Television Kingdoms: Yorkshire, Hill Communication

Remember that tour of the UK via television regions that I said I'd be doing? Started over a year ago and I haven't been arsed with blogging since. Well, somewhere over Stamford I conked out, just needed a jumpstart and here I am in the next spot, Yorkshire...

TV for thee

Even if you're not a telly nerd, you must be familiar with 'the Big Five'. The ITV franchises that dominated prime time in the days before it all turned into a unified mush of soaps, TOWIE, Kyle and Cowell. I'm referring to Thames; LWT; Granada; ATV/Central and Yorkshire.

Well, this is my first step into the territory of the Big Five and I dare say YTV is the smallest out of that elite ITV tier. In fact, Yorkshire's area was formerly served by neighbouring Granada on weekdays, with ABC - who would go on to become 51% of Thames) taking weekends. That was all before the 1968 change in the network.

There's something about the northern England, where it appears to those of us outside it, that they tend to hate each other, with the Pennines being a major dividing line between the north west folk and Yorkshiremen. Of course, I'm fairly sure hostilities ended in 1487 and the peoples are united in their hatred of anyone south of Worksop.

Why TV

So, I've travelled up here from my base in Anglia. And hey, the roads tell me to "keep two chevrons apart". Ha ha ha! You see? Because, um, Yorkshire's on-screen identity was a chevron. (Okay, that gag needs some work.)

According to many telly nostalgia forum users, the parping yellow chevron drilled fear into them as a child. Not for me, it just signalled the start of Tim Brooke-Taylor-narrated cartoon Gideon.

Having barely visited the region in my childhood (despite it being the birthplace for everyone on my mother's side) I can't really say I've had memories of growing up with the service. We holidayed for two weeks every year, but my parents tended to have 'northophobia', citing "the cold" as a reason to head southbound. Only twice was this rule broken - Blackpool and Scarborough.

On the Aire...

Come the age of the internet, my first meeting with someone online was over in Sheffield. A chap called Chris - a huge Sheffield Wednesday fan - took me on a walking tour of the Steel City. Fans of the Owls don't have a lot of respect for Leeds-based Yorkshire Television, with the station opting not to show any of Wednesday's post-match celebrations over Manchester United in the 1991 League Cup final, even though many other regions continued showing a rightfully exuberant SWFC.

YTV had decided that its viewers would enjoy the scheduled American import, War Of The Monster Trucks. Such disdain for Sheffield has had accusations slung over at Kirkstall Road for having a bias to West Yorkshire. The incident spawned a Wednesday fanzine to sarcastically adopt the name. Indeed, my online friend described the regional news show as CaLeedsar. Admittedly, that's a rather weak pun, but seeing as I've just used a gag about road chevrons, who am I to complain?

So, for those you that don't know, Yorkshire is actually four counties. It's also our true midlands, if you take Great Britain into consideration. As such, playing cricket, regarding tea as a science and moaning about change - all Yorkshire stereotypes - can be considered the beating heart of our country.

There are three things on British television that convey their own vision of Yorkshire to the rest of the country. Last Of The Summer Wine; Emmerdale and Heartbeat. The first one, undoubtedly a stalwart of the BBC schedules up until recently, portrayed the massive hills and valleys to the point where they actually played a part in the comedy.

Woolpacking in them

I really really wish I could state that Rising Damp has been Yorkshire Television's biggest and most prolific export, but the sorry truth is that it's Emmerdale, ITV's 'B' soap, has that title. Probably the biggest money spinner for the franchise, the farm-based serial started life as Emmerdale Farm - filler for afternoons in 1972 when the IBA allowed ITV to broadcast non-stop through the day.

As someone with no time for soaps, I've very little to say on them, but even I recognise Emmerdale. The earworming melody of the theme tune followed by 27 minutes of rural tedium. It was a sneered-upon parochial offering back in the day, at a time when ATV's Crossroads was neck-and-neck in a prime-time war with Coronation Street from Granada.

Of course, by the early Noughties, the roles were reversed. Crossroads was the daft hopeless afternoon filler, whereas Emmerdale had already cemented its place in the evening schedules thanks to a 1993 plane crash storyline. That epoch had turned the soap from dreary Archers-on-TV mediocrity to being an eyebrow-raising 'drama serial' with realism-defying incidents. A bit like every other prime time soap on telly.

I'll recognise Rising Damp as the greatest thing Yorkshire Television have ever produced. It's a bit of a cliche, but most folk will agree it's the best sitcom ITV have ever made. To this day, it deservedly forms part of the ITV3 listings. Miserly landlord Rupert Rigsby, with his right-wing leanings, is played brilliantly as a pathetic petty character by Leonard Rossiter. Students Alan (Richard Beckinsdale) and Philip (Don Warrington) were the target of Rigsby's spite.

Alan's hippy-esque ways and, sadly, Philip's skin colour, would bring out the worst in Rigsby. Thankfully, he always came a cropper, making it a delight to see an on-screen bigot fail every week, just like Alf Garnett over on the Beeb. Unifying all the male tenants' attention was spinster Ruth Jones (Frances De La Tour).

Having established a ratings hit, Yorkshire kept Rising Damp's writer Eric Chappell employed throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Subsequent sitcoms from his pen were Only When I Laugh; The Bounder; Duty Free; Home to Roost; Singles and Haggard. Of those, I could only say I heard of Duty Free and Home To Roost. Rising Damp was always going to be a tough act to follow.

Les is more

A huge face in comedy, figuratively and literally, Les Dawson had won ABC's talent show Opportunity Knocks in 1967. He went on to be compere on BBC2's International Cabaret. In 1969, with Yorkshire Television being a year old, he was signed up for their comedy panel show Jokers Wild, helmed by comic mastermind Barry Cryer.

Now, there are two genres of television that are highly prolific these days. The TV talent contest and the comedy panel show. Two things that have me reaching for the 'off' button. However, with Les Dawson on board, you can bet it was a joy to watch. Alas, I was suffering with Not Being Born at the time.

Yorkshire must have taken a shine to the gruff Blackpool-based comic, as they handed him his own star vehicle, Sez Les. This sketch show ran for eleven series and various specials. It was the birthplace of 'Cissie and Ada', where Roy Barraclough and Les dragged up to play the northern gossipmongers. Also, John Cleese joined the series after exiting Monty Python's Flying Circus. Despite the jaw-dropping differences in their comedy styles, the two became great friends.

Kirkstall Road continued to pay Les's mortgage for much of the rest of the 1970s, as Yorkshire continued with a news series - Dawson's Weekly and various specials, such as Dawson And Friends. In 1978, he signed a contract with the BBC, largely sticking with the broadcaster for the rest of his life.

Based on Un Dos Tres, Devised by Ibanez Serrador

A really massive thing YTV was famous for in the 1980s, was the evening game show 3-2-1. It's a cliche to point out how the clues were totally unfathomable. Mind you, all game shows were baffling to me at that age. What kept me amused was the way Yorkshire's chevron could whizz around the screen in the animated titles, before landing in a bin.

This receptacle for refuse would then transform into Dusty Bin. Well, that's the magic qualities of the mighty Yorkshire chevron. It all went tits up by the mid-80s when they took on computer graphics, with the animation so incredibly stilted, they may as well have pointed a camera at a real bin.

Of course, computer graphics would also infiltrate the Yorkshire ident itself. According to TVS's The Television Show, the new sequence where a solid 3D chevron rose out of liquid gold, cost a million pounds.

"Hello, 'Benders!"

So far I've not really mentioned anything of Yorkshire's contributions to kids' television. The station tended to contribute a fair bit to the lunchtime pre-school strand, keeping former Rutle Neil Innes busy with the cartoon Raggy Dolls and wizard-based antics in Puddle Lane.

The Book Tower remained part of Children's ITV for a very long time, having started long before the strand existed. Its title sequence was utterly terrifying, the exterior of some empty stately home, soundtracked by Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Variation 18 - a doom laden piece of orchestral prog-rock. Once that ordeal was over, we had the host, a post-Doctor-Who Tom Baker. Actually, that didn't make things any less scary. The series ended in 1989, with Timmy Mallett as host.

The TV-am irritant also got his own vehicle, Utterly Brilliant, in the early 90s. While this show tried to take on a 'cool' street style, it wasn't going to go far with Timmy Mallett as host. Also, around this time, another TV-am refugee - Mike Morris - ended up fronting Calendar, the region's evening news.

Now, for my money, Yorkshire Television didn't put a foot wrong when commissioning Round The Bend - an 'electronic comic' (thankfully Krankies-free) that was devised by cartoonists/writers Patrick Gallagher; Tony Husband and Mark Rodgers, at a time when their own comic - Oink! (a sort of junior Viz) was facing an uncertain future.

This really was a televisual Oink! Of course, there was no Uncle Pigg battling it out with Mary Lighthouse. We had a puppet Doc Croc hosting the show from the comic's offices - based in a sewer - with all kinds of rodents struggling to get the show together. A bit like The Muppet Show with snot-and-bogey humour. All puppets were put together by the Spitting Image workshop. Tony Husband, now more famous for his Private Eye work, has every episode available to view on his website.

Naturally, anarchic humour has always been right up my street and I usually found that ATV/Central could deliver that in spades. However, Yorkshire did well with the aforementioned Round The Bend, plus a little known school-based comedy, Behind The Bike Sheds, featuring a pre-omnipresent Tony Slattery and numerous child actors. Maybe it could be seen as the parent of Hardwicke House or Palace Hill, but having just viewed a bit of it, it's way too song-and-dance heavy. I do recall the final show doing a bit of fourth-wall breaking, by just announcing they were in a television studio all along as the cast dismantled the set.

Whiteley Rose

I don't know whether to go with stuff outside of ITV for the Television Kingdoms strand of the blog, but then, early Channel Four was pretty much like an extension of the ITV network. Well, you don't get much more early Channel Four than Countdown - the first show on the fledgling station and it's still there today.

A Yorkshire Television production from the off, Countdown probably gave viewers the impression that Channel Four was a second ITV (and sets of the day would literally have 'ITV2' on such a button).

As unlikely as it sounds, Countdown actually began life as a branded spin-off from regional news programme Calendar, as Calendar Countdown. It was only screened on ITV in the Yorkshire region, and didn't get networked. Like YTV's other game show behemoth, 3-2-1, it was actually a format from the continent. Des Chiffres Et Des Lettres had been running since 1965.

Also, I'm stunned at how Yorkshire slapped their Calendar brand (itself a rather generic word that has no connotation to the region) on the show in its pre-Channel-Four days. They did the same with short-lived music show Calendar Goes Pop. Taking YTV's logic, maybe my home region could have produced About Anglia Sale Of The Century.

Anyway, Countdown is cemented in the Channel Four schedules and, as you'd suspect, it attracts a huge audience of pensioners. My friends from ATVLand.productions got to see the last edition Carol Vorderman worked on, and reported how the warm-up man constantly reminded the silver-haired demographic - without any irony - to take their pills during the breaks.

With the near mothballing of the Leeds Studios towards the end of last decade, Countdown was taken away from Kirkstall Road by ITV and relocated to the Granada region at Salford's MediaCity.

Now, if we're channel-hopping, I guess we could give a nod to BBC2's dark sitcom The League Of Gentlemen, as all the interior scenes were filmed at Kirkstall Road. This isn't too surprising, given that the BBC didn't really have any suitable studios in the area.

World Of Pub

Quite possibly the most Yorkshirest thing ever shown on TV has to be Indoor League. A none-more-1970s daytime filler that covered pub games like skittles, shove ha'penny and arm wrestling. This was actually networked (and is astonishingly out on DVD), but most people my age only really came across it when Frank Skinner and David Baddiel highlighted it on BBC2's Fantasy Football League.

The sight of Baddiel in drag as a darts-throwing old lady, replete with a Yorkshire Television badge, during one Phoenix From The Flames sketch had me cackling for about five minutes after it aired, despite me not having a clue about this utterly low-budget show.

Just tyke that...

Now, as I said at the start, I don't have much of a personal connection to the station or region. However, there is one incident which left me rather dismayed with Yorkshire Television Limited, to give it its full title.

During a rather extended break 'between jobs' in 1993, the DSS had myself and a friend join one of those 'job restart' clubs, designed to gently encourage long-term dole-ites into work. I could say it worked for me, using the reasoning that it was incredibly depressing to go to these daily meetings. I recall a former butcher at the table moaning that "increasing vegetarianism" was to blame for his redundancy. Quite a few of the assembled tutted and sneered when they saw a guy come in to set up a computer.

"That's where it's all at, these days," said the ex-butcher. "It's all bloody computers."

I nervously shuffled in my seat. Only my friend knew that I'd spent two years at college studying Information Technology and thankfully he stayed quiet on that subject. So, what does this have to do with Yorkshire Television?

Well, one day we were treated to a documentary on gaining employment. The programme was supplied on VHS tape and was shot just like a typical schools programme. The subject was Yorkshire Television and we saw the company giving auditions to would-be lunchtime newsreaders and a day in the life of an outside broadcast engineer.

I have no idea what the documentary was called and I very much doubt it was aired on actual television. The newsreading auditions included quite a bit of fluffing from nervous women, no doubt put off by the fact there was also this documentary camera crew present as well as the news crew gauging the performance.

The part that fascinated me was the outside broadcast truck. The narrator explained that, Yorkshire was very much physically different to other regions, due to having such massive hills and valleys. Having become a motorist three years ago, I can certainly attest to the eye-popping landscape. I've felt my ears pop as I've driven down hugely steep hills in the Whitby area. I've felt my car beg for mercy at the thought of driving up a steep cobbled road in Scarborough. I've had my breath taken away by the cliffs between Bradford and Keighley, where my mother and uncle spent their childhood.

The engineer was interviewing assistants and - with an implied wink - mentioned the need to 'sweet talk' authority figures into allowing the broadcast truck to spend some extended time in spots where a decent line of sight could be established over to Leeds. Evidently, their counterparts in Anglia would have it very easy.

A low point was when a black interviewee was asked about how his interview went. Sitting in the YTV canteen, he gave a rather negative view of the company and, with a nod towards a nearby black cleaning lady, said "that's probably the only kind of job people like me will get here". I hope he was wrong.

People's Republic of Yorkshire

I started work on this blog on Saturday 26th December 2015, at a time when a fair bit of Yorkshire (as well as the north west) was flooded. These events are unrelated to my decision to restart this blog, it's just down to having the spare time available.

By the following morning, ITV Yorkshire itself was facing Neptune's revenge, with the nearby River Aire having reached their archive building.

Firefighters pumping out @itv archive on Kirkstall Rd #Leeds pic.twitter.com/OggPAnoE1o

— Margaret Emsley (@itvmargemsley) December 27, 2015

Now, the vast majority of ITV's archives are stored over in Leeds, partly due to the expertise of the staff and also due to having the space available. If you've ever travelled along Kirkstall Road, you'll notice that ITV Yorkshire spans quite a few buildings, a bit like a university campus.

