Tag Archives: The Space

LeftLion 47

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It’s Jubilee weekend so what better way to celebrate than with Issue 47 of LeftLion which is rammed to the hilt with literature. The WriteLion page features nine book reviews, three celebrating the third anniversary of Angry Robot Books (Zoo City Lauren Beukes, Embedded Dan Abnett, Empire State Adam Christopher) and the six shortlisted books for this year’s East Midlands Book Award (The Whispers of Nemesis Anne Zouroudi, The Truth about Celia Frost Paula Rawsthorne, The Misadventures of Winnie the Witch Laura Owen, Pao Kerry Young, An Ordinary Dog Gregory Woods, Ours are the Streets Sunjeev Sahota) As per last year, there are interviews with all of the authors online.

I reviewed three of the books which went against my policy of trying to get a different reviewer for each title. The reason for this was simple. Some publishers were so late sending stuff out that it was too late to get them to reviewers and so I had to lock myself away for a couple of days and read until my eyes started to bleed. This meant I got to read and interview the winner of the East Midlands Book Award, Anne Zouroudi. Her publisher, Bloomsbury, are forgiven for sending the book so late as it came with all of her previous titles in the Greek Detective series. So, a holiday in Greece is called for so that they can be read in their natural habitat.

With PRIDE soon upon us I interviewed Jim Read, the author of a new biography on Justin Fashanu. Fashanu is one of the most fascinating players to grace the game and quite remarkably, the only openly gay football player in the history of the British game. Fashanu was a complex and contradictory character; Christian, rampant fantasist, charismatic playboy, scorer of that goal, victim of homophobic bullying from that manager, adopted, and perhaps most bizarrely, Bet Lynch’s ex – if we are to take his word. His story – which ended tragically in suicide – has been handled superbly by Jim Read and has a good chance of making it on to the Whitbread Sports Book of the Year and hopefully will go some way in encouraging gay players out there to come out.

But the big celebration in this issue was the two page interview with Derrick Buttress who was the first commissioned writer on the Sillitoe: Then and Now project I’m doing for The Space. Nothing has given me more pleasure in all of the articles I’ve written for LeftLion over the last six years than featuring an eighty-year-old writer. Derrick is Nottingham born and bred and had his first short story collection published this year. I can think of no better inspiration to writers out there than sharing his story.

And to cap it all off my partner on the Sillitoe project, Paul Fillingham designed the front cover. Paul is an absolute wizard on the computer and has produced some stunning visuals for the project, blending old and new photographs together to perfectly capture the essence of the project. Now, time for a well deserved drink.

Sillitoe Trail goes to the BBC at Wood Lane

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Photo James Walker.

I achieved one of my ambitions the other day when I went for a meeting at the BBC Television Centre on Wood Lane, the one with the massive windows and a back garden full of gigantic satellite dishes. It was surreal entering this iconic building that had existed previously as a recurring image on the news and reminded me of how excited my son used to get when I took him to a Forest away match and he discovered a new ground for the first time. It is the only time I’ve ever regretted having a crap £5 phone as it meant I was unable to take a photo, upload it on to Flickr and preserve the experience in the digital void. I should get a better phone as mine is so rubbish it only has the capacity to save ten texts at a time. But having a rubbish phone means that when I’m on a train I get to read and think. However, this project is demanding so much of my time I may not be able to fend off the temptation much longer. I just don’t want to become one of those people with heads perpetually facing downwards, flicking their fingers across their touch screens like they’re dismissing everything. This project isn’t going to make me become one of those, is it?

The BBC are supporting the Space project by offering up lots of training sessions and workshops in things such as using a self-op camera, general desktop editing skills, rights and intellectual property. I was here for a session on archiving. I was late as someone threw themselves in front of a train at White City, and so missed the opening talk by Tony Ageh, Controller in Archive Development. But I was in time to discover that it is an incredibly complex process. The how-to-find-it demo seemed simple enough, requiring a keyword search which then lists relevant clips, meaning you don’t have to watch a whole programme to find what you’re looking for. As with any form of cataloguing though, it’s only as good as the person determining what subjects/words require logging.

Only very recent broadcasts come with visual previews. This means after finding possible material based on keyword searches, I’ve then got to make a request, wait for it to be burned to CD, then go and view it at the BBC, only to possibly discover it might not be of any use. The BBC archives cannot be accessed remotely but fortunately they can be viewed at the local station in Nottingham. When I put in for this bid I drastically under-estimated how time-consuming this process would be, and that’s before you’ve even broached the murky waters of copyright. Fortunately, I can’t think of a better way to spend my Saturday nights and Sunday mornings.