“Foul Play” by “Cowboy” Journalists; or, how to be an internet troll.

Regular readers of my rants will know that from time to time (regularly and often) I criticise what I see as dangerous and destructive ethics and practices increasingly being forced on academia from without and within.  If you’re not a regular reader, check out the last two posts and you’ll see what I mean.  It was with some widening of the eyes therefore the other morning that I read an email from one of my bosses about “allegations” and “accusations” made against my employer, Swansea University.  (It was very clear what said boss felt about the accuracy of these allegations and accusations, but as it was an email from him to staff I don’t feel it’s right for me to put anything but the neutral terms he used into the public domain.)  I soon realised, though, by virtue of another email, that in momentarily thinking that the first missive might have something to do with something I’d written, I was vastly overestimating my own significance.  The momentary relief that followed, however, was very soon replaced with anger at the second email and, on this occasion, total sympathy with my boss and empathy with his sentiments.  I trust that my previous perhaps all-too-well-documented criticisms of the current state of the sector I work in will only add weight to the defence I make here of my colleagues and my institution against what I will say is certainly an appallingly unfair attack in terms of its methodology and I would guess at this stage an appallingly unfair one in factual terms.  (I’d say here as well that even in my critical moments I am in fact defending my colleagues and my institutions and indeed academia itself, however much some inside and outside of academia may disagree with that self-assessment.)

The attack I read that morning came from a group that calls itself UK Academic Monitor, or, to give it its IT moniker, ukacademicmonitor.org.  The essential accusations are that certain colleagues of mine in a cognate department wrongly declined to award a student a PhD degree at his first attempted defence of his thesis, then unfairly denied the student the opportunity to appeal against the deferment of his degree award—before awarding the student his PhD at his second attempted defence just under a year later.  It’s perfectly normal, by the way, for PhDs to be deferred, which means go back, do some revisions, and defend the thesis again after a period of time commensurate with the extent of revisions required—thus allowing the maintenance of standards while giving a student a second chance, rather than saying at the end of his or her three or more years, that’s it, one strike and you’re out, you’ve failed, end of, bugger off.  It seems to me an obviously sensible and fair procedure in general, though, admittedly, unfairness is always possible in particular cases.  But, anyway, my university more broadly is accused of failing to have sufficiently robust procedures to prevent these alleged injustices or to discipline the colleagues concerned for committing them and indeed in engaging in secrecy and a cover-up of these misdeeds and failures.  Now, as a historian, and as, I hope, a fair-minded person, I hereby provide a link to the accusations that was emailed to me and all my colleagues, as produced by UKAM and as is on their website.  I believe that one of the first things that may become clear from your reading of this report, though, is that its writers did not do those they are accusing or indeed you the reader the same basic courtesy.  The criticisms that follow are, like this one, mostly methodological.  They are not about the case itself, but about the conduct of UKAM.  They alone, however, ought to cast some considerable doubt, to say the very least, on UKAM’s supposed findings about this case.  You can find their findings and from there their homepage here: http://www.ukacademicmonitor.org/

Indeed the first thing that becomes clear is that it is not at all clear who UKAM is or are (I’m going to assume the organisation consists of more than one individual, though, and call them are from here on in).  As I’ve said, they call themselves UK Academic Monitor, which is very grand.  That “UK” and that “Academic” might invite readers of their website to suppose that UK Academic Monitoring are some kind of official authority.  That they are perhaps legitimated if not licensed by an independent university sector investigator (such as a University Visitor, analogous to the Police Complaints Authority or the Press Complaints Commission, for example), or by the government itself (a kind of educational ombudsman or a QUANGO, maybe), or, best and most appropriate of all, given the circumstances, by the National Union of Students whose job it is, after all, to look after students’ interests.  All I can find about UKAM, however, is a kind of mission statement on their website (linked above) and a short chain of likes and mentions of them on Facebook—from just three pages worth of citations a Google search threw up, suggesting the group is new as well as unauthorised by anyone but its website founders.  Also, Swansea so far is their only target, although their website indicates that there is at least a plurality and implies that the generality of UK universities are short-changing their students and covering it up.  But, anyway, the point is there are no known associations with any known authorities by which one might know the provenance or judge the legitimacy of UKAM. 

Indeed there is no way of knowing anything about them at all, as neither do its members name themselves as individuals.  They might argue back on that count, I suppose, that they are maintaining anonymity for their own personal protection.  To which I answer (and from here on in I switch register and address UKAM directly): guys, you’re alleging unfairness to university students—it’s not exactly Ayan Hirsi Ali territory, is it?  And if you’re worried about the effects on your career prospects (as opposed to your lives, like Ayan Hirsi Ali), well, as I say, I frequently have a go at the authorities over me and it might get me in trouble one day and it might already have buggered up my promotion prospects, but that doesn’t bloody well stop me doing so and from doing it under my own name with my name, contact details, photo, and bio all there for anyone and everyone to see.  I know a lot of others go under pseudonyms, but in all cases they give enough away so you know where they’re coming from and usually enough so you can even figure out who they actually are, rather like eighteenth-century radical pamphleteers who called themselves Cato and Plato but who weren’t fooling anyone and who knew they weren’t fooling anyone.  It’s a matter of honesty and honour. 

It’s also a basic principle of justice that any kind of accused person, whether accused by the media or in a court of law, is entitled to know the identity of their accuser and thereby among other things to have a fair chance to answer back and explain or defend themselves.  Whoever you are, UK Academic Monitor, like some vigilante group, you have deprived those you accuse of these basic rights. 

It’s also a matter of your own credibility with anyone who might read you.  First of all, how can anyone take your accusations of secrecy and cover-ups on the part of others seriously when you refuse to reveal anything about who you are?  It’s just a little hypocritical, isn’t it?  And really, more seriously still, how dare you—HOW VERY BLOODY DARE YOU—“name and shame” others as you, exposing them to extremely serious accusations, while protecting yourselves with anonymity.  I guess you think of yourselves as masked avengers of some kind.  To me you’re just cyber-muggers, nothing more than bullies in balaclavas.  Also, how can anyone credit anything you say, hypocritical or not, when no one even knows who you are?  For all anyone knows, you could be anyone at all.  You might be perfectly nice, decent, fair-minded people (and just be misguided and if so perhaps now regretful of your balaclava-wearing antics), and maybe you’re simply out to the help the less powerful and the aggrieved.  On the hand, you might be just a bunch of internet trolls.  Or, worse, you could be undercover Daily Mail journalists.  No one has any way of telling.  At the very least, one might quite reasonably suspect that you have some sort of axe to grind, and that for that reason, whatever it is, you might be less than fair and partial, and you might even be total liars.  Who knows?  I don’t.  I can’t.  No one can. 

