The Joy of Six 1492

"It’s a well-worn tactic: Say something obviously offensive and watch as the media debates whether you were right, actually. The result is that the state of general discourse moves further to the right, the ratchet effect in action." Don't fall into the Nick Timothy trap, warns Mic Wright.

Helen Maguire exposes planners' failure to consider women's safety: "Simple issues like lighting dictate who feels able to use public space after dark. Many women plan their routes based on lighting, avoiding dark shortcuts or taking longer paths home simply to stay on well-lit streets. Some pay for taxis to avoid walking along unlit roads altogether, a luxury that not everyone can afford."

"Quietly, our country is moving, state by state and executive order by executive order, towards policies that all but dismantle the rights of those deemed mentally ill. In the US, both Republican and Democratic legislators have applauded the trend toward seemingly humane policies that lower the threshold for involuntary psychiatric commitment and assertive, non-consensual treatment in the community." Nancy Burke on mental health and the assault on autonomy in Trump's America.

Georgina Brewis and Sam Blaxland consider the long history of student finance: "It is hard to see successive campaigns against repayable loans or fee increases as anything other than a series of failures. But it is also clear that many of the support systems students today take for granted arose out of such activism, from student discounts to subsidised canteens to union shops and hardship funds."

Emily Temple tells how J.R.R. Tolkien stopped W.H. Auden writing a book about him.

A run of Japanese films released around the millennium, and bracketed together as 'J-Horror', gave new life to the ghost story. In 2026, says Ray Newman, they’re still exciting.

The last episode of Shoestring: The Dangerous Game

This post is written for the 12th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon on Terence Towles Canote's blog A Shroud of Thoughts. Click on the image above to go to a video of The Dangerous Game.

Shoestring was different. Both the character and the programme were different. A rare BBC show built around a private detective, it ran for two seasons and was screened in 1979 and 1980.

Eddie Shoestring, Radio West’s “private ear”, was a modern hero – so modern that he had suffered a breakdown after working with computers – and his eccentricities immediately cohered to form a believable character. 

I remember my mother complaining that the show was “puerile” and, while I wouldn’t agree with that, there was something boyish about Eddie himself, with his innocence and curiosity. Though he did run into some serious bad hats from time to time, he was to an extent living out a fantasy of being a private detective amid the benign home of a Bristol local radio station.

Two Shoestring novelisations were published around the time the show was screened. In one of them he was warned off a case because “this is a businessman’s city,” and as a young councillor later in the Eighties I identified with him. No one was going to ask me to join the golf club or the Freemasons.

Enter Trevor Eve

Trevor Eve, who played Eddie, was little known when he was cast in the lead of this new BBC show. He had come to notice playing Paul McCartney in Willy Russell’s play John, Paul, George, Ringo ... and Bert, which opened at the Liverpool Everyman and later transferred to London’s West End. 

Robert Banks Stewart says in the BBC documentary The Cult of Shoestring that he had seen Eve directed by Laurence Olivier in a Granada TV production of Hindle Wakes and been immensely impressed by him. He championed Eve against the better-known actors who were being considered for the role of Shoestring and got his way.

Helped by an intermittent ITV strike, the early episodes of Shoestring won audiences of up to 21 million in its Sunday evening slot – a figure that is unthinkable for any British show now in our multi-channel world – making Eve a star.

Essentially playing himself

The regular supporting cast was Doran Godwin as Shoestring’s long-suffering landlady and occasional love, Liz Crowther as Radio West’s receptionist and Michael Medwin as the station’s boss.

Doran Godwin was a more experienced stage and television actress than Eve whose credits included the lead role in a BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma 1972. Liz Crowther is the daughter of the popular comedian and television host Leslie Crowther, who as a child played Lucy in a 1967 BBC adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. She had returned to acting a year or two before she was cast in Shoestring and is still working today.

I wrote about Michael Medwin’s childhood and acting career when I covered The Intruder for Terence Towles Canote's 12th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon. By the time Shoestring was made, he had long been concentrating on the business side of the film and theatre business, and with notable success. 

So when Medwin played the smooth station boss Don Satchley, who was always fretting about how much Eddie’s investigations were going to cost Radio West, he was essentially playing himself.

