Epigram #253

Blumenthal on a budget e2

Obama drama: Film and politics in the US election page 27

Palma Violets interviewed page 25 Issue 252

Issue 253 Monday 22nd October 2012 www.epigram.org.uk

Bristol University’s Independent Student Newspaper Harry Engels

Gym pass heroes: Students win back pay as you go Sports pass A campaign spearheaded by the Students’ Union and the Underwater Society has forced the University to bring back Pay As You Go access to the sports halls and swimming pool Zaki Dogliani Deputy News Editor Following a campaign and petition spearheaded by the University of Bristol Students’ Union (UBU) and a number of sports clubs – primarily the University of Bristol Underwater Club – the university has partially reversed its decision to abolish the Pay As You Go (PAYG) system for the sports hall and swimming pool.

Students can now use facilities on a Pay As You Go basis at off-peak times – weekdays until 3.30pm and any time at weekends.

Simon Hinks, Director of Sport and Lynn Robinson, Deputy Registrar, announced they would ‘Reinstate

the availability of the ‘pay and play’ option for the coming year at the pool and sports hall. We will review the impact of this throughout the year in discussion with the student sabbaticals and sports club representatives.’

Underwater Club’s Joe Hawksworth welcomed the decision ‘This is clearly fantastic news for all societies affected by the changes and students wishing to use facilities on a casual basis,’ he told Epigram.

According to an online petition set up by the Students’ Union and the Underwater Club - which received 1497 signatures before the decision was revised - scrapping Pay As You Go and requiring students to purchase gym membership for £250

– peak – or £150 – off-peak – to use the facilities would ‘Stand against the claims of affordability and accessibility put forward by the university, marginalising casual users and threatening the existence of many of Bristol’s longest standing sports clubs.’

Hannah Pollak, UBU’s Vice President of Sport and Health, told Epigram that the U-turn ‘Demonstrates the power of the student voice and willingness of the university to listen. This is a really positive start [...] however, continued efforts will be made by elected officers to ensure that all students have equal access to sports facilities’, Pollak added.

Read more on page 35

George Galloway disinvited after rape comments

Can students and locals co-exist?

The Big Debate

The University of Bristol’s International Affairs Society (IAS) has cancelled a talk from Respect MP George Galloway after his controversial comments about what constitutes rape.

Galloway defended Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in a video uploaded to YouTube in which he says that the rape allegations levelled at Assange have no basis because having sex with a woman whilst she is sleeping does not constitute rape.

‘Not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion.

Continued on page 3

Page 11 Should some companies be banned from sponsorships?

Page 32

Epigram

22.10.2012

News

Editor: Jemma Buckley

Deputy Editor: Zaki Dogliani

Deputy Editor: Josephine McConville

news@epigram.org.uk

zdogliani@epigram.org.uk

jmcconville@epigram.org.uk

Editorial team Editor

Style Editor

Pippa Shawley

Lizi Woolgar

editor@epigram.org.uk

style@epigram.org.uk

Deputy Editors

Deputy Style Editor

Patrick Baker

Anisha Gupta

patrick@epigram.org.uk

deputystyle@epigram.org.uk

Imogen Rowley

Arts Editor

imogen@epigram.org.uk

Rosemary Wagg

e2 Editor

arts@epigram.org.uk

Ant Adeane

Deputy Arts Editor

e2@epigram.org.uk

Rachel Schraer

Staff and volunteers from both the University

the aforementioned Chandos Road area received

News Editor

deputyarts@epigram.org.uk

of Bristol and the University of the West of

a local newsletter when moving in, encouraging

Jemma Buckley

Music Editor

England (UWE) have been knocking on doors

them to become part of the community and to

news@epigram.org.uk

Eliot Brammer

in neighbourhoods where large numbers of

visit the newsletter’s Facebook page. This page,

Deputy News Editors

music@epigram.org.uk

Zaki Dogliani

Deputy Music Editor

students live, such as the area surrounding

it turned out, was less a chance to get to know

zdogliani@epigram.org.uk

Phil Gwyn

Chandos Road in Redland.

your new neighbours, and more a chance to

Josephine McConville

deputymusic@epigram.org.uk

jmcconville@epigram.org.uk

Editorial Local relationships must improve

The aim of these visits is to welcome students

badmouth students, many of whom are living

FIlm & TV Editor

to the area, and establish a good relationship

away from home or halls for the first time.

Features Editor

Jasper Jolly

between the semi-nomadic student population

One sarcastic post read ‘They are back... Happy

Nahema Marchal

filmandtv@epigram.org.uk

and local residents. While Epigram commends

parking everyone!’ while another suggested that

features@epigram.org.uk

Deputy Film & TV Editor

Deputy Features Editor

the efforts of those involved to share information

students should not own cars as the university

Kate Samuelson

Helena Blackstone

deputyfilmandtv@epigram.org.uk

about refuse collection and good neighbourly

buildings were nearby.

deputyfeatures@epigram.org.uk

Science & Technology Editor

Comment Editor

etiquette, the paper also feels that some of the

This underhand hostility towards students

Mary Melville

volunteers have already decided that all students

will have a detrimental effect on student-local

Joe Kavanagh

science@epigram.org.uk

are cut from the same dirty cloth. Residents in

relations, increasing the feeling of ‘us and them’

comment@epigram.org.uk

Sport Editor

Deputy Comment Editor

David Stone

Nat Meyers

sport@epigram.org.uk

deputycomment@epigram.co.uk

Deputy Sport Editor

Letters Editor

Laura Lambert

Lucy De Greeff

deputysport@epigram.org.uk

letters@epigram.org.uk

Proof Readers

Living Editor

Katy Barney

Imogen Hope Carter

Jessica Easton

living@epigram.org.uk

Tom Brada

in areas such as Cotham, Redland and Clifton.

Meetings News: Features:

jfranks@epigram.org.uk Mona Tabbara mtabbara@epigram.org.uk Travel Editor

Epigram is the independent student newspaper of the University of Bristol. The views expressed in this publication are not those of the University or the Students’ Union.

The design, text and photographs are copyright of Epigram and its individual contributors and may not be reproduced without permission.

Alicia Queiro travel@epigram.org.uk Deputy Travel Editor Alex Bradbrook deputytravel@epigram.org.uk

Advertise with Epigram?

To enquire about advertising, please contact Leanne Melbourne - advertising@epigram.org.uk

The Refectory, 1pm, Nov 1st

appreciate being awoken by babies screaming in the street, but equally they resent the few student houses that do insist on blasting out Mumford

Comment: The Hill Pub, 1.30 pm, Oct 22nd

and Sons until 3 o’clock in the morning, making

Science & The White Bear, 1.15pm, Oct Tech: 23rd

both our ears and our neighbourhood relations

Living:

The White Bear, 1.15pm, Oct 23rd

Travel:

The Refectory, 1.15pm, Oct 22nd

Style:

The White Bear, 1.15pm, Oct 24th

Arts:

The White Bear, 1.15pm, Oct 31st

Music:

The White Bear, 7pm, Oct 31st

Film & TV:

The White Bear, 1.15pm, Oct 23rd

Sport:

The Refectory, 5pm, Oct 23rd

Deputy Living Editor Josephine Franks

The Refectory, 12.15pm & 5pm Oct 22nd

Locals must recognise that most students do not

suffer.

Epigram

22.10.2012

33

Amnesty action disbanded by security Emma Fine News Reporter Students squeezed themselves into a mock cell to highlight the inhumane atrocities in prisons in Chad as part of a protest held by the University of Bristol Amnesty International Society.

On Wednesday 10th October, the society aimed to gather 75 people into a 4x4m² area in the Royal Fort Gardens to highlight the seriously overcrowded conditions of Chad prison cells. The direct action protest was to raise awareness of the humanitarian violations that prisoners are experiencing on a daily basis.

Ben Rhodes, the Direct Action Officer of Amnesty International society told Epigram that the protest served as an example of the sort of campaigning Amnesty

undertakes in countries ‘often brushed to one side by the mainstream media’.

‘Many students are wellinformed; they will know all about the Arab Spring uprisings or about Amnesty’s ongoing campaign to abolish the death penalty worldwide, but we wanted to demonstrate that there is always something to learn and that our student group is a great place to start,’ Rhodes said.

However, there was some ambivalence regarding the success of the protest as only around 45 students turned up to the event - rather than the 75 that the society hoped for - and after 20 minutes the campaigners were disbanded by security because they were told they did not have proper documentation to hold the protest on university premises.

Rhodes told Epigram of his anger that the protest was stopped, ‘Ignoring the fact that

is seems ultra-bureaucratic to want documentation for such a small harmless event, the reason we had none was because there is now a 3-week minimum waiting list to hold an event on university premises despite the fact that the spot we were using is virtually always not in use.

“

It seems ultra bureaucratic to want documentation for such a small harmless event.

”

3 weeks to our minds seems highly prohibitive for societies like ours who want to campaign for very current issues.

In response to these comments Head of Security Peter McClory told Epigram ‘While we appreciate that in this case the process may seem frustrating, it is there for

good reason. The University community is of significant size and the number and variety of requests to hold events is understandably considerable.

For this reason there needs to be a proper process to ensure these are all managed appropriately.

We are keen to accommodate as many events as we can, but they do need to follow due process.’

Rhodes told Epigram that despite the problems, they still managed to raise awareness of a good cause.

‘We definitely received attention: no student passed us that day without an inquisitive stare or, better yet, a quick read of the leaflet we handed out.’

Many of the students who were engaged in the protest said that they had not been aware that issues like this existed within systems and were shocked by how cramped they felt even for the matter of minutes they stood within the perimeters of the mock cell.

‘FRUNI’ expands Best of Bristol lectures across UK Melissa Sykes News Reporter The highly successful Best of Bristol lecture scheme has now been expanded to universities across the UK through a social enterprise called FRUNI (Free Range University) with the aim of creating a ‘publicly free national resource of outstanding university teaching’.

The FRUNI model - founded by a former Bristol University engineering student Tom Corfield - has two stages.

In the first stage, students are given the opportunity to attend free lectures on a

broad range of subjects given by lecturers voted for by the students themselves. The second stage sees the FRUNI team collaborating with universities to put these renowned academics at the centre of their outreach programmes.

The first part of the model is expanding across the UK and the second part is currently being trialled at the University of Bristol with the aim to expand the project throughout the UK. Corfield was at the University of Bristol when he had the idea that firstly inspired the Best of Bristol lecture series.

‘When I was a student at Bristol I used to get “subject

envy”.’ I started going along to see the most inspiring lecturers in action. Then I thought “why doesn’t everyone get to do this?” And that’s when the Best of Bristol lectures was born,’ he told Epigram.

Corfield firstly set up an online statement of support to allow him to gage the response and over one thousand people associated with the university signed up. He then asked students which of their lecturers should be chosen and over 1500 students voted.

Professor Nick Lieven, Pro Vice Chancellor for Education demonstrates his support for the idea on FRUNI’s website.

‘Bristol has always had a peculiar embarrassment about celebrating and displaying what is good, so I fully support this [idea],’ he is quoted as saying.

Corfield believes the popularity of this concept is down to a simple formula of ‘asking all students at Bristol what they find inspiring, and then making sure everyone gets the chance to hear it, no matter what subject they study’.

In the first year of the Best of Bristol project, 11 lectures were attended by over 3000 people and the scheme proved to be just as successful in its second year.

FRUNI

FRUNI aims to take the successful ‘Best of Bristol’ lectures across the UK.

Amnesty International Society

Josephine McConville Deputy News Editor

Students gathered to highlight the serious overcrowding in Chad prison systems.

George Galloway ‘uninvited’ after rape comments Jemma Buckley News Editor Continued from page 1 ‘Some people believe that when you go to bed with somebody, take off your clothes and have sex with them and then fall asleep, you’re already in the sex game with them,’ Galloway said.

He conceded that Assange’s behaviour may have been ‘bad sexual etiquette’ but insisted ‘it is not rape, or you bankrupt the term rape of all meaning’.

Following his comments, the National Union of Students (NUS) passed a motion effectively banning Galloway from speaking at events affiliated with the Union. It has been reported that Galloway is now suing the NUS for libel.

A spokesperson for the NUS told Epigram that ‘NUS believes that there is a culture of undermining rape victims and alleged rape victims and is concerned by attempts to glorify, joke about or dismiss rape. The motion passed by our NEC [National Executive Council] confirms that NUS shall not offer a platform to speakers who are rape deniers, and blame and undermine rape victims, nor shall it officially support any event that does.’

Bristol’s IAS confirmed that they had received a letter from Bristol’s Student Union stating their opposition to his remarks on rape and asking them to withdraw their invitation to

Galloway but a spokesperson for the society insisted that ‘At no point did IAS feel threatened or compromised by the Union’s position’.

‘The decision to cancel the George Galloway event was not taken lightly and was one that was reached only

“

It might be really sordid and bad sexual etiquette, but whatever else it is, it is not rape or you bankrupt the term rape of all meaning.

”

after discussions with the Union and within the committee. It was certainly not the case that the event was cancelled as soon as we became aware of opposition to the talk.’

‘We are not inclined to restrict speech simply because it may offend some or may be seen as controversial.’

The IAS also cited lack of security and resources – and the concern that the talk would stray from the ‘international issues’ Mr. Galloway had been invited to speak on – as reasons for cancelling the event.

Epigram

22.10.2012

4

Duffy opens Bristol Poetry Institute Emily Ford Ellie Taylor News Reporters

The University of Bristol has fallen in the world University rankings

Paul West

Carol Ann Duffy CBE performing at the BPI launch .

Methadone cuts HIV risk, study says Adam McNeil News Reporter

New drug therapy can cut risk of contracting HIV by

54%

hepatitis C, reduces drug related mortality, reduces drug related crime, reduces injecting and other risk behaviour.’

As the debate surrounding OST continues in Britain and across the globe - including in countries such as Russia where its availability is intentionally limited - this study is a significant contribution to the growing base of evidence that supports the use of OST. A 2010 Edinburgh University study found that methadone treatment reduced the risk of death among addicts by 13% per year, and that those addicts who received methadone treatment had a longer life expectancy than those who did not.

“

The BPI aims to bring together a wide audience of poetry lovers from across the university and beyond

”

both Duffy and Sampson left a lasting impression on the audience. Christine Plastow, a Classics student, described Sampson’s playful tunes as ‘creating a sharp contrast to the serious emotion of Duffy’s work’ as well as ‘bringing an evocative atmosphere to

some of the more descriptive poems such as The Christmas Truce and creating a strong emotional connection within the audience’.

Another member of the audience, Rowena Henley, a first-year English student, also saw the reading as ‘more expressive than simply reading the words on a page’.

The sell-out event marked the Institute’s main focus which is to explore poetry from other languages and cultures.

Several events are planned next year such as a public debate in Spring 2013 and an international conference in Summer 2013 - ‘Modernisms: Poetry, Time and Place, 18901920’ - which will bring together scholars to debate the change in poetry from 1890 to Modernism around the world.

The launch was supported by the Bristol Institute for Research in the Humanities and Arts (BIRTHA) and the Public and Ceremonial Events Office (PACE).

TV chef launches Festival of Ideas at Wills Memorial Olivia Lace-Evans News Reporter Celebrity chef and food campaigner Hugh FearnleyWhittingstall recently gave a talk in Wills Memorial Building to launch the partnership between the University of Bristol and the upcoming Festival of Ideas.

Over the next few months the festival and University will host a programme of 200 lectures, debates and conventions discussing a vast array of topics designed to inspire and provoke debate.

Fearnley-Whittingstall explained to the audience his approach to food and discussed his new recipes and food campaigns which have seen him take on Tesco and intensive farming, including his promotion of a more ethical treatment of chickens and sustainable fishing.

The festival, which takes place in association with The Observer, has run annually since 2005 and aims to cover topics from across the academic spectrum.

