Words Dept.

I don’t really get the point – journalistically, poetically, metaphorically or otherwise – of the Observer’s 3,000-word Miranda Sawyer-authored feature on the joy of Nando’s today. The feelgood piece, with the headline How Nando’s conquered Britain, is the type of advertising money can’t by, as Sawyer mooches around a couple of branches of the restaurant chain and links its growth with Britain’s simultaneous assent to the position of a mythical “multi-cultural” nirvana. Sawyer even references the lovely Nando’s PR people (“one of whom is on maternity leave”) who fed her this utter nonsense, while there are a couple of token paragraphs towards the end that refer vaguely to Nando’s half-hearted approach towards animal welfare. (Hint: the phrase “actively looking at” is actively totally meaningless.)

With this in mind, I thought I’d have a bash at a similar sort of piece. Obviously 3,000 words might piss you off a bit, so I’ll just give you the first few pars. If anyone at the Observer wants to commission me, I’m all yours at a rate considerably cheaper than Miranda Sawyer.

How Greggs is taking over the world

Peter Kay’s mate (the one out of Max and Paddy) eats there, so does Brian Blessed and my window cleaner. The appeal of Greggs among hungry normal people in places like Chadderton and Northwich is truly fucking astounding. So how did that happen, asks David Quinn (BA (Hons) Smash Hits)?

It was on the high street I spotted the place, just between Curry’s Digital and Timpsons. Blue and orange sign, with the delicious aroma that only baked-on pastry can provide. The queue of unfashionably-dressed people outside told me everything I needed to know. These normal types simply couldn’t get enough of this stuff, whatever it was, and I was determined to spend several weeks researching a pointless feature on the subject.

I went inside and looked around. There was a fridge with some sandwiches in it (“prawn mayonnaise” according to the sign) and some ladies behind an apparently heated counter containing an array of pies and pasties. “What would you like, love?”, one of them asks, and I am immediately drawn to her crow’s feet, her daft hat and her gruff northern charm.

I ignore her completely and instead identify an office worker standing in the queue, which snakes purposefully towards the exit. As I reach for my Moleskine notebook and Olympus voice recorder I poke him in the chest and ask him: What brought you here? What is all this stuff? How can I wring a 3,000-word feature out of it? He looks at me, him in George at Asda, me in Paul Smith, and replies: “I like cheese and onion pasties.”

Greggs. You might not have heard of it but you probably know at least one person earning below thirty thousand pounds a year who regularly buys some kind of cooked brown thing from one of these establishments. Be it a pie, a pasty, or a “prawn mayonnaise sandwich”, Greggs is the place to be if you are a British person who has a proper job in a shop, office, factory or somewhere like that, somewhere in 21st century Britain today.

Peter Kay’s mate (the one out of Max and Paddy) is an idol to these people and regularly comes into the Horwich branch for a steak and kidney pie, a packet of salt and vinegar crisps and bottle of 7Up. “It’s all about the pastry, the heat on your tongue as the gravy dribbles down your chin. It can only be matched by the joy of the fizzy bottle of ice cold 7Up that I wash it down with!” he says, after I have his dialogue translated by a northern person I went to university with.

Emily, a wonderfully committed and, dare I say it, attractive young thing who runs the PR team, is similarly enthusiastic. “Greggs has become a metaphor for all that is wholesome, wonderful and British about this great British country of ours in the 21st century,” she says. “Cheap, ordinary, drab it may be, but, look, we can’t all eat at the Ivy every day, can we?”

Continues for several pages…

My memory of the General Election this year is going to be dominated by Salford. As previously mentioned, I’ve been making a documentary about the local campaign in Salford and Eccles, focusing mainly on the anti-Hazel Blears candidate. As a result, I managed to get into the count on Thursday night/Friday morning and witnessed, at around 5am, Blears win through a glorious combination of steadfast political apathy and the fear of a Tory government.

