On the panel were: Dominic Fisher, Chair of the Ladywood constituency Conservative Party, Councillor Paul Tilsley, LibDem Deputy Leader of Birmingham City Council, Jonathan Bartley, Co-Director of the liberal Christian thinktank Ekklesia (and also speaking as a member of the Green Party), and Jack Dromey, Labour MP for Erdington.

How to reform the House of Lords without giving too much power to one party and/or preventing gridlock between two houses?

PT: the problem with an elected upper chamber is if you get it wrong in the electoral cycle you’ll end up with stalemate, but he does think we have to move to an elected Lords.

DF: one of the key things needing changing is the element of patronage in the current system. He wouldn’t want people who ‘feel like they’ve been elected’ – the upper chamber’s role is one of scrutiny, not to vote against the lower house. He would favour some form of pr election, plus some form of appointment by a commission for say five years.

JD: would we have a second chamber at all if we were building a system starting from scratch? Since we’re not, he thinks it should be entirely elected and is opposed to patronage and what it has led to. Any system which continues to have nomination by political parties is prone to corruption. The House of Commons should remain supreme and not be challenged.

JB: agrees wth the others; sings the praises of the approx 200 cross-benchers who are independent of any party – an elected second chamber should not lose this. The coallition agreement to make the House of Lords look like the House of Commons in terms of representation is a mistake.

From the floor: as well as bishops, shouldn’t there be other representitives of ‘organisations’ eg trade unions in there?

Who benefits from the Alternative Vote as proposed in May?

DF: voters will benefit the most – you get to vote with your head and your heart, without needing to vote tactically. He also agrees with the idea of the referendum to decide this, because voters should choose the method of voting, not MPs. He does expect to see more extremes at both ends of both main parties under AV.

PT: not a fan of AV, but that was the best that could be done in the negotiations leading to the coallition agreement; at least every vote would count, which is a start.

JB: voters will benefit. He notes that the BNP and other extreme minority parties oppose AV because they wouldn’t stand a chance under it, whereas with FPTP they do stand a vague chance in some constituencies.

JD: agrees with PT about AV being a poor step; he also thinks the current bill to enable the referendum stinks because of the link with the government’s MP reduction plans. He thinks MPs will have to work harder and not able to take anything for granted, and it will add to the legitimacy of MPs since they’ll be able to say they have the support of 50% of their electorate.

From the floor: is marginalising the minorities actually fair?

Is an elected mayor for Birmingham a good or bad thing for democracy?

PT: one of the problems an independent candidate – even a famous one – would have in standing is being able to mobilise people to shove leaflets through doors, so they don’t stand a chance. He thinks a mayor would be a total disaster for democracy to vest all the power in one person. Stoke-on-Trent is a perfect example of the disaster, as are Doncaster & Hartlepool. The London model of a strategic leader of a regional assembly is totally different from Birmingham and other local authorities. The Birmingham Mail’s failed campaign demonstrated that the people of Birmingham really don’t have an appetite for an elected mayor.

DF: agrees the public has no appetite, but he comments that business is apparently in favour. The test is, does it bring power from Whitehall to the region, or does it actually transfer power from neighbourhoods to the Council House? He thinks the latter, and doesn’t agree with his party on the issue.

JD: thinks it’s particularly silly that the Localism Bill proposes appointing the current council leader as the caretaker mayor until a mayor is properly elected. Again, he thinks it worked in London, but wouldn’t work in Birmingham – but does think we need to have the debate on it. He does think if there was a referendum tomorrow Birmingham would probably vote for a mayor on the basis of a perception that Birmingham doesn’t punch its weight, and predicts that the public might think a mayor would solve that.

From the floor: thinks it would lead to corruption in Birmingham – which is why business is in support, because they’d be able to do dodgy deals…

How representative is Parliament, and what could be done to fix it?

