Did anyone notice we had an election? If you voted you will no doubt have been disappointed. Tory supporters didn’t get the clear mandate they wanted. Labour did better than some expected, but still got pushed out of Downing Street. The Lib Dems think they’ve done quite well by getting a few cabinet seats, but I suspect that in a few years’ time we’ll see that as a mistake and they’ll become even more obscure than they were before the election.
Nobody else really figured on the electoral radar, apart from the Greens who did a fantastic job of bagging a seat down in Brighton. The first of many, I hope.
The biggest winners, then, seem to have been the broadcasters, who have been camped out on the green outside Parliament for the last two weeks.
The BBC, as ever, is putting on the biggest show as it seems to have moved half of White City to Westminster and boxed it up in a big black spaceship. Sky, on the other hand, is having a little garden party and has cracked open the gazebo. ITV, too.
Kay Burley, from Dancing on Ice, interviews Ken Clarke, Secretary of State for Justice
The ITV gazebo (left) and the BBC’s glossy black spaceship (right)
From The Guardian:
The [23rd James Bond film] would be Mendes’s first proper action film – the director is best known for taut relationship dramas such as his 1999 debut American Beauty, for which he won the Oscars for best film and best director, and last year’s Revolutionary Road. However, he has dabbled in more high-octane fare before: on the 2005 Gulf war tale Jarhead, as well as the 2002 gangster flick Road to Perdition.
Well if it’s true it would make perfect sense, and would point ever more clearly to Bond 23 being the third part of a trilogy that kicked off with Casino Royale.
<spoilers ahead>
At the end of that film (and indeed the book as it was a fairly faithful adaptation), the treacherous Vesper lay dead and Bond retreated into the emotional shell that sees him through the rest of the series with the immortal words ‘The job’s done and the bitch is dead’. They were lifted directly from the book.
It’s only when he meets Tracy – an equal – that he is finally able to let down his guard where women are concerned.
Quantum of Solace picked up an hour on from the end of Casino Royale, and followed Bond on his quest to track down the Quantum organisation, which was ultimately behind Vesper’s death (through revenge of duty? Who knows – it could be a little of both). In the closing scenes he confronts Vesper’s betrayer in a Moscow flat, but apart from leaving him more or less alive we know nothing of what happened between them or the content of their discussion.
Bond 23, then, must surely repeat Quantum’s trick and pick up the story an hour later as Bond sets out to use the information he learned in the flat, find a way to reconcile himself to Vesper’s betrayal and finally become the a fully-formed, rounded character who can leave this thread behind in Bond 24 and beyond.
The 23rd instalment will be Bond’s final counselling session. So who better to direct than Mendes? A man who, in the words of The Guardian, is ‘best known for taut relationship dramas’?
That’s what Bond has been since Casino Royale.
Poor old PCW. Incisive Media, its owner for the last couple of years, shut it down today, declaring it financially unviable in the current economic climate.
A rather familiar refrain just now, so why mention it here? Because PCW is where I got my break, big or otherwise, 12 years ago.
It wasn’t the first magazine I wrote for, but it was the first one that gave me a full-time job; still the first of only two full-time jobs I’ve had in journalism. When I joined I envisaged staying for a couple of years, but by the time I left I’d been there for seven and a half.
It was riding high back then. For a while we the UK’s biggest-selling computer magazine and both advertisers and kit suppliers were falling over themselves to get onto our pages.
Apparently not any more. When its shut-down was announced today it was still drawing in 54,009 readers every month so, as Chris of the Brennan intimated, clearly the ad sales were very poor or the rates were too low.
Or the readership figure was a bit out.
It’s a sad day, seeing it go like that, but I do feel it strayed a bit lately. Some very strange covers, a fair amount of re-used copy in between them, and an apparent fascination with certain subject matters, which came up more often than they probably should.
There might be some job losses so it’s nothing to celebrate, even if you do work for a rival publisher, but it’s something I think a fair few could see coming. That, though, doesn’t make it any less of a shame, or that it will be any less missed.
From today’s Times:
Russia’s entry for the Eurovision song contest was mired in controversy today after a Ukrainian singer was picked to represent the country at the final in Moscow.
The choice of Anastasia Prikhodko and her song Mamo, sung in Russian and Ukrainian, sparked allegations of vote-rigging from one losing finalist and caused angry debate among Russian fans of the contest. (Source: Times)
There would be some delicious irony in a Ukrainian representing Russia this year. The two countries aren’t entirely best of friends, and last year’s contest really should have been won by Ani Lorak, singing for Ukraine, but actually went to a far inferior song from Russia.
This didn’t surprise everyone. Garry Mulholland, writing in The Observer, knew who last year’s winner would be before the show even opened. He was covering the show in host country Serbia:
‘So … you are working at Eurovision?’ [his Belgrade taxi driver asked him]. I confess that I am. ‘Then maybe you can tell me … how come I was told three months before that it was arranged for Russia to win?’