That said, and continuing with theme of your methods, having read your accusations, I can see that you are at the very least manifestly less than fair and partial.  Or, rather, having read between the lines of your accusations, I can see that you are indeed at the very least less than fair and partial, as it’s what you don’t say as much what you do say that says so much about you and possibly about your accusations as well.  Just as your title, UK Academic Monitoring, gives an impression of legitimacy, so your long narrative of events gives an impression of authoritatively forensic investigation.  But, just as there are no affiliations, links, or even individual names to go with your title and therefore there is no real legitimacy, so there is something missing from your narrative, and therefore from its authority.  And it’s rather a big thing too: namely, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY.  Did you give any of the people you shamelessly named, and who you accused of serious malpractice, a chance to answer or explain themselves?  Did you even ask a university spokesperson for a comment before you attempted to blacken an institution’s name in cyberspace?  If you did, and they refused to comment for whatever reason, you do not say, and nor do you give what might in the circumstances be perfectly good reasons for not doing so.  Even the basest tabloid journalists at least make a show of asking for comments from those they accuse of whatever they accuse them of.  They might not be sincere and might not relate their accusers’ answers fairly or properly, but even then at least they acknowledge the existence of and make at least a show of following these basic rules of fair and proper journalism.  You don’t even do that. 

Because you apparently forewarned no one of the accusations you made the other day, I no more than anyone can comment on their factual veracity.  And, unlike you, I’m not going to take half a story and present it as fact.  That is why all I’ve done so far is take your anonymity and your story-gathering or presentational methodologies, and comment on those alone.  If you are the perfectly nice, decent, fair-minded (but misguided) people I acknowledged you might be, then I hope you will retract your accusations or at least revise them extensively accordingly.  I’m certainly not going to comment on the student or his case.  He may very well have felt aggrieved at his deferral and at the difficulties of the appeal process, for whatever reason, rightly or wrongly, fairly or otherwise.  These things happen in all organisations.  That’s meant neutrally and it’s all I can fairly say.  I do know, though, that the student got his PhD from Swansea University, and I trust my colleagues enough to presume that he deserved it.  And I know he got his degree because you said so in your story, albeit very late in your story, indeed very, very late in your story.  I guess that putting the happy ending at the beginning, even though it’s a rather crucial part of the story as a whole, would have put your hoped-for readers off reading the rest of what turns out in fact to be not much of a story at all: student gets PhD—difficult process, as it often is, it’s the highest academic qualification anyone can get after all, but he got it. 

A couple of other facts I do know and will comment on.  I know the people you accuse of all the above, and who you labelled “Cowboy Academics” in yesterday’s version of your web story and committers of “Foul Play” in a previous iteration of it.  They are not cowboys and they do not do foul play.  They are highly dedicated and professional people who are in university teaching to help people get degrees, not to hinder them.  So I say the following with the fullest confidence.  At the end of your narrative you say that “the public, and, more importantly, the thousands of students who,” you proclaim, rather hubristically it seems to me, “will now have second thoughts about applying” to Swansea, are the best judges of whether Swansea is a university worth applying to or not.  Yes, there’s some truth in that, your hubris aside.  I suggest that “the public” or those prospective students indeed come to Swansea and talk with the members of staff concerned (you named them, so they’ll be easy enough to find), and indeed any members of staff, and to other Swansea students, and see what we say we have to say and to offer, and then these prospective students can make the judgement in fairness, having had the chance you didn’t given them to see if there’s another side to all of this.  They definitely shouldn’t and I hope won’t make any judgements about my colleagues or about Swansea University on the basis of manifestly one-sided accusations made by anonymous, untraceable, unknowable, faceless, unaccountable people like you.        

A couple of final things....  If you want to have a go back at me, you can easily do so as you have my name, contact details, picture, bio, etc.  You know who I am and can easily find me.  But if you do have a go at me, and indeed if you have a go at anyone else for that matter, how about you do it fair and square and equal?  That is, how about you take your mask off so I and others can see who you are?  And finally, if you want to put right anything you feel is wrong or unfair in what I’ve said about you in the above, please reply in the box below and I will acknowledge and correct all verifiable errors.  I hope you will see fit to offer others the same opportunity in the future.

PS I put a link to this post on UKAM's Facebook site this morning.  They have since taken it down and issued a denial of my claims while depriving of access to them.  Which couldn't be in closer accord with what I claim about them.     

PPS http://whois.domaintools.com/ukacademicmonitor.com

Britain’s Top 100 (actually 28) Rejected Pop Singer/Band Names (and some other stuff)

Judging by the All Staff emails my university’s suits occasionally send to everyone every day, I am, by implication, like every other non-suit in our learning environment, no longer dynamic, innovative, thrusting, and quite probably bumping and grinding enough to be an entrepreneurial academic in the modern world going forward.  I have therefore been attempting to break into the relatively genteel, service-based, and more old-fashioned intellectually-oriented world of television.  My attempts so far include a once-retweeted suggestion of a sexually-explicit drama about the violent struggles for control of a chain of seven medieval bakeries, called Game of Scones.  Then I had the idea, which received a similar level of Twittaffirmation, of an ancestry-based programme but with a more personal and critical edge than any so far broadcast, called Who the Fuck Do You Think You Are?  I also once blogged in more than 140-character detail a conceptual revamp for Extreme Fishing with Robson Green, called Really Extreme Fishing with Robson Green:  http://stevesarson.blogspot.fr/2012/04/really-extreme-fishing-with-robson.html . I have yet, however, to hit TV pay dirt.  Then, when watching one of Channel 4’s Britain’s top-100-whatever programmes, I realised I had been wrong end of things money-wise.  Each of the ideas I’ve had so far would cost literally money to make, but I need to make my mark at the cheaper end of entertainment before being allowed a budget.  And then, while watching Channel 4 in its it’s-the-weekend-we-can’t-be-arsed mode I came up with the idea of Top 100 Rejected Pop Singer/Band Names, which, over the course of several hours on a Saturday night, will reveal 100 pop band and soloist original names that, for various PR and PC reasons, had to be abandoned before the band or singer concerned, using a slightly different name, could finally become famous. 

