BCSA meeting at the BAFTA

I have mixed feelings about meetings, some are very interesting and productive (BACEE, TFPL Bath Club, some work meetings) while others (most at Lambeth Council or at Kingston Council) are a depressing waste of time. However, even the most boring meeting can be rescued by a good location, and a good location makes a good meeting even better.

On Thursday we had a BCSA meeting at BAFTA, which is in the heart of London at 195 Piccadilly. The image above is familiar as the design for the BAFTA Awards but this one is about a metre tall and decorates the stairwell just below the second floor bar.


We had our meeting in a quiet corner of the bar (sadly, due to severe delays on the Piccadilly Line, I arrived too late to enjoy a drink before the meeting) which has this rather lovely ceiling.

The meeting itself was OK though (to be very stereotypical) I had a hard time explaining Facebook to Czechoslovak ex-pats in their golden years! I ended up taking lots of actions, which I tend to do at meetings, another reason for not liking them!

It's my birthday soon ...

... and my old IBM ThinkPad X21 (running Windows98) has just died, so guess what I am thinking of buying for myself :-)

Two Pints ... live and kicking!

Series 7 of Two Pints ... got off to a great start on Sunday night with a live broadcast in front of a studio audience, including me! I am directly above the word "Johnny" on the first line and behind the lady in green.

We were not sure how popular a recording of the show on a windy Sunday night would be but we left here at 4:45pm and got to BBC Television Centre in White City and hour later and an hour and a half before the doors to the site were due to open. We seemed to be in our usual place in the queue which I estimated at the time to be around 120th.

A cold and not particularly pleasant 90 minutes later they started to let people into the site but they only had one security x-ray machine working (they had two last time) so it took us another 30 minutes to get on to site.

At that time we were allocated ticket numbers 140 and 141. I guess that we were slightly lower than expected due to the larger number of guests that had been invited.

The good news was that we were given a voucher for a free drink in the bar the bad news was that there was a long queue and we only had 20 minutes before the doors to the studio opened. In the end I managed to get and gurgle a bottle of Carling (?!) and chomp a cheese, tomato and mushroom panini.

We were then led into the studio and as there were only two of us we were squeezed into a couple of seats in the central block. The warm-up guy did his stuff and before we realized it, it was time for the show.

If you are a fan then you'll have seen the show and if you are not then there is no point telling you the plot, so here are a couple of observations instead. Firstly, it rally was all live, apart from one very short clip of Corinthina tied up in his cot. The set was layed out as usual with Janet's house on the left, the Archer on the left and Gaz's flat at the back in the middle. The difference was that they had lots of cameras in place to cover all the sets at the same time, rather than using fewer cameras and moving them around.

Clearly the script had been designed to be recorded in one take with few costume changes and no outside sequences but I was impressed with the risks they took with things that could have gone wrong, such as Gaz's fire eating and Janet catching a peanut in her mouth. I suspect that Donna was meant to catch the beer mat first time though!

There must have been a few other glitches that I did not spot at the time as the show over ran by a few minutes. This was corrected quickly and the repeat later that evening (which I watched, of course) had a few minor cuts. If you taped the first broadcast then keep the tape, it will never be shown again!

The excellent show made all the waiting worthwhile and the evening was rounded off nicely with a couple of quick pints before closing time in Richmond!

A busy time for international politics

I'm not sure if it is just because it is the start of a new year or if it is a symptom of a growing instability and uneasiness in the world but my inbox is filling with invitations to meetings and news international developments.

Unfortunately I am unable to attend the meeting organised by CND on 22 January about OPPOSING US MISSILE DEFENCE: A EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE as I shall be working in Kiev then. The speakers include Lubomir ZAORÁLEK MP, Shadow Foreign Minister from the Czech Republic, which is another reason why I would have liked to attend.

One meeting that I should be able to get to is Towards a progressive immigration policy, organised by Compass: direction for the democratic left, on 29 January. If you want to know what my views on immigration are then watch Planet Corduroy by Marcus Brigstocke!

On Saturday 15 March there is a Stop the War march in London which I hope to be on, having been on most of them over the last five years, including the one last year. Incidentally, Marcus Brigstocke was there too.

I have, of course, voted for the anti-Iraq war protesters in the Channel 4 Political awards.

Finally, it is good to see recognition for the International Crisis Group who have just been listed as one of the top ten think-tanks in the world. They continue to provide thoughtfully analysis on all the potential crisis situations in the world (there ate lots of them). Anyone who wants a broad understanding of what is happening in the world would do well to start here.

Is Kingston Council as good at Education as it thinks it is?

One of the hardest things about being on education committees in Kingston upon Thames is having to put up with the constant mantra that they are outstanding and Ofsted agrees with them, when my own experience is that they generally do not have much of a clue. Some of my reasons for this are given in my previous posts on education. But now the truth may be coming out!

One of the (many, many) things that I do not like about our education department is the grief they give us over our lowly league table position when the reasons for our apparent poor performance are the low levels of prior achievement for many of our children and the insufficient funding we get from the council to meet this need (see previous postings on the funding of schools for the proof of this). One of our counter-arguments is that our Contextual Value Add (CVA) is above 100 (by definition the average performance improvement for all children across all schools in the country), so we must be doing something right.

Now the secondary results published this week show that Kingston upon Thames has a CVA of 998.9 against the national average of 1000. Put simply, equivalent children make less progress in Kingston's secondary schools than the national average. Kingston is less than average.

It will be interesting to see how they try to maintain the "we are outstanding" stance after that. Sadly, I think that they will try and they will still convince most people. At least I'll continue to have the satisfaction of knowing that I am right.