A London Tale: the merely stinking rich shoved out by the filthy rich...

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Andrew Marr, who is pretty rich by most folks standard's is moaning in The Spectator:

A recent victim is Cork Street, for generations the heart of the commercial British art world. But as Spectator readers may know, it is ceasing to beat. Seven art galleries are going after Christmas, mostly to make way for flats for billionaires. Another four are to go next year. In a few years’ time there will still be galleries here but they will be run by international fashion houses who have the money. A unique part of London life, which grew by accident, will be destroyed by speculative investment.

I for one won't miss those galleries. And I'm pretty sure there'll still be a commercial art market for people to write about in The Spectator. However, it won't be in Cork Street - it'll be somewhere else, somewhere a little further out - perhaps New Cross or Stoke Newington.

And in moving out, these rich art dealers will push out what's there now - maybe some pleasant, treasured shops loved by locals. Perhaps the little corner shop where celebrities go once or twice a year in extremis when faced with a shortage of some essential (or a weird craving for a Snickers).

It has always been like this, the city. Changing. Dynamic. Exciting.

And when you get bored with this creative destruction, you retire - in Andrew Marr's case to a nice barn conversion in the Cotswolds or a farmhouse in Sussex. Forgetting, of course, that the barn once had cows in it and the farmhouse provided a home for generations of farmers.

There's something poetic about the various translations of Heraclitus' famous dictum (Πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει) in Wikiquote :

Everything flows and nothing stays.
Everything flows and nothing abides.
Everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.
Everything flows; nothing remains.
All is flux, nothing is stationary.
All is flux, nothing stays still.
All flows, nothing stays.

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Sunday mornings...

I don't know about you but I've never been able to get to grips with this habit of showing political programmes on a Sunday morning. There is a place for interviews with the great and the good, faux little debates and the endless scandal-mongering that passes for political journalism these days but it isn't for Sunday morning.

I gather from extensive investigation (I asked some bloke down the pub who seemed well informed) that this politicisation of the sabbath morn is, like so many other bad things, an import from our former colonies in North America. Which is odd because I though they were a deal more god-fearing than us and troop in their droves (do droves troop or rather meander?) to vast churches built using the same architects who, in England, design warehouses for electrical component distributors.

So now, as I sit with my morning tea (dreaming sweetly of bacon sarnies) before the telly, I am regaled with Andrew Marr interviewing some or other grandee - today it happens to be Nick Clegg. Marr's interviews do rather remind me of the "great microphone of state" and provide rather less insight than Desert Island Discs. It's almost like a staged, scripted event - a few gentle questions, the grandee getting his (it's usually a 'he') point across and Marr being able to extract just the one theatrical squirm from the interviewee.

Sunday mornings are to blame for this softball approach - if the interview was at seven thirty on a Wednesday evening, it would be all businesslike, stern and of infinitely greater value to the viewer (although less useful to the political superstar being grilled). Sunday mornings are for tea and slippers, for having breakfast in the garden, for the slow life. Sunday mornings are when we should savour things - the sun, the grass, our families and all the good things around us.

Sunday mornings aren't for politics.

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Go on Andy! Get yourself a blog...you know you want to!

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There’s been a slight frothing of the blogosphere in response to some comments made by Andrew Marr. Now, dear reader, since you are of a sensitive disposition I shall not share with you’re the full vituperation of the average pimply, basement-dwelling, social inadequate on the matter of Mr Marr’s parentage, ears, nose coloration, self-importance and general smugness – it’s all out there on many, many blogs.

Instead, my lovelies, I would rather consider quite why Mr Marr – and indeed other Initiates of the Media Elite – are quite so animated by bloggers. Not me of course since I write nothing of consquence and only write under the affluence of inkerhol. I’m also never up early enough to watch the stuff Mr Marr puts out – although I gather he has a corner in interviewing grand and important political figures on behalf of the BBC. So – since I’m good enough to hand over money for a TV Licence – I’m paying for Mr Marr to suck up to the great and good. And I’m a blogger (a rather poor excuse for one I know but a blogger nonetheless).

The truth is that pundits – and remember that this is what Andrew Marr is, he long ceased to be a journalist in any recognisable way – are threatened by bloggers. And not just by the Guido Fawkes of this world but by the great mass of questioning, doubting, opinion-forming and pomposity-pricking bloggers. It is these people who make Mr Marr’s programme so relevent not the tiny little audience he gets or the looping round of a selected clip on BBC News 24. Bloggers now shape how the world responds to what politicians say far more than does Mr Marr – and he doesn’t like it, just as Ian Hislop doesn’t like Guido, Bloggerheads and PSBook doing the job that, once upon a time, Private Eye used to do so well (before Ian became a celebrity rather than a journalist).

And, as we’ve seen with Iain Dale, Mark Pack and Will Straw, the blogger can produce fine interviews, insightful analysis and a level of detail seldom seem these days in the press or on TV. Moreover, describing the investigations of Wat Tyler, Anna Raccoon or Jack of Kent as anything other than fine ‘citizen journalism’ is to do them an insult and bloggers a further disservice. Most of us don’t do great stuff – we won’t be lining up for prizes, that’s for sure – but frankly there’s more interest, edge and excitement in what I read on-line than there is in the BBC’s entire current affairs production.

Rather than indulging in childish rants, the BBC’s grandees need to be thinking about how to work with bloggers to get more interesting, engaging and involving news reporting and current affairs discussion. Some of the leading newspaper journalists are now becoming successful bloggers – mostly because they’re good writers who know how to research a story. Perhaps Andrew Marr might like to sign up here and spend an hour of his day providing a little backgound, comments, thought and observation about his journalism – it would make him more interesting, would drive traffic to his TV show and would perhaps broaden his character beyond being ‘sycophant-in-chief’ for the Government’s media outlet.

Go on Andy...you know you want to!
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