Thankfully, I learnt from archivist Chris Perry that all was well. "ITV have replied and said that nothing has been lost in the flood. They had already made plans for this eventuality and all went smoothly."

So this goes to show that while it's at the opposite end of the M1 to ITV's major base in London, the Yorkshire HQ is still a major cog in the network.

Television Kingdoms: Anglia, museum of the airwaves

I'm going on a virtual journey through the UK, having always viewed the country divided into television regions. Sod country boundaries and accents, my head says this rainy island in north west Europe is made up of bizarre and effectively-defunct television stations from the past.

A brief introduction to regional television

The first half of the word 'television' is ancient Greek for 'far-away', and at times it seems like TV does appear to be from a totally different world. If you're over 30 and experienced television in Britain when growing up, then you'll be familiar with the patchwork quilt that was the ITV regional system.

Basically, the fourteen far-flung companies who made the shows on the third button, all had a piece of the United Kingdom (and Channel Islands) all to themselves. Of immediate recognition to anyone with a vague passing interest in telly would be big hitters like Manchester's Granada; Leeds's Yorkshire Television; London's Thames and the self-explained London Weekend Television. Oh, and Birmingham's ATV which meta-morphed into Central in the 1980s.

These were the 'Big Five' who delivered the most familiar programmes seen on ITV. Coronation Street; Emmerdale Farm; World In Action; This Is Your Life; The Muppet Show; Crossroads; Rising Damp and basically any shiny-floored stuff featuring Cilla Black or Jeremy Beadle.

The rest of the ITV stations are sadly vague memories to most people. Newcastle's Tyne Tees; Cardiff and Bristol's HTV; Southampton's Southern (and later TVS); Norwich's Anglia; and Glasgow's STV did manage to get a fair few notable productions on the nationwide network here and there, like the occasional FA Cup win from a perennial Premier League mid-table floater.

These could reasonably be termed as a 'Medium Five', which does sound like I'm damning them with faint praise. However, it'd be churlish to ignore their ITV contributions, such as Robin Of Sherwood; Worzel Gummidge; Tales Of The Unexpected; Taggart and The Tube. Actually, that last one was made for Channel Four, and the closest ITV equivalent would be Top-Of-The-Pops-wannabe The Roxy, but let's try to forget that.

If those are the B-list, then we're left with the minnows - Aberdeen's Grampian; Belfast's Ulster; Carlisle's Border; Plymouth's Westward/TSW/WestCountry and St Helier's Channel Television. Rarely spotted, and usually giving some token filler material, like religious programming, schools and children's slots.

In this post-Alan-Partridge era, the idea of regional television is something that is laughed at, just parochial telly to look down your nose upon. Much of these regional companies have been merged into one big massive PLC that uses the ITV brand, through a series of mergers that took place throughout the Nineties and Noughties. As a result, regional ITV is reduced to about 30 mins at 6pm every evening, presenting the news from a galvanised shed on some charmless industrial estate.

With digital, we have at least 70 channels available to anyone, and the quality is spread rather thinly. 'Constructed reality' is the order of the day, with members of the public making up the cast, real-world locations being the backdrop and no proper writers to be paid. It's strange to think that the North East is now represented on the airwaves by orange-hued twat party Geordie Shore.

However, I'm acutely aware that I should never come across like some finger-wagging old man, sneering at anything new. Thus I cannot say "things were better in my day" without remembering that we had to put up with a metric Bobby-Davro-load of televisual shite.

Eastern promise

I kick off this tour of the UK from my own region, Anglia. Actually, whether or not it is my region is disputed. I live in Northamptonshire, which for many decades has received a none-too-shabby signal from the midlands, so we've had the option of watching the far cooler ATV/Central offerings. Considering my county is officially and legally in the East Midlands, I've felt like it was an anomaly in the first place that we've had Anglia on our screens.

Nonetheless, with Anglia being the strongest signal here, Anglian Water serving us with dihydrogen monoxide and various other businesses with Anglia/Anglian in their name, people in my hometown have come to think of us being part of East Anglia. This is despite the somewhat less-than-flat topology and the obvious lack of rural charm of somewhere like Southwold. Oh, and Birmingham's just 60 miles away, whereas Norwich will set you back 100 miles.

Rural retreats

Still, channel 3 in most homes was dominated by that horse-riding knight statuette, which only confirmed that Anglia was a station broadcasting direct from the 19th Century. Other stations had beautiful geometric symbols, we had to endure about three hours of a heraldic crest placed on a turntable.

Anglia's station ident wasn't the only thing rendered in silver. Most of the announcers between the programmes seemed to be upwards of fifty, so tuning into Anglia was like having your television run by your grandparents.

On my only visit to Norwich, and continuing a childhood mission to visit as many television HQs as possible, we popped into Anglia Television's reception and managed to see a two-foot replica of the Knight-on-a-Horse. In neighbouring glass cabinets, there were many other smaller replicas. One of these had to be The One, surely? Well, I use that excuse to say I've literally seen a famous television ident 'in the flesh', so to speak.

One slight relief in the presentation would be during the children's programmes, where we were treated to the anarchy of B.C., a leopard-y tiger-y lion-y puppet thing, who was the focal point of 'Birthday Club'. Viewers would get their birthdays read out on air by the announcer and have a wave from the aforementioned feline jester.

I recently learnt this tradition lives on over on CBeebies, thanks to a neighbour whose sprog had their birthday cited by the announcer.

The regional news, About Anglia, where we'd learn of ward closures at Addenbrooks Hospital or of a bus strike in Lowestoft, rarely touched on our county. However, a visit by Princess Diana to Wellingborough's Victoria Centre granted me a fleeting appearance on the telly, my first time on the gogglebox.

Ambitiously filling an hour of weekday evening schedule, About Anglia would often pad the programme out with a cookery slot called Patrick's Pantry (brought on to the strains of Hot Butter's synthpop hit, Popcorn and helmed by Patrick Anthony), and an amusingly humble attempt at Points Of View, entitled Write Now! This would be hosted by Paul Barnes, who would 'spike' every viewer letter after reading it out, on some strange mustachioed bust of Victorian police officer. It made no sense to me, but seemed to be cult viewing for my mum and dad, like a newspaper letters page put on the airwaves.

Other local fare included farming programmes. Pretty much every weekend was made up of them. If you switched on your telly on a Sunday lunchtime, you'd be faced with some gruff presenter helming Farming Diary, Farming Today, Farming Now, Farming Calendar, Farming Appointment, Farming Right This Second, Farming For Farms, or whatever it was called.

Obviously, with the transmission area for Anglia being largely rural, this is what you had to expect, but it was televisual anathema for this young viewer. Still, it's one of the purest examples of public service broadcasting, and you can't imagine the ITV of today even contemplating such output.

Speaking of which, Anglia were rather famed for their in-depth weather forecasts, and they'd be presented by a chap entitled Michael Hunt, who was never to be referred to as 'Mike' for obvious reasons. Weathergirl Becky Jago superceded him, and then went onto bigger fame as a Newsround presenter and Chris Tarrant's sidekick on Capital FM, before returning back to Norfolk as newsreader on Anglia News.

Aside from B.C., one regional announcer tended to go off-script. I'm referring to the nocturnal Paul Lavers, who did all the live night-time continuity throughout most of the nineties. He of the unusual hair colour, would go into free-form monologues and worry the management. It's the closest Anglia ever got to a Phillip Schofield or Andy Crane, and yet you'd probably only see him if you set the video for WCW Wrestling or Prisoner Cell Block H.