Obviously, all the names below are totally made-up, but it doesn’t matter because link-man Vernon Kay will “remember” them and talk about them as convincingly as he does for all the other things on such programmes that he recalls from many years before he was born.  Kay is also perfect for the aforementioned economic reasons, because you only need to pay him minimum wage, which saves on the Pete Waterman standard fee of a Ginster’s scrotum pasty and three pints of Old Speckled Flatulence for a an hour or so of off-the-cuff scripted segments.  All I need to do now is write the script for the guffawing Kaymeister, whey hey, get in, as the rejected names of the bands and soloists are below, in roughly chronological order so that I can somehow marry up thematically to cartoonishly reductive representations  of their respective eras.  We begin in the Fifties, an era of absurd outfits and even more absurd hairdos, and end in our own time, an era of absurd outfits and even more absurd hairdos.  

Little Dickie
Stiff Richard
Willy Fury
Winklespurt Pumperdick
The Floaters (kept original name)
Cocker Joe
Mongo Jerry
The Pervs
Marvin Battyman
The Bo Gees
The Bumgay Dance Band
Stegosaurus Rex
Gadd the Ladd and the Kiddie Fiddlers
Alvin Spanglepants
Hot Chocolate Starfish
Sticky Little Fingers
Spastic Bertrand
The Cottage People
Spazzin’ Stevens
Kakapoopoo
Lemonorama
The Travelling Dangleberries
The Foo Foo Fighters
Pjork
Chaka Will
Boyz 4 Men
Nelly Farturdo
Gob’Shite

And that’s it.  I know I said Top 100 and this is only 28, but there are two reasons why the shortage doesn’t matter.  First, even I can only take so much of my childish bum jokes and knob gags, never mind the tendentious rest.  Second, by the time we get to number 28, it’ll be about 10 o’clock on the Saturday night of what the French call the emission, and so members of the target demographic will have pre-loaded and be on their way to a “nite”-club to spend the rest of the evening ululating to loud, repetitive pounding noises, like a tribe of savages who’ve just sacrificed a virgin, before starting a fight in a kebab shop, blowing chunks over the arresting officer, and losing what passes for their consciousness in the caged but heavily-padded environment at back end of a twat wagon.  Actually, that sounds, on reflection, a bit on harsh on those who comprise, after all, my intended audience.  So I’ll finish by admitting that their assaults on the concept of civility and the basic tenets of human social and cultural evolution are, obviously, nowhere near as barbaric or destructive as those of the suits I mentioned at the start. 

Wanted: Excellent Graduates To Work For Nothing. A Little Battle in a Big War over the Future of UK HE PLC--or not

There is currently a kind of culture war going on in the UK between those who believe in maintaining the ethics and practices of service in public institutions and those who believe in either abolishing public institutions altogether or at least forcing them to adopt the ethics and practices of private enterprise.  There need not be such a war.  The two sets of ethics and practices can co-exist in their respective domains, and have done so for a long time.  Indeed, we don’t even have to see them as being as polarised as, for the sake of argument, I am currently doing.  Public servants can be entrepreneurial, as long as the ultimate aim remains public service, and private businesspeople can adopt service ethics, as long as they make the profits they need to make.  Yet private-enterprise fundamentalists right now are attempting to enforce their ethics and practices on public services, when they’re not busily privatising those services altogether.  And at present they seem to be largely succeeding.  Too beleaguered and too scared of losing our jobs, made insecure as we are in the wake of an economic crash caused by private-enterprise fundamentalists, we mostly just stand by and let them do what they will, hoping we’ll still be in work at the end of it.  This isn’t good enough.  We are ourselves betraying what we believe in if we don’t start talking back more and fighting back more.  So, at the risk of blowing the ballbags off what I sometimes laughingly call my career, I nevertheless want to say what follows.

Every day I feel more and more like I’m living in a parallel universe, a bizarre one and not at all a nice one.  It is in some ways like an Orwellian dystopia where our rulers maintain their rule by telling us that black is white, that bad is good, and, most recently and what occasions this particular post, that unpaid labour is voluntary and honorary.  In a rational and reasonable universe, when a private enterprise system leads an entire hemisphere of a planet into financial crisis, plunging the large majority of its people into frightening uncertainty and many of them into appalling poverty, one might expect that the ideology and practices of that economic system would be thoroughly examined for faults, if not entirely discredited.  Indeed, one might expect that politicians, those charged with protecting the interests of the people, in a democracy anyway, would look for an alternative model of future economic conduct, especially as that same economic system had repeatedly created chaos and poverty roughly every 30 years since grossly irresponsible speculation caused the South Sea Bubble crisis in 1720. (We can be fairly sure that the inquiry announced yesterday into the conduct of banks won't go as far as this, though I would love to be wrong about that.)  It is true that this economic system has created unprecedented wealth, wealth that allows for the existence of large public service sectors in modern civilised countries, sectors where trained experts provide education, health care, and the needs of those who for can’t fully provide for their needs themselves (which is nearly all of us, eventually or at some point or another).  But recent events prove (not at all for the first time) that the spirit of free enterprise is a dangerous beast when not reigned in.  As it is not in the nature of the beast to reign itself in, governments, supposedly protectors of the interests of the people, should enforce effective regulations.  The government could, for instance, force large private companies upon whom so many people depend for their livelihoods, to adopt and abide by service missions that would protect those people's livelihoods rather than endanger them.  You might expect right now, in the current financial crisis, that exactly that should and would be happening.

  

But no.  The opposite in fact is happening.  Public services are being forced by governments to adopt the ethics and practices of the economic system that has so recently and destructively discredited itself.  The process began some time ago, and it is not just a Tory thing, but it has recently accelerated significantly.  And it's happening in all public services, but the one I work in is higher education and so that's what I can talk about best.  By the way, you might well be wondering what happened to all that stuff in the title about excellent graduates being wanted to work for nothing.  It's coming, it's coming, I promise.  Sorry for the delay.  Just let me finish this wider context bit and then I'll get to how a university expecting graduates to work for nothing (it failed, but one of them tried) is the most recent example of the effects of the ethics of private-enterprise fundamentalism creeping into the higher education sector.

