How to publicise railway works

Once upon a time "Operation London Bridge" referred to, well, London Bridge station.

In the 1970s a major project was undertaken to rearrange the railway tracks not just at London Bridge itself but right across south east London to avoid conflict on the different routes to Charing Cross and Canon Street and at the same time to rebuild the railway station to better serve customers.

What's interesting from the modern perspective is the way in which passengers were taken with the project. There was a concerted publicity effort not only to make sure passengers were aware that there was going to be disruption, but also to explain the aim of the improvements and get them on board.

A collection of leaflets and posters can be seen at Southern Railway Publicity, specifically at Station Improvements. Some of the design and level of information may seem odd from a modern perspective but the key message is clear throughout - this was a project to untangle a major blockage in the system and improve reliability.

There was even a special film made by British Transport Films:

Note how often signs would include the words "Operation London Bridge", again making it clear to passengers that this was all part of the major project. This was especially useful at stations some way out from London Bridge itself.

All in all the publicity side can be considered a great success. Today's railway managers could do well to look back at this and remember that just stating "engineering works" does nothing for customer satisfaction.

(What of the changes themselves? Well they made the station more efficient for Charing Cross and Canon Street but note there have so far been no references to Blackfriars and beyond. This is because at the time there was no regular service to there from London Bridge. It wasn't until the late 1980s that the old Snow Hill tunnel was re-opened to passenger services, thus creating Thameslink and massively transforming the needs of London Bridge, with the added problem that the route to Blackfriars brought its own complications. Hence the more recent Thameslink Programme upgrade.

Operation London Bridge may have improved operations around London Bridge itself, but one consequence was a segregation of tracks right out across south east London which could affect the available services as network-wide efficiency took precedence over local through connections. One notable long term casualty has been the Bromley North branch, as explained in detail at London Reconnections: The Past and Future of the Bromley North Branch.)

Arrival of the Cybermen

For those who enjoyed this evening's Doctor Who, here's a special blast from the past - the first full introduction of the Cybermen from The Tenth Planet back in 1966:



Note that you can see the actors' eyes under those masks. With any other monster fans would cry out. But with the Cybermen it's very appropriate...

The This Week election introduction...

Well the one from 2005. They haven't done a recurring one since, so here's a reminder of a different age.

Unfortunately embedding is disabled (perhaps someone's trying to hide it?) so here's a link to Andrew Neil Amarillo spoof song.

There's an election on...

...so my apologies for not posting much this month. In the meantime, here's the classic election video:



But if you're a candidate or agent, please remember that this represents several serious breaches of election law. Can you spot them all?

Pancake Day

Here's a treasure from my childhood - the "Pancake Day" song from Maid Marian and her Merry Men:



And for those wondering, yes that is Danny John-Jules, best known as the Cat in Red Dwarf.

Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord - 30 years on

A rare Doctor Who post these days but a special one.

People who've only discovered the series in its current incarnation may be forgiven for thinking the overall season long story arcs are a modern invention. But thirty years ago the series served up its biggest ever adventure.

"Eighteen months is too long to wait!" had cried a pop song that protested the twenty-third season being slightly delayed. How little did people realise there would come a time when an eighteen month wait would seem like nothing!

In the autumn of 1986 the series put the Doctor on trial for his actions, taking him all over space and time and even confronting his own future. There were many great guest stars, including the one and only BRIAN BLESSED, as loud as ever. It also had some of the best music of all.

Composer Dominic Glynn has reworked his brilliant rendition of the theme and here's an excellent music video celebrating the great epic:

If you thought Donald Trump was nuts...

Currently Ted Cruz is being looked on as a potential saviour of the world, the last man with a chance to stop Donald Trump. But it seems he has his own bizarre moments:



What a tosser. A gun is a tool not a toy. And what sane country allows anyone, even a political, to play with a machine gun?!

Al Murray on democracy

Here's a less well known moment from the South Thanet declaration - Al Murray's speech.

It's good to see a comedian with a lot more sense than the breach of the Trade Descriptions Act that is Russell Brand. Nice pwning him!

The Farage moment

Here is a reminder of one of the best moments from the general election results.

Al Murray's reaction is priceless.

