1. Lord Patten’s speech to the Oxford Media Convention earlier this week got headlines because of the reveral of cuts to BBC local radio.

But the speech is worth reading in full. It’s a sincere and dare I say passionate defence of not just the BBC but the very notion of public service and the uplifting possibilities of cultural excellence. I’m tempted to quote the whole thing:

“I remain unashamedly of the view that introducing people to good books, great paintings, or beautiful music – allowing them to better pursue and appreciate their passions and interests – helps to enrich them as individuals and to improve the quality of civic life for all of us…

…Television at its best is a popular art form. It is not absurd to argue that it is the closest we get in modern life to the sort of collective experience that was created by Sophocles or Shakespeare…

…Lord Reith, although he hated television, identified in the earliest days of broadcasting an opportunity to extend this noble artistic lineage.  When he said it was ‘better to over-estimate the mentality of the public than to under-estimate it’, he wasn’t being elitist.  He was being meritocratic…

…Think of the disruptive, challenging, intellectually seditious nature of great art – Goya or Beethoven or Grossman. Think of the wild potency that we celebrate in art and artists, so difficult to fit into any kind of mould.  No wonder Denis Donoghue said, in his Reith lectures on The Arts without Mystery, that ‘there isn’t much point in having the arts at all unless we have them with all their interrogative power. They are not cosy or ornamental.’…

 If you work for the BBC and you don’t get even a flicker of excitement from reading this speech, maybe you’re working for the wrong organisation.

2. Jon Jacobs will be known to anyone reading this as “Thoroughly Good”. I found his description of getting out of the BBC bubble and observing the landcape around White City very moving.

3. “Call The Midwife”. And don’t say “I don’t watch that kind of thing”. It’s not Heartbeat. Just watch it.

4. Bearing in mind I’m occasionally on the recieving end of, shall we say, “robust comment” about the BBC’s approach to complaints and feedback , I had to sut down when I read this:

…the BBC is excellent at listening and it has done on this occasion. And its consultation systems are absolutely top notch. Anyone who commented online, as we on the Northerner did, was guided through a simple but comprehensive system.

5. Dave Lee. Dave Lee always cheers me up. Beacuse of this. And this…

They kindly bought a stack of albums from me last year.

But if there’s an elderly gentleman out there who happens to come across this post and wishes to own a copy of Snakefinger’s “The Spot” on blue vinyl please contact me by leaving a comment.

All singles have picture sleeves except where noted.

Husker Du “Eight Miles High” (SST)

Snakefinger “The Spot” (Ralph Records) Blue Vinyl

Age of Chance “Motor City” (Riot Bible)

3 Mustaphas 3 “Si Vous Passez Par La” (Globestyle)

Robert Lloyd “Something Nice” (In Tape)

Average White Band “When Will You Be Mine” (RCA)

Ultravox “Live – Retro” (Island)

The Human League “Empire State Human” (Virgin)

The Fix “Lost Planes” (101 Records)

Kiss “I Was Made For Lovin’ You” (Casablanca) plain sleeve

Kiss “Sure Know Something” (Casablanca) plain sleeve

Gene Simmons “Radioactive” (Casablanca) plain sleeve

Roxy Music “Trash” (Polydor)

Roxy Music “Both Ends Burning” (Island) plain sleeve

Rezillos “I Can’t Stand My Baby” (Sensible)

Rezillos “Destination Venus” (Sire) plain sleeve

The Damned “Neat Neat Neat” (Stiff)

The Nervous Germans “These Boots Are Made For Walking” (Rondolet)

Surface Mutants/Bass Tone Trap/They Must Be Russians/Hula“Four From The Floor” (Box Office)

Tom Waits/Jesus & Mary Chain/Husker Du/Trouble Funk –free single given away with NME in 1986 plain sleeve

Bronski Beat/Cocteau Twins/The Smiths/U2 – free single given away with NME in 1985 plain sleeve

Style Council/Lloyd Cole and The Commotions/The Robert Cray Band/Prefab Sprout - free single given away with NME in 1985 plainsleeve (1985 wasn’t much of a year, was it)