JB: most MPs were opposed by two thirds of their constituents; AV would at least address that. It’s not representitive because it doesn’t represent peoples’ concerns – he thinks AV would broaden that. The last election campaign was a sham, because it focussed on one thing which was not actually relevant anyway. A third of parliamentary seats haven’t changed hands since the Second World war – the whole election is won and lost on a few thousand votes in a few marginal seats, so that’s what the campaign is focussed on.

DF: MPs aren’t representitive on anything – how many creative industries people are in there? The fault of this is not the voting system, but the way parties choose their candidates. He likes Caroline Lucas’ proposals to modernise the way Parliament works, eg electronic voting, to make Parliament more ‘family friendly’.

JD: thinks things have moved in the right direction in terms of the powers of backbenchers, but Select Committees are still nowhere near as powerful as eg Congressional Committees in the USA. He thinks it’s wrong that parliament has become dominated by the professional middle classes and the professional political classes, and wants to see more car workers and care workers in Parliament.

Should we make more use of referendums for important issues?

DF: we’ve never had that tradition. He thinks it’s wrong, and capital punishment is the classic example – predictions are a majority of the public would vote for it, and that would lead to so many disastrous miscarriages of justice.

PT: thinks capital punishment is a red-herring – ‘personally i’m a fan of democracy’. Switzerland demonstrates the increased political engagement of the people there, where they have a referendum culture.

JD: thinks democracy needs reinvigorating by making representatives more accountable to people, rather than moving to a referendum culture. He notes some of the ugly xenophobic outcomes of the Swiss referendum culture.

JB: agrees with a greater use of referendums. He notes that a referendum on Iraq would have said no. (Does he like referendums so long as they come out with the right result?!). He thinks there’s a big problem with the way that elections are run on manifestos that most people probably don’t agree with most of the contents of, and thinks increased referendums would introduce more honesty to political campaigning.

From the floor: Swiss referendums are polarised yes / no questions – what about multichoice? Who and how would it be decided what becomes a referendum issue? How many people voting in a referendum have properly studied the issues anyway?

Amazingly it seemed that all four members of the panel agreed with each on about 80% of the issues during the evening!

It had a good innings – nobody can complain about a run of 856 years and it being curtailed; I remember when plans to demolish the 1960′s market and shopping centre area were being consulted on how most of the traders predicted the market wouldn’t survive, but – the soul having been ripped out of the place notwithstanding – most of the stalls made it through that redevelopment.

Then there are the current fears that the move of the Wholesale Markets from right next to the Bullring Market will cause major hassle – Jon Bounds has commented on the silliness of the image of traders wheeling trolleys full of cabbages half way across town half way through the trading day, but there’s the very real concern of how produce will be then transported, coupled with the new uncertainty surrounding when the move will actually happen.

But to me, what has finally killed the market is the combination of the serious drop in quality of the produce on sale, combined with the scourge of the man from the weights and the measures, the Poundabowl.

Now don’t get me entirely wrong – where the typical shopper might think more in terms of a number of items rather than a weight of items, there’s nothing wrong with it; but it still makes price comparisons difficult, because you don’t know how much you’re getting for your pound from different traders – you may well even be getting a different amount from the same trader each time you buy!

Until recently, produce from the market always tended to have what supermarket fruit and veg well and truly lacked – flavour. I still remember like it was yesterday my reintroduction to the market (after being horrified by reading Felicity Lawrence’s supermarket exposé, Not on the Label) and rediscovering that an onion is an actual real vegetable with a texture and a flavour, rather than some white thing which goes in the dinner for I’m-not-really-sure-what-it’s-adding. The market produce was the blemished, funny shaped stuff which the supermarket bland-o-matic rejected as being Not Possible To Bland.

But of late I’ve noticed that the flavour is less noticeably different from the supermarket, but more critically, the quality has gone right down the pan. It’s no use buying four or five peppers for a pound rather than three or four peppers for £1.50 if you only get to actually use two of them because the rest have become a putrifying blob of mush after a couple of days. I already decided a couple of weeks ago to stop getting my onions from the market because basically half of them were rotten even on the day I bought them.

