A rover-reaction

In a report costing a staggering sixteen million quid, the Government lambasted The Phoenix Four – the former directors of MG Rover – for paying themselves £40-odd million... and did so without the slightest hint of irony. The fact that it was the slippery Lord Mandelson, famously booted out of Government, not once but twice, for dodgy dealings makes the foaming-at-the-mouth reaction (the sort usually only reserved for paedophiles and terrorists) even more ludicrous.

Unusually for the media - especially given their beloved Gordon Brown’s involvement (he vetoed a survival package for the company in a rumoured plot to damage Tony Blair) - they have lamely and lazily accepted the report’s findings word for word. What’s even worse is their extremely belated concern for the 5000-or-so workers who lost their jobs way back in 2005, having been the very same media responsible for constantly ridiculing their products and undermining their efforts whilst their company was fighting for its life (I vividly remember The Sun’s front page, dancing on Rover’s grave when BMW pulled out).

On the subject of BMW pulling out, let’s not forget that the Phoenix Four supplied skilled jobs for those 5000 workers for a further 5 years, not forgetting the huge amount of tax paid to the Government, the same Government that has now turned on them so spectacularly. Having raped and pillaged the company, the Germans knew that MG Rover was on borrowed time and simply handed the company to someone else so that they would get the flak when the inevitable happened, although given the British people’s love of all things BMW, including both Police and Ministers shamefully choosing them ahead of Jaguar, it’s very doubtful that they would’ve received anything like the same criticism as the Phoenix Four.

Three of the P4 - Messrs Towers, Stephenson and Edwards - had been involved with the company for a very long time... I genuinely doubt that they would’ve done anything to deliberately harm it, and if anybody believes that the £40 million that they ‘took’ would’ve made a blind bit of difference to the company's survival, then they're seriously deluded. Yes, those directors may well have been out of their depth, but, as far as I know, this isn’t yet a crime (if it was, most of my favourite football team would’ve been placed behind bars weeks’ ago), although with this Government anything is possible. I actually think they were right to accuse the Government of a witch-hunt – stupidly, on hearing this, Mandelson unleashed yet another barrage of vitriol in their direction, inadvertently giving further credence to the directors’ accusations of a grudge!

Later this month, it’s rumoured that SAIC, the Chinese owners of what is left of the once-sprawling Longbridge plant on the southern outskirts of Birmingham, will announce whether the famous old factory will produce their new MG6 saloon. Fingers-crossed. The plant, still affectionately referred to as ‘The Austin’ by locals, deserves some good news.

Ashes to ashes

So, England (well, nine Englishmen and two South Africans) won The Ashes again? Thankfully, we seem to have been spared the mass hysteria of last time (and hopefully the MBEs that went with it). Let’s face it, being a two team series, even before a ball was bowled England had a 50% chance of winning (increasing to something like 84.6% if they happened to win three of the five tosses!).

Now, I have nothing against cricket – I can see why people enjoy an informal knockabout on the village green, I just can’t fathom why people would want to pay serious money to see the likes of test cricket and one day finals where the result is largely determined by the toss of a coin. Sorry, until cricket introduces a more reasonable, less fairground system of deciding who bats first, I’m afraid I won’t be able to take the sport seriously.

Either that or Lords replaces the entire 25-day Ashes series with a ten minute ‘best of five’ toss-up, with the winning captain taking home The Ashes, removing the need for any of this increasingly unnecessary cricket mullarkey. Sounds fair enough to me.

Eco un-friendly

It’s bad enough when Tesco keep referring to their proposed new supermarket in Seaton as an ‘eco-store’, but when the local press repeat the same Tesco propaganda, it’s even more infuriating.

Let’s not be hoodwinked here, Tesco’s new store may, or may not, have a long list of worthy green credentials, but it’s still a supermarket (an unsuitably oversized one) first and foremost.

No amount of solar panels can alter that fact.

Pyscho-analysing

The conclusion of the BBC2 series Pyschoville will leave a huge, half-hour void in my Thursday evenings.

When the series was unveiled a few people sneered, reckoning that, without the talents of Jeremy Dyson and Mark Gatiss, the new venture would fail to achieve the success of The League of Gentlemen (whose third series in particular was the work of genius).

People needn’t have worried, though. Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith created a programme that was, somehow, even better than their previous work. Occasionally poignant, usually hilarious, often warped, it was always brilliantly clever. It made the current crop of television comedies appear even more lazy than usual.

It will be missed.

Feeling sheepish

Shaunetta, the sheep allegedly stranded on a cliff edge in North Yorkshire for a month, has died. I say ‘allegedly’ since some locals claimed that she was able to escape back up to the fields whenever she wanted and simply visited the ledge because she preferred the view from there.

The RSPCA - that’s the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in case you had forgotten (please remember that PCA bit) - were called and, presumably because Shaunetta suffered from the misfortune of having not been born a cat or dog, ordered that she be shot ‘in the best interests of the animal’. Well, I don’t know about you, but being a healthy (hopefully) and happy (definitely) animal myself, if someone wanted to shoot me ‘in my best interests’, I wouldn’t be best pleased.

If this is the sort of action undertaken by a society that claims to prevent animal cruelty, then I shudder to think what would’ve happened if a society that encourages animal cruelty had been called instead. Maybe Shaunetta would’ve been machine-gunned to death, as opposed to having to endure a single bullet?

Just makes me a little angry and a little sad. I’ve a good mind to phone the RSPCA and report the incident. Oh...

The price is right

Apparently, it’s been reported in OK! magazine that Katie Price is considering becoming a surrogate mother for one of her gay friends.

I wonder what it’s like for your life to be one long publicity stunt?

Art for art's sake

Last week, in the space of a long weekend, I saw three Art Deco buildings.
Trouble is, all of them were 100% fake - one of them having been ‘knocked-up’ a couple of years ago, with the other two having been erected in the last few months.

As buildings in an Art Deco-style, they’re a decent attempt, but why go to all that trouble when all over the land there are beautiful, genuine Art Deco buildings being torn down by a combination of clueless councillors and dim-witted developers? Well, they were, before the recession.

These Modernist buildings from the golden era of the 1920s and 30s - with their clean, smooth surfaces and contrasting, ornate detailing - have often been overlooked simply because people believed that it was impossible for anything beautiful, especially architecturally, to have come out of the 20th Century.

The Hoover Building in Middlesex is widely regarded as the finest example of Art Deco architecture in the British Isles and was restored by Tesco - not renowned for its social conscience - when converted to a supermarket following its closure as a vacuum cleaner factory in the early 1980s.

Nearby, the (arguably even more wonderful) Firestone tyre factory wasn’t so lucky. Sadly, developers got wind of the structure’s impending listing by the Department of the Environment, and so when the preservation order arrived, the dust was still freshly rising from the rubble following the visit of the bulldozers only days earlier.

In an act of pure vandalism, the developers cynically worked faster than any building company before or since to get the huge structure demolished over the course of the August Bank Holiday weekend in 1980. That was a lot of triple overtime, even back then.

Thankfully, the Firestone factory didn’t die in vain. The subsequent outrage was channelled into the formation of The Twentieth Century Society who campaign for the preservation of Britain’s architectural heritage, protecting buildings constructed from the end of World War I right up to the present day.

The society has helped high-profile buildings, like Hoover, survive, but as I mentioned earlier, more obscure Art Deco buildings are still disappearing, or are in danger of disappearing, at an alarming rate. Just five years after Firestone disappeared, the much less well-known, but equally splendid, Woolworths store in Weymouth - complete with tiled façade and ocean liner appearance - was demolished, to be replaced by a depressingly nondescript row of shops.

Further along the coast, Campbell House in Plymouth, once home to Habitat, is facing an uncertain future, despite it being one of only a handful of buildings in the city centre that survived the blitz. Where the Luftwaffe failed, sometimes councillors and developers succeed. Let’s hope not.