A journey in reconciliation: an exploration of the friendship of CS Lewis with JRR Tolkien (Monday 20 May at 7.30pm)

As part of Community Relations Week, Contemporary Christianity are hosting a talk by Rev Mercia Malcolm - a Church of Ireland vicar in Carnmoney - exploring the friendship of two of the Inklings, CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien.

As a fourth or fifth former, I remember re-reading Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Tolkien in order that I could be interviewed in character as Tolkien as part of an exercise in Mr Duffy's English class.

Tolkien was a devout Catholic and his faith was significant in Lewis' conversion to Christianity and the Church of England. Lewis described the friendship between the two writers as one which

"marked the breakdown of two old prejudices."

Find out more on Monday evening (20 May) at 7.30pm up on the third floor of 21 Ormeau Avanue, Belfast, BT2 8HD (just past the BBC). There's always tea and coffee and a warm welcome. The talk will be followed by questions and discussion.

2013 is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Belfast-born author. CS Lewis Tours run every Sunday afternoon from June to September, leaving the front of the Linen Hall Library at 2pm.

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Do you switch off at funerals? (40% don't power off their mobile) Do you tweet? (3% have)

I can *exclusively reveal that a survey of two thousand funeral attendees found that 3% had used social media (Facebook or Twitter) at a funeral, and 4% thought it was acceptable to use social media to describe what was taking place at a funeral.  [* It’s ok, I washed my mouth out with soap after typing the tabloid E word.]

Eamonn Mallie – I’m looking at you! While your funeral tweeting has been scoffed at in the past, and is often the subject of debate at tweet-ups and seminars, 4% of folk are with you!

In fact, of those surveyed across the UK, one in six had used their phone during a funeral.

I used to tell folk that I only switched my phone off for funerals and flights. Increasingly that’s not true.

On a plane, the phone just goes into flight mode rather than being fully powered off. (Bluetooth is allowed on most airlines once the seatbelt lights have been extinguished.)

Funerals had become another situation when the phone was simply slipped onto silent.

A couple of years ago, I silenced my phone as I got out of the car and headed into an East Belfast church to attend a funeral. I remember doing it as I’d paused when a colleague walked past the car and told him that I was fixing my phone before going any further.

Somewhere in the middle of the tribute I felt a vibration in the chest pocket of my jacket. The vibration that comes a second before the ringer goes off. For that second I was calm. Only I would notice the vibration. And I could slip my hand into the pocket and hit the button to reject the call.

What happened next caused my heartbeat to race and no doubt my neck to go red. bRing! bRing! Whaaaa … I’d taken precautions. I’d set it to silent! How could it be ringing? It takes a lot longer to reach into your pocket to switch off a noisy phone that one that’s simply vibrating.

The ground didn’t open up and swallow me. A lightning bolt didn’t crash through the roof of the church and strike me down. Though I half expect to be held to account for the incident at the pearly gates!

Later on when I was thinking straight again, I realised that my phone had already been on silent earlier that morning. So I’d actually un-silenced it getting out of the car. And I hadn’t looked down at the screen to check. Holding in the ‘C’ button had been enough every other time.

For a while after that I switched my phone off at funerals. But more recently I’ve lapsed back to silencing it … though I nearly always visually check it is muted nowadays.

As well as being purveyors of food and banking, The Co-operative Group run hundreds of funeral homes across the UK, including 19 local ones under the banner of Funeral Services Northern Ireland. The survey I referred to early was commissioned by the Co-Op and the two thousand adult funeral attendees were cornered at some of their funeral homes across the UK.

I suspect we’ll be reading a lot about the results of the survey in this morning’s papers and hearing the issues discussed on the radio. Like the regular Travelodge surveys – the ones that reveal a third of British adults share their bed with a teddy bear – the funeral industry’s mobile survey is very accessible and easily conveyed, with a sprinkling of advertising thrown in for good measure!

Some more statistics (non-exclusive ones this time!):

• 70% of people thought that it was unacceptable to use your mobile phone at a funeral. That’s higher than while driving (55%), at a wedding (41%), on a train (18%) or on a plane (18%).
  
• Yet 40% of those polled said they wouldn’t turn their mobile off at a funeral: 30% would put their phone on silent; 10% would refuse to even turn the sound down. (It’s not quite clear from the press release whether that’s 30% of the 40% (ie, 12% of total polled) that put their phone on silent; or whether the 40% = 30% silent + 10% sound still up.)

Beverley Brown – General Manager of Funeral Services Northern Ireland –talked about the hypocrisy of the public position:

“We are witnessing a cultural shift in society’s stance on funeral etiquette. Although people universally despise the use of mobile phones at funerals, many exercise double standards by frowning upon the use of mobiles by others when they are unwilling to turn the sound down or turn their own phone off.

As people become ever more time-pressed and ever more welded to their phones, the use of mobiles has become commonplace at events which would have been considered unthinkable only a few years ago, and none more so than at a funeral.”

Sentiment shared exactly by David Collingwood, operations director of Co-operative Funeralcare in the Guardian. Great minds think alike - that's how it works with regionalised press releases!

But if our phones were off, then we couldn’t take calls, tweet, read emails ... or film the service.

Over one in four people in Northern Ireland talk [on the phone] during funerals, in the north of England over one in 10 admitted to leaving their phone on by mistake while Londoners and those from the South East were the most likely to make a call. One in 40 East Midlanders have filmed a funeral on a mobile phone!