All sorts of interesting actors turned up in the series. Harry H. Corbett, playing one of the nastier villains Eddie encountered, shook off years of Harold Steptoe to remind you he had once been Joan Littlewood’s star Shakespearian at Stratford East. Kevin Whatley made his first screen appearance as a professional footballer, and Daniel Day Lewis his first adult screen appearance as a DJ.

Trevor Eve after Shoestring

Shoestring came to an end after two series because Trevor Eve wanted to move on with his career and feared he might become known for only this one role. He soon found success on the stage, winning an Olivier Award for his performance in Children of a Lesser God, and has appeared in films, but has remained best known for his work on television. 

He played the equally unconventional much angrier Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd, head of a police unit that investigates cold cases, in Waking the Dead, for nine series between 2000 and 2011, totalling 92 episodes. 

He is now seen, like John Thaw and James Bolam, as a first-rate actor who has made his greatest contribution on the small screen.

The last edition of Shoestring ever made

The episode I have chosen is episode 10 of its second series, The Dangerous Game, which was the last edition of Shoestring ever made – it may be because the series finished so soon that it is fondly remembered. It certainly went out on a high with this one, which displays both Eddie Shoestring in knight in shining armour mode and the series’ sense of humour. He quizzes a department store buyer who turns out to be acting as Santa (“One of the perks of the job. Market research, if you like. I do it every Christmas.”), only to find he is a big Eddie Shoestring and Radio West fan.

A nurse talks to Eddie about a boy who has been admitted to hospital with burns and an eye injury – she is concerned that he and his father are not telling the truth about how he was hurt. After making himself a thorough nuisance to the father, the father admits that his son was injured when the transformer of an electric game he had bought him (the boy’s birthday s a couple of days before Christmas) blew up in his face. Eddie is then faced with the task of tracking down all the games that have been sold before they are opened as presents on Christmas morning.

We see him haunting the shops and markets of Bristol as seasonal music spills from every radio and even the Salvation Army band. This diegetic music makes the show feel absurdly Christmassy, and the city was always part of the show’s attraction, notably here in Eddie’s last-minute dash over the Clifton Suspension Bridge in the small hours of Christmas morning to retrieve the one dangerous game he has not yet located.

Son of British film royalty

The supporting cast in The Dangerous Game is impressive. The importer of the toy, who turns out not to be the villain we imagined, is played by Bert Kwouk, who was the go-to Chinese actor in British films and television for decades – he was in everything from Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Deep End to Last of the Summer Wine via the Pink Panther films.

The injured boy’s parents are Michael Elphick and Celia Imrie – the former a big name in British television and the latter about to become one, as well as enjoying great success on stage and in films to this day. And the boy himself is played by Tom Bolt who, as I discovered while writing this, is the son of British film royalty. His mother is the Oscar-nominated actress Sarah Miles and his father the double Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Bolt.

The Duke of Wellington's daughter

Writing this has reminded me just how much I enjoyed Shoestring and how much fun it was. I have linked to a video of The Dangerous Game at the top of this post – just click on the image. (I’m sorry about all the advertisements.) If it disappears from the web because of some nonsense about “copyright”, I shall replace it with the documentary The Cult of Shoestring, which is well worth a watch anyway. 

If nothing else, you will learn how the Duke of Wellington’s daughter played the key role in persuading the BBC to broadcast the show in the plum Sunday evening slot.

The team behind Shoestring went on to make Bergerac, an equally successful police detective series set on the Channel Island of Jersey. But we leave Eddie Shoestring asleep among the ruins of a Christmas party that he has missed while saving children from injury. 

The streets of Bristol were only intermittently mean, and perhaps Eddie was a little tarnished by experience and sometimes afraid, but he was far from mean and people loved him. 

Dog solves murder: Labrador cracks 160-year-old case when he digs up bottle of Victorian poison in the garden

Photo by Grant Durr from Unsplash

The judges bid you unclutch your pearls, because the Mail receives today's Headline of the Day Award.

They also say this story reminds them of that time the head of the victim on a notorious 19th-century murder was found in David Attenborough's garden.

