The Blog Snorkeller: January 2006 Archives

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January 30, 2006

When exactly is 'Heartbeat' set?

Soap operas are usually set more or less in real time. As in: you've watched last night's (Sunday) episode of 'Coronation Street', and it's likely that the action happens at a weekend, the weekend. The lasses in the knicker factory are on their weekend break after the weekday exploits of the weekday episodes. It's possibly a Saturday and there's a bit of overtime, or maybe it's a Sunday. But not a Friday.

Or if it's an episode transmitted on Christmas Day, it's set on Christmas Day, or perhaps the day before or day after. And the 2006 episodes are most definitely set in 2006. Because they shoot a few weeks in advance, they might not refer to the specifics of last week's weather conditions or the resignation of an MP the night before. But if it's Valentine's Day in real life, it's quite probably Valentine's Day in soap life.

So, what happens if your soap is set way back in the mists of time? It has to have some sort of chronology, but then at a certain points it hits a seriously large brick wall of Stephen Hawking proportions in the space-time continuum.

For example, older readers may recall that Aussie TV series 'The Sullivans'. It was supposed to be set in WWII, yet - like a Japanese soldier on an obscure Pacific island who never heard the news - the series itself managed to run for about two years longer than the actual war.

Then there's that thing about the English bobby in 'Aidensfield' in the Yorkshire Dales. It's set in the 1960s, right? When 'Heartbeat' began in 1992 with Nick "Wicksie" Berry from EastEnders, it was definitely set in 1965.

Then, as the ever excellent Wikipedia notes, the setting moved on. It trundled along approximately in "real time", until it reached early 1969. Only trouble is, it has been stuck in 1969 ever since. One 2004 episode was set on February 6th, 1969 - eagle-eyed viewers know this because the show had a close-up showing the date on "today's newspaper".

The village has also celebrated a lot more than four Christmases between 1965 and 1969. And whenever a car or motorbike's tax disc is shown on screen, it's always valid until December 31st, 1969.

In our house we also have raging rows whenever they use a track that we know for damn sure was never released on vinyl until at least 1970 or even several years later, but we skip over this. "Poetic licence", blah blah blah..

Yet there's something else that doesn't quite gel: the language. I don't mean that they'd use some noun that couldn't possibly have existed, as in "I see Alf Ventress has caught Greengrass/Vernon Scripss/Aunt Peggy selling some dodgy stuff that fell off the back of a lorry on that e-Bay on the Interweb yoke..."

No, I mean those linguistic moments that are less obvious but are equally jarring when you come to think of it. Like last night TV3 had a repeat in which one of the characters talks about how he's going to "meet with" somebody.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but "meet with"? That's a very North American way of using the verb, a way that surely didn't creep in on this side of the Atlantic until well after the 1960s. You might say somebody "met with a bad end", but the idea of saying "The Taoiseach met with the American President" is a very 1980s or 1990s thing.

North American English is usually more economical - "honor instead of "honour", etc etc. The "meet with" thing is one of those rare instances where North American English stretches a short and snappy word ("met") into a sort of bad shorthand for "had a meeting with".

Then there are series with soap-like elements that are stymied by the ages of their cast. Hence Malcolm and Dewey get older from season to season in 'Malcolm In The Middle', but Bart Simpson will always be a 10-year-old.

And don't get me on about 'Life On Mars'...

Posted by mick cunningham at 08:22 PM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2006

'Village' mag distribution list

Amazing the spreadsheets that turn up where you least expect them...

Posted by mick cunningham at 02:59 PM | Comments (1)

January 23, 2006

Daily Mail Ireland

At my bus to work it's hard not to miss the current skirmishes between the Indo and Associated Newspapers over the Dublin freesheet market. Piles of discarded Metros and Herald AMs, hordes of competing distributors with their different bibs and bags.

The battle could be very quickly decided if just one of the titles manages to tie down a distribution deal with CIE (newspaper stands at stations etc).

According to recent ABC figures, Herald AM is giving out 66,047 copies a day while Metro is shifting 55,196. Each distributor has to get rid of about 500 papers a day, weaving in and out of the commuters. The pay is crap, but it all adds up to over 100 sellers per title - a bill that could be significantly reduced with a CIE deal.

A survey by Starcom Mediavest Group found that two thirds of respondents said the launch of the two freesheets hasn't affected their readership of paid-for papers. That means a third... Actually you see a lot more newspaper reading on the buses by schoolkids and foreign workers.