Serving the nation

Ask anyone outside the region what Anglia was best known for, and you can expect the words "Live from Norwich, it's the quiz of the week!" to be bellowed. This phrase always introduced Sale Of The Century, which was rather confusing to me, having expected to see a show genuinely called The Quiz Of The Week. (Still, Central's Family Fortunes was also bewildering with the first words on screen being 'Big Money'.)

Much parodied and derided, this low budget game show operated a shoestring and yet gained something like twenty million viewers nationwide around the late 1970s. It's probably Anglia's biggest known hit.

At some point in 1996 I had a job interview for a satellite TV station in central London, run by a former LWT programme director. When they asked me what region I came from, they all went into the Sale Of The Century theme tune. I should have cited the much cooler and hipper Central instead.

Other things Anglia made for nationwide consumption was the wildlife-observational spectacular Survival, which went all around the world to film exotic animals. Heavily highbrow and definitely worth to make, this was a time when ITV could be expected to create output that rivalled BBC2 as well as BBC1. It simply wouldn't happen today. Anglia milked this for all its worth, putting reruns of it out in their region long after it stopped being nationally transmitted.

And then of course, there is Britain's answer to The Twilight Zone. Tales Of The Unexpected ran for many series, introduced by a frail-looking Roald Dahl and showcasing a standalone 30 minute supernatural drama each night. Nowadays just boiled down to that silhouetted-naked-dancer title sequence for talking heads clips shows and tired comedians to re-enact.

Tales Of The Unexpected did meet its ambitions, albeit not with an Anglia production crew. It was largely made in London by non-Anglia employees.

"And for our younger viewers"

One chance for smaller broadcasters to build up their IBA-mandated national programme quota was with children's television. As I've detailed so far, Anglia seemed a century out of touch, so it's actually quite surprising that it was behind one of the most well-remembered children's programmes of all time.

Knightmare hit Children's ITV in the late 1980s, combining the geeky world of role playing with a much more respectable pseudo-video-game-like concept. It nearly didn't get made at all, as the Anglia management were adamant that any programme they made had to reflect their region - something that never bothered The Big Five.

Thankfully, by pointing out Cambridgeshire's contribution to home computing (what with the Acorn Electron and Sir Clive Sinclair) and Northamptonshire being home to various games producers (such as Activision), the board of directors were convinced, and Knightmare become cult viewing for several years. Child players were chrome-keyed against backdrops of beautifully hand-pixellated art, as live actors and animations posed as risks or even assistance.

Anglia's big blue-screen studio was also used for a little-remembered Alice In Wonderland playlet, proving that chrome key would suffice in lieu of an expensive studio construction budget. Impressively, Michael Bentine, Eric Sykes, Leonard Rossiter, Bernard Cribbins and Windsor Davies were on the voice cast list.

While Anglia never played a big role in the Saturday morning slot, it did take part in the Get Fresh and Ghost Train shows, which were vehicles (yes, literally) managed by Tyne Tees in order to let all the regions outside of the Big Five and the Number-73-producing TVS to have a crack at putting their region on air.

The Anglia region of course played host to a few of these shows, and they also contributed to every show of Get Fresh series 2 and 3 with gunge-as-punishment game show slot Get Mucky (scarily reconstructed on YouTube by a muck enthusiast in his home here). This is pretty much as close as Anglia would get to making a new Tiswas.

The game involved two children playing computer game Starglider against each other. The later series used Xenon (on the Atari ST, I believe). The losing child would have their friend stood on a plinth, as host Charlotte Hindle pulled a lever to drop a load of gunk or flour over them. We're a long way from Farming Diary now.

Speaking of Tiswas, Anglia was one of the first regions to simulcast ATV's flan-stained parade of anarchy, although it did made the stupid decision to drop the show in favour of Southern's Saturday Banana in 1978, along with a few other regions. After the 1979 strike, most regions backed the return Tiswas, although Anglia decided to take on the Saturday Banana again for a second series, which no other region (apart from Southern, obviously) bothered with. By 1980, Anglia and Southern were back with Tiswas. I'm pretty sure at one point, Anglia had their normally staid announcer Michael Speke flanned by a replica Phantom as the show was introduced. I'm not imagining that, am I?

In a convoluted way, Anglia is responsible for The Prodigy's success. The Braintree-based rave anthem makers definitely lived in the region, and their official biography tells of how Charly managed to become their breakthrough hit, thanks to a decision to rerun 1970s Bash-Street-Kids-as-live-action serial The Double Deckers on Saturday mornings in 1991. Whether it was due to irony or budget constraints, I'm not sure, but both Central and Yorkshire were also shoving it out in a similar timeslot.

In the commercial break, Anglia had stuffed in a few vintage Public Information Films. This is usually a sign that a station hasn't sold enough adverts for the slot, but with this rerun evoking nostalgia amongst the student-age generation, especially a 19-year-old Liam Howlett, it could be said it was a deliberate move.

Impressed with the "Charly says..." cartoon (where the cat was allegedly voiced by Kenny Everett), Liam set the video for the following week, hoping to grab the PIF to include the lines as samples over a Joey-Beltram-riff-infused track he had been working on.

Thankfully it was repeated, and the result is of course Charly, the band's second single yet their first appearance in the mainstream. The rest is of course, history. It's odd to think that such a massive hard-edged band with over two decades of hits, owes its success to a space-filling decision made at Anglia Television.

Thatcher lot

As the eighties were about to expire, so would the regional make-up of ITV itself. The 1990 Broadcasting Act meant the once-a-decade-ish renewal of television franchise would now take bank balances into account rather than programme quality. Wiser stations, such as LWT, had broken themselves up into production facilities, transmission, studio hire and archives, ready for a worst-case scenario if they were no longer to be part of the ITV network.

Sensing the regulatory authority ITC would take into account regional commitments (just as its predecessor the IBA did back in the early 1980s) when assessing renewals, Anglia quickly carved its rather large region up into two by the middle of 1990. Hence, the service became a bit like HTV's West and Wales offerings, and here in Northants, we were served by the refreshingly titled 'Anglia West'.

This was a huge breath of fresh air, as no longer would we have to suffer boring reports about surfers in Gorleston from 120 miles away, we could instead sit through a handful of stories about Luton job cuts, Cambridge students and the occasional report from our county!

Neighbouring region Central had already sliced itself up into two east/west options by 1984, and did another act of localising segregation with the creation of the Central South region in 1989. We had Central News East as competition to Anglia West, and yet if Wellingborough would be featured, they tended to use the same video as each other.

It took years for the BBC's Look East offering to do the same. Now satellite viewers in my area have the rather bafflingly titled 'BBC One East (W)' label at the top of the EPG.

Of course, with cost-cutting going throughout the cash-strapped ITV plc in the Noughties, the two services were once again unified. The regional split does technically exist for advertising purposes, but Anglia is barely considered in the modern operation of ITV. Every feed of Anglia on HD or +1 is superceded by Meridian. So if you're in Stamford and hoping for a local report, you'll have Eastbourne on your screen instead.

While it barely bothered with Channel Four, Anglia's parent company in the 1990s (United News & Media) had the station producing early Channel 5 shows hosted by Matthew Wright.

Anglia also played host to the terrible Trisha Goddard shoutathon, which are the spiritual ancestors to Jeremy Kyle's daily humiliation platform. Yeah, er, cheers for that. Trisha herself is now a fairly big name on American network NBC.

