Taking Out The Trash

Edge of Darkness

Disturbing news item in The Guardian (no, not the stuff about the economy or Obama failing to pull ahead of McCain).

Robert De Niro has walked out of the shoot for Mel Gibson's return to acting, thriller Edge of Darkness, after less than a week due to "creative differences".

I'm not opposed to remakes but the list of good remakes is very very short and the list of bad remakes is very long and the list of terrible remakes is also very long.
Get Carter, The Italian Job, Point Blank (I won't go on)
And Edge of Darkness remains exceptional - a fantastic thriller, evocative of its time but with themes which still matter and with acting which is classy from the central parts (Bob Peck) to the bit parts (Tim McInnerny).
There is a great book about the background to EoD by scriptwriter Troy Kennedy Martin. (He also had a hand in one of the original films mentioned above, do you know which one?). If you can get hold of it, it's well-worth a read. Amazon's details on it are here.
Directing the remake is Martin Campbell who was also behind Casino Royale. OK, so that Bond film was far better than the David Niven original.
But with star power such as Mel 'Blame it on the Jews' Gibson I fear a flashy but hollow and ultimately unnecessary movie.
Grumpy comments like 'it was better in my day'  are rubbish - but does anyone think the BBC's recent eco-drama Burn Up, with roughly similar ideas, could hold a candle to Edge of Darkness?
No, so leave the jewel so alone and just make better new stuff.

Update: As Matthew, the ever-reliable fount of film knowledge, points out - Campbell directed the original series so there's hope for this one. And we must cling to that hope. Seems odd, though, that there isn't an obsure language or strained accent for Gibson in this role....

Brass neck of the year award

I listened to a quite extraordinary exchange on Radio 4's You and Yours this week.

Trafford Council has twice been found guilty by the Local Government Ombudsman of maladministration causing injustice. Both times they have simply ignored the ruling.

Both cases involved vulnerable people and both seem, to me, to be simply that Trafford is too stingy to pay what it should and has too much brass neck to be bothered by the public reaction.

In the first case it refused to agree to waive repayment of a housing grant it had made to an elderly woman with mental health problems who had been unaware of a change in the rules governing such a clawback.

In the second it is refusing to pay £100,000 in compensation to the family of Carly Wright, a young woman with disabilities whose needs were neglected by the council when she was due to transfer from children's services to those for adults.

You can read the rest of my latest post on the Total Politics site here.

One rule....

Just a little addendum to my post yesterday about private schools.
While researching something else I came across this from the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Public authorities, including state education providers, must comply with certain legal responsibilities set out in the following duties:

• The race equality duty
• The disability equality duty
• The gender equality duty

The duties apply to the governing bodies of all maintained schools (community schools, foundation schools, voluntary aided and voluntary controlled schools), city technology colleges, city colleges for the arts, city colleges for technology and city academies.

 Are independent or private schools subject to these duties?
Private or independent schools are not required to comply with the equality duties, although they are strongly encouraged to do so as it will help them to establish and maintain good practice in promoting equality.

So, go private if want to less protection from discrimination: can't see that appearing in any of their brochures.

Your autumn reading list

I'm going to be doing some lecturing at the University of the West of England this year to first year students on the BA Journalism course.
Below is a list of books, of which the students are expected to read at least one in the first term and review. (There are other, practical, books on the syllabus as well)
Personally I found former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee's autobiography A Good Life very instructive (if not the most sympathetic to union members) and is often overlooked.
When I started out the three books which really inspired me were Michael Herr's Dispatches, Edward Behr's Anyone Here Been Raped And Speak English? and Pilger's Heroes (just seeing the cover again is so evocative).
Foreign reporting (and all those Vietnam movies) seemed to similary inspire a lot of my peers. I guess books such as Ravi Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City perform the same function today. Something's got to be motivating aspiring journalists because I'm not sure you can write a ripping yarn about blogging (made some coffee, scanned the feeds, rang someone, fed the cat, wrote a post).
What inspires me now are those books which dig out the stories closer to home - getting down and dirty not swanning round Westrminster. Dark Heart by Nick Davies, which is on the list below, is a prime example.
A journalist friend (where are you now David Northmore?) once gave me a copy of The New Journalism by Tom Wolfe and Edward Johnson. It was once groundbreaking and I still like it - but it seems to have fallen out of favour.
(Meanwhile thanks to Roy Greenslade for the tip about a new website for local and regional journalists. I'll be adding that to my resource list for the students).