As I say, it's not entirely new and it's not just a Tory thing. New Labour introduced student fees and then moved responsibility for Higher Education out of the Department for Education (where else would it be?) ... to the Department of Business, Innovation, and Skills.  The Business Secretary responsible for this crass machination, Peter Mandelson, referred to students as “consumers of the higher education experience,” utilising with subtle but devastating deceptiveness a language that evokes images of choice, control, value for money, happy customers, and so on--a language quite deliberately crafted to make you forget that entrepreneurs don’t seek to make profit for you, but seek to make profit from you.  Indeed, this you-pays-your-money-you’re-the-boss hocus pocus was used to justify the most significant step so far made in the businessification of higher education: the raising of student fees to a maximum of £9,000—a level thought to be high enough to replace all public funding of teaching and almost all public funding of research, effectively privatising higher education (to a certain extent*).  When asked about the enormity of these fees in a TV interview, a man I shall call Harry Callaghan, a member of the Browne Commission that recommended the fee hike, and Vice-Chancellor of what I shall call Bourneville Tech, said that “it puts students in charge.”  For more on Harry Callaghan and Bourneville Tech, see Historian on the Edge (who first coined "Harry Callaghan" and "Bourneville Tech": http://600transformer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/more-trouble.html  and http://edithorial.blogspot.fr/2012/06/birmingham-blues.html

As the above suggests, this creeping hegemony of business fundamentalism is aided by the co-option of individuals and institutions.  Hence the significance of Peter Mandelson, who was of course a chief architect of the New Labour project that transformed the Labour Party into what is effectively the left-wing of the Conservative Party, which itself was transformed by Margaret Thatcher into the political wing of big business.  Hence also the significance of the aforementioned Harry Callaghan, formerly a Professor of Social History, who once delighted in lecturing about the Chartists, and about Karl Marx, but is now the closer-downer of the more “unsustainable” sections of the Department of Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology at Bourneville Tech.**  As well as helping to privatise and as well as being the hammer of archaeologists, Callaghan dislikes dissent, and is on record for effectively criminalising peaceful campus-based student protest: see here Birmingham University gets high court injunction against sit-in protesters, here Birmingham University protest ban attacked as 'aggressive and censorious', here Student protesters get evicted by universities, and here Birmingham students seek to overturn protest ban.

The latest news is that Bourneville Tech, thinking outside the box, in a dynamic, thrusting, goal-oriented move going forward, decided to try to desist from paying some of its employees—if what we mean by thinking outside the box is stealing discredited ideas recently reluctantly tipped out of a shabby old Tesco box—and if what we mean by dynamic, thrusting, goal-oriented moves going forward is the resurrection of a labour system that was outlawed in British dominions in 1833. Like Tesco and like Caribbean slaveholders before them, though, Bourneville Tech has now backed down in the face of questions about the morality and legality of its attempted actions, and has withdrawn its advert for unpaid employment (see below).  Exactly what role Harry Callaghan played in the conception of this latest ill-fated innovation, I do not know.  The advert was for a position in the School of Psychology, but, as he is Vice-Chancellor, one has to assume it is a major one.  And he is a clever man, and good with words, despite apparently tripping over the law.  And, as implied above, words are important here.  There is a link below to the advertisement, if it still works.  Do read it if possible (though I’ve quoted most of it below if it’s gone).

Now, it’s not that Bourneville Tech doesn’t have high standards, of a sort.  The work the *successful* applicant would have been required to do is very important and requires high-level training, expertise, and sensitivity, involving as it did “conducting clinical assessments with adolescents and young adults who are seeking help for mental health issues.”  “The role will also,” the advert continued, “include ongoing assessment of participants and some data entry and management...”, all of which is “aimed at understanding psychosocial, environmental and biological predictors of the onset and course of major mental illnesses (depression, bipolar and schizophrenia).”  Accordingly, and rightly so, the person Bourneville aimed to *employ* was to be highly qualified.  “Applications are invited,” the advert said, “from excellent graduates of Psychology or a related discipline....” Furthermore, because of the sensitive nature of the work, a “recent enhanced CRB [Criminal Records Bureau] clearance is required,” again, surely rightly so.  The position was supposed to be part-time, but nevertheless would have required considerable commitment.  The “minimum time commitment required”, the ad specified, “is two days per week.”  Also, applicants “must have access to a motor vehicle to drive to assessments (there will be full reimbursement for mileage).”  Any applicants hoping for reimbursement for their time, labour, and employment of their highly accredited skills, however, were to be disappointed.  And here’s where obfuscatory language really kicks in.  As the first sentence of the advert said, the post is entitled “Honorary Research Assistant.”  The next sentence began as follows: “The appointee will work on a voluntary basis.”  A little further down it says that “The posts are offered on a voluntary basis.”  I’m not going to get into the issue here of whether what at first appeared to be one post then became two or more.  My point here is that at no point did the advert say that the applicant’s work would be unpaid, except of course that it very much did.

How is unpaid labour in a semi-public institution in a free, democratic country in the 21^st century justified?  Harry Callaghan may well have used the advert’s line that applicants “should be keen to learn core research skills for clinical assessment.” In other words, they were to gain knowledge and skills.  Yes, true, but young people used to gain knowledge and skills and still get paid properly for the time, labour, and expertise they gave to their employers.  Any job anyone does enhances knowledge and skills.  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be paid some money for doing it--so you can buy your food and pay your rent or your mortgage and so on.  I’m a historian of slavery, among other things, but no expert on modern employment legislation, yet surely British or European law has something to say about unpaid labour?  If not that, then equal opportunity laws surely do?  The particular point here is, if you can afford to support yourself, or your parents can afford to support you, while you do unpaid work, you can apply for the *job*.  If you or your parents can’t, you can’t.  In short, if you can’t afford to work for free, you can fuck off.  One thing I do know, though, is that it is already clinically proven that among the “psychosocial, environmental and biological predictors of the onset and course of major mental illnesses (depression, bipolar and schizophrenia)” one can list exploitation and undervaluation in the workplace.  Perhaps, then, in another spectacularly cynical linguistic subterfuge, when Bourneville Tech said it wanted an “Honorary Research Fellow,” what it was actually looking for was a guinea pig.          