I can’t find any quantitative stats but there is anecdotal evidence that some people are being buried with their mobile phones … occasionally in mobile-phone shaped caskets!

It does make me stop and think. The only place I’m truly offline and out of touch with the world is while on a long haul flight.

Being constantly “on the grid” is certainly normal, but can it also be healthy? Well connected but perhaps constantly distracted?

It's a subject that digital researcher Aleks Krotoski tackles in two recent episodes of The Digital Human on Radio 4: Isolation (listen to the last 7 minutes) and Detox (covers solitude). [available as podcasts]

Statistics and neat infographics from FSNI/Co-Op

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Snags continue to hit the News Letter; while two regional dailies run identical features in their women’s section

I had a leisurely read today through a couple of this morning’s papers and a number of oddities jumped off the pages. While verging on petty, the snags and snafus do point to the lack of subeditors at the News Letter and the pressure on the remaining Johnston Press staff who recently switched to use a new template-based approach that imposes limits on story length and page layout.

Both the Irish News and the News Letter use the same old photo of Keira Knightly in a bridesmaid dress at a friend’s wedding in 2011.

Unfortunately, the News Letter label the picture as “Actress Keira knightly arrives for her wedding”. [Other than sharing the same image, the News Letter online article for this story is completely different from the published one!] The Daily Mail is pretty sure she wore a white dress at her own wedding!

Both papers cover Friday evening’s statement from the Archbishop of Armagh in reaction to Archdeacon Leslie Stevenson’s last minute decision to decline appointment as Bishop of Meath & Kildare. Referring to the three bishops who had visited Leslie Stevenson “in an individual capacity to offer pastoral support” the day before he declined the appointment (which was first announced in February), the News Letter piece finishes with the odd sentence:

Archbishop of Dublin Dr Michael Jackson said the bishops “were they seeking to revoke the decision of the House of Bishops”.

Whatever that means? [Corrected in the online version of the article.] The full sentence from the Archbishop of Dublin that was being quoted said:

The bishops were not representing the House of Bishops, nor were they seeking to revoke the decision of the House of Bishops who had previously confirmed his election to the bishopric of Meath & Kildare in good faith.

My eye was caught by the same white and blue patterned clothes in the women’s section of both the Irish News and the News Letter [also online]. Feature writer Lisa Haynes struck gold - twice - with her content being picked up by both regional papers today. While the two articles differently edit Lisa's original material and photos, both pieces start with same common sense sentence:

With each fashion season there are mainstream looks, and then there are niche trends.

Not for the first time, the Letters to the Editor page in the News Letter seems unsure of the newspaper’s proper Portadown address.

The bottom left hand corner of the page suggests it is “Cam Industrial Area”.

In a paragraph immediately below it becomes plain “Carn”.

And over in the bottom right hand corner it is more correctly listed as “Carn Industrial Area”.

Let’s not even start commenting on the wide variation of byline styles still being used across different articles in the relaunched News Letter.

Questions remain about the effect of recent changes at the News Letter on staff morale, its inability to include late-breaking stories given the inflexibility of the new templates, and whether the concentration on online video will pay off for the paper's website and tablet edition.

I understand that Johnston Press are once again looking for further redundancies, and in the last few weeks the NUJ have raised the issues of defamation/libel (writing a balanced article that sums up two sides of a court case in 200-250 words is very difficult) as well as occupational stress with local JP management.

While Johnson Press' managing director in Ireland agreed to be interviewed last August/September, a date was never set and she hasn't responded to my most recent email trying to arrange something to mark the paper's relaunch. 

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Innovation, business and culture at the EBN Congress in Derry (29-31 May)

Derry’s stint as UK City of Culture for 2013 is bringing all kinds of events and conferences to the city. At the end of May, a business and innovation conference with a technological and cultural will take over the Millennium Forum.

The EBN Congress will bring together European business and innovation centres, incubators, businesses and entrepreneurs. This year’s congress is being organised by NORIBIC, the Northern Ireland Business Innovation Centre.

The line-up of local and international speakers and contributors is impressive:

Steve Wozniak is best known for co-founding Apple Computer Inc along with Steve Jobs. He’s also a philanthropist and founding sponsor of technology and children’s discovery museums as well as an initial funder of the campaigning Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Richard Florida is described as an “urbanist” and wrote The Rise of the Creative Class, a book whose concepts Derry academic Paul Moore rubbished in his 2011 TEDxBelfast talk.

Tim Smit co-founded the Eden Project where he is still co-chief executive. The project has contributed over £1 billion into the Cornish economy. Long before that he worked as a composer and producer of both rock music and opera.

Michael Gorman is founding director of Dublin’s Science Gallery and has a passion for exciting people about the “creative collisions between art and science”. The Science Gallery was described at last year’s TEDxBelfast as having “no entrance fee and a decent café in which you can meet scientists and artists, their exhibitions go beyond simple childish scientific displays and offer an insight into real science”.

And that’s before you list the experts in economics, semiconductors, sustainability, the University of Ulster’s Director of Innovation Tim Brundle and director of Derry’s CultureTECH festival Mark Nagurski and lots, lots more. It’s good to see that the list of speakers is not all male. Themed villages will focus on culture, digital, social and internation opportunities for networking.

The full programme stretches over three days from 29 to 31 May. Local delegates can take advantage of heavily discounted tickets. (The main EBN Congress site handles bookings from further afield.)

Hopefully I’ll be there on the middle day and will post about the atmosphere and some of the content being shared. In the meantime, local creative firm Uproar Comics have produced a light-hearted guide to the congress.

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14th Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival (2-12 May 2013) - the IMF, time portals, music and death

A quick look at some events that are running as part of the 14th Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival which starts this week.

Friday 3 May

Abie Philbin Bowman: The IMF vs Jedward // 8pm in The Dark Horse // Another year and another promising show from the Irish comic who brought us Jesus: The Guantanamo Years and Pope Benedict: Bond Villain. He has a radical plan to save his country: “Ireland should get Jedward to renegotiate our bailout from the EU and IMF. After half an hour with Jedward, the IMF will give us whatever we want. After half an hour with Jedward, Bono and Bob Geldof, Ireland will own Germany.” £5.

Saturday 4 May

Sylvia’s Quest // Leaves The MAC at 3pm and 6pm // Follow Sylvia through “her labyrinth of secret streets and time portals” listening in to “the sounds, voices and worlds which only Sylvia can usually hear’ on the provided headphones as she tries to find her way home. £7. Dress for the weather. Also on Sunday 5 May.

Sunday 5 May

Bernadette Morris // 7pm in The John Hewitt // Having been captivated by her at Out to Lunch 2012, it’s brilliant to see Bernadette Morris at CQAF launching her debut album All the Ways you Wander. £4

Tuesday 6 May

St Anne’s: Full Circle // 6pm and 7pm in Writer’s Square // A 22 minute documentarion filmed and edited by Peter Adam about the rise and fall of the original St Anne’s plaza, told through the eyes of the skateboarders. £2.

Wednesday 8 May

Seo Robert – The Search for Robert McAdam // 8pm in The Baby Grand // a bilingual show (with Irish sections repeated in English) looking a cross-cultural nineteenth century northern Presbyterian Robert Shipboy McAdam. “McAdam was involved in setting up a library, a harp society, a museum and a literary society, he designed and mended steam turbines, made the windows for the Pasha’s Palace in Cairo and still found time to compose music and amass one of the largest collections of Irish cultural treasures on the island. A fascinating insight into one of Belfast’s most eminent Victorians.” £9.50 and £12.50.

Sean Hughes: Life Becomes Noises // 8pm, Downstairs at The MAC // Having sold out at January’s Out to Lunch festival, Sean Hughes is back with his one man show about aging and dying, poignant yet light hearted as he reflects on the death of his father. £10.

Thursday 9 May

Mark Thomas: Bravo Figaro // 8pm, Downstairs at The MAC // Another father and son tale from another comic. This time it’s Mark Thomas bringing opera to his bed-ridden Methodist-Thatcherite father in his Bournemouth bungalow. £10.

The QUBe Myth-Science Space Arkestra perform the music of Sun Ra // 9pm in The MAC Upstairs // Easily the strangest-titled gig at CQAF this year. QUBe are a 16-piece Belfast group of improvisers and experimental musician. Hip hop, New Orleans’ brass, lower east side experimentalism, electronica and noise; custom made costumes, unusual instruments, dancing, and unexpected surprises. £6.

Sunday 12 May

Bronagh Gallagher // 3pm in The Black Box // Bronagh. Soul. Sunday afternoon. Book. Tickets. Now. £12

If you’re in The Black Box for an event, check out Helena Hamilton’s dizzying monochrome installation in the toilets.

Also check out the Open Source #OSBelfast programme running in 25 Lower Donegall Street (building to the left of Belfast Exposed/Northern Visions) during the CQAF festival. Lots of events, workshops and performances already scheduled in to their timetable. And you can even suggest and run your own.

The History of the Troubles accordin’ to my Da with Conor Grimes, Ivan Little and Alan McKee is running (again!) in the Grand Opera House from Tuesday 7–Saturday 11 May. The play was originally commissioned ten years ago by CQAF.

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Bruiser make a feel good song and dance with their Spelling Bee in the MAC (until 4 May)

My spelling is getting worse. Auto-correct means that I no longer even see half the red wiggly lines that should appear under my misspelt sentences. However, spelling bee participants are in a whole different league of enriched word power.

The adult actors from local Bruiser Theatre Company in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee are totally convincing as the younger characters they are playing. The minimal set – a gymnasium – has a quirky built-in emphasised perspective.

“All the children you see on stage are here because of their love of words.”

The children sitting on the benches include a few familiar faces – volunteers, don’t panic! – from the audience. The audience participation is free from humiliation and they're made into stars of the show. Based on last night’s performance, Basil McCrea may have a career in the Countdown dictionary corner if politics gets the better of him!

If you haven’t been to a spelling bee before you’ll soon pick up the pattern of each child stepping up the mic while a fascinating fact about them is read out. A word is announced and before spelling it out the contestant is allowed to ask for the word’s language of origin, its definition or for it to be used in a sentence (rarely useful, often sarcastic, and always funny). If you get a letter wrong, the bell is rung and your time in the competition is up.

“Words in the dictionary are the friends I shall have forever, more than the friends I have in school”

The characters have impossible names but very believable pubescent issues. The bee progresses, and through flashbacks and bursting into song the audience get to know the contestants and examine their vulnerabilities as the children, one by one, exit the competition.

There’s an energy to the cast and the musical score that carries right through the show. While there aren’t any Webber/Rice tunes that you’ll hum on the way home, some of the songs stand out and they’re certainly sung with gusto by the relatively small cast. At times some of the lyrics were lost in the noise, but the emotion was still understood. The live band sits up behind the stage and benefits from an enormous percussion section.

