RIP Ken

From watching interviews with him and reading his obituaries, the film director Ken Russell who died yesterday aged 84 appeared to be someone who combined a passion for film making with good humour and a lack of pretension.

I must confess that I've never seen any of his films, save for a few clips which were shown again yesterday.  This is partly because as far as I know most of them haven't been shown on TV for years, if at all, either because of their content or the critical panning they received. 

Hopefully following his death TV channels will show them so that we can see his artistry in full.

Düsseldorf versus Cologne

I'll be in the Rhineland next week visiting Düsseldorf and Cologne.

The two cities are about thirty miles apart and have a sharp rivalry going back hundreds of years. Coming from Manchester, I know about rivalries with cities thirty miles downstream but whereas the competition between Manchester and Liverpool centres on football and music, the Rheinland one is expressed most clearly over beer: Alt in Düsseldorf and Kölsch in Cologne. 

Maybe this is because Fortuna Düsseldorf are a bit like Manchester City, bouncing up and down the divisions not winning anything, and neither city as far as I know has been the centre of a music scene like Merseybeat or Madchester, but I still can't think of any other two cities so close together which denigrate the beer produced in the other.  I've not been to the Czech Republic but I don't think the competition between Pilsen and Prague beer extends to calling the other one undrinkable.

For the record, I like them both (heretical in the Rhineland),  but if I had to pick one it would be Alt.

From the North (part two)

I don't think I'll be watching this later.  It appears to be just a collection of clips cobbled together to make a promo film for the BBC's move to Salford.

The BBC's invitation to join "a host of stars as they recall their favourite TV moments and celebrate the distinctly northern flavour" falls as flat as a Southern pint when you realise that they're talking about Dragon's Den, A Question of Sport, It's A Knockout, Mastermind and Songs Of Praise. They may have been filmed here but what they mean by their "distinctly northern flavour" is beyond me.

Beer and the tie

The FT takes a gloomy view of the Government announcement yesterday that it doesn't intend to change the tie, the arrangement by which pub tenants are restricted to buying beer from the owners of the freehold. CAMRA is also against the tie.

There are two issues here, pub companies that own freeholds but don't brew beer and breweries that have an estate of tied estates.  It is the former that cause problems for tenants by hiking beer prices and rent but the latter who would suffer most from the abolition of the tie.

CAMRA should be careful what they wish for: the existence of pub companies is largely the result of the Beer Orders of twenty years ago that forced breweries to offload large parts of their tied estates.

Bankers doing God’s work?

I just watched the programme When Bankers Were Good, presented by Private Eye editor Ian Hislop.

Hislop's argument is that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries bankers were sober Quaker types like the Barclays who only loaned to respectable businesses and were generous philanthropists who made charitable donations to feed and house the poor, in contrast to the bankers who work in the deregulated, risk-tasking City of today.  It's a similar argument to Ed Miliband's about "predatory" and "productive" capitalism.

The problem with all this is that as a result of all kinds of complicated financial devices like credit default swaps and bundles of sub-prime mortgages, "predatory" and "productive" capitalism has become inextricably intertwined to the extent that even the banks themselves are unaware of their liabilities to each other.

Just as banks and joint-stock companies characterised the early development of capitalism, so the international finance system that has grown up since World War II characterises its current stage.  Attempts to turn the clock back and retreat behind national borders are neither possible nor desirable.  The answer is to bring international finance under democratic control.

Hislop also concedes at the end of the programme that the philanthropy of the Victorian bankers only had a marginal impact on poverty and that it was progressive taxation and the welfare state that began to narrow the gap between rich and poor in the twentieth century.

An A-Z of Murdoch's crimes

Watching the Leveson Inquiry into press standards earlier, I started thinking about how most murky or destructive things can be linked to or traced back to Rupert Murdoch. 

The list of crimes he is directly or indirectly responsible for and their victims is a long one and in many cases the name alone is enough: the anti-union laws (which he exploited to bring out his scab titles at Wapping in 1986 before getting Blair to  promise he would keep at the News International conference on Hayman Island, Queensland in 1995 in return for the support of his British newspapers in the 1997 election),  the Dowlers (whose murdered daughter's voicemails a News of the World employee deleted, leading them to think she was still alive), families of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan and people killed in the London tube bombings (phones hacked by News International employees), Fox TV, Hillsborough, journalists (whose union the NUJ he derecognised after the Wapping dispute, meaning that News International reporters are no longer covered by its Code of Conduct),  the McCann's (News International bought a copy of the diary Kate McCann kept following the abduction of her daughter Madeleine in 2007 from the Portuguese police and published it in the News of the World), the NUM in the 1984-85 strike, printers (sacked en masse with other newspaper workers in the 1986 Wapping dispute), Sky Sports (which charges cricket, football and rugby league fans to watch matches previously shown live on free-to-air TV and dictates changes to kick-off times which mean they have to take time off work or travel at ridiculously early or late times),  The Sun, the Tea Party (promoted by Fox TV), Margaret Thatcher.

I'm sure I've missed lots of his other crimes and victims but the charge sheet above is enough to convict him I think.

From the North

Like many people born in Manchester in the 1970's, I first heard of Shelagh Delaney as a teenager when The Smiths put her on one of their single covers (left) and lead singer Morrissey championed her work in interviews.

Delaney, who has died aged 71, is best known for her play A Taste of Honey, later made into a film by Tony Richardson. Apparently she wrote it while on two weeks holiday from Metro Vicks, the massive engineering factory in Trafford Park where most of my family also worked in the 1950's and 1960's.

Delaney was part of the British New Wave realist film movement in the early 60's, many of whose leading lights were like her Northern and working-class: fellow Salfordian Albert Finney and Bolton's Shirley Ann Field (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), Hull's Tom Courtenay (Billy Liar, written by Keith Waterhouse from Leeds) and writers Stan Barstow (A Kind of Loving) and David Storey (This Sporting Life), both from Wakefield and respectively a miner's son and ex-rugby league player. It also coincided with the start of Coronation Street on TV.

Here's a homage to Delaney by another member of Manchester and Salford's Irish diaspora: