I interrupt this desert of blogging mostly to wax lyrical about Four Lions. Yes, Chris Morris made a film! Yes, the same Chris Morris who created the best television of the 1990s! And yes, you ought to go see it!

It was this kind of instant enthusiasm for a slapstick satire about suicide bombers which got Lucy and I to make plans to see it on Saturday, as it happens. (Bit of a weird day, incidentally, since my mum and three of her friends also found their way to mine for tea - forcing me to resort to using the novelty 'sloping' mug which is the perfect demonstration, should you ever require one, for why mugs generally don't slope.) But since Four Lions didn't suggest itself to be the world's most romantic film ever, I also gathered a fine collection of people-who-don't-revise-through-the-night to come along. And so it was that Oliver, Simon, Eamon, Patrick, Caroline, Flora, Matthew, Laura, Lucy and I (phew) ended up at the Cambridge Picturehouse on Saturday night, facing a rather perturbing snaking queue and worrying mutterings that it was totally sold out.

Being resourceful people, however, we began a trek to the Out Of Town Soulless Multiplex (TM) which - amusingly - is located right next to the 'Cambridge Central' Travelodge. But not wanting to face the embarrassing prospect of being turned away once again, I also commandeered Caroline's iPhone in order to book us all tickets. And it was at this precise moment that I first came face-to-face (or voice-to-voice) with those awful automated phone booking systems - y'know, the ones which require you to walk down the street shouting out "FOUR LIONS" or "YES" or "STUDENT" at regular intervals. (And why waste my time offering me a 'plot summary of the film you have just selected'? Does anyone actually use this?!)

Anyway, the point is that the whole experience reinforced my view that there is probably no crime in Cambridge at all, because I was walking down the road desperately trying to punch debit card details into an iPhone and still nothing happened - a rather pathetic indictment of the ability of local criminals to respond quickly to opportunities. (Although I suppose I'll have to eat my words if I log onto internet banking later to find that I've bought a yacht or something.) But yes. We got there, and it really was a superb film, and I highly recommend it.

(Oh, and this week's Doctor Who was similarly excellent. Though I hope it doesn't persuade a generation of kids to throw themselves off hill-tops in the hopes of waking up in the TARDIS. At least save that for the night before your HAP exam, kids!)

I thought trivial news was at least supposed to have the element of surprise?

Dear James Murdoch,

I'm really, really sorry. Really, I am. I've let you down so really terribly badly, and the least I can do is apologise right here and now.

As you so rightly noted, the BBC's callous 'dumping' of content onto the people who paid for it makes it tremendously hard for hard-working media executives like yourself to get by. You toil away, day after day, and yet with little or nothing to show for it. But the truth is, James, it's not just the BBC frustrating your ability to put a roof over your head. It's also me.

That's right. Over the course of my life I've been shovelled money by the government. Child benefit, free education, student loans... I'm a tax-funded monster, really, just as bad as the BBC. Under your intelligent and wise definition of the word - which I heartily suggest we adopt unquestiongly - I am an arm of the state.

And what do I turn around and do with this unfair funding advantage? Why, produce this very blog of course! I pour out content here - all for free - which sucks up my readers' time and interest away from you. Why read The Sun when you can read The Musings of a Red Dalek, indeed?

The BBC - and me - are both total anachronisms. We belong to a bygone age, and we must adapt to a future of unlimited choice and competition by closing ourselves down immediately so as to provide less choice and competition. It might sound severe, but this really is the only way of ensuring that your business model - handed down from father to son in one of those timeless traditions which we must all surely protect and cherish - can remain exactly the same in this so-very-changed world.

The alternative is truly too ghastly to even consider, and I'm glad you came up with the ingenious idea of using George Orwell's little-known novel 1984 as a warning against the dangers of having the power of the media concentrated in too few hands. Orwell himself, a fervent defender of the unregulated free market, would have well approved.

So battle on, brave James - ever the feisty underdog. I too share your confidence in the power of privatised plurality and I firmly believe you will attract a broad range of supporters in the media world. From The Sun, News of the World, The Times and The Sunday Times to The Wall Street Journal, Sky and Fox - the plucky independent media will stand with you in your hour of need.

And so will I. This will be my last blog thrusted onto the world without appropriate recompense, destroying your very lifeblood. Regular readers should look out for eye-watering annual subscription offers, starting soon.


With very best wishes and - again - my sincerest apologies,


Dominic Self
dominicself.co.uk

At the request of Esmaa Self, Twitter friend with an obviously cool surname, I thought I'd do a little review of Ground Control by Anna Minton. The book is about the social and psychological impact of British city and housing design, a topic which - to anyone who's heard me go on about how nice the centre of Leeds is without cars - is clearly a topic close to my heart. It's also an unabashed polemic against privatisation, the decline of local democracy and British attitudes towards shared spaces and crime.

Divided into three parts, the first - 'The City' - deals with the creeping privitisation of large areas of formerly public land in cities, to be policed and controlled by private security firms with their own rules about what behaviour is acceptable within. 'The Home' attacks the growth of gated communities and 'defensible space', which acts to increase fear of crime as well as strangers in general, robbing cities of the natural protection afforded by strangers in public places. It also lays into the termination of new social housebuilding under Thatcher, and the community-displacing regeneration projects of more recent years. Finally, 'Civil Society' challenges the idea that anti-social behaviour is at the root of further crime, arguing that policies such as Blair's 'Respect' agenda are counter-productive in attempting to institutionalise that which can only ever really be provided organically by local communities.

I'm in two minds about this book, and although overall it is well deserving of being read, I'll start with the negatives in order to end on the high which it deserves. Firstly: it's perhaps obvious that this is the first full length book from a successful journalist, as there is sometimes an odd pacing which betrays a determination not to go for more than a couple of pages before repeating the central argument of the piece. (She also misuses the word 'ironically'. Frequently.) More seriously, I'm wary of international comparisons which fall into the oft-repeated technique of reducing the US to wild freemarketism and 'nice' continental Europe. Consider the following:

"This is a very European way to enjoy life, window shopping, wandering around, doing nothing, going to the market, taking in the café society of the continental squares and piazzas... rather than spending our way out of recession, we need to look at real alternatives, based on a more European rather than American model, which will moderate the architecture of extreme capitalism..."

Really, though? Europe has one homogeneous model, stretching right across the continent? And before we write off America, shouldn't we remember that this is the same country which maintains a ginormous system of National Parks? I'm not saying there's nothing at all in the comparison, but it's become such a trope that I'd like a little more nuance and case study rather than resorting to 'Europe' and 'America'. Furthermore, it's a dangerous path to go down, because if you associate 'markets' with 'America' (i.e. one side of a binary divide) then you lose the ability to suggest workable market mechanisms by which a different culture might be achieved. It is all very well suggesting that there is massive market failure in planning and housing - there is - but that doesn't mean that the state cannot alter economic incentives in order to change things.

However, this shouldn't obscure the fact that I do agree with the majority of Ground Control - its central arguments are largely valid, and on an issue which deserves wider public debate. It is important that shopping alone does not come to dominate city centres, and that we retain public, open spaces where citizens are governed by the common rule of law, not private security rules. If we don't then politics becomes powerless, and so do people. Gated communities in Britain are as vile as they are totally unnecessary. Banning councils from investing 'Right To Buy' profits in more social housing was an unqualified policy disaster, fermenting the tensions which we see today being exploited by the likes of the BNP. And, more often than not, it is indeed fear of crime which is a far more debilitating problem than actual crime itself. Segregation by wealth will make both worse.

Minton is very polite, and so never says anything like '...and we need thriving British cities, not more suburbia'. So I'm going to say it instead: ...and we need thriving British cities, not more suburbia. Suburbia can, of course, inculcate shared public spaces, but does it really have the scale to answer today's problems? Young people complain that there is nothing to do, the elderly find local services increasingly deemed unsustainable (c.f. the Post Office), whilst everyone needs an alternative to the ghastly reliance on the private car to shuttle back and forwards from place to place without ever really travelling. And aren't the cities best placed to provide that infrustructure, that diversity, that 'hustle and bustle' which Minton euphemistically refers to? A place has got to have more than shopping, but it's also got to have more than housing plus the odd corner shop. British cities may have their problems, but they're also worth fighting for, and we abandon them at our peril.

Don't worry Tash, I did love it!

Yup, I'm just back from finally seeing Slumdog Millionaire with Oliver and Owen at the Picturehouse, Paper Planes still ringing in my ears. It's the film that absolutely everybody has told me to go and see and I don't have much to add to the many, many blogs I've read about it already, really. It's a great film, wonderfully made, with a plot that you know is going to end on a fulfilling, heartwarming and somewhat sentimental note but - y'know - sometimes that's not a bad thing. I can't always do grim. It was also the perfect time for me to see this kind of film, at the end of a long essay-writing day where I'd handed it in about ten minutes before the deadline. At the point in the weekly cycle you suddenly get filled with a rush of satisfaction and contentment (the tiredness kicks in tomorrow) so it was lovely to relax and let the cinema wash over me. I am curious about how the film has gone down amongst the Indian public generally - is the depiction of the slums sensationalist, voyeuristic, unfair? I don't know, and I'm not really in the mood for digging deep into the politics of it at the moment to be honest. It was good.