Addressing issues ranging from the War on Drugs, the cultural impact of film, financial and government policies to historical debates, astronomy and law there is something to excite everyone.

The University of Bristol will be assisting not only on a practical and academic level but also by encouraging student involvement in both producing

and proposing ideas.

David Alder, the Director of Marketing and Communications for the University, told Epigram that ‘the festival and the university have a long history.

The festival has certainly grown both in terms of its variety of events and also in terms of its notoriety. The variety and prominence of the speakers is astounding and the great thing about the festival is that whether you’re a scientist or an arts student there’s something for everyone. We are hoping the festival can become a model for other cities to follow’.

The programme is running from October to January 2013 and includes internationally

acclaimed speakers and academics. Some of the most prominent speakers include fiction author Will Self; scientist

200

The number of events hosted by the Festival of Ideas and author Jared Diamond; film expert David Thomson; psychologist Steven Pinker; journalists Polly Toynbee, David Walker, and Aditya Chakrabortty; broadcaster and writer Jonathan Dimbleby and many more.

Many of the events are free but

the Festival of Ideas are offering free student tickets to two paid events: Schindler’s Ark author Thomas Keneally’s talk about his new novel and journalist and historian Clive Aslet’s discussion of twentieth century conflict from the perspective of a village war memorial. Students will also receive a free drink after the event. To book a place at either event students should email ideas@businesswest.co.uk stating which one they would like to attend.

If students wish to become more directly involved in the festival they should contact David Alder for opportunities to volunteer or to develop ideas for the festival for the future.

Paul West

An international study involving University of Bristol researchers has found that providing drug addicts with substitute drugs like methadone rather than forcing them to give up ‘cold turkey’ can cut their risk of contracting HIV in half.

The study pooled research from across the globe and concluded that this type of therapy – known as opiate substitution therapy (OST) - cuts the risk of drug addicts contracting HIV by 54%.

The principle investigator, Matthew Hickman, a University of Bristol Professor, told Epigram that ‘it is important for local and national policymakers that the evidence based on the effectiveness of drug treatment is highlighted.’

Providing addicts with drugs such as methadone in order to provide safety and stability to their lives, building a strong platform for recovery, is one of the key features of how Britain treats heroin and other injecteddrug addicts today.

However, the policy is controversial.

The Scottish Government has recently set up an investigation into OST following questions over its effectiveness, and the issue received wide coverage when ex heroin addict Russell Brand, entertainer and drugs campaigner, took his case to Westminster.

Brand, quoted in The

Guardian, says that ‘we might as well let people carry on taking drugs if they’re going to be on methadone,’ believing that total abstinence is always a better treatment for addicts.

This study presents a strong case to the contrary. Hickman told Epigram ‘We show that OST [with] methadone and buprenorphine can halve the risk of HIV transmission among people who inject drugs.

‘Other evidence shows that OST reduces transmission of

The Poet Laureate CBE Carol Ann Duffy performed at the Wills Memorial Building on the 10th October as part of the launch of the Bristol Poetry Institute (BPI). Based in the University of Bristol’s Faculty of Arts, the BPI aims to bring together a wide audience of poetry lovers from across the university and beyond to discuss ideas and research.

Before handing over to Duffy, the event- entitled ‘Poetry and Song: A Celebration’- kicked off with an introductory speech from the Director of the BPI, Professor Daniel Karlin, who said the Institute would be a ‘shared space between the university and the city’. He also encouraged students to get involved ‘not just by attending events but by initiating and running them,’ he said.

Duffy was joined by

musician John Sampson who played exotic instruments and melodies as an alternative to the Poet Laureate’s readings.

He also accompanied Duffy on some of the more evocative poems such as Last Post. This emphasised the projects exploration into similarities and overlaps between poetry and other arts such as painting, music and film.

The performances from

Fearnley-Whittingstall launched the Festival of Ideas partnership

Epigram

22.10.2012

5

Mayor contenders seek student vote On the 15th November the people of Bristol will choose the city’s first ever directly elected Mayor. With over 40, 000 students currently living in Bristol, Epigram presents a student’s guide to the 2012 elections.

Why these candidates want the student vote Marvin Rees: Labour

George Ferguson: Independent

7/2

4/7

“

Students have been hit hard by Tory cuts on education and the EMA whilst Lib Dems have betrayed students leaving them with lifelong debt. I will stand up for students and I will make Bristol a world class city with a living Wage, cheaper transport and an arena to support music, sports and culture in the city.

I will stop students being ripped off by introducing a tenants charter and a register of good landlords.

”

“

”

“

I first came to Bristol forty years ago as a medical student and I loved the city so much I made it my home. My three top priorities are: 1) to do everything I can to create jobs and tackle the terrible problem of youth unemployment, 2) to fix Bristol’s public transport system and bring bus fares down to an affordable level and 3) to use my thirty years of experience as a family doctor to help make Bristol a healthier, happier city.

”

Daniella Radice: Green

Corrupt self serving lying thieving Bast’rd: Independent

100/1

33/1

I am immensely proud of our beautiful City, but I believe that too many times it has been left behind: Bristol needs decent, affordable, public transport, an arena for concerts and a superstadium for sporting events. I want to get the very best from the Government, champion our local businesses and jobs, improve our public services and make Bristol the greenest and best City in Britain.

How will the mayor system be different from the one now?

The current Council leader is selected by councillors from their own political party. The Mayor will be directly elected by the people of Bristol.

How will the elected Mayor differ from the Lord Mayor?

The Lord Mayor holds a ceremonial post with no political powers. The Lord Mayor will remain in his postion.

200/1

“

My main priority will be to make Bristol’s public transport cheap, reliable and integrated. I will ensure rented houses meet appropriate standards and promote energy efficiency for rented housing to reduce occupancy costs for tenants. I will raise money directly through issuing bonds, and invest it in Bristol’s transport, renewable energy generation and community buildings to create jobs.

”

What powers will the Mayor hold?

There is some ambiguity surrounding how the powers of the Mayor will differ from the council leader being replaced. It may depend on who the Mayor is - he or she can choose to make a decision as an individual or to delegate to the Cabinet. Once elected, the Mayor will select a Deputy Mayor and between two and 9 Cabinet members.

The Mayor’s Salary According to the Bristol City Council, the Mayor will be paid £51,000 although this will be reviewed later in the year.

The Elections When: 15th November 2012.

Where: Everyone registered to vote should receive a poll card in the post with the address of their local polling station.

How often: Every four years.

“

I will pay every adult resident of Bristol an Unconditional Basic Income of £15,000 every year. This will give you the time and the freedom to do stuff just for the love of it. If you earn extra money doing this stuff, that’s an added bonus. I will fund this Annual Unconditional Basic Income by introducing a tax on all spending. The time has come to eradicate poverty and free the spirit of all Bristolians. This is your chance. Seize it!

The Supplementary Vote (SV) 1) 1st preference votes are counted. A candidate needs 50% of the vote to become Mayor.

If no candidate is successful then the vote enters the second round.

2) The 2nd preference votes of the two leading candidates from round 1 are counted. Whoever received the highest number of combined votes wins. This means that the candidate with the highest number of first

preference votes necessarily win.

”

does

Ladbrokes odds on 15th October

“

The race to become Bristol’s first directly elected Mayor is hotly contended with 12 candidates so far in the running. Out of ten, Bristol was the only city to vote in favour of an elected mayor in the referendum last May. The result indicates the city’s growing disillusionment with Bristol Council - power has changed hands six times in 10 years. What the Mayor will bring to Bristol remains to be seen but Epigram reveals the basics :

4/1

As a graduate of Bristol University and a current trustee of the University of Bristol Union, I’m as aware as anyone of the massive social and economic impact that students have on this city’s life. The election of an independent mayor for Bristol is an opportunity for real change. We can set the city free from the party antics of politicians and work in partnership to make this city even greater.

Geoff Gollop: Conservative

”

Jon Rogers: Liberal Democrat

not

The official list of candidates will be announced on the 23rd October. The other candidates currently in the running are: Tom Baldwin: Trade Unionist and Social Coalition (TUSC) Craig Clarke: Independent Tim Collins: Independent Neil Maggs: Respect Spud Murphy: Independent Andy Thorne: Independent

Wednesday 31st October 7pm til Midnight

Live music Ghoulish cocktails Drink deals Best Hallowe’en costume will win £50 in high street shopping vouchers

Epigram

10.10.2011

6

Free Walking Tour explores ‘Bristory’ Stephanie Rihon News Reporter What started out as a small venture by medical student James Bogie to familiarise university students with Bristol’s history has become TripAdvisor’s third most popular tour of Bristol.

According to Bogie, ‘Walking Bristol’ aims to ‘Give people a greater insight into the city’ as

”

many live in Bristol without having truly experienced the area’s rich historical heritage.

The tour runs every Saturday at 11am from the Marriott Hotel on Park Street. It covers landmarks well-known to students such as Wills Memorial building - often seen as the last great Gothic structure - to those less familiar like the Floating Harbour, where visitors learn about Bristol’s

Alex Bradbrook Senior News Reporter A Bristol engineering mathematics graduate has won one of the most prestigious awards in the European IT sector.

Philip Kingsley, who completed his MEng in July, received the award for Best Information Technology Student in the Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) awards following a competitive process in which technical, presentation and communication skills were assessed by industry experts.

His final-year research project - ‘a 3D haptic-elastic table with multi-touch capabilities’ - was highly praised for some innovative design features, such as the way it permits users to use their entire hand to interact with the device, instead of a single finger.

Its design allows more natural and sophisticated interactions, such as grabbing and throwing features on the screen, rather than just touching and dragging, as on a regular tablet computer or Smartphone.

Project supervisor and senior Engineering Mathematics

YouTube: Philip Kingsley

“

The tour includes the tale of the dog on which the HMV logo is based

famous engineer Brunel.

Bogie told Epigram that ‘Tours are accompanied by charming Bristol anecdotes to help captivate the audience’.

This includes the tale of Nipper, the dog on which the HMV logo is based. Nipper’s master - a set designer - created lavish backdrops for a small theatre on Park Row. After he died a painting of the dog by his brother became an advertisement for a gramophone company. The painting called ‘His Master’s Voice’ was later adopted by HMV as the basis of their logo.

The popularity of Walking Tours is supported by testimonies from fans on the website. Adam, a student, assured potential tourists that ‘The Brizzle story somehow manages to fit over 60,000 years of “Bristory” into a gentle morning stroll’.

‘This tour is great fun – I’d thoroughly recommend it to anyone wishing to see more of Bristol than Bunker, Sainsbury’s and Wills Memorial Building.’

The tour is free of charge and are open to everyone. Visit www.walkingbristol.com.

Student honoured for ‘touch technology’

Philip Kingsley’s product enables users to control the device with their entire hand

lecturer, Dr Jonathon Rossiter, said ‘We are incredibly proud of Philip and his award. This is the perfect recognition for Philip’s dedication and enthusiasm in developing this project’.

Now working at a leading software engineering solutions company, IPL, Kingsley said he ‘Thoroughly enjoyed working on such an exciting project,’

expressing his gratitude to the engineering mathematics department for the support and help he had received.

A YouTube video uploaded

by Kingsley demonstrates the futuristic technology that he developed to win the prize, and explains the engineering required to make such a device come to life.

The video demonstrates the many uses the “hapticelastic table” could have – from simple leisure activities such as gaming, to giving doctors the ability to precisely analyse and manipulate an MRI scan using their hands – and shows just how useful this progression of technology could be in the future.

£5m awarded to Physics Department Isy Orange Laura Webb News Reporters

Flickr: Mark Hillary

The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland

The University of Bristol’s particle physics group - a team of academic staff and PhD students which carries out experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, has been awarded £3.9m from the Science and Technology Facilities Council – a government body that carries out research in science and engineering – while physics lecturer Dr. Jonas Rademacker, has been awarded an individual start-up grant from the European Research Council of €1.4m (£1.1m).

Following the discovery of the Higgs boson this year, Bristol’s particle physicists will embark on a new phase of research at the LHC in Switzerland.

The Higgs boson – often referred to as ‘the God Particle’ – is considered to be fundamental to our understanding of the nature of matter and may solve fundamental questions about the formation of the universe.

The £3.9m grant will enable Bristol’s particle physics group to reconstruct particle detectors, which will allow them to collide particles at double capacity by 2015. Dr. Rademacker’s grant will permit an exploration into the mystery of uneven levels of matter and anti-matter.

Dr. Dave Newbold, head of the particle physics group, told

£3.9m awarded to €1.4m

awarded to

Dr Rademacker

Epigram that ‘2012 has been a major year for physicists following the discovery of the Higgs boson this summer.

‘All our research from now is looking for something new.

This is a very exciting time.’

Dr. Newbold explained how the group was instrumental in the experiments at CERN (which houses the LHC) with at least ten post-doctorate students there gathering data

at any given time.

The group also actively makes new scientific discoveries here in Bristol, through data analysis in the Physics Department.

Dr. Paras Naik, Dr. Rademacker’s Research Assistant, told Epigram of the benefits Dr. Rademacker’s grant will bring.

‘This five-year grant will give Dr. Rademacker more freedom to continue his research and also benefits the rest of the department by decreasing the burden on the rest of the research budget’, he said.

These research grants will benefit not only the particle physics group but students of physics as well.

Fourth year physics undergraduates will now have the opportunity to take part in data analysis as part of their final year projects. New observations have the potential to be groundbreaking.

The Physics Department is keen to share research findings with other departments, like medicine, geology, computer science and engineering, where collaborations are already

developing.

Interested in journalism? Want to write for Epigram News?

Email news@epigram.org.uk or join our facebook group www.facebook.com/groups/epigramnews

Epigram

08.10.2012

Features

Editor: Editor: Tristan Martin Nahema Marchal features@epigram.org.uk features@epigram.org.uk

Editor: Deputy Andrew White HelenaEditor: Blackstone

@epigramfeatures

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Student activism: a vehicle for social change?

Photo: Matt Gibson

Where has our fighting spirit gone? Sam Fishwick reports on today’s students’ disappearing appetite for social activism

Bristol students protesting on Park Street against government cuts. December 2011

Sam Fishwick Features Reporter Bristol’s student body is hardly renowned as a hotbed for political activism, although admittedly it has had its moments. In November 2010, nationwide protests against the threefold rise in tuition fees attracted more than 2,000 student demonstrators to take part in anti-austerity marches through Clifton and Redland, gathering at the Wills Memorial Building and College Green, whilst a similar number took to the streets in February the following year.

Yet these events are becoming

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Today’s students are more occupied with improving their CVs than changing the world

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more isolated in an increasingly apathetic demographic.

Further marches taking place in London in November 2011 barely registered in the south west, whilst the Occupy Bristol camp on College Green was shuffled off with little more than a whimper last January after a public eviction notice was served by Bristol City council.

Today’s students seem to have lost some of their stomach for

a fight.

This loss of appetite is hardly a localised pandemic.

Simmering resentment is still palpable in the UK, but it is gradually being tempered by grim resignation as the public accept the inevitability of the coalition’s austerity measures. This September, just 20 demonstrators gathered in Bloomsbury, Central London, to decry the opening of AC Grayling’s £18,000-a-year New College of the Humanities.

If this were a Western, George Osborne would be casting nervous glances at the foothills, with David ‘Quick Draw’ Cameron muttering darkly ‘it’s quiet, too quiet.’ Nick Clegg would then be poleaxed by a tomahawk, and Native Americans would descend whooping upon the cabinet.

Yet figuratively or otherwise, it’s an unlikely scenario.

The sudden eruption of violence across England’s major cities in August 2011 affected an abrupt shift of national sympathies away from young adult protesters. Prior to last year’s events, the public majority naturally sided with student groups campaigning for a fairer deal on government education.

Now, a real and reasonable

fear of mass escalation at such demonstrations has dampened popular support for even the most peaceful protests.

Another concern is that we have simply grown apart from politics. Certainly, the student forum is no longer basking in the golden summer it enjoyed in the late sixties. Then, thousands of demonstrations took place across the world in 1968 as the post-war generation rose up against homophobia, racism,

social injustice, inequality and the war in Vietnam.

Globalisation, and in particular twenty years of household television, had brought social issues across the planet home to the western world. By way of contrast, the UBU elections this year drew 3,997 voters, a significant but small percentage of the 13,187 undergraduates at University of Bristol. There is little doubt that, in light of the ongoing recession, we live in more pragmatic times. In 2012, the average undergraduate is more occupied with improving his or her curriculum vitae than by scaling clock towers and flour bombing the local police.

If live protests are going a little out of fashion here, recent world events h a v e

called to disperse a rally of several hundred people in Montreal.

There is also reassuring evidence to suggest that perhaps it is the medium rather the manpower that is changing.

The enormous public turnouts that drove the Arab Spring have been much vaunted as evidence for the power social media can

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“Western, If this were David

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‘Quick Draw’ Cameron would mutter darkly ‘it’s quiet, too quiet’

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play in driving a revolution, as pictures posted of the violence in Tunisia on networks such as Twitter and Facebook catalysed the popular response across neighbouring countries.

Less impressive but equally significant consequences of social media pressure have been apparent in the west – Netflix lost 800,000 customers last year after 82,000 negative comments were posted across related social networks by consumers responding to the company’s price increases for its services. The way we respond to the world is changing once again, and the current lull in social activism may be in part a temporary result of this transition. The public has certainly not forgotten the broken promises on the tuition fee pledge made by Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrat Party before the previous election, nor has it forgiven them.

Although their anger is unlikely to boil over on the streets, it will certainly spill into the next election. We may just have our tomahawk after all.

‘#Demo2012: Educate, Employ, Empower’ , the first served as a timely reminder of how effective they can be in getting results. In Canada, the backlash against the student fee hike of 82% proposed by the previous Charest government has been so vitriolic as to force the newly installed Premier to entirely reverse the policy. Not satisfied with this, the CLASSE student group is now to push for free education, with police

student demonstration called by the NUS (National Union of Students) since the 2010 tuition fee protests. will take place on Wednesday 21 November in London.

For more information, visit: https://www.facebook.com/events/259158454193672/ http://www.nus.org.uk/en/campaigns/funding-our-future/ demo2012-educate-employ-empower1/

Epigram

Democracy 2015: Power to the people

Source: British Social Attitudes 2012 Levels of trust have fallen over the past 25 years and, despite some recovery since the MPs’ expenses scandal, remain at a relatively low ebb.

becoming increasingly disengaged from national politics. Clearly the movement aims to tackle this trend, but will it ever gain enough publicity and media coverage to truly make any noticeable difference, or even achieve its aims of getting a non-politician elected into parliament? Whittam, the founder, appreciates these concerns and describes the ‘Exceedingly challenging task that takes us into the realm of the near impossible’, but goes on to suggest that ‘In politics, the near impossible can happen.’ It would

“Do we need to readdress the ‘political class’ of ministers ruling the country? ” certainly appear that he has a colossal task on his hands to achieve his goals, but his fresh approach, belief and determination could yet see him make a significant mark on British politics.

One of the driving forces behind Democracy 2015 is the need to readdress the ‘political class’ of ministers ruling the country who, Whittam argues, ‘Only do politics and don’t know anything about how to run something.’ This is indeed a very contentious issue: do our current crop of politicians really lack worldly experience? Certainly there are many common societal backgrounds amongst ministers, many of whom are ‘Oxbridge’ educated. Is this necessarily a negative thing? Arguably we need to have our brightest men and women leading our country, even if it means that they are all from the same background. Nonetheless, diversity is essential and that is Whittam’s point here. Ultimately Democracy 2015 aims to bring politics to the forefront of

Photo: Flickr/ Peter Davies

On September 4th Andreas Whittam Smith, founder of The Independent, launched his plans for a radical new political movement named Democracy 2015, which aims to get non-politicians into parliament at the next round of elections through a grassroots campaign.

Whittam’s motivation is twofold: not only does he see the trust between the general public and politicians as fractured, he is also disillusioned with the ‘self-serving political class’ that is currently ruling our country.

It is from these concerns that the financial journalist decided to develop Democracy 2015 and attempt to get a person who has ‘done something with their life’ elected into parliament. His first candidate was announced this week as Adam Lotun, a registered disabled ‘family man’, who will contest

the Corby parliamentary by-election on November 15th. In accordance with the themes of Democracy 2015, Lotun has described his manifesto as ‘A fluid document to ensure that comment from the public could be used to improve the base that I started with.’

Whether Lotun will take any substantial share of the vote on November 15th remains to be seen, but his standing at the Corby by-election represents a significant step forward for the movement.

One of the interesting features of Democracy 2015 is that it is open to everybody, which means that students are able to register their interest and potentially play a pivotal role in the development of the movement. While the ideas and motivations behind it are inherently noble, there are certainly questions that need to be asked. One of the most important is whether the campaign is truly realistic when we consider that polls show that the public and particularly the student body are

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Photo: Flickr/ UK Parliament

Spencer Turner Features Reporter

22.10.2012

the lives of ordinary people and not only make us think about it, but also encourage us to actively take part.

Perhaps then, the composition of our government is desirable and in recent times we have seen ‘demos kratos’ - ‘rule of the people’ - lose its meaning. It is possible that politics is no longer of significant importance to many people and is something that we may be detached from. Does the ‘political class’ of our government, as Whittam describes it, really need to be tackled?

Democracy 2015 certainly raises numerous far-reaching questions about the state of our current political system. Whittam should certainly be commended for his dedication to improving diversity and social mobility within government, and also for attempting to bring democracy and parliamentary processes back into public consciousness. It must be asked, however, whether Democracy 2015 is really going to make any significant impression on British politics. We eagerly await May 2015 to find out.

‘Open access’ sparks heated debate in the academic world

Photo: Flickr/ StAcfan

We are all familiar with trawling through JStor and the MetaLib catalogue. But have we considered what’s going on behind the scenes? You may have heard snippets of the debate raging in the academic community recently, with regards to the government’s proposal to make all publicly funded research ‘open access.’

The decision, announced in July, is surely a good thing.

If executed properly, it will mean research carried out by universities and other academic institutions will be readily available online, for everyone. It doesn’t seem too controversial, but why then has this ‘radical’ decision sparked such a heated debate?

The decision to make research available is not provocative in itself. Rather, it is how the policy would be implemented which is causing the tension. There are two options for making research open access - the Gold scheme and the Green scheme.

Photo: Wikipedia/ Igor Mukhin

Lucy Coombs Features Reporter

The Gold scheme means that authors of academic articles would have to shoulder the burden of publication costs.

The academics - rather than the current system of individual or library subscriptions - would be the ones paying the publishers their Article Processing Charges (APC). Considering British universities currently pay £200m a year in subscription

fees to journals, this is an enormous responsibility.

Understandably this has come under heavy fire from all angles. Paul Ayris, director of library services at UCL, argues that this system would make life incredibly difficult for university departments, which ‘will have to find money from existing budgets to meet the charges involved.’ With departmental

funds already stretched so thin, can we afford this? Moreover, the Gold scheme has been recommended by the Finch Group, which has come under attack for being a self-interested stakeholder, representing the concerns of publishers, rather than benefiting the wider community. Despite this, it has been reasoned that this system will mean universities

and researchers will no longer sell their papers exclusively to a select few of the top journals, most likely with higher APC fees. Articles will be exposed to judgement on their merit and content rather than the title of the journal that they appear in.

The second option, still under consideration by the government, is the Green scheme. Under this policy research papers will be made freely available online six to 12 months after they have been accepted for publication by a journal. Though this sounds more promising, it has been argued that it would be fatal for publishers, who make a profit from the journal subscriptions and, as a consequence, for the academic community and research itself.

This debate also needs to be considered on the international stage. Evidently open access would not be exclusively confined to those of us in the UK; the Internet is global.

With huge social benefits to the developing world, anyone with Internet access could keep up to date with cutting

edge scientific research without paying unaffordable subscription fees. The UK is currently leading the debate in open access to research, not only asserting itself as one of the most prolific and important nations for scientific research, but also having the reputation as a visionary and progressive place to undertake research.

Unfortunately, it has been articulated that unless open access to research is adopted as a more global policy, ‘paying to publish’ means it will become far more expensive to commission research in the UK and funds may well be redirected abroad.

With the promising idea of open access in research comes many pitfalls and hurdles.

However, open access has the potential to transform the academic world - which is precisely why it is not a decision to be taken lightly.

Epigram 22.10.2012

10

Mau Mau justice and the legacy of British colonisation Shanice Swales Features Reporter

The Mau Mau Uprising was a military conflict that took place in Kenya between 1952 and 1960 involving a Kikuyu-dominated anti-colonial group called Mau Mau and elements of the British Army.

The Kenya Human Rights Commission estimates that 90,000 Kenyans were executed, tortured or maimed during the movement’s violent repression.

Photo: Flickr/ David Blumenkrants

The recent picture of three frail and elderly figures standing victorious outside the Royal Court of Justice is one which represents a historic precedent.

Able to proceed with their case, which accuses the British government of carrying out torture half a century ago, these individuals are now closer to receiving an apology for the alleged atrocities carried out by the British during the ‘Mau Mau uprising’ between 1952 and 1960. They can now fight to be awarded what they see to be long-awaited damages from the British Government and

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The Mau Mau torture court ruling brings Britain’s colonial past to the forefront of political and historical debate

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compensation for the lifelong injuries allegedly sustained while detained in work camps and being subjected to violent interrogations.

Many are now asking if this will open the floodgates for thousands of claimants who were subjected to mistreatment during the last days of the British Empire. The Foreign Office seems to think so, as it acknowledged that the ruling

A contingent of Mau Mau veterans, attending the funeral of one their most revered leaders, General China, at his farm in Kenya, May 1993

had ‘Potentially significant and far-reaching implications’ and stated that it was planning to appeal.

The lawyer for the claimants, Martyn Day, added that ‘There will undoubtedly be victims of colonial torture from Malaya to the Yemen, from Cyprus to Palestine, who will be reading this judgment with great care.’ If further cases ruled in favour of the claimants, it could potentially cost the British government millions of

pounds in reparations. Caroline Elkins, Historian of Colonial Africa and author of Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, states that monetary worries are unfounded and instead the importance of the case lies in justice and having ‘A truly productive conversation about the dark side of the Empire.’

The discovery last year of thousands of secret documents from the Foreign Office Archives, referring to

thirty seven colonies, brought forward new evidence of torture of detainees and atrocities against the ‘enemies’ of the empire. These files can now be accessed and reveal further controversial episodes within the Mau Mau uprising and also during the Malayan Emergency and evacuation of the Chagos Islands.

This bringd the issue back into the spotlight. Only a few years ago Gordon Brown declared to an audience in

East Africa that ‘The days of Britain having to apologize for its colonial history are over’ and asserted that we should be proud of the empire.

Revisionist historian Niall Ferguson has insisted that Imperial guilt leads to ‘selfflagellation,’ and instead we should focus on the benefits of the empire. But is the view of Britain’s benevolent empire outdated? Often recognised as morally superior to French, German, Portuguese and Dutch

empires - especially in the area of Imperial retreat - do we fall towards looking at our empire through rose-tinted spectacles?

Recent developments may suggest so. Although we cannot turn back the clock, should we, as Elkins suggests, admit to the brutal side of empire?

Does the legacy of empire put Britain in a position of global responsibility? Along with an apology, should aid to former colonies be increased? Currently, the majority of Britain’s foreign aid is sent to Commonwealth nations; the biggest receivers include India (£268m), Pakistan (£216m), Nigeria (£172 m) and Kenya (£94m). But we must ask, does this compensate the individuals who bore the brunt of the troubles during Britain’s retreat from their empire?

Only this year India proclaimed it no longer needed this aid, while Indian Economist Jayati Ghosh said ‘The UK wants to feel like ruler of the world,’ adding that the aid benefits the UK more than it does India and ‘makes a negligible different to relieving poverty.’ It has even been suggested that aid is simply another part of 21st century imperialism.

Although the majority of the British empire fell over half a century ago, many will be looking intently at the case of the three individuals caught up in the Mau Mau uprising. The result of the dispute is sure to shed new light on the history of British imperialism, along with the future of ex-colonies and their relationship with Britain.

Mia Zur-Spiro Features Reporter Once upon a time in ancient Sumerian, ‘cunt’ described a spiritual and empowered woman. Now it is the only word left in the English language with the power to shock, due to its supposed vulgarity.

This evolution of language epitomises the woman and her sexuality’s fall from grace.

Once revered, now the subject of derogation. New and predominantly snide nicknames have since materialized ‘pussy’, ‘gash’, ‘furry axe-wound’ - anything so long as men and women alike can avoid addressing the vagina.

‘I have never understood why female sexuality has always been targeted’ confesses American author and leading spokeswoman of third wave feminism Naomi Wolf, ‘but I now believe it is due to the brain-vagina connection.’

In her latest book Vagina: A New Biography, Wolf brings to light new and overseen

neuro-scientific discoveries, concluding that ‘the vagina is the gateway to female empowerment.’

This sounds about right considering the three chemicals released by the female orgasm dopamine, oxytocin and opioids - are responsible for ‘confidence, creativity, motivation and a sense of ecstasy.’ I’ll have what she’s having.

‘When you realize that the vagina is the mediator of these feminist mind states, then you get why it’s been targeted throughout the history of patriarchy’; ‘The vagina is a woman’s superpower,’ thus ‘to suppress the vagina is to suppress the woman.’

Wolf has provided the

primer for why the vagina has historically always been an ideological battleground.

Whether it is rape used as a weapon of war in the Congo, amongst many other areas of conflict, ‘invading the vagina in Virginia’ with compulsory, medically, unnecessary, transvaginal ultrasounds or the forced virginity tests performed on Egyptian female protesters during the Arab Spring, the vagina is consistently used to control a woman’s right to her life and her body and to manipulate her sense of self.

In Victorian Britain, the Contagious Diseases Acts, 1864, 1866 and 1869 legislated the rounding up of women assumed to be prostitutes, who were then held in hospitals for nine months under lock and key continuously subjected to forced vaginal exams. Why? The British Government feared for the health of their military and scapegoated ‘diseased’ prostitutes for rising STD rates.

‘This has had a lasting imprint on all of us. When the issue of rape comes up, we feel

“If I have ever been sexual, the state won’t protect me, they’ll lock me up, take me away.” It’s deep. It’s a deep generational trauma.’

Wolf hopes by exposing how much female sexuality differs from male sexuality in terms of neural functioning, she can change how rape is viewed.

‘Rape, including so called “non-violent rape” stays in the female brain and body for years. It changes how your Autonomic Nervous System operates, the reality being that it leads to constellations of medical symptoms: tinnitus, postural and balance problems - they literally can’t stand their ground...survivors of sexual abuse are literally more easily pushed over, perceptual problems, anxiety…the list is endless,’ she explains.

‘There is this legal system that assumes if he didn’t beat you up then it’s just a sex act that you didn’t want and has no measurable life altering consequence. But there is no such thing as “legitimate rape” and we need to see significant

Photo: Flickr/ cqrulmqre

A private question: Who’s afraid of Vagina Wolf ?

changes in attitudes and treatments provided to victims.’

The problem isn’t just female sexuality being slandered when it shouldn’t be, but that women’s desire and pleasure aren’t valued.

‘When you’re handed out the pill like M&Ms there isn’t a giant warning sign saying that you will lose up to half your libido.’

The fact that we’re dished out the pill or antidepressants which literally ‘dials down female sexual desire’ without adequate warning, demonstrates how female sexuality is simply not respected as an end in itself in our society.

