Not happy that it happened in the first place and only for an eagle eyed photoblogger who saw it in teh paper and then came across mine a few days later I would be completely unaware that it was used. Anyway as I said it is now sorted and I’m happy.

http://redmum.blogspot.com/2008/05/gggggrrrrrr.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/redmum/2509092708/

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/psb_review/psbplurality.pdf

Begins pg 168

http://www.portadownnews.com/

Which incurs the wrath of a “proper journalist”. Cue sacking from day job.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2001/dec/30/northernireland

Not quite so humble ex-employee now embarks on a career? as columnist and general wit about town finally ending up with the sort of gig that the “proper journalist” could only dream of:

The Price of Plurality

Choice, Diversity and
Broadcasting Institutions
in the Digital Age

Published by
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
Department of Politics and International Relations
University of Oxford
13 Norham Gardens
Oxford, OX2 6PS
reuters.institute@politics.ox.ac.uk

The section on Wales was written by:

Geraint Talfan Davies is Chairman of the Institute of Welsh Affairs,
Welsh National Opera and a former Controller of BBC Wales. Having
worked in newspapers he spent twelve years in ITV news and current
affairs and became Director of Programmes with Tyne Tees Television.
A former member of the Radio Authority and Chair of the Arts Council
of Wales, he is a trustee of the Media Standards Trust.

The section on Scotland was written by:

Philip Schlesinger is Professor in Cultural Policy and Academic Director
of the Centre for Cultural Policy Research at the University of Glasgow.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Society
of Arts, an Academician of the Academy of the Social Sciences, and
a member of Ofcom’s Advisory Committee for Scotland.

Neither of these people had any experience in writing a satirical newspaper column and thus failed to spot the comic potential inherent in a weighty report on plurality on broadcasting (224 pages)

Not so our hero.

His first paragraph announced that his writing style was not to be corrupted by the cerebral company he was now keeping.

“Only two organisations in history have ever referred to Northern
Ireland as a ‘nation’. The first was Tara, a far-right Paisleyite cult from
the 1970s which also believed that Ulster Protestants were the lost tribe
of Israel. The other is the BBC, which ranks Northern Ireland as one of
‘the nations’ within the United Kingdom.”

His trademark contempt for journalists and indigenous? languages is not forgotten.

“It was noticeable that BBC
Spotlight began heading downmarket at exactly the same time. This
is worrying when the BBC is the only media outlet in Northern Ireland
that can afford to mount long-term investigations. In February 2007,
Spotlight won an RTS award for a seventeen-month investigation
into dog-fighting in South Armagh, which revealed that dog-fighting
occurs in South Armagh and it is not very nice. This award will only
encourage the downmarket trend.”

“Like much of the public
sector, BBC Northern Ireland has seized on Ulster-Scots as a possible
counterweight to ‘balance’ the issue. Ulster-Scots is a unionist project
designed to spike the Irish lobby’s guns by classifying a Ballymena
accent as a language. The absurdity of this claim is underscored by
the failure of the Council of Europe’s office of minority languages to
find a single ‘native speaker’, despite spending a fortune trying to find
one, and also by the failure of the Ulster-Scots Agency to compile a
dictionary despite having a decade and £4 million to do so. This has
not stopped Radio Ulster producing a half-hour Ulster-Scots magazine
programme, A Kist O Wurds, which it puts out weekly after Blas,
creating the distinct and perhaps not entirely accidental impression
of a ‘Dead and Made-Up Languages Hour’. BBC Northern Ireland’s
dead and made-up language original television output now stands
at twelve hours a year for Irish and 3.6 hours a year for Ulster-Scots.”

Good knockabout stuff but unusual for a learned tome. Quite what the rest of the UK thinks I can only guess.

Little fleas have bigger fleas
Upon their backs to bite ‘em,
And bigger fleas have well-paid fleas,
And so ad infinitum.

On the odd occasion it’s befallen me, I’ve ascribed it to “synchronicity”.