Anglia had a go at digital satellite broadcasting, like many active and inactive ITV franchise-holders did in the 1990s. In an out-of-character move, it transmitted dance/club channel RaptureTV, which has collapsed and been revived a number of times.

So, Anglia, as parochial as an ITV region can get, firmly rooted in its region and fairly proud of it, even if it meant losing out on the national limelight on many an occasion. Never shifted by any latecomers, this eastern-counties broadcaster has remained on air since its inception in 1959.

Where are they now?

I believe Paul Barnes married announcer Helen McDermott. Paul went onto host a jazz-infused evening show on BBC Radio Norfolk, called The Late Paul Barnes. It went on to do so well that it's now shared across all BBC local radio in the BBC East region and even BBC Radio Kent.

Chef Patrick Anthony also jumped over to BBC East, having a radio gig on BBC Radio Norfolk at one point, and also became part of Ready Steady Cook.

As you probably know, Nicholas Parsons hosts Just A Minute, Roald Dahl is currently dead.

Paul Lavers plunged himself to satellite broadcasting, taking a major part in shambolic premium-phoneline-dependent Friendly TV, where he possibly libelled a couple of Hollywood stars on one occasion. This cash-strapped channel was a rare example of a satellite station fronted by visible continuity announcers, and in its death throes, it had a few hours where Paul Lavers was literally presenting and managing every caption on screen. Friendly TV evolved (or devolved) into one of those Babestation type affairs, and so now Paul treads the boards, having been an experienced thespian well before Anglia gave him a pay cheque.

As for Anglia itself? The regional archive is held by the University of East Anglia. Anglia's news output for the entire region emanates from Norfolk.

Paul Hayes has commented below this blog entry to correct me on a few things, which I'm grateful for. He points out: "...after selling off most of the latter bits, they're back just in the original building they started off in in 1959, the old Agricultural Hall. There's a story that the reason they don't leave this bigger-than-they-need property is that a condition of the lease is that they must return it to the condition in which they took it on, which would be very expensive, but I have no idea of the truth of that."

Good knight

And that's that. Quite a lengthy blog post, as I've lived in this region all of my life, plus I had to write a few paragraphs on the whole concept of this series of posts. If you've made it this far, give yourself a pat on the back and book yourself in for a viewing marathon of Tales Of The Unexpected.

The UK's smallest television station, ever

If you had to pitch a business in one of these five locations...

• Greenwich, London
• Bristol, Avon
• Swindon, Wiltshire
• Sheffield, South Yorkshire
• Wellingborough, Northamptonshire

...you'd probably go for one of the first four, as the chances are, you'll have heard of those places. Wellingborough is a small market town in the east midlands which isn't exactly on anyone's radar. Yet, unbelievably, it achieved parity with those much more famous locations back in the early 1970s due to a television experiment.

Yesterday, I blogged about the current batch of 'local TV' channels that have arrived in various bits of the country on Freeview's channel 8 slot. Yet I completely missed the opportunity to talk about my hometown's role in the first ever local TV schemes rolled out in Britain.

In the 1970s, when television was heavily regulated, Christopher Chataway, the Conservative Minister of Posts and Telecommunications was lobbied so that localised television could become a reality. This meant officially allowing broadcasts from outside the established BBC and ITV systems. It wasn't a 'broadcast' in the strictest sense, in that these stations would have to be run via cable.

These days, when we think of cable television, Virgin Media is the blanket brand name that's cornered that market. It seems odd to think there was ever a need for cable television in the 1970s, but for some residents, television aerials gave them sub-standard reception and in some cases, they weren't even allowed to have such things mounted on their roof.

For these reasons, cable television has actually been fairly well established since the 1950s, relaying the established TV channels to viewers, and usually throwing in radio and a few additional ITV regions as a bonus. In fact, British company Rediffusion was launched in 1928 to 'rebroadcast' radio and early television feeds. Subsequently they would go onto to help form ITV by establishing their first London weekday franchise in 1955.

Growing up in Wellingborough in the 1980s, I had known of a few households that had taken cable TV, which brought them the pre-Sky delights of The Children's Channel and SelecTV, alongside the usual four channel line-up. I never got to see this first hand myself, but rumour had it that you could also have ITV's midlands and London offerings (Central, Thames/LWT) in addition to the 'default' Anglia region. I was in a cash-strapped household and just being able to pick up Central was a welcome bonus.

By the early 1990s, the town's cable supplier offering this (Mobile Radio), had changed to selling a diet of Sky One, Sky News and Eurosport alongside the four terrestrial channels, as long as you paid £5 a month.

Getting back to the main topic, the Conservative government had granted licenses for five local community stations in the early 1970s, planned to run until 1976. The first to launch was Greenwich Cablevision in July 1972, run by the south London district's cable business with an eye on increasing cable subscriptions in the area. This was already a captive audience due to a hill blocking off conventional broadcasts from the Crystal Palace transmitter. Half the finances for this were put up by Canadian businesses.

Second to launch was the 'Bristol Channel', on 17 May 1973. It was run by the city's cable supplier, Rediffusion, who at that point was a 49% stakeholder in Thames Television.

Sheffield Cablevision saw the light of day in August that year, backed by British Relay Wireless, swiftly followed by Swindon Viewpoint the following month, which was financed by EMI for their Radio Rentals cable network they had established in Wiltshire's pseudo-city.

What strikes me about Wellingborough's foray into this early broadcasting experiment is that the town certainly doesn't strike you as a media-savvy environment. It's an average-sized market town, dwarfed by at least two or three other places in the county. It would be understandable if its bigger brother, Northampton, had gone in for this venture, or at least Corby or Kettering. I don't mean to bash my hometown, but it's a fairly underwhelming place, like most middling towns across the east midlands. It's on the same level as Loughborough, Worksop, Rugby or Chesterfield.

Bear in mind that even the well-established ITV system had seen some desperate situations. Wales-based broadcaster WWN hit financial troubles just over a year into their contract, despite having been given a lot of programmes by Granada and ATV for free. WWN had to be purchased outright by neighbouring region TWW.

Also, Border Television coasted along with bankruptcy almost staring them in the face during the 1980s. It's not surprising when you look at their broadcast area, the sparsely-populated regions of Cumbria, Dumfries and Galloway, The Isle Of Man and various other parts of the England/Scotland divide.

In any case, 24 March 1974 is when Wellingborough Cablevision got piped into various homes across the town and was made available by Mobile Radio in Midland Road, who were also purveyors of televisions, radios, hi-fi systems and various white goods.

Mobile Radio was based here, in what is now a solicitor's office.

While the other stations were backed by big pockets, and in some cases having help from established players in broadcasting, Wellingborough Cablevision was owned by the curiously-named Wellingborough Traders Television Relay. In other words, local businesses.

At this point, I should concede that I've never seen a single frame of this station, due to not having been born at the time of its launch, and only being about six months old when it came off air. However, I'm just so intrigued at my humble hometown having its own television station, no matter how ill-fated it could have been, that I just had to write this article. Oh, and Wikipedia is pretty sparse on the subject.

The station was black-and-white only, and the 'studio' was situated in what is now Silk nightclub, just a few hundred yards up from Mobile Radio's HQ. It's believed the cable network was VHF-only, so up-converters were provided to subscribers so signals could be seen on the newer UHF televisions.

Silk nightclub. Believed to be one-time home of the UK's tiniest television station. Last time I was in here, I met the Happy Monday's Bez, smashed off his tits.

From online reading about some older residents' experiences, it's not quite clear exactly what was broadcast on this fledgling station, but it gained the affectionate nickname 'WellyTelly'. A friend talks of how he appeared live on the station, singing as part of a children's choir. The station had visited schools in the area, presumably using the idea that local newspapers have, attracting the eyeballs of parents who want to see their little cherubs gain a bit of fame.

I'm told the studio "backed onto Glenbank" (the dead-end terraced road behind Silk), which means this slightly unglamorous sight would have greeted visitors. Not exactly Shepherd's Bush or the ITV Tower.

Warwick Primary School in the town's Kingsway area had their 1974 Christmas concert televised to cable viewers, and Weavers School (based close to the Queensway estate) were keen to show off their new gym.

Local woman Teresa Webb was a presenter, and interviewed a few star names, such as veteran crooner Frankie Vaughan and Canadian singer/actor Edmund Hockridge. I can't be certain, but with no theatre in the town at that time, it's possible these people would have been performing at The Fir Tree nightclub, which had been a magnet for a fair few household names.

The set-up of the station didn't please everyone. "We were promised a peppercorn rent for allowing the cable on our house," said local resident Edward Chambers. "We never got a penny."

Broadcasting to an area an eighth of the size of Leicester was never going to be a long-lasting situation. Despite the five cable community experiments being allowed to continue beyond the initial 1976 expiry date, Wellingborough CableVision closed on 24 March 1975, exactly a year after it had launched. It was the second to do so, with the Bristol Channel having beamed its last output ten days earlier. Sheffield and Greenwich stations would also turn into a white dot the following year.

The present day Mobile Radio shop, which will be closing next month.

Swindon Viewpoint managed to survive for many years. In 1980, EMI pulled the plug on funding and staffing, but left the equipment with the station after local protests. This channel continued to run on and off throughout the 1980s and up until the mid 1990s. Nowadays it runs online.

What of Wellingborough's legacy though? Absolutely no trace of recordings online, not even an idea of the schedules. Yet actual physical traces are still around, according to local resident Martin Percy...

"If you know what you are looking for around Wellingborough, you can still see cables running along the walls of houses, just below the gutters, and a few booster amplifiers for the old 'piped TV' system. There are even traces of the old Broadcast Relay radio service, installed in the 30s, which relayed one or two radio stations around the older parts of town, recipients having a speaker, and a selector switch....I can remember a great aunt and uncle in Albert Road listening to The Archers on the Home Service, later BBC Radio 4, on theirs, up until about 1970."

Plus, it seems one engineer from those days has gone on to greater things by taking up a role at Virgin Media's R&D department.

I'm quite keen to discover more about this short-lived broadcasting experiment. Little is written about Wellingborough's efforts, somewhat understandably, so I'll be making enquiries. I'll have to be quick. Mobile Radio itself closes down in August.

The tale of local media doesn't end for me with Wellingborough CableVision. There was another local cable service, on a county-wide level, which launched in the 1990s, but that's a subject for a later blog...

When television on your doorstep is just wrong

The first eight years of my life were spent in the era of three channel TV, with BBC 1 offering shiny-floored glitz-and-glamour, BBC 2 seemingly offering a non-stop child-unfriendly diet of highbrow documentaries and ITV being the plethora of the great, the good, the awful and the downright odd.

For most of its life, ITV was a patchwork quilt of stations dotted up and down the country, each of them seemingly having their own speciality. Fast-forward to the present day and modern ITV is pretty much styled on those women's magazines you see at the supermarket checkout, with lurid headlines announcing how an evil rapist uncle ripped someone's life apart, why one woman's husband likes bathing in yak's urine and look, Kim Kardashian has cellulite on her thighs, doesn't that make you feel better?

It's easy to mock ITV, but in the digital era, they now sit alongside tens of other channels fighting for your eyeballs. You can't exactly blame them for seeking the lowest common denominator, although there has been some pretty unforgiveable cases of not just scraping the barrel, but removing the barrel and digging up what's beneath it. It's baffling as to why, in the 21st century, we have the council-estate bear-baiting contest that is The Jeremy Kyle Show; why the mentally ill are invited on to be mocked on The X Factor and how can anyone laugh at the catchphrase farm emanating from that post-millennial Bobby Davro, Keith Lemon?

One thing I'm conscious of, is that as I approach middle age, I don't want to turn into the finger-wagging dullard who sneers at the younger generations, spewing out sentences that begin "Back in my day...". It's become quite a challenge, as the mere existence of Nicki Minaj and Ed Sheeran has made me envy the deaf.

Back in my d... Um, when I was growing up, TV was a great companion for me. My first memories were of getting up really early on a Saturday morning and sitting through the test cards and start-up sequences, having our colour television all to myself.

The BBC would usually be the first to open its doors, giving us Battle Of The Planets followed by their main attraction. Swap Shop would launch a full hour ahead of Tiswas, yet the Noel-Edmonds-helmed compendium of phone-in chat and proto-Freecycle trading was such dreadful tedium that I nearly always opted for ITV despite the first sightings of Chris Tarrant being an eon away.

Now, Tiswas was one of the many gems that was generated by the ITV system of old. Fifteen different companies covered the nation, along with the Channel Islands, each with a region to themselves, yet expected to pitch in to the 'network' as a whole. You didn't always get what your regional neighbours were watching. It paid to keep an eye on the TV Times magazine...

This was multi-channel before the term was even coined. And living in Northamptonshire meant that although Anglia was our main provider of ITV, we could also opt for a version of ITV from the midlands, albeit on a slightly weaker signal. Most folk in Wellingborough stuck with Anglia for the solid picture quality, although the midlands broadcasts were very much watchable, with just the merest hint of haze.

The offerings from the midlands company (ATV until 1982, then Central onwards) were a lot sharper than Anglia. Switch on Central News, and you'd hear of a nightclub stabbing in Leicester. Go for Anglia, and it's a cat stuck up a tree in Cambridge.

It was more than just news. Everyone's heard of the output made by ATV and Central, which was eye-catching and beautifully anarchic. From the aforementioned Tiswas, over to Revolver; The Muppet Show; Spitting Image; Hardwicke House; Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and Sapphire And Steel, the Birmingham-based guys ran riot over the schedules. Of course, there was the more family-friendly stuff which also hit the ratings, like The Upper Hand; New Faces (a watchable Britain's Got Talent); Bullseye and Celebrity Squares.

What's Anglia notable for? Survival; Sale Of The Century and Tales Of The Unexpected. The first of those is undoubtedly a remarkable venture in television broadcasting, but for my tastes, Survival is in the box marked 'Worthy but dull'. Long after they had made a few runs on the network, Anglia would fill a few slots in their own region with scratchy repeats of the exotic-animal-spotting documentary.

It's not too difficult to see that the ITV network of old was dominated by a few big players, with the far-flung less-populated regions barely getting a look-in. There certainly was a 'Big Five'. Being based in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds meant that Thames, LWT, ATV/Central, Granada and Yorkshire could dominate the prime-time schedules with their own big-name productions. The others in the system were forever to be 625-lined Cinderellas, putting in their bit with children's telly and daytime efforts, with only the odd sniff at a post-7pm networked slot.

Central had a very slick presentation about it, making it compelling viewing even when your favourite programmes weren't on. By contrast, Anglia resembled a museum of the air, with silver-haired presenters stuck in front of a locked camera, reading out the schedules with some curtains as the background.