Today, when I went to my usual stall for getting peppers, I was saddened to see they too have gone over to poundabowl. Rather than hand-picking the precise peppers I wanted (ie, the ones which looked the least off) I would have been forced to accept the ones in the bowl. I usually get a mix of colours, but these bowls were all monochrome – when I asked the assistant for a mix, her reply was “no, I’m not allowed to do that”. So I walked away and found another stall.

The other stall was also poundabowl, but at least when I asked if he could do a mix he said yes. When I checked in the bag to see how mixed he’d done it (just one red to five greens – I wanted three reds and three greens), I saw that two of the peppers were a putrifying blob of mush already.

If I can’t even rely on what I buy being of merchantable quality on the day I buy it, I’m not sure I can be bothered going all the way down there to buy in the first place. So for that reason, I’m out.

It is of course entirely my own fault. I mean, silly me – I made the stupid error of assuming that because every single other train to London stops first at Birmingham International, then at Coventry, the journey taking a mere 20 minutes, that the 09:42 from Birmingham New Street would also stop first at Birmingham International, then at Coventry. So naturally it didn’t occur to me to stand there for some minutes whilst the display scrolled round to confirm my assuption. Why would I need to? Apparently my quickest way to Coventry now is to get off at Rugby and then get a bus; the ticket man didn’t say whether it was a rail-replacement bus from the station or whether I’d have to wander around looking for some other information about buses – and pay for a bus fare on top of my train fare. So, I’ll be lucky to get to the meeting which finishes at 4pm by lunchtime, making the value of my attendance now questionable. The cost of this exercise in time wasting so far – around £10, including the rail ticket and the extortionately priced coffee and breakfast sandwich. To put that into perspective, the cost of my night on Broad Street last night with some good friends was, including my meal, only £14.

Last Saturday public transport let me down too – I had to attend a meeting in Cotteridge, thinking the 10 minute train ride from Five Ways to Kings Norton would be a doddle. Sadly there had been a power failure at New Street first thing in the morning which had stuffed things up, but when the Network Rail website at 3pm was giving the impression things were nearly back to normal I thought it seemed better than the bus. After about half an hour at Five Ways with no sign of when a train might come I re-evaluated that decision and opted to risk my life on the 8A Inner Circle to then pick up the 45 at Pershore Road. Arriving at the 8 bus stop over the road from Five Ways I found a sign giving me all the information I might need to know about locations of city centre bus stops, but nothing to tell me when the bus which went past this stop might be expected to arrive, or even how frequent it was. After 15 minutes I gave up and started walking. My return journey at 7pm wasn’t much better – at Kings Norton station the trains were still stuffed up with no indication of when one might come on the screens, and the man on the end of the loudspeaker-box on the platform was still saying my train hadn’t left Longbridge (and he didn’t know when it would do) literally as it pulled up at the platform 20.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the principle of public transport; it annoys me massively when, with the planet on the brink of environmental catastrophe and the city on the brink of total gridlock, that catastrophe and gridlock is being exascerbated by people with bus stops outside their houses get in cars to drive to workplaces with bus stops outside their offices.

But when I, as an occasional public transport user (I’m fortunate enough to be able to walk to most places I need to get to) who believes in it has such a poor experience of it three times out of every four, who can blame them?

http://www.andygaylejazz.co.uk/

The idea of making a stop motion animation is one we had last year, but beyond doing a test shot of two seconds with Tailycat – our lead in The Quest – we hadn’t got around to taking it any further. So when Filmdash 2010 was launched, with the general theme of ‘happiness’, we thought what better than to revive our animation idea with the two happy Jellycat toys!

As per the Filmdash rules no scripting, shooting, or planning was done in advance of the start of the challenge at 7pm on Friday – the only thing we did beforehand was to make the decision to do the animation using the toys. At the 7pm start time we got our criteria, containing a mandatory line of dialogue (“you’ll feel it in your blood and guts”) and a mandatory prop (a scarf).

Our process over the weekend was:

Friday evening

Initial ideas for the plot, deciding which characters would be used and how, and drawing up of the basic storyboard.

