The World Service

The BBC World Service is 80 years old today (Given that it's February 29th, that means it's only had 20 actual birthdays, I presume).  Anyway, in a slight diversion from the usual matter of this blog (ie periods of nothingness interspersed with incoherent rants about stuff that bothers me in small town Romania), I thought I would mark this milestone by saying how great the BBC World Service is, and how many years I spent in which my short wave radio was my most prized possession.  It genuinely was one of the things I had to check anytime I went anywhere - money, ticket, passport, radio - that was the list.

Anyway, I listened for years to the BBC World Service (and the fact that I can download things like Analysis and From Our Own Correspondent on podcasts now is somehow not the same thing. They're still good radio programmes but something about the medium and the vehicle of the radio clutched to the ear, with the elaborate wires and things attached to the aerial to try and enhance reception, is just something that I'll never forget, and I think always miss a little bit).  The fact that I can have news from anywhere in the world at my fingertips at any time in various different formats these days is just ... not the same.  (In other forgotten methods of obtaining news from home, does anyone remember Reuters teleprinters that you could find in the lobbies of expensive hotels?  They were brilliant too, though not quite up to the standards of the BBC World Service)

Anyway, just as with the internet, much of my dedication to my shortwave radio came with the need to keep up with English football.  Every Saturday afternoon (or whatever time of day English Saturday afternoon was in whichever country I was in) you could find me twiddling the dial, fine tuning the signal as I listened to comforting snatches of home telling me about the driving rain at Portman Road or the advertising hoardings at Ibrox.

My most vivid memory though was in a tent just outside the Masai Mara in Kenya listening to the 1994 World Cup Final from California at about 3am. I had headphones so as not to wake my girlfriend, but the signal kept drifting in and out. Despite the fact that the match was terrible (I am told), I could not go to bed - this was the World Cup final after all.  At one point through the crackle I heard this almighty roar, which was clearly not from the crowd, but from outside the tent.  I decided staying put was possibly the best idea (and anyway if I'd gone outside Sod's Law dictates that I'd probably have missed a goal).   In the morning I learned that a lion had wandered through the campsite in the night.

(A much more amusing anecdote about the World Service from my friend Ken Wilson, can be found here)

Not thinking things through

According to the survey data reported here, among the depressing findings that 91% of Romanians would like to reintroduce the death penalty and 88% think it should be a crime to criticise the Orthodox Church, is the statistic that 89% of Romanians think that anyone in favour of autonomy for Székelyföld should have their citizenship revoked. I suspect people didn't really think this through, since, you know, if you revoked everyone's citizenship round here, they'd effectively be autonomous. No taxes, no need to obey the law, etc etc. You couldn't deport them because they'd have no state to be deported to, so they'd have to stay here. In a stroke you'd effectively have created Székely autonomy. Brilliant thinking, Iosif Public.

Either 89% of people in this country are a bit thick, or the questions were skewed in such a way as to make the findings seem really newsworthy. I suspect the latter.

Documentary recommendation

Just watched a nearly hour long astonishing documentary made by a Romanian guy for the BBC on Romanian Rroma kids in Europe being exploited as child criminals. Well worth watching if you've a little time to spare:

Part 1 is here and after that you can follow the links to the following parts.

Whatever happened to the BBC?

These days, thanks to the miracles of modern technology and that, we can get two BBC channels on our TV all the way out here in li'l ol' Csikszereda. (The same technology means we can no longer get the very local channels like Csiki TV and Szekely TV, which is kind of weird, really, but I guess that's globalisation for you)

Anyway, these channels are BBC World (which is the news channel) and BBC Prime, which has recently been rebranded as BBC Entertainment. I'm assuming that the rebranding came because lots of people were asking "is this really your prime output?". It may well of course be, and that all the BBC actually shows these days are interminable shows about antiques, "The Weakest Link", and seemingly thousands of soap operas with "Holby" in the title. Every now and again I flick over to see, but it's always some awful rubbish. The only time it gets watched is in the early morning when Paula watches the kids shows on it. These are actually quite good (at least compared with the alternatives she has available), though all of them seemingly ask her to guess something (which window to look through in Tikkabilla*, which coloured house someone will visit in Balamory, which teletubby will get the TV beamed through their stomach, etc), which is something she's not yet comfortable with. Perhaps it's something that you get along with breast feeding in the UK, but here I try to chivvy her along "Which window do you think it will be?" but she's having none of it "I don't know". "No, I know you don't know, but guess". "I can't know". "No, I know, just guess", by which time the camera has already zoomed in on the square window so she then says "The square one".

(*Tikkabilla, by the way, is clearly just the children's programme formerly known as Play School, but rebranded to be more hip for today's web 2.0 generation. New name, dolls and teddies replaced by small purple dragon, etc etc.)

But, anyway, I digress.

So, BBC News, has really gone downhill, and is depressing me. This is the channel that the hard right calls "leftist", but is in fact, as far as I can tell these days very much rightist. Some examples:

1. Yesterday, they invited someone from the Wall Street Journal to comment on the Massachusetts election (and provided no information that the WSJ has over the past few years turned into a hard right wing rag of the lowest order, nor any balancing viewpoints). This guy proceeded to say that the reason Obama was losing popularity was because he wasn't reaching across to the other side, which as far as I can tell is patently false, and if anything his problem is that he's spending too much time trying to appease Republicans. He's not reaching out to the mad Limbaugh/Beck/Palin extreme end of the Republican party, well, because they're all barking mad, and how the hell would you reach out to them? Promise to bomb Iran and jail people for using birth control if they agreed to say not such nasty things about you?