It does indeed appear, judging by the Times Higher story (below), that Bourneville’s plans fell foul of employment law.  Yet I cannot believe that whoever came up with this plan and whoever endorsed it did not guess that there might be legal implications.  It certainly didn’t take them long, less than a day indeed, to be persuaded to back down.  It seems, then, that they tried it on but found this cunning plan didn't work, at least on this occasion, and they were ready for that.  If so, then Harry Callaghan, like his filmic namesake, appears to see the law as an obstacle to be challenged and hopefully overcome, rather than a codification of civil rights that deserve to be respected.  And, like another Machiavellian film character pushing the boundaries of legitimate behaviour, he’ll be back.  And so will others like him.  This little battle is won, and indeed it’s a happy thought that these battles can be won—if we choose to fight them.  But we do still need to fight them.  The war is still on. 

Here’s the advert: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AES213/honorary-research-assistant

Here’s the story of the withdrawal of the advert, from the Times Higher: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=420451&fb_source=message

Here’s some notes clarifying the asterisked points above:

* Except that universities are not entirely privatised.  Their funding base is, but the government nevertheless retains an enormous degree of bureaucratic control.  The logic of marketisation, as many have said, would allow each university to charge whatever it can, which could leave them entirely free from government, and that might make them less useful as tools of the private sector, as many, probably most, professors and lecturers are old-fashioned service-oriented people, which is why they went into teaching and research in the first place.                                          

** Of course not all academics do what they're told by the powers-that-be. Very recently, Professor Teresa Sullivan, President of the University of Virginia, was, in a test of strength by the Board of Visitors, fired for refusing to cut language provision and for generally failing to ascribe to the business-based ethics and practices of private sector fundamentalists who took control of this venerable institution, and indeed for her adherence to the service ethics of a public university passed down by its founder, Thomas Jefferson.  In a test of the strength of those who believe in service ethics and practices, a public campaign saw President Sullivan reinstated and the businesspeople of the Board of Visitors not only defeated but deservingly humiliated.  For a brilliant account of this affair and of why the supposed “inefficiencies” of public universities (in fact, the long-term usefulness eschewed by private enterprise) are actually for the benefit of everyone—including the private sector, see Siva Vaidhyanathan, Why Our Universities Are Supposed To Be Terribly Inefficient:  http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/06/teresa_sullivan_reinstated_as_the_president_of_the_university_of_virginia_.html?tid=sm_tw_button_chunky 

Bullingdon - Kubla Cam

I originally adapted (!) this as "A poem for the Right Dishonourable David Cameron, 'pon the occasion of his appearance before my Lord Leveson. Apologies to the wonderful Samuel Taylor Coleridge."

I now revise it slightly as "A poem for the Right Dishonourable David Cameron, 'pon the occasion of his indebtedness to his fracking friends, and the unrelated £500,000 paid by them unto the fracking Tory Party, and other sundry accomplishments."  

In Bullingdon did Kubla Cam

A stately restaurant destroy:

Where Barf, the lumpy river, ran,

And damage measureless to normal man

Was nothing to Bozzer, Oik, and me

So PR roads in fertile ground

From walls and towers gilded round:

And there was a rose garden with sinuous Clegg,

Where blossomed many a money-bearing tree;

And there were forests ancient as the hills,

We vend to fracking friends with glee.

 
But oh! That deep romantic chasm which granted

Down Cotswolds hills award a certain cover!

A fracking place! As holy and enchanted

By woman editing for her demon-lover

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth no pants were wearing,

An unmighty fountain momently was fracked:

Amid whose swift half-intermittent burst

Little blobs vaulted like rebounding hail,

And chavvy grain beneath the fracker’s flail:

And ’mid these dancing rocks once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river of

Of long wine’d lunches with mazy motion

Chillaxin’ til the lumpy river ran,

Then reached the money measureless to normal man,

And sank into a soulless ocean:

And ’mid this tumult Cam heard from far

Ancestral voices punishing the poor

     
The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;

Where was heard the mingled measure

From underneath the jubilee,

It was miracle of enterprise,

A darken'd dome where sleep and freeze

Those I force to work for free!

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of asylum hope’d for.

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such deep delight ’twould win me

That with music loud and long

I could build that dome in air,

But instead I sent the scrounger home

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His vacant eyes, his flopping hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on money-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise

Then barfed it back into your face.  

Honk if you love Jazz

It is, apparently, International Jazz Day.  Why jazz needs an International Day, I have no idea.  But lots of things have National and International Days and Weeks, and even Months, so why shouldn’t jazz, I suppose?  So go on, then, enjoy your Jazz Day if you love your jazz.  Go on, honk if you heart jazz, go on--honk!  Go on!  And toot and parp and then honk some more.  Let's hear some random honking, tooting, and parping for International Jazz Day!  Yay!  These noises are, after all, perfectly fitting onomatopoeic tributes to your horrendous musical taste.  I, however, have decided to mark International Jazz Day with a mean-spirited polemic against jazz and, more importantly, what jazz sometimes represents.  The following is, I should say, some reheated bile that I once spewed on Facebook.  Anyway, brace yourselves, and here we go.

Me, I cannot stand jazz.  For me, jazz is to music what warts are to the human face, what camels are to the animal kingdom, what fruit and vegetables are to eating.  Insults: ugly, hideous insults.  Of course, this is just a matter of personal opinion, and I acknowledge that you cannot help liking jazz any more than you can help having a hideously warty face.  But what really gets me about jazz, and this, admittedly, is not the fault of the genre itself, or its practitioners, but what really gets me is when jazz gets used as a cultural signifier by people who don’t actually like the music but like what they think is its image and what they therefore think their artfully constructed love of jazz says about them.  Of course I know some people actually like jazz, genuinely like it, and fair enough.  With all its jolly honking, tooting, and indeed parping, jazz is bound to appeal to some people in the same way that bright colours, spinning bow-ties, and clowns appeal to some people, and you, genuine lovers of jazz, are entirely exempted from the hate-filled claims I am about to make.  Thing is, though, let’s face it, far too many people claim to like jazz for them all to be telling the truth.  So what are they playing at, these fakers of a love of jazz?  It seems to me that in “liking” or “loving” jazz, they’re trying to show that they like and appreciate vernacular cultural forms, that they can relate to the alterity of it all, yeh, so they’re cool, man, kinda groovy, freethinking yeh, a little bit *alt.*, little bit rad, despite being a solicitor by day, while at the same time their appreciation of jazz demonstrates their impeccable aesthetic taste and intellectual discernment.  In other words, they’re trying to be non-stuck-up and non-conformist, and yet unwittingly, and indeed witlessly, they’re doing it in a totally stuck-up and conformist way.  In these ways, jazz is just a meme, and not a musical one, but, for Jazz-love-fakers, a cultural one, and is thus the opposite of what they think it is, and it says the opposite about them from what they think it does. These people live in Islington in the late 1980s and early 90s. They probably “love” contempowawy darnce as well.  And they're posh too, and talk all lah-deh-dah, like “Yah, Tarquin and I are gaying to the Montreux Jizz Festival.”  The idiots.