Salford (the Eccles bit was recently bolted on to the constituency) is Labour through and through but during the time I’ve spent there during the last few weeks, it’s become obvious that there is little real backing for the party or its candidate. On polling day, I witnessed a Labour canvasser bawling in favour of the pint-sized MP through a megaphone and an old lady on the pavement mutter, quick as a flash, “I’d rather vote for Adolf ‘Itler”. Nonetheless, many people were happy to admit that they will vote for Blears anyway because they don’t want to open the door to anyone else.

On the night, Blears’ share of the vote fell by 15%, off a 55% turnout. Out of a constituency of around 75,000, just 16,655 people actually voted for the victorious MP, who singled out the Conservative candidate, Matthew Sephton, in her thank you speech.

Despite Blears’ declining share of the vote, the traditional left doesn’t seem to be winning the argument in Salford. David Henry, whose Hazel Must Go ticket was backed by the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, did manage a respectable 730 votes. But that was less than a third of the total achieved by the BNP candidate, Nick Griffin’s PA Tina Wingfield, who racked up 2,632 votes. Blears has promised to listen to her constituents as never before and her most pressing task now is surely to win back support from those whose disillusionment with her brand of politics and house-flipping antics has resulted in a rise in support for the far right. Unless the issue of immigration is properly discussed and debated by the main parties, I really fear for places like Salford, where anti-immigrant sentiment on the doorstep is regularly fairly shocking.

As for what happens now, it would be nice to see some form of proportional representation come out of the situation. In Salford, the votes of 60% of those who voted counted for nothing, which simply can’t be right. I have a feeling, though, that despite honourable intentions, Nick Clegg and the massed ranks of the Liberal Democrats will be no match whatsoever for the entrenched political elites who want to preserve the power base afforded by first past the post.

I finally escaped Buile Hill Visual Arts College, where the count was held, at 5.43am. Towards the end, under the fluorescent lights, the atmosphere got very unusual indeed. Although the only chemical about the place was adrenaline, there was this really odd feeling of a bizarre all-nighter populated by wide-eyed, rosette-wearing geeks.

As a follower (and member) of Amnesty, I was perturbed to read this tweet from their official Twitter account this afternoon:

Gordon is right. She is a bigoted woman. Here is a tip Love, where have all the Eastern Europeans come from? How about Eastern Europe!

The tweet has since been deleted from the web but here’s a grab from Tweetie:

It was all very strange, since Amnesty rarely, if ever, uses its Twitter stream for anything outside the sphere of human rights. The use of the word “love” and the sarcastic tone were also most unlike them.

A few minutes later, this tweet appeared, disclaiming responsibility:

I can only apologise massively for our last tweet – trying to work out how it happened. Obviously, not Amnesty’s view.

Subsequently, the charity said it had changed its Twitter password. In an @reply, it confirmed the tweet had been sent by a staff member, but blamed a “very obscure Tweetdeck bug” for accidently sending the message from the AmnestyUK account instead of the individual’s own account, adding: “We’re a bit baffled.”

There have been a couple of interesting developments on the local web publishing scene in recent days. Firstly, it looks as though Manchester Confidential’s paywall model has rather sheepishly fallen over after three months because boss Mark Garner finally realised some time after everyone else that it never had a hope of working.

Commenting on a post on this blog in January, Garner said he wanted ManCon to “stick out like a sore thumb” – as though this is the key criteria for success in online publishing. He has since presumably realised that much, much more is needed to sustain a subscription-based model, and he has been unable to provide it. As another commenter wrote here back then, all ManCon managed to do was to cull its readership, thus alienating advertisers. Was this really so difficult to predict?

Over at How-Do, the sentiment seems to be that everyone should salute Garner for his boldness and for admitting it didn’t work. Fair enough. I’m just curious about those subscribers who signed up for ManCon for a year, paying up to £100 each. Will they be getting a refund?