The show keeps the cast on its toes with plenty of opportunity for improvisation and ad-libbing around the volunteer contributions. Director Lisa May describes being attracted to this “danger” in the script. It means it’ll be a slightly different show every night and the cast won’t be able to just go through the motions.

In the end, Spelling Bee is less about words and music, and more about people dealing with their insecurities, coping with competition and expectations, finding friendship and acceptance, and learning to make good choices and live well.

It’s unashamedly feel good, a little schmaltzy, very funny, and at the end of a busy Thursday it made me smile from beginning to end. And now I know what a sermuncle is!

“There's no such thing as a sermuncle.”

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee runs at the MAC until 4 May. Well worth going to see. I'll be back to see what Bruiser get up to next.

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What is This Film Called Love (Mark Cousins) at Belfast Film Festival

Stuck in Mexico City for an unexpected three day layover while promoting his epic fifteen hour documentary The Story of Film, filmmaker Mark Cousins decided – in the middle of a press-up – to go out and make a film.

He took with him the laminated photograph of Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. Walking fifteen or so miles a day, he pounded the pavements of the bustling city like a melancholic flâneur, exploring it with Sergei, and filming only using his pocket Flip camera.

I talked to Mark after the tonight’s screening at the Belfast Film Festival, appropriately filming him using a Flip camera (for the second time) to find out how his limited equipment had influenced his ad hoc film.



A male and a female voice talk over the shaky pictures taken by Mark as he marches all around the city. Sometimes he’ll stop for a rest and a drink. Sometimes the camera will rest on some facet of nature and stare for a minute or two.

With a fixed wide angle lens, a short battery life and only a built in mic, the Flip camera is limited to just two kinds of shots – wobbly and stable – depending on whether a tripod was used.

The voiceovers are fabulously detailed, referencing poetry and history as well as musing on the meaning of ecstasy. While the slow pace of the film grated at the start, I relaxed into the easy going, free-flowing narrative and warmed to the peculiar plot-less tale.

What is This Film Called Love has flashbacks galore – and flashbacks within flashbacks – along with dreams and at least three twists in the last ten minutes of the film.

Shot in three days without a thought-out plan, and edited in just nine days, the 77 minute film is a remarkable example of what you can achieve if you give a creative mind a camera and the space to think. Film buffs will love the auditory and visual references to classic movies and soundtracks. You can read more about the editing process on the film’s website and read through the storyboard that Mark crafted and (re)sorted on A6 index cards.

Sitting in the soft QFT seats watching Mark and Sergei take a gander around Mexico City, I remembered a weekend in September when I spent long periods walking through Boston city centre and over the bridge to Cambridge to wander around MIT. Fond memories of being solitary in a city, of having time to think and read and watch. Memories shattered as I returned home from the QFT to hear the news of explosions and the unfolding tragedy at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in a city I grew to love so quickly.

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Extra DAB radio stations coming to Northern Ireland - Digital One licence extended

Provision of DAB radio in Northern Ireland has been weak since its inception.

When originally set up, DAB radio had two national multiplexes (bundles) of radio stations (one with BBC stations, the other commercial) that were transmitted all across the UK, supplemented with local commercial multiplexes.

Due to frequency constraints – avoiding interference with frequencies already crowded with FM stations in the north and south – the national commercial multiplex was not licenced to operate in Northern Ireland, leaving us short of digital channels and making the DAB radio proposition considerably weaker, demonstrated by low public awareness of DAB in surveys.

A frequency – DAB channel 11D – has become free that will allow an additional multiplex to transmit across Northern Ireland, and the UK's national commercial operator Digital One has applied to extend into Northern Ireland.

Ofcom consulted during a four week window during February and March, and I read in the Irish News this week that Ofcom had approved Digital One’s licence extension to Northern Ireland, and an additional six transmitters (Divis, Carnmoney Hill, Londonderry, Brougher Mountain, Strabane and Limavady) will start to be built this year.

• Existing BBC national multiplex: Asian network, Radio 1, 1Xtra, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4, 4 extra, Radio 5 Live, 5 Live Sports Extra, 6 music, Asian network, World Service
  
• Existing local commercial multiplex, operated by Bauer Digital Radio: Citybeat, Classic FM, Cool FM, Downtown Radio, Heat, Kiss, Q102.9, TalkSport, UCB UK + BBC Radio Ulster*

* Since the BBC national multiplexes transmit on the same frequency right across the UK, the channels on each have to be identical. So local BBC stations like Radio Ulster are carried on local commercial multiplexes. Since different multiplexes use different transmitter sites, this explains why DAB coverage for Radio Ulster and Radio 5live are not identical in Northern Ireland.

You can check your predicted DAB coverage on the Get Digital Radio website.

• The Digital One Network being extended to NI carries Smooth, Smooth 70s, Classic FM, Planet Rock, BFBS (GB rather than the NI station already on FM), TalkSport, Premier, UCB UK, Jazz FM, Absolute, Absolute 80s, Absolute 90s.

There is some overlap – Classic FM and UCB UK – between the Digital One national commercial multiplex and the existing Bauer local commercial multiplex. There is also an anomaly that local station U105 has so far avoided the expense of entering the local DAB market, even though another UTV-branded company operates DAB multiplexes in England.

Also worth noting that other than a novel technical experiment a couple of years ago, BBC Radio Foyle is not available on DAB, even from the transmitters in the north west.

The Irish News quotes Ofcom’s head of digital radio Neil Stock:

“This move puts Northern Ireland on a par with the rest of the United Kingdom, giving radio listeners the opportunity to tune in to a far greater number of services.”