If you don’t believe any of the above, check out the YouTube video below of a pair of appalling drongoes doing some “Experimental Jazz” in front of a small crowd of precious gumps pretending they’re enjoying what they’re watching and hearing.  I mean look at them.  Listen to them.  That tool can’t play a trumpet any more than I can, and the drummer’s even worse.  Sounds like an avid vegan's arse blasts at the wrong end of International Mung Bean Day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT2kvMSVrFI

Really Extreme Fishing with Robson Green

Because my life is sometimes so exciting, from time to time I find myself sitting in my armchair in my slippers reading my Radio Times, with my cup of tea and my toasted tea cake to hand.  And in these circumstances, as I peruse the cornucopia* of television entertainment advertised therein, I sometimes find myself utterly at a loss to understand what on earth is going on.  [* I wasn’t totally sure I was right to use the word cornucopia here, so I checked it out on Googlepedia, and Googlepedia said this: “A goat’s horn overflowing with fruit, flowers, and grain, signifying prosperity. Also called horn of plenty,” and I thought, yes, that’s what I meant, so I left it in.]  It’s not that the programme titles are difficult to understand.  The problem is often the opposite of that—that I am left at a loss to understand what on earth is going on if I take the titles as literal descriptions of what’s in the actual programme.  I’m talking about programmes like I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here (there really is no punctuation), Embarrassing Illnesses, Embarrassing Bodies, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, The Only Way Is Essex, The Jeremy Kyle Show, and so on.  You’ve seen them too.  Of course, eventually I come to understand what these emissions comprise, either by watching them or by osmosis, the latter process involving glancing at  tabloid newspaper headlines and reading the more informative Facebook and Twitter feeds. 

But one programme I never either watched or got clues about via tabloids and social networking is this one: Extreme Fishing with Robson Green.  So, one evening recently my life got so overwhelmingly exciting that I decided to research what this programme was about by utilising the internet: the ultimate goat’s horn overflowing with fruit, flowers, and grain, signifying prosperity.  Also called a horn of plenty.  And on the internet, or horn of plenty, I discovered, to my enormous disappointment, the nature of which is explained later, that Extreme Fishing with Robson Green involves the rather un-extreme actor fishing for unusual fish in unusual places. So the four episodes of series one, for example, involved Robson Green fishing for tuna in Costa Rica, for catfish in the USA, for sardine in South Africa, for blue marlin in Spain and Portugal, that kind of thing. This was admittedly evidently exciting enough for enough viewers to tune in to prompt Channel 5 to commission a second and this time nine-part series in which Robson Green fished for things such as sablefish in Canada, hapuka in New Zealand, and arapaima and fresh-water stingray in Thailand.  Now, I think you can already see what’s happening here: inflation.  The passage of time and the imperative to improve the viewers' experiences of piscatorial extremity led to more and then more extreme fishing in more and then more extreme places.  Indeed, by the time we get to series five (tellingly but inaccurately entitled “At the Ends of the Earth”), Robson Green is fishing for six-gilled shark in Ascension Island, ruby snapper in Papua New Guinea, Pacific giant crab in New Caledonia, and silver piranha in Argentina.  In a sign that the franchise was by this time reaching the end of its natural life, series five had only six programmes.  Besides, where do you go with Extreme Fishing once Robson Green has been to “the ends of the earth”? Okay, er, Slightly More Moderate Fishing, Again, with Robson Green?  I think we can all agree, that that means, in terms of television spectacle, and therefore viewers and therefore advertising revenues, we’re going nowhere any more.

So, here’s my pitch to get commissioned a sixth and maybe seventh and maybe even endless numbers of series’ of Extreme Fishing with Robson Green.  First, I propose, and herein is the source of the enormous disappointment mentioned above, that the whole concept the show was based on initially was wrong, even possibly misleading. But it’s not too late to change.  Indeed, now they’re running out of species and places, change is a matter of survival. The problem is that the first five series were all about “what” and “where”: all very salmon fishing in the Yemen, and therefore clichéd and boring.  And indeed, it means that the species of fish and places they were fished were “Extreme,” supposedly, rather than the extremity inhering in the fishing itself.  That indeed is where things get misleading, because, presumably, when Robson Green fished for barracuda in Cuba, he used tried-and-tested local Cuban methods of barracuda-fishing.  And that of course would have been highly advisable for health and safety reasons.  In other words, then, he did “Ordinary” fishing for “Extreme” fish in “Extreme” places.  Even then, though, it requires a certain Brit-o-centrism to describe barracuda and indeed Cuba as extreme.  They’re not extreme to either barracuda or to Cubans, presumably.  I, a Briton, would certainly think it odd if the Cuban equivalent of Channel 5 had a programme entitled “Extreme Fishing with Roberto Verde” in which Roberto Verde spent a quiet afternoon mildly fly fishing on the River Avon.  But, anyway, the main point is, the newly and more accurately re-conceptualised, revamped, and far more exciting version of Extreme Fishing with Robson Green needs to get away from what and where and move on to “how.”  Yes, HOW!  That is, not what fish you fish and where you fish them, but HOW you catch the fish.  A much more exciting idea, as we’ll see.  Also, a new series conceptualised this way would be much cheaper and more environmentally-friendly to make, because you would not have to worry about expensive or endangered species or hard-to-reach and exotic locations.  The catching of the fish is the spectacle.  And if the fish-catching methods are sufficiently extreme, then no one will care if the fishing is for tiger fish in Zambia; it could as easily be about fishing for trout in the Manchester Ship Canal.  So, to give specific examples that I believe will prove beyond all doubt the enormous potential viewing appeal of a sixth series of “Extreme Fishing with Robson Green,” here are some ideas for what could feature in particular episodes:

