A Contribution to the Great Debate

Much hard work lost today as a fire alarm took the programme off the air ten minutes early. Still, it was pretty funny. Here’s the moment it happened:

The Google Street View car has been spotted on the streets of London. Here it is:

I can’t wait for Google Street View London to go live - and I’d love to get my face on it somehow. But since I spend most of my life behind a desk, it seems unlikely.

If you’ve never seen Streetview, it’s here. They basically take pictures of every street in a city, and publish them on a map - so you can get a simulated ’street level’ tour of a city.

It’s quite entertaining for five minutes, but doesn’t seem to have any serious purpose, apart from minor invasions of privacy -a classic Google frippery.

A brief celebrity encounter - I booked Feargal Sharkey of the Undertones to come in and talk about music downloading.

You might expect a punk legend to be somewhat prickly in the flesh, but he was charming - and quite funny, as this interview shows. Made my day.

Here it is - the results of our live terror blog:

About half-way through I realised that I’d never actually sat down and watched a parliamentary debate from beginning to end before. With good reason, too - this is a pretty important issue and a moment of considerable drama, but the actual debate had long periods of exquisite tedium.

The House of Commons has some great speakers in it - and some exceedingly bad ones. I think I did end up knowing quite a lot more about the issue at the end than I did at the beginning, but much of the debate was bogged down in repetition and minutiae.

It’s nice to do some writing, too, after all these months (though not all this blog is mine - there were three of us working on it, but I probably type the fastest). And the shoot-from-the-hip forget-in-a-minute style of live blogging is quite fun. Probably easier to write about cricket than parliamentary debates, though.

Next Wednesday I return to the new media world for some live blogging coverage of the Commons vote on detaining terror suspects without trial for 42 days.

I don’t normally ‘do’ terrorism - there are lots of other people who know much more about it than I do, and I always saw it as a bit of a distraction from real social problems and the proper business of government.

But this debate and vote promise to be very exciting ones. The whole 42 days issue was new Labour at its most Orwellian. No-one (to my knowledge) has ever presented any example of a case where a 42 day detention would be necessary or helpful, but the struggle to be ultra-tough on terror was a key part of Blair’s compact with middle England and the tabloids; as well as an insurance policy in case something big and horrible happened on these shores.

The past couple of months have seen one government retreat after another, on issues far more important than 42 days - the nation’s tax policy, for one thing. So, will this be the day Gordon Brown stands and fights? And does it matter if he wins or loses, given that the whole thing is basically theatre anyway?

I will post the full link to the debate here as soon as I get it. But it should be pretty easy to find on Wednesday at www.channel4.com/news.

I’ve lived in Stepney for nearly eight years now (phew!) but I never bothered to find out what this funny building on Whitechapel High Street was.

I’ve now found out. It’s the building that used to house Wickam’s department store - it’s an extremely odd-looking building in its own right - a sort of Masonic warehouse - with a bit missing right next to the middle.

It turns out that the missing bit used to be the premises of Speigelhalter’s jewelry shop. They refused to sell out in the 30s when they were building Wickams - so they went ahead and build the department store anyway, and left a gap that they could fill in when they finally got the Speigelhalters to see sense.

The department store went bust in the 60s, apparently - long before the Speigelhalters sold out. So the gap remains to this day - partly hidden by Billy Bunter’s 24-hour snack shack.

Both the department store and Speigelhackers are pretty much deserted now - the only occupied wing is now a Blockbuster. And that hardly has the feel of permanence about it.

This week sees the quiet launch of an online service which could be quite a revolution for the Channel 4 News website. It’s a flash-based video player which allows you to watch the whole of the show, from the beginning, in the order it went out.

You can play it full screen, it works on a Mac - in short, it has everything. They’re still a bit nervous that it might get derailed by some massive technical horror, but thus far it looks extremely cool to me. This link should take you there.

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)