Elsewhere in the world of Manchester-based online publishing, a new “hyperlocal” news site called Inside the M60 has launched. (Hyperlocal, in case you hadn’t realised, is the new word for “local”. Just as “binge drinking” is the new word for “drinking”, “hyperlocal” sounds zeitgeisty and now-ish and everyone is getting terribly excited about the concept.)

Inside the M60 was created by journalists Louise Bolotin and Nigel Barlow. According to its own “about” page:

As a result of cost-cutting measures, local papers have by nature become more insular, relying more and more on “churnalism” and breaking that crucial relationship with their readership and their customers, the advertisers. There are, therefore, opportunities for niche journalism projects with a small cost base that take advantage of the low cost of entry and can act as the voice for these communities.

The site has was only properly launched yesterday, so it will be interesting to see how it develops. It wants a range of contributors from different areas of the city to become “community reporters”. Once these slot in, the potential for genuine scoops seems realistic, particularly since the Manchester Evening News closed its local offices last year and now makes all its local reporters work out of central Manchester.

Presumably Inside the M60 is not expecting to recruit an army of NCTJ-trained hacks to man the bureaux in Crumpsall and Beswick and so the mysterious people who constitute “the general public” will be relied on to provide content. Michael Taylor has highlighted what he sees as the “chasm between the present reality of bloggers and the needs of a well-informed society”, using a crass question about Sir Richard Leese posed on Inside the M60′s Twitter stream as the basis for his argument.

I’m not so frosty towards the  idea of “amateur” news bloggers providing a useful service because I don’t believe that only journalists can do what journalists do. After all, some journalists aren’t very good at their jobs and there’s no reason why a moderately intelligent person with good contacts in a local community can’t break decent stories. But, on the other hand, some form of quality control will need to be put in place in order to retain accuracy and, ultimately, credibility. A dispassionate approach to an issue is often the best way to expose it. Nobody listens to a (hyper) local ranter with a chip on his shoulder, and that sort of approach is something that will need to be avoided.

I’m reluctant to be too critical of Inside the M60′s content given the site’s tender age but since its creators are ready to criticise what they see as the weaknesses of other local media, I reckon a little constructive criticism is justified. Firstly, I spotted a lot of typos on the site, including Harpurhey being misspelt, lots of mis-spaced, glitchy commas and the odd half-written paragraph. There also seems to be a bit of an over-reliance on press releases and surveys, which, of course, fall into the category of “churnalism” that the site is railing against. For example, of the ten stories on the front page, three start with a statement summarising some survey or official report, followed by a second paragraph starting with the words “That’s the conclusion of…”

Still, it’s all free to look at and, once the community reporters bed in, perhaps there will be a change of focus. As we have all learnt today, credit should be given for trying something new. So I wish Inside the M60 the best of luck.

Following my earlier post on the subject, radio DJ Steve Penk has this week received a justified bollocking from Ofcom over his decision to play the song “Jump” in reference to a woman threatening to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge over the M60. Unfortunately, they’ve not fined him or his radio station a penny.

According to the Ofcom ruling, former ITV prankster Penk said

Just get on with it!

before playing the track on his Alan Partridge-esque local radio breakfast show at 8.28am on 14 January. He’d also suggested someone could

Video it and send it to Harry Hill

and whinged on-air about how the woman was “inconsiderate”, since her actions had led to a motorway closure through the “peak rush hour”. (Incidentally, a transcript in the Ofcom report also mentions in passing someone called Tony texting in to complain that he is “fed up” with “health and safety jobsworths” and “do-gooders”, to which the DJ replies: “I’m with you there, Tony, 100%.” Quite right, Steve. These do-gooders eh? I don’t know. I’m so fed up with people, y’know, doing good.)