When the Liberal Democrats had a strong leader

Apparently the Lib Dems had a party conference this week. Not that it got much notice. The Lib Dems remain in a rut.

But there was a time when they made an impact under a tough leader and were actually very good at coming third. Here's a classic Rory Bremner sketch from those days:

The Balls moment

Here it is, courtesy of You Tube, the moment when Ed Balls lost his seat to Andrea Jenkyns:



In future we must replay this every year on Ed Balls Day.

Spot the breaches... or just enjoy the song

Here's a blast from the past - the time Mr Bean stood for Parliament:


My readers who are candidates or agents will doubtlessly have spotted all the various breaches of election law in the campaign. But I don't know if there's a follow-up song entitled "Petitioned".

For those who hated summer camps and the like...

Yesterday while channel surfing I came across a rerun of Addams Family Values. And the very best scene is available online:
The perfect antidote to all the patronising smarminess of helpers and plastic artificialness that many a child has endured at one holiday activity or another throughout the ages.

Bye-bye analogue television

Tonight is the second and final stage of the digital switch-over in London. I've blogged before about the screw-ups (The Digital Switchover screw-up) and for the moment am just thinking on the passing of an institution.

Here at least it's the final end of Ceefax as we knew it. When we first got a television with text I remember the fun of going through the various pages. In the days before the internet it was incredible to be able to access so much information, from news stories to weather reports to travel disruption to TV listings and so forth, all at the pressing of a few buttons... and waiting seeming ages for the right page to load. Sure there's the red button service on some of the digital channels, but it just doesn't feel the same. There was something about the blockiness of the old text system that just made it so reassuring, in a way that hasn't been replicated.

What about the signal itself? Well the harsh reality is that on modern television sets an analogue signal looks distinctly worse, largely because the modern sets are over analysing the signal. On a good old fashioned set you could got brilliant pictures given good reception. I grew up not many miles from the Crystal Palace transmitter and we always got brilliant pictures for BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 4 on our fixed aerial, and pretty good on portable aerials too. Of course there had to be something to let the side down, and that something was Channel 5. I remember the lousy signal quality no matter what was done to boost it, and there were periods when we just gave up altogether. (It was even worse when I was a student in Canterbury. Because of potential interference with French television, Channel 5 simply wasn't available there at all. I often wondered if it was barred from obtaining the rights to screen reserved sports that were otherwise only available to the most widespread analogue channels.)

There was also the fun of trying to get good reception on portable aerials (a fun I haven't yet tried with digital) - the joy of wandering round the room trying to find the precise angle to get the best picture, of trying all manner of boosts through special devices and bog standard VCRs, of frustration with it all, and then triumph when you found the signal.

I wonder if people felt the same sense of nostalgia at the time of what we'd now call the "625 switchover"? I can't remember it myself. This was the time when the transmissions in the old 405 line format were finally ended and the 625 line format was left as the only service in transmission. Although 625 line transmission began as early as 1964 with the launch of BBC2 (which led to a bizarre series called "Theatre 625" - basically plays, or TV movies, shot in the higher definition format - I wonder if anyone would do a series called "Film HD" today?), and was brought to BBC1 & ITV in 1969, 405 line signals were still broadcast for older television sets up until 1985. And you thought it took a long time to switch-over to digital!

(Here's a little piece from that time. This clip shows the very BBC1 last signals transmitted in 405 lines in London. And it's the weather with Ian McCaskill:)

(Yes they did used to play the National Anthem upon close-down.)

And now as analogue passes away, I wonder how long it will be before we contemplate a shut-down of the digital system in favour of something more advanced?

"The truth is there are none so pure as the impotent"

Here's a wonderful clip from Q & A, the Australian version of Question Time, as Malcolm Turnbull responds to the simplistic approach of minor parties who shout solutions from the sidelines:

A true statement the world over.

Images from the Past: Thirty years ago...

Exactly thirty years ago today Blake's 7 ended.

And I don't mean the last episode went out and it didn't come back, like many a show. No it truly ended.

I've shown this clip once before, but it's so striking here again is what went out just after 8pm on that day in 1981:

Can you imagine the BBC today showing something so bloody and bleak not just at any 8pm but just four days before Christmas?