Despite each woman being wired entirely differently in her pelvic innervation we are not encouraged to explore and know our own, very individual, body.

This results in so many women judging themselves because they can’t take pleasure in the ways wthey think they should.

Women are too often alienated from their vaginas and desires, and are ashamed to communicate what they want.

Are private parts intrinsically private, or is this the reflection of a society in which women feel censored from asserting what they want for fear of rejection?

Maybe it’s time to say ‘I like my vagina and this is what I want’.

Comment

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Editor: Joe Kavanagh

Deputy Editor: Nat Meyers

comment@epigram.org.uk

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22.10.2012

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Can students and locals co-exist?

A new University fund offers local residents up to £250 to organize events which include their student neighbours. But can students ever fully integrate with their community?

Rob Stuart

A scheme like this appears to be a totally viable way of building bridges between the students of the university and local residents. Admittedly, the lifestyle that young adults adopt when living on their own for the first time is hardly compatible with that of their older neighbours. However, by giving out small grants for low-key events, the least that can be expected from this programme is that some form of mutual understanding and hopefully respect - can be cultivated between two completely different groups of people.

It is a well-known fact to the outside world that students are amongst the most irritating groups of people in the United Kingdom, if not the world.

Pseudo-intellectuals, quasi-liberals and new-age conservatives represent just a tiny portion of a huge swarm of insecure, amorphous and conceited young individuals.

What’s more, university is the key facilitator in giving cheap alcohol to the masses, which in turn allows all of these people to become even more exasperating than they were when sober. Now, as a student myself, I would beg to differ, but even this would ultimately corroborate the argument ‘non-students’ hold that we are self-righteous and uncompromising narcissists.

So, it appears necessary to show the world that we, as students, can actually be nice people. Surely it won’t hurt to spend one evening out of the hundreds we have as undergraduates to display our sensitive sides to the community? If the only time they hear us is at four o’clock in the morning shouting expletives and other niceties, then it wouldn’t hurt in the

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Some loudmouth students might come to understand that the world does not revolve around them.

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epigram.org.uk/comment

slightest to let them hear our real voices.

Remember, these people actually live here. With real jobs. And marriages. And a mortgage. Not degrees.

How can someone with four children and a 5 o’clock wakeup call every morning ever have sympathy for somebody with a couple of lectures a week?

The only way to harbour an understanding between the residents and students is to establish formal events to allow casual conversation and lighthearted chitchat. In this way, we might actually see some of these loudmouths posing as undergraduates understand that the world doesn’t revolve around them and in turn tune their behavior to a more considerate setting.

This scheme is also able to burst the ‘Bristol bubble,’ that, as a first-year, has already become manifest in my first few weeks. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there appears to be little, if any, substantial interdependence between the locals and the students.

It would be a shame to see thousands of students leave every year without ever having to got to know the city beyond the confines of taxi drivers and bouncers outside Bunker.

But, as far as I’m concerned, it appears that for many, their scope will remain that parochial. A little bit of witty repartee over a mug of brew is an excellent way to get to know someone better. Considering most of us are living here for at least three years, it would be somewhat comforting to know that we could leave with a more rounded image of what the city’s all about.

Finally, it seems necessary to consider the logistics of the project. As the grants are only worth up to £250, there is little to argue - on a financial level at least - against its conception and execution. When the Council is entitled to fine students up to £5000 for disruptive behavior, it seems rational to sacrifice a relatively paltry amount of cash in return for preventing a much larger bill coming through your letterbox.

No

George Robb

At the risk of sounding either defeatist, elitist, or a combination of the two, I cannot see the sense in setting aside significant sums of money to help fund such events.

For years the University, with its monopolisation of the Stoke Bishop area and its exclusive student nights, has been perceived as a separate entity from the city which surrounds it. In some ways Bristol has developed around this. Although insular, there are clear benefits for students and locals alike as a result of this system. It creates a comfortable environment in which we can drink, dance and vomit without the fear, however unfounded it may be, of unprovoked, prejudiced attack. For the various bars and clubs which are dotted around the city, the student population also provides a reliable market

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The money could be better spent on student requirements, such as lowering the cost of Sports Passes.

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Yes

as they spend the taxpayer’s hard-earned cash. No doubt some of this will trickle back into residential areas through taxation and local council, and personally I do not feel that there is any point in spending sums of money trying to fix something if there is nothing broken in the first place.

The Community Fund consists of money which we will pay but will seldom see.

It is ridiculous to assume that people our age would rather go to a tea party or a street fair than a nightclub filled with like-minded friends. The money could be better spent on student requirements, such as lowering the cost of Sports Passes - which could be bought for the same price as one of these integration events. If this were the case, the increase in muscle-bound Adonises walking around

would certainly make us more attractive to the public’s eye, as well as being a thing of immediate health benefit to the people who shell out £9,000 a year in fees.

A more successful way to integrate the two communities would be to alter the public’s perception of the University, and steps taken to even the public/state school ratio have undoubtedly helped deconstruct the idea that Bristol is exclusively for the financially elite.

However, one cannot help but feel that throwing money to the locals in an attempt to make them like us is counterproductive.

Not only will it make the years of work spent trying to improve the University’s image obsolete but it is fundamentally hypocritical in the sense that we are treating the local residents as hirelings in an attempt to create common ground.

The only possible situation in which the scheme could be of use would be in helping the occupants of student houses and apartments meet their neighbours, but even this has its flaws. Firstly, how will the University ensure that all the money granted will be spent by the recipient on the proposed event rather than hoarding some for their own ends?

Although slightly cynical, if I had to listen to the thudding bass filtering through my walls - as many residents have complained - then I would consider it just compensation.

Secondly, just because some people have played some party games and eaten a burger together, it does not mean that all the problems will be solved.

Students will still be students, and the neighbouring parents, young professionals and children will still find discarded fast-food wrappers and drunken shouts a nuisance.

Although the Fund has its heart in the right place, it will result in a draining of funds, a battering to the University’s reputation, and an increase in poorly lubricated, awkward conversations between what are two entirely different social groups.

Epigram

22.10.2012

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Plans on the West Coast Mainline are derailed

James Day From Glasgow Central to London Euston with stops at both Liverpool and Birmingham en route – the West Coast mainline is a behemoth amongst the UK’s transport infrastructure.

Passenger numbers have more than doubled over the past six to seven years, to a point where the 30m mark is within touching distance. Virgin Trains, who have been running the line since 1997, reported record sales of £753m for the year up to March 2011, with a whopping £110m going to the government.

So how did we get here?

How did we get to a point at which the most conservative estimates for damages incurred sits at £40m, a sum inevitably drawn from the taxpayers’ pockets?

The answer is - I have to say - rather galling. In order to lay it out plainly, it would be wise to elucidate some

technicalities before subjecting the appropriate parties to criticism.

When a bidding contest for franchising rights is run, the governing body - in this case the Department of Transport (DoT) - puts together a model of the financial implications involved in running it. This model acts as a benchmark which calculates the risk of estimates being met, of the government being paid the correct fees and/or the bidder going bust and having to forfeit the franchise before the specified period comes to an end. The DoT model was handed over to four bidders: the Dutch train operator - Nederlandse Spoorwegen, a joint bid from the French transport group Keolis and the French stateowned railway company SNCF, Virgin Rail and First West Coast - a subsidiary of FirstGroup, the UK’s largest rail operator.

It wasn’t long before Virgin told the DoT that the model wasn’t worth the piece of paper it was written on; errors ranged from conflating actual figures with estimates to doublecounting. Richard Branson dubbed the process ‘flawed’ and ‘insane’ but DoT, clearly unperturbed by heavy criticism from a company which has done more than display its mettle over the past years, ignored

them and, on 15 August 2012, announced their intentions to offer a 13 year contract to FirstGroup.

All one has to do to get an idea of just how poor the DoT model was is to compare the effect it had on the amount to be paid in bonds with that of the model that Virgin subsequently produced.

FirstGroup were organising their bid based on predictions that they could move 66m passengers per year by 2026 whilst Virgin went with a more conservative 49m. Clearly the former were aware that they would have to take risks in order to better a bid from their oh-so-competent competitors.

Nonetheless FirstGroup’s £200m in bonds plus a £45m contingency was dwarfed by the £600m suggested by the more accurate model. Such a gaping discrepancy would expose the taxpayer to an unpalatable level of risk if FirstGroup were to go under as National Express did in 2009 with the East Coast Mainline.

However, unlike then, now is a time when reducing the deficit is at the forefront of everyone’s minds, the last thing that the government want to do is run the line with Directly Operated Rail; the government owned company that took over after

the National Express debacle.

What looks more likely is that the government will have to pay Virgin to run the line rather than vice-versa - whilst they organise reimbursement for those parties who spent months and millions putting their bids together.

What of the inevitable plea that ‘it was all a big mistake of which no one was aware?’

Firstly, when a sum likely to be near the £100m mark is the cost to the taxpayer of your mistakes, you should know.

Furthermore, you should know if the venture you are partaking in has the potential to dissolve into such a quagmire. Secondly, stating that you have total confidence in a model’s ability to withstand legal action then deferring on signing a contract that would bring forth such action - as the transport secretary, Greening did - is somewhat suspicious.

Moreover, with Labour closing the gap in the opinion polls, one wonders if things could get much worse for the calamitous coalition. Surely, the paradigm characteristic of poor governance is an inability to maintain a contract? And isn’t the paradigm characteristic of a poor - or at least, a short-

lived - populist government an inability to prove their stereotype false?

Well, the whole fiasco is symptomatic of the kind of institutionalised arrogance that ‘bankers’ were being chastised for in the wake of the recession; the far-toofamiliar rhetoric concerning bonuses and ‘a total lack of a sense of responsibility’ could seamlessly be applied to the case in hand. With bids as eye-wateringly huge as £13bn this was a job for the top professionals and industry experts, not civil servants who were so out of their depth that it’s miraculous to find that they don’t have gills. Consider also that a petition calling for

reassessment, with 150,000 signatures on it, was ignored after FirstGroup initially won the contract; the sheer bigheadedness of it all becomes yet more apparent. But unlike the incessant banker bashing that has gone on in recent months, no big heads have rolled, or even little ones for that matter!

Three civil servants have been suspended and you can bet your bottom buck that the ministers responsible are going nowhere soon. Meanwhile the taxpayer bears the brunt of their incompetency.

Occupy Downing Street, anyone?

U.S. Elections 2012 DonkeyHotey

Gareth Reilly

feature technology companies like Google and Microsoft and universities such as Harvard. In contrast to Levitt and Dwubner’s theory, I think it’s fairly safe to say that investment banks will donate to the man supporting fewer regulations on their operations, even if he is more likely to lose.

But why do these candidates need such a large budget to run for office? Astonishingly, those cheesy television commercials, ending with the notorious ‘I’m [insert name here], and I approve this message’ statement, eat up over half of all campaign spending.

In the UK, campaign ads are free and very limited, which would explain the remarkable difference in election spending between the two nations.

Surely the American people could live without those biased ads? It’s important to note that the target audience

of these commercials is the independent voters of the ten swing states. In other words, over half of Obama and Romney’s campaign budget is spent to win the votes of just 5 to 10 per cent of the nation, a statistic that is sometimes reduced even further to 3 to 4 per cent to account for poor voter turn out.

Yes, these votes will make or break a candidate’s bid for president, but I find it hard to believe that these TV ads are actually effective in wooing independent voters.

My evidence is the independent agenda itself, moderate in nature and put off by partisan politics. So surely an advert promoting a solely liberal or conservative cause would fail to appeal to this group of voters.

It seems much more likely that the independent voters are to be more influenced by moderatecontrolled informative sources,

ges

Money buys elections. Or so it would seem. Why else would the U.S. presidential candidates work continually throughout the election to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for their campaigns? It is predicted that the total cost of the U.S. elections, including congressional elections, is to be $5.8 billion in 2012. This amount has been trivialised by being equated to the amount Americans spend on crisps in a year, but it is also 120 times the cost of the UK general election

in 2010.

So why do American politicians spend so much on their campaigns? And how often does it actually secure them with the winning ticket?

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner explored this thought in their book Freakonomics. They suggested that the candidate most likely to win is the candidate that will attract the most money, which has created the common misconception that money buys elections.

But, looking at the key donors to both Obama and, in particular, Romney, it becomes clear that a donor will fund the candidate who has their interests at heart, regardless of the more popular candidate.

For example, the breakdown of Romney’s top contributors is quite simply a list of Wall Street banks, such as Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.

Obama’s top contributors

Gareth Reilly on The Role of Campaign Funding in the US such as the presidential and vice-presidential debates that have been occurring this month. These could be the true game changer, exemplified by Romney receiving a surge in points in the polls, after the first presidential debate on the 3rd of October where he found himself quite well received by the public.

The culture of campaign spending, whether or not it influences the election results, also subjects a campaign to a huge amount of pressure to focus a significant amount of time and energy into fundraising from extremely wealthy donors. Time and energy that could be better placed elsewhere, especially in the case of an election with an incumbent candidate, such as the 2012 presidential election; as a result, people question why Obama spends so much time conducting fundraisers

when he should be running the nation.

The inherent flaw of the electoral finance system in the US is revealed by considering who actually benefits from the huge sums of money pumped into the campaigns. Given that half of this money is spent on television ads, broadcast stations stand to benefit a substantial amount during election year. Millionaires and billionaires also come out on top. Although money spent rather than money earned, the financing by the super rich gives them a powerful tool of influence in these elections.

This is more powerful than the single vote given to the average citizen, who ironically falls quite low on the list of those who benefit from campaign finance.

www.epigram.org.uk/ categories/comment

Epigram

14

22.10.2012

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Time’s up: Examination boards have failed the test In light of the recent GCSE controversy, Sophie Jarvis makes the case for the nationalisation of exam testing

Even if you haven’t been a victim of the decidedly dodgy marking of exams or been faced with the ludicrously expensive re-mark charges, you can’t escape the media’s heavy criticism of the exam boards.

So, what exactly are the problems regarding exam boards? The privatised, profithunting businesses have filled the headlines due to seemingly unfair marking; in reaction to this, the exam boards have simply blamed inadequate teachers for the fall in A/A* grades attained at GCSE level.

Specifically, AQA have recently shot into the limelight due to a large number of pupils getting lower grades than expected. Teachers complained that essays of the same standards attained different marks, thus rendering it hard to decipher what the examiners were looking for. This has led teachers across the UK to criticise the mark schemes, which are vague and open to

“

Nationalization will ensure that the right pupils acheive the right grades.

established fact that is rarely probed. By this method the markers are much cheaper per script and this therefore improves the profit margin.

At an extreme, one may even go as far as to suggest that AQA may have deliberately encouraged under-marking in order to increase the demand for remarks and thus gain more revenue. After all, any private firm aims to maximise profits over everything else, it seems nowadays. The objectives of the firm are starkly contradictory; profit maximisation versus professional, ethical conduct.

There is also an income discrimination.

Those in higher socio-economic classes will be more able to commit to spending money on remarks, no matter how speculative, whereas those from lowerincome families would certainly be more frugal when

considering the price. Let us not forget that it is children’s futures that are being toyed with here.

So how can the system be improved, the conflicts of interest removed and a level playing field created? How do we inject trust and fair play into this significant and highly influential profession?

I propose that the exam boards are nationalised, in order to ensure fairer marking and the right pupils achieving the right grades. Although it could be argued that with nationalisation comes more paperwork than the students’ revision itself, not to mention the cost of training examiners, I maintain that profit should not be the main incentive. As a result of this, better-quality markers would be employed, thus giving fairer grades, and if papers were submitted for

re-marks there would be no fianncial pressure to keep the grade the same. We may also see an increase in the standard of exams and utility in the world of work, if the boards were to be nationalised. The government would want to maximise social welfare by developing exams, as opposed to keeping money as profit.

“

boards within the same subject will be eliminated; previously this led to each exam board making their exam easier so it would attract more schools and therefore more profit.