2. Just before Christmas the woman who does the business section on the morning slot was discussing the possibility of a strike by British Airways cabin crew. "It's really important that BA win this" she said (and that's a word for word quote, since it stunned me so much that I can still hear her saying it). Firstly "BA" does not equate to "BA Management" as she implied, and also what kind of reporting is it to say out front that the workers needed to be defeated? I know she's the business correspondent, but still. How left wing is all of that?

3. Today's top story was that the Chinese economy was moving ahead of Japan's. Haiti was barely even mentioned. I know it was a week ago, but it's still a huge story and one that is a bit more important than China moving up to second place in some kind of imaginary world economic league table. Euronews, by the way, has been fantastic on Haiti. Really good reporting, important information (journalists have been banned from the airport now, by the way, which is not something I've heard on the BBC), and great testimonies from people there (Haitians and relief workers).

4. They are really pissing me off with their pro-occupation stance whenever the issue of Israel - Palestine comes up. I mean compared to any US media outlet they come across as balanced, but they're really not. (And in fact an independent report a year or two back, confirmed this feeling of mine that they are more favourable to the Israeli government position than anything else)

So, what happened to the BBC? And what will become of it under the next government? It's all very depressing.

Paper View

I have a nascent theory of the "it came to me while lying awake one night/while I was drinking a beer" variety, that you can judge the quality of a holiday destination by the British newspapers on sale there.

The highest quality such destination is the one that doesn't actually have any British newspapers on sale at all - as that means the place doesn't actually attract enough british people to make it worth while (note: this only actually applies to holiday destinations - you can't buy English newspapers in Csikszereda, but this doesn't imply a high-quality place, merely remote and uninteresting to any outsiders)

However if the number of UK visitors does create enough demand to stock newspapers, then you can start wondering about why and how decisions are made to order which papers. In Malta a couple of years ago, for example, where I was working, the only papers available were The Sun, Mail, and Express. The three worst mass readership papers in the country. The thoroughly downmarket, Murdoch owned Sun, and the two extreme right wing anti-immigration/anti-foreigner rags Express and Mail. Frightening. What had Malta done to deserve this little slice of little-englander hell in it's corner shops and kiosks? Sure the vast majority of English people there were elderly people seemingly escaping the British winter, but not all such people are obnoxiously right-wing, surely? Or are they all in Malta not so much to get away from the weather but to get away from all those foreigners?

Thassos, which is what made me think of this half-baked nonsense in the first place, had the following British newspaper options - Mail, Express, Sun, Mirror and Times (to add to the English language newspaper options it was also possible to buy the International Herald Tribune). Not sure what message this is giving us about Thassos. That tourists there are somewhat right of centre in general (and in the case of the Mail/Express saddoes, completely off the chart). That there was no place for the middle ground Guardian/Independent reader? It's a rum do and no mistake. Wonder what you get in Chiantishire? Guardian and Telegraph?

So, I bought the Times once. I'm not proud of it since it's a Murdoch paper, but I could justify it to myself since the newspaper's online presence does boast the most consistently funny podcast that I know of - The Bugle. I learned that the Times is the official newspaper of The Ashes, whatever that means (it obviously means that the paper contained ludicrous amounts of coverage of said cricketing event), and that it's editorial team have obviously decided that the solution to all the world's problems is David Cameron. One of those "If the answer is David Cameron, it must have been a particularly stupid question" type things. It's a bit like imagining the problems of the world's entertainment industry could all be solved by James Blunt. Another bland vapid inoffensively rubbish toff.

I also bought the IHT (as we seasoned travellers know it). It's not a bad paper all round (though it does give airtime to idiots like Thomas Friedman), but why oh why do all US newspapers do this thing where they start a load of stories on the front page and then ask you to turn to another page to finish each one? It's mad. You have to go front page, page 3, front page, page 5, front page, page 3, front page, page 4, and so on for ages. What possible advantage does it serve? Why don't people complain? It drives me mental.

Csikszereda: going to the Blogs

A few weeks ago, I reported on the blog competition that was going on here. Well the competition closed yesterday and the winners were announced. It turned out that I was one of the judges of the competition (I didn't know I would be when I wrote before) so I did read all of them in great depth, and they are a fantastic bunch of very different, very interesting, well written, well put together blogs.

There were 10 entrants and 6 of them would all have been worthy winners. In the end the winners were:
Under 18 category:

First place- Visit Csikszereda! This one is great and really has some superb photos on it, and has used the visuals in a very good way.
Second place- Aagota's Hometown Again very good, a nice variety of stuff and a different kind of format.

Over 18 category:

First place- Csixereda!? Another really excellent blog. Some really nice pieces of writing (and excellent English). I urge you to watch the video by local band "Los Colorados"
Second place - Ikarosz Grocery Different, varied, great design, very original. Good mixture of items

Public online vote:
A Piece of Harghita. I loved this one, and actually it was my top choice for the competition, so I'm glad it won the public vote, after being pipped in the under 18 category. Very interesting, well written, great design, I loved the way he uses video. Highly recommended.

