be money well-spent, wouldn't it?

Three years on from the Act and the NHS is in crisis (or not if you are Jeremy Hunt) with several key indicators being failed at local and national levels, month after month; mental health services stretched so thin that waiting lists for 'upstream' interventions are growing which, in turn, contributes to the increased acuity of cases requiring more intensive interventions or admission; staff shortages and low staff morale compounding the problems. But, is this all the fault of the Act? In part, possibly. The Act was, on the face of it, a big change to the way the NHS is organised: cutting out a level of bureaucracy, putting commissioning power into the hands of clinicians and improving quality through a tougher inspection regime. The reality is rather different. Yes, clinicians did take the reins when it comes to commissioning local healthcare, however, such a change could have been achieved without the Health and Social care Act by simply amending the mandated structure of Primary Care Trust Boards and requiring them to include more clinicians and put them in charge of commissioning. No costly, complex Act required. On the removal of bureaucracy and increased inspection, I think the Act has failed in a spectacular manner. Taking out one tier of the command chain but then introducing several new bodies that complicate that fairly simple chain, results in a confusing mess. Responsibilities that lay, in the past, with one body, have now been split between multiple bodies. Control of the NHS, which was previously ultimately in the hands of the Secretary of State, now seems split between several bodies leading to a lack of clarity and focus. Finally, the increase in inspection and oversight by three - count 'em - three regulatory bodies is costing a fortune and acts only to point out where the service has gone wrong. The bigger, more important function - what to do about such failure and how to build good quality into the everyday work of healthcare providers - seems a much lesser aspect of their work. Finding fault is seemingly easier to measure than ensuring quality and success. As at least one commentator on all things NHS has said, "You cannot inspect quality into a system".

So, in part, the act has failed. However, the other, bigger reasons for the crisis in the service are lack of cash and lack of integration with social care. On the latter, the Health and Social Care Act was the ideal opportunity to address the point but it did nothing about integration. Right now, A&Es are failing to meet their 4 hour waiting targets because people ready for discharge from hospital are blocking beds as the services to allow them to be safely discharged are not in place in the community. Health providers need to work much more closely with social care providers, especially in time of cash shortage. On the matter of money, I am not suggesting that merely throwing money at the NHS is the answer. However, the lie that the coalition have somehow 'protected' NHS funding has to be exposed: funding the service with a 0.5% budget increase when inflation is running at 4% sounds to me like a cut in the available cash. The £20 billion that the NHS had to save over the five years 2010 - 2015 pales into insignificance alongside the additional £30 billion that will need to be saved over the next five years if current funding trajectories are followed. Different thinking needs to be applied.

I know that putting together two leaky buckets does not make one good bucket and, by analogy, putting together a cash-strapped NHS with cash-strapped social services will not produce an instant financial miracle, solving the money worries of both parties. However, the announcement of the devolvement of the £6 billion health budget to the control of the Greater Manchester local authorities may, perhaps, allow that co-ordination of health and social care, to produce some economies through shared services such as back-office functions and just, overall, allow us to think about 'health' and wellbeing on a wider scale than just in terms of the biomedical model. There will be problems: council and health cultures are very different, many social care items are means tested and paid-for while healthcare is free and there will, potentially, be redundancies ahead but, overall, the Greater Manchester health and social care partnership would seem to be a positive move.

What really is amazing, though, is that it has taken so long for this partnership model to be tried in some shape or form. In health, we have talked for years and years about 'ensuring no-one slips through the gaps', providing 'joined-up services' and so on and so forth but it has proved to be extremely difficult working across the divide caused by two very different bodies, each covered by very different rules and regulations and with separate budgets that encourages silo thinking. Perhaps - just perhaps - now that health and social care are going to be on the 'same side' in Greater Manchester, patients and the public are going to see some benefits. That is, after all, what this is all about isn't it?

Do yourself a favour

I have just been listening to today's broadcast of 'You and Yours' on BBC R4 and it is a wonder that I did not have an accident, so preoccupied was I with shouting - possibly screaming - at the radio in the car. They were taking listener views on the subject 'What have the arts ever done for me?'. Now, I realise from the start that these kind of phone in/Tweet in/text in affairs are always going to produce an overly-polarised division of opinions. Let's face it, they are not going to feature contributions from anyone who wants to put a balanced or reasoned view across. Instead, we get 'tit-for-tat' contributions, first from someone who says the arts are completely irrelevant and then from someone who owes their livelihood, marriage or sanity to the arts. Repeat over and over. Of course, it is meant to be provocative (or at least as provocative as Y&Y can be), but it still riles me every time...

In this particular debate, however, those giving a negative view of the contribution of the arts to society just came across as exceptionally narrow-minded and dull (as in beige) people. The first negative contributor seemed to be convinced that the only people who attend theatre or the opera (he reserved special bile for opera-goers) are the middle or upper classes. In part this may be true: I would guess that the theatre and opera are frequented by those classes to a greater degree than the working classes. In his world, this meant all public subsidy for those art forms should be stopped at once. However, I saw this as a reason why we need to keep public subsidy: God knows a night at the opera or theatre is expensive enough but without any subsidy, it would be prohibitive for all but the rich. If all tickets reflected full cost/no subsidy, the costs involved would prohibit a whole raft of people from ever experiencing these branches of the arts. Just what we want - extending the culture of privilege and exclusivity as opposed to encouraging access and inclusivity! In fact, as the caller went on, it became clear that he could find no place for the arts in the lives of 'ordinary' folk. I found that depressing. Someone who has such a large chip on their shoulder or whose heart is so dead to emotional contact that they are happy to leave theatre and opera to his perceived 'betters', I found to be an awful thought. "Art? It's alright for the likes of them toffs but give me a draughty church hall and a game of bingo anytime. I know my place!" he seemed to be saying.

The next caller was an art therapist who spoke of the use of art in the treatment of physical and mental illnesses. This used to be something that many hospitals provided: it was both popular and found to have positive benefits in terms of aiding recovery and/or improving outcomes. Unfortunately, when money gets tight, this kind of holistic approach to treatment bites the dust and any small move away from the traditional biomedical model of health is quickly ditched in favour of allopathic medicine. The art therapist explained that since health and local authority monies had dried up, she could now only provide her therapy on a private basis. It was now the turn for an 'anti-arts' person to speak so the next caller suggested that, because of the needs of austerity, all arts subsidies should be removed (due to "the mess made by the last Labour government" quoth he) and should instead be spent on something worthwhile "like the NHS". At that point I was definitely losing it as I was shouting at the radio "Have you not been listening to anything the previous caller said? Health is a wider issue than merely giving some drugs to someone or bandaging a limb, you bloody idiot!".

Art/the arts, often seem to be a difficult concept for some. It's almost as if we are scared to explore, to open up, to go out there and learn something about the world or about ourselves. Art is not about 'someone else' - it's about you and me, it's about shared experience, shared emotions; it's about the community in which we live. Yes, it may be a little difficult to get engaged with to begin with and, yes, it may be, unfortunately, overly associated with 'posh people'. But it doesn't have to be that way at all, not by a long chalk. The arts are for all. Treat yourself soon.

Miscellany (2)

A mixed bag or two rants and a question...

Getting onto the M66...
This rant goes out to the driver of a blue BMW 3-Series Coupe who was getting onto the M66 at Junction 1 this morning at around 8:15. You, sir or madam, are a complete idiot of the very worst kind. Personally, I don't care if you kill yourself through your crazed and selfish driving: that is entirely your own prerogative and I will not stand in your way should you wish to end it all in a mangled wreck of steel and plastic. As I say, your choice. However, if you choose to take the chance to bow out in such a manner, please, feel free to take your car to a track day at a race circuit or, cutting straight to the chase, find a nice sturdy concrete pillar and just drive straight at it. That should get the job done nicely! What I am trying to say is, do not involve me or any other motorist in your suicide plans: we are not as interested in you in shortening our lives. I saw you cut up four cars in the space of around 400 metres and at a speed of around 90 mph. Coming just a few days after a multiple car pile-up on the M40 leading to the death of one man, serious injuries to six people and 45 other injuries, one might have thought that lessons might be learned. Some selfish idiots, however, obviously refuse to be taught anything.

Cartoon memes
I had a thought last night. A couple of things that we might refer to as memes - a picture or a video clip that graduates to the status of cultural references - occurred in cartoons and comics when I was a child and, no doubt, still do today. The ones I was thinking of were the child in the doctor's surgery or casualty with a saucepan stuck on their head and the other was the notion of fixing a punctured bike tyre by 'bandaging' the holed area of the tyre. It got me thinking: where did these memes arise from? Did a cartooninst just think the notion of a child with a pan stuck on his head would be funny or did they know of a child it had happened to? Had it happened to the cartoonist themselves in childhood? Similarly, did anyone ever actually manage to fix a punctured tyre with a bandage rather than glueing on a patch? I'd love to know.

...Getting off the M66
When departing the M66 at Junction 1 (Ramsbottom turn-off), there are two lanes on the slip road. Where the slip road meets the top road (Manchester Road I think it is at that point), the left-hand lane turns left towards Bury while the right-hand lane turns right towards Ramsbottom and Edenfield. It seem logical to me that, if you want to go to Bury, get in the left-hand lane of the slip road but if you are going to Rammy or Edenfield, use the right-hand lane. Simple, yes? No, far too complex for some. The number of people who get in the left-hand lane, drive half-way down the slip road and then switch across to the right boggles my brain and pricks my OCD-like need for order. Yes, some may be people who are coming to Rammy for the first time and do not know the raod layout - I agree totally. Many, however, I know for a fact to be locals who take part in this strange lane switch, probably on a nightly basis. I'm confused...

Victor Meldrew signing off.

Who would Jesus vote for?

The furore over the pastoral letter published by the Church of England's House of Bishops threw up some interesting views. The letter urges Christians to ensure that they vote in the upcoming general election (so far, so neutral) but then goes on to point out some of the areas that people might want to consider when voting such as poverty, welfare reform and nuclear weapons whilst adding that "our democracy is failing" and noting the growing need to find scapegoats in society. Cue apoplexy on the Right...

The Sun, that balanced and ethical source of news and tits, screamed that the Church of England has "revealed its hand as the religious wing of the Labour Party"! The Times, another Murdoch rag that toes the Dirty Digger's party line on all matters, called the letter "political" and "nakedly partisan" whilst adding that the "tacit criticism" of the government contained in the letter had left the Prime Minister "incensed". The Daily Mail, another completely balanced and fair organ, called the letter "narrow-minded and insular" and advised bishops that if they wished to get political, they should throw away their mitres and stand for election. Finally, the Telegraph, although more accepting of the right of the bishops to say what they said, still felt that it gave the impression that left-wing ideas are more moral than those of the right.

The latter point is probably the crux of the whole matter: were the bisops being openly political in publishing their letter and if so, to what end? My answer would be of course they were being political: there is no way that any pronouncement of this kind cannot be extrapoloated to have a political resonance. We are in the (protracted) run up to a general election so anything that can possibly be interpreted as having 'meaning' or influence on it's outcome will be siezed upon by the press, especially a press that is a) in the majority right-wing and b) scared that a future Labour government will implement the recommendations of Leveson and rein in some of the excesses of Fleet Street. Consequently, anything that may give the faintest boost to Labour has to be stomped on, even when the message that the bishops wrote in the letter was always going to contain those sentiments, regardless of who is in power.

Yesterday, in an interview, Nadine Dorries (I know, I'm invoking all that is best on the Right today, aren't I?) said of the letter "[t]here is a very definite left-wing leaning to their message". And right there is the problem. The job of the church, in my simple mind at least, is to put into action the teachings of Jesus. Now knowledge of the bible is not my strongest suit but I'm pretty certain that much of what Jesus said and did was about ensuring that the needs of the poor, the sick, the vulnerable - those who are being left behind, especially when times are tough generally - should be at the forefront of our minds and should inform our actions. Jesus did not say - and neither are the bishops saying it - that making money or running the country well is anti-Christian, merely that part of the responsibility of those two activities should be ensuring that those less fortunate are properly cared for. In her comment, Ms Dorries exposes the fact that, rather than the bishops' comments being driven by any political bias, they are pro- the poor and vulnerable and, thus, contrary to the mood that the Coalition is currently promoting with their constant demonising of the poor as feckless scroungers.

Just as the Mail challenged the bishops to stand for election, I'd say the same to the editors of our so-called "free" press, a press which, in the level of political influence it seeks to exert, has become an enemy of the democratic process in this country. Peter Oborne in resigning from The Telegraph over its failure to properly cover the HSBC tax avoidance scandal (he called it a "fraud on their readers") is to be congratulated. In doing so, he is highlighting the current, debased role of the press: it is now less about telling us what we want to or should know but, instead, is much, much more about telling us what a bunch of newspaper owners want us to know and how we should be voting to best support their interests. I'd rather the bishops point out a few home truths every now and then if it wipes the endless diet of celebrity and showbiz gossip off the front pages for a while.