They recently had Sir Tom Stoppard and the Belarus Free Theatre on at the Free Word Centre.

Nick Cohen wrote a smashing review in the Guardian about how to make a drama out of a crisis.

Belarus is possibly Europe’s last dictatorship where freedom of speech and expression are, to state the bleeding obvious, non-existent. We can whinge about media bias and BBC censorship or other indulgent bullshit that may or may not affect our mortgage prices. But if I make sweeping criticisms of government or take a detailed bash at our police, I do not have to wait for the knock on my door. Nor do I have to watch my mobile phone conversations, vary my journey to work or learn how to lose people who are tailing me. All because I want to tell a story that needs to be told.

There’s a lot UK activists can learn from people like BFT’s Natalia Koliada – the main one being to stop ratcheting up your suffering under the unjust hands of the state. When you don’t know where your friend’s body has been buried because he popped round yours for a chat about life, the universe and everything, then come back to me. The next time you feel compelled to whine about having your ‘cover blown’ as you were trying to D-lock yourself to a bank, have a little whine. Then shut up, stop focusing on your suffering and look at the wider picture. The states and systems that need addressing, the truth that needs to be spoken to power.

Right. End of self-righteous bitch. Here are the videos.

The interns filmed them. I corrected exposure, cut them down yadda yadda.

Learning Mandarin Chinese is easier than working out the finer threads of the News Corp/Shine Group/BSkyB/News International tapestry. The basics are that they are linked via a network of relatives and close friends last seen in the days of the Hapsburgs. To avoid treading on the world’s anti-monopoly laws, they’ve carefully divided control of each unit.

We’re all too aware of the monopoly of one Sergio Berlusconi. Murdoch the Elder is not doing a large-scale version of Italian media. Under Berlusconi, everything from newspapers, magazines and television is dictated by one man whose sole purpose is to hang on to power and escape prosecution for dodgy dealings. Murdoch is a businessman addicted to acquisition – he has a typical collectors mentality of wanting to have everything with little regard for the consequence. Being able to pull the puppet strings of business and government is one of the benefits of his unique position…but it is not his drive.

Life under Murdoch, at least my erstwhile parish Sky News, is not the plot to Tomorrow Never Dies. Rupert does not have a secret phone to editorial footsoldiers on newsdesks. When I was on the foreign desk, producers invoked the muscle of John Ryley, Head of News, when they were trying to swing the editorial eye. “John’s very keen” is a line often heard. Clever editors rebut with “let’s give him a call”.

Critics of Murdoch bias will invariably bring up the Adam Boulton and Kay Burley affairs during the last General Election. Casting personal opinion of these strong-willed stakeholders aside, let us look at the facts.

In Adam’s case, as Political Editor he was the pivot point for Sky’s election coverage. He is also a workaholic who hadn’t slept for days. When pitted against the stable and calm winds of Alaistair Campbell, Adam buckled. A moment of abandon – to be seen by all on YouTube.

In Kay’s position, a gaggle of demonstrators took advantage of Sky News having an open broadcasting stage as opposed to the BBC’s enclosed one. It’s like offering a crowd a large screen and a live Twitter feed. Someone is going to abuse it for a laugh.

Gaza, the Israeli raids on it and Sky News’ refusal to run the subsequent DEC Appeal is the only time I truly felt a corporate hand muzzling the mouth. And that on the day both the BBC and Sky said they would not be running the appeal, Sky News correspondent Emma Hurd opened a news item with a wide shot of the Gaza Strip and the line “this is the scene of a war crime”.

Should a takeover occur, broadcasting standards aren’t what journos at Osterley will be worried about. They’ll wonder if they’ll still have their jobs. As the axes fall, hacks will keep their heads down, produce the breaking news they’re so good at and pray they’re not next for the chop. Emails will be sent about how to cover stories on the cheap, deals and alliances with sister broadcasters will be forged to pool manpower. Quality of content won’t matter as much as appearing to tick the right boxes. Fear is a good way of keeping the rats in the hold.

