Bite my wire

Just this minute watched episode 1.13 of The Wire. Yes, I am very behind on this one, and yes, I've been meaning to get to it for ages. And oh god yes, it's as good as everyone has made out.

Jimmy McNulty is working in Baltimore Homicide, and is aggrieved that anyone he catches gets off, and that none of his colleagues or anyone in the DEA even knows the name Avon Barksdale - the man running all the drugs. So Jimmy kvecthes to his mate who is a judge, and the judge sets up a special operation tailing Barksdale. But this only pisses everyone in the two departments off, so McNulty's unit is mostly a bunch of lazy, sweary no-hopers, the deadwood everyone else has been looking to get shot of for years.

Or so it seems at first...

It starts slow and for the first three episodes I just thought it was a perfectly competent cop show. Being HBO, there's sporadic nudity, violence and swearing. I know one chap who was turned off the whole thing by a scene in episode one where some cops are stupid and crude.

But firstly, it's clouding up the moralities, so there's nothing so simple as good guys and bad guys. Every one of the huge cast is morally conflicted and there's all kinds of stupidity on show due to short tempers or not giving a stuff.

Secondly, in episode four the real genius kicks in. We get scenes playing off - without spelling out explicitly - stuff we've already seen. And we're often privy to stuff that particular characters don't know: what really happened or how close they came to a lead. And yet at the same time the show holds stuff back from us, so something said earlier on in the series gets shown to be macho bluster in the last episode.

From episode four it is utterly compelling, and when they start bumping off regular characters, you genuinely have no idea where it's going to go. And I have years of this stuff still to get to - hooray!

But Charlie Brooker enthuses much better than I (and has all sorts of stuff about why it feels like a novel and has such an authentic feel):

XO2

I'm not usually hot and sweaty for technological nubbins, but phwoar! check out the news about the X02.

I've been following the One Laptop Per Child project for ever and am a bit surprised I've not blogged about it before. The prototype model of the chunky green thing even came with a yellow crank handle. How can that not be cool?

The BBC news story is especially exciting because the laptops are going to be released to us greedy Westerners:

Prof Negroponte announced the resumption of the Get-One-Give-One programme to allow people in wealthy nations to buy two XO laptops and donate one to a child in a developing country.

The programme will be open to people in North America and Europe and start in August or September.

Stamp duty

Our local Post Office depot closed earlier this year, and collecting parcels or mail that needs signing for – which we do about once a week – now means one stop on the train, and juggling time off work.

Royal Mail is fast running out of solid ground under it, like the polar bears. Branches of Post Office are closing up and down the country – which, one claimant argues, is a breach of human rights.

There was also a story a couple of weeks ago that, since 2006 and the end of Royal Mail’s 350-year monopoly on delivering post in this country, nobody’s actually come forward to try to compete.

It’s apparently just not worth their while; the volume of letters is declining at the same rate as the polar icecaps. And of course, the postal regulator thinks the solution to this is privatisation.

The mail system we understand today is a Victorian invention – Rowland Hill’s revolutionary “Post-office reform: its importance and practicability” was published in 1837, the year Victoria gave up being a princess.

Hill begins his argument for reducing the cost and complexity of the postal system with some numbers. Taxing postage is counter-productive, he says. The tax deters people from using the state-owned mail, and fewer people using the system means less revenue to the state overall – Hill himself quotes a loss of some half a million pounds for 1835 on page 2.

“The loss to the revenue is, however, far from being the most serious of the injuries inflicted on society by the high rates of postage. When it is considered how much the religious, moral, and intellectual progress of the people, would be accelerated by the unobstructed circulation of letters and of the many cheap and excellent non-political publications of the present day, the Post Office assumes the new and important character of a powerful engine of civilization; capable of performing a distinguished part in the great work of National education, but rendered feeble and inefficient by erroneous financial arrangements.”

Rowland Hill, “Post-office reform: its importance and practicability” (1937), p. 7.

Admittedly, Hill argued that the system would probably be better administered in private hands:

“There cannot be a doubt that if the law did not interpose its prohibition, the transmission of letters would be gladly overtaken by capitalists, and conducted on the ordinary commercial principles, with all that economy, attention to the wants of their customers, and skilful adaptation of means to the desired end, which is usually practised by those whose interests are involved in their success.”