Not to forget:
Zsu's Blog. Sadly there were only 5 awards made, and as it turns out there were 6 really excellent blogs, so this one missed out, but it is still worth your attention. Well thought out, good design, nice writing and presentation. Good use of pictures.

So, I'm actually about to go on holiday for the next ten days or so, and anyway, it's not like I've been around a lot of late, so, I'd like to recommend that anyone who is in the vaguest bit interested in Csikszereda/Miercurea Ciuc take a look at these blogs. And I'd like to urge the authors to keep at it, since they're doing a great job and they shouldn't stop when the competition is over.

To finish, shamelessly ripped from "A Piece of Harghita" a video presentation of this town. Manages to achieve in 4 minutes what I have failed to do in 5 years of incessant rambling on here

Local News News

For many years I have been the English language voice of Csikszereda, the place that people discovered when they searched for English language information about the town. I have been contacted by ice hockey fans, by Hungarian-Americans, by people who adopted children from this area in 1990, by tourists (not so many of them, I confess), and by various others from around the world who have come across my rambling nonsense and thought I might be able to provide them with some insight into the mysterious world of the Csik/Ciuc Depression.

Now there are some problems with this obviously - (a) I'm not a local and so what insight/information I can offer is not quite as insightful as it might be (though arguably, I suppose, it could be more objective); (b) I'm a 43 year old bloke with kids, and therefore do not necessarily represent a hugely diverse body of opinion. (What do women think of this place? Young people? People with social lives? etc etc); (c) Is my opinion to be trusted? On the internet it's always hard to tell. I'm not sure if I would trust my opinion, so why anyone else should is beyond me.

But now, I can exclusively reveal, there are more English language bloggers in the Csiki-blogosphere (Blogo-depression?). These bloggers are not outsiders, but real live locals, with lives and everything. I have not made them up. They are all part of a competition being organised by the Soros Educational Center here - and are listed here (and you can vote for them too). More might be appearing in the next few days, so keep checking that page (I'm hoping that at least one Romanian (by which I mean Romanian Romanian rather than Hungarian Romanian) will join up, because that perspective would be really interesting and valuable too)

So here they all are:

• Csixereda!?
• Ikarosz Grocery
• Visit Csikszereda!
• Aagota's Hometown

Enjoy. And vote. And, if you live in the town, sign up for the contest.

In other local news news, the town's most historic newspaper "Harghita Nepe" has, as far as I can tell, vanished as a commercial entity, and been bought up by the County Council as a place where it can sing the praises of its works, and especially those of the "Dear Leader", one Borboly Csaba, whose tenure at the helm of the County Council has not so far been one of unalloyed success (and who has, it is rumoured, attempted to drag Harghita County Council into the 21st Centruy by, wait for it, signing the staff up for a Yahoo group. Rock and roll.). So, I suspect the interest in Harghita Nepe will be soon no greater than that for the Pyongyang Daily News.

Ceausescu's excrement

I'm in the UK this week, and probably not likely to be here much, but I just wanted to mention that on Saturday night just after I arrived there was a documentary on BBC2 about Ceausescu, which was a bit less fascinating than I hoped, but still had some interesting nuggets of information. Chief among which was that Nicolae employed someone to destroy his excrement so that foreign agents couldn't get hold of it and analyse it to check on the state of his health. How do you destroy shit? Blow it up? Fire it off into space? Throw it against a fan? Flush it down the toilet?

He also insisted that Romanian TV never filmed him doing anything normal - like eating, drinking, wiping sweat off his brow, coughing, that kind of thing.

I'd tell you to watch it on BBC iPlayer (the title of the programme was "The Lost World of Communism"), but because nothing in the world makes sense you can only watch BBC iPlayer in the UK (which also happens to be the only place in the world that you can actually watch the programmes on TV in the first place - go figure). I believe you can trick the BBC iPlayer into believing you live in the UK, but it's beyond my technical abilities, so I've never done it, and can't pass on the way of doing it to you. But if you manage it, let me know.

Putting on the breaks

OK, so I’ve had a go at Hungarian TV and its love of dubbing, and now it’s the turn of Romanian TV. Not for dubbing (they don’t, they subtitle *roars of approval*), but for the advertising breaks. It’s not so much the content of the adverts themselves, which are rubbish, but no different from anywhere else (loads of really crap ads for things you don’t want, with one or two funny ones mixed in as well as the standard highly produced ones telling vomit-inducing sweet little stories to a cutesy indie backdrop for mobile phone network providers), as the length of the advertising breaks themselves.

In the UK people typically use the ad breaks to nip to the toilet and have a slash. Or, occasionally, go and put the kettle on. In a football match for example, you might make trip to the fridge to get a bottle of beer. All these activities are doable within a normal sized break, allowing one to settle back down in one’s chair just before the action restarts. In Romania, you can not only go to the toilet, you could run a bath, lie in it for half an hour until the water gets too cold, get out, shave, trim your nose hairs, get dressed, go to the kitchen, cook a large dinner, go out and buy a bottle of wine, invite your friends round, eat the dinner, play scrabble a couple of times, and then clean the house from top to bottom, before settling back down – and you’d still have time to make serious inroads into A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu (to be fair you probably wouldn’t get past the first book of the three, unless you were a really fast reader) before the programme restarts. It’s insane. I have no idea how people stand for it.