Albeit, the EBacc does come with its problems. Although we may see more consistency with grades, one has to realise that exam boards themselves may continue to mess up, and continue to charge ludicrous fees for remarks. While it may stop a race to the bottom, what if an exam board in a particular subject is really awful? It would be impossible to redress and impossible for schools to switch.

Although there are no plans in line for nationalisation to happen, teachers are protesting against such appalling marking. We can only hope that nationalisation gets put on the agenda.

I maintain that profit should not be the main incentive.

“

Sophie Jarvis

ambiguous interpretation.

There are three potential problems with the current exam boards. Firstly, there is a significant conflict between financial interest and professional duty for the exam board and the examiners themselves. Exam boards operate a system in which - if a remark is requested and your grade does not change - the exam board gets to keep your money. However, if there is a change in grade, then the pupil receives their fee of £40-50 back. Clearly, as private firms seeking to maximise profit, they are incentivised not to change your grade; perhaps this is why we rarely see successful remark stories. Naturally examiners have a professional and ethical obligation to the students but the potential conflict in objectives is very apparent.

In a profession which creates the mould for a child’s future this dilemma is bizarre, and this conflict of interest should simply not exist.

Secondly, the competency of the examiners warrants some scrutiny; not only do we hear of heinous mistakes in exam papers but we also hear of occasional dramatic changes to student’s grades – +38 UMS being the largest leap I’ve ever heard of. Perhaps exam boards such as AQA are inadequately teaching examiners and cutting corners in order to reduce costs and maximise profit. It is a common misconception that all papers are marked by skilled examiners – they are not. Senior examiners draw up marking guides and most papers are marked by lower skilled individuals: this is an

The introduction of the EBacc in 2015 will perhaps help eliminate the lucrative and corrupt nature of the exam boards. There will be one exam board per subject, so competition between exam

“

A royal surprise as Kate titillates the nation Following Epigram’s discussion of The Sun’s Page Three, Ailsa Cameron considers a recent case of media hypocrisy

Jugs. Melons. Bazookas..

Puppies. Nunga-nungas. Half of us have them, most of us have fed on them, and a significant few like them big, fake and bouncy. From the greasiest lads’ mag editor to the Black Eyed Peas, everyone has their own special term of endearment for the illustrious bosom. And, most importantly, just about anyone with an internet connection

have even got them out in the first place! Yes, how shocking that Kate Middleton might do as she wishes on her own holiday, with her own breasts. The Daily Mail even squealed their way through a poll asking women if they were audacious enough to get their knockers out abroad.

One woman assured readers in her response that, though she would take her top off to prevent tan lines, she would never do so in front of children. Thank God for that! They’ve probably only just gotten over the trauma of suckling on them to stay alive.

Of course, in a world where breasts are both operating as milk glands, and as pointless, page three funbags for the pleasure of ageing Sunreaders, no doubt it was going

to get confusing. Where the empowered female might feel the urge to reclaim her breasts as natural symbols of maternity and sexuality, the Kelvin McKenzies in the room retort ‘cor that’s a nice rack, bet they’ll shift a few copies.’

“

Such invasive treatment is reserved for the likes of Tulisa and Peaches Geldof.

“

Ailsa Cameron

has instant access to a dynamic range at the click of a button.

So why, one must ask, do we fuss about the breasts of the Duchess of Cambridge?

The case of the photos of Kate Middleton extends far beyond the mere offence of the naked boob. A combination of an illegal invasion of privacy and a dismal argument that their publication was in the public interest makes for a pretty depressing state of affairs. And profiting from someone else’s body is a very grim business.

But the British media’s reaction that the pictures were toxic, and that the content was hideous and ghastly, was the ultimate hypocrisy.

How indecent!

How humiliating! How shameless to

Or not, as the case may be. Enter Britain’s favourite porn baron, Richard ‘Dirty

Des’ Desmond. Owner of such esteemed publications as The Daily Express, The Daily Star and OK!, and television channels Television X and Red Hot TV. When, earlier this month, another of his papers, The Irish Daily Star, printed the photos of the Duchess, Des was angry. Really, publically angry.

He threatened to close it down.

What’s with the hostility, Des? After all, this is the proprietor of the channel, which in 2004 broadcast Cosmetic Surgery Live, on which pornographic actress Cathy Barry underwent a live breast enlargement.

But the press banged on. And on. ‘It’s smutty!’, they seemed to say; such invasive treatment is reserved for the likes of Tulisa and Peaches Geldof. It

must not touch the pedestal of saintliness on which they have placed Kate Middleton. And to be titillated by the idea of such images is to be the worst kind of pervert.

It was an expert lesson in how to make the humble breast appear much saucier and more exciting than it actually is, a challenge such publications have relished for years. The truth is, by bloating their showbiz pages with mock indignation, the press did its best to satisfy any guilty fascination we might have with Kate’s boobs. And thus, triumphantly, made money out of them: just like any magazine that published the damn things in the first place.

Epigram

22.10.2012

Science

Editor: Mary Melville

@epigramscienceandtech

scienceandtech@epigram.org.uk

Asteroid mining: fiction or reality?

Callum Muir Technology Reporter Planetary Resources is a new company founded by Eric Anderson, an experienced

aerospace engineer, and Peter Diamandis, of X PRIZE, a nonprofit organisation that aims to bring about innovation in order to benefit humanity.

The company intends to put space to more tangible use.

Their audacious plan: mining

asteroids. The obvious questions are how and why.

Let’s start with why. Asteroids have two very precious resources in great abundance. The first are platinum group metals, which are used in a number of medical devices. A single 500m

asteroid could hold up to one and a half times the amount of the world’s reserve. This is because the majority of heavy metals on Earth have sunk to the core, out of reach, while they are spread much more evenly in an asteroid. The second, and most important resource is water. It costs about $4500 to

“

A single 500m asteroid could hold up to one and a half times the amount of the world’s reserve

”

NASA

get a single kilogram of matter into Earth’s orbit, and a single human needs about one and a half litres of water a day to stay hydrated, which is $6000 a day per person. Water obtained from asteroids could cut costs if used elsewhere in space, for example on the International Space Station. Water can also be split into its component elements: hydrogen and oxygen, which are used in rocket fuel.

In order to take advantage of these valuable supplies, the team at Planetary Resources

first need to find an asteroid.

The largest concentration of asteroids in the solar system is in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, which is far away by anyone’s standards. However, there is a crop of asteroids a lot closer to home: near-Earth asteroids. These stay in an orbit close to that of the Moon’s for up to six months. As mentioned before, getting matter into orbit is an extremely expensive, not to mention risky, endeavour. In fact, moving around in space is significantly easier than actually getting there. Therefore accessing a near-Earth asteroid would be much easier than getting to the Moon, even if the latter is an easier target.

Finding an asteroid that is worthwhile to visit is the first part of the plan. To facilitate this, the company is developing a number of satellites, the Arkyd series, planned to locate, intercept and survey potential asteroids. So far, only the first phase of this plan is anywhere near completion, with contracts signed with Virgin Galactic to ferry lots of the Arkyd-100 series satellites into orbit. Interestingly, the company is looking at raising some extra money through Kickstarter, a popular crowdfunding website. Whether this is a marketing gimmick or

if it is a legitimate way to raise funds has yet to be seen. While exploiting the resources found in space might be an expensive task, the company already has a number of wealthy investors, including Eric Schmidt and Larry Page of Google and the film director James Cameron.

It won’t be evident for a number of years yet whether this venture will pay off, but there has recently been a lot of buzz around the space industry.

With great technical feats such as the landing of Curiosity, it’s not beyond the realms of

“

It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that an asteroid could be mined costeffectively

”

possibility that an asteroid could be mined cost-effectively, and with the end of the space shuttle and rise of companies like Virgin Galactic and SpaceX, it’s becoming more likely to be achieved in the private sector.

Appsolutely vital : Five student must-haves Cass Horowitz Technology Reporter With almost everyone having an iPhone, iPad or some other app-friendly device, this article is designed to make your phone more then just a distraction.

However, with so many apps now available from the various stores it can be difficult to cipher out the good from the bad. With that in mind, here is a list of what we think are the five apps every student should download in order to organise and improve their lives.

1. Good Reader

2. Epicurious

3. iStudiez Pro

4. Penultimate

This app is perfect for anyone who is fed up with printing out pages and pages of lecture slides.

With this app you can download the lectures directly on to your device and it supports all sorts of file type. What’s more you can even highlight and annotate the slides on your iPad or iPhone. Although, yes, it means you have to be that guy who brings the iPad to class, in the long term it will save you time and money. It is well worth the £2.99 it will cost you - especially considering all that print credit it will save you.

Students are notoriously lazy when it comes to cooking, but for those of you who want to eat more then just pizza and chicken kievs this is the app for you. Epicurious is an online recipe book with over 30,000 recipes from various websites. It has a great search feature which allows you to choose a main ingredient - i.e beef, bacon, duck etc. - and a region in the world, it will then find recipes that match your selection and display them alongside ratings and pictures. There are lots of recipe apps out there but this one is not only really easy to use but also free.

Free

I usually hate any app or product that puts an ‘i’ in front of a badly spelt word in order to be trendy, but this might be an exception. iStudiez is a calendar app that is tailored for students. It allows you to input the term dates and then store all your lectures and seminars for each term.

Although the app is designed to facilitate entering in all of

As the name might suggest this is a really useful handwriting app that is currently only available for iPads. You can use it to take down random thoughts, share ideas or even just to draw pictures of people in your lecture. It prides itself on the realism of the ink effect and supports images, which can then be annotated or drawn over. Once you’ve completed your various scribbling, the app allows you to create folders to store them or you can even share them using all the usual methods. For some this may seem pointless but for others I’m sure it will be priceless.

0.69p

£2.99

Google maps:

Waze app:

Bizarrely this app was recommended by Apple themselves as a good alternative to thier own faulty app.

Go to the google maps mobile site on your phone and click the handy box that pops up prompting you to add the mobile app to your home page.

This app works really well in big cities like Bristol. It is also excellent at warning about traffic jams. Even better then this, it’s free so worth a look.

flikr: William Hook

Nokia Map app:

this information - it allows you to choose how regular a class is and where it is etc. - it still takes a long time to set up. That said, once you’ve done it once it can be your organiser for the rest of the year, ensuring you will never miss a deadline again.

0.69p

It would feel strange to write this list and not have a game included. For me nothing beats Tiger Woods golf. Firstly, I don’t even like golf but this game is highly addictive and looks great on the ipad. It’s got lots of different game modes and so will keep you going on those quiet nights - or days - in. Look out for the fairly regular EA games sales, as when I got this app it was free. That said iPad users should consider splashing out, after all it’s still cheaper then a cinema ticket and I guarantee you’ll be ferociously swiping at your iPad for weeks.

£069

Flickr: timdifford

Three free alterternatives to the new Apple maps...

5. Tiger Woods PGA Tour

Epigram

22.10.2012

15

Silent Spring: Is it too little, too late?

Nick Reiss Science Reporter

“ Is the issue no longer

pesticides, but deforestation, desertification and the melting ice caps?

”

such groups as Greenpeace and

flickr: The Justified Sinner

The 50th anniversary of a book, often hailed as one of the greatest and most influential scientific books of all time, will inevitably pass without any sort of furore. Half a century ago, during the presidency of John F Kennedy, Silent Spring was published, a book arguably as important now as it was back then. Rachel Carson’s controversial 1962 documentation of the effects of pesticide use on the ecology has since been credited for launching the contemporary environmental movement.

This movement has spawned

Sterling College

Friends of the Earth as well as recently becoming prominent in the environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Al Gore, the influential former US Vice President and presenter of this film, was reported to treasure a framed photo of Rachel Carson. Among the assortment of famous politicians and celebrities to adorn his office wall, the author of Silent Spring stands out.

In an introduction to the 1992 edition of the book, Gore said ‘Rachel Carson was one of the reasons that I became so conscious of the environment and so involved with environmental issues ... Carson has had as much or more effect on me than any, and perhaps than all of them together.’

Amongst other criticisms, the book harshly attacked the use of DDT, a commonly used organochlorine insecticide.

Once consumed by insects, the DDT molecule causes spasms and eventual death. Carson introduced the idea that this chemical was not only toxic to all sorts of wildlife but a threat to human health as well.

Despite its great effectiveness at fighting malaria, DDT was linked to disruption of the human endocrine system and some cases of foetal toxicity.

Silent Spring was incredibly effective in gaining great public support by use of its real-life examples portraying the harm the pesticides were doing on the ecology of certain areas. For instance, in Michigan, attempts to rid a group of elm trees of beetles by spraying DDT led to the subsequent death of the robins who frequented the trees. The title of the book itself alludes to this, evoking concerns of a spring without birdsong.

Carson’s vocal criticism of the chemical companies for spreading disinformation about such effects caused

rumblings in the industry, as well as filtering up to the top of politics. In 1962, when President Kennedy was asked whether he had commissioned government officials to look into the issue, his response was: ‘Yes, and I know they already are. I think particularly, of course, since Miss Carson’s book.’ The evidence portrayed in the book, combined with the subsequent large public outcry, led to an investigation into the effects of DDT and other pesticides on the environment. Many view Silent Spring as the first and instrumental step of a process that led to the complete ban of DDT in the US in 1972. Up until that point more than 600 000 tonnes of the insecticide had been produced by American chemical companies.

Since her death in 1964, Rachel

Carson has attracted criticism from groups claiming the ban on DDT caused an increased prevalence of malaria.

“The

more we understand about the fragility of the environment, the more we need to act

”

Furthermore, some have stated that Silent Spring overexaggerated the effect of DDT on wildlife and the ecology.

They claim that the benefits of the insecticide far outweighed the harm caused. Carson never once called for the complete ban on pesticides, nor did she ever portray herself as an ecowarrior; she was a biologist calling for better responsibility for the environment.

Have the apparent successes of Silent Spring and, more recently, An Inconvenient Truth encouraged the discussion of current environmental issues?

Recent evidence shows that people seem weary of reading depressing newspaper articles about the environment and are stubborn towards changing their ways. These attitudes may well have led to a feeling in the media that people don’t want to know about issues that one day may affect every person on the planet.

Despite the lack of columns in national newspapers and reports on the television, care for our natural environment is as important now as it has ever been. The more we understand about the fragility of the environment and the results of our actions on it, the more we need to act.

Rachel Carson fully understood the idea of ecosystems and the knock-on consequences our mistakes and failures have on it. Yet, are we in a better place now than we were 50 years ago? Or is the issue no longer pesticides, but deforestation, desertification and the melting of the ice caps? Silent Spring seems just as relevant now as ever but I wonder if it will be a book, email or tweet that wakes people up to the issues of today.

Venturefest Bristol 2012

Communicate Conference

What: Innovation showcases, inspirational speakers, worshops and pitching sessions where delegates can pitch their technological ideas. Plus its free if you register.

Where: UWE Conference Centre, Frenchay Campus, BS34 8QZ

What: Communicate is an enviromental conference that takes place every year. This year is it’s tenth anniversary and it will be based in Bristol. The conference will be looking at the next 10 years for people and nature. Students can apply for a reduced pass.

When: 7th November 2012, 9am - 6pm

Where: Passenger Shed, Brunel’s Old Station, BS1 6QH

Who: Last year over 600 delegates attended the event.

This year delegates include Technology entrepreneurs and new busnesses.

When: 24th-25th October 2012, 9am - 5.30pm

For more information visit: www.sciencecitybristol.com

For more information visit: http://www.bnhc.org.uk/home/communicate.html

Who: Keynote speaches from BBC News Science Editor - David Shuckman, and the recently appointed head of BBC Natural History

Epigram

22.10.2012

Letters

Editor: Lucy de Greeff letters@epigram.org.uk

No longer a case of ‘a class above the rest’?

