A great deal!

Halifax are offering a fantastic deal in their notoriously annoying adverts.

Their new Reward Account promises to say more than just ‘Hi’ to their customers, they want to give them a tantalising £5 a month, just because they are so cuddly and nice.

Just pay £1000 a month into it. Say ‘Hi to £5 a month’, cue high five

A month! I make that an interest rate of 0.5%. Comparably one their web saver  savings accounts offers 2.80%, with no income needed at regular intervals to get the interest. Then there’s the ISA at 4.25%.

Now who gives you extra?

It’s GLOBAL warming, stupid

At least he's happy about the continued chilly weather

I was just about to sit down and rant about how annoyed I am that people are saying that global warming is just a made up fairy tale.

Blah blah blah.

Someone usually says something like “look at now cold it is at the moment and we’re supposed to be all bathing in a tropical sea according to Al Gore!” – which rather grinds my gears somewhat.

Not that I fully understand the all the complex climatology, nor do I say that I blindly accept everything I’m told about rising temperatures. I’m not a ‘climate-credulous ladyboy Yakult-drinker in Islington’.

But then I saw that Giles Coren has said it all for me. Therefore it gives me great cathartic pleasure to link to this article in the Times.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/giles_coren/article6981487.ece

Feed the 5000

I went to the Feed the 5000 food give away in Trafalgar Square and received a lovely free curry!

The line was long!

I met some Americans enjoying their lunch

It was run by “This is Rubbish” to educate people about the shocking scale of food waste.

Less than 40% of food waste is produced by households and they are campaigning for the government to introduce an obligation on retailers to reduce food waste.

I spoke to Meredith Alexander the Head of Trade and Corporates at the charity Action Aid.

She told me that she hoped people would take away the knowledge that food waste is a significant problem, and that it is a problem we can all do something about.

None of the supermarkets were represented – Action Aid are running a campaign for a watchdog to regulate the power.

Save the Children were also represented, and I spoke to Mathew Winigate who had just returned from Kenya to investigate malnutrition. 1 in 3 children are malnourished in north-east Kenya.

He told me that they were working with the government who don’t have sufficient resources and independently to tackle the problem there.

Here in Britian we waste, 12 Billion pounds, 500 pounds per household on food each year. Yet in East Africa people and children are dying because they simply do not have enough food.

He hopes that British people will engage more with the problem and help charities to do more, especially for those who are being effected by drought attributed to climate change.

Myspace Music launched

Myspace music launched this week. The music industry is constantly changing, with new media providing a challenge to the traditional record labels.

Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace for $580million in 2005. This new service tries to make a commercial success of its surprising ability to break artists such as Lilly Allen. The question remains whether he will make any money from it.

Today the results of the Music Choice poll of 5000 people across Europe found that the most important music event in thirty years was the launch of downloadable music (19%), ahead of Live Aid (18%) the iPod (17%) and the Death of Michael Jackson (13%).

Amazing Radio also launched this week online and on DAB digital radio. It is the first radio station run by the people who listen to it.

Amazing Radio is a new competitor in the vastness of online music. Spotify is forging forward with support from most artists, and is now expanding into the mobile market. It carries adverts, but doesn’t have the backing of some major names like the Beatles.

Myspace has a head start in breaking new bands.

The University of Westminster is turning out bands like The Feeling as well as the song writers and producers of the future. They have more opportunities than ever to get their music into our ears, but with the vastness of the internet, they hold their fate in their own hands.

Eddie Izzard

Izzard on God

Eddie Izzard, Stripped, Wembley Arena.

James Mason did not make an appearance, nor did a man punching a baboon, but Eddie Izzard was on fine form once again. Anyone that can sustain a mime for five minutes containing a speechless speeding velociraptor (doing 45 in 30mph zone), even if they can’t believe they are getting away with it, I’ll pay to see.

Izzard is fantastically post-modernly self aware. Fine. Though it can be frustrating – half way through a gag that is going no-where, he’ll dig out a joke from his previous shows. His biggest laugh came from the old pathos of pretending to write on his hand: “don’t rehearse scenes at Wembley”.

He chose easy victims for the jokes. God, who even after being asked, failed to make an appearance to defend himself. Darwin got a good endorsement, but Izzard doesn’t think the Noah story holds much water.

The energy seemed down. Tired from too much running?

It was a safe, funny act but it did seem that a little short of classic quotable lines. I would love to see it again, perhaps on DVD and give it a second chance.