Arguments against a Murdoch monopoly are usually based on events in print. Sky News knows it can’t get away with blanket bias on air. They can’t declare an allegiance to a political party like their ink-stained counterparts. Actions are watched closely by Ofcom and if one side of an issue appears to be getting too much air time, balance is restored one way or another.

Because television is not “self-regulating”, quality and content are dictated by public interest – or an editor’s perception of it. It’s hard to break truly original journalism in broadcast because editors closely monitor their competitors to see what they’re running – and run that. The process becomes a mobius strip of information dependent on precedence of events.

What I am worried about is what will happen elsewhere. Business-wise, a monopoly like that planned should a takeover occur is frightening…it will send shockwaves into other industries – healthcare, property, construction, natural resources. That’s what we should really be concerned about.

======

This article was originally published on the Index on Censorship, 17 June 2010, and in a different version on The Comment Factory.

Here are a couple questions I’ve had to answer recently…along with the answers.

Which TV programme has been the most innovative over the last year and why? * (Max 200 words)
Newswipe. Through the laconic sarcasm of Charlie Brooker, BBC4 have tapped into the sort of demographic that reads Private Eye, claims to have read Shakespeare and secretly dances to Baccara.
Brilliant in its use of news archive, it jump cuts its way through the haze. Most Britons have no clue that a good number of the reporters giving them their news gleaned their information from press releases, newswires, the BBC News website and Wikipedia. Ten minutes before broadcast. Fewer still know that some news presenters are little more than bedtime story readers who ply their trade with autocue – the clever questions they ask are bellowed down their ear by an anonymous gallery producer.
Newswipe unashamedly bares these truths. It’s Private Eye for telly.
Brooker’s editorial combs through the news and uses facts and deeds to trip The Man up. Televisual aikido.
Brooker takes us on a journey. On his sweaty sofa we see a man who is as baffled with how the world works as we are. The sort of chap you’d have on your pub quiz team.
It’s infuriatingly perceptive. Newswipe cuts through bullshit in a way that makes you think “I wish I said that.”

In your view, what should be the top priority in media policy for the new Culture Secretary? Why is it such a top priority? (Max 300 words)
Jeremy Hunt’s priority ought to be encouraging quality local content – not just formats that can be replicated and readily sold on to television markets around the world [talent show TV, I'm talking to you]. He’s stated in his keynote speech that he not only intends to push superfast broadband across the UK, but to accept Ofcom’s recommendation on reforming local media ownership rules. He will “significantly relax” rules to allow local newspapers to own local commercial radio stations and establish local TV stations.
A important idea that aims to strengthen “local communities”. He’s even hired an asset management firm to publish a report in the autumn. But Hunt forgets that the internet has remapped the idea of the local. It’s no longer a geographic measure, but an interest-based one.
“New York has six local TV stations, London has none,” Hunt says. But what can a local television station achieve that neighbourhood-centric blogs given more bandwidth or a newspaper tie-in can’t? The push to digital has already killed appointment to view television. Neighbourhood-centric and interest-based new media is where extra revenue should go because the content structure is already established. Blogs like Brockley Central already have a following. Trying to manufacture a local feel by allowing local newspapers to run mini media fiefdoms can only lead to the sort of contrived quality last seen on Ghanian talk shows shot on VHS.
The DCMS should press on with pushing for more local media, local TV stations, local radio, local everything. But if this government wants to “repair broken Britain” and encourage local communities to communicate, they should look beyond the box.

=====

When we meet, he is ankle deep in cut-out letters, spraymount and a scattering of UK election campaign propaganda. He’s recently finished a two-storey high paste up outside Shoreditch’s Cordy House in support of the Robin Hood Tax – a simple suggestion whereby .05% of profits made by big business gets allocated to social services and charities. To erect the behemoth on brick, it took one scissor-lift, twelve hours and a sea of paper and paste.

“So this is where the magic happens?” I ask.

“Hardly. I don’t really work like that.”

Known for altering a billboard of Amy Winehouse with the words “I hear Duffy’s selling coke” and likening Tony Blair to Darth Vader this most unlikely graffito is unconvinced of his status as a street artist.