‘The progression of time slowly softens the often harsh exterior of “class”’ necessary grades, no matter what their background or disadvantages’. While the article was sensationalist and relied upon only a week of freshers experience it raised some salient points regarding the view of the University from the outside community (and indeed from a few within, perhaps especially during freshers); a view which is still very much the case today.

I was very aware of this when I arrived in Bristol many a year ago; however, I have generally found that the progression of time softens the often harsh exterior of ‘class’ and slowly the ‘green-welly university’ façade slips away as people bond over different, less immediately

Anon. postgraduate

Steven Depolo

apparent factors. It would seem to me that those intelligent enough to attend a university such as Bristol are also intelligent enough to abandon book-cover judgement and form friendships based upon a variety of factors.

While many may disagree in light of rowdy ‘lads and lasses’ and fur and Barbour clad girls (and boys for that matter) it is important to remember that it is those passing judgement that are really at fault as it is impossible to get to know someone whom one doesn’t talk to due to some preconceived judgment.

Oh, and to the girl who was screaming outside Lounge due to the bouncers refusing to let you in because ‘I am better than them because I am from Kent and they are from Bristol’: they saved your life by stopping you after you tried to dive headfirst down the Lounge stairs to get in… Classy.

I’m afraid I completely disagree with Robert Foote’s suggestion that people went to the free barbecue at the church on Woodland Road and were surprised that they may be approached by a member of the church. What did he think was going to happen? Members of the church would attend but say nothing about religion?

It seems to me quite patently obvious that the free lunch is designed to attract people to the church in the first place and to enjoy a mediocre burger washed down with a chat about a man who died for our sins.

Religion, Foote declares, is a ‘sensitive moral subject’ - is it really? I would argue quite the opposite. Religious people tend to constantly impress their beliefs (as shown) and atheists really have nothing to be sensitive about. The fact that the students appeared awkward

Bryan Ledgard

In March 2003, during the height of the controversy surrounding the admissions policy of the University of Bristol, the Observer published a rather damning and condemning article about the rife elitism and classism present in the University. Focusing particularly upon the distinct divide between Halls (such as Wills and Hiatt Baker), the article highlights a ‘class war’, supported by quotes from particularly ill-informed members of both sides of the divide ranting about “posh idiots” and the ability for ‘Anyone [to]be able to get the

Church barbecue letter provokes a different response

Tweets of the fortnight

‘If you don’t want to be harrassed by Christians... Don’t attend a free lunch in their church’ when speaking to the church members suggests to me a social deficiency rather than a sensitivity around the subject of religion. There is no such thing as a free lunch Robert. I suggest that if you don’t want to be harassed by Christians, you follow my lead and don’t attend a lunch in their church.

Rupert Hill 3rd year English Robert Foote’s letter suggests that the free barbecue at the Woodlands church had ‘slightly hidden motives.’ It seems obvious to me, however, that there might well be people of an evangelical nature hanging around an evangelical church, and that it is highly likely that the regular members of a congregation might want to talk to people at a church event about religion.

I, personally, have been going to the freshers’ barbecue there for four years now, and have only ever been spoken to once. I took the opportunity to attempt to convince the unsuspecting Woodlander of my own religious convictions.

Robert Beavis 2nd year Archaeology

Unlike other cities in the UK, Bristol is generally rather expensive. We pay more rent, more for a coffee, and even more for toilet roll in Sainsbury’s. So when it comes to the university gym, one might expect to pay a little more for our membership.

Yet we naively thought this would only be marginally higher than other universities. I am not alone in my aggravation, there is positive uproar surrounding this issue of increased gym membership.

If you are an avid gym goer or more of a once-a-year attendee, you would no doubt have been notified of the membership changes prior to successful lobbying. Peak and off-peak memberships have been introduced and consequently a whole barrage of differing opinions on the matter has arisen. Though this new system is supposed to ensure ‘greater clarity, flexibility and affordability’ (according to the Sports Centre), the responses to the recent changes claim it is anything but. Many students think it is in fact a more confusing system which has implemented fixed time barriers as well as being false economy.

The Sports Centre claims that the new system is a more simple arrangement, where instead of one bundle membership, one can choose according to their lifestyle. Though I may be an English student with seemingly very flexible hours, I do have to work during the day and I would not always be able to get to the gym before 3.30pm. With all these terms and conditions to the new price plan, it becomes as complicated as purchasing a new phone contract. One must read the small print at the bottom of the page to dissect the

@UBUVolunteering NEW weekly Quiz Night! Starts 8pm this Tuesday at Bar 100 in the SU :) Prizes, cheap drinks, & only £1!

UBU Volunteering, University of Bristol Students’ Union

@bristollacrosse Bristol double for the Men’s and Women’s at the South West Preseason Cup. Bring on the rest of the season. #bestofthewest University of Bristol Lacrosse

@UoBproblems So how much are Bristol Taxis going to fleece our poor Freshers for tonight? “Can you turn on the meter?” “Oh, no I can’t” Bristol Uni Problems

Follow us: @EpigramPaper

Got something to say?

Get in touch:

letters@epigram. org.uk

apparently amazing new offer and find out the catch. Let me dispel the myth for you; the new off-peak membership allows you to attend the gym 7am-3.30pm and no more… That means if you wanted so desperately to attend Body Pump on a weekday (self- torture) then you simply couldn’t. Until a week or so ago, you can’t even pay-as-you-go. So much for a more flexible gym!

Welcome to the new phone contract gym where you must sign up for the fixed price plan.

You might not even mind the ridiculous off-peak times if the membership was dirt cheap to accommodate for it. But there is only £100 difference between the one year peak membership and off-peak, which begs the question, who would bother with this restricted plan? Since offpeak hours are pointless, 9 out of 10 students will opt for peak memberships, or what was the normal membership last year, but because they’ve introduced off-peak, the university has had to increase the price of peak to accommodate off-peak. Thus it is a double hit. In simple terms, those of you who want to go to the gym or be in a sports team will have to pay a lot more than you did last year. The university is seemingly doing us all a favour with this new system, but what would be an even better offer would be if they were to reduce the price of a gym membership.

After all, they have increased the student numbers by 600700, so you would have thought that with all this surplus money they could give us a truly good deal?

Let’s remember that there are plenty of other gyms in Bristol (including one at Fresher’s Fair which seemed to be doing very good business) which offer allinclusive gym memberships with fewer restrictions.

However, within my non-stop ramblings and pleadings for goodwill, we must not forget that Universities are businesses who prioritise money above student life. For example, you are allowed to upgrade to a peak membership from an off-peak but cannot downgrade to offpeak from peak. If all this peak/ off-peak/peak nonsense has got you a little confused, you will reconsider the gym’s claim of ‘greater clarity, flexibility and affordability’.

Olivia Ward

Epigram

22.10.2012

13

which are beginning to be realised and recognised both by students and externally.

The biggest consultation with students to date, “Say It!” in 2011, demonstrated a 68% satisfaction rating with UBU. The 2011/12 ‘Student Barometer’ survey, specifically concerning academic representation, showed a satisfaction rating of 90% from members.

Additionally, the nationally recognised SUEI (Students’ Union Evaluation Initiative) awarded UBU a bronze award in 2012, and UBU has also achieved the ‘Investors In People’ status.

UBU works hard to support and represent students at the University of Bristol, and this work pays off; UBU led the campaign that successfully saw the reinstatement of bursaries

Email letters@ epigram.org.uk

“Our long term planning is already tackling many of the issues raised”

Paul, Alice, Alessandra, Hannah, Martha and Tom UBU Officers 2012/13

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in Bristol in 2011/12, and just last week ensured that the Pay As You Go option for sports passes was reintroduced by Sport Exercise and Health.

Rest assured, however, that we are taking the results of the NSS very seriously. We are currently compiling a report that will be presented to all students and the University in November.

The report will present detailed analysis of the results, explaining how our long term planning is already tackling many of the issues raised, and perhaps most importantly it will show exactly what is being done right now to ensure current students have the best possible experience.

We also acknowledge the impact of our building’s £30m refurbishment but we are dedicated in limiting the disruption this may cause and we are excited to see the building become a more dynamic and vibrant space.

We are working very hard to make things even better at UBU and at the University both now and in the future and will be using these results to further drive that change.

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Want to get your own printed?

no.38

“The results of the National Student Survey did not come as a surprise to UBU”

Puzzles are back!

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We are writing in response to your leading article from the previous issue (issue 252).

The results of the National Student Survey did not come as a surprise to UBU. However, it is important to recognise the limitations of the survey.The NSS is only completed by students in their final year, many of whom form their opinion of UBU in their first year three or four years ago. Since then, UBU has changed enormously.

UBU has undergone a huge amount of restructuring and change, the results of

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French millers (6,5) 2. People (4) 3. Port city (4) 4. Bird/soap (4) 6. Large pony (3) 10. Tooth cover (6) 11. Northern river (4) 12. Cooking method (5) 13. Couch (5) 15. Process of

imitation (7) 17. Changes (7) 21. Revealing tic (4) 23. Adult comic (3)

Want to lead your Students’ Union?

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BECOME A PART-TIME OFFICER! • Ethics • Environment • International Students • Part-time/ Mature Students • Widening Participation • Disabled Students • Black Minority Ethnic • Women’s • LGBT Find out more about the positions at ubu.org.uk/representation Nominations close 24 October at 5pm

UBU.ORG.UK/VOICE ubu-representation@bristol.ac.uk

Available from the Students’ Union foyer or the UBU Info Point.

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Poetry Special page 20

CULTURE

Play of the Fortnight The Judas Kiss Theatre Royal, Bath 22-27 October From £21.50

Gig of the Fortnight

Film of the Fortnight BeastsoftheSouthernWild Watershed 19 October- 1 November From £4 www.watershed.co.uk

Rupert Everett and Freddie Fox star in David Hare’s play following a sucessful Oscar Wilde struggling to choose between freedom and his lover in a time when it was impossible for his to have both.

Legendary hip-hop outfit Public Enemy visit Bristol on their momentous 25th anniversary tour.

With boundless influence and respect throughout the music world, this show provides a unique opportunity to see Flavor Flav rock out with his clock out and isn’t to be missed!

A young girl living in a bayou community is forced to confront the reality of the power and danger of nature in order to survive.

Winner of the Camera D’Or at Cannes, Beasts has received rapturous reviews (read ours in the next issue).

Jeremy M Farmer

www.theatreroyal.org.uk

Public Enemy Motion 18th October From £15.50 www.bristolinmotion.com

Epigram

22.10.2012

Arts

Editor: Rosemary Wagg

Deputy Editor: Rachel Schraer

arts@epigram.org.uk

deputyarts@epigram.org.uk

@EpigramArts

The Poetry Special, in association with Helicon - Bristol’s Creative Arts Magazine

The Great Poetry Debate: Page or Stage?

What is poetry now? Helicon’s Poetry Editor Anna Godfrey takes on the complexities of the ancient form

“Like children prodding a dead frog” is intentionally invited or not. Performers such as Scroobius Pip have revived poetry for a generation by creating a new, more vivid, poetic style to which festival-goers flock after a dose of Stevie Wonder.

So does the work of Scroobius Pip—pulsing with modern topics, from the gritty to the humorous.

These such as self-harm, of the praising of innumerable clay-footed idols, and of falling in love with ‘a girl from the city’—define what poetry is now? It’s as though we need our poetry to be presented, alive and kicking, on a plate, for us to aurally devour it - if it requires effort, if it is not screamed in our face, we reject it.

As with so much that is great in the human

creative endeavour, the soaring concept must be simplified, replicated in neon crassness and mass produced on Topshop t-shirts for the public to embrace it. As Oceana hosts a ‘Fuzzy Logic’ night, perverting the philosophical theory so as to entertain hoards of drunken teenagers and, most unfortunately, Kristen Stewart enables Kerouac to reach his widest of audiences, concepts must be made kitsch to become popular. Perhaps poetry, too, has suffered the same fate of massproduction.

In sharp contrast to performance poetry - whose strength lies in the emotion of the voice, the modern form of the ‘newspaper poem’ creates a purely visual impact. By highlighting words within the newspaper article, and thus recomposing the message of the text to provide its reader with a completely new meaning, newspaper poems are designed through destruction - excavating a poem by actively creating negative space. Both descendents of the poetic form -the newspaper, and performance poem - are not bound to the traditional poetic lineage, but are a hybrid of arts with performance poetry converging theatre and literature, and newspaper poems welding literature to art. Poetry seems to be spreading itself too thinly, straying too far from the original notion of poetry.

‘Poetry’, in all its modern disguises, has become a distant relation to itself. But, then again, what is poetry if not a restless, regenerative, everburgeoning beast of an art? It seems that the only guide to categorizing, and therefore clarifying,

Flickr: ElfieTakesPictures

Poetry has been pushed into a pigeon hole. GCSE English has transmogrified poetry into something that we are taught not to absorb, but deflect. We kept Wilfred Owen at arm’s length by collapsing his lines into neat, easily-digested conclusions, droning: ‘plosive “P” provides momentum’. We dryly dissected each line by pulling out the crumpled list of ‘poetic terms’ from the bottom of our bags (alliteration, assonance etc) to use as though Dora the Explorer were mapping Mordor.

Like children in an American high-school prodding a dead frog, we were taught not to engage with, but to analyse poetry, reducing it to a form that is basic, neat, and therefore tameable. The majority of our generation then lost contact with poetry, most students tidily tucking their memory of it under their A* to become a stale, self-contained memory. After all, how could a group of 16 yearold students connect on any substantial level to a man whose poems were nurtured in the soil of shellshock and mass slaughter?

But poetry is not restricted to this mental mortuary. Little does the public know, poetry frequents the lives of almost everyone, whether it

“AsthoughDoratheExplorer were mapping Mordor” poetry, is by a separation of the high, reflexive, rudimentary poetic tradition from the dense network that is ‘poetry’ in all its contemporary, cultural, and capricious character.

Strictly Speaking: The Beauty of Spoken Word Spoken Word in Bristol’s own bard, Vanessa Kisuule extols the virtues of spoken word and encourages people to rediscover poetry Music. Theatre. Film. Comedy. These are mediums that lend themselves to the wider public as a visceral and, let’s admit it, sexy, form of artistic expression.

Poetry, however, has long suffered from a bad reputation. Too many people have haunting memories of brushing the dust from creaking tomes of Keats’s Complete Works at school, finding little or nothing that spoke to them of their lives. And can they really be blamed? There is nothing in a stagnant GCSE English pamphlet of sonnets to suggest that poetry has any relevance to the here and now.

But spoken word completely overturns this notion, making poetry exciting again. Slam poetry was established in Chicago in the early nineties. It quickly spread across the US and established poetry scenes can now be found all over the world.

The British scene is currently coming into its own, with many incendiary names such as Kate Tempest, Bohdan Piasecki, the University of Bristol’s own Harry Baker and many others paving the way for the UK’s contemporary bards.

I was first introduced to the art form through Youtube videos of Def Jam Poetry, a now discontinued HBO programme that showcases American poets. I can’t quite describe the feeling of revelation I had watching all these crazy, assertive, powerful voices saying….words. But words in a way I’d never seen before: there were story tellers, rappers, people whose message seemed to be wrung from them with an urgency that a song or a painting could not replicate.

The variation of the medium is astounding.

Anyone who has written off poetry as ‘not their kind of thing’ needs to realise that it is as various as music, art and indeed people.

I have been performing poetry for over two years now and am constantly seeing new and exciting poets who express their own unique truths. Search the name Rob Auton and compare his dry, comical style to the soaring modern elegy of Buddy Wakefield, Shane Koyzcan or Andrea

Gibson and you can get a mere taste of the wicked array of awesomeness that poetry has to offer. But here’s the real beauty of it: though the poets speak of their own personal experience, the topics and sentiments they address are universal.

Everyone can take something away from a truly great poem.

“Get a mere taste of the wicked array of awesomeness poetry has to offer.”