The Last Dictator Standing

There's a brilliant advert put out by Nando's, starring a man who has lost another friend this year and reflecting. Here's the full version:
Sadly threats of violence against Nando's's Zimbabwean staff have resulted in the advert being withdrawn. But time is running out for Mugabe.

Be careful what you promise!

Remember those fun adverts for Scotch videotapes with the living skeleton? Thanks to YouTube we can see them again. Here's the one I remember the most:
And here's another one predicting the flatscreen TV quite well, although making a rather rash promise...
"Every recording as good as the first or we'll give you a new tape."

Does anyone want to put that to the test and invoke the lifetime guarantee? After all the advert is pretty explicit that Scotch tapes should still be working as good as new after all this time... And there are still people who use their VCRs for recording because it's "good enough" for the task at hand.

Scotch was a trading name used by 3M Select. Their UK website no longer sells videotapes but they did promise to guarantee the tapes for life... Or will they give you your money back?

Alternatively if you used your Scotch tapes to preserve video recordings for posterity and still have some (I think I still have a 1993 recording of a Doctor Who story on a Scotch tape somewhere) then they made promises about those too:
And for some bonus points I noticed that one of the tapes advertised is Betamax (and the second advert has a third cassette but I don't recognise it at all). Does anyone still have both tape and player to test the limits of the guarantee?

The Alternative Vote in action: New South Wales

In the run-up to the Alternative Vote referendum in May there will be a lot of talk about other countries that use the AV voting system. And there will also be an election using the precise variant of AV that the UK will be voting on.

The Alternative Vote has a number of versions around but the one we will be voting on is the "full optional preference" version, practised in the Australian states of New South Wales and Queensland for state elections, whereby voters can number as little as a single candidate for their vote to be valid. (Elections for the federal parliament and most of the other states use the "compulsory preference" version where voters have to number all candidates to count.) New South Wales will be going to the polls on March 26th and it will be possible to compare the claims made in our AV referendum.

(For those who want to see & find out more of the election in the wider context the best guide is the ABC 2011 New South Wales Election.)

At least two claims have been made that are already possible to check against existing experience in the state. Quickly running through them:

Claim 1. AV will mean parties can fight elections as a Coalition, offering voters candidates from both parties.

The full number of candidates in the last (2007) election is available at ABC News Election Preview. There were 93 seats and with the Liberals and Nationals fighting as a Coalition it was possible for voters to have a choice.

However the table shows that each seat had only one Coalition candidate. In fact it would have been playing with fire for the Coalition to offer competing candidates in all but a few seats. There would have been a real risk of votes for one Coalition party failing to transfer to the other, not least due to many voters "plumping" or just using a single preference. For parties aiming to win as many seats as possible this is not a desirable situation and so it's unsurprising that the Coalition stands a single candidate. (In Queensland it proved even harder for the Coalition parties to agree such an arrangement and eventually the two parties merged to eliminate the problem.)

Claim 2. AV will put an end to negative campaigning and parties will have to offer positive reasons to vote for them.

This is one of the wilder claims, and frankly feels like a typical case of seizing on any unpopular element in politics and pretending the proposed change will magic it away. In fact the types of campaigning used reflect the political culture, the effectiveness of methods and any laws governing it far far more than the voting system in use. New South Wales is certainly not free of negative campaigning as this Labor party advert from the last election shows:

If you can find one positive reason to vote for Labor in there (beyond their ability to make cartoons and catchy songs) I'll buy you a pint.

(By the way there is one myth about AV that stems from New South Wales that can be cleared up. There's a belief in some quarters that AV will lead to ballot papers that are the size of tablecloths - some of you may remember David Dimbleby producing one such monster on a few election nights. In fact those monster ballot papers are for the state upper house which is elected by Single Transferable Vote with an option to use a Group voting ticket. That's something different from AV and there are plenty of good reasons for voting against it without the need to resort to such scare myths.)

Twenty years ago - Margaret Thatcher's last performance

Twenty years ago today Margaret Thatcher announced her resignation. Later that day there was a debate in the House of Commons on a motion of no confidence in her government, giving her the opportunity to defend the record of her government.

Without further ado, here is her speech: