Being Creative - I have a dream

I think its time I revealed why this blog has this name. I have a dream. It is a creative dream. I want to share it with as many people as I can around the world. I believe that everyone has creativity within themselves. Some realise this and understand that they should accept this part of their nature. Just because you can’t play an instrument doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate your kind of music.

To that end I put together www.bCreativelimited.com, which is a new generation business that services the new needs of today and caters for those coming on stream. What’s different about this generation of users is the blur between consumer and creator. Everyone who consumes the creative can be creative.

Growth in social network sites has been extraordinary, as has the shift in purchasing entertainment from retail outlets to those on the net.
We all listen to music, watch movies, go to galleries, concerts, play games and have creativity at the centre of our lives, whether we know it or not.

This is a place where you could imagine being able to buy and sell original art, poems, music, and the creation of galleries of new work.

bCreative is also a one-stop website covering the main areas of the arts.
Set up like a social networking website, it allows anyone to become a member and promote their work with their very own web page or micro site.
It allows members to create a profile and promote whatever creative or artistic venture a member is working on, whether it be a film script, a piece of music or creative writing.

The difference between bCreative & other social networking sites is twofold:
• bCreative offers advice and help by respected professionals within each of the arts to all our members

• Their work will be placed in a shop window to the arts world and those within the industry as a good market place for spotting new talent
Because experts are working with bCreative, and working with members, the bCreative website will receives recognition by the arts world.

We start out with the shop window, which is www.bcreativelimited.com

If you ever had a creative dream but didn't know how to make it come true but wanted some help, a guide, a little encouragement, or simply someone to be in contact with? The answer is here now, and available to anyone, it's name, bCreative.

bCreative is unique, helpful and informative, it's the creation of industry professionals aided by gifted teachers with vast experience in each of the creative sectors. Allied to this bCreative is the one place where you can, in future, simply view the creative work of others, show what you've got, develop your creative talents just because you want to, or because you want to share your creativity, perhaps even sell the results.

The founders of each creative gateway have enormous knowledge of the creative process in each of their fields, plus experience of how to pass on this knowledge, and where necessary, help guide the creator to realize their commercial potential.

bCreative is not a school, but does guide you to a greater knowledge of how you can achieve your best work. bCreative is also a social networking site for the creative person, and that means every one of you. bCreative is here for you now, and people will say of course it is, as if it was an old friend.

Just to look at www.bcreativelimited.com is free of any charge. Just log on and register your name and details. If you want to interact there is a nominal charge, and if you want further, specific services there is menu with costs attached.

There are a large and growing number of subject areas and facilities such as Film, Music, Radio, Theatre, Creative Writing, Poetry corner, Crafts, Friendship club (dating and / or just friends) Art (to look at and ponder)
And many more related links are to come.

Each of these topics contains a varying number of sub headings. For example in Film, there are many groupings, such as Casting, Budget, Directing, Producing, Distribution and many others.

bCreative is a one-stop website covering the main areas of the arts. bCreative is also going to be a social networking website that allows anyone to become a member and promote their work with their very own web page or micro site.

Now you can create a profile & promote whatever you are working on, whether it be a film script, a piece of music, creative writing, painting, sculpting or anything else that defines your creativity.

bCreative is for people of every age and type, there are no exceptions. Whether you are 8 or 80 you will find something for you on this site.

Students are welcome and encouraged. bCreative provides half price membership and services for all registered full time students.

I hope you share my creative dream.

Password Overload

I don’t know about your take on this, but I have reached Password overload. I agree with the need for security, but clearly our systems don’t operate as they should. They’re impossible for the consumer, but perfectly navigable for the fraudster. That cannot have been the intent.

I have about ten personal and corporate credit and debit cards, and they all have Pin numbers, or in the UK you simply can’t use them. The temptation is to change these Pin numbers when you received the card, to a simply remembered number, such as a birthday, on all of them. Of course this is pretty foolish since, if someone else, can figure this out, and gets hold of your card they can have a birthday treat of their own. How can anyone remember ten different Pin numbers, it’s not possible. Some of us cunningly have half of our cards using one memorable birthday and the remainder on a different memorable birthday. Then you’re faced with which card belongs to which birthday group.

Add to this the requirement to remember every one of your web, blog and other Internet addresses, passwords and URL’s and your head begins to spin. If you write these numbers, codes or passwords down somewhere then your local, friendly crook can find it just as easily as you can.

In my home and business we have four computers which I guard like an attack dog. I am responsible, each have their own passwords, and then there’s our WiFi broadband access code.

The burglar alarm has its own code, and another word to remember to tell the central dispatcher when you set it off by accident and you have to telephone them to stop the police coming to your home, costing you a whole bunch of money for a false alarm . It's not so easy to remember that word when the loudest noise in the universe since the big bang is happening and its 4 in the morning and you're trying to tell some really cynical person down the line that it was just a mistake and you can't recall the code word.

Of course all the bank accounts also have their own security codes, and passwords, as do every other account we have. We should be the most secure people on the planet. We have about the same level of security as Fort Knox without the armed guards, what could go wrong?

Imagine my horror when, after all of this being in place, I looked at one of my credit card bills last month. I discovered that someone had defrauded the card of nearly £3,000 ($6,000) in January. Immediately I telephoned my card issuer to notify them of this. A charming young lady with a Punjabi accent passed me to someone in the Fraud department. They listened to me patiently, but somehow they made me feel as if I had done something wrong. The questions they asked me sounded more like accusations. I re-assured them that I had never been to any of the places in Florida in which the fraudster with my cloned card had spent this money. In fact I have only been there twice, once about eight years ago, and previously twenty-two years ago. I found myself having to prove a negative, which was not appropriate or easy. I wasn’t there, and could prove it, but maybe, the implication was, you had given someone else your card and they were doing this on your behalf. A neat trick when I had the card with me all the time.

My card must have been cloned but I was faced with having to dispute each and every Florida entry, including visits to a risqué lingerie shop, and trying to reclaim the excess interest and over limit charges.

Surely the way to counter act all of these problems is for the credit card companies, the banks, the insurers, the customs and immigration people and anyone else whose business demands knowledge that proves we are who we say we are to work together. Maybe there’s one biometric system for everyone to enable this. That way the system could be made foolproof. We can’t fake the details in our eyes and fingerprints simultaneously as its just too difficult. We would be left with a system that didn’t involve signatures, codes, passwords or other nonsense.

Of course I would then have no alternative but to fight the system I’m calling for on the grounds of it infringing my human rights and privacy. What was that bloody number?

The Gift of Friendship

Before my dad and mum died I had the opportunity to tell them how much I loved them. I think that was hugely important. You should, right now, tell people that you love them if that’s the case, don’t wait until it’s too late. The subject of this essay, I hope has many years left to live. But this is a brief love letter to a friend called Stevie. Although we’re straight, it doesn’t stop me loving this special guy.

I have this friend called Stevie. He has a great gift. His is the Gift of Friendship, and it is a rare and wonderful gift we could all use some more of. Stevie makes people happy just being himself. He has a smile and a greeting for everyone. He has his own problems, but rarely talks about them; in fact he doesn’t unless you ask.

Stevie only wants to share himself and his poetry with the world, and there are far worse things in life than this gentle man and his gift with words. Stevie is truly a gentleman, a man who wants everyone else to be happy and friendly.

Stevie is a friend to everyone he meets. He knows and is known by everyone from the richest to the poorest of the world, from the bus boys in restaurants, to the most powerful men and women. He treats you the same if you are the biggest movie star or the guy who fetches your drinks. It is the most unusual thing to watch billionaires treasuring their time with this unique man. Some of them have no idea that this guy can give them nothing more than his time and his poetry, and they don’t know how to react to him and his happy smile.

A great many people in the sixties called themselves Hippies because they took a lot of dope and made peace signs every place they could. Stevie didn’t just make the noises of peace; he has lived his whole life that way. I don’t want you to think I am trying to make a saint out of Stevie, in fact I don’t know if you can have a Jewish saint, but if the qualification for sainthood is to live a good life making as many people happy as possible, then Stevie is getting near to being Saint Stevie. But I do wish there were more people like Stevie, who want to see the good in this world.

Stevie is not perfect; he comes with the same waft and weave we all have built into our DNA code but in him the faults are far outweighed by the good stuff. I love his poetry and lyrics, his passion and his love for others. I wish you all could have a friend like Stevie in your life. The world would be a better place. Thanks Stephen J. Kalinich, for being my friend.

Things That are Good

I have been accused of ranting, and I have also been told that I am writing what many of you are thinking. Both of these observations have some truth in them. Despite my best efforts there are some of you who ask me if there are some things I am happy to say something good about. Of course there are.

In my office at home, where I write this blog are pictures of my family, smiling, happy photographs of people that I love. Nothing, except being in the room with them could give a person more pleasure than seeing those pictures.

I looked out of my window yesterday and saw two ducks walking on my lawn. They are clearly a bit confused as the River Lea, and the adjacent canals in this part of Southern England, are about a hundred metres away, but they are very welcome guests. The ducks spent the day with us, waddling up and down, quite happy to visit with us, and, although I’m no bird specialist, it was a pleasure watching them.

Now in danger of sounding like a nature boy, which I certainly am not, I have to admit to enjoying the first buds of the spring flowers. They’re brave, these possibly foolhardy flowers, coming out at Easter time in England, because the frost can easily return and kill them instantly. But thanks for showing your pretty faces to us, yet again giving promise of another good year to come.

Admitting to being a rabid Manchester United football fan I have to admit to a bias with my next choice of things that are good. Watching Cristiano Ronaldo play this season is one of those things. Unless, that is, you are a supporter of one of the teams that he’s punished with his beautiful skills. Not since George Best has there been a single player who is worth the price of admission by himself. If you get a chance to watch him, even on your television, do yourself a favour and do so.

Speaking to your friends every day should be a part of all our lives. It’s the best medicine for when you’re feeling down, or you can reverse the flow and be the giver of a smile to someone you care about and who cares about you. The same goes for family. We speak to each other, brothers and sisters, partners, kids and parents, cousins, all the time. It’s great to communicate, but don’t just speak at each other, try listening, and talking with each other. There is a difference.

I can remember setting myself a series of very real targets when I was a child. I refined this list when I was a teenager, and again when I was in my early twenties. I wanted to make a million pounds, win all kinds of awards, be a film maker by the age of eighteen, have a London film premiere by the time I was twenty-one etc. I achieved most of my list, and climbed my imaginary mountain, and when I got to the top I realised there were many more mountains to come. Over the years I also came to the realisation that the targets I had set myself were meaningless. What’s an award when set against the smile of a child you care about?

When we’re kids it seems like every day is an eternity and the things we want to do, not allowed to us until we’re bigger and older, will never arrive. Then there’s the rush of the teenage years, where everything is for the first glorious time. Before we know it we’re in our twenties and the responsibilities multiply, the realisation dawns that with these come problems and set against possible rewards are the chances of failure. Most of us get through this stage into early middle age, when we build and consolidate. Relationships, some build, mature and endure, some come to a natural end, leaving room for fresh hopes and potential, but all are to be learned from. Taking us to that point in our existence when we seek answers to eternal questions and rail against injustices, perceived or real. We take stock of ourselves and the world around us. Did we achieve what we set out to do? Was there a good reason to it all? Is the sum total of the love we get equal to the love we give? When people contemplate you do they think, or even better do they smile, or better still, do they think and smile?

Everyone has different answers to these questions, but if the balance is in your favour then you have lived a good life. It would be a very good thing if I have achieved any of this. There is still time for me I hope, and I shall keep trying to work toward the goal of being one of those things that are good.

How’s that, not one rant, can I keep it up?

The Three Ages of Exercise

William Shakespeare wrote about the seven ages of man. I think there are the three ages of exercise. I am fairly long into the third age but maybe there’s also a fourth age beckoning, when I just think about jumping about and running, rather than doing it.

Mirrors and exercise don’t go together for me. Perhaps they would if you look great in a leotard or other sporting apparel, but you need to be blessed with the ability to perspire and glow at the same time. Most of us just sweat and melt. I was blessed with some ability in sport when I was a boy. That ability and sheer laziness meant I didn’t do or need much exercise to get into the swimming or boxing or football teams. I got into them because I was pretty good, and there were a lot of boys who must have been a bit worse.

I loved sport and still do. I enjoyed being part of a team. It was exhilarating trying to win matches for both the team and myself. Of course it helps if you are part of a good team, but your memory is a strange thing, the matches you won are well remembered, and the ones you lost are now more humorous than annoying. I remember one of the few rugby games I played at full back and seeing their biggest, fastest forward bearing down at me at what seemed like inhuman speed. I immediately realised that there was nothing I could do to halt this leviathan, so I tried to skip about, to avoid this onrushing collection of bone, muscle and gristle. I had to make it appear as if I was constantly hopping about to get in his path, but the opposite was true. However blessed he might have been in the size and strength and speed departments, he was not gifted with good steering, as I went left, he went to his right, and so on, the collision was inevitable. He ran right over me, all I could do was put my despairing hands up to protect my face, as instructed by my loving mother, and, as a consequence, I found myself holding his shorts, which somehow ripped from his body. As I looked over from my prone position on the mud all I could see was his lean and naked ass hurtling over the try line.

In the boxing team I had the good fortune to have been taught some of the noble art my grand father’s friend, Ted Kid Lewis, who was already a very old man at this point. Did I leave out the fact that he had been the World Boxing Champion? Yes, Mister Lewis knew quite a bit about what to do in the boxing ring. I learned just enough to win all but one of my fights. My technique largely rested on the fact that at a young age I was short for my weight and, as a consequence, could fight out of a crouch and was very hard to hit. Every so often I could bop up and bash my opponent in the stomach or on the nose. Ted told me that young boys were likely not to know that a bit of nose blood wasn’t going to kill them, and when hit on the stomach, they might well throw up. Both of these turned out to be accurate and it worked a treat until I had to fight a very tall fellow who simply poked my head off with a stiff and very annoying left jab. Try as I might I couldn’t get anywhere near to him. I reluctantly conceded my previously unblemished record to him always remembering my mother telling me not to let anyone hit me. It seemed like a very good idea to me.

My biggest disappointment came in the swimming pool, where I was at my best. I won all my races but one, and was capable of swimming endlessly up and down the pool at whatever speed my teachers selected for me. I was being groomed for bigger and better things when they told me about what I would need to do to progress to a national level. It involved getting up at dawn and swimming almost every waking hour except for when I attended school. I didn’t do as I was advised, and although I was a very good swimmer, I didn’t go nearly as far as I should have if I would have done the training and exercise.

Then I lived in the States and together with my friend, Dave, formed a Soccer team in the San Fernando Valley in California. We packed that team with celebrities who had in common a more than fair ability to play football. We won almost all the time in showbiz type matches in some blazing heat. For the first time I knew I had to get in some kind of shape just to be able to enjoy the game enough and to keep up with the pace. Now I was in my late twenties and this period would go on for about five years. I didn’t mind doing the exercise as it was aimed at being fit enough to play my beloved team sports.

Time passed and now I was a bit older but perhaps no wiser. I tried to participate in some friendly football matches but began to find that injuries that would have healed in a day or two were now taking a week or two to get better. In fact some of them never seemed to completely recover. My family advised me to seek more gently pursuits. In fact my son, somewhere along this time line, had become a monster sports person, and was now infinitely better than me at all ball games. In fact it was around this time that I walked past a shop window and saw my father staring back at me. I knew almost instantly that it was, in fact, me, but in my head I should have looked like my taller and more athletic son. In fact, when I don’t shave, I imagine that I am going to look like a mean, lean fighting machine, instead of which I look like middle European rabbi.

Now I was getting heavier and less fit, whatever I did to reverse, or even slow the trend. Years passed and I was forced to give up smoking at forty and anything I liked to eat at about the same time. I took up jogging and believe me it was hard, more like a punishment than a pleasure. I have, with the odd gap, managed to keep up some form of exercise most of the time since. O.K. I admit to the odd six months or so when my resolve vanished, particularly in the middle of the cold, damp British winter.

But, I am proud to report, I am back at my fifty minutes per day for six days per week. I am proof that you can be both fit and not too thin. Nevertheless all the illnesses that afflicted my late father now loom on my medical horizon also. I lamented my fate with my doctor who said that it was great that I was so fit or I would probably have had a heart attack and died years ago. In a perverse way this cheered me up , but looking at my overweight and unfit doctor I did think life could sometimes be so unkind. I bet he doesn’t get up to do his exercise by the dawn’s early light but I remain determined to be the fittest person in the graveyard, even if mirrors do me no favors.

The Sanctity of Insurance

I am a fervent believer in insurance. My belief is that if I am insured nothing can happen to me. It’s my good luck wrapped in a policy. Bad things cannot happen to those that are insured. I acknowledge that I am probably more insured than I might need to be. I also don’t claim very much against my many insurance policies. The reason for this is because I have the insurance in place. I am convinced that should a policy lapse I would immediately suffer terrible retribution from the insurance Gods. They exist you know, waiting for me to miss a payment.

I have insurance on my travel, cars, critical illness, death, but for some reason that’s called life insurance and health. This is a seriously expensive business. I don’t want to even calculate how much this is costing of my not so disposable income. My behaviour I learnt from my late mother, whose belief in good, solid insurance I have inherited. When she was dying in a very expensive Intensive Care Unit of a Harley Street hospital she rallied briefly and leaned forward to me, “Has it cost the medical insurance a lot of money?” she whispered, “Yes mum,” I responded, gently stroking her forehead, “but you don’t have to worry about it.” She smiled and gathered her strength; “I’m not worried, I’ve been paying all the years, now it’s their turn!”

I once had two insurance policies on my first ever house. My purchasing insurance cover on the house, and my lawyers, thinking I was new to the game of self-protection, also obtaining me another policy for the same thing, had caused this error. Apparently we had purchased the two policies within thirty minutes of one another. This is where my fear might originate. Of course the property consequently suffered subsidence. The policy I had obtained turned out to be the first one purchased. This meant that the two insurance companies would split the costs, and the two of them would be led by the first. “Ah ha!” I thought happily, “no problem,” that company had profited handsomely from my family business and therefore there would be a quick outcome. Flash forward some four and a half years. They were total bastards, not willing to pay a penny, and totally unhelpful. The other company, who I had never dealt with previously were more than willing to cooperate, but were constrained by their peers.

Eventually I was able to convince the building company that they should purchase the property back from us at the market value. I did this by reminding them that I had a camera, a film crew and access to the media. They got the message and I got a cheque. I think I might have forgotten to tell everyone about this happy outcome. That same afternoon I then telephoned the insurance companies and asked them if they would reconsider my plight as we had been begging them for half a decade. The people I didn’t know offered to match whatever the first insurers would do, up to half of the cost of repair. I told them I would accept. I then spoke with my friends, and they told me they would make an ex gratia, one time payment to close the matter once and for all. “But you must understand, old chap, that once you accept that payment you can make no further claim against the insurance company, ever.” I said I did understand and asked them, “and does this mean that the matter is settled, both ways, once and for all?” they repeated that it did. I accepted their payment on these terms and the payment, matching this from the first company. I banked the cheques.

Once the payments cleared I reimbursed the nice insurance company and they were most happy with this outcome. I telephoned my "friend" at the insurers with whom I had agreed that the matter was closed. They were annoyed that I rung, reminding me that there could be no further claims. I told them of my good luck and they were very happy for me. They asked me if I would consider giving them their money back. I told them I would consider doing so, for about four and a half years, strangely enough, the same period of time I had waited for them to honor their commitment to me.

I won’t bore you with the decision I reached all that time later, but suffice it to say I am still a believer in the insurance concept, if not in all its practitioners. Remember to buy that umbrella on the sunny days.

Roll of Shame

What do Vodafone, the Tesco store credit card, United Airlines Mileage Plus have in common? They all cost me time, blood pressure readings that were off the scale and tested my hard won patience. I am confident that the same kinds of things happen to all of you.
In no order of priority my stories are as follows. Last month United Airlines were running a promotion in which they stated that there were special bonuses for their Mileage Plus members if they were to purchase some long distance tickets before a certain date. I telephone and received confirmation of this from them. I purchased the tickets on the understanding that I would receive these benefits, which included maintaining my Executive Gold membership. I took the details of the call, including the time and date and accepted this assurance. You know what comes next don’t you. My new membership card arrived at the end of last week, and United had not delivered on their promise to maintain my Executive Gold membership. I telephoned the same number and was told, very politely, that I must have misunderstood what I had been told. As their answering system always states that they record your conversations for training purposes I asked them to play our previous conversation back. If I were wrong there would be an end to it. If I was right they should honour their representative’s word. Strangely enough, although they would not deny there might be a recording, they couldn’t or wouldn’t play it. Eventually, and I am cutting this very short, the charming young lady, clearly in the Indian sub-continent, agreed that I might speak to her manager. He came into our conversation and was equally polite, and useless. He now informed me that after checking, there had indeed been a special promotion as I had stated, but I hadn’t paid the $400 for it. As I had never been informed about any such charge I could not have paid it. I asked him if he could simply play back the call in question but he confirmed that this was not possible. What followed was even more Kafkaesque. The manager implied that he could well understand and sympathize with my view, and to that end he would e-mail United International in the States for their view. When he received a response in two days I could call them and they would tell me their decision. I asked him why they couldn’t call me, but apparently this was also not permitted. I also asked him to simply copy me in on the exchange of e-mails, but again, this was not permitted. I shall call United later today, and will be amazed if this airline, (on which I have flown more than 140,000 miles, including current travel in the last couple of years) will honour its commitments. What a shame and what a waste of time. I don’t think it even occurred to them even to care, or to pretend that they care. I can’t do anything more about it than to share their behaviour with you.

Vodafone was perhaps even more bizarre. They sent me a letter stating that as I had not paid an overdue amount and therefore my service was terminated. There were a couple of points at issue. My service was normal and I didn’t owe them a penny. I telephoned and eventually was connected to another charming young lady. I told her my tale and she agreed that I didn’t owe them anything and that my phone service was normal. I asked why I had been sent the letter. It was because several months ago I had changed the bank through which I was making my payments. But, I said, you had received the payments hadn’t you?” to which she responded, “yes, you don’t owe us anything at all.” I leave it to you to imagine why their letter had been sent in the first place, as I still do not understand.

Then came the Tesco Store Credit Card. In fact it belongs to my wife. We pay this card off in total each month, and therefore know that there should not be a problem with it. However recently when my wife had used the card it was registering that she wasn’t using the correct pin number, although it had not been changed. This got worse until the point that it wouldn’t work. My wife rang Tesco, and was greeted by a third very charming young lady. The Tesco lady told my wife that she must have been inputting the wrong Pin number. My wife assured her that this wasn’t the case. The Tesco lady said that they would throughput a de-locking instruction to the card and that then, after a 3 hour wait she could make rest assured her Pin number would now work. I went to the ATM for my wife and of course it didn’t work even after I had followed instructions precisely. Whilst I was attempting this, my wife was on the telephone with a fourth charming young lady who was informing her that I was inputting the incorrect Pin number that my wife was sharing with me on my mobile phone. I will not go into yet more painstaking detail enumerating the methods we are pursuing for a fallback position. We figure this will take at least another week or two to get straight, and it is all yet another dumb waste of time.

I have been accused of being a real life Larry David figure, but you have to admit that this kind of time wasting nonsense is happening to many, if not all of you. I want to say that you should keep a careful record of your calls, names, times, dates and details of what has been agreed, but here we have some perfect examples of my doing all of this, and still landing up to my neck in the brown stuff. No, the secret is to not be part of the system at all, but then you wouldn’t be considered a real person would you, so I guess we’re stuck dealing with a system that makes no sense at all.

Words We Won't Use

I don’t know about you, but I am getting so fed up with certain words. Every day I hear these words, and every day I get more annoyed by them. I’ve come to the conclusion that they use these words purely to annoy people like me. Perhaps you don’t know what I mean, so I shall list some of these words and see if they annoy you as well.

First on my list are the words, “climate change”. No day passes without someone saying or writing something about bloody climate change. I am fed up being blamed, along with the rest of you, for causing this. I don’t believe I am, and I am convinced that there has been, and always will be more climate change. I want my heating and air conditioning, and I love my big, powerful car. I have been informed that one quarter of the world’s carbon emissions emanate out of the asses of farting cattle, and I am prepared to bet that another quarter comes out of the mouths of the idiots who use climate change as an excuse to diminish the liberty of as many individuals as possible.

While we’re losing words, one that should never have existed is “multicultural”, because it’s a stupid label for a bankrupt conceit that should never have happened to us. I am convinced that the U.K. will, one day, discover that multiculturalism was a result of a planned social experiment by some far left bumbling bureaucrats. It has caused untold suffering to the economic migrants who were used up by it, and it will cause more grief to us all. By the way, let’s also drop the words, “hard left’”. That makes this small, otherwise unimportant group sound tumescent and powerful, whereas they are largely an intellectually flabby and secretive group of plotters who want to tell you and me how to live, but because they know they would never win a vote, they do their dirty deeds in the back rooms of the world.

The next words that must be eliminated from the England of Shakespeare, Churchill, Newton and Darwin are the words, “plastic bags.” I know that these bags are evil, perfidious and all pervasive, so let’s get rid of them, and stop talking about the X billion of plastic bags that will not vanish for ten thousand years. I’m happy to use paper, cloth, or anything else, just make them available and shut up!

Another collection of words rapidly becoming a total pain in the butt are, “sub prime mortgages.” This excuse for banking greed that has become a communal financial meltdown that might yet lead us to mass money suicide is depressing and masks the greed and possible criminal actions of a few bankers that should be what we need to examine and punish.

Please stop using any phrase with the word Islamic in it. Give that group and me a break. They cannot be that interesting. In the UK over the last several years it appears as if every news bulletin contains a story containing some mention of Islamic or Muslim and we could live with less, and so, I’m confident could the Muslims.

WAGS, the word, and WAGS the people should be consigned to the dustbin of history. This is an acronym for wives and girlfriends of soccer stars. They are vacant, preening, self-important little girls with big girl attitude with regard to their bloated self-importance and very big mirrors. Shut up and vanish, in another life you would be, at best, a trolley dolly on an airline, looking for a secure future with the only weapons you’ve got, good teeth and hair, fine legs and a healthy chest. In fact that qualifies you to be a racehorse.

Fundamentalists, this is another word for wrong headed, stupid murderous bastards. So are Freedom fighters, resistance guerrillas and militants. These are groups who should be captured, tried for their crimes against humanity and executed. It would be much easier for us all if every time a news item reported one of their murders they labelled the perpetrators, murderers.

Now I shall return to my exercise and diet and get on with my day, come to think of it, let’s get of the words diet and exercise and I could just go back to bed!

Why be honest?

Last week in Hull, a town in the North of England, an ATM machine was giving up double the amount of cash their customers were registered as taking from their accounts. Instead of these customers reporting this fault a line of over one hundred people soon formed. All of them, apparently, taking advantage of this error to cash in. None of them seemed to understand that this was wrong. The photographs of the event show them laughing triumphantly.

When I was a young man, a long time since, I was driving with some friends in France. My case was strapped to the back of the small MGB sports car. Somewhere along the route my case had fallen off. We retraced our route and entered the police station in a rural town. My case had been collected by a passing local man, he had returned it, after opening it and finding my wallet and passport inside. There was nothing missing and he wouldn't accept a reward. Has the world changed this much, or are these two isolated, unrepresentative incidents?

I like to believe in the inherent goodness of the individual. However I am not so confident of our behavior in groups. I think a great many people when confronted with a choice between honest or dishonest behavior will choose the former, even when they don't gain by it.

My despair is born from the apparent collapse of this moral code in our banking and political systems. These are clearly now peopled by men and women much less principled than that simple Frenchman years ago. Our leaders as represented here by senior politicians and bankers should be paragons of probity, instead of which they have consistently proved to be venal, greedy, cheating and mean spirited. They have become pigs at the trough and have lost all respect from the general public. It was inevitable that some of their behavior is copied by the public, hence the scenes outside that cash machine in Hull. What else can our society expect when our leading figures don't know how to behave?

What makes this situation even worse is the bombastic and breathtaking hypocricsy of these liars and cheats about anyone else behaving remotely like themselves. Of course not every politician or banker falls within these categories, but enough do for us to resent them all. I will not list examples of the fiddles, lies, fraud, corruption and theft undertaken by these leaders, suffice it to say that none of us can fail to have been confronted by examples in our news every day and we all suffer the cost and damage.

There is also a breathtaking arrogance around many of these political and financial leaders in which they appear genuinely astonished that their atrocious behavior over the last decade or so is called into question. We would all be well served by a genuinely new broom sweeping them away. I think that might be about to happen. If our economy does dip into some kind of recession bordering on a depression there will be a reckoning and those that have helped cause this plight will be swept away by it.

The Ghurkas

The Ghurkas are ferocious, loyal, honest, dependable and terrific soldiers from Nepal who have been fighting for Britain, as part of the army, since the early nineteenth century . They are feared by Britain's enemies and long admired by the British people. When push comes to shove they are amongst the first soldiers sent to the most difficult battles. Right now they are fighting alongside the rest of our men in the most difficult engagements in Afghanistan. Their battle standards have flown around the world and they have never let us down.

It is therefore sickening that the Ghurkas are now having to march in protest against the British government. Some of these magnificent men even returned their medals. They have no alternative because the government will not allow any of these men to live in Britain if they served its army before 1997. That's when Britain decided to base the Ghurkas in the UK rather than Hong Kong, where they had been stationed long term. They were also given a pension at about one quarter the rate of their British born fellow soldiers. The government's rationale was that the pension was based on where they were from, in Nepal, rather than in the UK. 

This has admittedly stopped for the Ghurkas who have been in the army over the last 10 years but the government still will not change these regulations for those who served before 1997. I am not very interested in the rationale of the government, and I think no one else is either. The should pay these people at the same rate of pension as anyone else who served us. 

The total cost for this would be something in the region of £200 million. We're a very rich country, with one of the biggest economies in the world, we can afford it, and its morally right to do it. 

Allowing these magnificent soldiers to live in the country they served shouldn't even be a question. We allow all the other soldiers who are born overseas, and serve in our army, to live in the UK after they serve. The Ghurkas have to be given equal right to settle in the UK under the same terms immediately. 

The total number of men who might take up this right to live in the UK would be about 7,000. Whereas the UK is currently allowing about this number of legal, economic immigrants into the country every 12 days. No one quite knows how many illegal immigrants are also sneaking across our porous borders in addition.

Why are we treating these decent, honorable men worse? Let them in, and pay them properly, now.

Crossing the Platform

Crossing the Platform

We’ve reached the digital age where people are making, distributing and viewing their own material digitally. The gurus call it pier to pier, or User Generated Content (UGC) but it’s more simple than that, it’s when pull became push.

In case you’ve been asleep and hadn’t realized you need to know that you can now see or be seen, hear or be heard, without limitation around the globe, instantly and unless you have the bad fortune to live in one of the totalitarian states can do this without limit unless your credit card runs out.

Everything can be got on the World Wide Web. An infinite variety of media is all now available in the one place, all at once. That’s what the geeky people call Convergence. Blockbusters and broadcasting are probably dead forever because web based distribution will lead to the power that was previously owned by the monolithic media owners now being owned and available to anyone or everyone or is that no one?

This doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a great thing since some of those distribution channels were really well run. There’s something to be said for someone who knows their job making sure the distribution chain is working. What’s the bonus in the “people” having the rights to do what they want when they want when mostly they want to make self-satisfied crap? There’s another way to describe that kind of democracy, and that word is Anarchy.

So beware of what sounds so sexy, because it could just be another way of our describing electronic anarchy.

Now, if it’s going to be bottom up entertainment rather than top down, does that mean that it’s going to get better? Do we achieve Highest Common Factor rather than the glitterati’s common belief that the Lowest Common Denominator is the result of the previously totally dominant top down material generated by the giants.

What it does mean is that the talent can get directly to the audience, and that they are one and the same thing. It means the creator and consumer lines are blurred to the point where they don’t seem to exist.

It also means that you can make low cost totally indie media products to suit yourselves, and if it works in one way or another then you keep on going. You don’t have any restriction, censorship or committees to answer to.

But you also don’t get to make big budget material that looks classy, or has big commercial values. How is anyone going to make a huge production? Can the micro and macro budget industry ends co-exist?

Now anyone can and does generate their own encyclopaedia and anyone can be an author of their own Blog, or create a V Blog to entertain, be entertained or simply as a means of expression. It’s the world looking up its own posterior with a mirror. Someone somewhere is always listening and looking and, depending on who you listen to there are two to three new bloggers signing on every second around the World.

This is totally changing the way we view ourselves, or the rest of the world, and this spreads ideas around the globe virally, without borders, in record time, with no intermediary to slow it up to moderate views or to censor.

This is cool. But how cool is the new order when someone like Rupert Murdoch buys My Space? Are we just changing the labels on the cans, but inside the cans will be just the same?

This is a revolution and the blood is still flowing in the gutter so who knows just yet who wins and who loses when the guillotine is still razoring necks, so no one knows. Nothing-new there then.

People are going to go out less in this brave new world, they are going to stay home, that’s because fuel is too expensive, roads too crowded, transportation reaching gridlock, terrorism being perceived as a constant threat, whilst at home, safe and secure you can give or receive what kind of entertainment when and how you want.

So here’s the story; this is how it has always worked in the recorded media industry. A new and special part of the industry appears out of the blue, let’s say the film business nearly 100 years ago or Pod Casting today. The film industry started very small, in fact it was considered a gimmick with a limited life span, but it very soon become gigantic, rich beyond belief and eventually fat, complacent and self satisfied. That’s what happens to most human commercial endeavour. But then some lean, hungry and very ambitious competitors appear and the fat guys become their fast food, when logic tells you, it should have been the other way around.

The people running the film industry originally made so much money that when a shiny new industry, television arrived they originally saw it as a joke to be ignored, and when that obviously was wrong, they then saw it as a threat. Of course those film guys should have owned this brash newcomer or at least embraced this weak newborn infant, nurtured it and made it their principal source of income. Instead living up to their laughably bad decision making of the past, the film business builds bunkers in which to hunker, hoping, like King Canute to keep the tide from rolling in on their heads. This activity has never worked, and the blind idiots drown before they realise that they are going to have to live with the blowsy but crazily attractive new gizmo.

So, now, instead of either owning or integrating with TV, there were now two tracks marching truculently along parallel lines. Only crossing platforms when they had absolutely no other choice!

Now it was the turn of the Network Television industry to become a huge cash cow for their owners. Billions were earned and they became just as fat and complacent as their film industry colleagues.

It’s of interest to note that despite both those industries being hugely bloated, out of date and missing opportunity after opportunity they were still insanely profitable for their owners. This translates not to their being well run businesses but being businesses in an industry that because of the public’s insatiable appetite for recorded media is almost indestructible, despite both actually suffering from appalling management during the 60 to the 80’s.

Of course this is all edging, inch by painful inch to the point where the customer is going to see what he wants, when he wants and how he wants. Time goes by and guess what, another new toy materialises over the horizon. This time it’s video and the same things happen again. The only difference is that this time around both the television and film industries miss the boat, rather than just one of them, they both wave sadly from the shore as yet another ship sets sail without them being the captain or the master. Video becomes huge, and from it springs DVD, and once again makes a fortune for many new people who mainly come from outside the entertainment industry.

You would think by this time that everyone knows what’s going to happen next and therefore prepares to embrace whatever is coming. And guess what, it then happens again and again and again and is still happening.

In case you’ve been in a very deep cave you will have notice that Television begat Networks and they begat Syndicated television and that created the spawn of the devil know as Cable television, and this begat Satellite television. You have the picture, forgive the pun, loads of different screens, funnily enough playing much the same kinds of things.

Due to the short sightedness of most of the conglomerates concerned the situation exists in which each of these systems has operated along separate railway tracks, parallel with, but rarely fully connected to one another.

They sometimes have come together because of financial engineering or due to one side in the equation or the other being perceived as a having a disproportionately higher market capitalisation at a particular moment. For example the seemingly crazy situation where AOL took over Time Warner when it was the latter which was the cash cow and the former was still primarily a blue-sky company, worth more in the common mind, but actually not earning anything like the company it purchased with its very high value stock.

Wave after wave of new innovation has crashed onto the shore. Because what do mobile phones, the Internet and all the new media players have in common? They are all totally reliant on content to make big profits.

Content is the King, Queen and Ace of what’s necessary for any media system to work commercially. This is going to become ever more obvious as with the Time Warner / AOL deal because the latter needs the content from the former.

Even some of the most media savvy analysts are blinded and confused by the technology. Somehow it’s this means of viewing that seems sexy whereas the content, to them, is the add on. The facts are entirely the other way around. You’re not dumb enough to go overboard praising a screwdriver for it enabling you to put a plug on a computer are you? All screens are just places for you to put on content. Nothing more, nothing less.

Many years ago there were many wonderful movies made where the hero and heroine saw each other fleetingly across two railway platforms, through the ever prevailing but oh so romantic fog of London, and the smoke generated by the train’s engine separating them and their unrequited love. They want to get together for some personalized inter activity; they want to go to bed together, and it isn’t to read……..

Their frustration is a bit like the film distribution companies looking at the mobile phone companies and thinking they would make a wonderful lover, perhaps even a wedding partner. Or perhaps it’s the other way around and it’s the gigantic Google data-bases of this world who cast about them, looking longingly at those very attractive curves of those advertising television billions, or even some bloody water company who wants to sex up their ultimately very boring profile??

I have news for anyone that’s been asleep the last few years; it’s all of the above and then some. Why, simply put we have a fairly static number of Western Dollars being pursued by a growing proliferation of narrowcasters. Forget the monolithic cash cows of the recent past represented by the old TV stations. They’re still there, and will continue to be, but now they’re less broadcasters beaming the big event show into everyone’s living room but the narrowcaster trying to cut through the cluttering proliferation to a more selective and selecting group of more narrowly focused viewers and / or participants. Again we’re looking at the need for these groups to come together for some inter-active personalized activity, they need some good loving!

This last description of the service end user as the viewer or customer and that they will be future participants further re-defines the entire dynamic of what skill sets industry professionals are going to have to possess or perish. People who view in the very near future will be demand to see what they want, when they want and more importantly how they want. And what people more than ever is to in charge of their time, and they’ve proven how willing they are to pay for what they want.

Essential in this change will be true inter activity for the viewer that has so far, only just begun on TV. Examples of this currently available are some voting techniques, choices of camera angles for sporting events, choices of matches to view and the now famous and ubiquitous “Red Button” which provides additional information or further choices.

The other major change coming rapidly at us is the BRIC countries. These are Brazil, Russia, India, and China and for good measure we’ll add the rest of the Asian Tiger economies who share a new insatiable frontier for these products and services. They want some very different products with varying sensibilities but mainstream films, music and above all personalised inter activity.

How personal media liberty will mesh with some authoritarian centrally controlled nation states remains to be seen. It seems improbable that these two diametrically magnetic poles can live together, and might well lead to meltdown in one or the other. It seems like something is going to have to give. Who knows what that will be?

The Cost of Fame

I have worked with many very famous people. In making films you get to meet stars. Everyone from Mickey Rooney, with nods to Roger Moore, Peter Finch, Michael Caine, Shelley Winters, Twiggy, Vincent Price, Ray Milland, Sir John Gielgud, Rita Tushingham, Barbra Parkin, novelists like Wilbur Smith, groups like The Who and Deep Purple. I have known and worked with these and many others of their ilk. Their fame allows you access to other famous people. Of course none of these people are being described by me here.

There is a cost of fame. You could see it on the face of Heather Mills outside the Divorce Court in London. There is a seemingly insane desire to be seen to be in the right if you are a seeker of fame. Being rich and famous means that you are surrounded by people telling you how wonderful you are, all day, every day. No one ever tells you that what you say or do might be wrong. Those that are close to you generally rely on you for their money, lifestyle or simple affirmation of fame by association.

Heather Mills does not know how out of touch she is. Poor Heather cannot see that the near twenty five million pounds Paul is having to pay her in a divorce settlement should be enough for Heather to pay for the A class travel she thinks their daughter is entitled. Heather wants more. Could I apply to Paul for adoption?

Another thing I have noticed with very famous people is that their faces become very smooth, like a baby's bum. I don't really know why this is, but I am sure I am on to some new Newtonian law of evolution that no one else has noticed. Rich, famous people get smoother skin. Of course it could be that they can afford more time and money in very pampering and expensive spas.

I was once traveling in a helicopter with a very famous pop star, who had made many millions of pounds. He was pilot and I was his very nervous passenger. He looked down at the traffic stuck in traffic jams on the roads below us and turned to me, "I don't understand why more people don't use helicopters." he said, not thinking for a second that it was because we can't afford them. Another perfect example of being in an entirely different world to you or me.

There was another when an equally successful singer from another rock band invited me to his just completed hotel for dinner. He had built this gorgeous place in the English countryside complete with guitar shaped pool. Every room was a state of the art suite, and the kitchen was both huge and magnificent. He had invested many millions of pounds. He had asked me there to give an opinion on his new venture and how profitable this investment would be. Simple arithmetic meant that if each of his suites was full every night for the next two hundred years he would never reach profit. When I told him the sad news he became upset, not with his advisers who let him get into this situation, but with me for telling him that the Emperor had no clothes.

It's a synergistic situation, the rich and famous and their coterie of brown nosing friends. Both feed of each other and its hard to fit in if you're honest, or don't need to eat rubbish for a living. Let's face facts, it must be great to be told how beautiful, rich, talented, desirable and incredible you are every day. It isn't quite like that for me and my friends and family. I suppose they love and like me, but there are reservations. If I do something particularly stupid I hope they tell me, and in fact I'm sure they will.

Who's happier? I think I am, because its better to remember who you are. When victorious generals returned to ancient Rome for their triumphal processions there was a man who stood behind them as they drove their chariots through the adoring crowds, his job, to whisper in the general's ear, "remember you are mortal." In our fame obsessed culture more rich and famous people would do well to remember that they are just men and women. Like they say in the States, get over themselves!

My Bubble, Your Bubble, One Big Bubble?

Have you noticed what’s happening? It’s like this. Everyone is going somewhere else. I started to really take note when I was still working in academia, toiling at the University of East London I took the Docklands Light Railway quite regularly travelling between uncountable meetings of various acronymic bodies all with the words Thames Gateway somewhere in the title. During those trips I was asked the question, “do you know which was the language most spoken by passengers on the DLR. Quick as a flash I realized it wasn’t going to be English. But seeing as how nearby Newham is supposedly the second biggest Bangladeshi community in the World, I assumed the answer must be Sirhati. Wrong, the most spoken language is Russian. Don’t ask me why there are so many Russians but I had a theory. Perhaps every Russian young man wanted to be part of the building boom around Canary Wharf. All of those amazing looking, Russian speaking young women, the genetically worryingly different looking offspring of hairy shot putting women, are the bricklaying off duty distractions for these young men. They are a kind of bling ridden RAGS, an acronym for Russian Anglo Good time Slappers. I say this without the slightest evidence, other than the very sketchy way these pneumatic breasted but skinny bummed women dress and speak into customised mobile phones. Other women of an English persuasion grumpily inform me that normal women are just not made that way, and therefore these remarkable bodies are purely the result of enhancement surgery. Wonderful stuff if that’s the result!

So apart from the fact that there a great many Russians and Bangladeshis in East London what else do we know? We know that huge numbers of people have immigrated to the UK in the recent past. It depends on who you listen to what numbers you believe. I have to swiftly announce a vested interest here. All my grandparents bar one came to this country from somewhere else. They were Russians and Polish and into their past were German roots, and going back even further they probably originated from Israel or Khazaria, whichever version of history you subscribe to. But then again you are reaching back a millennia or two or more, so it isn’t too urgent an enquiry. Almost everyone on that train, any train in the UK, comes from somewhere else like me, either in the dim and distant past, or in the last few years. We arrived here for various reasons. Looking for better economic chances, more freedom, free expression, whatever drives men and women to move on. I know it wasn’t the weather.

All of these people came to this little United Kingdom over a very long period. Otherwise we would all be Picts or Celts or some such. Whereas we are a dolly mixture, a sort of early version of the rainbow nation, except most people never realized it, as they were too concerned being terribly British, which was a bloody myth. We are also Saxons, Romans, Jutes, Normans, Vikings, Huguenot French, Jews from many countries, West Indians, Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Arabs and we could go on to name a hundred more countries. We supposedly have a bigger concentration of Polish people in the UK than anywhere else in the World except Warsaw, more Irish than any place other than Dublin and there’s certainly more Australians in Earl’s Court in London than you could fit into most cities in that fair country.

But being Brits we are nothing if not ingenious, so while these people pour into our country we leave for somewhere else, in almost as big numbers. So we continue to send vast numbers to Australia, France, New Zealand, America, Canada, and Spain. This works fine because the French send huge numbers of their people here to work in our City financial institutions, there are also several hundred thousand American in London, there are also huge numbers of Canadians living in the States, and New Zealanders who live in Australia. So we don’t have one-way traffic here, as everyone is swapping where they are for somewhere else. Like a giant swap market, we all think the other guy has got something better going on someplace else. In proof of this Time magazine recently stated that 31% of London’s current population was born outside Britain, and New York had an immigrant population of 34%. There are many people who believe that this figure is over 40% in both these huge cities. But the interesting statistic is the number of people leaving whilst these tides of humanity were arriving. Hong Kong is the third leg of the financial human traffic tripod, with enormous numbers of Asians joining the local Chinese community that will eventually render it cosmopolitan. Perversely there is now a huge Chinese community in Vancouver, British Columbia. It all supports my contention that everyone seems to wants to be somewhere else.

Recent polls demonstrate that the vast majority of English people would like to live somewhere else in the World. The most popular destination is Australia.

If the traffic were one way, inwards to London, the population would have become unmanageable long ago. What’s really happening is that we have different movements, both in and out, for different but allied reasons. We have, for example, the super rich Russian oligarchs coming here because the tax regime has been generous, there are very nice things to buy, and we’re between the USA and mainland Europe both psychologically and geographically. Our politics are stable and our law enforcement is OK, at least a whole lot better than Putin and his ex KGB cronies are likely to provide. On the other hand, we have those young, poorer Russians, travelling with the Docklands Light Railway. They’re probably here for just the same reasons as the odd million or two young Poles, to better themselves economically in a place that’s not too bad. Mostly they all think they’ll be going home, or moving on to a third country. History proves that most will stay, just like my grandparents who came from the same kind of place for the same kind of reasons. It’s only two generations since he travelled on the London underground (subway to the uninitiated) and, not being able to read English got totally lost when he had to take a journey with which he wasn’t familiar. Too embarrassed to admit to this deficiency he wouldn’t ask anyone for the route but stoically travelled to every station until he saw a familiar looking sign. I asked him about this in the direct way children have, “why didn’t you ask someone for help?” and he looked at me with that kind smile he reserved for me and said, “What, I should ask the Cossack gunuffs!” It meant he still harboured fear and loathing for the Cossack attacks from his childhood in the Tsar’s Empire, when they used to kill and maim the Jewish community without mercy, before the Nazis got up to speed. Yes, there is that other reason why people come to our country, and still do. They’re running from today’s Cossacks, Nazis and other genocidal lunatics. My poppa, in his late sixties, was still that frightened little boy, scared to expose any weakness that could expose him to attack. That’s the other reason people move on. We should be strong and secure enough to welcome and help the weak and oppressed, otherwise there’s no reason to be us is there.

This does not mean we throw away our common sense and become a place where people come not to seek their fortune but to remove ours. Spongers, of whom we have enough of our own, should not be allowed into our country, and those that have already crept in should be thrown out. Don’t you agree that we should all have to abide by the rules of our country and breathe the air together in our one big bubble?

What Happened to Us?

What happened to us?



Have you noticed how society seems to have become a bit of a mess lately? I see evidence of this everywhere I look. Have we really lost our direction? At the end of this article you can reach your judgement as to whether I am simply a grumpy old man, well not in the first bloom of youth, or someone who is saying what you are thinking.

Apart from struggling for my daily commercial life I also do some lecturing and pursue some other academic pursuits. This takes me to a variety of Further and Higher Education establishments. Sadly I have to report that most of the young adults swear most of the time and you are considered strange if you ask them to stop, which I do.

Many of the young men spit on the floor and when I told one of them to stop he simply couldn't understand why and instantly tried aggressive behaviour as his default position.

I also insist that the young men and women do not slouch with their feet on the empty chairs or listen to their MP3 players or take phone calls during lessons. They look at me as if I am deranged and I have had to eject a couple of them because they simply refused to live with this rule. Yesterday a young man appeared 45 minutes late for a one-hour lecture and couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t allow him entry.