After all this is a man who can mime a surprised giraffe and a cat singing scat.

EU poll

Your chance to vote on the Lisbon treaty!

Polls on the EU – HAVE YOUR SAY

News Bulletin

We had our first day of bulletins today

Listen here for the 3 O’Clock news and sport with me, Clem Silverman!

Living Library

High Wycombe library held a ‘living library’ event aimed at breaking prejudices, and I was the token Jew.

The concept was a very good one. People were invited from all walks of life to be ‘books’. Tea, coffee and sandwiches were supplied for the books, who waited to be borrowed by members of the public.

I quickly found that I was in high demand. There are six mosques and many churches in Wycombe, but there is a negligible Jewish community. People were very keen to talk to the Jewish person, but I would have thought that because Jews are so well integrated into society there couldn’t be too much ignorance out there.

Two people asked me if we sacrificed goats.

My first borrowers were two Christians. They had never (knowingly) met a Jewish person, and were very surprised to learn of my very liberal interpretation of biblical texts. They, as literal believers in the bible, couldn’t understand the dialogical relationship most Jews have with their faith. “God bless you” they said to me.

A Muslim councilor borrowed me next. He underlined the severe prejudice some Muslims have towards Jews. I got the impression that many people in the Muslim community find it hard to separate Israel and Judaism – thinking that Jews naturally support an antagonistic view towards Islam and fully supported Israel’s actions.

I spoke to a young Muslim lady who, like me, can separate religion and politics. She looked for similarities in the faiths – dietary, prophets, dress-code, cultural and family life. It was very encouraging.

More needs to be done by the Jewish community to make sure people have a chance to meet us. Because we are so small in number and so fully integrated into British society many people don’t understand what it means to be Jewish to most Jews. The most visible are the Chasidic ultra-orthadox, but that distorts the way that people view the Jewish faith.

Programmes like Dispatches have to be balanced after focussing on Islamic extremism, but by portraying the Jews as a small minority with a powerful lobby only stokes prejudice and exacerbates  problems.

The Living Library was a great concept and a really good way of meeting lots of different people. I felt it was important that people got the chance to speak to someone that might appear alien, and therefore breaking down barriers in the process. But these people are those that are willing to go out and discover for themselves – what about the majority who are happy to have their prejudices and will do nothing to try to change them?

No Expenses Spared

Robert Winnett and Gordon Rayner with Richard Wright

Robert Winnett, deputy political editor, and Gordon Rayner chief reporter at the Daily Telegraph came to the University of Westminster to talk about the expenses scandal and their new book.

Students put their questions to the writers of the book No Expenses Spared, click below for a poor quality short clip.

Nathan Rowden asks a question

Making news for peanuts

All news outlets are run by monkeys doing it for peanuts.

Nick Pollard

This week I visited a Media Society event to talk and discuss about the future of the news business. There was free wine. Hosted by Nick Pollard, ex-Sky and now BFBS (British Forces Broadcasting Service) chief.

But rather than the bosses at Sky, ITN, Al-Jazeera, BFBS and BBC reassuring all of us that we’ll have a job and a successful industry to inherit, they all seemed to be genuinely scared of falling advertising revenue, falling viewership and dissatisfaction from the public.

Like rabbits in the headlights, none of them have the inclination to hop out of the way. Instead they blather on about muti-platforms. Steven Cole of Al-Jazeera said that he would like to see broadcast news “get back to journalistic basics” to save it. Journalism is being diluted, according to him, and too many politicians are being let off the hook.

Mr Cole also said that TV news is too often a “parasite” on newspapers, whose journalists still make full investigatory stories, but they work to a different threshhold of truth.

All news is loss making.

Jonathan Levy from Sky News believes that 1 in 4 people still access TV news, and though the internet, IPTV and on demand are taking over, television will be forced to become more niche, but most importantly, it must be live.

Does the £180m budget the BBC spends on on-line news distort the market? The answer is, according to nearly everyone in commercial news, yes. They can compete nationally using powerful brands at Sky, ITN, but the Beeb trumps all when it comes to local news online coverage.

Jonathan Monroe, news editor at ITV, said that there is a difference between “information and journalism”. Anyone can be a ‘prosumer’ – a producer consumer – of pictures, video and information, but it’s up to real journalists to ask the how, what, where, why, when and how much questions. That is why 8 million people in this country watch some kind of 10pm TV news.

There is hope that so-called multi-platform journalism will one day start making money, but until then, the rainbow looks far off in the distance and its pot of gold is well hidden.