But that's all by the by. The bigger battle between the Indo and Associated will happen next month (or maybe in March), with the launch of Daily Mail Ireland - or "Anti-Irish newspaper plans to launch edition here" as the Sunday Indo so eloquently put it in an unsigned rant last September.

They're still doing interviews for staff at Associated's offices in Ballsbridge, and the team is tipped to include:

Project overseer: Martin Clarke, the Daily Mail's associate editor. A newsroom rottweiler, he's a former boss at the Daily Mail in Scotland and Associated's Ireland on Sunday rag (IoS shares those offices in Ballsbridge).
Editor (1): Ted Verity, a late thirtysomething journo from across the water who worked on the Daily Mail's Femail section, and moved on to the company's "new media" projects. In 2002, became associate editor of the Mail on Sunday, and took over from Clarke as IoS's editor.
Editor (2): Paul Drury, also from IoS stable, former editor at the Herald in the second half of the 1990s - and at the Star until he was replaced by Gerard Colleran in 1998.
News editor: Lisa O'Carroll. Not sure of her. Didn't she edit the Guardian's media section? Former TV corr on the Daily Mail too.
Night editor: Daniel Gallagher, former editor of the Irish Sun.
Newsroom something or other: Philip Molloy, who used to be the Indo’s executive editor of news.
Social affairs editory thing: David Quinn. Used to be a columnist at the Business Post, edited the Irish Catholic until 2003, then wrote about religious and social affairs stuff for the Irish Indo.
Columnist: Mary Ellen Synon. Made headlines as a right-wing columnist for the Irish Times in the 1990s, then the Sunday Indo, where she did the Paralympics clanger, then IoS, Business Post etc etc. Oh, and she also hit the headlines after receiving deposits at the Bank of England, on the office floor, from the Deputy Governor, Rupert Pennant-Rea. Hmm.

The initial print run is expected to be in the region of 100,000 copies, but my guess is that they'd be lucky to shift a third of that when the figures settle down.

Posted by mick cunningham at 05:56 PM | Comments (3)

January 17, 2006

Doubting Thomases

Here's a wee snippet from Bobby Robson in the London Times's report about yesterday's press conference in Dublin's Mansion House, in which Robbo was unveiled alongside the new Ireland manager, Steve "Actually I'm The Boss" Staunton:

"We know, and we're not disguising it, that Stan is inexperienced. It's his first job, and there are some doubting Thomas's, some sceptics but that's what I am here for. This is the role I saw myself in, so give us a chance."

And - pay attention at the back - the Herald AM yoke had this:

"We know, and we're not disguising it, that Stan is inexperienced. It's his first job, and there are some doubting Thomas's, some sceptics. But that's what I am here for. This is the role I saw myself in, so give us a chance."

Word for word it's the same - apart from turning one sentence into two (as you'd expect, given that they were all at the same press conference). Meanwhile Unison had this:

"We know, and we're not disguising it, that Stan is inexperienced. It's his first job, and there are some doubting Thomases, some sceptics. But that's what I am here for. This is the role I saw myself in, so give us a chance."

Spot the difference yet? Mind you, Sky Sports had a very different take on what must surely have been the same quote as all the rest:

"We know Stan, we're not disguising this and saying he's terribly experienced," said Robson. "We know he isn't."

OK, maybe they paraphrased a bit - well, a lot actually - and they meddled with a direct quote. But they also got rid of that "doubting Thomas's" reference. Or is it "Thomases"?

The plural of Thomas is Thomases. One Thomas plus one Thomas equals two Thomases - not "Thomas's". And Mr and Mrs Thomas would be the Thomases too: you just add "-es" to names that end in "s" to indicate plural form. If Mr and Mrs T had a daughter who happened to be a right skanger, she'd be the Thomases' skanger daughter - not the Thomas's or Thomas'.

If young Ms Thomas is in possession of a spliff, it would be Ms Thomas's spliff (not Thomas' spliff OR Thomases spliff).

And if she gets carted off to a church or hospital which happens to have the same name as her infamous clan, the correct possessive form is St Thomas's (as in St Thomas's Church, St James's Hospital), with that extra -s also normally pronounced in speech.

But then she goes off to London on a no-frills airline flight, and ends up lying comatose in St Thomas' Hospital in London. Yep, Thomas' is its official name. They say it's because the esteemed establishment took its name from not one but two lads called Thomas - St Thomas the apostle, and St Thomas of Canterbury.