The taxi driver didn’t seem to offer much in the way of evidence, but he was correct, and similar allegations of pre-determined outcomes and cats being let out of bags seem to be a factor this year, too.
Back to today’s story in the Times:
The losing finalist, Valeriya, was seen to storm off the set after the result was announced on Russia’s state-run Channel One television. Her producer Yusif Prigozhin later demanded a re-run of the contest, claiming that he had been told that Ms Prikhodko would win days earlier.
Eurovision is political – it has been for a long time, but not on the level most people claim. Block voting simply doesn’t exist, and the reason that certain national clusters vote for each other is that they come from the same part of the continent and thus like similar sounding music (and know each others’ artists).
The real politics of the contest happens not on the night itself but in the lead-up, like this. And, of course, like Georgia’s controversial 2009 entry ‘We Don’t Wanna Put In’.
When sung, ‘Put In’ sounds like Putin, the Russian Prime Minister who oversaw Russia’s invasion of their country last year.
Well if, if and if. The biggest ‘if’, of course, is ‘if’ he qualifies, but Alexander Rybak is surely a shoe-in with Fairytale if he gets through.
Best (potential) song of this year’s contest I’ve heard so far. Fingers crossed.
It’s a couple of days now since Obama took office and the dust has settled. On the day itself, we watched the inauguration at work, sat at our desks with Sky’s excellent HD stream in a window in the corner as we got on with our work. Very impressive. It shamed the BBC.
Talk is that the event provided a much-needed boost in newspaper sales right around the world, probably on account of people buying extra copies to keep, but with newspaper circulations in seemingly terminal decline you have to wonder whether Obama’s will be the last-ever front-page inauguration. When more readers turn from paper to pixel every day, there can’t possibly be as many print-based news outlets left when president 45 takes the oath.
Does that matter? Probably not. There’s something nice about holding printed material, but you can’t beat the immediacy of the web and, let’s face it, news outlets are information producers at the end of the day, not printing firms. A lot of them don’t even own their own presses.
So if we’re going to start collecting home pages rather than front pages in the future, what does this year’s coverage tell us about the future?
The Guardian provided exceptional coverage, redesigning its front page around lunchtime to give the main story almost all of the space above the fold. This was updated throughout the course of the ceremony and supplemented by a slideshow gallery and an offer of live video.
The Guardian in the morning, and the afternoon
CNN did the same thing, but not to quite the same extent. It still changed its regular front page to give the main story more prominence but it didn’t have the impact of the Guardian’s approach.
CNN before and after the inauguration
Al-Jazeera didn’t give the story much prominence on its front page at all. You had to click through to the Americas section to find its full treatment.
Al-Jazeera relegated most of its coverage to a sub-page
Pravda, the most recognisable Russian news source, wasn’t entirely unbiassed in its coverage. Obama got the top billing on its English-language pages, but the tone was more opinion-led than factual:
Barack Obama takes office as Republicans’ scapegoat
USA’s new President Barack Obama is taking office January 20. George W Bush was a big headache for the whole world, although his successor does not seem to be a man who can become the saviour of the great nation. Those thinking that the USA will have many positive changes in its politics after Obama comes to power think it wrong. It touches upon the US-Russian relations too. The Republicans simply decided to move over to make Obama become an intermediate figure. John McCain was too conservative to win. If Obama does not manage to extricate the nation from the crisis in two or three years, the Reps will unveil their real candidate.
Obama can hardly be described as Russia’s friend
The next biggest story on the page was about Hillary’s appointment as Secretary of State:
Hillary Clinton to bring four years of war as Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton as the US Secretary of State will not change anything. The colour of the skin does not change the essence of aggressive politics. She definitely enjoys great respect in the United States as a woman who returned to big politics after the infamous scandal with her husband. Unlike Condoleezza Rice, Clinton has a more subtle perception of the moment. She realises that life is not based on the American dream but follows a completely different motto: ‘We either swim or drown’.
Pravda’s approach was more opinion-based
Of the UK’s three main broadcasters, the BBC, ITV and Sky, Sky won out. Its top strip, which takes up roughly the same amount of screen space as the Guardian’s, was a bit uncomfortable as it didn’t really have enough content to fill it out, but it did make an ‘event’ of the story, unlike its competitors.
The BBC didn’t depart greatly from its regular template, which was a shame as it has knocked the right-hand section of headlines down to give important stories full width in the past, but I guess those headlines, relating to the inauguration, were still pretty important.
ITV’s showing was the poorest.
