PUTNEY DEBATER
A personal blog
What a gas!
Anyone who still thinks the privatisation of utilities was a good thing needs their head examined. When I moved back to London some three years ago, I elected to take both gas and electricity from British Gas. Sometime later, must have been when new neighbours moved in upstairs, EDF came along and somehow took over my gas account without asking. At first I didn’t realise. When I did, it took a good deal of effort to get it corrected (including writing to my MP). Read more
Academic boycott exercises Israeli TV
A current affairs programme on Israeli television is planning a report on reactions towards Israel’s policy in Gaza ‘taking place outside Israel, mainly in the UK’, and in particular, the call for an academic boycott. How I know is that I’m one of the people they’ve got in touch with to ask for my opinion. The email from the producer says ‘We’re trying to understand the intensity of this, the meaning of this, are there any concrete levels for that or [if] it’s a “silence boycott”, are there a group of academics organized acting together for this goal, or each one is protesting alone?’
This is my reply: Read more
Music Documentaries
Back from ‘Sights and Sounds’, a small but stimulating and enjoyable conference on music documentary in Salford. Films about music and musicians have been a major strand of documentary since the 1960s, so it’s odd, especially given the huge predominance of music in popular culture, that they’ve escaped systematic study, even among documentary scholars. This was therefore a pioneering event, and a lot of ground was covered.
It’s a subject in which I have a special interest, since this is the field that I entered at the start of the 1970s with two films I made for BBC2. Read more