So surely it should be St Thomases' Hospital then? No, because institutions can call themselves anything they bloody well like, grammatical or otherwise, and Ms Thomas and the rest of us just have to like it or lump it.

Mind you, if our young chav were to have a gander in the older parts of said building, she'd come across various ancient commemorative plaques referring, one after the other, to St Thomas's Hospital. Hmm.

But to get back to Stan the man and the FAI's unusual appointment. The jury's still out, and we are still doubting Thomases. Not Thomas's.

Posted by mick cunningham at 04:48 PM | Comments (2)

January 10, 2006

Well, I'm rumblin' in this JCB...

One of the best, quirkiest, most imaginative and innovative number one singles (and animations) in recent times was "The JCB Song" by Nizlopi, about a young lad's memories while sitting in the cab of his dad's JCB.

And - miracle of Christmas miracles - it managed to keep Westlife and an X Factor "star" off the top slot (and that fecker Crazy Frog with Jingle Bells/U Can't Touch This).

You might have come across some of the acoustic duo's Irish connections, what with the song involving JCBs and that line early on about the father and son singing the Christy Moore song "Don't forget your shovel if you want to go to work" as they rumbled along.

The Nizlopi duo, Luke Concannon and John Parker, hail from Leamington Spa in England and are indeed very much "of Irish extraction", as they say. John's ma comes from Dublin and Luke's grandparents are Irish too - and his da plays in a ceili band.

“I grew up with a very Irish-orientated family where everyone did their bit of performing at family parties. So from a young age I was singing to family and friends,” Luke explained to IrishAbroad.com.

And (as they say in those TV infomercials) there's more ("this pen cuts through tins!"). Irish instruments such as bodhrans and uilleann pipes pop up in several of their songs, and according to Eamon Fitzgerald's blog, "The JCB song" was written and recorded during the annual Willie Clancy Summer School down in Miltown Malbay in Co Clare.

Eamon - who happens to have been a classmate of mine many moons ago and used to present that brilliant radio show The Long Note on RTE Radio 1 even more moons ago, goes even further: "Just listen to those lovely uilleann pipes' drones that cut in during the chorus and round out the track. Could they belong to Mikie Smyth, whose bass drone sounds a fourth above the tonic? A bit arcane that, but piping knowledge is arcane, just as drones are distinctive."

Indeed. Mind you, one Coventry website tracked down Kieron Concannon, the JCB driving dad of the song, and found that he did the pipes on the track.

Songs about JCBs have a rich heritage, believe it or not. In 1958, Lenny Green recorded "JCB And Me", while the country-folk singer Seamus Moore, who hails from Kilkenny but is mostly based in London as far as I know, calls himself "The JCB Man". His repertoire includes such numbers as Take Me Back To Castlebar, The Transit Van, and a ballad called... The JCB Song.

Meanwhile if you go to buy Nizlopi's "JCB Song" on a well-known sales website, it tells you that: "Customers interested in this title may also be interested in... Supralift (special offers for Over 10,000 Used Forklift Trucks)".

Oh, and if you're wondering why with all those Irish connections they have such a funny and "foreign" sounding name, the band's name is in homage to Nina Nizlopi, a Hungarian girl Luke had a crush on at school.

Posted by mick cunningham at 10:10 PM | Comments (0)

Soccer transfer gossip

Sometimes the "sources" for newspaper stories can really do your head in. Take the Daily Mirror's "Football Spy" page (billing itself as "Football's original and best gossip column... the latest and hottest news... every single day"). It just has to be taking the piss. For example, the following intriguing item in today's edition was submitted by a Miss E Holland from Chiswick:

"The lady who teaches my godson to play the guitar in Madrid says that a friend of hers who works as a waitress in a tapas bar was told by a Real Madrid player that Jonathan Woodgate could be returning to the Premiership at the end of the summer."

So it's official then.

Posted by mick cunningham at 12:13 PM | Comments (0)

January 03, 2006

Happy birthday 2RN

January 1st was the 80th anniversary of Irish radio (as in State radio, because they don't count the broadcast by the rebels in the Easter Rising). The station was called 2RN. Why 2RN?

Well, John Bowman's archive show - which is now in a Sunday slot on RTE Radio 1, taking over from the retired Ciaran Mac Mathuna - explained that it was the last three syllables of the song title "Come Back To Erin".

They only had one studio, so there would be long periods of near silence in between programmes as the music stands and furniture were moved around. Sounds nearly as bad as that new "City Channel" in Dublin.

Posted by mick cunningham at 12:54 PM | Comments (1)