Academic Correspondence

Robbie was on top form again this morning with one of the highlights being Dianne Reeves with "Hello" produced by her cousin George Duke, from the 1994 album "Quiet After The Storm".
As a matter of fact, BBC 2 are showing "Good Night And Good Luck" tonight starring George Clooney set in the 1940s where Dianne can be heard singing in musical interludes during the film with the various songs from the period.

I'd say that she's probably better than Sassy, or Ella around that time.

I saw the film originally on my final visit to the Venice Film Festival in late August 2005 and it was one of my favourites, apart from probably "Elizabethtown" which I must get on DVD sometime.

It's not the sort of film I'd usually want to see but it has that certain something.

Whilst listening I read Paddy Scannell's book which Anastasia reccomended to me, although I didn't really find anything that was related to my dissertation.

However there was a really good chapter on Identity which made use of the late Graham Brand's analysis on Tony Blackburn in the mid 80s and the different types of voices he uses on his show.

It contains quite a few transcripts and quotes from the shows where he spent quite a lot of time slagging off Radio 1 where he resigned from in 1984.
To be fair, around that time Radio 1 was pretty rubbish with Mike Read on breakfast, and considering Tony's show was up against Simon Bates, I'd rather listen to Tony talking dirty to callers than Simon telling a made up sob story.

I don't think the station started picking itself up until around 1988 when Simon Mayo started on breakfast and the station started broadcasting on FM permanantley.

One quote I wasn't sure about was when a caller was suggesting that there weren't any other good broadcasters around to which Tone responded "I suppose there's Robbie Vincent, but he's not such a genius is he though?".

If I had to choose between either of them in terms of soul music I'd go with Robbie all the way as Tony's soul shows are far too repetetive and I don't want to hear
"You Know How To Love Me" being played every week.

As an aside, I recieved an e-mail from Simon, one of my lecturers at college and who I hold responsible as one of the men who introduced me to Shane Meadows and more specifically "Dead Man's Shoes".

The whole thing came about in 2005 when we were in a film studies lecture and pitching our ideas for what films we would analyse. A fella called Kacem who looked like Chris Martin out of Coldplay proposed Dead Man's Shoes and showed us the scene where Richard confronts Sonny with that brilliant opening line;

Sonny: "Ere some of the lads had this ridiculous idea that..."

Richard: "Yeah, it was me"

Although Simon wasn't the lecturer for that part of the course, he heard about him wanting to analyse and on a Tuesday afternoon the following week, we watched the film and I was laughing so much I almost fell of my chair.

I was rather annoyed that Kacem at the last minute decided not to analyse that film and opt for "Goodfellas" instead as I would have loved to have analysed that film for a media essay.

The one I chose was Fargo which got quite good marks and there's a brilliant book of other studies of the film compiled by William Luhr called "The Coen Brothers Fargo".

One of the many books I brought back from Canterbury this weekend.

I spent most of the summer of 2005 after College watching some of Shane's other films and was very pleased that quite a lot of people at Westminster were fans of the film as I found out just after starting there.

Anyway, back to the e-mail and Simon nowadays is working as an Advance Practitioner at the college in their Quality and Standards department, designed to improve and provide training for staff.

It turns out that he's a fan of The Wire as well which I reckon my Dad will be pleased about although I'm not too surprised as Simon was into TV series such as "Oz" and "The Sopranos" as well.

It turns out he was also a fan of YTV's Beiderbecke series when during a break in a lecture I played an audio clip of James Bolam yelling "I'll have some bloody loud jazz, and the bloody neighbours can bog off!".

We had plenty of long and interesting conversations about similar things whilst on my first visit to New York with the college in Feburary 2004.

For some reason he decided not to go on the 2005 visit but ended up having to reprimand Kacem after he exposed himself on the visit the following year which I was furious about.

I'm sure he didn't mean any harm but I draw the line at that sort of behaviour.

Overall though, they were really pleasant memories and I think that in terms of getting out to different places, my time at college was a lot more adventurous than University.