The Joy of Six 1491

Mariano delli Santi is concerned by the Information Commissioner's Office and its enthusiasm for age-verification: "The ICO are actively encouraging platforms to adopt more invasive verification technologies, at a time when privacy violations and malpractice are starting to emerge within the industry. Further, the ICO characterisation of age assurance technology as 'advanced' and 'readily available' comes as hundreds of computer scientists call for a moratorium on the roll out of this technology and warn about the technical limitations and infeasibility of this approach."

"The parental rights movement frames the conflict as parental rights versus government control, completely disregarding children's rights, but the actual constitutional balance has never been between parents and the state alone. It is more of a triangular structure in which the child is a distinct rights-bearing person, the parent exercises authority in trust, and the state acts as a backstop when that trust is fundamentally breached." Steve Kennedy examines the American right's enthusiasm for parents' rights.

Brian McHugh welcomes the growth of repair café culture in the UK.

Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri pays tribute to Jürgen Habermas by highlighting his study of the coffee houses of Georgian London.

"Watkins' film has only gained in relevance, with the US once again caught in endless foreign conflict, the undermining of civilian freedoms by the Patriot Act, the untold horrors of US detention compounds in Guantánamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan, and an Administration exploiting the politics of polarisation to its own ends ('You're either with us, or you're against us') in a land where domestic 'Culture Wars' continue to reflect bloodier struggles abroad." This article by rantbit on Peter Watkins' film Punishment Park was written 10 years ago, but it and the film sound even more relevant today.

"Craven House, a fledgling novel by ... Hamilton, fits right into this groove, set as it is in a West London boarding house during the early part of the 20th century. While Craven isn’t as polished as Hamilton’s later work – he was only twenty-two when the book was first published in 1926 – there is still much to enjoy here, particularly in the use of the setting as a vehicle for fiction." Jacquiwine looks at Craven House by Patrick Hamilton.

The Somerset & Dorset Railway branch to Burnham-on-Sea

The YouTube blurb for this video says:

The Friendly Line to Burnham was one of a series of delightful programmes in 1980 under the general title of The Seaside Trains. The Somerset & Dorset Burnham branch, which was a casualty of Beeching, typifies many such lines throughout the country. Today, part of the old trackbed across the Somerset Levels is a cycleway and footpath, whilst other sections have more or less vanished from the map completely. 

A feature of this little line was the number of level crossings, some 14 in total, some of which were manned by (chiefly lady) crossing keepers living in an adjacent little properties, some so far out on a limb that they were dependant on the railway to bring in their water supplies.

The branch ran from Highbridge to Burnham-on-Sea. It was closed to regular passenger services, long before the Beeching Report, on 28 October 1951. Excursion traffic continued until 1962 and the goods depot remained open until 1963.

Landspeed record celebration hit by parking tickets

As so often these days, BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The judges you thought you would enjoy this from the story below:

Southport Liberal Democrats said the parking tickets were an embarrassment to Sefton Council and claimed many tickets have now been rescinded after protests. 

The council and the office of the High Sheriff of Merseyside have been contacted for comment. 

Posting on Facebook the Lib Dems also criticised the council for charging the organisers for opening the public toilets and for refreshments provided for the mayor and High Sheriff's party.

On Liberty: New edition gives Harriet Taylor her due

An edition of On Liberty published this month is the first to name Harriet Taylor Mill as co-author alongside John Stuart Mill, reports the philosophy news site Daily Nous.

John Stuart Mill acknowledged Harriet Taylor's part in the writing of the work in his Autobiography:

With regard to the thoughts [expressed in the book], it is difficult to identify any particular part or element as being more hers than all the rest. The whole mode of thinking of which the book was the expression, was emphatically hers. But I also was so thoroughly imbued with it that the same thoughts naturally occurred to us both.

Yet On Liberty has only ever appeared with just the one name on its cover.

Daily Nous says there is objective evidence that On Liberty is the work of two hands:

In a 2022 article in Utilitas (on which part of the introduction to the new On Liberty is based), Schmidt-Petri, Schefczyk, and Osburg lay out one reason: "stylometric analyses" provide some strong (though not on their own decisive) evidence to “say with some degree of confidence that JSM did not write On Liberty all by himself and that HTM played a part in putting parts of the text into words.” 

And what are stylometric analyses? "Stylometry extracts the writing style of a person from his or her texts and then compares this 'stylome' to the stylome of texts the author of which is yet to be identified."