Robson Green goes pike fishing with a pump-action shotgun.
Robson Green goes cod fishing with hand grenades.
Robson Green goes crab fishing with a pneumatic drill.
Robson Green goes blowfish fishing with a steam roller.
Robson Green goes puffer fish fishing with a hat pin.
Robson Green goes catfish fishing with a dog.
Robson Green goes tiger prawn fishing with a real tiger.
Robson Green goes goldfish fishing in steel toe-capped boots.
Robson Green goes bream fishing with a cricket bat.
Robson Green goes trout fishing with a hockey stick.
Robson Green goes chub fishing, kicking the chub on to the river bank.
Robson Green goes carp fishing, stunning the carp with head butts.
Robson Green goes swordfish fishing, grabbing the swordfish by their snouts and smashing them against a rock.
Robson Green goes fishing for leaping salmon, chopping them in half in mid-leap with a samurai sword.  
Robson Green goes fishing for electric eels, throwing them into a wood chipper.
Robson Green goes tuna fishing in an underwater car with a machine gun on the front, like in The Spy Who Loved Me.
Robson Green goes lobster fishing with a remote control Transformer Robot.
Robson Green goes mussel fishing in a gigantic It’s a Knockout pirate costume, and has three minutes to put as many mussels as he can in a couple of big red buckets using his huge foam pirate hands, and then has to run though a large paddling pool while members of the production team try to knock him over by throwing water-filled balloons at him, until he reaches a skating rink, where he has to empty the buckets and try to stand upright while smashing as many mussels as he can to smithereens with an enormous yellow rubber mallet.
Robson Green goes fishing for shark by jumping them.
End of series.

The 1970s were a Bad Thing—A BAD THING—whatever Dominic Sandbrook may say.

So, a few afternoons ago I was sitting in my armchair reading my Radio Times, with my cup of tea and my toasted tea cake to hand, and my slippers on my feet *, when I noted with interest that Dominic Sandbrook is hosting a new TV series starting this week on BBC2 about the 1970s.  Here’s a link to information on it on the BBC’s website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ghscj [* I once mentioned to my mate Nick Davies that I read something or other in the Radio Times and he went into a quite hilarious extended riff at my expense about me drinking tea and eating toasted tea cakes in my slippers etc, but you probably had to be there.]  Anyway, according to Dr. Sandbrook’s RT preview of his series, and according to TV previews I’ve seen since, the programmes aim to debunk the popular conception of the 70s as a deeply desperate and dismal decade.  Now, hmm, now, yes, hmm, now, I was born in 1965, so I was four when the 70s began and I was 15 when the albeit arbitrariness of human constructions of time brought the era to an end.  As opposed to young Sandbrook, who was 5 when the long and literally dark decade ended.  Of course that by no means means that Sandbrook is unqualified to comment on the 1970s, or else I’d have to declare myself unfit to comment on the 18th century, which I do, as my job.  Nor does it mean he is less qualified than me to talk about the 70s: I don’t doubt for a moment that his extensive research makes him much better qualified than me.  But I can’t help thinking that, well, yes, and indeed OMG, I remember the 1970s, and, yes, well, OMFG, I have to say that I am a trifle sceptical about Dr. Sandbrook's claims.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I like Dominic Sandbrook.  What I’ve read of his work strikes me as fascinating, provocative, beautifully written, informative, and popular in a good way.  And I’m also not jealous or in any resentful of the popular and commercial success he has achieved while he was in and since he left academe.  I’ve criticised popular historians before (Steve Sarson's Blog: David Starkey: what the ****? and Steve Sarson's Blog: Niall Ferguson, Niall Schmerguson.), but I did so because of what these guys said, not because of what they do.  These people and their many counterparts play invaluable roles in spreading historical knowledge and in generating interest in history among audiences way beyond what I and most academic historians can hope to reach.  And that keeps the likes of me in work.  This can be characterised as a Good Thing. 

Yet I can’t help thinking that the claims that Dominic Sandbrook claims to make represent a bit of revisionism gone a bit too far.  Sandbrook has form for this kind of thing, writing in White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (2006) that the 60s were not really all that swinging and were, contrary to popular belief, a bit rubbish.  Ironically, considering what he says of the 70s.  But, while wondering whether the imperatives of writing for a wider audience encourage a bit of over-egged but commercially friendly controversialism, I have to admit that it happens in academic history too (by “academic history” I mean history produced for a largely academic audience; I don’t mean that Sandbrook’s work is not of academic quality), and academic publishers need to make money as much as what I’m calling commercial ones do, and nowadays we UK academics exist in a marketplace where we must prove the “impact” of our “outputs”.  Even before the days of the “impact agenda,” though, we had historians making counter-intuitive and therefore attention-grabbing claims.  Such as medieval historians claiming that medieval artwork was just as good as renaissance art.  But, Oh, come on!  I mean, come on!  I mean COME ON!  COME! ON!!!!!  Have you, you who make these claims, BEEN to Florence and seen room after room after room after room after room of Madonna con Bambinos?  Those stupid and ridiculous mono-dimensional pictures, with no light and no shade, just one pan-faced Mary and one 30-year-old baby Jesus after another after another, all exactly the sodding same, and all with backgrounds of kingy-blingy gold and blue, when the whole point of this “king” is that he was born in a rickety, stinky old stable and was surrounded in his infancy by hay, mangers, mud, wood, and donkey droppings.  You’re seriously saying that this crap is comparable with a Caravaggio?  You’re seriously suggesting that these tinctured turds measure up to a Titian?  If you’re saying that then I’m saying that I’m J-Lo’s bum double.  Or, for another example, how about those who claim that the Vikings were simple peaceful farming folk?  Well, maybe some of their descendants were.  But the ones who first left their shores in longboats were long-bearded axe-wielding bastards named Harald Hard Ruler, Sweyn Forkbeard, Eric Bloodaxe, Stenkil, and Cnut, and they terrorised, pillaged, enslaved, raped, and murdered their way through the populations of these British Isles and beyond, leaving nothing in their wake but death, destruction, and half-eaten and thoughtlessly discarded chicken legs.  These can be characterised as Bad Things.