Ibid.

But, since there is a monopoly, he argued, the state had a duty to make the system work, to make it work well, and to maximise revenues. And, because it had a monopoly, the costs would be easily spread across the whole country. In fact, if you had a national network anyway, the difference in cost of sending a letter 100 miles rather than 10 was almost negligible; either way, it was still even less than a penny.

So Hill rather brilliantly argued that you would raise revenues by at least quartering the price of postage (from the usual 4d) – and paying the fare in advance of posting, to avoid people cheating the system.

“I therefore propose –
That the charge for primary distribution, that is to say, the postage on all letters received in a post-town, and delivered in the same, or any other post-town in this British Isles, shall be at the uniform rate of one penny per ounce ; – all letters and other papers, whether single or multiple, forming one packet, and not weighing more than one ounce, being charged one penny ; and heavier packets, to any convenient limit (say one pound,) being charged an additional half penny for each additional half ounce.”

Ibid., pp. 33-34.

While Hill also called for a “great increase” in the number of receiving houses, he argued that a uniform rate of postage would make their job easier and more efficient: letters would either be paid for or not, so they’d just need distributing. It’s not dissimilar to recent discussions of micropayments: if there’s a system of handling them cheaply and efficiently, then there’ll be enough of them to make it pay.

And Hill’s brilliant system worked.

“In 1839 on average each person in the UK received just 4 letters a year. That figure doubled in 1840 to 8; in 1871 it was 32; by 1900 it had almost doubled again to 60.”

Simon Eliot, “Aspects of the Victorian Book – The Economic and Social Background to Victorian Print Culture: postal system”.

(See the graph at the foot of the page for the extraordinary scale of that…)

The Penny Black, the world’s first postage stamp, was issued on 6 May 1840. Soon there were wildly exciting technological developments like envelopes and, in 1843, Hill’s mate (and something of a hero of mine) Henry Cole invented the Christmas card. Hill, still the radical pioneer, was suggesting outlandish things like people having letter shaped holes in their front doors to make delivering post that much easier.

“Reducing the cost of mail would be a boost to literacy and democratise the use of the post,” says the British Postal Museum and Archive – arguing that Hill’s changes to the system were a deliberate social reform. But cheaper postage (and speedier services when post got sent my rail and, in London, it’s own private underground train) benefited everyone: the workings of business, of Empire, of news and thought and science were all given a great push.

As a result, and with Hill’s reforms being quickly adopted abroad, the world became a smaller place; our conversations became more widespread, diverse and quicker.

It’s no wonder that many commentators feel Hill’s postal system has been undone by the Internet – which, since 1990, has had just as huge an impact on worldwide work and natter. But the Internet is not the guilty party; the killer has been choking Hill’s system since long before 1990. Hill argued that the system would work because Royal Mail had its monopoly, and it is whittling away that monopoly that is causing the harm.

Telegrams, phonecalls and later faxes and pagers all competed with old-fashioned post; the speed and convenience of modern technology making many kinds of letter redundant. No longer would a courting couple arrange their dates by post; instead they’d enrage their parents by spending all night saying nothing down the phone.

But until (relatively) recently these technologies were no threat to Hill’s system because they too were part of Royal Mail’s monopoly. With its Victorian communication network set up, Royal Mail was inevitably in the best place to nurture the nascent technologies of telegraph and phone. Telegrams were sent and received from the local Post Office, and via cables that swam from Porthcurno in Cornwall, they reached the whole of the world. Britain’s telephone network was run by the General Post Office until 1980 – when British Telecom was created.

Now I’m not arguing that the telephone lines be renationalised. (But I can see an argument for making letters and parcels part of BT’s licence, that they’re as much “telecommunications” as telephone lines and broadband.) I’m just making the point.

But where the Royal Mail really was screwed was by being split into three. They separated the businesses of delivering letters, delivering parcels and operating post offices in 1986.

Oddly, Rowland Hill might have approved of this split. Having outlined his proposals for the fee of “an additional half penny for each additional half ounce” on parcels, he conceded his own doubts:

“The charge for weights exceeding one ounce should not, perhaps, in strict fairness, increase at so great a rate ; but strict fairness may be advantageously sacrificed to simplicity ; and it is perhaps not desirable that the Post Office should be encumbered with parcels.”

Hill, p. 34.