Bristol is a great city to get a taste of this emerging art form in all its naive and charged glory. Take a walk down to the Leftbank on Stokes Croft every second Sunday of the month for Poetry Pulpit, where you can watch the bestestablished poets on the scene and share your own work on the open mic.

Hammer and Tongue is an open poetry slam that happens every first Wednesday of the month at The Hatchet just behind the Hippodrome where poets compete for points from the audience in a rabble rousing battle of wits. I urge you to discover the wonders of Bristol’s poetry scene for yourself. You only need seek it out in the dark and magic corners of Bristol town, tucked away like the worst kept secret since Ginsberg.

your Living Room Our YouTube favourites: Kate Tempest

‘Icarus’

Katie Makkai

‘Pretty’

Harry Baker

‘Paper People’

Rob Auton

‘Life and Chips Twice Please’

Lydia Beardmore

‘Tupac’

Vanessa Kisuule

‘Love Letter to Bristol’

Epigram

22.10.2012

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Dispatches From Russia

Metamorphoses: Titian at the Royal Academy Tomos Evans goes hunting for the transformation of painting into poetry

“Vivid imagery of the hounds tearing ‘mouthfuls of hide and flesh and blood’” Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and since the first English translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Arthur Golding in 1565 - making Ovid more accessible to the public - Ovid has been a truly ineluctable figure in our literary heritage.

The power of this exhibition derives from the fact that, together with the selected paintings

by Titian and the commissioned poems, a fascinating retrospective - or psychological examination - of Diana, goddess of the moon and hunting, has been created. This can be seen due to the poets’ portrayals of the narrative in Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ where the unfortunate hunter Actaeon, after a blood-soaked hunt, accidently enters a valley where Diana is bathing nude. This leaves the chaste goddess humiliated and, in turn, she transforms Actaeon into a stag which results in him being torn apart by his own hunting hounds. In Titian’s painting, I noticed how sexually vulnerable a position the painter

had the nude Diana seated in, where she is facing the muscular Actaeon with her legs apart for one of her nymphs to wash her foot, and also her enraged glare at Actaeon, revealing her fury and humiliation.

Heaney’s poem ‘Actaeon’ depicts this transmutation of the hunter to the quarry and is written in, as he calls it, ‘a sonnet and a half’ in a dactylic metre, imitating Ovid’s own verse written in dactylic hexameter. Here, Heaney shows Diana’s insidious, composed vengeance through the tonal difference between Diana’s disposition and Actaeon’s death: the vivid imagery of the hounds tearing ‘mouthfuls of hide and flesh and blood’ contrasts with the phlegmatic and calculative nonchalance of Diana as she ‘stood/Impatient for the kill, assessing wounds’. This disparity is seen in Titian’s ‘The Death of Actaeon’ where Diana stands delicately and nobly poised, painted in a virginal white tone, holding her bow and arrow whilst Actaeon is blurred into the ‘leaf-lit woodland’ as he is brutally overpowered by his own hounds. It is interesting to see that Diana’s nobility in this painting seems to be gradually reciprocated by Actaeon’s death; one breast is still on show, yet one would imagine Diana to be totally restored of her dignity once Actaeon is finally killed, thus illustrating the magnitude of her hurt pride.

The tragedy of the scene in Titian’s ‘Diana and Callisto’ is astutely captured by Carol Ann Duffy. In this painting, Callisto is scorned and vindicated by Diana and her nymphs, whereas Diana contemptuously points at Callisto, who has become pregnant after being raped by Jupiter, before transforming her into a bear. Not only does this painting emit a sense of jealous anger on behalf of Diana towards Callisto - a name derived from kalliste meaning ‘the most beautiful’ - but Carol Ann Duffy’s poem also produces from this flickr: Cea.

Poetry and painting are not mutually exclusive.

The artistic language of both the poet’s craft and the painter’s dexterity are, at times, uniform due to factors such as repetition, space, and contrast where tonal differences in a painting, chiaroscuro, can be reflected in the sound or form of a poem; this is acknowledged by Horace, ‘ut pictura poesis’ (as is painting, so is poetry). This view of the relationship between paintings and poems has been demonstrated wonderfully by the National Gallery’s latest exhibition, Metamorphoses: Titian 2012, where fourteen eminent poets such as Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, and Wendy Cope have been commissioned to write a poem in response to one of three Ovidian paintings- or ‘poesies’ as some refer to them - by Titian. ‘Diana and Actaeon’, ‘Diana and Callisto’ and ‘The Death of Actaeon’: three remarkable canvasses of great narrative power from which each poet could choose only one.

Ovid’s mock-epic poem ‘Metamorphoses’ has been mused over and translated for hundreds of years. The Roman poet has been a fixed presence in English literature, and Ovid’s poem has been featured explicitly in Chaucer’s poetry,

Jenny Gaschke, Collections Officer at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery discusses the impact of childhood favourite, Leo Lionni’s Frederick, on her professional life.

They challenge Frederick to share his supplies and he dutifully brightens up their day by evoking in their minds the warm rays of sunshine and the colours of summer f lowers he observed around him earlier in the year. Finally, he uses the words he has gathered to offer hope to the mice by telling them a poem about the seasons.

This book’s beautiful and confident defence of art against purely

material values places culture at the heart of society. Frederick shows the redeeming quality of art and that, although not everyone has to be an artist, everybody can be inspired by culture.

Lionni - born in the Netherlands in 1910 as the son of a Sephardic Jew working in the diamond business and an opera singer - was the first to use paper collage in children’s literature and inspired illustrators such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar’s Eric Carle. His clear forms, colours and textures as well as the easily legible font are both accessible and beautiful at the same time. I hope that the visitors to Bristol Museum and Art Gallery feel equally drawn to the paintings on display, which can tell them something about themselves or instead transport them away from the here and now – and how important that experience is.

Anastasia Reynolds samples society comedy in Siberia Here in Irkutsk I am surrounded by theatres, almost literally: they line Lenin Street, so I pass through a corridor of them every day on my way to and from uni. Last week I decided I ought to investigate them, or at least one to start with, so I hied myself to the Dramteatr and was delighted to discover that all tickets are 300 roubles or less – that’s £6 and under.

Anyway, I decided to be spontaneous, picked a play from the repertoire, and bought a ticket. Zhenitba, by Nikolai Gogol. Gogol I know a bit about: he was a Poet, with a capital P. Even the things he wrote in prose are ‘poetry’. His writing is rhythmic, measured, precise, deadly dull translated into English (‘Dead Souls’ being a prime example), but rich and expressive in Russian. Zhenitba, however, was new to me, so I Googled it like a good student and discovered it is a society comedy, only by Gogol, so a slightly depressing society comedy in that it doesn’t end in a marriage. Instead, the groom escapes through the window and the bride is left regretting the fact that she turned down all her other suitors.

“The best bits were the omelette jokes.”

The plot is this: apathetic Pokolesin decides he ought to marry, so hires a matchmaker.

His friend Kochkarev finds out and, having a grudge against this matchmaker because he hates his own wife, decides to whisk Pokolesin round to a young lady and marry them off without the matchmaker’s help, thereby diddling her out of her finder’s fee.

The matchmaker discovers Kochkarev’s plan and quickly rounds up three other suitors (one of whom is hilariously named Fried Egg) so when Pokolesin arrives the young lady, Agafya, is inundated with eligible bachelors. When they all leave, Kochkarev persuades her to marry Pokolesin and Pokolesin to marry Agafya; however, whilst Agafya is changing into her wedding dress, Pokolesin decides marriage would be too difficult and escapes as described above.

Now, my linguistic abilities are not yet at a level where I can analyse blank verse from the 1830s, however, there were times when Gogol’s poetic language permeated even my consciousness. In the first act when Pokolesin is arguing with his exasperated servant Stepan, there’s a kind of call-andresponse thing going on, punctuated by little monologues from Pokolesin. In the second act I could identify poetic-ness when the suitors are proposing to Agafya: the drunk one almost rhymes, Fried Egg speaks in clipped couplets (he’s a civil servant) and the other one is somewhere in between.

I had a good evening. The best bits were the omelette jokes and the excellent mime section at the end of Act I when Pokolesin is extolling Agafya’s beauty; as you see, neither relies heavily on a deep knowledge of literary Russian, but it was good fun. I suspect I missed a lot of the cultural jokes: there were times when the audience laughed and I joined in out of habit, but without really understanding why it was funny. However, that was rarer – luckily there were far more slapstick moments and egg jokes to keep me entertained. flickr: Kate Ter Haar

One book that will always inspire me, and which has a great deal to do with my own work, is actually a children’s book. Leo Lionni’s Frederick was published in 1968 and I still have the 1970s German translation I grew up with. Told through a series of beautifully simple collages and minimal text, this is the tale of a family of field mice who are preparing for winter.

While the other mice work hard to gather provisions, such as nuts, corn and berries, Frederick’s apparent daydreaming is puzzling them – to put it mildly. He claims to collect sunshine, colours and words for the long grey days ahead of them. Winter arrives and the mice retreat into their hiding place in an old stone wall. There, they feast until all their supplies are gone and the – literally – cold reality of going hungry catches up with them.

flickr: Amy Bonner

A book in the life of...

painting a greatly tragic feeling towards Callisto.

As poet Jo Shapscott has remarked, ‘There is something about Callisto’s belly which is very strange.’ Lucien Freud had once commented on Titian’s mastery in painting Callisto’s pregnant belly, saying that it had totally changed the way he viewed human flesh, and Carol Ann Duffy, in her poem ‘Titian: Diana and Callisto’, depicts Titian’s Callisto as bearing an Ophelia-like disposition in respect to her demise, as shown by when the speaker of the poem inquires ‘Whether she was or wasn’t compliant / when she heard him pant / as his seed was spent’. For me, the questioning of whether Callisto was indeed ‘compliant’ or reluctant towards the virile Jupiter echoes the Gravedigger’s witty contemplation in V.i of Hamlet when he questions whether Ophelia’s death was self-inflicted or accidental: ‘If the man go to this water, and drown himself, it is, will he, nill he, he goes […] but if the water comes to him and drowns him, he drowns not himself ’. So, with this in mind, I believe that Carol Ann Duffy apprehends the tragic disposition of Callisto by placing her in such a Shakespearean light which reflects the forlorn expression of Callisto’s face in Titian’s painting.

Metamorphoses: Titian 2012 follows a poetical tradition of ekphrasis - an Ovidian poetic quality as seen by his descriptions of Arachne and Philomela’s tapestries - which many poets have undertaken such as W.H. Auden with his cogitation over Brueghel’s ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ in his poem ‘Musée de Beaux Arts’, Baudelaire’s eerie ‘Sur Le Tasse en Prison d’Eugene Delacroix’, and John Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. Although the poet Hugo Williams said that ‘It’s not about Ovid, it’s about me’, it is clear that this collection of poetry, published in Metamorphoses: Poems Inspired by Titian, offers a rich variety of interpretation on the Roman poet and the Old Master, synthesizing both of the great men’s works in order for the poets to create something highly personal, but also to shine a new light on Ovid and Titian and their poetic relationship.

Epigram

22.10.2012

24

Yesterday’s Paper

The World’s Wife Comes to Bristol

Lacking things to do with Epigram? Take Anna Godfrey’s lead and Arabella Noortman knows bad poetry* *and isn’t afraid to say so create a Newspaper Poem

Anna Godfrey

As Anna explains in her introductory piece (p20), newspaper poems create meaning through highlighting selected words within an existing article - all that is needed are is a copy of an old newspaper and a marker pen.

Send us your newspaper poems over the next few weeks and we’ll put up the best few on the our webpage. www.epigram.org.uk

According to Wordsworth, poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings… it is emotion recollected in tranquillity.”

Even this description is poetic, and in itself characterizes the Romantic preoccupation with feelings and beauty. However, what poetry is exactly is not an entirely straightforward question, and you could definitely write a lot more on the topic than I’m going to.

The special and peculiar nature of poetry can be understood by its treatment of language – wordplay, rhythm, rhyme. It is these features that differentiate verse from prose. Obviously throughout the ages the accepted consensus of what makes poetry has changed, as various literary standards have developed. We’ve traversed from the classical epic to the poetry of today, where frankly almost anything goes, and anyone can be a poet (whether they’re talented or not).

I don’t think it is too bold to say that the general aim of poetry is to move the reader:

my true love sent to me a card from home.”

Duffy gives a modern spin on the traditional Christmas poem, but her attempt is crassly demonstrated and fails to be either trenchant or humorous. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the brief to write an ethical cum festive poem was mistakenly sent to an angst ridden nine year old, rather than the poet laureate. I know my remarks are disparaging, but this is only my subjective humble opinion, and I’m sure many people would disagree with me; to give Duffy her due, she has written many other poems that far better showcase her poetic abilities.

“The opening lines make me want to eat my own face.”

The best poems are often the ones in which form relates to content and vice versa: that synergy makes for something more sophisticated, more interesting, more powerful.

whether emotionally or cerebrally, or both.

So why is it that some poetry has the power to penetrate us to our very core, whilst other poems leave us cold?

Essentially there is no hard and fast rule as to what makes good poetry, as dictated by the inherent subjectivity of individuals. But, for the most part, people seem to be able to identify and agree on what’s really, really good. And really, really bad.

Duffy’s Christmas poem is odious to me not because of its bleak content -consider the poetry of Philip Larkin, who versifies the most depressing subject matter with a brilliant insouciance – but because of the form. The way she relentlessly thrusts contemporary issues at you simply seems juvenile and, frankly, just tedious.

‘Bright star, would I were steadfast art – Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night…’

Anna Godfrey

“1 On the first day of Christmas, a buzzard on a branch.

In Afghanistan, no partridge, pear tree; but

Flickr: Maggie Hannan

Why is it that the opening lines of Keats’s poem ‘Bright Star’ fill me with joy and anticipation?

And why is it that the opening lines of Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘festive’ poem ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ make me want to eat my own face?

Can music heighten the meaning of poetry?

Christopher Skipper looks at the troubled relationship between poetry and music over the centuries Poetry and music no doubt compliment each other. However, it has always been a debate amongst philosophers - most of them German - as to which is the better art form. It was the German philosopher Hegel who in his Lectures on Aesthetics - compiled in 1835 - subscribed a common view that the arts were alike as to content and different only as to sensual form. He described the three romantic arts in ascending order of spirituality, with poetry as the highest, then music and then painting and sculpture.

On the other hand, a group of philosophers led by E.T.A. Hoffman and Schopenhauer (yes, both German) from around the same time Flickr: Skara Kommun

“A great musical description of a trout jumping out of the water” maintained that art of the highest sort was ‘pure’ instrumental music, and that an association with texts or literary counterparts dimmed its transcendental qualities. Nowadays they would have loved their instrumental drum and bass and

despised anything from the X Factor. composers chose poetry that was enamoured The pop music of what is loosely known as the with banal and pastoral imagery to form a Romantic Period of musical history was the lied. liederkreis (song cycle). For example Schumann Back in the nineteenth century the word lied chose Heine’s Buch dur Lieder for his Dichterliebe. referred to poetry with music or without. Lieder Of the 20 lieder chosen from Heine’s poems (a (in this case poetry set to music) were around small selection it must be said) they are linked by from as early as the fifteenth century, but how their imagery of love, flowers and dreams and not did it become so popular in the early nineteenth a narrative. Musical motifs are normally assigned century? The downfall of patronage in Europe to these images (Schubert’s Die Forelle has a great meant composers were left to compete on an musical description of a trout jumping out of open market – they were all seeking a niche to the water in the piano accompaniment), melodic make money. Funding was now sought through lines syllabic and the character of the text built the rise of the middle classes and every good through harmony and rhythm. bourgeois family had a piano in their drawing ‘They would’ve loved their room. They had probably appropriated a fair number of books containing lieder - I mean instrumental drum and bass’ poetry this time - which were ideal to set for piano and voice, and before Alan Sugar could say ‘You’re fired,’ they had spotted a gap in the market.