Not only are the advert breaks interminably long, but they are also placed in such a way as to really really disrupt the film or whatever you happen to be watching. Some exciting, nerve-wracking piece of the action? The crux of the plot, in which the dying old men begins to explain what has gone before? The moment when the hero is halfway through cracking the code? This is when the ads cut in. By the time the film returns whatever tension has been built up has gone, and to be honest you’ve forgotten what the film was about in the first place. Not only that, but on a number of channels they’ve decided that the best time to have one of these endless breaks is 5 minutes before the end of a film. I actually, out of interest, timed all this the other day – just before the end of a film on Pro TV, the ads cut in. The break was 22 minutes long. 22 fucking minutes. Twenty-fucking-two fucking minutes. Then the film came back for the denouement – 4 minutes. But if you’ve got that far in a film, you really need to watch those last 4 minutes. And that of course is what they’re counting on, that you will have to wait and wait, and started plucking your own eyes out in frustration until you get to watch the conclusion which you knew was coming anyway.

The concept of the half-time show in football is unknown here. There is no half-time show. There’s just 15 minutes of adverts. The broadcast stops when the ref blows his whistle and restarts when the match does. No half-time analysis, no highlights, no review of the action. I have no idea if they have any of that stuff at the end of the game, since I have never bothered staying on the channel that long. Perhaps after the obligatory 30 minutes of ads, they do actually have a post-match analysis. But I’m not waiting around for it.

And finally, he says, taking a deep breath before launching into the last element of this angry angriness, many of the channels have this weird propensity to do a kind of mini-skit as the link between the programme and the ads. I have absolutely no idea why, unless it’s just to add a further minute or two on to the break. National TV have this odd “fat policeman walking down a catwalk” thing going on, which I guess (though it’s difficult to really know) is supposed to be amusing. It’s not. Not even the first time you see it. It’s just bizarre. Prima, on the other hand, have this protracted thing with loads of blokes sitting in a company boardroom when two sexy window cleaners appear and put on a little dance. Why? Who the fuck knows.

So, I’ve given up. From now on I have resolved only to watch films and shows of interest on one of the State TVR channels, since they at least never put breaks in the show itself. They do have a lot of ads between shows, but at least the programme is left untouched. (They also show the best programmes anyway, so this is no great hardship)

Aye, there's the dub

Hungarian TV is dubbed. Not all of it obviously, some of it is originally in Hungarian anyway, but foreign language films and series are dubbed into Hungarian. Hungarians are extremely proud of their dubbing industry, and claim it to be fantastic. This may indeed be the case – it’s obviously better than the Polish/Russian dubbing industry which involves the original backing track being muffled a little and one bloke doing sort of a consecutive interpretation job over the top – regardless of what gender, age, species etc the speaker is supposed to be. It does seem also to be superior to the Spanish dubbing system.

The Hungarian dubbing factory seems to employ a large number of dubbers, many of whom do really pretty good accents which seem to stay quite close to the original (the bloke who dubs Thomas the Tank Engine, for example, seems to have managed somehow – at least to my ears – to have come up with a kind of Hungarian Scouse accent). (It doesn't always work flawlessly though, even on kids TV - the woman who dubs Dora the Explorer - who in her Hungarian incarnation teaches English whilst conducting her adventures mostly in Hungarian - for example,seems not actually to speak English rendering her pronunciation extremely amusing and/or cringe-inducing)

My problem is that saying that you are the world’s best dubbers is akin to saying that X is the world’s best instant coffee. It may be true, and you may even be proud of it, but ultimately it’s pride in an excellent version of an inferior product.

Based on my experiences as an action researcher in both teaching English and watching TV (by which I mean I have done both of those things a fair bit, and thought about this from time to time when I''ve got nothing much on), I have long held the theory that countries that dub their TV are significantly worse at speaking English than countries that subtitle. Obviously dubbing/subtitling is not the only variable here, but it is my submission that dubbing is a significant one of the variables. The Portuguese (subtitlers), for example, speak much better English than the Spanish (dubbers). They also speak much better English than the Brazilians who speak the same first language, but who are also dubbers. (There is a stress-timed/syllable timed variable here, which cannot be discounted, but I think it does not account for the whole difference).

Note: This theory excludes my own monolingual countrymen whose language skills are not noticeably improved by the fact that we subtitle and don’t dub, but I’d say that this was because if we import CSI or Desperate Housewives, we don’t need to do either, and if we were actually watching French films three times a week, or daily doses of Venezuelan Telenovelas, we would, I believe, through language exposure be better at those languages. Well, not Venezuelan because that’s not actually a language, but you know what I’m saying here.