And yet, I’d argue that the parcels – and post that needs signing for – is the profitable bit. It’s the service you pay a premium on, and it’s the bit phone, fax and email can’t do. Tellingly, Parcelforce doesn’t have a monopoly on this stuff and – as Hill did sort of predicted (see above) – capitalists have skilfully, economically made parcels big business. There are expensive, elaborate advertisements for why one courier’s that millisecond quicker or how you can follow the progression of what you’ve sent to the square quantum particle.

And it’s simple to see why: the transmission of abstract ideas can be done in the electronic ether, as fast and free as available technology; but you’re always going to need someone to shift physical stuff.

And the Internet, I’d argue, has increased the postage of physical stuff. People shop online and then have their wares sent to them from all over the country and even from abroad. They swap stuff, they auction stuff, they send gifts to the people and communities they met online. All the stuff you can’t just do by talking, that needs someone getting off their arse.

It’s difficult to quote any numbers when the infrastructure is in bits, but without competing couriers paying for lavish advertisements, or even paying separately and on top of each other for their networks to have the same reach, surely it’d be cheaper for all of us to send stuff. And, on Hill’s model, that means we’d do it more.

Dividing the postal system up ever further is just slash and burn economics; you strip out the bits of an ecosystem that will yield short term returns, but you do so at the expense of that system having a future.

Tales from the cryptic

On Saturday, I finished a draft of something which hasn't been announced yet so cannot be spoken of now.

On Sunday, I made amendments to something else which hasn't been announced yet and so cannot be spoken of either.

And this morning I was on the 07.02 train to Victoria to spend most of the day visiting something related to another as yet unannounced thingie.

I can reveal, however, that on the way home I was bought some Percy Pigs on expenses. Ooh, my showbiz life. But mmm, Percy pigs.

Merely silly

Mentioned in the pub last night, while at Falldog's birthday, that there's a great summing up of Doctor Who in the 1993 Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. So I looked it up this morning:

"At its worst merely silly, at its best is had been spell-binding."

John Brosnan, Peter Nicholls, Kim Newman, "Dr Who", in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (eds. John Clute and Peter Nicholls), Orbit 1993, p. 346.

On the hoof

Does Satan qualify as an ungulate?

50s way to leave your lover

It was like something out of Things To Come (1936) – and one of the glorious utopian bits, not the bits with fighting. A. and I made our way to the Science Museum’s ticket desk to buy our way into Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain (until 25 October 2008). And it turns out to be free.

Hooray! We almost skipped in the great glass elevator up to the second floor.

Also strikingly modern was the new-fangled audio guide. Rather than being given some ersatz walkie-talkie, you used your own mobile phone. (Calls were charged at London landline rate, rather than at some cunning premium. We, um, didn’t bother.)

The post-war period is a fascinating one, and is also currently RESEARCH. Which means any exhibitions and related books and curios are tax deductible. And what follows is cobbled together from various bits of reading and not-quite-thinking.

Britain was punch-drunk after the war, reeling from the barely-understood-yet evaporation of her empire. There’s a thing in Graham Green’s “The End of the Affair”, where the narrator describes the fearlessness of living in the Blitz, where you might die any moment. It seems it’s only when there’s no more bombing, when you might survive, that your muscles unclench and you again remember how it is to be terrified. This is a post-traumatic stress civilisation. How in hell did it get through?

The shared effort of war has led to expectations of a shared effort in peace. There’s a welfare system, a National Health Service and as much dentistry and spectacles as anyone can eat. A huge rebuilding operation was also required.

“The full extent of the war damage to London’s infrastructure and housing stock made reconstruction an urgent priority. The publication of Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan established a framework where issues of reconstruction and social progress combined in the utopian idealism of slum clearance, New Town development and green belt conservation.”

Paul Rennie, Festival of Britain Design 1951 , p. 36.

And with that rebuilding came a magnificent street party, deftly coinciding with the 100th anniversary of a great bash in a greenhouse. In his book on the Festival of Britain’s design and merchandising spree, Paul Rennie speaks of jubilant firework displays and nights of dancing.

“The relative sophistication of these entertainments, for ordinary people, and in the context of post-war austerity, should not be discounted.”

Ibid, p. 21.