The best before-and-after changes were those on the White House website itself. At the end of the Bush era it was a boring Web 1.0 design where the content was fighting the boxes and furniture for attention. It lacked any clear heirarchy. Ugh:
With Obama installed it was colourful, inviting, and somewhere you might actually want to visit. There’s even a blog:
George W Bush’s personal site wasn’t much better than the White House one. You’d think that it would be trumpeting what he considers the best achievements of his time in office, but instead it was selling calendars. And it didn’t even have his name at the top of the page, opting instead for the Republican National Committee:
The scene at georgewbush.com
In all, I’ve got 80 screen grabs from the day of the inauguration itself, and others from the day before and the day after, and they’re interesting to look at now that it’s all over. Whether they’ll ever have the same meaning as a newspaper front page, only time will tell. At the moment, though, they do little more than illustrate how different outlets covered one of the most important stories of American history.
Oh dear. This film came out when I was 12 and I remembered it being terrifically exciting. Zorin seemed more evil than it was ever possible to be, Mayday the coolest henchwoman of the series and the high tech plot was spot on for its day.
And then, after perhaps five or ten years of not having seen it, we watched it again last night. Not good.
The plot is almost non-existent, and when you compare it to the latest Bonds there’s so much chat and so little ‘doing’. The computers, which crop up frequently, are so very very outdated for a film 23 years old, and the plot’s dependence on them makes it look even more of a dinosaur. It looks even more out of date than older films like Goldfinger or On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
The characters are entirely one-dimensional, the lines are corny and Roger Moore is very old. Nothing wrong with that, unless you’re bedding a woman young enough to be your daughter (he was 28 years older than Stacey Sutton with whom he had his wicked way in the shower and 29 years older than Pola Ivanova, whom he had pressed up against the side of a Jacuzzi). And don’t get me started on the names. Jenny Flex. Monsieur Aubergine. May Day…
Even the soundtrack sounded recycled. You could easily have cut it into Octopussy and nobody would have known, and the noise on Stacey’s computer when she’s pinpointing the epicentre of the earthquake is the same as is made by the globe in the Liparus control room as it tracks the nuclear missiles in The Spy Who Loved Me.
This was Roger Moore’s last film, and not before time. The franchise was looking tired by 1985, and it needed to be reinvented. He should have stopped after For Your Eyes Only.
A View to a Kill (with retrospect): 
Speaking of The Spy Who Loved Me, anyone who knows both it and Goldeneye well (and the soundtrack to The World is Not Enough), will appreciate this very clever bit of editing:
’007 goes rogue’ is how they billed it. The last time they did that – License to Kill – was one of the series’ low points, portraying a cold, heartless character, and a story that lacked many of the franchise’s cornerstone features.
Well, Quantum of Solace doesn’t do that, but the three star ratings it garnered in most of the press reviews weren’t far off the mark. There’s still no Q, and there are no gadgets beyond an impressive array of Sony phones that run software years ahead of their time. There’s no Moneypenny and the villain – a fay environmentalist called Dominic Greene – has all the menace of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. His sidekick is more Bob-a-Job than Odd-Job.
There are some genuine edge-of-seat highs, like a prop-driven aerial dogfight and the much-hyped car chase, which really is brutal, exciting and loud. But in trying to emulate the Bourne films by putting you right in the middle of a fight or the Aston Martin’s driving seat it becomes confused and hard to follow. Bourne simply – sadly – did it better. Perhaps because it did it first and now we’re always comparing.
Never is the more evident than those times when director Forster stops trying to copy the competition and goes his own way, producing something so grand and impressive as Bregenzer Festspiele opera house scenes and the graceful gunfight that ties them off.
If the crew had been brave enough to do this throughout and create something entirely their own it would have been a stand-out entry in the franchise. In parts, though, it feels like a best-of. MI6 has dumped Windows and switched to whatever operating system they used in Minority Report, Agent Fields gets the Goldfinger treatment, although this time with oil, not gold paint. The eco hotel in which the climactic battle takes place looks for all the world like Ken Adam’s Fort Knox (Goldfinger) or the power station (green energy again) in The Man with the Golden Gun. And Quantum itself is the modern day Spectre.
That this is a more intelligent Bond isn’t in doubt, and it has once again stripped away the clutter of the Brosnan era to produce something more in tune with the rough, stark, more authentic From Russia With Love.
I left the cinema feeling a little disappointed, but suspecting that this would be a film that repayed rewatching. Two days later, I’m convinced that’s true, and already looking forward to the DVD.
And also to the third part of what is looking increasingly like a trilogy. We still don’t know what Bond found out from Vesper’s boyfriend, what Canadian intelligence has to do with all of this, or who heads up Quantum (or quite what it is). There is clearly a new Blofeld on the scene, and it wasn’t eco-warrior Dominic Greene.
Quantum of Solace: 
A very literal translation. They clearly haven’t got a clue what they’re singing. Nonetheless it’s so catchy you’ll be whistling it all night, if not trying out some of those fabulous crazy dance moves.