“Artists lock themselves up in studios and create something from nothing. I drive past a billboard and think up gag lines. I have a quiet chuckle and I come here and knock something up”.

It doesn’t take long.

“I drove past a nice low billboard advertising the UK Independence Party on the M4. I got some paint and parked up a lay-by. Walked – in the rain – and painted ‘Kilroy Silk Woz Ere’ then fucked off.”

You can probably see it as you land at Heathrow.

“I work on my own. So I’m carting along ladders, buckets, paper, everything. And a camera. It’s not that I don’t have any friends – though that’s true too. Just that nobody I know fancies heading out at three in the morning in the London piss to put posters up.”

My first encounter with Dr D was thru an East End billboard reading “HMP London / Open Prison / I.D. must be carried at all times”. At the top right third was “dr.d”. Being an anorak of the vandal variety, seeing someone new sparks the curiosity. Seeing someone good sparks inspiration.

There were rumours. Questions over Dr.D’s identity, gender, even whether Dr.D was a group or an individual. The same sort of buzz that surrounds any really successful vandal who hides under a pseudonym. But Dr. D was no Banksy. There wasn’t a constructed mystery wrapped up in a commercial venture. You had billboards, and you had the occasional poster knocked up for sale for a tenner at a group show. Whoever Dr. D was, they or he weren’t in it for fame or money.

I found more and more billboards doctored with a laconic back-of-the-class-with-a-peashooter wit. Evening Standard street displays that weren’t all they seemed. The Olympic rings with blood spattered on them reading “Made in China”. Police adverts changed from “Make a Visible Difference” to “Make a Risible Difference”. Dr.D was tipping the axis of how I viewed the streets of London by a few degrees. His humour was no different to me scrawling on toilet doors but D was scrawling on the walls of a bigger bog.

This glue-stained scarlet pimpernel is, in my eyes, delivering overtly political messages with the aim of encouraging people who see his work to rethink their socio-political spaces. He’s less convinced.

“You say it’s political, but I’d rather let the paper do the talking. I’m more of a piss-taker and a chancer. Politics and politicians are asking for it. They spend thousands on campaign posters begging for votes to get a job in Parliament. But they way they put themselves forward is totally laughable.”

The last time he was caught by the long arm of the law, he was customising a then-new David Cameron “Year for Change” poster.

“Must’ve been a pretty sharp copper because I was there in full hi-vis, all the kit and all the gear to make it look as if I’d been working. But he obviously spotted something that wasn’t right – the fact that that poster had been up for a few days. He came over, had a word and well… most of what I was trying to put up is in that pile over there.” He indicates towards a smattering of letters on a counter.

When he’s not covered in paper and glue, slipping under police radar he’s “a rat catcher. And if you bought any burgers out of a burger van in the East End in the mid-90s, you probably bought them off me. Not that the rats or burgers are connected.”

I tell him that he doesn’t make life easy for himself. Is there a Mrs. D? “Who’s to say I’m not Mrs. D?” And where did the name come from? “It’s an old DJ name. Works nicely these days because Dr. D can also scan as ‘doctored’.”

I’m taken to an alleyway behind his surgery. Stencils litter the earth floor and he picks up one of a cut-out man like the ones you see indicating the men’s loos. Beneath are the letters WC.

“It’s World Corruption. I put a few of these up in the Foundry toilets in Old Street on copies of the Financial Times. I’m experimenting a bit more with stencil and lettering. My dad was a typesetter so I suppose that’s where my obsession with letters comes from. Oh…and an old art teacher knocked my grade down when I made a piece that spelled “magic” with a “k”. The national curriculum in this country seems to say that you can’t make good art unless it’s spelled right.”

He’s reluctant to push himself as ‘the next big thing’ but walks about his studio with a quiet confidence. He makes good work that makes people laugh…and then think. As unassumingly humble as he is, he says the best feeling is when artists say he’s done something that’s influenced them.

“I find it weird when I’m asked where I think my art will go because I don’t see myself as an artist. I wish I was. I wish I could paint and draw freehand but I can’t – the closest I’ve been to being an artist is living in a squat with artists.

I got into paste-ups after reading Naomi Klein’s No Logo and was shown the work that Ron English does with pop culture and billboards. Those two ideas came together and Dr. D was born – it’s a low skill way of expressing myself. Nobody else does it like me because it’s stupidly complicated, hugely inconvenient and a ball-ache. It’s a long way to go for a bit of a chuckle.

What I do is a problem-solving exercise that comes out of pragmatic laziness. How can I adapt a board to say something in the easiest possible way? The logistics is what influences how the final piece looks.

What makes me different is not just the scale of what I do but the fact that it’s not my job. We all know artists who are under personal pressure to create, to come up with something new. They spend hours crafting, devising et cetera. I don’t. I see a billboard and think of ways of making it funny. Or I pick up on funny things my friends say.”

Dr. D’s stock in the street art world seems to have risen. In reputation at least. One of the outfits he works with recently told me that D is their “golden boy…does the best stuff around.” Asked about this, the doctor hesitates.

“Sometimes I wish the guys who could paint, the ones I’m secretly jealous of, had more of a message that comes out in their work. Arty people are so…arty. I’ve hung shows where guys would turn up and not even have a screwdriver.

And a lot of street art people don’t really get what I do. I know I’ll never sell huge amounts and most of my work is off the streets within weeks. And it’s big so you can’t nick it. That makes me a non-commodity. I don’t push to sell limited edition canvases or prints because that’s not really what I’m about.

I think like an ad-man but I’m not promoting a product, I’m working for my own ends. And often times it’s just so I can drive past a board I’ve done and smile to myself.”

Most of what I have written is true. But I have changed some details to ensure the good doctor’s work can continue. The messages, the jokes, the subversion – all of that will stop if I let my lips loose. The need to keep D as anonymous as possible is greater than any truth I can offer you. As of now, the doctor is in.

===

This article was originally published in Who’s Jack Magazine, June 2010.

A bit of background – photographer Steve Lazarides founded LazInc many moons ago…it was unofficially running out of the boot of his car at one stage. One of the main artists on his roster is Banksy. The others are a who’s who of street art including Bast, Blu, Conor Harrington, David Choe, Faile, Invader, Lucy McLauchlan, Mark Jenkins, Mode2, Paul Insect and Vhils. Original works by these artists stem from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand pounds. Lazarides is a primary market dealer with direct affiliation to the artists he sells / represents. Though he might have slightly ostentatious taste in wristwatches and people hold mixed feelings about him [usually dependent on what they can get out of him], he’s a decent guy all round. His significance as the man who offered a platform for street art in this country cannot be negated. But he’s not someone you should really cross. That is all.

Part of my role was to spark media interest in what Merlin were offering – a surgery specific relief effort that combined plastic surgery with orthopaedic surgery. So not only could a patient have their crush injuries seen to, but someone was around to make things useable. I witnessed so many acts of miracle performed by Merlin’s surgeons and nurses. And was privileged to be part of a team that had so much heart. One of the surgeons told me that he couldn’t stay in Britain when he had the skills to make a difference in someone’s life.

I’ll expand on this soon. Until then, here’s a small photo gallery of the people I got to know in Haiti. I miss them all.

“Film it. Present it. You can do it,” I think is what she said to me. My head was rushing with all sorts of fears based around fucking up.

A few months on and the taster for the film was selected for the Branchage Film Surgery session as part of the London Short Film Festival. Got some amazing feedback. James Mullighan and his surgeons took a potato peeler to my eyes and have given me a clearer idea of how I should take this project on.

Claire Lewis has agreed to Executive Produce my film. Less than a week after its taster was first screened.

I now need to find a cameraman with kit who believes in the project and is willing to work for deferred pay.

So I’m standing naked over the precipice but can see a nifty boutique at the other end.

Watch the taster here: Dirty White Gold

=====

Am a heartless bastard. Let me use this space to thank everyone who has helped so far (and has yet to be credited). This includes all at Pants to Poverty (inc Ben and Cecilia), all who attended the Branchage, those at the Frontline Club who’ve aided me so far (you know who you are), Mike Cupcake, those at Frith St with whom I share a space (again, you know who you are), Suzan Keen…lots more but I’ll save that for the Oscars speech I’ll give in the shower ok?