As a Tiswas fan, it's hard to forgive Anglia for dropping the show and taking Southern's Saturday Banana not once, but twice. I remember enduring this tame Saturday morning offering and wishing for Tiswas to return to our screens. I didn't quite grasp how to tune into ATV, where I'd have found Chris Tarrant and the Phantom Flan Flinger all present and correct.

Of course, later on as I discovered all about the different regions, I used it to my advantage. Popping over to my grandfather's house in Surrey was a great opportunity to watch The Smurfs on LWT. It also made me wonder what the hell Fangface was, having glanced an eye at Yorkshire's 'regional variations'. It hit Central, and my curiousity turned to disappointment. Ditto Sport Billy.

These days, none of this matters, as both regions are 99% identical, with only the 6pm regional news and a few sub-five-minute bulletins being the only difference. Every ITV offering from Berwick-upon-Tweed down to Penzance is pretty much the same. When Margaret Thatcher allowed the stations to take over each other from the 1990s onwards, ITV went from being weird and wonderful to being sterile and safe.

So we had Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, trying to undo the damage by allowing Freeview's channel 8 slot to be used by local TV stations. A few of these have launched, with Norwich's Mustard TV and Grimsby's Estuary TV taking the 'local happenings' approach. It's sensible stuff, not unlike the regional TV of old, yet on a lower budget. Despite the smaller audiences and narrow finances, both these stations do well with smart graphics and unrelenting enthusiasm. However, it's London Live that grabs the headlines, and all for the wrong reasons.

Being a station owned by the Evening Standard and Independent Newspapers, it's keen to make a big splash and to be known by every Londoner. While there is fresh local content in abundance, the directors decided to fill up a lot of the schedule with programmes acquired from the BBC, ITV and Channel Four. So you get Smack The Pony; Peep Show; Bugs and London's Burning, with the home-grown live stuff emanating from a small studio in the HQ of the newspaper-producing parent company.

Thanks to the satellite broadcasts, I'm able to watch the channel, despite being 70 miles away from the capital. It's not a pleasant experience. Obviously, being so far out of its catchment area, it's not really for me anyway, but I really do think that if I was living in London, I'd not give this channel a second glance.

The biggest mistake the channel has made is to aim itself purely at 18-25 year olds. To look at the presenters and studio is like looking into the window of Toni & Guy. It's running an MTV ethos and unsurprisingly, the original content has gained viewing figures as low as zero. Okay, so I'm citing some pessimistic ratings, but the average audience for their early evening show is around 4,000. When your broadcast area has at least a population of 10 million, that's a stunning failure.

The commissioning choices have reflected the desire to be a London-only BBC Three clone. On opening night, Londoners were subjected to some 'street footballers' and a Jamie-Oliver-wannabe chef who goes out checking 'street food'. It's all urban chic, segued with rapid camera whips and coming across like the station Nathan Barley and his media chums always wanted to make.

It should come as no surprise that the station is facing failure. The regional ITV programmes of old were watched by your mum and dad, and that's what London Live should have aimed for. There's no point targeting the current generation of youth, as local television is by far one of the naffest things from their perspective. It's dull, it's televisual Horlicks, it's 100% Alan Partridge. I very much doubt teenagers and twenty-somethings give two shits about what's on Freeview channel 8. They're off out clubbing and meeting their mates. At that age, so was I.

To grab the eyes of the young, you'd have to be like E4 or ITV2, be bold with expensive imports like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead. And that's obviously not what the local TV initiative was meant for.

There's no harm in going for the middle-aged viewer sitting at home trying to wind down after a day's work. Outside the M25, that's what the new local stations are doing. I'm baffled as to why channel proprietors Evgeny and Alexander Lebedev decided Hoxtonite hipsters would ever switch on to London Live.

50 Things More Gothic And Respectable Than Twilight

1. Rentaghost
2. A child shining a torch upwards onto their face
   
3. Derek Acorah
4. The Trap Door
5. Long-forgotten ITV Saturday morning show Ghost Train
6. An actual ghost train
7. A lolly stick with "What do ghosts eat for dinner? Spookhetti!" printed on it.
8. A werewolf glove from a joke shop
9. The Groovy Ghoulies
10. Shakespear's Sister
    
11. A pair of novelty plastic Halloween fangs from ASDA, 9p
12. The Amityville Horror and the seven diabolical sequels that followed
13. The Demon Headmaster
14. Babylon Zoo
15. Count Duckula
16. Secretly keeping your hand hidden behind a door or desk and then making it 'strangle' you as if it's someone else's hand
17. The Monster Mash
18. Covering yourself in toilet roll as a cheap mummy costume for Halloween
19. A rubber bat on a piece of elastic
20. The Sarah-Jane Adventures
21. In comic strips, where the main character has an angel and an devil version of himself that give good/evil advice
22. Plan 9 From Outer Space
23. That ancient trick where you make your thumb appear detached from your hand
24. The skeleton baddies in arcade game Golden Axe
25. Ghostbusters 2
26. In The Night Garden
    
27. The joke "Why didn't the skeleton attend the ball? Because he had nobody to go with"
28. Evil Michael Knight
29. Cyndi Lauper
30. The flaming skulls in Sega arcade game Wonder Boy
31. Keith Harris & Orville's Messy Monsters game
32. Any October 31st editions of Whizzer and Chips
33. Alan Partridge's 'abstract zombie'
34. The Munsters
35. Meat Loaf
36. Caspar the Friendly Ghost
37. That one from Bananarama dressed as a devil in their video for Venus
38. The drama segment 'Dark Towers' from BBC Schools programme Look & Read
39. Dr and the Medics
40. Shiver and Shake comic
41. Carry On Screaming
42. Spray-on cobwebs
43. Any bored 6 year old girl dressed as a witch for a carnival
44. TNA wrestler Daffney
45. Grotbags the witch from Emu's World
    
46. Red-and-black striped tights
47. A badly-rendered drawing of an Iron Maiden album cover on a school exercise book, made by that greasy-haired kid who smells of marzipan
    
48. Those novelty eyes-on-springs glasses
49. Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde
50. Abbott & Costello meet Frankenstein
    

Wellingborough MP Peter Bone can't handle web critics

Enjoying your internet connection? Like browsing the web? You've been let down.

"You can be punished for the actions of a friend or even a neighbour who has used your Internet connection." - OpenRightsGroup on the Digital Economy Bill.

"Essentially translating as “We can, via the secretary of state for business, take down any website we don’t like simply by citing a connection to some form of copyright infringement” - Jamie Thompson on the Digital Economy Bill.

The UK is ready to get China-style censorship of the internet, with the forthcoming Digital Economy Act that was voted in against the tens of thousands of wishes expressed by ordinary computer users. A despicable collection of MPs voted in favour of online censorship.

Politicians are a breed of people who have a lowly reputation, wedged somewhere between a orphanage arsonist and a commercial radio DJ. With the shameless expenses scandal, and a national economy so broken not even Cash Converters would accept it, there appears to be no hope for MPs trying to prove they share the same DNA as us.

It's no wonder that over half the population would rather vote on Big Brother or whatever Simon-Cowell-fronted sneer-fest is running at the moment. If you're in the company of friends and mention that you take an interest in politics, you may as well have sprayed concentrated halitosis in their faces.

There's simply no interest in Parliament these days, and I think the MPs rather like that. With the heavily articulate wordings of proposed laws, the endless exchange of statistics and monotone speeches, it's no surprise Joe Sixpack doesn't tune in.

Besides, when have you had a politician actually LISTEN to you? They don't do that, do they?

