Robin Brown

I was very sad to hear of the death of Sir Bobby Robson, a man I regarded with immense fondness and respect as a football man and, more simply, a man.

A Newcastle supporter since I was young, I followed the Magpies closely until the end of Robson’s tenure, at which point I felt a final disconnect with the club.

Their most grievous in a series of terrible decisions over the years was sacking Sir Bobby, after he took Newcastle from several years of drift to Premiership finishes of fourth, third and fifth.

I never really felt the same about NUFC or football in general after that. It was as if all the greed, stupidity and vulgarity of modern football had finally won, and given the greatest servant of English football for a generation an unceremonious boot up the backside.

Robson continued to flourish in the public eye though, as his popularity had grown beyond Newcastle, or football. He became something of a national treasure. Everyone loved Uncle Bobby.

Some of his last few public appearances seemed – to me – to sum him up: a recent replay of the 1990 World Cup semi-final at St James’ Park to raise money for cancer charities, attended by football’s great and good; opening a bank account with Northern Rock in 2007, rallying people behind the northern institution; and his gracious appearance at the Sports Personality of the Year. I watched the latter with tears in my eyes.

His football career speaks for itself, the outpouring of great love for the man today speaks of his character and generosity of spirit. We won’t see his kind again.

• Image of Sir Bobby Robson attending an aftershow at St George’s Hall, following the Royal Variety performance at the Empire Theatre, Liverpool, 2008. Image by Dave Evans.

Every time I see Frank Field in the news he’s making another pronouncement on some aspect of the state and how it requires a radical overhaul.

This has generally extended to the welfare state, with particular emphasis on social security and pensions.

But Frank has recently branched out by claiming that the BBC should be scaled back to being a minority public service broadcaster with two TV channels (BBC2 and BBC4) and two radio channels (Radio 3 and Radio 4).

Field was, for a very short time, social security minister in the Tony Blair government, having been priased for his radical forward thinking on the welfare state.

That was until everyone realised that just about the only person who agreed with Frank Field was Frank Field. It has to be said, he was remarkably prescient on a number of issues, probably too much for his own good.

Double F was swiftly sent back to the Wirral, where he has spent the last ten years arguing that everything should be scrapped, scaled down or broken up – cropping up with a new headline every couple of years when he’s got another headline-grabbing report out.

Here’s Frank on the BBC in his report, called Auntie’s Dying: Long Live Public Service Broadcasting.

“The BBC cannot continue to impose a version of the poll tax on every TV household.

“They are chasing viewers by producing rubbish programmes which, frankly, would make the founders of the BBC turn in their graves.

On a pedantic note, the licence fee isn’t a poll tax. Just to be straight on this, you don’t need to pay the TV licence if you don’t want to. Ergo not a poll tax.

Field argues that the public-fund nature of the licence fee compels the BBC to produce populist programmes that mirror commercial TV’s offerings.

He believes that diverting the licence fee to other content producers, who bid for the right, is a better idea – and one that is more likely to preserve public sector broadcasting in the long run.

The cultural value of the BBC is clearly a subjective one, but Field seems to have applied his own personal philosophy to everything in life. Who’s he to say which channels and stations are worthy and which aren’t? His continued references to the Proms highlight a peculiarly fusty idea of what’s of value and what isn’t.

I actually agree with Field that the BBC is going about things completely the wrong way by chasing viewers, and the continued existence of BBC3 – surely due to be renamed PramFaceTV* anytime soon – is baffling to me.

The problem is, and always will be, differing idea of what constitutes good public service broadcasting. Field has his own idea, I have mine, everyone else in the country will have theirs.

His paper recommends asking everyone what they understand by public sector broadcasting.

Frankly, I’m with Sid Vicious on this one – these are the very people who lap up the dross from commercial broadcasters at the moment. I dread to think what would be on the Beeb if it were decided by Joe Public.

Field would dispose of BBC management and an independent body would decide which broadcasters got their hands on the licence fee cash. I don’t see how this could really be much different from the current situation, where a largely unaccountable elite decides what gets made.

Field has earned a reputation for thinking the unthinkable, but it’s rarely pointed out that many ideas previously thought beyond the pale are unthinkable because they’re fucking ridiculous.

There’s certainly a debate to be had over the ways the digital revolution is changing the broadcasting landscape, and the way the BBC and other terrestrial broadcasters are funded has resulted only in a fudge thus far.

The commercialisation of some of the Beeb’s output is also problematic, as is the reach and scope of bbc.co.uk – but I’d rather have the BBC in the muddled state it’s in at the moment than a neutered niche broadcaster envisaged by Field.

Despite its intention to save public sector broadcasting, I rather fear Field’s paper will be more grist to the mill for the Beeb’s many and varied enemies – generally ranged across the right-wing and generally for economic or political purposes.

They’ll be rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of getting rid of a mortal enemy and competitor, plus all that lovely licence fee cash.

The BBC needs to be at the centre of British broadcasting, reaching out to as many people as it can while remaining true to its core commitments. I don’t think it currently does, but it only needs a little tweaking.

Under Field’s disastrous vision the Beeb would be cowed, a little-viewed curio amongst a sea of digital shite. His suggestions would be the first shots in the eventual destruction of public-service broadcasting.

I’ve always found it odd that while the rest of the world looks at the BBC in envy and admiration, in Britain we spend all of our time trying to destroy it.

*It was the BBC itself, lest we forget, that actually had the temerity to call a programme about teenage mothers Pramface Mansion.

I’ve recently been following a number of blogs where the author is suffering something of a crisis of confidence, or faith, or motivation.