Over 50,000 members of the “I Only Fly to India” militia will descend on Copenhagen over the next week to demonstrate over a shopping list of demands longer than J-Lo’s rider. Attendees are an international who’s who of the best-branded campaign groups from Oxfam to Action Aid to superglue and D-lock specialists Plane Stupid. Lesser-known groups like Brazil’s Land Reform Movement will be there to boost everyone’s ethnic credentials.

Developed countries like the USA and the UK have pledged to cut carbon emissions (on their terms) by 2020 alongside developing nations like China and India cutting their carbon intensity (on someone else’s terms). The finer points over who does what by how much and who’s going to police 192 countries will also be debated.

A sore point has already come up with the leak to The Guardian of the ‘Danish text’ – a leaked draft agreement that gives rich nations more power, marginalises the UN’s role and abandons the Kyoto protocol. All the jaw jaw about making a difference to the world’s global temperature becomes hot air in the cold Copenhagen wind.

The feeling that a potentially powerful global movement is being hijacked by some very slick PR is keeping me away from Denmark. The talk around and within the conference seems to be an exercise in appearing to make a difference without actually changing a damn thing.

Initiatives like the 10:10 campaign (who recently accepted missile makers MBDA onto their scheme with the lines “Of course arms manufacturers can reduce their emissions by 10%. What they do with the rest of their time is a different matter, on which we couldn’t possibly comment”) ask individuals and companies to pledge to reduce their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010. I had a recent Twitter debate with one of their worker ants, @malchadwick, who failed to see the hypocrisy in cosying up with a firm whose business it is making things that kill people.

If it makes you feel better about yourself turning off a few lights and flushing the loo only for solids, just be aware that the bandwagon you’re joining broke down a long time ago and your cooperation is helping corporations wash their sins away in the green haze of a well-run publicity campaign.

This weekend and next week will see a range of so-called direct action protests. How direct and effective will sitting in a street getting water-cannoned be if you’re an Indian farmer considering suicide to get out of debt because your crops failed?

What’s needed is justice. Fair rights and fair pay for workers and bold international policing of commerce and corporate structures. Grass roots movements that tackle tangible goals, not semantic abstract concepts. Proper justice and action directed at those who use and exploit. Not branded climate justice and a spectacle only likely to achieve hypothermia.

=====

This article was originally published in The Guardian, 11 December 2009, and republished on The Comment Factory.

At its height, up to 26 Indian cotton farmers a day were drinking pesticides to take themselves out of debt. The cycle of death and debt, pesticides and penury, starts off by farmers approaching loan sharks to front them the money to buy cotton seeds and the chemicals to tend their crops. Due to the failed monsoons, this year’s crop turned up rather crap. The majority of farmers are young – early twenties. And the debt accumulates as quickly as the dark thoughts that compel these young people to drink the very thing that took them into this deficit.

I’m cutting a little teaser which I intend to take out on the streets of London tomorrow asking shoppers what lovely cottony bargains they managed to bag ahead of this festive season. (If I got my shit together, I’d be filming the lights on Oxford St being switched on…but Oxford St + Boris Johnson + twinkly Christmas lights + Jim Carey + thousands of swine flu ridden Londoners and tourists = me rather being stabbed in the vagina).

The teaser will feature a suicide widow, a man who tried to kill himself in the fields, and a man who sells pesticides for a living. The salesman, when asked whether he felt bad about what he did, replied with something along the lines of “Yeah but it’s a job innit?”

So I plan to head out into the jungle of Calle Oxford to doorstep unwitting shoppers…and hopefully get kicked out of / barred / sent to the Topshop jail (yes there is one, ask me later about this).

Will then cut it into a little taster tape I plan to take with me to the Sheffield DocFest on Friday.