Recently, the Digital Economy Bill was proposed by the Labour government to impose censorship on UK internet services, all in the name of "reducing piracy". Unsurprisingly, it didn't take long to realise that the bill had been lobbied for by the BPI - the UK's record industry. In fact, large portions of this censorship law had been written by the BPI.

We know the record industry is angered at the millions of MP3s available illegally on the internet, and have pushed an anti-piracy agenda so heavily that they ignore the bigger picture - why piracy occurs in the first place.

Digital files are easy to copy and distribute, they cost almost next-to-nothing, they don't take up physical space and are theoretically infinite in supply. Compared to the physical product (such as a CD or vinyl record), there's a lot of convenience.

Yet the record industries still persist in selling their downloads at equivalent prices to the CD. They get a bigger margin, refusing to pass on any of the cost savings to the consumer.

Let's not forget the record industry tried to ban MP3 players back in 1999, so I don't have sympathy for the wailing dinosaurs. Imagine if they got their way! We know they spent most of the noughties coming up with rival formats, all of them were cumbersome and highly restrictive. No wonder they failed!

However, one small victory for the record industry is that Peter Mandelson recently holidayed with record boss David Geffen. And just by pure "coincidence", Mandelson later decided to put forward a law forcing all UK ISPs to regulate what you look at online, in the interests of copyright.

Those of you who've read this blog will know how I exposed Lily Allen for her copyright-infringement, along with Lily's response to me falling flat on its face.

Well, last week I discovered that Peter Mandelson has followed in Lily's footsteps as a copyright hypocrite. Again, I reported the story to techdirt.com, who are always keen to showcase the "do as I say, not as I do" arrogance of politicians and musicians who insist copyright should be stronger, despite masses of economic studies showing that lighter copyright laws benefit both publishers, creators and consumers alike.

My local MP is Peter Bone from the Conservative Party. In the run up to the Digital Economy Bill being debated (and I use that term loosely), various online compaigns were set up encouraging us to contact our local MP.

Thanks to the wonderful TheyWorkForYou.com website, it's easy to write a letter to Peter Bone. As my friends know, I'm not exactly a fan of the Conservatives, but I did vote Tory in protest at Labour's support of the ongoing illegal and unethical wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There you have it, I'm admitting to having voted Tory. (Well, in the ward I lived in at the time, it was just Labour vs Conservative, no other options.)

I confess to having not known much about Peter before. I do recall my friend Kat Fiction a few years back, stating her shock at how the Tories prepared an election leaflet for Mr Bone, using the fact he resembled then-England-manager Sven Goran-Eriksson as a positive campaign point.

Oh hang on, there is something quite disturbing about Peter Bone. He opposed the minimum wage, and continues to oppose it. Such was his conviction that Peter Bone paid just 87p-an-hour to one of his workers back in 1995. "The minimum wage would condemn hundreds of thousands to the dole queue", he was quoted as saying.

However, when it comes to Peter Bone employing his wife, he thinks she deserves £40,000 a year.

So, should I have anything to do with this hypocritical charlatan? Something else stirred the memory banks. Drinking buddy Richard Lockwood wrote to to ask why the MP supported the laughable bunkum known as 'homeopathy', which would clearly be a waste of NHS money. The reply he got back from Peter Bone was, er, minimal to say the least.

Still, I felt so strongly about the Digital Economy Bill (and still do), that I decided to write to Peter Bone and see where it would take me. It wouldn't matter if I didn't like the man, what would matter is him speaking against it. After all, a lot of businesses in Wellingborough do depend on an open web to do commerce. I'm affected by any such changes, being a local web-designer, web-programmer and SEO consultant.

A look at Peter Bone's voting record shows some signs of a soul. He wanted an investigation into the Iraq war, voted against the government's draconian 'anti-terror' laws and is heavily against ID cards. Pretty commendable, I have to say.

However, with his stance against gay equal rights, he shows himself up as an embarrassing social dinosaur, no better than the US politicians who denied civil rights for black people. The Conservatives try to position themselves as a modern party, but the homophobia isn't far away.

Still, I announced my intention to write to Peter Bone, urging him to vote against the Digital Economy Bill, and a few of my friends followed my lead. I even got a reply:

One of my key roles as your representative in Parliament is to listen to my constituents and campaign on your behalf - in fact, this is the whole philosophy behind my "Listening to Wellingborough and Rushden" campaign.

You have raised an important issue and I have accordingly forwarded it onto the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport so that the government can fully take your opinions into account. I have also requested a response from the Department and I will, of course, forward on to you any that I may receive.

Sounding very nice indeed. Unfortunately, Peter Bone could not be bothered to turn up to the second reading of the bill. Actually, to be fair, 95% of MPs - our so-called 'public servants' - also could not be bothered to attend this essentially important debate.

And thus, we entered the next step as the technically-illiterate MPs present outnumbered those who actually understood the importance of a free internet for the UK's economy.

Yeah, cheers Peter Bone. Well done for your apathy. Well done for ignoring such an important issue. Obviously sitting in a £15k-a-year rented flat paid for by us taxpayers was a much better option?

I wrote back, airing my disappointments on his lack of action, and my intentions to blog about his failure to represent his constituents' views. His response:

Thank you for your e-mail. You will know that I have one of the best voting
records of any Conservative Member of Parliament and my attendance in the
House of Commons is second to none. You will also know that I fully support
the Conservative Party on the Digital Economy Bill. I am sure you will also
appreciate that sometimes Members of Parliament have to be in their
constituency and not in the Palace of Westminster. Unfortunately, Members
of Parliament are not able to be in two places at once.

With regards to your attack on me for being anti-gay-rights, you are
entitled to your opinion, but it is not correct. You may be interested to
hear that I was recently voted by Liberal Democratic Voice to be one of the
62 most Liberal non-Lib Dem MPs.

The "you are entitled to your opinion" statement is such a poor cop-out. A terrible cliche that is a verbal white flag. It signifies the fear of his old-fashioned views being held up to rationality.

In a similar fashion, he states that he supports the Bill (Conservatives back it) yet will not even dare discuss why he supports it.

I'd like to put it to this pauper-wage-loving technically-illiterate gay-despising taxpayer-money-wasting waste-of-space that he dare not enter into any debate, because he knows he will lose. He's backing whatever the Conservative Party say, because that's his easy career - claiming huge expenses from hard working people, denying them rights, imposing censorship and wishing he could cut their wages to a fraction of what they are.

Naturally, I won't be voting for this knowledge-lacking tosswit, and since his views have been spread via Facebook, other locals agree...

"I'm not voting for that useless twat, who didn't have the honesty to admit, on his first reply that he had no intention of voting against the bill."

"it is HIS JOB to be entitled to MY opinion. So the oily, lazy waste of space can drop dead."

"I've emailed him 6 times. Had 3 responses, two of which were pretty much stock letters and the third was a little more detailed, but boiled down to "I'll be talking to the secretary of state about it". My question was explicitly about his behaviour, nothing to do with the government or anyone else.

Now, my understanding is that an MP is supposed to represent their constituents. Ignoring them is not representation.... See more

I want him gone, unless he learns to
1) Read
2) Turn up on debates that matter instead of the pointless ones that just bump up his numbers"

"make all the candidates in a constituency work as a waiter in a 'Frankie n Bennys' for a month....whoever gets the most tips in that time obviously has the right work ethic and becomes the MP.....shimples!!"

"if they could be in two places at once they'd be claiming expenses for both"

To conclude, I've just realised why Peter Bone is in favour of a law that censors the web.