But you don't need stylometry to tell you that On Liberty is not typical of John Stuart Mill's writings. It sets out to "assert one very simple principle", whereas Mill is usually well aware of the complexity that attends weighty questions. 

So his book Considerations on Representative Government, while supporting parliamentary democracy, hedges the principle around with all sorts of checks and safeguards in an attempt to ensure that parliament will act in the national interest rather than in the interests of a simple majority of the electorate.

Daily Nous also mentions Misha Glenny's first outing as presenter of the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time, which dealt with On Liberty. 

Harriet Taylor's contribution is discussed there too and, having had occasion to read On Liberty again recently, I concur with the comment that, who every wrote it, the text could have done with a good edit before it was published.

Oh, those Russians: Antony Beevor on Rasputin and the Romanovs

The British military historian Sir Antony Beevor is busy promoting his new book Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs. Here he in the guest on Jackson van Uden's History with Jackson podcast.

Not only did I love Sylvia by Focus when I was 12, I could name all the Romanov tsars in their correct order. I had developed a fascination with Russian history after reading Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie.

Sadly, that knowledge has been lost over the years, along with reams of chess opening theory and the ability to construct proofs in formal logic.

The Joy of Six 1490

"Our reviewers found that the guests or 'experts' are predominantly drawn from a pool of right wing commentators, politicians, polling organisations, or think tanks. The supposedly counterbalancing minority voices often have little real stature or expertise and are challenged or interrupted much more than the guests who agree with the presenter’s views." Alan Rusbridger introduces The New World's special investigation of GB News and of Ofcom's abdication of its role.

Thomas Worth sets out the threat the invigorated Greens pose to Liberal Democrat ambitions: "While it isn’t likely the Greens will take seats from us, it is possible they will prevent us from making gains by splitting our vote and allowing Reform or a wounded Conservative Party to slip through the middle. In Sussex, signs of this happening were occurring even before Zack Polanski took over the Greens."

Annabel Hoare argues that Louis Theroux's Inside the Manosphere opted for superficial spectacle over serious scrutiny.

"British children are not getting shorter, despite claims to the contrary. In fact, they are getting taller. But this is not good news. When my colleagues and I analysed national data on child height, we found that the trend is largely explained by rising childhood obesity and widening inequalities." Andrew Moscrop shares his research.

"Pym’s comic novels, on the surface, are simple, sometimes even silly, stories about sisters, village life, petty church and office politics, and the quiet lives of maiden aunts. But underneath, these are novels about love, loneliness, and longing; social connections, or lack thereof, plus that curiosity about others which is fuel for gossip; and the precarity of an unmarried woman’s place in society." Kerry Clare on the importance of Barbara Pym.

Philip Wilkinson discovers an "Edwardian baroque monster, which housed police, ambulance, and fire stations, together with a coroner’s court, for much of the 20th century," in Manchester's London Road.

London bars shun Margot Robbie’s gin over shellfish allergen concerns

Ladies and gentlemen, we have our Headline of the Day. Well done to everyone at the Guardian.

Focus: Sylvia

Sylvia was that rare thing, a European hit in the UK in 1973. Despite being an instrumental, it got as high as no. 4 in the singles chart.

And Focus's guitarist Jan Akkerman finished near the top in music papers' polls for the best guitarist for a good while afterwards.

Me? I loved this record when I was 12.

There's magnolia, that's for remembrance

It's almost four years since my mother died. A strong memory from her last days is the magnolia at the end of the street. I saw it every time I went out on an errand.

As it was so sunny today, I went to see if the tree is still thriving. And it is.

T.S. Eliot rejected George Orwell's Animal Farm for Faber & Faber

Stefan Collini has reviewed the latest volume of T.S. Eliot's letters for the London Review of Books. It covers the years 1942-4, and the most striking thing about the review is the revelation of how little time Eliot spent writing poetry and how much he devoted to his duties for the publishers Faber & Faber.

One advantage that firm had over other publishers was that it was based in Russel Square rather than the traditional book-trade quarter of Pasternoster Row, which stood in the shadow of St Paul's and was heavily bombed in the London Blitz.

