A Contribution to the Great Debate

So Leeds didn’t get our fifteen points back. I’m not too disappointed, I never actually thought we would. At best I thought we’d get five, and that would be no use to anyone. I’m rather looking forward to the play-offs, in any case.

Compensation arrives in the form of an email from Companies House, with details of the true financial state of Manchester United. It’s not unlike Leeds around the year 2000. In other words, massive, spiralling debts.

The Glazer’s holding company is called Red Football Shareholder Ltd, and it is indeed a long way in the red - three quarters of a billion pounds, in fact. I particularly like the detail about the Payment in Kind loans - an unusual financial instrument where the interest is paid not with cash money but with extra debt. At 14.25 per cent interest. Ouch!

To all Man U fans worried about what the future holds, fear not. Life’s wonderful in League One. More detail here.

For a couple of weeks I’ve been working on a story about BT and its secret trials of an internet advertising technology provided by a firm called Phorm.

The idea is basically that they track your internet surfing, work out what you like and then hit you with targeted advertising. Not necessarily an outrage in itself as long as they tell you and give you a chance to opt out.

However, in trials last year and the year before, they did a dummy run of the service without telling people. We spoke to a case study, Stephen Mainwaring, who was told by BT’s customer support that he’d been hit by a virus. Not surprisingly, he’s very upset and threatens to call in the cops to investigate.

All this is following up the excellent work of the Register, which has been covering this story brilliantly.

We finally got it onto the programme yesterday, complete with Salvador Dali-style special effects. And to their credit, BT put up a spokesperson to defend it. Here’s the result. Well worth watching.

If there’s one thing I love, it’s hairdressers with punning names. I used to get my hair cut at a place in Stockwell just because it was called ‘Mane Event’.

But walking through the seedy parts of Soho the other day, on a street lined with notorious Gentlemen’s establishments, I noticed the best name of all - The Clip Joint.

(For those who don’t frequent Soho, here’s the wikipedia explanation)

Good economics correspondents see a looming disaster in every fresh piece of market data. It’s one of the many reasons I’m not an economics journalist. Until now I thought things were perhaps a trifle messy, but not terrible. Another wobble which we would ride out easily enough.

Having covered the Bear Stearns collapse today, I’m now changing my status to absolutely terrified. Our old friend Helena Handcart is definitely on the prowl.

This is could well be the worst crisis since the seventies, and even if it’s half that terrible it will be bad enough. Aie!!!

A couple of weeks ago I was trained to use the new Channel 4 News editing system, Avid. I’ve cut a couple of little sequences and things before, but my first full length package was broadcast today. Here it is.

It’s a follow-up report on the collapse of First Solution, a Bangladeshi money transfer agency which collapsed last year. There are still no laws to prevent it happening again, and while some are in the pipeline they won’t cover the myriad of tiny money transfer agencies around the country with do less than E3m a month - that’s an estimated 2,700 agencies.

It used to be that producers would just be responsible for research, finding pictures, doing some of the interviews and generally making sure that the whole thing happened. A specialist editor would be the one sitting in a chair in front of the editing system making everything happen.

But with better technology (and falling budgets) producers are now doing some of the simpler edits themselves. I don’t think they’ll ever replace proper ‘craft editors’ - as we call them. They’re amazingly skilful people. I’ve watched in admiration many times as they’ve turned a pile of scrappy rushes into a decent three minutes of television.

There’s a fear that craft editors will be phased out altogether to save money. I hope that doesn’t happen - it would be madness. But a project like this isn’t big enough to justify a craft editor’s time, so it probably wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t had the new editing system, Newscutter. (Or ‘costcutter’, as the newsroom wags call it).

Luckily I had a couple of weeks to play with piece, so I could play around as much as I liked. I don’t think this would be so much fun to do in a hurry. But at leisure, it’s really enjoyable, and surprisingly creative. The tool is pretty powerful, so it’s a battle to resist the urge to put all sorts of cheesy effects all over the place.

Anyway, check out the results… not too bad for a first go. No silly effects, alas - but one bit of footage is craftily looped backwards.

The story I did last November, about Facebook and the excessive difficulty of leaving it continues to bubble around. Last month it made the New York Times (see the second page of this report).

I’m rather amazed that it continues to be a story, three months on. And I’m even more amazed that Facebook hasn’t done anything to sort it out.

Every few years I cook a batch of Christmas puddings. They keep for years, and get steadily better, so we eat one every year until they’re gone and it’s time to make some more.

I was hoping to get three this year, but one of them didn’t make it - I lost it when the bowl I was steaming it in started to melt. Yuk. Luckily it wasn’t the experimental pudding with the mango in it. I’m very keen to see how that turns out.

For the past couple of weeks I have been glued to The Wire. It’s the best TV show I’ve seen since the West Wing.

The premise is pretty simple, at least for season one. A bunch of more or less dysfunctional, oddball cops in the corrupt, inept Baltimore Police Department try to bust a drugs gang on a housing project. To do so, they set up an elaborate wiretap.

When I first read about the series it sounded like a fairly generic police procedural of the kind I never bother watching. I suppose the unusual feature is that the baddies are drawn as carefully as the cops. In fact it’s rather difficult to know exactly who the good guys are, as half the cops spend their time trying to scupper the investigation and most of the dealers are pretty disgusted with the violence and squalor of what they do, but are helplessly trapped in it.

Why’s it so good? I suppose it’s just great scripts, great characters and great acting. And I get the feeling that it’s about as close to authentic as you could reasonably expect a TV series to be. According to one of the many laudatory articles on the Guardian about it, they said that even the drug dealers in Baltimore used to tune in to see what the characters were up to.

It’s pretty depressing viewing, though, as you might expect. Everyone has their own addiction - coke for the dealers, booze for the cops. Yet another powerful reminder that drugs are a vastly bigger threat to Western civilization than terrorism.

I never used to devote much time to saving money. In the old freelance days, I would reason that the time would be better spent just doing more work.

As a result, I stuck with an old, ludicrously expensive broadband contract that I didn’t dare switch in case it took me offline for two weeks. The prospect was unbearable.

But now the day job is all about gas bills and credit cards, I’ve decided to start ‘living the dream’ and enter the world of the money saving trainspotter.

And what a wonderful world it is. My favourite site is instantly www.moneysavingexpert.com. The straight comparison sites like uSwitch.com just give you reams of data about different services and doesn’t make much sense of it for you. This one says, “Here mate. Forget the rest, buy this one.”

So - it’s TalkTalk broadband and telephone for me, and some curious override provider for calling India. A ginormous saving will soon be banked, then blown on some kind of matrimonial frippery such as an elephant to walk down the isle on.

But the thing I like about this site is the evidence it shows of people’s crazed determination to get the very best possible deals on things, going far beyond the point where money saved is less valuable than time expended.

For example - not only do you have to choose the best product. You have to choose the best site to buy it through - selecting one of five cashback websites who will return the lion’s share of the commission they make from referring you to the eventual provider.

Forget the fact that it sometimes takes 90 days for the money to show up in your account. There are still people who think it’s worth joining all cashback sites, just in case one offers you a slightly better deal. And then you’re meant to use a credit card and claim cashback on that too. As if the modern world wasn’t complex enough.

Well, it’s been a busy few weeks, what with the 7am starts and everything. I’ve learned a hell of a lot, but mainly that TV is incredibly fiddly and has enormous capacity for going wrong. Every day I seem to find a new mistake to make. So thank goodness viewers only see a tiny proportion of the chaos backstage.

We’re on air at noon, so each day seems to build to a crescendo of terror at about quarter to twelve. By that time it’s too late to correct the most serious mistakes anyway. Then blind panic starts to recede, and it’s replaced by the waiting to see the headmaster feeling, where you find out just how much trouble you’ve got yourself into.

One of the nice things about having a different shift pattern is the way it changes your entire routine. There’s no more loafing around in the bath every morning - I shave and shower the night before so I can just jump out of bed and leave the house.

Everything’s done by four, usually, so there’s a longer evening to sit around and read or go to the gym or something. It’s not so great if I’m due to meet someone in town that evening. I usually end up sitting around in coffee houses all afternoon - so the old Caffe Nero bill has been climbing dangerously.

Still, you can’t do all that with a hangover - so at least I’ve been spending less at the bar.