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From Kevin Marsh:
It's all about a sense of place.
You will all know that the saintly Ed spent much of this week in Brighton, interviewing and talking to members of the Liberal Democrat party who have suddenly become very tough and persuaded that they could overtake all the other parties and become the Government. What you might not know - as this is where the sense of place thing comes in and in particular the difficulty of conveying it on the radio - is that we placed the holy one in a small Perspex box and suspended him from what I understand is called a "cherry-picker" parked between the Grand and Metropole Hotels. This wasn't just to make life more difficult for the likes of Mr Kennedy and Mr (Menzies) Campbell though scaling the tall wooden orchard ladder that gave access to the box from the prom certainly did that. No, the point of it was to curb "holy" Ed's unfortunate tendency when near large expanses of water - in this case the sea - to try to walk on it.
Actually, though it seemed a good and imaginative solution at the time, it turned out to have all sorts of unfortunate repercussions some of which you'll have seen on TV though the pictures didn鈥檛 convey the half of it. If you were actually there, the grimly determined crush of neck craning crowds were quite scary especially when the mood turned inventively malign and they started throwing quail's eggs and quorn sausages at the box. I don't know if you know Brighton - the Sussex Faliraki they call it - but when it got late one night and people had had one or two Bacardi Breezers too many in the Pink Parakeet then it all got very Club 18-30 and there was a really ugly moment when two sporty Brighton burghers - I imagine they were sporty since they were clad only in undersized athletic supports and some of their musculature was quite evidently over-exercised - elbowed Sir Paul McCartney aside and positioned themselves under the Perspex box where they ululated wildly and started playing leap frog.
We tried very hard to get some of this across on air - but, frankly, it defeated us and the end result was something that sounded like a normal conference co-presentation.
The big issue of the week, of course, was Mr (Alastair) Campbell's occasional use of non-Churchillian phraseology in his diaries disclosed to the Hutton inquiry - or rather, not so much that - since he has every right to express himself as he wishes in his own private writings - but the way in which we might report it. Now you might not know this, but if we want to use on air the sort of language Mr (Alastair) Campbell used, we have to get the written permission - in triplicate - from the controller of Radio Four. This wasn't possible since the controller was actually down in Brighton sleeping off the effects of a night of throwing undercooked saveloys at the saintly Ed's box so our resourceful political correspondent Norman Smith came up with the simple answer - spell the offending word on the reasonable and wholly justified assumption that although no listener would be fooled, no editor, producer or presenter can spell properly and would conclude that Mr (Alistair) Campbe! ll was indicating a desire generously to kit-out Mr Andrew Gilligan in moderately priced fashion items.
Controversy of the week - is it cruel to put pictures of a dead goldfish in a TV ad? And are small fishbowls themselves "distressing environments" ? Apparently, a little-known body called the Broadcasting Advance Clearance Centre decided it was after advertising director Mr Trevor Beattie used a picture of his former fish-friend Frank - or rather a picture of his bowl in which there was precious little evidence of Frank - in an ad about life's little disasters. Obviously this was a bit cruel since for Fred it was more than one of life's little disasters though of course Mr Beattie was - as we trained executives say - apprised of the bigger picture and could see that on a disaster scale of one to ten Frank's demise probably didn't even make one. Which was probably why Mr Beattie was so readily able to get over the passing of Frank and bought himself a new scaly chum which he called Draconian - after the manner of the BACC, he said, but overlooking the fact that an adjective d! oesn't really make a good name for a fish.
Kevin
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