Collini also writes about Eliot's most famous business decision: his rejection of George Orwell's Animal Farm:

In July 1944 Eliot wrote what became one of the more celebrated rejection letters in literary history, turning down Orwell’s Animal Farm. This letter has been extensively cited by Orwell scholars, but the annotation in the present edition, based on the Faber archive, adds some fascinating detail to the story. 

Eliot’s letter has always seemed a little unsteady in tone: he declares that he cannot "see any reason of prudence or caution to prevent anybody from publishing this book – if he believed in what it stands for", but concludes that he and the nameless fellow director who he claimed had also read the manuscript "have no conviction (and I’m sure none of the other directors would have) that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time". 

Almost twenty years later, struggling to recall the episode accurately, the ageing Eliot did concede that rejecting the book "was a great mistake on our part". Later still, Fredric Warburg, chairman of Secker and Warburg, the eventual publishers of Animal Farm, claimed that Geoffrey Faber had once shown him Eliot’s report on the script, but at that point (after the deaths of both Eliot and Faber) no such report could be found in the files. Faber himself had been out of London at the time of Orwell’s submission and had not read it, so it seems to have been rejected principally on the basis of Eliot’s judgment. 

The rejection letter suggests that the book's "positive point of view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing", but other unresolved questions aside, there is a certain piquancy in seeing Eliot, by this point well known for his conservative political views, appearing unwilling to publish a critique of Soviet communism at a time when the USSR was Britain’s essential wartime ally. 

With hindsight, we can also see that had Faber and Faber accepted the book, which was an almost unmatched commercial success, it would have transformed the financial position of the firm to which Eliot was so devoted. 

Collini, incidentally, quotes some of Eliot's verdicts on his contemporaries – Orwell is "a very queer bird".

Now Ed Davey is implying that Nigel Farage is right

Early last week I sent off my latest piece for Central Bylines. In it I praised Ed Davey's willingness to challenge the right's claims to patriotism:

People on the left tend to be uneasy about patriotism – the last refuge of the scoundrel and all that – but it’s remarkable how many right-wing politicians and commentators give every impression of disliking their own country. They hanker after the fake past they see online in AI images, but have little love for the country as it really was or is.

By the time it appeared, Ed Davey had issued this video.

Winston Churchill helped defeat fascism in Europe. He deserves better than being replaced by a badger 🦡

[image or embed]

— Ed Davey (@eddavey.libdems.org.uk) 11 March 2026 at 17:30

Far from challenging the right, this as good as admits they are correct. Yes, it implies, the country is run by an elite of woke politicians who hold everything we Britons love in contempt.

Ed even starts with "Now they're going to take Winston Churchill of our fivers...", which is a journalistic tactic designed to give the impression that the isolated incident you are writing about is in fact only the latest in a long catalogue of outrages. A hard-right commentator could have used exactly the same angle.

In this video, the Liberal Democrats are adopting Labour's failed strategy of telling people "Reform are right about everything but you mustn't vote for them."

I sometimes fear that some of Ed's advisers are a little too online. Remember when they wrote a tweet for him expressing his shock at the shooting of Charlie Kirk? Had Ed even heard of him?

Anyway, let me end with a photograph caption from James Hawes's new The Shortest History of Ireland that's relevant to those advisers' choice of music:

The past is a strange country: Howth gun-runners Mary Spring Rice and Molly Childers aboard the yacht Asgard. From Limerick and Boston respectively, they – and Molly's novelist husband Erskine – were radical Irish Nationalists from the WASP elite: Mary's first cousin Cecil, author of the imperial touch-song I Vow to Thee My Country, was right then Britain's ambassador to the United States.

When John Smith's Magnet Ales were advertised across York

When I was a student in York the corner shops in the backstreets all had advertising John Smith's Magnet Ales.

The shops have mostly closed and, while the name Magnet still survives, the beer is no longer brewed at John Smith's Tadcaster brewery but produced under licence by Cameron's in Hartlepool.

I did find a couple of relics of Magnet advertising when I went hunting for the blue plaque on Frankie Howerd's childhood home in York.

Sign up to be informed each time a new issue of Liberator drops

The next issue of Liberator – "The magazine for all Liberals" – will drop in a couple of weeks. If you'd like to be notified as soon as it's posted on the magazine's website, then add your email address to the magazine's mailing list. 

Liberator publishes six issues a year. Once you're on the list you will receive an email each time a new one appears. You can download issues from the magazine's website as a pdf free of charge.

There's also a large archive of back numbers of Liberator to explore there. See the recent issues and the archive of older issues. 

The Joy of Six 1489

Searchlight has the measure of Reform UK's leader: "It’s a script Nigel Farage knows well. Candidates or causes closely linked to him, perhaps even bearing his name and his photograph, make large, attention-grabbing promises. Votes are won on the strength of them. Then, once the votes are counted the promises are declared – with an air of wounded innocence – to have never been made, and certainly not by him."

AI fakes spread disinformation but, asks Anna Merlan, is the distrust they create even worse?

"Julie Critchlow, one of the mums involved, told The Times in 2006 that much of the food they were delivering was healthy, and that the accusation that the kids were given chips every day was ‘such a lie’. 'We were taking all sorts – baked potatoes, salads, tuna sandwiches. You try getting teenage girls to eat a hamburger every day. Most of them won’t touch the things.'" Heather Parry looks back twenty years to the media panic in Rotherham which followed the Channel 4 documentary series Jamie’s School Dinners.

Patrick Wadden argues that Medieval Irish people saw themselves as Europeans, not Celts: "The Irish language and people were only labelled as Celtic for the first time in the 18th century. In the rich and varied textual sources that have survived from early Ireland, including annals, saints' lives, laws, and sagas about great heroes such as Cú Chulainn and Fionn Mac Cumhail, the words 'Celt' and 'Celtic' do not appear even once."

"In the case of Peter Grimes, Forster suggests, something is lost. Rather than Grimes as a lugubrious murderer, in Britten’s opera the blame is rather sanctimoniously placed on the townsfolk for misunderstanding him, turning the whole thing into social criticism, which was far from Crabbe’s original. It takes away from the strangeness and mystery of the character of Grimes, from his psychological complexity, but also from the ‘horizontality and mud’ that shape the feeling of the poem and the world it describes." John-Paul Stonnard finds that E.M. Forster did not appreciate the version of George Crabbe's character Peter Grimes presented by Montague Slater, who wrote the libretto for Britten's opera.

Helen Pickles rightly suggests Ripon, Yorkshire's smallest city, as a tourist destination.

Searching for Frankie Howerd in York

I've made it back from York. Our spring conferences always seem to involve too much travel and not enough conference, so I rarely attend them. But it was good to meet old friends and have a look round the city where I took my first degree many years ago.

One sight I made sure of seeing in York this time was the blue plaque on Frankie Howerd's early childhood home. The map suggested you could walk to it through a park that runs along the banks of the Ouse, but the park turned out to be flooded. I was forced to find a more inland route.

There's a reason that Hartoft Street, where I found the plaque, was built so it ended well short of the river and in steps taking you down to the park.

Abul Mogard: In a Studded Procession

I came across this on BBC Radio 3's Night Waves, but what they played was an orchestration of In a Studded Procession rather than the electronic version above. If you want to hear that, and I think it's preferable, then go to Night Waves for 1 March on BBC Sounds and you will find it starting at 35:50.

If you don't want to bother with that, the version here is still very good.

Abul Mogard? Digital in Berlin explains:

Abul Mogard is an alter-ego created by Guido Zen, an Italian musician currently based in Rome. He has performed at renowned venues such as Berlin Atonal, Poesia En Voz Alta, Auditorium San Fedele and South Bank Centre.

The Organ Reframed Festival commissioned him to write a composition for the pipe organ that he performed at London’s Union Chapel with the London Contemporary Orchestra. He has remixed Carl Craig and Fovea Hex (with Brian Eno) and his music has been used for films by Ridley Scott, in BBC TV programmes, accompanying contemporary artworks, and at fashion shows for Ferragamo.

I was reading when In a Studded Procession came on the radio that night, but I soon found myself devoting all my attention to it. The track may sound like film music, but I'd love to see the film.

Standing Stones of Leicestershire and Rutland

Some local lithic goodness from the redoubtable Bob Trubshaw.

The making of Peter Brook's Lord of the Flies (1963)

Lord of the Flies was first filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. Gerald Fell, who died in 2021, was the editor of the film and also a sort of auxiliary cinematographer on the set. Here he talks about the making of the film.

