Jack Thurston

I’ve lived in Waterloo since 1996. Over the past six months I’ve been helping Mike Bruce with the digitisation of his A Story of Waterloo, a ‘tape slide show’ that since it was first screened in 1982 has achieved something of a mythic status in community circles. These days nobody has the machinery to play ‘tape slide shows’ so the 600+ slides have been gathering dust in Mike’s attic and the only way of seeing the Story of Waterloo has been on a very poor VHS bootleg copy that I’m told exists, though I’ve never managed to lay my hands on it.

A Story of Waterloo is a really outstanding piece of local history, blending archive material with interviews with local residents (many of whom are long since dead, being in their 80s back in the 1970s and 1980s when the research was done).

A Story of Waterloo is in four parts and covers the period up to the end of the Second World War and Mike has plans to add further parts to cover the post-war era. Yes please! For the digitisation we’ve gone back to the original quarter inch reel-to-reel audio tapes and had the slides cleaned and scanned professionally (thanks to a grant from the London Eye). The whole thing is being reassembled in Final Cut Pro.

The first three parts (up to the outbreak of WW2) will be screened at the Waterloo Action Centre on 2 June. Part four requires some more work as the audio tapes were recorded using a four track recorder. If anyone reading has access to a four track reel-to-reel player, please get in touch. We’ll have other screenings over the summer and a DVD copy will be provided to any community groups who want to put on their own screenings.

Two excellent TED talks. Malcolm Gladwell says more choice is making us happier:

Barry Schwartz says more choice is making us miserable:

I love listening to the radio. I love podcasts because it means I can listen to my favourite radio programmes from around the world whenever I like. And I’ve recently made a fantastic discovery. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I ruffled a few feathers with a post about the sorry state of Labour and the internet. One of my main points was that Labour seemed to be drawn into a battle of the blogs and was neglecting investment in a responsive email campaign. Thomas Gensemer, founder of Blue State Digital, the firm which helped run Barack Obama’s online campaign for the US Presidency, gave a talk a couple of days later at City University. He made the same point. Hopefully City will publish a video of the talk before too long. I watched it live on the web stream and it was compelling. Click on the image below to watch the talk.

Gensemer really understands this stuff. If only someone in the Labour Party did too.

It’s taken thirty-six years but last week it finally happened. I found myself - however I might wish for it to be otherwise - agreeing with an article in the Daily Mail. It was a stingingly accurate critique of the Labourlist group blog which has been online for a while now but was ‘launched’ last Thursday.

Labourlist is not something that I would normally spare much thought about. I’ve been happy to drift away from the day-to-day dogfights of British politics since I stood down as a Special Adviser at the 2001 General Election in an effort to reclaim my life and start up some of my own projects. But I have found something sickly compelling about the way Labourlist has unfolded into a tragi-comedy that reveals more than it should about the troubled relationship the Labour Party has with the internet. Read the rest of this entry »

Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States. Four of his predecessors have been killed while in office and there have been near-miss assasination attempts on six others. There have been abortive or ham-fisted attempts on their lives of a further five Presidents. President Obama has, by my reckoning, at least a one in four chance of facing the same. Read the rest of this entry »

Each month the Mayor of London faces a grilling from the London Assembly, a kind of Mayor’s Question Time. It lasts up to a few hours and there is a webcast of it. But the image quality is spectacularly bad:

I suppose this is what people mean when they talk about ‘faceless officialdom’. It’s only recognisable as Boris Johnson by his trademark shock of blonde hair. And this is not just a one-off error, ALL the GLA webcasts are like this, with the faces blurred out like they used to do when represenatives of Sinn Fein were on the TV. You wouldn’t know it, but here is my representative on the GLA Val Shawcross chairing the Transport Scrutiny Committee on 9 September 2008:

Compare London’s foggy blur with the very clear feed of Prime Minister’s Questions:

The Mayor’s Question Time ought to be a showcase event for democratically holding to account the man who runs the world’s greatest city. You’d think they could set up a half-decent camera, and give its lens a wipe every now and then, wouldn’t you?

Make no mistake, I thought Gordon Brown’s speech today at the Labour Party Conference was his best for a decade. With all the pressure on him from the economic downturn, flatlining opinion polls and the machinations of rebel Labour MPs, he did a great job of balancing the essential elements of a good Leader’s speech: the personal story, a couple of mildly self-deprecating jokes, ‘fessing up to past mistakes and shortcomings, relating a single big theme (fairness) to real life situations, giving the opposition a good thrashing and generally helping the party feel good about itself. But one phrase that struck a strange note with me: ‘new age’ - a concept so central to the overall message that it even features in the speech’s notional title: “A Fair Britain for the New Age”. I thought I’d investigate. Read the rest of this entry »

In a post earlier this week, I referred to my ‘weekly diet’ of podcasts and I thought it was only fair to open up the larder. I have been podcasting the radio show I present since May 2005. Initially I didn’t know what podcasting was or how to do it. A kind listener explained and helped me set it up. For a long time I harboured suspicions that it was just something for the early adopters out there and was never going to go mainstream. That was until BBC Radio 4 issued an edict that presenters had to say the word ‘podcast’ every thirty seconds. In the past 6 months I’ve become a true convert, particularly on a three week solo cycle-camping trip in France, where spoken-word podcasts were regular evening listening. I’d add that not owning a television set also helps free up time for radio and podcast listening.

Just like blogs, there are a thousand awful and pointless podcasts out there for every one worth listening to. There’s also this thing called podfade, in which a podcast starts off really well then becomes less regular, less interesting before it runs silently into the sands of the presenter’s own guilt and self-loathing. In other words, not every podcast stays the course or lives up to its early promise. Then again, there are podcasts that get better with time, usually amateur productions in which the presenter(s) get more comfortable in the role and find their niche. In short, a lot of filtering, and scratching and sniffing is required. Beside the iTunes Music Store podcast area, a recommendation from a friend is probably the best way of finding out about what’s good.

It’s clear that not all of these are strictly speaking podcasts, rather radio broadcasts which are subsequently made available as podcasts. I don’t see that as a disqualification. So here goes, you can read the list after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Credit crunch, sub-prime mortgage, collateralised debt obligations… Obscure terms that now feature in everyday pub chatter, even more so after this week’s spectacular events involving the collapse of investment banks, unprecedented interventions by governments and a looming global economic downturn. But can you, hand on heart, say that you understand what the credit crunch really is, and where it came from and who’s to blame?

Fear not, for the brilliant radio series This American Life aired a superb hour-long documentary that tells the story of the US sub-prime mortgage bubble and bust as I’ve never heard it told before. From the people who were there, from the Wall Street bankers at the very top to the no income no asset borrowers at the very bottom. And all the middle-men in between. It’s a very human story of hope, greed, hubris and self-delusion.

The Giant Pool of Money show is highly recommended, not just as an explanation of the core cause of the seismic events of this week, but as an example of public service documentary radio at its very best. And it’s not just me that thinks so, according to the programme-makers it’s been listened to online by more than half a million people. It’s still available to listen again online. If you need any convincing, check out the first five mintes, on the link below:

[audio:http://jackthurston.com/audio/giant_pool.mp3]

Update 1: The success of The Giant Pool of Money has apparently led to National Public Radio launching a new podcast and blog about the global economy, called Planet Money. It’s presented by Adam Davidson from NPR (who worked with TAL’s Alex Blumberg on The Giant Pool of Money). Both men rank up there with Evan Davis of the BBC in terms of talent at explaining what the hell is going on out there in the miasma of global financial markets and relating it to real day-to-day economics. In just its first week the show has already featured some excellent guests and if they keep up this level of quality, Planet Money will find a regular spot on my weekly diet of podcasts.

Update 2: This American Life aired a second excellent collaboration with NPR the other week, this time dealing with the banking bail out. Listen over here.