Hungary is, according to a Eurostat survey a couple of years ago, which I am unable to locate at the moment, so you’ll have to take my word for it, the most monolingual country in the EU. Bearing in mind that the EU also includes Britain and Ireland, this is a pretty poor show. (I suspect that the numbers of immigrants in the UK and Ireland skew the figures considerably and Hungary really is not quite as bad as to be behind us, but even so the figures show something). Yes, Hungarian is a language which is radically different from English, for example, but then so is Finnish and Estonian and they’re up among the top countries. I’m also fairly certain that Hungarian L1 speakers (for those not familiar with the jargon, L1 means first language) in Romania speak better English than those in Hungary (and this is on top of the fact that Romanian Hungarians have to be functionally bilingual anyway because of the need to speak Romanian. English is, for most people here, a third or fourth language). Romanian TV? Subtitled.

So, join with me in SOD (Subtitling Over Dubbing). We can change the world. There is the minor problem of what to do with the obviously very talented people who are employed in the Hungarian dubbing factory should anyone pay heed to this message and throw off the shackles of voiceover, but there is enough work, I hope, in the cartoons/childrens programmes end of the market (I think subtitling TV programmes which are aimed at children who cannot be expected to be able to read subtitles would be a bit much, I’m not that hardcore of a SODomite. There are branches of our movement who believe that even shows aimed at the very young like In The Night Garden, ought really to be subtitled as it would (in their words) “encourage the lazy little bleeders to learn to read as well as to pick up a second language”.

In the meantime, I’d really like to discover that Albanians of a certain age all speak English with Norman Wisdom’s accent.

Romania to have violent street protests

"In a few months there will be people in the streets, that much is certain," said Luca Niculescu, a media executive in Bucharest. "Every day we hear about another factory shutting or moving overseas. There is a new government that has not shown itself too effective. We have got used to very high growth rates. It's an explosive cocktail."

-From this article in the Observer a couple of weeks ago

Blimey. Jason Burke is an excellent journalist who until recently was the most informed man on Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, etc etc. I have no idea why he's been redeployed to Europe, especially when it seems that this article is just a bunch of vague possibilities strung together and presented as some kind of prescient "be very afraid" type article.

A correspondence

In case you need any background to the following exchange of emails:
Disasters Emergency Committee Gaza aid appeal video
BBC refuses to air humanitarian appeal to save lives in Gaza
Martin Bell (former BBC journalist)

January 26th: Me to the BBC

Dear Sir/Madam

I am writing to strongly protest about the BBC's decisions not to show the humanitarian appeal for Gaza. Over the course of the last few years the BBC has, fairly clearly, taken on a less and less objective stance on the Israel Palestine issue, to the point now where it just seems to be a mouthpiece for Israeli government pronouncements. However, the decision not to show a humanitarian appeal is taking this to a new and despicable level. A friend of mine works for a charity and has over the years been involved very heavily in working with relief moneys collected through the DEC. I hope you don't mind me quoting his email to me on this subject:

"I have worked with a large and a small charity either in the field or at HQ ensuring that DEC money is spent properly and accounted for. There was never any question of taking sides by supporting the people affected. Obviously not in the Indian Ocean Tsunami or Pakistan earthquake (natural disasters), but also in Kosovo and more importantly with Hutu refugees from Rwanda.

After the Rwandan Genocide, the perpetrators, along with millions of other Hutus with various degrees of complicity fled to Eastern Zaire (now Congo) and Tanzania. They arrived in countires unable to support them and very, very quickly cholera broke out: the monthly mortaility rate reach 30 per thousand. Now these people were the 'baddies' the people who between them had the blood of 600,000 Tutsis and moderates on their hands. It was not an easy moral decision at first sight, but the agencies decided that stopping people from dying was a humanitarian imperative. And the BBC was there, supporting us with Kate Adie being rushed around to film it."

The obvious question is - what has changed? Why are the people of Gaza undeserving cases when previously the logic was that dying people were dying people and needed help?

I am disgusted by this whole episode and extremely unhappy at (a) the BBC's lack of compassion, and (b) its increasing pro-occupation political bias.

I hope that something can be done to make the BBC actually take some notice of the disgust that myself and many thousands of others feel about this horrific anti-humanitarian decision

Yours Faithfully
Andy H

January 28th: The BBC to me

Thank you for your e-mail.

We note your disappointment at our decision not to broadcast an appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee to raise funds for Gaza.

We decided not to broadcast the DEC's public appeal because we wished to avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC's impartiality in the context of covering a continuing news story where issues of responsibility for civilian suffering and distress are intrinsic to the story and remain highly contentious. We also could not be confident that the aid resulting from audience donations could reach those it was intended for at a time of a fragile ceasefire and sporadic border access. We will of course continue to report the humanitarian story in Gaza.

The BBC's director-general Mark Thompson has therefore explained the decision in more detail in a number of television and radio broadcasts and online at our Editors' blog. Please follow the link to read his explanation in full:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2009/01/bbc_and_the_gaza_appeal.html

Please be assured that we have registered your comments on our audience log. This is the internal report of audience feedback which we compile daily for all programme makers and commissioning executives within the BBC, and also their senior management. It ensures that your points, and all other comments we receive, are circulated and considered across the BBC.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to contact us.

Regards

January 30th: Me to them

I recently made a complaint about the BBC's decision to refuse to show the humanitarian appeal regarding Gaza. It was a long and considered complaint and referenced a number of other times when the BBC has (correctly) formed the opinion that humanitarian concerns should be above political ones. In response I received a standard letter summarising Mark Thompson's comments and basically ignoring all my questions and points.

I realise that the BBC employees charged with dealing with these complaints are overworked and overstretched, and it is of course not their fault that the easiest way of responding is just to cut and paste the standard non-answer. But if you offer the option of receiving a response it at least ought to reference the complaint in question.

I am still awaiting a response as to why the humanitarian appeals after Rwanda and Kosovo were broadcast, despite political concerns, whereas this was one was not.

(I would also like to know why the editorial policy of the BBC these days on the Israel/Palestine issue is to merely parrot the Israeli government line at all times, but I don't expect I'll ever get an answer to that questions)

Yours Sincerely
Andy H

Jan 30th(within about 25 minutes): Them to me

Thank you for your further email about the BBC's decision concerning the DEC Gaza Appeal.

The Director-General has explained the BBC's position and is the BBC's Editor-in-Chief so this cannot be considered at a higher level by the BBC's Executive. We cannot therefore add more to our previous response but if you wish to take the matter further you can contact the BBC Trust about the decision. For details of how to do this please see the information on the BBC Trust's website at:

www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/appeals/dec_gaza_appeal.html

Thank you again for your email.

BBC Complaints

I have, of course written to the BBC Trust. Don't expect much more from them, but you never know.

In case you haven't yet complained, and want to:
BBC Complaints
BBC Trust

Minstrels

Every now and again, the stuck-in-the-pastness of Romania* catches my attention. I've learned to overlook the horsecarts and the dingy little shops selling communist era tinned goods, and now I more or less forget that they are there. But once in a while I'm jolted back to reality.

TV Comedy in Romania is pretty ropey, and mostly of a sub-Benny Hill style slapstick, but there is one show which has always seemed to me to be a cut above. That show is called Cronica Carcotasilor. The hosts seem to be quick witted, and they lampoon most things that they see in Romania (and as an added bonus, they really rip the piss out of Gigi Becali). It does have this sort of gratuitous scantily clad dancing girls thing going on, but I figure they have to do that just to get the show on TV.

But then yesterday I caught a part of this week's show. Which they did blacked up wearing afro-wigs, and with the name cards Oblada and Obladi in front of them, and occasionally punctuating their lines with 70's style jive talk. What decade are we living in here?

Don't believe me?


The house band: The guy here appears to be, yes, I'm not joking, doing a monkey impression.

For fuck's sake.

(The really sad thing is that they probably felt they were doing this in some kind of spirit of celebration and empathy, and were not attempting to make just a bunch of cheap racist jibes)

*Because I seem to have acquired something of a reputation of being anti-Romanian among some people, I want to make it clear that I don't think this kind of thing is confined to Romania, and I'm guessing similar "jokes" have been made all over Eastern Europe this week. Which doesn't in any way excuse it.

Debranded

If you do not live in the UK or do not regularly follow the news from there, you are probably unaware of the main story of global significance that is the number one headline in all newspapers, on the TV broadcasts, everywhere.

No, it isn't the US election, and no it isn't the financial crisis. It's not the earthquake in Pakistan or the US attack on Syria. Neither is it the humanitarian crisis in Goma.

It is in fact the moral outrage of the nation's shocked conscience over a prank call on a radio show. I won't go into all the details since it's not terribly interesting when all is said and done, but the upshot of it is that the pages of the Daily Mail are overflowing with outraged blue-rinsed grannies and other moral crusaders calling for the BBC to be disbanded. (These people, with no apparent irony, will also rail incessantly against "political correctness" - ie the attempt to minimise offence caused by language - but obviously making the leap and realising that there is a contradiction is impossible in these small minded little-englanders). This hysteria is being whipped up by papers such as the Daily Mail which is a newspaper of extreme ill-repute, in order to pursue their "demolish the lefty BBC" agenda.

The BBC in its cravenness has bowed to this ludicrous pressure and suspended the two people responsible, one of whom has now quit. I despair of my people sometimes.

How does this effect me, other than there being pages and pages of rubbish that I have to search through on UK based websites in order to find what's actually happening in the world? Well, the weekly podcast of the radio show in question is actually very funny - it has moments of being rubbish, and moments of cringe-inducing stuff, but in the main is a really excellent radio show. I can see how a lot of people can't stand the guy - Russell Brand - who does it, but that's kind of beside the point. Anyway, that podcast will be no more, and the amount of interesting material available from my homeland has been reduced. And all because of a bunch of braindead wankers and sheep led by the braying mouthpiece of vileness, the Mail.

Anyway, if you want to laugh at their idiocy, rather than being utterly infuriated by it, you can indeed still find amusing content from the UK on the internet - in this case at spEak You're bRanes. Highly recommended.

Transylvania Cliche Watch (3) (and final)

Very poor showing from the headline writers after last night's game. Obviously coming up with something for a 0-0 game is too difficult for the cream of the UK's cliche-wielding hacks. There were one or two "toothless Chelsea" lines (though it wasn't toothless Chelsea so much as outplayed Chelsea). The only real contender for the crown of most badly written report came (surprisingly) from the Independent, with Jason Burt's report entitled "Drogba ankle injury drives stake into Chelsea's season" which is about as melodramatic as anything Stoker could come up with (Oh, woe, poor Chelsea, a player is out injured for a couple of weeks, what will they do with such limited resources?).

For future journalistic reference, writers from Britain need to know the following (all these mistakes have appeared this week):

• Cluj is not west of Bucharest (or at least it is only so in the same way that Edinburgh is west of London).
• The name of the team is not CFR Cluj-Napoca. The official name of the city is Cluj-Napoca, but the team is CFR Cluj (or, if you want to go the whole hog CFR 1907 Cluj). Just as the team owned by Italy's slimeball extremist prime minister is AC Milan, not AC Milano.
• Steaua did not lose to Dinamo on the last day of last season to hand the title to CFR Cluj
• Count Dracula was not a real person
• Vlad "the impaler" Ţepeş did not do his impaling in Transylvania, as he spent almost no time here, being in charge in Wallachia, not Transylvania.
• Maurizio Trombetta is a genius (this is not correcting a mistake, just a statement of fact)
  

Thanks.

[Oh, and by the way, the best written piece on the whole "who are this CFR Cluj team?" question, came unsurprisingly from the best UK football source, When Saturday Comes. No, I didn't write it, in case you're wondering]

Transylvania Cliche Watch (2)

This is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel (or, I suppose, biting the neck of a giraffe), but as the game approaches, the media has struck a rich vein of Dracula references and has sucked upon them wildly. For the match reports I'm going to have a scoring system:
10 points -"XXX drove a stake through the heart of the plucky Transylvanians"
5 points - "Chelsea scented blood", "... sank their teeth into..."
3 points - all bad dracula puns (e.g. "much was at stake", "fangs a lot", "made it count", the fans were going bats", etc etc)
2 points - any mention of garlic, crosses (in a non footballing sense), coffins, stakes, blood, necks, jugulars, vampires, bats and Bela Lugosi.

Some more examples from today's previews:

"We'll put bite on Dracula boys" is the classy headline in the Daily Star, the paper that manages to make The Sun look highbrow. But in a race to the bottom, the Sun reported on the story that Chelsea brought their own food taster and that they won;t eat the food in a five star hotel (what five star hotel? I've never seen one in Cluj) with the headline "We'll Try the Stake" (it's worth clicking on that link, if only for the ridiculous picture of a punctured-neck John Terry trying to beat Dracula in goal. Oh, and the last line of the article).

Outside the British media, things are no better. Fox Sports has "Blues Go For the Jugular in Transylvania", while AFP go with "Chelsea will be hoping to sink their fangs into Cluj's jugular when they travel to Transylvania - the land of horror story icon Dracula."

It may be that CFR have decided to play this overkill up somewhat though, with Sky Sports quoting Juan Culio as telling The Sun "It is true we want to suck the life out of the big clubs. If we beat Chelsea we will all be as famous as Dracula." a quote which they probably made up (it is The Sun, after all). However it is possible that he did say it, since he is pictured in the Romanian press dressed as Dracula and renamed Draculio


And finally, the stuffy and conservative Daily Telegraph finishes its piece with the line "Cluj-Napoca is the third largest city in Romania and the capital of Transylvania, made famous by the gothic horror novel Dracula, and more recently the Cheeky Girls." That will be good news to the people of Cluj, not that they've been made famous by Romania's top university or being the birthplace of Matyas Kiraly/Matei Corvi. No it's all about the Cheeky Girls. Contrast this with the Times, who actually do a decent job of outlining the club's (and the city's) history.

Last update in the series tomorrow (time permitting)

Transylvania Cliche Watch (1)

This week sees the visit of Chelsea FC to Transylvania to take on CFR Cluj in the Champions League (Chelsea aren't actually champions, but that's the nature of UEFA competitions these days and another story about which I could rant for interminable pages. I won't, though). What this visit means though is that there will ample opportunity this week for the notoriously cliche-thirsty British press to repeatedly sink their teeth into the the Dracula vein, since they won't have much else to say about CFR Cluj (I suppose they might bring up the Cheeky Girls too, but I'm guessing it will be lots of blood sucking imagery instead). Anyway, in order to amuse I thought I would keep a watch on this.

First up this week, you might be surprised to learn, are not the tabloids but two bastions of the establishment.

The Sunday Times headlines its article "Chelsea must beware Juan Culio, the new terror of Transylvania: Argentina’s Juan Culio hopes to give the Blues a fright on Wednesday" setting their stall out early, letting you know that the angle they're taking. Then the first paragraph really takes the theme and runs with it:

LIKE all the best stories from Transylvania, the tale of CFR Cluj has a strong sense of mystery, of the unexpected. It also has its moment of shock and, at the end of the first night, even a perturbed heroine. “I didn’t believe it could be as bad as this,” shrieked Rosella Sensi, the president of AS Roma, as if she’d just woken up from a dream in which Bela Lugosi stood poised over her bedside.

Classy stuff you can see, he's really gone to town there, and actually made some serious effort to cram his Transylvanian theme into some kind of order there. Like all good writers, Ian Hawkey, for it is he, returns to his opening theme with his last sentence "Once bitten, twice shy, as they probably say in Transylvania." Ohh, very nice. Hats off to Mr Hawkey.

