Wardman Wire Magazine

With all this talk of Atheist Buses, I thought I would post the Churches Advertising Network Nativity Video (BBC Report) for this year. There are also two 30s radio adverts.

This is a 1 minute snippet of Sir Arthut Conan Doyle talking about how Dr Joseph Bell was the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. He notes that various real police forces adopted the “Holmes” method. Via Dr Grumble:

The recording is a bit stilted and there is only a hint of the admiration and gratitude Sir Arthur showed for his teacher, Dr Bell, without whom there may never have been a Sherlock Holmes.

Click through on the title for the audio segment.

On the blogs this issue seems to be turning into a “we hate the Daily Mail” festival. Here’s the general narrative (one example). Liberal Conspiracy’s blog roundup yesterday:

So…Russell Brand prank calls an old guy, during a near recession, and it’s the PM and Leader of the Opposition’s job to wade in, sparking the BBC to suspend him, because of days of front page tabloid over-reaction. Hoax call a police force on the other hand and you get little more than slight coverage in the tabloids. I despair, as such here are my highly subjective links for the day…

I really think that a lot of people have got the right end of the wrong stick on this one.

There’s been a lot of comment on the Russell Brand / Jonathon Ross Obscene / Prank phone call to Andrew Sachs farrago, such that I’m reluctant to add to the pile.

However … I have one or two things that may be useful, such as a spliced audio recording and some information about the growth of the resulting fuss.

From this morning’s Daily Mail.

A wall built at a cost of £3,000 by a council so that teenagers would have somewhere to spray graffiti was daubed with its first slogan: ‘I paid my tax and all I got was this lousy wall.’

The 6ft high by 30ft long barrier was installed in the hope that youths would stop vandalising local property.

But ahead of its opening on October 31 a fed-up resident in Wadebridge, Cornwall, sneaked behind a security fence and daubed a protest message.

Priceless.

I picked this up from the BBC iPM programme:

You’ve probably read the flurry of press coverage the followed our earlier blog post and the subsequent article in BBC News Online. To recap, exam board AQA removed a poem, Education for Leisure, from a GCSE anthology because of concerns over knife crime.

It’s good to see iPM breaking some stories.

A poem has been removed from the material examined by an examining board because of the content of the poem. That raises concerns:

• Is it the role of an Exam Board to make “content” decisions?
• Do they have to justify themselves?
• Is the poem actually a problem?
• What are the criteria for these decisions, and are they done consistently?

Yesterday (21st July) in the Independent Media Section, Claire Beale was very enthusiastic about an advert designed by Ogilvy.

In the Best in Show section of her Advertising Page, she included:

• The standard presentation of four screenshots in the printed Media Section of the paper.
• Instructions on how to find it, including details of the exact search to use on Youtube.

The article does not include a clickable link within the web page on the Independent website.

I’m taking an interest because the video has had a relatively small number of views, so it is an opportunity to examine the statistics in a bit more detail than we usually see.