The new fashion for promenading wasn’t just dangerous for its European influence. The Thames beside which young people strolled was still busy, noisy and industrial, and the London smog killed 4,000 people in 1952. Yet the Festival marked something important; freedom after the austerity and secrecy of the war.

In some ways, the Festival was a conscious step backward to the pre-Great War – and imagined – period of church fetes and bicycling vicars. Look at the type-faces used in the Festival’s literature: fat-stemmed, fussy, serifed fonts as if Modernism had never happened. Things clearly fashioned by men and not machines. That, says Rennie, is a conscious turfing out of the

“ubiquitous sanserif faces of the 1930s and WWII”.

Ibid, p. 52.

The celebration is especially evident in the Festival’s logo; a compass decked out in coloured bunting. Abram Green’s Festival logo and his posters for the Financial Times, according to Rennie,

“define the graphic style of the decade perfectly.”

Ibid. p. 24.

And yet Rennie’s own book and the Science Museum would seem to disagree. The Festival isn’t of its age for looking fondly backwards, but for its yearning, breathless gaze into the future. It was symbolic, says Rennie, of,

“Britain’s status as an atomic power and the technical lead that it had in such fields as radar, computers, telecommunications, television and jet engines.”

Ibid., p. 50.

The Festival was defined by technical innovation. New electric trains from Waterloo meant the South Bank site was viable because there would be less soot and smoke (p. 15), while the Festival also introduced ordinary people to the space-age concept of proper toilet paper (p. 19). It was this generation that put men on the moon.

Oliver Postgate – later inventor of Bagpuss, the Clangers and Ivor – had a job at the Festival. He helped build the scientific machines, which were constructed around complicated bubble machines,

“in essence, a large diagram depicting a flow of materials, the flow being marked out by thin glass tubes through which coloured liquid, regularly interspersed with air-bubbles, would travel along slowly."

Oliver Postgate, Seeing Things, p. 165.

His description of that work gives a brilliant, idiosyncratic sense of what the Festival – and its time – might have been like.

"The main characteristic of work for the Festival was that nothing that was supposed to happen happened when it was supposed to. Our material was finished and ready on time but the building it was to go into, the Power and Production Pavilion, was, to put it simply, not there. It was eventually made available to us exactly a week before the Festival was due to open, whereupon we discovered that, for reasons we knew nothing of, the showcases had not been made according to the plans we had been working to.

There was no time to argue about this and no point in doing so because nobody was taking responsibility. Bob and I just set to and sustained by Benzedrine and knobs of sugar, worked, non-stop, night and day for the whole week.

Even then I didn't quite finish. As the King and Queen and the two Princesses came through the pavilion, viewing the exhibits on the formal Opening Day, they might have thought that all the ingenious animated displays were electrically driven. Not so; I was lying on my back underneath one of them, winding it by hand.”

Ibid., p. 167.

I love the glee and naivety around this new-fangled science stuff, of civilisation being on the cusp on an enlightenment it doesn’t like to admit it doesn’t understand. Shoe shops of the period excitedly offered to X-ray your feet on the pre-text that they’d fit your shoes much better, but really because it was just cool to use the gadget. Paul Rennie tells of similarly overly-enthusiastic space-age jollity at the Science Museum.

“A proposal for a new 'Newton-Einstein House', which subjected visitors to extreme gravitational forces, was ultimately rejected.”

Rennie, p. 51.

The present day Science Museum is divided into three. The first section contents itself with the new technologies that people chose themselves. There’s the ultra-slim GEC hairdryer (model DM397A) from 1956. “Unlike previous types,” says the label, “it had a compact and quiet induction motor. This did not protrude from the main body and allowed the hairdryer to be sleek and stylish”.

There’s Russell Hobbs’ first offering, an electric coffee pot from 1952. There’s early electric toasters and the onomatopoeic “Sylph” electric iron. Various versions of bulky hi-fi systems all include complex valve and bulb-strewn amplifiers and hardly space-age wooden surrounds. The clunky Post Office-provided telephone receiver was still supplied until 1981.

The list of artefacts is important because each is a sea change in how people lived their lives. More, it gives an insight into how they filled their time and recorded their experience, increasingly with gadgets. I was taken by the mechanics of a Bell & Howell cine-camera, where you only used one side of the 8mm film at once, reloading it when one side was full. At the process lab, the film was split lengthwise and the 2x 25 foot lengths spliced together into 1x 50 foot length.

