A new academic year

Yep. The new academic year starts today.

For me that means thirty new postgrad broadcast journalism diploma students. I've begun to meet them about the place - in Tesco's for example - though in practice they meet me.

At interview you see people in suits (or the female equivalent) so are hardly prepared for meeting them in standard student attire.

Putting names to faces on a new course is always difficult. Colleagues tell me I do it pretty quickly.

As it happens I know I tend to rely heavily on the hairline to recognise people (this is not a lifestyle choice - it appears to be fairly deeply built-in) so a beany or a new haircut will confuse me more than a suit.

Thus - students with similar hair styles - if I fail to get your names right - forgive me. There is something more fundamental going on here.

Facts are sacred and expensive

Just run across Richard Sambrook's private - as opposed to his BBC sponsored - blog, "Sacred Facts".

Oh dear - how very BBC - even in private.

I admire the sentiment over the howls of derision from a milllion media studies lecturers. It is, of course, a reference to CPScott's famous aphorism about facts being sacred and comment free.

Sambrook last came down to Cardiff to speak to students a couple of years ago (pre-Hutton when he was still THE big cheese at BBC News). He painted a worrying picture of the BBC as this vast journalistic organisation - globally in a league of it's own - unchallengably vast. But never answered the question, why? Who asked the licence payer if they wanted to pay for a global journalistic behemoth? Did anyone ask the treasury for that matter?

These were the unasked questions that floated over the whole session. So these are very expnsive (£2 billion+) "Sacred Facts".

Nonetheless I can point to a number of recent former Cardiff students who are surviving in uncomfortable parts of the world thanks to financial arrangements with the BBC behemoth. And, of course, the BBC accounts to fully 50% of all British broadcast journalism.

This is a hand I'd better stop biting. Long may it live!

GB, UK , does it matter?

Just noticed that, when you select your 'country' on this blog site, selecting UK actually generates GB.

Now there's a difference between "Great Britain" and the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". Does the apparently internationally agreed GBR three letter abbreviation for Britain mean GB or UK? I don't know. Does it matter? I don't know. It only seems to affect people from Northern Ireland.

So does this kind of thing irritate people from Northern Ireland? Again I don't know. All being well the Northern Irish are less pedantic than I am.

Putting the 'p' into 'hamster'

Good news that TV presenter Richard Hammond seems to be out of danger and on the road to recovery following his 300 mph crash.

Apparently he was known by his fellow Top Gear presenters (because he's not the largest of people) as 'the hamster'.

Looking at the BBC website, I was struck by how many of those posting get-well messages to Richard had spelled hamster with a p - hampster.

I'd guess over 50%.

So where does the p in hamster come from? I think from here.

Another one for the OED.

Up to....

Some supplier of broadband has been taken to task recently by the Advertisimg Standards Authority for claiming 'upto 8 megabits a second' speeds. The ASA said that, while occasionally 8 mbs might be achieved, a lower speed was more typical and accordingly the ad should be changed.

"Up to..." is one of those advertising terms that one has got so used to it hardly registers when it masks an actual untruth. I suppose along with its cousin "From..." it's the mainstay of all cut-price 'come-ons'.

So what is one supposed to make of the slogan painted onto the side of many of Cardiff's new 'bendybuses'.

"Upto every five minutes".

The ASA could have a field day with that one.

Popular Culture (1) - Kitchens

I'm in the final stages of speccing (is that how you spell it?) a new kitchen.

The idea is to make my flat more saleable. In other words my new kitchen has to be in tune with the latest in kitchen 'popular culture', and, since I probably don't want to sell for three or four years, I've got to second guess taste three or four years ahead.

Wow! All the magazines (and there are lots of them) don't really seem to consider this aspect of the awfull new kitchen business.

I'm terribly conscious how quickly some things date. How slowly others do. What to do?

I'm relying on my judgement of what looks and feels good to me now - today - over second guessing tomorrow's taste. And the result is alarmingly conservative - in the sense that it's almost indistinguishable from what I have now. Except it isn't filthy and falling to pieces.

Oh dear! A kitchen is a big chunk of money. Unlike a car it isn't resellable. But, as they say, it could add '£££ to the value of your home.'

Why doesn't the academic study of popular culture cover kitchens?

Popular culture (2) - Radio 4, Corrie and Arctic Monkeys

Heard the BBC's Sean Curran neatly trap Sir Ming Campbell on my way home this evening. It happened on Radio 4's PM show as Mr Curran invited Sir Ming to demonstrate his familiarity with popular culture.

A pretty easy question as these things go - did he watch Coronation Street?.

"Oh yes - regularly", replied Sir Ming.

"Who's your favourite character then?" asked the guileless Curran.

Sir Ming faffed about and came up with Bet Lynch. Now, apparently, she left the show three years ago. Mr Curran pressed Sir Ming along "that's ancient history" lines. Sir Ming, I suspect sensing disaster, waffled out a "wouldn't like to rate one above another" type answer. And that's where it ended - though who wielded the merciful editorial scissors here I don't know.

A number of points emerge from this.

If I'd had the wit to ask Sir Ming that question, I wouldn't have had the knowledge to challenge his Bet Lynch answer. My last regular watching of Corrie was in Ena Sharples days.

So - clearly - this is an example of why journalists should be abreast of popular culture (before correction that came out as 'culturd' - an interesting new word).

Like Sir Ming, I listen to Radio 4 and don't have Arctic Monkeys on my iPod (but I do have an iPod) . My soaps are 'The Archers' and 'West Wing'. I suspect neither rate as touch-stones of popular culture with our tabloid press.

So again, like Sir Ming, a guess I'm a 'toff'. Now that's a word I thought was these days confined to the arcane vocabulary of the red-top tabs. But no. It featured in the BBC PM piece from the Liberal Conference. Shame on you Sean Curran - surely there's a BBC editorial guideline prohibiting such usage.

Are "The Archers", "Just a Minute", "The Now Show", "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue" and all the rest of them, including "PM" and "Today" just the preserve of 'toffs'?

I think not. But they do represent an under-researched area of popular culture. Maybe Channel 4 Radio will lavish money on acedemia to unpick this area.

Boiling frogs

It's a week now since I had a corneal implant in my right eye at Cardiff's University Hospital. There cannot be many medical procedures that produce such instant results. Cataracts develop slowly - so slowly you barely realise what you're losing. It's a road where the milestones are few but all the more important when they crop up.

• The day you stop buying newspapers because you've come to terms with the fact that they're a waste of money - you can't read them.
• The day you stop sitting in your 'favourite chair' to watch TV but sit on the floor nearer to the set.
• The day you stop driving.
• The day you realise you don't read in bed any more - actually you don't read at all.
• The day you decide not to go somewhere or do something and you realise you're using poor sight as an excuse.
  

Then comes the day someone does something about it. Now I can close my right eye and look through my untreated left eye and really see what this particular 'boiled frog' put up with. It's a world of yellow fog.

Which is why the greatest revelation after an implant is the rediscovery of BLUE. OK being able to read again is pretty crucial too, but losing most of blue from your colour palette really does affect your relationship with the world around you. Blue is symbolic of sharp focus, of freshness, of life itself - "the blue planet" etc.. Yellow is symbolic of old parchment; a fuzzy yellow is even worse.

So "thank you" to Roger Morgan and the team at Cardiff's University Hospital. I'll be back for the left eye as soon as possible.

To kinform - have we a new verb?

On Friday an RAF NImrod crashed in Afghanistan with the loss of 14 lives.

The plane was based at RAF Kinloss in Scotland and this morning (Sunday) I heard the base commander (I think) speaking at a press conference use the neologism "kinforming" as in "names will be released once kinforming is complete".

Was this a slip of the tongue or the launch of a new verb? Am I alone is suspecting that this is a piece of service jargon that's now crept into the public domain.

How widely is it used? Do, for example, the police detail officers to kinforming duties?

I'll keep an ear out for further hearings of kinform. Meanwhile OED - you heard it here first.