Couldn’t really be any more Partridge-like if he tried, really. The bewildering response of Revolution 96.2 to Ofcom, following complaints from 57 people, goes like this:

According to The Revolution, Steve Penk “thought very carefully about [these requests] and took the view that playing the track – and making a point of it – would have been insensitive, cheap and likely to cause offence”. However, the broadcaster continued “Steve’s intent was to ‘subliminally’ demonstrate to [the listeners] and [their] fellow sufferers that he had empathy with their predicament without causing widespread upset amongst the wider audience”. The presenter therefore played the track “Jump” at 08:28. However, The Revolution said “no obvious reference was made to its significance”.

Except for the phrase “just get on with it”, of course. Not very subliminal.

A-ha!

I’m currently working on a film about the general election campaign in Salford. It struck me as a good idea for a documentary after Salford MP Hazel Blears got embroiled in the expenses scandal last year. The film isn’t really about that, though. It’s about how ordinary people respond to politicians and the candidates themselves, particularly 26-year-old David Henry, who is standing on a “Hazel Blears Must Go” ticket.

It’s not especially likely that David is going to win. Despite the problems Hazel Blears has faced, Salford is an extremely strong Labour heartland and the latest odds from Ladbrokes rate a Labour win in Salford at 1/12. Still, I’m hoping that there will still be some drama in this David versus Goliath battle. Either that or we will end up with quite a pessimistic film in which, despite the ingredients for change being very much present, everything eventually ends up being the same.

From what I’ve seen so far, apathy and disenfranchisement from the political process seem to be a major problem for all the candidates. Among the few issues voters really want to talk about is immigration. Where disillusionment with Labour is to be found on the doorstep, people admit that they are considering voting for the BNP, whose candidate, Tina Wingfield, is Nick Griffin’s PA.

We’re going to be filming for the whole of the campaign in an observational style. It should be an interesting process.

This table shows how MPs in Greater Manchester voted over the Digital Economy Bill. The only Manchester MP who voted against was Liberal Democrat John Leech, MP for Manchester Withington. Of the 28 MPs across the city region, more than half (17) didn’t actually bother to vote. Of those who voted, all the local Labour MPs voted in favour. The Liberal Democrats are against the bill but local LibDems Andrew Stunnell, Mark Hunter and Paul Rowen did not vote.

If any of these people come knocking at your door in the next few weeks, you might want to cut this out and wave it at them accusingly.

The information is taken from Hansard here.

If you live in Manchester, you cannot fail to have been swept away in recent weeks by the hot topic de jour of the day. Namely: Which one of them two fast food places in town that specialises in burritos does the best burrito? I speak, of course, of Barburrito and Pancho’s and will now analyse the merits of each before arriving at a definitive answer.

Barburrito

This place opened a few years ago at the Piccadilly end of Piccadilly Gardens and is, to my view, a bit pricey for everyday fodder. Last week I went in there and had a chicken burrito and Diet Coke that cost £6.20. Your burritos in Barburrito are available with several extras, including guacamole at 50p, which I ordered but I can’t really say added much to the overall experience.

Although I’ve been in there several times, I always find the choice a bit intimidating and I have to clarify what’s included and what’s charged extra, which is a bit embarrassing. The salsa comes in four levels of hotness. I went for the hottest one, which has quite a daft Disneyland-ish name that I can’t remember.

Taste-wise, it was rich and delicious. Not mind-blowingly hot but certainly very tasty. I particularly enjoyed the beans and it was very thoroughly filled. The soft drink is £1.50 but for that you get unlimited free refills.

The ambience is quite pleasant, sort of like a posh KFC but with more tasteful fonts, some kind of wood and floortiles that nod towards the Mexican. Overall I would give it a rating of 7.5/10. The plasticky, chainstore-type ambience and excess of choice may annoy some but the burrito was delicious.

Pancho’s

Pancho’s is located in the unfashionable end of the Arndale Centre near where they sell crabs. What initially pleases about Pancho’s is that it is extremely unpretentious. In fact, it’s just a stall near a fishmonger on the Arndale Market. It’s run by what appears to be Mexican bloke and his girl assistant, who has an interesting hairstyle.