This has tied in with a fairly recent trend I’ve noticed of blog fatigue that leaves once-thriving weblogs desolate and lonely ghost towns. It’s an odd phenomenon, and I feel sure someone will soon start a site on abandoned blogs.

I’d normally be tempted to write this off as one of those occasional bouts of bloggy hand-wringing (Is my blog important? Will it ever earn any money? Do people read what I write and like it?). I suspect most bloggers suffer from this from time-to-time, or simply find themselves too pushed for time.

Like cricket, or any sport, I think bloggers suffer from temporary losses of form. I think this inevitable, but like sport the best way to get back into the groove is to keep practicing.

To extend the analogy, I also think writing a blog is like learning how to play a musical instrument – you won’t be good at it straight away; it requires dedicated practice.

My early blogs on Liverpool Culture Blog were, frankly, rubbish. The structure, length, cohesiveness of the arguments and wildly flailing tones are not a pretty sight to my eyes. My post on Jaguar Land Rover is several thousand words long. It takes time to learn what blogging is and how to do it well.

Creature Features isn’t even really a blog. It’s a daft indulgence which would be better suited to my Tumblr blog. But when I pull my finger out I usually learn something new about Photoshop.

Adturds is good for learning how to write a certain kind of post. I think the quality of my posts on there fluctuate quite a bit, but I’d like to be able to write stuff like Charlie Brooker and Jim Shelley. Dave can already, which may be why he’s given up. AdTurds has allowed me to identify some flaws in my invective.

Quis Est Porcus is a bit of an experiment. Do I know enough about cricket to launch a career in it? Can I capture the subtle lyrical rhythms of the best cricket writing? I’m not sure on either count at the moment, but I intend to keep trying.

The MT Blog is a no-brainer from a work point-of-view, and it’s proved its value beyond question to my eyes, even in the few short months I’ve been writing it.

This one? Well, it’s about personal branding really. And it allows me a platform to write on things that interest me that don’t fit on the others.

My Tumblelog is just an outlet for weird, cool and funny stuff I like it. I love doing it.

And to be honest, there you have it. I love doing all of them. I’m someone who communicates best through writing, so it makes sense for me to put all of my thoughts, feelings and experiences down in the written form.

I enjoy writing for the hell of it alongside all of the fringe benefits, many of which are, frankly, nebulous or non-existent.

I enjoy interacting on my blogs, and I enjoy the validation, but they’re not the fundamental reasons why I write them. The more I blog, the better I get at it. The better I get, the more enjoyable it is. Like bowling leg breaks or playing the piano.

Anyway, as for the angst that’s going on elsewhere in the blogosphere I do detect a trend in the failing love affair with blogging. Some people have pointed the finger at Twitter, some at the lack of obvious returns, some at the general attention spans of people in the modern age.

I think there’s another factor in all of this – corporate blogging and the rise of Page Rank. Page Rank, as we all know, is Google’s ascribed importance to various web places. The more points, out of ten, your blog gets the higher up the SERPs you’re likely to get.

Places like the BBC, CNN, Guardian and big companies boast massive Page Ranks, and wield them to propel their blogs to the top of the SERPS. The number of corporate blogs has exploded over the last couple of years. Unless you know a bit of SEO, have been around a while or focus on a niche, the chances are your blog will lose out to these guys every time.

So I lay the blame, or a bit of it, at the door of corporate blogging. Everyday bloggers can’t compete, get dispirited and give up. Blogging has become more homogenised, more mainstream and frankly more stupid and boring – a cursory glance at WordPress home pages should confirm that.

So maybe the spirit of blogging is changing, moving further away from the customised home pages of 15 years ago and more towards a different way for news platforms to deliver their content. The creation of geeks in their bedrooms has become the preserve of the money men.

It’s easy to get misty-eyed about all of this, after all nothing on the internet stays the same way for long. And I’m not that bothered either way – I’ll keep writing, and practicing my googlies.

• Image by Eirik Newth via Creative Commons

For those unfamiliar with it, Tabbloid is a kind of feed aggregator that display your feeds in a newspaper format.

It’s meant to be a reader but I tested it out using feeds from my various web nodes, just to see what it’s like.

I just found the link in my inbox and am impressed to see it’s pulled articles from all of the feeds I entered and compiled into a fairly well put-together PDF.

So, it obviously works, but beyond that it also provides an astonishing ego boost (I’m always inordinately entertained by my own writing).

Anyway, for those considering using it, I recommend it. It has obvious advantages over other web-based readers – I use Netvibes, which i like – and is a nifty piece of kit.

For those as self-absorbed as I am, I also recommend it.

Here’s my edition (in 2meg+ PDF format):

It’s always said that Americans don’t do irony. Neither, it seems, do they do innuendo.

The news of Mollie Sugden’s death has propelled the hashtag #MrsSlocombesPussy to the top of trending topics, only for Twitter to ban it and Mashable and TechCrunch to rage against Twitter spam, and subsequently display a total lack of humour about the issue.

TechCrunch:

“Still amazes me how stuff like that gets in the top list of trending topics. It shouldn’t.”

So, the Brits like smut – and Are You Being Served was gloriusly stupid, hilarious smut – and the Americans are humourless nerds. Who knew?

But the unlikely, and rather sweet, phenomenon does highlight a growing issue on Twitter – the explosion of spam followers and hashtag spam.

The fact that it was initially assumed to be more spam speaks as much of the problems Twitter is experiencing as of the typically myopic and pompous worldview of US geeks.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and stroke my cock.

EDIT: For any passing Americans, or others generally baffled by today’s events, here are some cracking pussy gags.