Lunachicks “Sugar Luv” (Blast First/Mute)

Snuff “Not Listening EP” (Workers Playtime)

Raspberries “Overnight Sensation” (Capitol) plain sleeve

Roy Orbison “She’s A Mystery To Me” (virgin)

Rich Kids “Rich Kids”(EMI)

Serious Drinking “Love On the Terraces” (Upright records)

The Cravats “The End” (Small Wonder Records)

The Wedding Present “Anyone Can Make A Mistake” (Reception)

The Comsat Angels “Independence Day” (Polydor)

The Clash “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” (CBS) plain sleeve

The Clash “White Riot/1977” (CBS) plain sleeve

Sparks “Girl From Germany” (Bearsville) plain sleeve

Sparks “Get in the Swing” (Island) plain sleeve

Sparks “This Town Aint Big Enough For Both of Us” (Island) plain

Sparks “Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth” (Island) plain

The Lone Groover “The Lone Groover EP” (Charley)

Siouxsie and the Banshees “The Staircase (Mystery)”(Polydor) plain

Klark Kent “Don’t Care” (A&M) Green Vinyl

Dog Faced Hermans/Sperm Wails/Turncoats/Membranes “Fridge Freezer EP” (Ridiculous)

Dog Faced Hermans “Bella Ciao” (Calculus)

Public Enemy “Bring The Noise” (Def Jam)

Public Enemy “Rebel Without A Pause” (Def Jam)

The Residents “Duck Stab EP” (Ralph)

Overlord X “2 Bad” (Island)

Faith No More “We Care A Lot” (London)

The Cookie Crew “Born This Way” (FFR)

Bomb The Bass “Beat Dis” (Mister-ron)

Sham 69 “If the Kids Are United” (Polydor) plain

Wire “Kidney Bingos” (Mute)

Gang of Four “At Home He’s A Tourist” (EMI) plain

Sex Pistols “My Way/No One Is Innocent” (Virgin)

David Bowie “Fame” (RCA) plain

David Bowie “Rock n Roll Suicide” (RCA) plain

David Bowie “TVC15” (RCA) plain

999 “Emergency” (United Artists)

The Fall “Hey! Luciani” (Beggars Banquet)

The Fall “High Tension Line” (Cog Sinister)

The Fall “Kimble” (Strange Fruit)

The Fall “Victoria” (Beggars Banquet)

The Fall “Hit The North” (Beggars Banquet)

The Fall “Popcorn Double Feature” (Cog Sinister)

The Fall “Telephone Thing” (Beggars Banquet)

The Fall “Edinburgh Man” (Cog Sinister promo)

The Fall “Oh! Brother” (Beggars Banquet)

The Fall “c.r.e.e.p.” (Beggars Banquet)

Nick Cave “Tupelo” (Mute)

The Donkeys “What I Want”(Deram)

Grandads Don’t Indicate “Bin Bag” (Mook)

Linus/Pussycat Trash/Cometgain/Skinned Teen – “Some Hearts Paid To Lie” Double EP (Wiija)

Huggy Bear “Rubbing The Impossible To Burst”(Wiija)

Huggy Bear “Kiss Curl For The Kids Lib Guerillas”(Wiija)

Bryan Ferry “Price of Love” EP (Island) in picture sleeve

Huggy Bear “Don’t Die”(Wiija)

Huggy Bear “Her Jazz”(Wiija)

Terry Edwards “executes Miles Davis Numbers” (Stim Records)

Elton John “Ego” (Rocket) in picture sleeve

I'm not selling the Dog Faced Hermans single which has my name on the back

I was lucky enough to work with Bob in the early nineties when (among other people) I produced his BBC World Service programme “Anything Goes”.

Bob was the best, most professional, most trouble free presenter I ever worked with. A consummate broadcaster from a kinder, gentler era. A gentleman of the old school.

“Anything Goes” was a request show where listeners could request… well anything. This included speech from the BBC archive (Churchill’s speeches and the Abdication broadcast came up a lot) and an eclectic variety of music. When I produced it I gave it a little push in a slightly more contemporary direction but Bob was always unflappable despite my gentle provocation.