Digital One predicts its new services will include indoor coverage for 74% of households and 70% of the road network (suspect that's 70% of motorway and primary A roads).

An older coverage map from Arqiva (who run the transmitters) was included in one of Digital One’s proposal documents.

There were relatively few responses to Ofcom's consultation, but nearly all were in favour of Digital One's extension to NI:

• I think all DAB services should be extended as soon as possible to Northern Ireland.
  
• I beleive that if Ofcom did not grant a licence toDigital One it would be tatamount to Racial diacrimanation [sic]
  
• It is simply unfair that we in Armagh and the wider population of NI are not able to receive the range of digital stations that, not only GB residents, but those in Belfast can. May I add that it would surely be unthinkable for any other Government agency to suggest that many people are able to avail of the services already available to those who happen to live in major centres of population. It would be inaccurate to refer to a postcode lottery, since a lottery is chance, whereas digital radio coverage has been specifically planned and implemented to exclude hundreds of thousands of eagerly would- be listeners. Can we in Armagh and other areas please have equality of coverage?

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Forked.ie launches new blog to look at the Norn Iron food and drink industry

Great to see the launch of a new blog - Forked.ie - in Belfast tonight. A blog with branded bags and badges ... as well as an appetite for news and views about food on the island of Ireland.

The badges were the tell-tale sign that Manuel the Waiter was one of the four resident foodies behind the new venture which merges the talent of Belfast Bites (Laura Clatworthy), Food Belfast (John Ferris), Well Done Fillet (MtD), a cocktail evangelist (Conor Brady) and the Mystery Chef (the 'mystery' being another sign that MtD is involved).

Expect bar and restaurant reviews, interviews and gossip with local hospitality industry types, and the mad musings and mutterings of those who make the food and serve it.

Hosted in Ox Belfast (recently opened at 1 Oxford Street, just up from the Laganside Courts), the launch packed out the upstairs with screeching eaters, drinkers, owners as well as old and new media folk. The screeching was real: like a rock concert, my ears hurt as I headed back down the street to get my car.

Forked.ie has already got off to a great start with a scoop on the closure of the Cayenne restaurant in an interview John Ferris conducted with "the two godfathers of modern Northern-Irish cuisine" Paul Rankin and Michael Deane.

Looking forward to what they serve up in the weeks and months to come.

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A Little History of the World (E. H. Gombrich)

With only three years of history at school, my knowledge jumps from Neolithic man to the Roundheads, Cavaliers and Cromwell, and finishes with Franz Ferdinand and the First World War. While my daughter went through a period of devouring Horrible Histories books, I struggled with their mashup of manufactured monstrosity and reality.

A Little History of the World was written by Ernst Gombrich and first published in German in 1936. The two hundred and eighty page book blasts through world history at a breakneck speed. Each chapter looks at a period or a character. The prose is anything but staid, launching into minor digressions and asking the reader questions throughout the chatty and energetic text.

Egypt, Babylon, an Athenian called Draco (from which we get the word “Draconian”), China, Muhammad, Charlemagne, knights, Popes, Columbus, Joan of Arc, Martin Luther, Ivan the Terrible, Napoleon, Karl Marx, Abraham Lincoln, and lots, lots more. Gombrich also records the industrial and technological advances throughout the ages, while noting the social and political upheaval they cause.

Given the broad sweeps of history being covered – the First World War is fitted into four pages – lots of periods and places are left out. The book is unsurprisingly light on Irish history, and local readers will discover that 1690 is not remembered for the Battle of the Boyne! There is relatively little on Africa, hardly anything about South America, and the far eastern references are paltry.

Gombrich was an art historian by trade – better known for writing The Story of Art than his children’s history of the world – and moved from Vienna to London in 1936. He worked for BBC Monitoring Service, translating German radio broadcasts during the Second World War, before going back to academic life. Becoming a British citizen in 1947, he received a CBE in 1966 and was knighted in 1972.

The original manuscript was supplemented with new material when an English translation was first published in 2005, four years after Gombrich’s death. In particular, the author added a final chapter to reflect on “the history of the world which I have lived through myself”. He talks about the war from both the perspective of his adopted country as well as that of his place of birth.

One can be attached to one’s own country without needing to insist that the rest of the world’s inhabitants are worthless. But as more and more people were taken in by this sort of nonsense, the menace to peace grew greater.

For a non-historian, Gombrich’s history is accessible and a very easy book to read. It’s refreshingly not centred around the British empire and looks at Europe as a whole. For anyone wanting to revise their history and fill in a few gaps, I’d recommend a copy of this book. While originally written as a children’s book – and is certainly simple enough for good readers from aged 10 upwards, or suitable to be read to children as a series of bedtime stories – it also works well with adults!

As part of this year’s World Book Night activities on 23 April, I’ll be giving away copies of A Little History of the World.

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The Avengers - a movie that shouldn't have been made

If there’s a list of films that shouldn’t have been made, then The Avengers should be near the top.

No, not the Marvel comic characters who escaped onto the silver screen. But the “spy-fi” series from the 1960s and 1970s television series, that was reinvented for a woeful, sequel with new actors in 1998.

The original six series (four in black and white) of The Avengers starred Patrick Macnee as agent John Steed with his trademark bowler hat alongside companions Cathy Gale (played by Honor Blackman) and Emma Peel (Diana Rigg). And then after a break of seven years, another two series were filmed, this time called The New Avengers, starring Joanna Lumley playing Purdey and Gareth Hunt as Mike Gambit alongside a more portly and less athletic Steed.