However this is not just a story aimed at the more moronic of our young. We have a Government that lies and when discovered who does not apologise but justifies. This is about people who are supposed to know better.

Recently we, in the UK, have been barraged with a variety of different numbers of foreigners admitted to work legally. Don’t get me wrong I have nothing against those of foreign origin, my grandparents included!

I’m not so much worried about the foreigners as I am about the liars running our lives, our Government. This is not a political argument, this is about morality.

It is worrying that there are wildly varying numbers of illegal aliens we're told who are living among us. Surely if we know how many this is, we would know who they are and where they live and could simply kick them out.

This reminds me of my headmaster of many decades ago asking me "where did you lose your cap Klinger?" For me to respond, aged 11, but clearly brighter than him, "if I knew where I'd lost it sir it would be on my head."

The facts are that our Government lost all control of this situation and has since sought to obscure this from the public. Years ago the Klinger family lived in California, and they had similar problems, albeit their largest number of illegal aliens were from Central and South America. They seemed to have a more enlightened approach to the same problem. Every so often they had an amnesty to regularise the situation. That way at a given moment in time you knew how many people there were and what resources you needed to plan for. Anyone there, making a contribution to society at that moment in time, was allowed to stay, and rendered legal. This was a tremendous benefit to both the previously illegal and to the society in which they lived. It also stopped the lying and cheating and back room bullyboy tactics of those who take advantage of the weak and the oppressed.
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Unfortunately, for short-term political reasons, we also have many politicians of every hue who are at ease with a more relaxed version of the truth. Yes, liars.

In the last weeks we have had the most senior police officer in the country hear his department roundly condemned by an official enquiry and he did not resign. We have had a junior minister who called for more severe punishments for those using their mobile telephone whilst driving caught by the police using his mobile telephone whilst he was driving, and he did not resign. We had two senior ministers of our Government tell us figures for immigration that they changed (upwards) on the same day, and again, upwards, the following morning; and neither of them resigned.

It isn’t that long ago that the British system was honour driven. If you were caught doing wrong, or failing to live up to your public duty, you resigned. It was stoic and a very good idea. The whole world looked with envy on our incorruptible civil service bureaucracy, it was all that was best about our country. Honest, efficient, and above suspicion. Of course no system was, or can be one hundred percent perfect, but it can aim for it. We seem to have given up on this, and to be prepared to accept lies, half-truths and spin; and we’re all the worse for it.

In the same vein we have the ever-present debate about climate change. It is an obsession that knows no limit. With every passing day we have further legislation and threats of draconian rules and regulations to enforce eco friendly behaviour. The big new “right on” behaviour is for us to purchase carbon offsets so that we can mitigate the damage we're supposedly doing to our planet. No one has justified this to me as yet. There are people who are gaining from this, and they are businessmen with a vested interest. Just like no one except local and national government will gain from taxing our rubbish collections. However, because these actions are being taken in the name of protecting the planet no one dares even raise a question mark. Instead we are told we must make these and many other alterations to our behaviour to stop our imminent demise.

So I must sort my rubbish while over 20% of the planet’s energy is burnt on the freeways of California, and 2 new fossil fuel power stations a week are being built in China?

I, for one, recognise climate change when I see it, but also recognize that there has always been climate change and always will be. Now the politically correct guardians of the gates of moral right and certainty are convinced that they know the cause, the effect and the cure. They don't and most scientists know this but still stood applauding when Al Gore received a Nobel Prize for his very iffy documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth" which a British court recently found was wrong on at least 9 major counts. Should we simply re-name the
film, "An Inconvenient Opinion"?

I have simply had enough of the thought police now patrolling the corridors of our local and national government nanny state who tell us what to eat and drink, how much to exercise and how to look after our children. They are seeking to run every aspect of our lives in a realisation of an Orwellian nightmare. It is long past time we spoke up.

The reasons why this is all so important are not quite so obvious. I truly believe that we are allowing all the ingredients for a totalitarian state to be put in place without too much thought and virtually no protest. We all understood when some of the tougher laws were introduced they were created to deal with the ongoing terrorist threat. But we have to be extremely careful not to become a totalitarian state whilst protecting our democracy.

Of course while we have a basically decent and well-intentioned, paternalistic and democratic leadership in place we can all sleep safely in our bed. Heaven forbid, through any kind of national emergency and we find ourselves in the hands of someone less benevolent we could be living in a dictatorship.

The increasingly strident rules and laws already make for a less civilised and pleasant place for us all to live in. You can measure the downward spiral of a society by its use of euphemism. When words lose their power and we avoid difficult truths we are in danger of not waking up before it is too late. I am not saying that many of these new laws and regulations have been thought up with evil in mind. No, I firmly believe that the people doing this were well intentioned, but deluded. It is not the job of our political leaders to rule on our lifestyles. That is the job of every individual, for you and me, for our moral conventions. Our religion, our spirituality, our traditions, our evolution to a chosen path, these are the guides to live by. Not the political theorists in the Town Hall. With all the laws and regulations coming into force in our country we are in grave danger. Wake up and be afraid, be very afraid.

Going to the Bejing Olympics?

The last week or so has seen a seemingly popular uprising by the Tibetan people against their Chinese occupiers. Now we are beginning to witness the news of the brutal repression of this by the Chinese government. This news has dribbled out of Tibet despite the authorities largely efficient efforts to cynically censor this whole affair from the world.

I am against the Chinese government in this, as are, I suspect, the vast majority of people watching these events unfold. I have always wanted Tibet free and the Dali Lama in his rightful place. His exile has gone on too long as has the apparent effort toward ethnic cleansing by the Chinese government.

We should seek to apply as much pressure as we can on our governments for them to do the same to their Chinese counterparts to end this unjust and ill conceived occupation. I don't believe we should include a boycott of the Olympics, one of the few global event which should remain above politics. If the West boycotts Bejing the Chinese will find an excuse to lead a boycott of London's Olympics in 2012, and then we're on the slippery slope to not holding global sporting events. My belief is that these events are amongst the more important glue ingredients for international understanding.

What we should do is go to the Olympics, and while we're there, in the full glare of the media spotlight, make a big noise about Tibet and other human rights abuses in China, of which there are many. What we mustn't do is go to the Olympics and allow ourselves to be dragged in front of the global media for picture opportunities in seeming support of the Chinese government. That would be too much like the English soccer team giving the Nazi salute, out of politeness, at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. We can never live that moment of infamy down, and I fear we might be about to repeat that terrible mistake.

The Chinese political establishment inhabit a very sophisticated society and would clearly understand a well thought out global response to their totally unacceptable human rights position, particularly with regard to Tibet. It's time they got out of that small country and started to behave like a responsible member of the family of nations rather than as the neighborhood bully.

Loving the Anglo American Way of Life

What is it about the Anglo American way of life that makes other people from other nations so jealous? I believe its because they know that there is so much to be envied. They mock our culture but then buy our films, music, writing, architecture, design and other creativity by the bucket load. Our language dominates the world, and is the commonly accepted big brand for everything from commercial air traffic to finance. If two people from diverse third countries get together, the accepted common language will almost always be English.

It’s that open export of our ideas and our concepts that has made ours the global culture. The internet came out of British and American brains willing to share. Compare this to similarly able French or Italian speakers from largely inward looking cultures and you can see why their countries culture simply is not expanding. They used to be happy to share their undoubted brilliance through centuries of inspiration, but then, like the Germans, Dutch, Japanese and others, they simply got left behind.

More than this there is a sense of excitement in Britain and the States that is simply missing elsewhere. This comes from more than what some might regard as cultural imperialism. It is what advertising people call buzz marketing. There is a good vibe, a buzz coming out of the Anglo American experience that attracts others to it. This is plainly not because we get everything right, we clearly don’t, but what we do get right is a national generosity of spirit that is all too rare elsewhere.

I have been traveling between Britain and America for about forty years, and there is something reassuring about being at the nexus of London, New York and Los Angeles. It is where the decisions are made and executed regarding the driving forces of finance, culture and communications and where the prime movers of foreign adventures, both good and bad, are fed from and upon. Perhaps this will change as the BRIC economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China begin to dominate the global economy of the coming century.

I suspect this will not happen for a multitude of reasons. One is that the prime movers of those economies actually seem to want to live in either Britain or America, and while that’s the case I believe the levers of power and choice will stay in our countries. It is simply more fun to live here and safer. The other main reason is that not only has the Anglo American culture been exported for a long while, but so has our capital. We have always invested overseas in a much bigger fashion than our natural competitors. For example Germany and France might invest more in their infrastructure than we do, for which I am envious, but they have never matched us for long term international investment. We have also been brilliantly successful encouraging future leaders of the world to come to our two countries for their education, military training and social polishing.

I am not primarily interested in the economic benefits or wonderful modern culture of living within the Anglo American context. We also have had more real democracy, within a stable context, for a longer time. Despite our many faults we are also both inclined to be interventionist countries for what we believe to be the right reasons, to be on the side of the good guys. We are the people who other countries come to for help because we have a track record for helping those that cannot help themselves. We have got some balls, and that’s no bad thing. Even when our NATO allies join us in a fight regarding a third party, like Afghanistan, which is legal and more or less universally agreed upon, they mostly try to weasel out of the battlefront. Kind of a war lite!

If there are to be global responses to global problems I am convinced these will still have to be led by certain states taking a lead. I see nothing to suggest that the U.S.A. and U.K. will not continue to be at the forefront of the supposedly new world order. Why would I want to be anywhere else but at the centre of events.

I love England and America because they’re terrific and I understand them, and, as important, they understand me. My family lives in both places, and so have I. There are more reasons for loving these places including obvious, wider freedoms of expression and ways to earn a living that have become the norm for many countries grudging in their admiration for the Anglo American lifestyle.

However there are also some growing differences between Britain and America that are beginning to become obvious and that often go unremarked.

One of the things I love about America is that its basic social shape or lifestyle has not changed perceptibly in all the time I have been going there, whereas in the UK everything has changed. This statement will astonish many Americans as they believe theirs is the country, which is moving forward quickly whereas they believe little old England is stuck in the past. In some ways I wish this were so, but the opposite is true. There is a consistency to American life, not always a good thing, but largely it is. In the UK we live in what has become perhaps the biggest Western social experiment in modern times. Our laws are evolving so fast no one I know can keep pace. For example there are so many initiatives, laws and regulations supposedly to curtail the ill effects of climate change that they are beginning to change the very fabric of our lives. We now also have something approaching five million closed circuit television cameras in place in Britain, photographing the average city dweller up to 400 times a day. We are about to develop biometric identity cards for our people and a national data base for almost every heading. It is ironic that the country who’s author George Orwell bought the world the nightmare visions of 1984 and Animal Farm is also the place where these are apparently coming to life. Perversely I am certain that many of these new laws are being created with the best of intent, without their proponents understanding the huge and imminent danger of a slip over the cliff of civilization their ideas are taking us toward. Unless these issues are addressed just one bad undemocratic leadership will result in an inevitable totalitarian British state,

My hope is that there will be a massive national realization of and revulsion to the dangers of a drift toward a police state in the U.K. Hopefully just as there was a Thatcher to beat back the seemingly unmanageable power of the trade unions there will be another political figure to harness this natural democratic and evolutionary trend in our national character. As the emergence of other great leaders in British history has proven we are capable of finding just the right person at the right time. If we don’t then America might find itself even more politically isolated in future, just when its economy and therefore its military will be much weaker. We need each other to be strong, and we need each other to be free, and so does the rest of the world.

An Economic Tsunami?

Yesterday saw another outcome of the sub-prime mortgage disaster. Bear Sterns, the fifth biggest investment banker in the U.S.A. was bailed out by the Federal Reserve Bank. This was the same Bear Sterns which, one year ago, was voted the most "admired investment bank" in America.

There will be more such banking collapses to come. The question is how many, to who, when and can the financial system smoothly come through this. If any of the banks bigger than Bear Sterns in the States or Northern Rock in the U.K. the recent British bank collapse that was nationalized a couple of weeks back,  goes down then we are in for very big trouble. 

That is why it is essential that our central banks give total and immediate support if there is any sign of a problem. Our entire banking system relies on customers having faith in the system. Nothing is more important than this, it is what they exist for. If faith in the system vanish we get runs on the bank, and Northern Rock's near total collapse demonstrated this to perfection. It took very little time to see people fighting for their cash. Surely that example will have been taken on board by the central bankers and they will not hesitate to give help again. If there is a moment where they blink we are all in very big trouble, and a tsunami will come that could sweep away much, if not all, of the prosperity we have enjoyed for nearly twenty years.

Mister Bean - In Charge of the Money

In the UK the person in charge of our economy is called Mr. Darling, and he is the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Where money is concerned he is the main man. Our cause is not helped by the fact that Mr. Darling has a name that seems designed for a particularly British form of comedy. This is compounded by the fact that he looks exactly like Mister Bean. In fact, after listening to his budget earlier in the week, I now know he is Mister Bean!

Without a hint of irony he told us that we were doing very well economically, and that although the world economy in general was going to have a rough year or two, we, the British, were better placed than anyone else to sail serenely through the choppy seas to come. Forgive me continuing with metaphors, but what planet is he on?

We are borrowed to the hilt despite our having an incredibly strong economic inheritance from the sainted Maggie Thatcher era. On top of which this Government have spent, or mis-spent, depending on your political point of view, enormous sums of our money gathered in from our oil and gas revenues over the last two decades, now, sadly, nearing their end. In addition to which the Government are about to exceed their self imposed borrowing targets ranking us amongst the biggest borrowers in the world, ranking us, per capita, amongst those economic powerhouses, Egypt and Hungary.

If this were not enough our tax burdens are at historic highs, albeit more indirectly gathered than previously. Last in this sad list is the fact that the Government is squandering a disproportionately high percentage of the GDP. From beginning as a lean, mean fighting machine we are morphing into a socialist workers paradise, with the transition hidden behind political spin.

Darling is dressing up many of his actions as plans to decrease climate change. That's how he can legitimize charging huge amounts of additional tax on "gas guzzler" cars, and, in October, yet more tax on gas itself. This is on top of the already huge tax burden on petrol we pay now, up to about 80% of the approximately £5 ($10) per gallon, already on our gas station forecourts. He is also presiding over a ruinous housing policy which he will directly manage to ruin, and that seemed impervious to this Government's mismanagement, until the American sub-prime lending bust. That wasn't Darling's fault, but he then screwed up the British end by acting with startling indecision until it was too late, and then went all macho on us, when he should have been negotiating behind closed doors. He is a grade A prat!

Those of you who have not been to the UK in a while would be astonished at our cost of living. London and Tokyo compete for the unwanted title of the world's most expensive city.

I am astounded that the patience of the British public continues to hold despite never ending price increases on everything including water, power, mortgages, food, transportation and taxes etc. Not to worry though, Mister Bean, he tells us everything is great.

Mister Bean might look funny, and sound daft, but he is actually Count Dracula, and he is sucking the financial blood out of our country. How does the saying go, you can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people........

Bridging the Great Educational Divide

This is an extract from an academic presentation I gave last week at an Arts Faculty conference at the Open University to both their people and their Open University Validation Partners from around the world in Milton Keynes, which is in the countryside near London, in the U.K.

The UK’s creative sector is growing at twice the pace of the rest of the British economy. The creative sector is no longer a poor relation of bigger, more responsible, senior sectors of industry. We are it! We have arrived. We are bigger than cars, steel and almost any other sector. We are now the big boys of growth. In London, one of the world cities, we are over 10% of the entire economic scene, with a worth measured in many billions of pounds, and employ several hundreds of thousands of people. Even companies like BT consider themselves part of this phenomenon, now to a large extent feeling themselves part of as an entertainment provider, knowing that communications would one day have to be provided for free.

It’s only natural that young people want to join this vibrant sector, want to learn about it, and then inhabit it for the rest of their careers. Culture informs our lives, and feeds into every aspect of them. Virtually no youngster in the industrial world does not own a mobile phone, an MP3 player, a games console, a TV a DVD player and, of course, a computer. Through all of them pours interactive creative output in an unending stream. Today’s task is not to discuss the reason for this personalized electronic infusion but to understand the young consumers. This has resulted in an increasing blurring of the lines between consumer and creator. Kids are interactive.

I am a passionate devotee of the creative arts. We are all the better for the creation, viewing and appreciation of them in all their forms. I am of the view that people blessed with creative abilities, drive, appreciation and instinct are a force for good in our world. I have, to that end created a new entity called www.bCreativelimited.com where we celebrate creativity in all its forms. I have spent my life writing and making films of all types and teaching others how best to do so themselves. However I am not here to self advertise, although I will, given half a chance.

Instead I want to debate how we can best share the creative instinct within an academic context reinforced within a religious or moral construct. Of course all rules are best exemplified by a story to demonstrate the point, and it is said that Adolf Hitler was appreciative of the arts. As the zany Nazi German New York character in Mel Brooks “The Producers” describes the difference between Hitler and Churchill and their artistic abilities thus, “Churchill, you call him a painter, Hitler he was a painter, he could paint an entire room, two coats, one afternoon!”

Last Autumn I was walking through the campus of my then new Further Education College in which I was going to serve as a part time lecturer. My academic background to that point has been at Higher Education level, and I have also been a film- maker and writer and toiled in the corporate world. I have worked occasionally with the Open University Validation Service in various guises and traveled the world extensively as a filmmaker, writer and educator. I was now going to lecture to various FE media classes. I had just agreed to do some work with the Oxford and Cambridge Review and I thought it would benefit me to learn from teaching at younger levels, between Year 11 GCSE groups on through BTEC’s, National Awards, National Diplomas and Foundation Degrees. I also thought it might be fun but I soon realized that previously I had been spoiled, having led the film production courses at the Bournemouth and Northern Film Schools. There we had our pick of the best and the brightest, amongst the most motivated and able film and media production students in the world. Thereafter I directed the behemoth Media Production Centre at the University of East London, servicing the media needs of thousands from within my beautiful air conditioned office where I could muse on the finer points of media and creative teaching whilst looking on the changing moods of the River Thames. Now I trudged across a very different vista, the mud-splattered college, more of a building site than a cloistered hall of academe. The students looked more bovine than eager. They dripped social worker from their knuckles, which dragged alarmingly close to the floor. They smoked even though this was prohibited, they swore, even though this was not permitted, they spat on the floor, despite this being both foul and a health hazard. They had very little to recommend them. To paraphrase a Winston Churchill quote, “They have all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."

There is a difference between right and wrong. One of the places these values must now be taught is our place of learning. This is considered controversial, but one wonders why. I imagine it wouldn’t even be a subject for discussion if families had succeeded in inculcating a responsible attitude and into the young.

I come from an interventionist, muscular Judeo Christian left of centre background. I was taught that you must never wait to cofront ignorance as it will grow and morph into hate, prejudice and victimization. In education you must seek to teach the whole person, not just the subject on the curriculum. You should try and create a moral geography for them to explore. We might well not always do what’s right, the Lord alone knows how very weak I am, but at least we should try and understand the differences between right and wrong. This belief system dictates that you don’t walk past the unacceptable but make your objection known. I stopped a young man who spat on the ground and told him that this was a disgusting and unacceptable way to behave, as it was both unhealthy to others and made him look silly. There was a moment when he considered doing something nasty to me but then he relented, smiled and apologized, his friends took note. A very small victory, but nevertheless I was reinforced in the view that you stop aberrant behavior immediately or not at all. I was not shocked, or even moderately surprised that at my first lecture attendance was very low, and many students rolled in late, listening to their MP3 players, talking on their mobile phones or to each other. I was disappointed, and frankly quite insulted. In the armed services you salute the badge, not the man. Your position as a teacher warrants common courtesy. How do you set about achieving this?

I formed the view that before one can coherently teach such a group you have to create a moral topography, setting out the parameters, the borders of acceptable behavior. I talked to my peers. Most of them were bowed by the weight of trying and failing to work within systems that creaked with inadequacies. I come from a film making background where punctuality, attendance, honesty and top performance are demanded all the time. These would be my building blocks. My message being that if you didn’t meet these simple media demands you were not worthy to study these subjects. Luckily for me, there were two other lecturers with similar views, one is a born again Christian, but although our observances are different our values are similar. The other person who joined our informal, ad hoc group of like-minded souls was a Moslem young woman. A strange team indeed, heard the one about the Jewish middle-aged man, the young Greek Cypriot born again Christian woman and the Islamic girl whose family came from Sri Lanka. But we shared a desire for “old fashioned” or core values.

We shared some similar rules, and these were simple and straightforward. No lateness would be tolerated, no swearing, no MP3’s or mobile phones and no gossiping in class. Non-attendance without an accepted reason had to end. Work not handed in on time would fail that unit. We all felt that we needed to weed out those students who were simply in the wrong place studying the wrong course and remove others from the student number who saw media study as a soft option, and this was quickly achieved. The results for the vast bulk that remained with us were astonishing and positive. Most interesting and rewarding for me was the fact that the 20% or so of my students who wanted media jobs when I started to teach them had grown to more than 80% by the time I left the college.

There are many ways in which we pass on knowledge. The British convention is that we generally break this down into two main areas, theory and practice, we label the latter, vocational, and there is a definite diminutive contained in the word, vocational. It is as if those who go on to practice are somehow the intellectual inferior of those that study and theorise on that practice; but we are left asking how there will be something to deconstruct if no one is there to facilitate the construct. There has also long been a separation of these so that they now form a divide, more like a chasm within our academic institutions. These are characterised by many as follows, if we are from the Russell Group or its devotees, we are more pure than the driven academic snow, and we, naturally assume the languid air of Oxbridge and try to turn the study of the arts into a purely theoretical, deconstructive construct. If we have our origins within the old Polytechnics the likelihood is that we are supposed to have swallowed the opposite view, we only teach button pushers so that they can go and get a job in media.

My contention is that we should be striving to do the exact opposite. We must seek to use the teaching of the creative arts to help students explore the possibilities and thinking this space allows them to study and understand, morally and within a social context, the complexities of humanity. The last six months has seen me striving to do this in this local FE College. I had, with some success, explored similar ideas at HE, in institutions known more for their practical abilities to teach the best young talent how to produce media rather than how to read that media. I believe it is of even more importance to explore at all available levels, our place within the universal issues, such as racism and morality. It is not enough to teach how students can best produce creative media unless they have some understanding of why they should do so other than to purely entertain and how such creative output can be used to affect themselves and the society they inhabit.

All traditional religion tell us that there is a moral parameter, there is a difference between right and wrong, and some form of deity or group ideology to judge our actions. At the college I was lecturing part time at these articles of faith had, or were all breaking down. It was accepted, for the sake of a quiet life, when a student swore in class, or spat on the floor outside, or smoked in a non-smoking area, or was not punctual, or simply did what they wanted to do. I had never seen anything like it and, I suspect, this is the underbelly that we all want to disappear, or sweep under the collective carpet.

There is a contradiction in the British F and HE systems and how the funding systems work. The UK has not suffered from a lack of general funding for more than a decade. In fact it has been awash with certain types of money. It’s what kind of money, applied how, that has been, and remains the problem. I have visited, worked at or examined at many institutions in this country and there are new buildings going up, or recently constructed everywhere. These capital projects cost billions of pounds. We have seen waves of expenditure follow the growth of the HE sector from an historic 4% of the requisite population when I was a youth, to a figure more than ten times that number now. What doesn’t track is the revenue spending to go along with it. Therefore we have built a great many new buildings, fill them with fantastic hardware but are hard pushed to staff it strategically as we would like or use the correct software. This was exacerbated by rather too much focus on the RAE and other, arcane, systems of evaluation that have not, sometimes delivered as they might. This has resulted in strange anomalies. My department in UEL was top rated for research. It also had a stellar publication record. Nevertheless many of its students were not vocationally taught to a sufficient level. We constructed a magnificent Docklands campus where we were great in certain disciplines, but lacked such excellence alarmingly in others. We could recruit from around the world but our retention rates were alarmingly poor. Of course, this is part of a bigger picture of many such institutions with similar problems and we’re not here to deal with those here other than to state that there is an obvious, urgent and long term need for universities to be dealing with these problems at a local and not national area.

The English higher education system in general rewards form filling, target achievement, throughput and exit velocity more than it does excellence. I note with satisfaction that some of the beacons of old fashioned getting it right, are how it’s still done at the Open University, and about twenty of our other British universities. These exemplify how the system could work in general for this country, if there were the will and standards. These institutions make certain that rigorous academic standards are maintained. I am convinced that their doing so has largely ensured that they continue to secure large amounts of additional funding, and the maintenance of this gold standard of quality has meant they all recruit well. That is at the macro level, whereas most of us spend the majority of our time working daily within the micro level. We can only expect to overcome the bigger problems by starting at the ground floor and building on those foundations. The one thing the failed central command economies of the past century have taught us is that top down philosophies in big institutions like education simply does not work. An example of how wrong this is all going is that the system is simply dysfunctional. What is required is either not possible or cannot be achieved. I was just informed that the college expected me, like all their lecturers, to prepare a lesson plan broken down into twenty-minute sections, even if the lesson was three hours long, and this had to be validated, in detail. There had to be an Assignment Brief and this had to be validated, in detail. This had to fit within a Scheme of Work, and this had to be validated, in detail. I could go on but I think you get the picture. Added to this was when I was faced with a student with any learning difficulties I was to give up to half my lesson time to that student exclusively. I asked whether, if I had two such students I would then have no time for anyone else.

I will never forget my first lessons at the college. I set about trying to find out more about the students, their levels of knowledge and interests. I discovered a great divide between their ideas of what creative arts are, and what their place within them could be. There was an appreciation, an enjoyment of movies, music and some television, but not for much more than sheer visceral pleasure. There was no understanding of why they liked something, no deeper grasp of what an artist might be trying to say, or why. No inkling that they were participating in an ongoing creative interaction that affected every aspects of their lifestyles.

I set about my bridge building by giving the students a few simple tests on the subjects at hand and their scores averaged well below 40%, which was simply not an acceptable base level. I also asked them about themselves and what they thought was the purpose of the creative industries, most specifically with regards to TV, newspapers, radio and advertising. Their responses indicated that they were not aware of having been asked to seriously consider such subjects although all of these issues should have been at the core of their courses. Most disturbing to me, when I asked them about their take on conspiracy theories there was a general consensus that 9/11 was an American fabrication and the moon landings were faked. Conversely the same students believed there had been Alien abductions and UFO sightings were definitely real. I asked all of them for any proof of any of these statements and all pointed to me to the “net”. What they meant was that their had been videos posted on You Tube etc. which made such claims, and this being their source, it was believed. Not only was there no rigor, there was little self-discipline, no understanding of gathering evidence to support any argument. When I asked one of the students why she believed in the crop circles and not the existence of man’s landings on the moon she told me that her dad had told her about the former, and he knew about these things, and she’d seen a part of documentary on You Tube which said that the Americans fakes the landings, and you could tell by the fact that their flag was “mistakenly” taut, when, in fact there was no air to blow it in that direction on the moon. I pointed out that this was not a mistake and that NASA had prepared the flag to look good in zero atmospheres. Why would students of any level ignore the evidence provided by regular media but accept unknown sources, or electronic gossip, buzz marketing and simple anonymous malice. The reason is that people are unable to differentiate between the sheer proliferations of sources pouring toward them in an unending torrent. What looks good, panders to baser instincts, looks cool and entertains is often given greater credence than formal, forensic evidence, if the latter is perceived as boring.

My recent direct experience touches on various FE levels of study I was teaching. Elements in which these students were particularly weak were Key Skills, particularly writing ability, research and anything theoretical. Therefore whatever else we did regarding the moral questions had to include communication in writing that I would reinforce by creating a vigorous verbal debating group. It was essential that we used popular language rather than the language of film, media or communication, the subjects I was covering, to enable this process. We wanted to make complex thought processes as accessible as possible, as easily as we could.

Apart from all the reasons I have touched upon earlier I was very disturbed to witness various forms of overt and covert racism between the students. Therefore there were reasons beyond the theoretical for me to address these issues. I used very simple systems to explore these ideas in class and they centered on our classes watching films, which we then debated and they then wrote about. I picked films for them to review that examined important social issues and did so dramatically. The films were, “This is England” and “La Haine” about racism in England and France, “Pierrepont” regarding capital punishment and “We Were Soldiers” touching on heroism of different types and patriotism. All touched on the human condition and dispensed with stereotypes. As each film was playing I would write headings for them to include in their essays. The idea being to stimulate thought regarding issues that touch all our lives and to make the students aware of themselves within the larger society. By picking films from three countries we were immediately able to dispense with racial stereotypes about the French, Americans, Arabs, Jews, Vietnamese and others. It opened the student eyes regarding violence, capital punishment, sexual politics and the differences between people being less important than that which they have in common.

Although I cannot claim to have created or discovered forensic evidence with regards to the impact that this and other initiatives had on these students we can at a base level inform you that the students themselves believe it has changed their perceptions. Our attendance, punctuality and achievement results all became exemplars. After shaking out some students, who perhaps, in retrospect should not have been there in the first place, we achieved near 100% attendance and punctuality and delivery of on-time work. The results were about 20% higher than those previously achieved. The students told me they had never been happier in any classes, and this, for me, was perhaps the biggest reward. They now clearly understood the purpose of their course of study and what they should be gaining from it. They also had a clear understanding of what we required from them. It was a good starting point.