There’s not as much “confusion on entry” as at Barburrito. Various Mexican dishes are scrawled on a blackboard and priced at a reasonable £3.75 or less. They also stock a wide range of Mexican foodstuffs for home cooking purposes, which is a definite bonus if that’s your bag.

To keep things fair, I ordered exactly the same as at Barburrito – a chicken burrito in the hot style. Pancho’s only seems to offer “hot” or “mild” sauces and the hot one was a fair bit spicier than the Barburrito equivalent. Drinks are not bottomless. Instead I went for the closest equivalent, which was a single can of Diet Coke at 85p, taking the grand total to a wallet-friendly £4.60. I forgot to order guacamole but I checked and it would have been an extra 20p. So the total would have been £4.80, or £1.40 cheaper than Barburrito.

It tasted good. Slightly creamier than Barburrito, certainly spicier but not quite as rounded or rich tasting. The ambience, as I say, is a bit earthier than Barburrito but I found that quite charming. Overall I’d say 8/10, with bonus points for cheap price, simplicity and heat.

Verdict

There’s virtually nothing in it I’d say but Pancho’s nudges it on the basis of price and “realness”. At £6.20 Barburrito is overpriced compared with the same thing at Pancho’s for £4.80, although Barburrito has free refills. Taste-wise, there’s not much in it. I enjoyed the punch of the Pancho’s burrito but the Barburrito one had a more pleasing texture and was highly flavoursome.

If you disagree I don’t really care but feel free to add a comment.

Today’s CashGordon fiasco has got me thinking about the point of a social media campaign and reinforces the point that simply getting your brand or campaign mentioned on Twitter is not an end in itself.

For Tories, the CashGordon strategy was based around creating something that would inflame people on Twitter, and then watching as the #CashGordon hashtag began to trend highly, regardless of the actual merits of the campaign or content of the CashGordon site (in this case, Charlie Whelan and the Unite union’s supposed hold over Gordon Brown and Labour policy). This much was admitted by Tory blogger Samuel Coates, who said on Twitter earlier:

Sitting back and marvelling at #CashGordon – we had an open hashtag policy, and have not changed that today, for a reason!

Other examples of self-satisfied gloating on Twitter earlier today came from the Tories’ in-house “online communities editor” Craig Elder, who praised Labour and lefty-types for drawing attention to the CashGordon site:

@psbook Such an own goal on your part, repeatedly drawing attention to our campaign. Please continue.

What was actually happening here was not any discussion of Whelan or Unite. Instead, there was lots of criticism for CashGordon. The Guardian had noticed that the site used a template that had been developed in the US as a campaign tool against US healthcare reform. The phrase also started to trend highly because people quickly realised that since the Twitter stream on the CashGordon website was unmoderated, you could write embarrassing things about the Tories (or indeed childish swearwords, or even adverts) and get them on to the CashGordon site in real time, provided they were tagged #CashGordon (see image, top left).

Then someone realised that the site could be exploited by script commands. Pretty soon, CashGordon was redirecting to a site saying “David Cameron is a c**t” in 48-point type, a Rick Astley video on YouTube and some OAP porn (link is safe for work). The site was subsequently taken down and remains offline. All in all, then, this was fairly obviously a total embarrassment, a mega PR fail and a terrible idea very poorly executed.

Yet, after a couple of hours, Elder and Coates reappeared on Twitter, still maintaining that all was well. After I sarcastically observed that CashGordon was “a social media triumph”, Elder replied to me like this:

@davidquinn Can’t disagree with that – it’s still trending in the UK…

How stupid do you have to be to think that just because a word or phrase trends on Twitter, that automatically makes it a good campaign? It obviously doesn’t, and to think otherwise is simply confusing the medium with the message.

I realise that as an employee of the Conservative party, Elder’s job is to talk up its “successes” against all rational logic but, really, does he actually believe that this idea was executed in a way that was positive for the Tories? His argument, and that of some other social media practitioners, seems to be that if you get something trending, you’ve automatically “won”. But in this case people aren’t talking about Unite, the BA strike or Charlie Whelan (the point of the Tory campaign). Instead, they’re talking about how a flagship Tory website has been forced offline in embarrassing circumstances – and having a bloody good laugh about it. How is this a win?