Beside me in the exhibition, a fellow visitor was trying to capture this explanation on his mobile phone. In the modern world, you just plug in a USB or email the pictures to yourself, or go to one of those photo machines that accept every kind of plug in but the one you’ve got.

And last there were the Frigidaire electric refrigerator, a Hotpoint washing machine (with mangle attachment on its top) and a Dishmaster electric dishwasher – all with the same stylistic rounded edges and gleaming surfaces, like props straight from Dan McRegor Dare.

Dare is the subject of the second section, which sketches who he was and how the Eagle came about, and includes a few pages of original artwork from his comic strip adventures and a selection of the wild merchandise that went with them. Admittedly, the Dan and Digby walkie-talkie is rather less strange a concept than my own walkie-talkie Eccles and Slitheen.

Excitingly, there’s two exclusive Frank Hampson posters, commissioned by the Science Museum in 1977. You can see them here:

• Planetfall
• Earth orbit space station

I was rather sad to see the state of the exhibits. On the latter poster, Hampson’s signature is smudged, while the original artworks would surely be better framed.

I wasn’t surprised to see no mention of Colonel Dan’s adventures in 2000AD, Eagle mark II or recent CGI. A panel did show covers to the Garth Ennis-scripted Dan Dare strip and the Best of Eagle collection, and of course neither of these was available to buy from the shop.

Lastly, there was a section on broader developments in technology – the health service, nuclear power and electric trains. The Daily Mirror of 25 January 1955 (price 1½d, “Forward with the people”) broke the news of a “£1,200,000,000” network of electric trains, ordered by the Transport Commission. And, from Saturday, it would also be offering a brand new “Woman’s Sunday Mirror”.

I loved the British space suit – or rather the “Royal Aircraft Establishment flying suit” – with it’s goldfish-bowl round helmet, chunky zips and pleated arms and legs, with slipper-like boots lacked to the suit’s ankles. It seemed so cheap and simple, and made of natural fibre, that it seemed more like a costume from a low-budget sci-fi show. The adjacent oxygen cylinder had apparently been used on the conquest of Everest. Noticing the chunky black piping, I wondered if the air would taste of rubber. Nicely, these exhibits were often labelled with classic, cutaway illustrations from the old Eagle.

It’s a strange exhibition in all, I think because of the disconnect between the bright-eyed aspiration in the comics and designs – the determination to built a better future after the horror of the war – and the literal fall-out. It’s not just the X ray machines in shoe shops, or the scant protection offered to the Duke of Edinburgh in the photo of him visiting a nuclear power station – in a nice suit, just some paper coverings on his feet. A. spoke of having seen many of the exhibits in his own family’s homes, only yellowed with years of cigarette smoke.

In looking into this period, I guess I keep seeing the same thing; people plunging into the future because it was too awful to go back, rather than because they had any idea what they were doing. There seemed to be no thought at all that people might get burnt by the white heat of technology. The nearest mention we get of the nuclear threat in the Science Museum is an Eagle cutaway of a British intercept missile.

And I didn’t spot any mention of the hovercraft, the resolutely British invention I associate so indelibly with its Eagle cutaway. But then only this weekend I was reading how the hovercraft helped kill off some of the sexy sheen which difficulty lent stuff we take for granted.

“James Bond did not take the car ferry to France. This is the one part of the journey where my plans must diverge from his. He headed instead for Lydd Ferryfield airport, in Kent, where he drove up a ramp and straight into a Bristol plane bound for Le Touquet. This used to be a regular practice for the rich until the hovercraft killed off the business in 1970.”

Jon Ronson, “The name's Ronson, Jon Ronson”, The Guardian Weekend, 10 May 2008, p. 45.

See also Charlie Higson’s piece on Ian Fleming, and the booze and fags and women that killed him, in the same bat-time, same bat-paper:

“Let's face it, writers are pretty boring. Writers never know how to pose for photographs – is it hand on chin, or hand not on chin? Some might get drunk and sleep around, some might shoot themselves in an effort to appear more interesting, but the fact is 99% of our lives are spent locked away in a small room with a keyboard.”

Charlie Higson, “The Man Behind 007”, The Guardian Review, 10 May 2008, p. 21.

Which is my cue to just shut up.