My best memory of Bob is this one.

At one point for some strange reason World Service management decided that they needed 5 minute long filler programmes. I think it was something to do with a gap where one transmitter took over from another or something. A typical BBC absurdity. And after some typical BBC moaning about how daft it was we producers dutifully got down to the task of thinking up 5 minute long ideas.

Some strange connection was made in my brain.

I selected “Jazz: Delicious Hot, Disgusting Cold” by the Bonzo Dog Band. I wrote a script attempting to explain why it was funny aimed at someone with English as a second language living in Addis Ababa. 3 minutes of music, just under 2 minutes of script.

Who better to voice this script than the urbane, unflappable Bob Holness?

Bob dutifully recorded the script. I don’t think he’d ever heard this piece of music before. He roared with laughter all the way through it.

So I’ll be celebrating Bob by listening to perhaps the funniest music parody, faux jazz track ever recorded and remembering him chortling. (If you’ve never heard it - it’s here on You Tube.)

RIP Bob.

I’ll miss you and so will millions of others.

From Ariel November 1st 2011

The article below was written for the BBC staff newspaper Ariel. As it does not appear in the online version of Ariel, they have kindly given me permission to republish it here. Also see this blog post from October. You can find the new incarnation of h2g2 here.)

So long h2g2 – It’s  a pleasure to set you free

Can you innovate by stopping doing something?

In early October the BBC mothballed the community site H2G2. But instead of simply closing it and archiving it, we did a deal with a unique partnership of H2G2 community, Robbie Stamp (one of the sites original founders) and hosting company Noesis.

They got a complete copy of the h2g2 site, thousands of unedited guide entries, hundreds of edited guide entries, images and animations created by the community, badges, forums and comments, and a copy of the DNA technical application which supports and publishes all that content.

It’s the first time that BBC Online has handed over a section of its’ website to someone else.

Was it complicated?

A raft of legal, fair trading, intellectual property and technical hurdles had to be jumped, most of them from a standing start. I lead the project at the beginning although cleverer people than me did the final stretch. My approach to the legal and governance aspects was “We’ve never done this before. Take it a day at a time. If the most important person in the room doesn’t say no, sleep soundly and move on to the next day”.

The Social Publishing Services Team in Programmes and On Demand lead byMarcus Parnwell and with a special mention to developer Mark Neves, did the technical work. DNA (named after the founder of h2g2 Douglas Adams) is a unique platform, designed as a reusable, flexible, multi system codebase, and still powers the moderation and comment services on BBC Online. So all non h2g2 content had to be stripped out. To say Marcus and his team went the extra mile is putting it mildly.

Why did we do it?

Now at this point I stop using the word “innovation”, go all soppy and start to use words like “love”.

The h2g2 community is the best behaved, most delightful and decent online community I’ve ever encountered. Not for them trolling, flame wars, sniping and abuse. They love the site they make. And although for ten years the BBC owned h2g2 legally, morally it was always part owned by the strange, wonderful community with their own quirkly language and their absolute determination to keep alive the spirit of Douglas Adams.

For once the BBC acted with its head but also with its heart.  As one h2g2 user  commented:

“The transition and placement of h2g2 with its new owners (via the BBC) has been one of the most honourable things I have seen in my time. I’m convinced that there is a ‘hardcore’ of workers within the BBC that really do *care* about their audiences.”

Visit the new site www.h2g2.com. In the immortal words of Sting, “If you love someone, set them free…”

To be honest I follow CorpsCommsMag because it reminds me of the title of a song by The Fall.

However last month through CorpsCommsMag I found myself reading this article “Controlling the Media” by Andrew Cave.

It’s about the future of the Press Complaints Commission. This paragraph lept out at me:

Hawker argues that the PCC is ineffective in assisting communicators to suppress information that may be harmful to their clients, leaving them with the
expensive route of taking out injunctions in the courts to prevent publication – something he has only been successful in achieving once.