So, anyway, it seems to me that maybe Dominic Sandbrook is trying to do for the 70s what some aesthetically-challenged medievalists did for art history and what some cranially-challenged Viking skolurs did for Anglo-Saxon history.  Like I say, though, I like Dominic Sandbrook and I’m going to give his show a go.  I’m sure it’ll be fascinating and fun.  It may even convince me.  His ideas certainly, admittedly, sound more plausible than those of the medieval revisionists I’ve mentioned.  I may well write about the 1970s afterwards, one way or the other.  But beforehand, at the risk of sounding like I’m barfing up a Stuart Maconie script written by researchers for I ♥1970-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 or 9, here’s a list of Bad Things about the 1970s.  Some of them are general Bad Things that many of you will recognise, others were more personal Bad Things that I experienced myself, though you may recall similar sorts of experiences, but all of them are Bad Things.  Afterwards, in the interest of balance, however specious that concept is, I will mention some Good Things about the 70s.  But then I will conclude that overall the 1970s can be characterised as a Bad Thing.  So, here we go.

* Endless, endless, endless industrial inaction.
* Blackouts.

* Red Robbo.

* The election of Margaret Thatcher and the birth of hegemonic neo-liberal politics in the UK.

* The IRA.

* Astrid Proll, though 70s terrorists sounded sexier than the Abu Hamza types we have now.

* The oil crisis. Which, thank goodness, is now long over with.

* Pol Pot.

* Idi Amin.

* Plane hijackings, on a daily basis.

* The later stages of the Vietnam War, without the really cool soundtrack that the earlier stages had. 

* Glamorous Rock.

* Disco.

* Discos.

* Johnny Cash’s tragic “Cheese Period.”

* Chopper Bikes.
* The Ford Crapi, the Dagenham Ferrari, nuff said.

* Flares.

* Trim phones.

* Douchebags.

* Douchebags who could—and would—imitate trim phones.

* Douchebags who could, would—and did—imitate trim phones on That’s Life.

* Dogs who supposedly could say “sausages” but who could actually only growl “ghshsughshsughsh” on That’s Life. If their owners forced their jaws open and squeezed their arses hard enough.

* That’s Bloody That’s Sodding That’s Bloody Sodding Life.

* The Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Wisdom affair.

* The cutting edge of sexual liberation being represented by Sid James, that gurning geezer off On the Buses, and that quivering erection-on-legs who was in Man about the House.

* Racial politics, as represented in Love Thy Neighbour, Bernard Manning, Jim Davidson etc etc etc and et bloody and unbelievably cetera.

* TV presenters on Pebble Mill at One and Midlands Today who spoke a posh foreign language, tyelling ass for exaarmple thet aarfter the knews there will be a progremme about the potaarto femine. (That was before they invented “regional” accents in the 80s.)

* Summer-holiday-time children’s TV schedules made in That London for Them Southerners, so that the Banana Splits started two weeks after the summer holidays began in the Midlands and, even worse, ended two arse-aching and bitterness-inducing weeks after we went back to bloody buggering school while Them Southerners ponced around on their sofas or couches, or whatever they called their settees, in their mansions eating foie gras, caviar, and foxes, while enjoying the Banana Splits and talking to each other in their non-regional accents. The bastards.

* The vandalisation of the Blue Peter Garden.  By a bitter provincial.  But I can’t say who it was.  Or I’d have to kill you.

* White dog poos. What was that about? as comedians like Peter Kay say.
* Watneys Red Barrel (with not even a redeeming apostrophe).

* Double Diamond “beer”.

* Babycham “?”

* Working Men’s Clubs that smelt impossibly glamorously of darts and of beer- and urine-soaked Axminster.

* Convenience foods whereby granulated carcinogens could be turned into pooey puddings by just adding lime-encrusted tap water, and that are to this day busily concocting cancers in the intestines of everyone over the age of 32.

* Mince.  Every night.  Every sad and sodding night.  For ten years.  For ten desperate, depression-era fucking years.  

* My mum deciding that, after Egon’s barber shop closed, the hairdressers cost too much, and so she began cutting my and my brother’s hair herself, giving rise to the famous Lutterworth “Knife and Fork Job.” Pic below.

* The Queen’s Silver Jubilee, when everyone gathered for street parties and ate jelly and wore paper hats in communal rituals of moronically happy obeisance to a millennia-old harbinger of death and bringer of oppression that even the most primitive Amazonian Head Hunter would point and laugh at and that... oh... er... Diamond Jubilee....  

* The summer of 76 that was so sunny and hot that everyone had a fucking headache all the time, which was made worse by the fact that you had to talk to and be all chummy-chummy with your horrible, boring, sweaty neighbours at effing standpipes, as if we were all gruel-eating Dickensian grotesques, and yet still all happy and chipper and keep-calm-and-carry-on and make-do-and-mend and community-spirited and shit, so that photographers could take photos of us to fool future historians into thinking that, in contrast to the popular belief and indeed the very real reality that the 70s really were a Bad Thing, and despite being gruel-eating Dickensian grotesques, 1970s people were all happy and chipper and keep-calm-and carry-on and make-do-and-mend and community-spirited and shit.

Okay, so there were some good things about the 70s, and in the interest of pointlessly balanced argument I’m going to list them now.  All of them.

* Tiswas: a partial compensation for Noel Edmunds’s Multicoloured Swap Shop (why was it multicoloured? Why? Why?).  
* The Rockford Files, a more than sufficient compensation for Petrocelli, but not for Petrocelli and Starsgay and Butch combined. 
* Hill Street Blues, and the birth of the modern US police drama.
* M*A*S*H, Cheers, and the birth of the modern US sitcom.
* A Tory Prime Minister, Red Ted Heath, who talked about “the unacceptable face of capitalism,” while today no “Labour” Party leader would dare much less desire to utter such heretical words.
* And, er, that’s it.
* And anyway, even if the list were longer, one Lindisfarne Gospel does not cover a million Madonna con Bambinos.   

  The famous Lutterworth Knife and Fork Job c. 1976