August 2007 Archives

IT IS bad. Very bad.
And it’s excruciatingly, bitterly sad.
You know, of course, to what I refer.
The killing of little Rhys Jones.
Like millions of others I was blinded by tears as I listened and watched his mum and dad bare their souls on the television news about the unspeakable act of evil which ended the life of their precious lad.

MORE than anything else, what stops Liverpool from regenerating is the fact that the city’s politics are so inept and juvenile.
Private investors (and even those committee placemen and women with responsibility for hosing away Government and European slush funds disguised as development grants) are not idiots.
They can tell if a city has an unstable political culture, and they consequently direct investment elsewhere.
That is why Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham are succeeding with regeneration while Liverpool is faltering – despite our city having the extra benefit of European Capital of Culture 2008 status.
The latest twist in the sorry story of Liverpool City Council and its pathetic offshoot, the Liverpool Culture Company, illustrates my point.

SO I went to see Everton beat Wigan Athletic in the season opener at Goodison – my first visit to the doomed stadium.
I was up in the top balcony of the main stand and suffered a mild attack of vertigo as I shuffled into my seat.
The ticket cost me £31, which was a terrible shock. The last time I paid to see the Latics it only cost me a shilling.

TODAY I can reveal what might well be the real reason for the sudden axing of the Mathew Street Festival in Liverpool.
According to my spies, it has nothing to do with public safety concerns in the conventional sense.
Rather it is this … the Government cannot risk having the streets of the city centre awash with boozed-up revellers when Condoleezza Rice is in town.
Because, according to the blathering of some loose-lipped public officials (overheard by my unblinking moles in Hell’s Waiting Room, New Brighton), the US Secretary of State is planning to pay a ‘surprise’ visit 'on or around' the opening of Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum, scheduled for August 23.
That’s on the eve of the festival-that-might-never-be, you see.
It is also anticipated that Nelson Mandela might be in town around then for a tour of the museum.

NEWSFLASH !! Sam Brady the acerbic TV critic and columnist is back... as a blogger. Check out his latest writing ...

http://sambradyoracle.blogspot.com/

AS some of you have already guessed, some years ago I used to write under the pseudonym of Sam Brady as an acerbic TV critic for the old Oracle teletext service.
Sam's weekly blast of bile about the smug, politically correct, middle class blandies who ran (and still run) British telly, gained quite a cult following - particularly among students, as I recall.
At the start of my Sam Brady column, in the late 1980s, I remember warning readers not to be taken in by all the talk of a glorious flowering of creativity that the digital future of broadcasting was supposed to bring.