Hooray for Hounslow - council tweeter defends borough's honour

Some London boroughs do tweeting better than others. Some tell you useful things, others parp out meaningless stats to big themselves up. Some still don’t bother.

Many though, will kindly keep an ear out for you if you have a question or suggestion.

So hats off to Hounslow Council’s intrepid tweeter, who got in on Monday morning to find a curious question from one Wendy Owen, sent at the start of the weekend when that Friday feeling had clearly started to kick in: “How do we arrange for lovely Chiswick to be removed from your skanky borough?”

Clearly, she hasn’t walked along the Thames at Isleworth or explored the canal at Brentford. It’s not bad out west, you know.

The response? “Hi Wendy we’ve no plans to remove Chiswick from lovely Hounslow. We’d be interested to know what particularly you find ‘skanky’.”

Sadly, no response from Ms Owen, who says on her Twitter biog that she’s a “Marketing Exec for BBC Children in Need… My views are my own not Pudsey’s!”

She might be a bit more careful with those views in future. In the meantime, it’s Hounslow Council 1, Pudsey 0.

Boris Johnson's deputy interfered with hacking investigation

Boris Johnson’s Deputy Mayor for Policing tried to interfere with the Met’s hacking investigation, the former Police Commissioner has claimed.

According to Sir Paul Stephenson, Kit Malthouse repeatedly told the police they should scale back their investigation, arguing that it was driven by media “hysteria”.

In his witness statement, Stephenson told the Leveson inquiry:

“On several occasions after Operation Weeting had started and I had returned from sick leave, the Chair of the MPA, Kit Malthouse, expressed a view that we should not be devoting this level of resources to the phone hacking inquiry as a consequence of a largely political and media- driven “level of hysteria”.

Stephenson defended the police investigation saying that they had “little choice” but to devote the resources that they had.

Boris Johnson has also repeatedly criticised the investigations into illegal practices at News International.

In 2010 he described the phone hacking saga as

• “a load of codswallop cooked up by the Labour Party” which was
• “patently politically motivated” and
• “a politically motivated put up job” and
• “completely spurious and political” and
• “a song and dance about nothing” which had been
• “whipped up by the Guardian and the Labour Party.”

Last week he also told ITV’s Agenda programme that “the caravan should move on” over phone hacking and criticised the amount of resources being spent on the investigation.

Update: The Labour party are now calling on Kit Malthouse to resign. Chris Bryant MP said today:

This amounts to a clear political intervention designed to intimidate the Met into dropping an investigation. Considering that the investigation has thus far uncovered bribery of police officers by the Sun, mass criminality at the News of the World and a deliberate attempt to pervert the course of justice by News International, both Boris Johnson and Kit Malthouse’s interventions show that they are more interested in protecting their cronies than in pursuing justice. In any other country this kind of political manipulation would be considered wholly unacceptable and corrupt. It is no longer possible for Londoners to have confidence in the Met with Kit Malthouse sitting at the top table. Kit Malthouse should either resign or Boris Johnson should be forced to sack him.

London agenda for Monday 5 March

1. View the cheeky art of Jeremy Deller at the Hayward [Le Cool]

2. Gawk at some rarely seen pictures of Marilyn Monroe [Run Riot]

3. Watch the tense documentary, Liberia ’77 [Don’t Panic]

4. Visit the lost leper hospitals of London [Ian Visits]

5. Find the Yuri Gagarin statue [Tired of London]

Camden Fringe versus London 2012

Recently there was a story in the Guardian about nervousness at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival administration. It’s feared the 2012 Olympics could absorb every tourist penny pouring into the UK. Will the crowds be pouring into the Scottish capital or stay down south for the games? Will theatre producers stay in London to cash in on these crowds? Will the cash waving hordes be packing out the west end when javelins are flying and ribbons at the finish line being broken in the east?

Meanwhile, will the Londoners who normally support small scale and neighbourhood productions stay indoors or even flee the city entirely to avoid these mobs? Optimism is shaky but the general mood is hopeful.

The Edinburgh Fringe is a big deal, but my love is for the Camden Fringe. Last year’s riots threatened to derail this smaller but more beautiful festival. The level heads of organisers Michelle Flower and Zena Barrie helped the event pull through with only a day or two lost. The Olympics, though, is the biggest event in the world. How will the Camden Fringe survive that?

“We’ve not really made any provision for the Olympics.,” says Flower. “Very difficult to know what to do about it all as it’s really a once in a lifetime thing. I think we have a 10 day overlap. Originally the council were all very excited about it and saw it as a very positive thing for theatres, as it would be bringing lots of visitors to the city. Now it seems they see it more as a logistical nightmare. We’ve decided to plough on regardless, thinking that there must be enough people who live locally who will be thoroughly bored of all the sport and want to come to the theatre. Hopefully a few of the visitors will make it down as well.”

The festival will be slightly smaller, as the Roundhouse and RADA are programming Olympics-related events, but Flower is probably right not to be too worried. Sports and arts aren’t exclusive of each other, but folks who live for theatre aren’t necessarily the same folks who live for weight lifting. And with all the artists being imported from around the world, there may be be an influx preferring the Fringe over the track and field events they have been brought to promote.

I know the javelin in the one where they throw spears at each other and track events are mostly about running in circles. I am also expert enough in sports to knowing football is the one with the Kicking Ball. Chances are, though, that I will be at the Camden Fringe, and hopefully some percentage of Olympic visitors will add to the theatregoers in Camden this August.

Ockham's Razor

Three people adrift. Such a simple idea, but there are hundreds of possible stories in this elegant premise. Ockham’s Razor, an aerial theatre company combining circus skills with physical theatre and physics, tell several of these stories in a tight thirty minutes, but they leave all interpretations so open the audience can imagine the hundreds in between.

Two women and a man dance with gravity on a grid suspended above the stage. Swooping and clambering with the grace of dancers, the performers can manipulate their flying stage with subtle shifts of weight, but every move has to be shared between them. Love triangles, power struggles, rivalries, but also vulnerability, mutual respect and cooperation, Arc’s themes are beautifully married to the techniques and circus skills used to tell their stories.

Two other pieces presented, Memento Mori and Every Action were every bit as cleverly done, but for me Arc had the most emotional power. The last, Every Action… is played out on a long length of rope between four characters. It was the flashiest in terms of acrobatic technique, and I could see why it rounds out the show. It was also the funniest, a big finale. Arc, though had more depth for me. The kids, however, loved it. On the night I saw the show the audience was primarily students, teenagers, probably on an official outing, but they were held rapt by the poise and physical power of the performers.

Artsdepot is a great venue. It’s mindboggling they should have been forced to scramble for funding last year, when they are the fulcrum of the arts in that area. This was my first time there and won’t be my last. But I do have to manage my travelling time a bit better. Finchley must be a huge patch of land. I had no idea it would take so long to get out to Wood Green Park tube station from central London. Give yourself plenty of time to get there. I gave myself an hour and was still nine minutes late for the show. The front of house staff kindly bit their tongues and ground their teeth but slipped me in anyway. Sweethearts.

Ockham’s Razor will be back at Artsdepot at the end of the month, 29-31 March, with Something in the Air, a collaboration with Oily Cart. This is an interactive aerial show specifically geared for kids with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, but no doubt a cool show for all. More details at ockhamsrazor.co.uk and artdepot.co.uk.

Next up at Artsdepot, on 10 March is John Peel’s Shed, an Edinburgh Fringe success by John Osborne (not the Look Back in Anger one) about loving the radio and its lost champion.

Creature of Our Make by Jenny Gillespie

This new one from Chicago musician Jenny Gillespie has got a lovely lazy quality to it. It’s the sound of Gillespie and East Coast folkster Sam Amidon (violin, backing vocals) having fun, before things take a slightly more serious turn around the two-minute mark. Her new EP Belita is out April 16th in the UK.

Annoying habits of Londoners #4: Dancing along to their own headphones

The most disagreeable contention in China Miéville’s NYT article about London is surely this:

“Tinny music raises disproportionate ire. Travelers shift and glare as 14-year-olds give themselves soundtracks, as if they’re boxers. Not all, but a fair few of the older passengers look wrathful.”

The ire invoked by tinny music is, in fact, entirely proportionate to the provocation involved. But that’s not the worst of it. Tinny music is an unfortunate but established fact of public transportation. It can be prepared for. It’s the devil we know.

Much more sinister is the tinny music’s cousin. The tinny gesture. The aborted half-movement of pretended dance. It invades physical space just as perniciously as tinny music invades the airwaves.

I’ve seen microphone miming, word-mouthing, foot-tapping and hip-shakes. I’ve seen air-drumming, air-guitar, air-trumpet and air-jazz-flute. The worst gestures are the half-secret little flinches – the dancing wrists behind the pages of the Metro, drawing attention to themselves by trying to hide.

All of it draws the eye just as tinny music fills the ear. Like an insistent beat, it cannot be ignored.

If I get on the bus or tube I know my ears are going to be besieged with unwanted sound. I’ve made my peace with that. But my eyes, spare my eyes I beg you. Turn up your music, if you must, but sit on your hands. Just give me one sense not filled with this interminable clutter. Is that really so much for me to ask?

See also:
Annoying habits #3 – Holding the door open
Annoying habits #2 – Being annoyed when strangers gawp at you
Annoying habits #1 – Applauding at the cinema
Best and worst of the New York Times Magazine’s London special

Follow Mike
Twitter: @MikPollitt
Email: michael.pollitt@snipelondon.com

The most cringeworthy video of the day is sung by Hammersmith and Fulham council

Well, thanks right back to you, Hammersmith & Fulham council.

Source: Tory council cuts £60m but can still afford crap propaganda video

London agenda for Friday 2 March

1. Take a ‘masterclass in Electronic Soul’ at the Brainfeeder Takeover of Village Underground [Le Cool]

2. Sure, it’s an electronic night, but these guys deserve support strictly by their clarifying name: The Idiots are Winning [Run RIot]

3. Reflect on personal loss, political power and the ego from artists Sanam Khatibi, Daniel Medina, Jamie Shovlin at Waterside [Don’t Panic]

4. Look at how Rome maintained control over Londinium by the sword at the British Museum [Ian Visits]

5. Visit Harrow Museum [Tired of London]

'Boris Johnson' reveals: "I wish David Starkey was my uncle"

Whoops. A classic Twitter mistake from Boris Johnson’s pretend tweeter, captured during last night’s Question Time.