Saturday all day

Principle photography, rendering all the still photographs for each shot into a motion .avi file, first (very) rough cut of all the shots into one continuous video.

Sunday morning

Starting to do the special effects in photoshop (an idea which was immediately abandoned!), starting to do moving subtitles for the dialogue (another idea which was immediately abandoned), replaced by doing silent-movie style caption slates.

Sunday afternoon

Incorporation of background music soundtrack into the film, a series of rough cuts (three in total) in order to get the timing for the caption slates right, followed by exporting the final cut and uploading to YouTube.

Not only was this our first film with a story (I’ve made a number of YouTube films which are more documentary), it was also our first animated film – and after the fact (well during the fact on doing the postproduction work on Sunday morning) we can see all the errors we made – some of the focussing is a bit off, had we known we were going to use caption slates we should have left each shot before each slate linger just a touch longer, the special effects (which were going to be the kiln getting hotter, and the dalek firing its gun) were dropped, the penultimate scene (shot at the end of the day using fading natural light) with The Oracle really could do with having been re-shot entirely, my tripod, whilst smooth enough for normal use isn’t really smooth enough for panning and tracking the micro-movements needed for animation, and the scenes we shot right at the end of the day really did start to have bigger movements between each frame (thus becoming jerkier) as we started to get tired and wanting to ensure got it completed and uploaded by the 7pm Sunday deadline. And due to a whole day of crouching for extended periods of time in awkward positions to take each frame, I’ve twisted my back a bit!

But these are all things we would have done just the same had we spent two months making the film rather than two days – and that would have been well annoying! We were also a bit compromised by having a bit of a rubbish computer – about five years old and not the fastest processor available even at the time, using the free software which came with my hand-held video camera  (Adobe Premier still seeming to be a bit temperamental on this computer), the best thing about which can be said is ‘well it sort of works’.

But in the process we’ve learned an awful lot in a very short time about how to make an animation, meaning for Tailycat’s next adventure things should hopefully be a bit smoother. Many thanks to Chris Unitt and Ian Ravenscroft for their work in organising it, and also thanks to all the other Filmdash entrants for helping make it such a fun challenge to participate in!

The complete set of Filmdash entries are now on YouTube.

http://www.myspace.com/davidlloydhenry

The perfect present every time, indeed; whose face couldn’t possibly fail to light up at receiving such a kind & thoughtful gift, when the gift of choice includes wares from these fine emporiums:

One is – quite literally – spoilt for choice.

I’m writing to complain to you in the strongest possible terms about the lack of gritting along the towpath of the Farmer’s Bridge lock flight, Birmingham City Centre.

This morning, between the top lock and lock number seven (where I disembark) walking along it to work I slipped and fell over not once but four times; I was reduced to descending the lock ramps by squatting & sliding myself down with my hands behind me for balance. You can imagine I’m sure the dangers inherent in slipping on the ice next to a lock, especially if one fell into the frozen lock itself.

I appreciate that British Waterways can control neither the weather nor the temperature, and that there’s little you can do to ensure passage for boats when the canal itself freezes over. However, you can control the pedestrian environment, with the application of salt / grit to ensure key strategic pedestrian routes such as this are safe for the people who use them regularly; the nature of that section of towpath route is such that once one has started going that way you are pretty much committed, as leaving the towpath to take a different route isn’t so simple. Once I reached the normal pavement – which the council is responsible for – my passage was completely fine, so if the council manages to grit the pavement, how can British Waterways not manage to grit the city centre towpath ?

Fortunately neither myself nor my laptop and phone were damaged in my four falls due to British Waterways’ negligence in failing to make the towpath safe, however be assured that had anything been damaged, I would be holding you liable. In this age of no-win-no-fee personal accident law firms advertising on television, I urge you to arrange for the key strategic pedestrian routes in Birmingham to be gritted and made safe as soon as possible, before another member of the public has a more serious accident, and my British Waterways licence money has to be used to pay out on a hefty compensation claim rather than its proper use of paying for the maintenance of the network.

in Friendship,