Theeeeeeen…it’s full steam ahead for an exhibition I may or may not have a little hand in with some friends at the Truman Brewery in London. It’s called Signs of Revolt and looks at activist and protest art from Seattle in 1999 to Copenhagen 2009.

Participants range from David Gentlemen, Adbusters, kennardphillipps, Guy Smallman, Jess Hurd –  a kind of who’s who of the thorns in the Metropolitan Police’s side.

And theeeeeeeen…it’s off to Ethiopia. It’s a junket of some sort, though a very loose one where I’m given a lot of freedom to find the stories I want to find. I’m thinking of things outside the “hey check this it’s a starving black kid” angle. If you know of any outfit or outlet that would want something out of the Kingdom of Ethiop, drop me a line. I know quite a few news outfits are currently trawling the starving black kids route ahead of the eco summit in Copenhagen. Which is fine. It’s the newsroom bread and butter. But Ethiopia is a country that eats sour bread as its staple and is possibly where we’d find the origin of the human species (apart from Charles Darwin’s bookshelf). There’s a lot more in that land which I’d like to find in the week I’m there.

There’s more planned for when I get back from the sand and starvation but that’s for a later note.

Despite the fact that photographs from the first day of the G20 protests in April 2009 show me astride an armoured personnel carrier in black bra and blue boiler suit with another woman straddling me in red stockings and lipstick heels, the Crown Prosecution Service has charged me and 10 others with impersonating police officers. We’ve been charged with two counts under Section 90 of the Police Act 1996 – the greater of which carries with it six months in prison.

Spot the Policeman

The vehicle, owned by anarchist pranksters the Space Hijackers, bore a number of fake CCTV cameras bolted onto its turret, a plastic pipe with holes in it for a gun and a bumper sticker that read “How Do You Like My Driving? 0800 F**K YOU”. It blared Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries from a sound system. If you can show me a police force that does all that, I can show you a police force on acid.

“This is ridiculous, they’ll never press charges,” lawyers who attended to the arrested said on the day. Nearly six months and one court appearance later, the CPS is showing no signs of dropping what will be a four-day trial at the City of Westminster magistrates court in February. Eleven people, witnesses for the defence, witnesses for the prosecution, at least half a dozen legal representatives, the paperwork, the man hours, the expense – to what end? There were 27 prosecutions arising from the G20 protests. The rest include violent disorder, affray and setting fire to things at the Bank of England. The Space Hijackers and their tank sought to satirise the aggression stirred up by police ahead of the protests. Police said they expected violence and were “up for it”. It was April Fools’ day. And it was apparently the start of the “Summer of Rage“.

The case of the rather large Sergeant Delroy Smellie (quiet at the back please), charged with assaulting a rather small protester, Nicola Fisher, by smacking her across the face and whacking her with a baton, is representative of the 250 complaints received by the Independent Police Complaints Commission over police violence at the G20. Sure she was short and shouty, but you swat flies. Not women.

Events surrounding the death of Ian Tomlinson show police to be drunk with the illusion of their own powers. Even members of the Metropolitan Police Authority despair over how things are run. They have criticised police over not taking the issue of wearing ID numbers seriously enough. Apparently disciplining those caught without ID badges was unnecessary because they could fall off or officers could forget to put them on. Smellie was not wearing his numbers when he vented his rage at Fisher. That fuelled public anger over the overt disregard for the accountability that wearing ID badges would give. So since the G20, the Met has spent over £40,000 on force identification numbers for public order officers. A very expensive way of paying lipservice if police chiefs don’t consider wearing identification important.

There is a feeling that police chiefs and the CPS – run by director of public prosecutions Keir Starmer (formerly a defence lawyer with a long history of human rights cases) – have lost a sense of perspective. The Space Hijackers have a 10-year history of using comedy and theatre to highlight the hypocrisies and failing of the system. I was accepted as their embedded journalist to get a flavour of their version of protest.

Impersonating a police officer is a criminal offence. Murder is a criminal offence. Would you rather see your tax money go towards prosecuting 11 people up for poking fun at the police, or 11 murderers?

======

This article originally appeared in the Guardian’s Comment Is Free section, 01 October 2009.