‘People think that because you’re a FTSE100 company, you can afford to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on protecting your reputation,’ he adds. ‘But
that’s not the judgment of most shareholders. Injunctions are really just for celebrities and, unless you are royalty, the PCC is no good because it is
reactive, rather than proactive. So the News of the World case is not just about voicemail interception; it’s about the media being able to answer for
the way it operates.

This struck me as an unusual interpretation of the role of a regulator.

If for example it was said ”OFCOM has proven ineffective in enabling ITV to supress information which may be harmful to ITV”, this would seem…odd.

True the world of newspapers and the world of broadcasting are very different. And OFCOM and the PCC are very different kinds of regulators (for a start the PCC is widely assumed to have failed).

It set me wondering “Does digital media make it more difficult to supress information which may be harmful to your client?” and “When does it becomes so difficult that it’s not worth doing anymore?”.

It had the same title as another more recent book, which was gobbling up all the Google juice.

Then last weekend in a happy moment I discovered it in the attic. I hadn’t lost it at all (nor had I lost “The Terror of St Trinians” which was in the same box, but that’s another story).

Fromt Cover of "A Short History of the Future" by R C Churchill

Like many books about the future, R.C. Churchill’s “A Short History of the Future” tells you more about the time it was written than the actual future. It’s not futurology either. Rather it takes some of the dystopian and satirical writing about the future from the period 1949 to 1955 and turns it into a bogus chronological history. It’s a parody of history.

It also feels like a very English attempt to deal with anxieties stirred up by George Orwell’s “1984″ – published only a few years before. In 1955 (when Churchill’s book was published) Orwell’s nightmare vision of a global, totalitarian, communist state probably felt as though it might be close to actually happening. So Churchill attempts to deal with this fear by placing it as part of a timeline that includes other science fiction of the period: Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Aldous Huxley’s “Ape and Essence” which I confess I have not read (Huxley’s “Brave New World” is not included in Churchill’s book).

It’s as if Churchill is saying ”the world of Airstrip One is terrifying, but even this will pass”.

Map of the world of Orwell's "1984" from "A Short History of the Future"

Although I now have the correct the name of the author, the book still has a very small digital footprint. Search doesn’t give you much. Biographical detail about R.C. Churchill is scant.

So as result of this blog post the book now has a slightly bigger digital footprint.

Until the oil runs out, the electricity is switched off, all the screens go blank and the internet vanishes.

In which case, I’ll still have the book.

One of the things I like about working with Ian McDonald is that I can throw him a curve ball and he doesn’t blink.

Instead of looking at me like I’m mad – which is the usual reaction – he understands what I’m talking about.

So I when I showed him the above diagram the other day and said “What is this saying to you?”, he said immediately, “You’ve been reading about the Romans”.

Indeed I have.

 ”Rubicon” by Tom Holland to be exact.

From which I learned this fact.

To the Romans a man’s moral excellence and his reputation were exactly the same thing, and they had the same word for both: “Honestas”.

In social media people spend a lot of time honing and managing an online reputation. They present a polished face to the world

The “Nick Reynolds” on twitter is a version of me. How big is the gap between the “integrity” of the twitter me and the “reputation” of the twitter me? Or is there no gap?

Institutions employ teams of people to hone and manage their reputation and present a polished face to the world.  How big is the gap between the moral excellence of the institution (but which I mean its behaviour and moral codes) and its reputation?

Despite all the evidence before my own eyes to the contrary, I still cling (albeit wearily) to the belief that the best way to manage your reputation is to tell the truth.

The public seem to like the BBC for the fact that it tells the truth. Therefore it has to tell the truth about itself, even when that’s inconvenient. Telling the truth has to include allowing all sides of an argument to be heard, even when that’s inconvenient.

The lengthy “how the world is” section, for example, is a barely-finessed paste of a 2005 report called Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology by American think-tank the Free Congress Foundation; Life Site News hosts what appears to be the original. Breivik might have found it all together, or in the various forms it’s been scattered across the net.