Using the Tory rationale, Nestlé had a good day on Friday, when the company’s name began to trend on Twitter following claims by Greenpeace about the slaying of orang-utans during Nestlé’s harvesting of palm oil, which was compounded by Nestlé’s disastrous intervention on Facebook, in which it told people to stop using its logo. In reality, of course, the brand has taken a dive and the thing is already a case study in how not to “do” social media.

Looking back, if it’s remembered at all, I very much doubt CashGordon will be seen as a brilliant use of Twitter as a political campaigning medium. Instead, it will be seen as a byword for total technical incompetence and a fundamental misunderstanding of the point of social media.

Footnote: In case you’re wondering, and since there’s an election brewing, this blog is not pro-Labour, nor is it pro- any other political party.

I’ve just got back from Bolton, where Unite Against Fascism have organised a counter-protest to a demonstration by the English Defence League in the town centre. I’m making a film about someone on the UAF side, so I was there as an observer.

It was my first time at a protest of this sort and it started quite amicably before getting a little bit unpredictable later on. There was some heavy-handedness on the police side. Its strategy of entering the square, arresting UAF leaders and moving a line of officers forward in an attempt to pen anti-fascist protesters into a small area seemed over the top. It struck me that the police were happy for the UAF to remain in Victoria Square but as soon as they started to march, they felt the need to crack down.

I also found it odd that the police had split the town centre into two, with a kind of Berlin Wall type arrangement running down across Victoria Square. Predictably, neither side was ever going to pay much attention to this and, at about 11am, the UAF lot marched off towards Knowsley Street, in the opposite direction from the blockade. I’m not entirely sure what happened after that but the police formed a line, there was a lot of pushing and shoving, and the UAF group got split in two, with a second group forming on Old Hall Street.

Around the same time, a number of coaches arrived and the group in the square swelled. The police moved officers into the square, which was seen by the UAF lot as an aggressive encroachment into an area of peaceful protest (I’m inclined to agree with them). The police then arrested a number of UAF leaders, which of course didn’t go down very well at all. The riot uniforms and dogs soon appeared.

I saw quite a lot of people getting dragged off by police, including a number of bespectacled women who, to be perfectly honest, didn’t look even slightly threatening. An old guy of about 80, clearly a pacifist who was holding a sign imploring British troops to leave Afghanistan, was bundled to the ground by an advancing plod (image, right).

We saw some smoke bombs and then, ludicrously, found ourselves on the other side of the police line at the northern side of the square, looking back at the anti-fascist protesters. It struck me at this point that there was a bit of pointless posturing going on. One minute I was on the protesters’ side of the line, the next minute I was on the other. I couldn’t work out the point of this police front line, which was made up of riot police and dogs, since there was nothing but other UAF and media people on the other side of it. Around this time I saw a young blonde police woman in full riot gear laughing her head off. Perhaps she found it strange, too.

After hanging around a bit longer we decided to leave. The subject of the film (I’d best not name him just now) had left after his mate got arrested and a couple of his friends sustained injuries. Police claim there were 2,000 EDL supporters and 1,500 anti-fascists in Bolton today. I would estimate that there were more anti-fascists (I’m not an expert on protests, as I say, but I’ve been to music festivals and football matches, and I know what a thousand people looks like). The only EDL group I saw numbered less than half a dozen numbskulls waving St George flags – although it could be that the bulk of the group had assembled elsewhere.

I’ve previously been a bit sceptical about UAF protests and it’s tempting to argue that if you just ignore the EDL they will eventually go away. On the other hand, why should racists be allowed to parade through the streets unchallenged? Either way, town centre businesses will have taken a big hit today. There isn’t a shop open and, away from the protest, it felt like a ghost town.