The quality of the TV episode plots was admittedly variable. Sometimes brilliantly surreal, with frequent references to enormous-scale game-playing and secret organisations. Other times, lapsing into tedious car chases. But on balance, a good series.

BBC Four aired Series 4-6 of The Avengers. And in recent years, BBC Four and ITV4 have repeated The New Avengers episodes, though ITV4 inexplicably showed the majority of them out of sequence.

But the 1998 film – starring Ralph Fiennes, Uma Thurman, Sean Connery and Eddie Izzard, and directed by Jeremiah Chechik – is a disaster.

While containing some futuristic technology and gadgets, the film is beautifully ambiguous about its period, with a black and white palette occasionally punctuated by bright splashes of colour like the red phone box.

The Avengers film includes many elements of the television series: high performance cars, Steed’s hat and umbrella, surreal moments like a meeting full of men disguised in different coloured fluffy teddybear costumes, and lots of tea. But it fails to pull off the quintessentially British feeling required. The humour isn’t funny. The action sequences should have kicked off a whole new martial art based around fighting with an umbrella. And the plot is more difficult to follow than a fast moving episode of Spooks (with which it shares actress Keeley Hawes) or something from the Bourne franchise.

Apparently, after underwhelmed audiences previewed the 115-minute original edit, the film was cut down to the 87 minute version that is now available on DVD. Crucial elements of the plot must have fallen to the cutting room floor into the digital wastebasket, leaving unexplained jumps in the action and an odd sense of pace throughout the film.

£2.99 on Amazon, or just £2 in the Belfast branch of Head!

Let’s hope ITV4 or BBC Four show some more of the original series soon.

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Hiding your Publication Scheme defeats the purpose of having one ... and raises your costs through needless FOIs

Publication Schemes are supposed to publicise what information a public body holds and regularly makes available. The Information Commissioners Office have a Model Publication Scheme for District Councils in Northern Ireland, listing the type of information that they must make available.

You should publicise the fact that information is available to the public under the scheme. You should make sure the model scheme, guide to information, and schedule of fees are all available on your website, public notice board, or in any other way you normally communicate with the public. [Source: ICO Guidance]

As well as listing the information being made available, a publication scheme also signposts how to access it, usually offering URLs for online documentation. In theory this should cut down on needless Freedom of Information requests, since interested parties can find the information themselves without assistance. It cuts cost and improves transparency.

North Down council have (recently?) revamped their web presence, and in the process taken a step backwards in transparency. The new website has a nice look and feel, but it’s very light on information in some areas.

There is a page devoted to their Publication Scheme. However, it just lists the headings in their scheme and doesn’t link to the actual scheme. So the public are none the wiser about exactly what information is already available and how to access it. Mandatory items like the “most recent election results” are now missing from the website.

Oddly, at the time of writing – 21 March – not a single set of minutes from 2013 have been loaded onto North Down’s public repository. (Minutes tend to go online about one month after a meeting takes place: approved at the next month’s meeting. So I'd expect February's minutes to be missing.)

Their Local Government Reform page also refers to “images on this page show our current boundary, and the areas (in red) which will become part of the new North Down and Ards district council”. Yet there are no images on the page.

Magherafelt District Council have a reasonable publication scheme. Some other councils go further and keep the scheme as a set of browsable webpages with live links to the information. However, Magherafelt District Council haven’t managed to publish any council minutes since June 2012, rather contradicting their publication schemes advice that “minutes of Council meetings available on the website”.

Back in 2009 I blogged about my experience asking Magherafelt District Council for electronic copies of minutes. After been offered paper copies (at a cost) they relented and sent them electronically. And after a struggle it turned out that the council had voted in March 2005 to publish their minutes on their website. But four and a half years later they still hadn't got around to it. Seems that the wheels have fallen off that wagon again.

From past experience, I’d say that Belfast City Council has a pretty slick FOI process. However, checking their Publication Scheme tonight I found that the document (linked to from two different webpages) is dated February 2003 and has just celebrated its tenth birthday.

Someone in Belfast didn’t get the "memo" from the ICO that “Authorities which are still operating publication schemes from before 31 December 2008 should note that these expired on 1 January 2009.” While they might want to claim that they’re not a District Council and that the NI District Council model publication scheme does not apply, they could default to other model publication schemes for NI.

I’m sure the local ICO office in Belfast would be glad to offer advice …

Missing publication schemes, absent minutes and out of date documents lead me to make two conclusions: (1) transparency is not at the heart of local government in NI; and (2) members of the public are disinterested – or disheartened – and not reminding councillors and council officials that information is missing.

Neither of these is a sign of a healthy local democracy.

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A feast of fantastic films at the 13th Belfast Film Festival (11-21 April)

The programme for the 13th Belfast Film Festival was launched this week and in a little under a month, cinema screens across Belfast will be screening local and international films – shorts, features and documentaries – to suit all tastes and pockets. (Most of the films are £4-6 a ticket.)

I’ve previewed some of the screens and events below to whet your appetite before delving into the full programme. Festival programmer Stephen Hackett spoke to me at the launch and talked about some of his highlights in the dense programme of cinema.

listen to ‘Talking to Stephen Hackett about @BelfastFilmFes1 11-21 April’ on Audioboo

Thursday 11 April

Made in Belfast, 7pm, Moviehouse, £6 // Local actor Paul Kennedy has turned writer and director and his film premieres and opens the festival. A story of friendship and betrayal, of an author returning from Paris to face the friends and family he treated so badly.

