Penners Hot on the heels of Norman Tebbit, we can see just how fashionable it is for the beneficiaries and former apparatchiks of Mrs Thatcher's regime to bemoan their reversals of fortune when no less than former disc jockey, TV "personality" and "entrepreneur" Noel Edmonds (!) claims to have an MI5 phonetap. According to Matthew Norman's diary in the Guardian of 31 May, Edmonds has been writing in the Daily Mirror on the destruction of the countryside he loves, attributing most blame to the Ministry of Agriculture for its sledgehammer response to the foot and mouth epidemic. Having gone so public with such seditious stuff, Noel admits "I'm taking some very big risks at the moment. A journalist friend rang the other day and said, 'Just be careful. You can make some very, very powerful enemies with this sort of stuff.' I mean, I know I've probably got the phone tapped and an MI5 file on me now. The fear factor is just so intense I took these threats very seriously." Of course, as with MBAs, the more people who acquire MI5 files as this season's essential fashion accessory will find they are trading in a devalued currency. However, that serves the very useful purpose of helping to discredit the thoroughly serious concerns regarding what MI5 was up to during the 1970s and 80s as it set to work dismantling the UK labour movement. It's a sick joke of sorts that parasites like Edmonds and racist thugs like Tebbit should be squealing about a rogue secret state. Edmonds began his professional career as a disc jockey for Radio Luxembourg in 1969, swiftly moving on to wunnerful Radio 1 during the 70s, transferring over to BBC children's TV and from there in the 80s into light entertainment (heavy emphasis on the light). His first notable foray was a Saturday evening series, the "Late, Late Breakfast Show" which had to be cancelled in 1986 after an audience participant in one of the weekly ludicrous stunts featured on the show was killed. Not for long, however, as Noel was soon back with his Saturday Road Show, itself soon becoming Noel's House Party, for many seasons a ratings "banker" for a BBC that was desperate to fight off the horrendous offerings put out by London Weekend Television on behalf of the ITV network. All the while Edmonds was building a behind-the-scenes media career via his Utility group of companies, which did very nicely out of the internal market carved out of the BBC by former Directors-General Michael Checkland and John Birt (ex-London Weekend TV and author of the notorious "mission to explain" style of journalism "pioneered" by Peter Jay on LWT's "Weekend World", a reliable conduit for Friedmanite/Hayekian propaganda during the 1970s). An example of the Edmonds business style is his "acquisition" of the rights to a mildly entertaining show, "Telly Addicts", originally dreamt up by a BBC production staffer, but effectively privatised by Edmonds whose entrepreneurialism cut the originator of the programme out of any income derived from ownership rights. The decline of Edmonds as a force in "entertainment" is analysed well by Jack Kibble-White at the first URL below. Kibble-White makes the point that the death of the audience participant on Edmonds' show was the pretext for the removal of Alasdair Milne as BBC Director General, who had ruffled many establishment feathers by overseeing the production of serious stuff such as the infamous "Real Lives" documentary of 1985, in which Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein was profiled so objectively that Thatcher, via her then Home Secretary Leon Brittan and pliant BBC Governors (including chairman Stuart Young -- brother of Cabinet Minister Lord David Young, and vice chairman William Rees-Mogg), sought (successfully) to ban the programme. This led to a notable one day strike by BBC journalists (joined by their ITN colleagues) in protest at such heavy-handed government interference in news and current affairs reporting. Meanwhile Tebbit, in charge of the Media Monitoring Unit at Conservative Central Office, was exacting BBC output (the corporation was lambasted at one point as the "Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation") to intense scrutiny, homing in on every news report for traces of "bias". Playwrights Alan Bleasdale and Dennis Potter were targeted for their criticisms of Tory policies implicit and explicit in their works, with Bleasdale's "Monocled Mutineer" combining with Edmonds' show as the excuse to dump Milne (see second URL). http://web.ukonline.co.uk/ott/latelatebreakfastshow.htm http://web.ukonline.co.uk/ott/bleasdalemutineer.htm Edmonds now, when not working for "charity" and putting his life at risk unmasking the unspeakable tyranny that is Blair's Britain, is involved in various media business ventures as well as (what else?) management consultancy, charging fortunes for delivering such earth-shattering wisdom to dumb managers as: "To create a successful business you must master the art of communication". http://www.videomeetingcompany.com/news/events.htm And that, from the "creator" of Mr Blobby... http://members.tripodnet.nl/blobblob/blob.html Michael K. Michael Keaney Mercuria Business School Martinlaaksontie 36 01620 Vantaa Finland [EMAIL PROTECTED]
