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Since June, the UK Top 40 has featured a hidden advertisement for chewing gum. It turns out that Chris Brown's hit Forever is a crypto-ad for Wrigley's Doublemint gum.

I recently posted an item on how the charts included a number of references to trainers - a commercial battle between Nike and Adidas conducted within the lyrics of pop songs.

But in studying the words of all the hits, I failed to spot the significance of the chorus to Brown's number. "Double your pleasure/double your fun", he sings - a line I should have twigged was from the Doublemint gum jingle used since 1960.

Now Wrigley's have come clean. In a press release they reveal how the song is an extended version of a new jingle for their product.

"The summer release of Brown's smash hit, Forever, which featured the unmistakable Doublemint gum jingle lyrics, kicked-off the creative partnership between Brown and Doublemint gum", the company announced.

"Wrigley consulted with Translation Advertising (NY) to conceptualize and identify the artists behind the jingle remakes."

Translation Advertising is co-owned by Grammy-winning rapper , real name Shawn Carter. With another African-American entrepreneur, , they started the agency to help companies reach young multicultural consumers.

The Wrigley's campaign is aimed at the US market and includes TV ads featuring R&B singer Ne-Yo doing his own take on Big Red's "kiss a little longer" jingle and country singer Julianne Hough proclaiming that Juicy Fruit's "taste is gonna move ya".

It is the global chart success of Chris Brown's Forever that takes the campaign into new territory. No-one knew the song's secret until an .

Apparently, while recording the Doublemint jingle in February, Brown extended it into a four and a half minute pop song. Then, in April, Mr Brown's record label, Jive, released the song to US radio stations and digital download services as a single. It crossed the Atlantic a few weeks later and has sat in the UK charts for the last 10 weeks.

British gum-lovers will not be tempted by the rapper's jingle which is only being used in the US, and most Brown fans I suspect will be unfazed by the origins of the hit. But the story does remind us how sophisticated the advertising industry is becoming in trying to make an impact with potential customers.

The Mother advertising agency, based in London, is using theatre and film to sell product. The low-budget movie Somers Town, set around St Pancras station and due to hit the cinemas this month, is sponsored by Eurostar.

Meanwhile at the Edinburgh Festival, has played to standing ovations. Behind the scenes, most of the production's costs are being picked up by the snack manufacturer.

I don't mind being advertised to but I can't help feeling slightly abused when I discover selling is being conducted only with my subconscious. Perhaps it is a legacy of the way commercial broadcasting has clearly marked out the ads from the content in this country, but I also find it slightly disconcerting when the two become blurred.

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Burnley in Lancashire, scene of race riots in 2001, still has some of the worst community relations in the country, tensions blamed on social and ethnic segregation

But this week I went to Burnley to investigate what might be described as generational segregation - how the town's teenagers and adults live separate lives.

The charity, which has a number of projects in the town, recently did a survey involving hundreds of teenagers there. What they found was Burnley's young people are turning to gangs for support and friendship because they lack parent and adult role models.

Two-thirds said they didn't consider either of their parents as someone they would wish to emulate and they are twice as likely to turn to a teenage mate than an adult if they had a problem.

Without the limits that adult society places upon them, young people can easily fall into anti-social or criminal behaviour. I met many young lads who rarely spoke to an adult - spending almost all their spare time on the streets

At a youth club where he does voluntary work, I asked 17-year-old Steven Jones how much time he spent with his parents. "None", he replied with a shrug. In the evening, he was out with his mates, returning home after his parents had gone to bed. And in the morning? "No, because I just get up and go out."

It is not just a Burnley problem, of course. There are tens of thousands of parents who cannot control their children and simply don't know where they are for much of the day and night. The young people may not want to spend time with their parents but it would be wrong to imagine they don't want adult company. They are desperate for more.

16-year-old Hayden Tomlinson told me how the workers at the youth club keep the lads on the straight and narrow. "You like to go out with your mates and stuff, but you do need adults there as well to keep it under control", he told me. "If this place it wasn't here we would all probably be near enough inside or ASBOed up and stuff", agreed Steven.

Another boy said the youth workers, unlike 'boring' parents, understood what young people were all about.

It is easy to blame the parents and many do. But then I met Sue - mother of 11-year-old Shane - and saw a woman who was on her own and struggling to cope.

"Sometimes he's out 'til 11 or quarter to 12 at night and I don't know where he is" she told me. "I have to go walking the streets late at night trying to find him."

We were chatting because Shane had gone missing - again. This time the police were touring the town looking for the youngster who was supposed to be attending a restorative justice session when he would be required to apologise to a victim of his behaviour.

The 'RJ' as police call it, is an alternative to a criminal justice response, but if Shane doesn't attend he could face arrest. The little boy already has an Acceptable Behaviour Contract (ABC) to try to provide the boundaries his family life does not offer. Now an incident in which a piece of drain pipe hit a woman in the face could threaten everything.

We finally found Shane in a back alley - a tiny lad with big eyes and a cheeky grin... He'd been to Manchester on the train with a mate and had forgotten about the appointment. But then I wonder how many 11-year-old boys would manage such responsibility without adult help?

In the rangers' hut of a local park, Shane sat at a table with Carol, his mother at his side. "How do you think Mrs Gardiner felt", PC Dave Pascoe asked him. "Angry", Shane replied. "Sorry... Mrs Gardiner."

It was if the spell was broken. Shane's mum and Carol discovered they had both had problems with children and each had received help from social services. The Family Intervention project, they agreed, had been a life saver. If only it had been there earlier.

Meanwhile, Carol's young son Richard played tag with Shane - two innocents running around in the sunshine. What the police, local authority and agencies are doing in Burnley is trying to find ways to bridge the generation gap. When parents cannot cope, they bring the skills to keep young people out of serious trouble

17-year-old Hayley is a case in point. A year before I met her, the relationship with her parents got so bad she'd ended up homeless - trapped in a downward spiral of drink, drugs and crime. Then a firemen working with The Prince's Trust came to her rescue. "I look back now and it's like a film of people who, you know, go off the rails", Hayley says. "Twelve months ago that was me and now I am working full time and I've got myself a nice little flat."

Fire officer Graham Coxon reminded her about the long nights they'd spent together just talking things through. "You kept me up until 4.30 in the morning!", replied Hayley. "But it were worth it."

It was time invested in forging relationships between people from different generations - there's 40 years between Hayley and her fireman.

Mobility has made extended families a rarity in Britain. There is no grandpa around to take over when Mum cannot cope. No auntie who can be an honest broker in disputes. And so wider society needs to step in. It is not football pitches that youngsters are short of. It's football coaches. Not facilities but facilitators.

Young people want and need adults to provide them with the structure that too often family life cannot give them.

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This weekend in the French town of Nontron they are holding their annual - a celebration of the knife.

Knife lovers from all over Europe will descend on Périgord Vert to discuss blades with some of the world's finest cutlers.

Even in Sheffield where cutlery runs in the blood, it would be impossible to imagine such an event. The knife has become weaponised in Britain, stripped of all artistry and beauty.

As a Cub Scout in the 1960s I was given a knife by my parents to wear on my belt. It was one of the best presents I can remember; a bone handle with a long and razor-sharp blade housed in a tough leather sheath. It was certainly dangerous but it was also significant: a sign that my mum and dad considered me mature enough to be trusted with such a tool.

Were I to do the same for my son today, I would be regarded as irresponsible and he might be regarded as a criminal.

The now ubiquitous phrase "knife crime" suggests the problem lies with the implement rather than the user. The contents of my kitchen drawer has become an arsenal. Evil lurks in the cutlery tray.

A few weeks ago, at the height of the knife panic, Gordon Brown was filmed chatting to some urban youth at a project in South London. "What do you think about an amnesty for knives?", the Prime Minister asked.

The tall young man in his hoodie was quick to point out the policy flaw. "What's the point of that?" he asked. "You'd just go and get another one."

I am hopeful that as we enter what some call the "silly season" (but I prefer to think of as the sensible season), the sense that we are living through a widespread epidemic threatening our daily lives will be replaced by a belief that, while there are dangers in our society, the vast majority of us need not worry unduly.

I worry that the British media, including the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ, must take some responsibility for a different epidemic - a phobia of street violence which diminishes people's quality of life.

The renowned criminologist Robert Reiner published some a few years ago which asked whether the media's depiction of crime had changed since the war. In quantity terms, he found very little difference. But the way criminal behaviour was described had altered significantly.

"The most marked trend in the reporting of crime over the half-century studied was the increasingly accentuated portrayal of crime as an all pervasive menace" he wrote in the journal Criminal Justice Matters, "threatening ordinary people...and in particular harming exceptionally vulnerable individuals."

"The style of reporting shifts markedly", he concluded, "from a degree zero description largely in legal terms only, to the vivid accounts of the fear and suffering of the victims with whom the reader is invited to identify."

He compared two stories from 1945 and 1989. The first from the Daily Mirror reported the trial of a "strip-tease dancer" and an American paratrooper for the murder of a hire-car driver.

"What is striking from the coverage", wrote Professor Reiner, "are a number of absences: no account of the details of the murder itself, of the injuries suffered by the victim, or any fear he might have experienced."

The more recent story comes from The Times and was headlined "Martial arts fanatic gets life for killing daughter aged five: Girl died from a combination of pain, shock and exhaustion after vengeful beating."

"The pictures portray a smiling child, a sullen and sinister looking man and a weeping woman", Professor Reiner noted. "The story graphically details the fear and suffering of the girl, and undermines any excuse of 'bad temper' offered on behalf of the accused. The story is clearly victim-centred and demonises the offender."

"Crime stories fifty years ago took for granted that crime was wrong independently of whether suffering was inflicted on sympathetic victims. The burden of the story was to make the perpetrator comprehensible."

Academics in the USA have long been documenting a similar phenomenon there. In her 1980 book, Crime News and the Public, Doris A. Graber noted: "The mass media supply a large amount of data about specific crimes. These data convey the impression that criminals threaten a legitimate social system and its institutions."

A 1998 report included this observation: "Disproportionate and superficial coverage fuels public fear and anxiety, which then can cause politicians to overreact and pass unnecessary and costly get-tough-on-crime laws."

In February 1999, an American Bar Association study on "Federalization of Criminal Law" criticised the US Congress for passing "misguided, unnecessary and harmful" anti-crime laws, for fear of appearing "soft on crime."

I feel as though we have been living through an identical experience a decade later. Crime has been falling for over 12 years and yet our law makers have passed more than 50 Acts of Parliament to deal with public concerns that it is getting worse.

Some of the legislation has been valuable, but there is scant evidence that all the new laws have contributed to making us safer. I suspect the constant focus on counteracting the crime menace has helped make us all more fearful.

Will we ever again have the confidence to put on a British festival of the knife or give a Cub Scout a bone-handled blade?

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A couple of years ago I attended a Downing Street brainstorm on "the role of the citizen and the state" chaired by the then Prime Minister Tony Blair.

"There needs to be a fundamental re-examination of the future relationship between citizen and state", Mr Blair argued, admitting that during his period in office he had too often felt it necessary to control from the centre.

He talked of the need for a smaller and strategic state built upon a new contract which spelt out not only the responsibilities of government but the responsibilities of citizens.

One of the reasons for his philosophical shift lay among the Cabinet Office papers on the table in No 10 that day. "The UK remains among the most unequal societies in the EU", the authors admitted. "The very poorest have not shared in recent growth."

It was a candid assessment of his own failure which got rather ignored amidst the then fevered speculation about his handover to Gordon Brown.

But David Cameron was watching closely and taking notes.

The No 10 analysis fitted with the Tory leader's own concerns about central government's inability to reach and help the very poorest in society.

Labour had made some inroads. Six hundred thousand children lifted out of poverty, no mean achievement.

Overall, the least well off 20% in Britain had narrowed the gap on those above them. But the poorest 5-10% in the UK was actually falling further behind.

Not that Whitehall hadn't tried. Initiatives like Sure Start, working family tax credits and the minimum wage were designed to help just this group. But whatever levers were pulled seemed to have little or no effect.

Money was targeted to help schools in deprived areas and yet, on some measures, the gap between pupils from the poorest backgrounds and others widened.

It was, in part, Tony Blair's sense of powerlessness in reaching what advisors called "the severely disadvantaged" that led him to question the role of the state.

And just as Labour's policy review teams were busy cogitating and brainstorming, so former Tory leader for David Cameron, considering how a Conservative administration might deal with the plight of what he called the "underclass".

we get a little more meat on the bones of the Tory thinking. Shadow schools minister Michael Gove ridicules the current government philosophy: "I fear, for Gordon Brown there is no such thing as society", he says, "only the individual and the state."

A neat back-reference to Margaret Thatcher's much-misquoted line on society and the promise of a more complex contract between citizen and government.

On the role of the citizen, Mr Gove says this: "of those to whom much is given, much is expected". Although he doesn't credit him, this is almost an exact lift from John F Kennedy: "of those to whom much is given, much is required". Or to quote another line of JFK's: "ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country".

And on the role of the state: the responsibility of narrowing the gap between the richest and poorest - one of the fractures in what the Conservatives characterise as a broken society.

How would that be achieved? "Our social policy", Mr Gove makes clear, "is explicitly redistributive". In his own area of schools policy, money will flow from rich to poor in the form of pupil premiums - additional funding for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

More broadly, the Conservatives stress the importance of devolving power away from Whitehall to local government and civic society; of the need for the state to become more active in supporting and encouraging traditional family structures.

What politicians from all parties will concede is that the poorest in Britain seem to losing ground on the rest, and attempts to pull them closer by throwing policy lifelines from the centre hasn't worked. Whether a redrawing of the roles of citizen and state will provide better answers is far from clear.

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Another mild, damp summer - just the weather for fleas. Last year the UK saw record numbers of "siphonaptera" according to environmental health officers and this year looks likely to see a similar story.

So, Map of the Week this week is actually four maps looking at the UK from the flea viewpoint.

There are about 60 species of flea in Britain and thanks to the extraordinary life work of Bob George, a former RAF pilot and school teacher who began recording fleas in about 1950, naturalists now have a much more profound understanding of this wingless and largely friendless insect.

Bob initiated the national flea recording scheme in 1964 and so these maps reflect almost half a century of new data but also many historic records including those of the natural historian Miriam Rothschild.

According to Bob's "Atlas of the Fleas of Britain and Ireland", the human flea (Pulex irritans) is considered to be of New World origin. "It is possible that this species may have originated in South America, associated with guinea pigs", he writes. "Pulex irritans appears to have spread with humans around the world during the post-glacial period.

There is evidence of its presence at Viking settlements in Dublin and York."

The human flea is in decline apparently, a victim of the vacuum cleaner and insecticides.

The cat flea, however, seems in good health and is Britain's most common flea. Dog fleas are rarer and are almost unknown in Scotland. If a pooch has fleas north of the border, they are almost certainly cat fleas.

Our final map shows recordings of Brtain's rarest flea: the Manx shearwater flea. You will need to look closely for the only dot - in the Inner Hebrides off the West coast of Scotland. The Manx shearwater flea is only found at high altitudes (650 m and above) and has only been collected from shearwater nest burrows on the mountain of Hallival on Rum.

Fleas can jump up to 150 times the length of their bodies, equivalent to a person jumping about 300 metres. Their acceleration is equivalent to 50 times that of the space shuttle during lift off.

According to the Health Protection Agency, fleas are carriers of the cat and dog tapeworm, which may infect humans. Apart from this there is no disease transmitted by fleas in the UK (although they are still an important carrier of plague in many parts of the world).

If you are interested in the distribution of animals, birds and insects in the UK, go to the where you can take advantage of a wealth of wildlife data to make your own maps. You could also get involved with adding dots to maps through involvement with a recording scheme - visit the to find out more.

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