Russell Davies

planning joke

Adam Morgan's done well for himself.

little incredible movie

Click here for a little mpeg (7MB)of something that amused me mightily at Hamley's last night. Though maybe you had to be there.

he kneads the dough

I was in a cafe the other day. Having a meeting. But also glancing at someone present to someone else with a laptop, at an adjacent table. I was just being nosey.

It was clearly some kind of business plan thing. I could read the headlines on the slides but not the bulletpoints.

All the usual slides went by - 'strengths and weaknesses', 'goals and objectives', 'timing and deadlines'.

And then came 'rolls and responsibilities'.

I was sniggering at the typo until Neil suggested 'maybe he's a baker'.

It would be lovely if he was.

egofication

More ebcb coverage today. Very exciting. Pieces in The Guardian, The Sun, The Independent, The Mirror and Metro. The PR company doing the announcement for Yahoo seems to have done a really good job.

Everyone seems very keen to describe me as 'wacky' though. Wish is a shame.

(And is it just me or is The Mirror's website the slowest in the world? Have they only got a dial-up connection or something?)

bizarre phenomenon

My website eggbaconchipsandbeans.com has been nominated as a Yahoo 'Find Of The Year'. You can vote for me here if you feel so inclined.

But what's weird is, as a result of this, I've already done interviews with three newspapers and some local radio is on the way. it is very strange. Is there no real news around?

On the other hand, my ego is obviously delighted.

job titles

John Kerry's PA describes himself as 'Chief Of Stuff'. Very good. Watch Staffers on CameraPlanet.

FCB have a 'Director Of Accountability'. I think that sounds hugely pompous. But I like to think it means he takes the blame for anything that goes wrong. Which is nice of him.

Cry The Beloved East Midlands

(Apologies - this is a slightly parochial post).

We were talking in the office the other day about the death of Brian Clough and the all the Forest and Derby fans talking about him on the telly. And someone pointed out that he couldn't ever remember hearing East Midland's accents on the TV before. And that's starting to obsess me now. (Actually the EMDA draw it a bit too big for me, I think it's more like this size.)

Infact the only East Midland's accents I can think of hearing on the telly are Nigel Clough, Shane Meadows and Paddy Considine. (And there was a time when that bloke from the UDM was on a lot.)

And the only famous East Midlanders I can think of are Joe Jackson and DH Lawrence.

(And whenever people do Lawrence adaptations they always get the accents wrong and go all Yorkshire.)

I'm starting to wonder why this is the case.

Are East Midlanders too happy to be assimilated and let their accents slip away though lack of regional pride? (This has happened to me. But you don't see it happening to Yorkshire folk.)

Are East Midland's accents too unpleasant for public consumption - meaning they're less likely to become famous? Or what?

According to this Wiki article "the East Midlands has the least distinctive of all British accents. Nottingham, Leicester, Derby and The Wash, and to a lesser extent Northampton and Lincoln all have accents close to BBC English."

And this piece says that East Midland's accents are the actual basis of RP - "RP was once itself a regional accent - that of the East Midlands. It acquired its status because East Midlands speakers converged on London as it became a centre for merchants. In other words, London became the power base and the financial centre, and the East Midlands accent became the spoken standard"

That's a really interesting thought, but having grown up in Derby, it seems like bollocks to me. A Derby accent is certainly nothing like BBC English (ie RP) And it's cetainly distinct. No-one says 'ehup mi' duck' like a Derby chipshop owner. And I can remember that we could tell the difference in accent (and dialect) between places that were only a few miles apart.

Maybe this is something to do with time (or me not appreciating the timescales these authors are talking about) because this BBC piece about Chaucer says "he wrote in the East Midlands dialect (covering London, Oxford and Cambridge), the most influential in forming Modern English." And obviously you wouldn't think about those places having the same accent nowadays.

Anyway. Enough rambling.

What I'm saying is - are their any East Midlander's on the telly that I'm missing?

pet shop boys potemkin

Went to see the Pet Shop Boys playing along to the Battleship Potemkin in Trafalgar Square last night. Very good. They've always liked big romantic sweeps and Soviet key changes and that perfectly suits the film; no point being subtle with this stuff, especially when it's played outside to a group of drunken tourists. The crowd were, of course, the most annoying bit, especially the woman who came and danced and whooed along to the pram rolling down the Odessa staircase.

And there was also some horribly 80s student socialism agitprop intro which didn't help. (Though it did illustrate just how good Eisenstein was, by contrast.) The ICA is disappointing sometimes; so much of the stuff they do could also have been done at Cambridge Poly in 1983. Had to leave a bit early because the dancing whooing woman was so irritating.

My favourite bit was just how the square looked before the whole thing started. The arc lights shining through the fountains.

Blimey, shows how old I'm getting, been doing this blog for ages and this is my first review of anything vaguely like a gig.

where is north?

Went on the London Eye at the weekend too. Never been before. Very good. But it makes you realise how skewed your view of London is.

Conceptually, I think we mostly just assume that the river is a straight line running East to West. But of course it isn't, and the bit of the river where the Eye is definitely isn't, so you see all sorts of strange things; like Battersea Power station appearing to be North of the Houses of Parliament.

This really screwed me up when I lived in Portland, where the river ran North to South. I could never quite conceptualise it like that in my head, couldn't stop thinking of the river as dividing North from South. Made it hard for me to find my way home.

DoThinkPlan

One of the things I realised on sabbatical is that I'm constitutionally an employee. I'm never going to start my own business much as I'd like to think that I am. I couldn't do it. I couldn't waste my days away if it was my own time, I have to do it on someone elses.

On the other hand I have all these grand schemes and crazy notions about a start-up creative business should be run, which I get really frustrated that I can't do because I'm not in charge (and they're wildly impractical).

So I've started a fictional agency instead. Called DoThinkPlan. Which is how I think great things are created. And I've built a little website for it - as that's the only place it exists. It's only four pages at the moment but I have great hopes for it - as a place where people can become fictionally employed and make imaginary contributions to mythical projects. If you'd like to apply for fictional employment visit the site. Though if NetworkSolutions hasn't made it happen yet you should go here