Kate Adie

The Kindness of Strangers,

Corsets to Camouflage: Women and War

Nobody's Child

Into Danger: Risking your life for your work

George Alagiah

A Passage to

Africa

A Home from Home: From immigrant boy to English man

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Some of my best friends are…

Lynn Barber

Mostly Men

Demon Barber

Nick Davies

Dark Heart

Murder on Ward Four

White Lies

Flat Earth News

Thomas Harding

The Video Activist Handbook

Emily O'Reilly

Veronica Guerin: The Life and Death of a Crime Reporter.

John Pilger

The New Rulers of the World

Tell Me No Lies: Investigative journalism and its triumphs

Freedom Next Time

Tim Gopsill and Greg Neale

Journalists: 100 years of the NUJ

Chris Horrrie & Adam Nathan

L?ve TV: Telly Brats & Topless Darts

Feargal Keane

Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey

David Loyn

Frontline: The British mavericks who changed the face of war reporting

Andrew Marr

My Trade: A short history of British journalism

Angela Phillips:

Good Writing for Journalists

Anna Politkovskaya

A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in

Chechnya

(2001)

Putin's

Russia

(2004

John Simpson

Strange Places, Questionable People

A Mad World, My Masters

News from No Man’s Land: Reporting the world

private school myths

I'm not usually a fan of the I, I, I school of journalism (especially set in London) but Arabella Weir has good piece in today's Guardian about why middle class families in the capital choose private over state for their child's education.

A friend of mine who lives in London and has a boy approaching school years was shocked at the snobbery which suddenly surfaced among her fellow mums. Let alone the sudden Catholic conversions.

You can see some of the same divisions even in my village. There are people for whom the primary school (which is not a star performer but absolutely fine) is not even on their radar. Freedom of choice for parents is something that middle class families exercise to the detriment or working class ones by creating an apartheid between the 'will argue' and 'wilfully ignored'.

And if you can't afford private then where's the choice? (Don't even get me started on the charitable status of private schools).

Anyhow Francis Beckett, in a sidebar to the main piece in the Guardian, answers some myths about private versus state education which is well worth a look.

Those on the right go on about class envy and the left hating people wanting to succeed. If anything breeds class hatred it's a segragated education system which rewards people because of where they were born. I don't hate the parents of pupils at public schools for wanting their children to succeed - I hate the waste of talent that happens because working class children don't get the same opportunities.

The title of this blog comes from an episode of The West Wing and there's a nice line Sam Seaborn has in one when asked about education policy.

"...education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes. We need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense."

(Just for fun trivia fans: which episode did Sam utter these words?)

They seek him here, they seek him there

We were just quorate for the full parish meeting as late summer holidays had taken their toll on members.

It meant a brisk trot through the agenda until we reached the ‘pallet’ problem. It’s one of those interminable planning issues which make Jarndyce and Jarndyce seem like an open and shut case.

So I suggested that perhaps we copy in our district councillor on the correspondence to see if he could get some resolution.

Some members laughed, one said something rude and another just stared at me like I’d announced I was from Mars.

You can read the rest of my latest post on the Total Politics site here.

And if you want to know the identity of the councillor in question, well it shouldn't be too hard to find out, but I'll post it up if anyone wants to know. My point, though, was a wider one about holding members to account.

It's all about sources

Interesting column from Siobhain Butterworth, the Guardian's readers' editor, on journalists and legal protection.
Journalists love to set themselves apart from the masses - and being able to claim some high-falutin' public interest defence for nosing around in peoples' rubbish bins is seen as one of the perks of the job.
But Butterworth quotes Clay Shirky that, with the rise of citizen journalism, how can this protection be extended to, well, everybody.
As he says:

"If anyone can be a publisher, then anyone can be a journalist. And if anyone can be a journalist, then journalistic privilege suddenly becomes a loophole too large to be borne by society."

As ever, the law lags behind technology.
Do you need to qualify for legal protection, and if so how? Does my NUJ membership (and consequently signing up for its code of conduct) give me rights over well-meaning but non-union bloggers? Are gatekeepers becoming redundant?
Perhaps the rights of journalists will become the rights for anyone who takes a mature role in civil society. If you can prove your actions are well-intended and carried out in as professional a manner as possible you deserve some legal protection. You are simply exercising your rights as a citizen to scrutinise society.