Next up is the BBC, who have provided a handy click through biography of the club under the heading "Who are Cluj" (by the way, that click through thing is absolutely not handy at all, is it? It's much more irritating to have to open page after page of the thing than read it all in one go, surely? Or am I hopelessly behind the web-architecture-times here?). Anyway, the scene is set with the use of a picture of Christopher Lee as Dracula on the front page, and then the second paragraph

The club hail from the city of Cluj-Napoca - the third largest city in Romania - situated in the province of Transylvania, home to the famous nocturnal blood-sucker Count Dracula, some 300 miles west of the capital Bucharest.

Now I suspect the Beeb are trying to be a bit knowing here rather than jumping completely unironically aboard the Dracula bandwagon, but that doesn't really excuse the geographically challenged nature of the positioning of the city. West of Bucharest? North would be closer, Northwest closer still. Plus it's got to be more than 400km from Bucharest. 300km west of Bucharest is somewhere like Belgrade.

Anyway, I'll be keeping an eye on the theme this week and letting you know how much Dracula (and the whole horror theme in general) gets mentioned.

Smoking

I am regularly flabbergasted at the ways advertisers find to insert naked or scantily clad young women into their work, but this one takes the biscuit.

What was the thinking that went on behind this? The anti-smoking campaign isn't working well enough, we need to attract people's attention - we need...naked women. Yes, that'll do it. This is bound to stop people smoking.

It's not, by the way, in case you were wondering, going down the well worn, and I suspect quite successful route of highlighting the link between smoking and impotence (somehow in the minds of most blokes the following thought processes occur "Suffer a slow and lingering death? Hmm, C'est la vie. But not be able to get it up? OK, I think I'll stop") No, the headline reads (roughly, and bearing in mind that my Romanian is rubbish) "Is smoking your only pleasure?" (To which presumably the answer would be "No, but it's one of them")

I think they'd have got a lot more interest if they'd put the other, secondary line at the top "Now there is help for you to quit". That, with the picture, would have had people flocking to call the number.

Televisual Feast

This blog is soon, maybe, it is possible, if the stars align correctly, going to go televisual. I have filmed a short piece for Villagunk, a show on Duna TV (that's the BBC of Hungary). When I say "I have filmed" I mean my neighbour Denes has filmed a short piece in which I appear. There is a possibility that this will turn into a more regular thing.

Anyway, I have no idea when this will appear, and so if I hear in advance I'll give you a heads up so you can all tune in (if you get Duna) and watch Csikszereda Musings in it's new format.

Don't worry, I'm not going to stop writing (I know you must both have been panicked by the thought), but right now I'm in Kazakhstan, and am too busy to write much. So, I'll do some more when I have time.

Cheers

Please the Press in Belgium

Romania’s accession to the EU has thrust the country into the international media spotlight. Well, to be more accurate a few people with metaphorical torches are poking around looking for the latest human interest story / political bombshell / zeitgeist-capturing headline. In so doing, one or two of them have happened upon Csikszereda Musings and have asked for help.

In my role, then, as the Ciuc Depression’s resident media slut, I have been contacted by the following:

• A journalist for a reputable English national newspaper (there are only two reputable English national newspapers, and it wasn’t the Guardian), who had been asked to write a story on the floods of Romanians heading for the UK and the glorious hopefulness of a new life in Hull or Stoke or somewhere. I told her that it was not much of a story, and if there were floods of migrating Romanians they would almost certainly be going to Spain or Italy. She managed to wangle her way out of doing the story, but pointed me in the direction of the story she probably would have written had her editor not relented. (It's pretty good and worth the click). It turned out that a grand total of 4 Romanians flew into Heathrow on January 1st – two of whom were students there and the other two of whom had established work contracts. [Later edit: Apparently this is ambiguous and could be interpreted as me saying that the Times is Britain's other reputable newspaper. As it is owned by Rupert Murdoch, I'd like to refute that right now. OK?]


• I got interviewed on a podcast! It was only very recently that I worked out what a podcast was, and now I’ve been on one. By the time they’ve been yesterday’s news for about 5 years, I might do one myself. By then you’ll all be blogging with video chips wired into your eyeballs so we can all see exactly what you’ve been seeing. Anyway, Mark from Amsterdam interviewed me and you can listen to it on his website here (and so learn what I actually sound like. I realize that this is such a tempting thought that I must ask you to refrain you all from clicking at the same time in case it buggers up his bandwidth or something. I’ll draw up some kind of rota or something so you can all find a quiet time to go on). I daren't actually listen to it myself, since my entire recollection of the interview is Mark asking me a question about what Romanians think, or what the reaction has been in Romania, and me egotistically answering with what I think, like that's more interesting to people.


• Someone from BBC Radio (Cambridgeshire) might be in touch, I’ve been informed. It’s a mate of my brother’s actually, who may have agreed that talking to me live on air was a good idea at some point on New Year’s Eve (the night of the year when we make all our best decisions), and be now trying to avoid making the call. So, we’ll count that as an unlikely occurrence until further notice.


• That’s it actually

In the cold light of day, that’s not exactly the world’s media beating a path to my door, I must confess. Still, if anyone else wants to contact me to pick my brains on the EU, Romania and the relationship between Romania and Britain, take this as a come hither look with a saucy wink.