For Central Bylines: Ed Davey takes aim at the unpatriotic right

I have a new article on Central Bylines this morning:

People on the left tend to be uneasy about patriotism – the last refuge of the scoundrel and all that – but it’s remarkable how many right-wing politicians and commentators give every impression of disliking their own country. They hanker after the fake past they see online in AI images, but have little love for the country as it really was or is.

I wrote this before Ed Davey decided that Nigel Farage is right about badgers being woke and we have to have Churchill on our banknotes.

The Joy of Six 1488

"It’s what happens when the NHS has run out of room. It means intimate conversations about cancer, stroke, or dementia in earshot of strangers. It means delays to assessment and treatment, including pain relief, become more likely – dignity stripped away through lack of capacity." Danny Chambers says corridor care will continue for another three years – and that’s not good enough.

Nick Bowes reckons political fragmentation could lead to the most interesting London election results since the 32 boroughs were formed.

"When e-cigarettes first appeared around 2010, they were hailed as a breakthrough: nicotine delivery without the toxic tar and combustion byproducts of traditional cigarettes. Public health bodies cautiously endorsed them as a tool for adult smokers to quit, often citing early claims that vaping was 95 per cent less harmful than smoking. More than a decade later, with millions now vaping regularly, the picture is less clear." Vikram Niranjan reports on warning signs that vaping may not be as benign as we thought.

Black female footballers are praised for their strength, white female footballers are praised for their intelligence. Paul Ian Campbell and Allison Thompson discuss the findings of their research.

Jude Rogers chooses her 10 best folk albums of 2025.

Ray Newman follows in the footsteps of Henry VII, who made a pilgrimage to the holy well of St Anne  near Bristol in 1486: "If you want to stick to something like Henry’s route, you have to push past rows of signs and columns cones, squeeze between temporary fences, evade robotic security sentinels that shout at you if you linger too long, and leap muddy puddles in a road surface turned into no-man’s-land by the constant passing of concrete mixers."

Celebrity dog trainer sues government for £8m over upheaval caused by HS2

The Independent wins our Headline of the Day Award and the judges thought you might enjoy this example of a celebrity dog trainer's work.

Achieving economic growth takes more than booing Nimbys

New housing at Wellington Place, Market Harborough

There's an article on Liberal Democrat Voice today by Steve Wootton announcing the formation of Lib Dems for Growth. The group will have a stall at the York spring conference this weekend.

Economic growth does sound like the answer to our prayers, though the environmental constraints on it are becoming more apparent. But that's not what worries me about the statement from the group that Steve quotes.

Like a lot of people who call for economic growth, it rather assumes that British industry would leap into action and deliver growth at a startling rate if it weren't for the stage army of planning officers and Nimbys that they bring on to be denounced.

As far as there are problems with the planning system, I suspect they run deeper than people getting up petitions against new housing development. For one view of what's wrong, have a look at the paper Dan Davis wrote for Labour Together: Build the rail! Save the snails! How to really fix UK infrastructure planning.

In it he argues:

UK infrastructure projects cost significantly more than European equivalents, and the time and money spent on the pre-construction phase is greater here than in any other country. This is because our system treats projects as "guilty until proven innocent" and provides feedback too late to correct course efficiently. 

Developers, consultants and planning authorities all respond to uncertainty by over-mitigating potential objections. The cause is not environmental regulation itself, but an adversarial planning system that incentivises pre-emptive risk aversion.

But what if the problem lies deeper still? What if our industry isn't well placed to make that great leap forward?

Chris Dillow often writes about the poor quality of British management. He talked about this subject on Nick Cohen's podcast Writing from London a couple of years ago.

And he wrote about it on his own blog not long before that. As with planning, a large part of the problem is systemic rather than down to individual delinquency. When it comes to British management, the problem is that there are perverse incentives that lead to mangers not striving to perform better.

Yet, as Chris points out:

Whether it be efforts to weaken trades unions or to "strengthen work incentives", both Labour and Tory governments have for decades seen their task as ensuring an adequate supply of quiescent labour. Ensuring an adequate supply of good management, by contrast, has barely figured as an objective.

It seems that calling for a higher level of growth in the British economy may be a more radical policy than its enthusiasts realise.