La Traviata, 8.30pm, St Anne’s Cathedral, £8 // Members of NI Opera's Young Artists’ Programme will perform pieces by composers inspired by Verdi before the screening of La Traviata in a fabulous location.

Saturday 13 April

Spoof or Die, 5pm, QFT, £4 // In this short film set in modern day Northern Ireland, Craig and Nicky are bullied at a bus stop and decide to bunk off school. But as the ghosts of conflict emerge, their brash youthful anarchy leads them towards a darker, older world, and from that towards an unexpected closeness. Written by Stacey Gregg and directed by Prasanna Puwanarajah.

Only the Young, 7pm, QFT, £6 // A documentary following three teenagers living in a small desert town in South California. Skateboarding, friendship, heartbreak, desolation. “Delicate and ethereal filmmaking” from Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims.

Cool Hand Luke, 8pm, Crumlin Road Gaol, £10 // Clips from classic prison movies precede the outdoor screening of Cool Hand Luke starring Paul Newman. Tours of the gaol from 8pm; film starts at 9pm.

Sunday 14 April

A Hijacking, 7pm, QFT, £6 // Kasper from Borgen turns up in this Danish film written and directed by Tobias Lindholm. A tense thriller develops as the crew of MV Roven are taken hostage by Somali pirates while the shipping company CEO is a hostage to ever-escalating negotiations conducted from his corporate prison. Filmed on a real freighter that had once been hijacked off Somali.

Monday 15 April

What is this film called Love? 7pm, QFT, £6 // Mark Cousins is back at the Belfast Film Festival with his “poetic documentary about the nature of happiness” filmed for just £5.80 over three days in Mexico. Travel, homecoming, solitude and looks like it was filmed on a pocket Flip camera. Miles away from Mark Cousins’ previous output: the epic fifteen and a half hours of The Story of Film that tracked the history of cinema over more than a hundred years. Update - review and interview with mark Cousins.

Brief Encounters, 7pm, Beanbag Cinema, £5 // Documentary following photographer Gregory Crewsdon as he creates elaborate portraits of suburban American life and his own anxieties, dreams and inner desires. To get his still images, he sets a house on fire, builds enormous sets with large crews and shuts down city streets.

Tuesday 16 April

Dead Dad, 8.30pm, Beanbag Cinema, £6 // A story of loss, sibling relationships and resentment. Three siblings come home to attend their dad’s funeral. There’s an abandoned dinosaur themed mini golf course, the dad’s ashes and the need to get together to give the man who split them up a proper goodbye.

Last Tango in Belfast, 9pm, QFT, £7 // In the summer of 1973, Belfast City Council was “focused beyond the escalating unrest on the streets and firmly fixated on the cinematic souls of its citizens”. The Council’s viewing committee debated Last Tango in Paris over the summer and ultimately banned the Oscar-nominated film. Forty years on, Belfast Film Festival audiences will get a chance to review the film and come to their own conclusions.

Wednesday 17 April

Politics and Drama Debate, 6pm, Belfast MAC, £4 // Stratagem’s Quintin Oliver chairs a panel discussion asking why political drama is in short supply on these islands? Why do we know more about the workings of the fictional Danish parliament via Borgen than the devolved institutions in Belfast, Cardiff and Edinburgh.

The Fifth Season, 7pm, QFT, £6 // A small Belgian agricultural community struggles as spring does not follow winter. Instead crops fail, cows stop producing milk, and human relationships deteriorate, perhaps at a faster rate than mother nature.

Thursday 18 April

Doctor Who, 7pm, Micro Cinema, Free // A screening of the colour-restored six Doctor Who episodes in the serial The Mind of Evil from the Jon Pertwee era. Free screening, but booking necessary.

Friday 19 April

Devices of Attachment, 6pm, Micro Cinema, £5 // Damian Gorman’s critically acclaimed 1992 film for BBC Two followed the writer across Northern Ireland with poems read against the backdrop of violent scenes of conflict and interviews with “ordinary, decent people”. This will be the first screening of the film in Ireland for 21 years, and will be followed by a Q&A with Danian Gorman and producer/director Hugh Thomson.

Pictures of the Pope, 8pm, Micro Cinema, £5 // Join William Crawley as he “assesses the best and worst onscreen portrayals of the pontiff, and what they tell us about the spiritual times in which they were made”.

Saturday 20 April

Niall Óg, Culturlann, 7pm, £6 // On top of the BBC documentary, another crew from Belfast Media Group followed twenty six year old Lord Mayor Niall Ó Donnghaile throughout his year in office. A year in Belfast’s life dominated by MTV and Titanic, but also conflict, regeneration, mental health and investment. Irish language documentary directed by Siobhán Ní Chiobháin and produced by Sorcha Nic Eochagáin featuring interviews with Niall as well as UDA leader Jacie McDonald.

The Evil Dead II at Ormeau Park, 9pm, £8 // Want to be scared witless in Ormeau Park? The organisers encourage you “to wrap up warm and bring your own seating, chainsaws, umbrellas, raincoats and hot drinks” to the “gaudily gory, virtuoso, hyper-kinetic horror sequel/remake”.

Sunday 21 April

We are Legion, 1pm, Beanbag Cinema, £5 // A feature length documentary looking into the birth, growth and culture of the Anonymous hacktivist movement with its online cyber attacks and offline protests. Copyright abuse, censorship, police brutality: We are Legion examines what motivates people to get off their sofas and join the risky world of civil disobedience and Anonymous activism. [This is the original film that was reedited and shortened in a recent BBC Four Storyville episode.]