Paul Graham’s “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” made me think “Ah – so that’s why I can’t manage my diary”.

Nevali’s summary of his first six months at the BBC suffers from that strange tendency of people who work there to be over cautious in what they say. However as a description of what working at the BBC is actually like it’s about 60-70% correct – which is a lot higher than usual.

N.B. So I was fed up with the amount of noise (or as I shall call it from now on “drivel”) I was getting from Twitter. So I culled my twitter account, and stopped following people (even nice people) who were tweeting me drivel). I realised later that this drivel was little to do with social media but was actually coming from “media”, or what used to be called “mainstream media” or as I shall now call it “people who are paid too much money to churn out drivel to an arbitrary deadline set by a publisher”.  This drivel was then being retweeted by people who really ought to know better. As soon as I did my cull the quality of what I was getting from Twitter improved. It’s interesting to note that neither Nevali or Alan Connor probably got paid for writing the very useful things above (I don’t know about Paul Graham). Alan certainly should have been.

The moral high ground can be a lonely place.

But it’s also alarming when the moral high ground suddenly gets crowded.

Understandably a lot of people have been rushing onto it in the past ten days.

This reaction is inevitable. Because what has been revealed goes to the heart of what it means to be human.

The word “inhuman” has been used. That’s a word which resonates with me.

The alleged hacking of murder victims’ answering machine messages feels like an animal eating its own young. Human beings are rule making creatures. It doesn’t really matter what those rules are as long as there are rules. It feels like somehow some people had got to a place where there were no rules at all (legal, moral or any other kind). Without rules human beings start to behave like beasts.

No wonder then that there’s been a collective revulsion. It’s like seeing a shadow of ourselves in a mirror, the shadow of a distant past when human beings had no rules, had no consciousness, were like beasts. For me personally that was very disturbing.

I’m a cynical old buzzard and have seen a few things that make me raise an eyebrow when people talk loftily of the special role of journalism. So when Jeff Jarvis argues that a free press should not be regulated I respond:

The BBC, Channel 4, Sky News are all more tightly regulated than the British press. Their standards are just as high, arguably higher. They practice investigative journalism. This is because of regulation, not in spite of it. One thing that is very clear is that the current system of regulating the press in the UK is broken.

And when George Monbiot says that it’s journalism’s “primary purpose” to “hold power to account” I say:

The purpose of most journalists is to write intelligible copy telling people about things that have happened that might interest them to a deadline (why do we call them “stories” rather than “truths”?). That’s a difficult job in itself (eye witnesses are notoriously unreliable). “Committed or campaigning” journalism does not necessarily lead to better journalism, and sometimes leads to a disregard for the facts. Scribes throughout history have simply reported what the powerful have done, often in a flattering light, and there’s value in that. Journalists are not doctors. The last thing we need is for them to turn into politicians.

One man’s moral high ground is another man’s killing field. Think first, judge later. Check the mirror.

• some cultures have no concept of privacy
• is there a connection between the concept of privacy and the “aggressive western eye”? in order to establish a line between private and public is do you have to “see all”?
• or is “seeing all” a state of pre consciousness – not being able to see the wood for the trees?
• in a world of Google Street View do we now see all?
• does the concept of privacy rights emerge from ideas about the nobility of man and his “rights” (and should therefore be treated sceptically?)
• tweets are not phone calls – they are published, permenant and therefore subject to the law – people are outraged by having their phone calls hacked but are happy to make their tweets public
• interesting conversation between lawyers on Newsnight last night seemed to be about tactics not principle – Twitter is within the reach of the law but what’s the best way to stop people tweeting injuncted information
• if journalists wish to challenge an injunction they should go to court – but that’s a lot more expensive than an anonymous tweet – a power imbalance
• the feeling that this is one group of powerful elderly men (judges) protecting another group of powerful younger, more potent men (footballers) against women
• private behaviour does have an impact on public accountability – if someone shows poor judgement and treats people badly in their private life then surely this must influence their public judgement
• Pictures of Imogen Thomas outside the High Court (this seems relevant but I can’t quite work out why)