Ernest and Celestine, 2pm, QFT, £6 // On the last day of the festival there’s an animated children’s film. “Giant bears and tiny mice don’t tend to socialise much, but when grumpy deadbeat bear Ernest and crafty orphan mouse Celestine cross paths, the two become inseparable friends and embark on a journey that will turn their worlds upside down.”

My Brooklyn, 3pm, Beanbag Cinema, £5 // Documentary exploring the forces reshaping Downtown Brooklyn and Fulton Street Mall (a popular shopping destination in New York City) as government policies and corporate development join forces to displace small businesses and long-time neighbourhood residents. Followed by discussion organised by Forum for Alternative Belfast.

Final Cut, 7pm, Moviehouse, £6 // György Pálfi’s premiers and closes the festival. It combines scenes from over 450 other films and marries them into a new narrative. A “master class in both film history and editing” as well as a storyline that can’t be carried by a lead actor or a common location.

There are also a couple of films looking at Human Trafficking as well as a series looking at pregnancy, motherhood and two shorts and a timely debate looking at abortion.

BBC Northern Ireland are also working with the festival to profile the work of playwright Stewart Parker. Details to be added when available

And if that’s not enough, Northern Visions (who recently won the Belfast community TV digital licence) are running chargeable workshops on Interview Techniques and Working with the Media (Tuesday 16 April) and Final Cut Pro 7 Editing for Beginners (Wednesday 17 and Thursday 18 April).

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Can you see your tax dollars at work? Boosting accountability, efficiency and transparency the Louisville KY way

How accountable and how transparent should public bodies be? Whether council departments within local government, Executive departments or their arms length bodies, do you wish you could see how your money – your taxes and rates – were being spent?

These organisations all produce annual reports and high level financial figures. Relatively few councils seem to publish any form of targets – other than perhaps recycling levels - and show regular progress towards or away from those figures. Progress reported against the Programme for Government at an NI Executive level can be woolly too, lacking figures to back up progress against numerical targets, and often marking against unspecific goals. [Click through for an example taken from the March 2011 PfG delivery report.]

I'm cross-posting this from Slugger O'Toole for the benefit of AiB readers who have been wondering what I got up to on the e-Governance programme last September* when I saw examples in the states commonwealths of Massachusetts and Kentucky of opening up information about spending as well as organisational performance to the public.

Louisville is the largest city in Kentucky (though not the capital), with a population of 741,096 in the consolidated city-county area. The front page of the Louisville Metro website has a link to answer the question “I want to ... See my tax dollars at work”.

Instead of some bland pages showing departmental spend, the link leads to a suite of data mining tools:

Louisville Checkbook allows you to drill into the spending of each agency/department, through a hierarchy of categories right down to the itemised monthly payments made, eg Agency -> Parks & Recreation -> Athletics & Community Centers -> Athletics -> Contractual Service -> Equipment Rental -> and then see their monthly photocopier payments. You can also look up any of the contracts, hundreds of scanned pages with very little redaction (eg, the Minolta contract for photocopiers/printers), and look at funding sources.



City Employees Salaries allows you to look up the annual salary, overtime and incentive/allowance of any city employee, from the Mayor ($110,346,60) to his speech writer ($45,910.80). Twenty five people have a higher salary than the Mayor. Every employee – other than police informants – are listed.



Even without this voluntary disclosure of information, the Open Records legislation in Kentucky requires any state/country/city office/agency to respond to public requests for information within three working days. Compare that with the workings of the UK or Irish Freedom of Information Acts.

LouieStat is perhaps the most innovative aspect of Louisville Metro’s emerging online transparency measures.

A handful of staff within the Office of Performance Improvement have been working with each department to define Key Performance Indicators. The current status along with the goal (when appropriate) and a Red/Amber/Green traffic light is published along with historic tracking information. The data is updated every two or three months.

There are some standard enterprise measures like dollars spent on overtime and hours lost due to work related illness and injury, along with department-specific metrics. Metro Animal Services track the percentage of calls not responded to within seven days. The Economic Growth and Innovation department (think Invest NI or Enterprise Ireland) track the jobs they have created, the annual salary of those jobs, and the number of active new clients.



Not everything is green. The strategy has been to get departments to define some KPIs and immediately publish them online – good or bad – and then provide the techniques and encouragement to drive through improvements and efficiency measures to meet the Mayor’s goal that “every department in the city of Louisville should at a minimum be in the top quartile of performance compared to our national competitors”. In the first year of running, departments representing 45% of the operating budget have been brought on board.

Together, these services make Louisville Metro more accountable, increase the transparency of how they spend (and earn) their funds, and spur them on to improve the quality and value of their services. The ongoing cost has been minimised by building contract scanning into business as usual processes and automating the feeds of financial and salary information.

It’s a long way from the glossy annual reports that come through NI ratepayers’ letterboxes each year, full of photographs and light on detail. While many NI councils will have internal KPIs, do any councils publish regularly data on their performance, and publish it in a manner that is readily accessible to members of the public (rather than buried in minutes of council committee meetings)?

Theresa Reno-Weber who heads up the Louisville Office of Performance Improvement is over in Ireland – north and south – next week. Expect an interview and more discussion of whether and how this could apply to local public bodies, particularly in the context of local government reorganisation and a focus on Executive delivery.

* The e-Governance programme was organised by the Irish Institute at Boston College with funding from the United States Department of State.

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