Listen to Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin, So what poetry was actually set to music? Beethoven’s An die Ferne Geliebte and Wolf ’s Nineteenth century composers followed a school Goethe-Lieder and you may just disagree with of thought held in the treaties of the seventeenth Hegel. For it is these beautiful melodies and century First Berlin School of composers, led colourful harmonies that heighten the meaning

by C.G. Krause. They wrote that a lied should be of the words and can only mean that poetry and folk-like, simple and easily singable. As a result music exist on the same level of spirituality.

Epigram

Epigram

10.10.2011

Music 22

22.10.2012

Advertisement Editor: Eliot Brammer

Deputy Editor: Phil Gwyn

music@epigram.org.uk

deputymusic@epigram.org.uk

@epigrammusic

The world in the Palma their hands Phil Gwyn takes a seat in the van of Palma Violets, the most talked about new band in the country The pattern of destroying the careers of new bands is by now well established – pick any four photogenic lads with guitars, tell them they’re better than The Beatles, construct headlines hyperbolic enough to sell your magazines, and then discretely palm them off with a generous two star review for their album. So it has been for many an aspiring musician who is now relegated to a future involving job centres, and it is a path that cynics would say that London’s shambolic indie revivalists Palma Violets are currently treading. Since forming a year ago, they’ve progressed from playing incendiary shows in their basement to performing in front of the f lapping cheque books of the majority of London’s A&Rs, to signing to legendary independent label Rough Trade, and eventually ending up splashed across the cover of the NME a few weeks ago. Yet Palma Violets are different, because their tense, psychedelia-edged sound is so firmly out of fashion that there’s no way that it could be contrived; this is poignant and heartfelt rock and roll that’s been poured from the minds of four fiercely passionate young guys.

The original trio of front-

“We thought, whoever brings us the most beer and cigarettes we’ll sign to” man Sam Fryer, keyboardist Pete Mayhew and drummer Will Doyle met at school, but it wasn’t until they ran into their bassist, Chilli Jesson, that they were forced into forming a band. As Sam puts it, ‘We bumped into this fella at Reading Festival, and he wanted to be my manager, but I didn’t take him seriously’. Fortunately, Chilli is a charismatic character who possesses that on-edge charm, and he persisted until he’d found the perfect place for them to form. He says himself with a deadly serious stare that ‘“Studio 180” came to me in a dream, I saw this place outside Waterloo station, and I just

found myself there’. The eminently more trustworthy voice of Sam confirms this, ‘We realised that “Studio 180” was the place where we could start something really good’.

The tale of how they acquired their real manager, Milo Ross, is not much more believable, either, as Chilli succinctly puts it, ‘I was sat next to him at the football, QPR, and he was just a really nice guy.’

Politeness is perhaps not the best criteria to go for when choosing a manager, but apparently, ‘Milo contacted a few ‘people’, word got out, and we started getting loads of labels coming to our gigs in the basement of the studio.’ Sam adds that ‘the great thing about us was that we had nothing online, so everyone had to come down and watch us,’ clearly aware of the increasingly short attention spans of people on the internet. But Chilli looks at it in a different way: ‘we used to make them bring us beers and cigarettes, and we thought, whoever brings us the most we’ll sign to, but as it turned out, we signed to the label that brought us

fuck all.’

Simply the fact that Palma Violets chose Rough Trade when major labels presented them with the easy path to momentary success proves the band’s commitment to their music.

As Chilli says, ‘we say we want to do something and the label support us 100%,’ giving the band the creative freedom to write without the constraint of worrying that the people at Radio 1 might not like you being slightly unconventional. At this point Will chimes in that ‘If we were on a major we’d have an album out now.’ And he’s right, because after the attention they’ve attracted, any major label would have been cashing in on the initial buzz as aggressively as possible. But with Rough Trade, Palma Violets have only just released their brash and anthemic first single, ‘Best Of Friends’, and they insist that there’s no pressure to release an album, ‘all they want to do is to capture the moment in time, and they’re giving us room to grow.’ As Rough Trade recognise, they

don’t need to have as much mediocre material as possible wrung out of them, because if they’re going to outlast even Jimmy Saville’s nose-diving reputation, then they need that time to develop.

After the unhealthy level of hype and industry interest that they’ve been subjected to, it’s a minor miracle that they’re not challenging Liam Gallagher for having the most inf lated view of their own importance. Chilli is quick to attribute this to their manager, explaining that ‘I only realise now, but he shielded us from all that kind of attention’, but it seems like they themselves are disinterested in the hype, as he continues that ‘A lot of bands want to know what all the A&Rs and magazines are saying, but it’s better not to know.’ It may well be that they’re just completely unaware of the reality of their own situation because it’s all happened so fast, and Chilli is quick to agree that everything still feels surreal, adding that ‘I don’t think that any of us have had time to sit down and think about

it.’ And as Will says, Palma Violets haven’t actually done anything real yet. He states with genuinely convincing humility that ‘We’re just another group really, and it could still all go wrong.’

He’s right to be cautious, because Palma Violets really are just a band: four people who get together to play simplistic and primal rock and roll. It’s a basic formula, but it’s the way that Palma Violets do it that makes it so intoxicating. On stage following our interview, they incite such fervour by tumbling through their mind-altering tunes with tangible passion that one woman is driven to liberating her breasts from her clothes, and yet Palma Violets still somehow manage to upstage her. Perhaps it’s because they play with such furious conviction that it all seems completely genuine, either way, that emotional commitment is certainly something that defines Palma Violets, and they know it.

Chilli laments that, when they were getting together, bands ‘didn’t play with any feeling,

and that was the main thing for us, songs have to mean something.’ Conveying that live is central to what they do too, and Chilli continues that, ‘We put everything into a performance, those songs mean a lot to us,’ which might be because of the inspired way in which some of their songs come to them; ‘“Rattlesnake Highway” was all a dream I had,” he explains in the most unjustly casual manner.

It’s tough to disagree with their diagnosis of contemporary music as emotionally detached, and this divergence from current trends may explain why Palma Violets have been received so ecstatically. Over the past few years, the characteristics of lo-fi production and a dreamy aesthetic have predominated, resulting in the emotion of songs being obscured behind hazy melodies. In that way, Palma Violets are exciting precisely because they’re regressive, as they’re intense and bristling with indignant energy – an approach that has attracted comparisons to bands like The Clash and The Libertines - but as Sam says, ‘When someone is built up as the next whoever, people just want to believe that they are.’ It really is as superficial as that, because as Chilli insists, ‘this is 10 years after that! We’re a new grain.’ So both forget and believe the hype, because Palma Violets are just a talented rock and roll band who definitely won’t change the world, yet somehow they sound so unjustifiably vital, and that, unlike hype, is a f leeting sensation that’s worth going along with.

‘Best Of Friends’ is out on 22nd October via Rough Trade.

Palma Violets play Bristol’s newest venue, The Exchange, on 31st October.

Epigram

22.10.2012

26

Mercury Prize misses the point With the levels of coverage given to nominees of the Mercury Prize, surely it wouldn’t be wrong to expect genuine excitement immediately ahead of the shortlist announcement? Such an expectation would be wrong. Mild cynicism and general apathy towards the Mercury Prize prevailed and was ultimately vindicated this year by the revealing of the safest shortlist yet. Not necessarily a bad collection of artists and albums, but a wholly predictable one. But does this indicate that Britain’s new music scene is dwindling and in decline?

Billed as Britain’s premier music prize, it makes little sense at all for the shortlist to be quite so predictable. The best of new music surely can’t be pigeonholed and predicted quite so easily?

Ben Howard, soulful singer-songwriter, neatly fits into the slot usually occupied by folk songstress Laura Marling, with Michael Kiwanuka following him into the shortlist on similar grounds, despite neither having produced a particularly exceptional record, but both having achieved some commercial success.

Coming round the Mountains

Eliot Brammer catches up with Gallic-poppers François and the Atlas Mountains ‘I think that the connection between jazz and electronic music is more than electronic and pop or jazz and pop. I think maybe jazz and electronic musicians are more willing to explore sounds and compositions a bit more’, François Marry tells me, as he considers the inf luence of a lifelong love of Charles Mingus and John and Alice Coltrane. In fact his band, François and the Atlas Mountains, craft sensitive, Afrobeat-tinged pop songs that bear the soft caress of both ambient electronics and lounge jazz, occupying a neatly-carved middle ground between the two.

The band’s third full-length, E Volo Love, was released back in January to warm praise, despite drawing criticism from some quarters for drifting along a little too harmlessly.

However, François contends he is happy for the music to settle into the background on record, and says that ‘When I do an album I make it gentle on purpose because I don’t want, when you’re listening to my album while driving, or having a conversation or cooking with someone, I don’t want my music to be hitting people in the ears saying “Hey, listen to me!”, I just want the music to be around.’ The live shows he points to as a ‘counterpoint’ to this gentleness, taking the pop tunes on a lengthy workout driven by Afrobeat percussive rhythms. The trace of Afropop that colours the album is one of its most distinctive features and it’s an inf luence carried by François from an early age, his mother having grown up in Cameroon; his first gig came when she took him to see the legendary saxophonist Manu Dibango in concert.

He’s a well-travelled man, having lived in Dakar and spent much time in Morocco – he mentions to me an ambition for the band

to play a residency in Africa – and also in Glasgow, where he became a touring member of indie darlings Camera Obscura. In 2003, as a wide-eyed nineteen year old, François speculatively moved to Bristol, attracted by a music scene that had produced artists such as Minotaur Shock, Portishead and Tricky. He gained a job as a French assistant at Bristol Catholic School and integrated himself within the artistic community around St. Pauls and Stokes Croft, volunteering at the Cube cinema for four years and playing the trumpet with

“I guess, when you first hear a band it reminds you of something else, and then little by little you connect to it and its own identity” other local bands. The song ‘City Kiss’ on E Volo Love is a hopelessly romantic ode to a frost-coated morning in the south west city.

He declares those years to be ‘The best time of my life’, but isn’t one to live in the past: he talks excitedly of recording sessions next year with Antoine Gaillet at the helm, the producer behind crossover hits from other French pop acts Berg Sans Nipple and M83.

François and the Atlas Mountains are the first French act to sign to UK-based independent label Domino. I suggest to François the inherent risk of this move: of singing half of his lyrics in French, when it’s rare that a mainstream pop audience takes

to something in a foreign language, and of attracting lazy comparisons to French musical stereotypes, whether it be the crooned vocals of Serge Gainsbourg or the electronic pop of a band such as Air. He admits to being ‘Really surprised that the song ‘Les Plus Beaux’ was played on Radio 1 because it’s completely in French, but at the same time I’m very pleased to know that people like the musicality of the album more than lyrical meaning or anything.

It’s so hard to understand what makes music commercial or what makes music easier on people’s ears but you never know what’s going to be the key to success with music, it’s very unpredictable.’

As for being pigeonholed by their nationality, he believes there is a positive side to this, too. ‘I think it’s just a natural way people connect what they listen to with what they already know, but I don’t disregard that. First off, I really like Gainsbourg and Air and those other artists you name, so that’s good, but I guess, when you first hear a band it reminds you of something else and then little by little you connect to it and its own identity. I believe people will come to see us live and see a different side to François and the Atlas Mountains. Maybe it’s playing to my advantage at the moment.’

F r a n ç o i s & the Atlas Mountains play the Exchange on 26th October.

Lauren Laverne announces this year’s shortlist.

Alt-J’s An Awesome Wave and Jessie Ware’s Devotion, two of the more critically acclaimed nominations and quite possible the frontrunners for the prize itself are representative of exactly what’s wrong with this year’s shortlist. Despite both being noteworthy records individually and drawing upon different genres to craft fairly unique sounds, both could sit neatly side by side as part of a postdinner party playlist without a single eyebrow being raised.

The descent of new music into an easily palatable collection of sounds is disturbing. However, it would only be worrying if that actually were the case. Does the Mercury Prize shortlist accurately portray the state of new British music? Is it any real coincidence that many smaller artists are routinely overlooked, when in order to be considered for a nomination for the Mercury Prize, a fairly substantial application fee is required?

The billed status of the Mercury Prize as representing the best of British music is clearly inappropriate given the barriers of entry which require less established artists to take a significant financial risk. Small artists could effectively be gambling away their entry fee in hope of a nomination, and given the increasing disillusioned reaction to the annual shortlist, why would some artists even bother?

The shortlist this year is not particularly exciting, but this does not mean that British new music is not. The connection between being willing to pay for a Mercury Prize entry and being an artist who has produced interesting music does not exist.

Scaremongering over the state of new music on the basis of this particular shortlist is misguided and misleading. In order to be able to comment fully on British music at present, more is required than a swift survey of this sole sketchy shortlist.

Rishi Modha

E Volo Love is out now.

The Barclaycard Mercury Prize winner will be announced on 1st November

Epigram

Epigram

10.10.2011

22.10.2012

24

27

Reviews MELODY’S ECHO CHAMBER

THE HAUNTED MAN DELICACIES Bat For Lashes Simian Mobile Disco Parlophone November 29 2012 2010 15th October Delicatessen Bat For Lashes has a special place in my heart, and with this new album more than ever. Her 2006 debut Fur and Gold was nominated for the 2007 Mercury Music Prize, and while perhaps Amy Winehouse and winners Klaxons stole the show, Natasha Khan’s live performance on the night was thoroughly enchanting. This year, on the verge of the release of The Haunted Man, she did the festival rounds, and new singles ‘All My Gold’ and ‘Laura’ were well-received, especially at Bestival. I mean, what’s a girl to do (considering the fancy dress theme of wildlife) but dress up as a bat with a set of four lashes? Khan seems to prefer every name save her own, and especially likes to personalise her stand-out tracks: from her debut’s disturbingly upbeat ‘Prescilla’ to Two Suns’ hit single ‘Daniel’ and culminating in The Haunted Man’s ‘Laura’. This beautifully restrained song is presumably just Khan and her piano, and in fact she has stated that the album is ‘Just me and my haunted man!’ It is a song as evocative as the album’s striking cover image.

JAKE BUGG Jake Bugg Mercury 15th October 2012

The buzz surrounding 18-year-old folk prodigy Jake Bugg is quite staggering, and his highly anticipated self-titled debut album sees the Nottingham-born teen’s brand of country rock in pop format confirm his place as a truly exciting talent. Central to his sound are the obvious influences of Bob Dylan and Oasis, and the driving force behind this record, his piercing voice, is just as powerful as that of Liam Gallagher. However it is the delicate vocals on tracks like ‘Simple as This’ and ‘Country Song’ that provide enough light and shade to help create a variety-filled album. It is during the more mellow sections of the album in which Bugg is at his brilliant best as he croons over intricate guitar parts. The teenager also conveys elements of maturely honest song-writing not dissimilar from Alex Turner, which makes him all the more promising a prospect considering his youth. From early short and sharp punches of pop, the record matures into one full of soul and depth, as Bugg displays his repertoire of country rock to mellow folk. It seems that all the hype may be justified, as this truly is a very promising debut album from an enormous talent.

Matty Edwards

Melody’s Echo Chamber Weird World 5th November 2012

Two years ago, Khan was ready to put out an album, but having been on tour for so long found it dull just writing about that experience. Perhaps after two albums shortlisted for the Mercury Prize, it was no surprise to feel an increased weight of expectation. The wait is well worth it, with this, her third album at three year intervals.

She has gone from animals (‘Seal’s Jubilee’, ‘Horse and I’ and the equine cover art of Fur and Gold) to the solar system (‘Two Planets’, ‘Moon and Moon’ of second album Two Suns) right back to humanity, as the front cover shows Khan carrying on her back her naked, haunted man. Indeed, this album’s third track shows how she is bringing together the themes of her previous records with ‘Horses of the Sun’. From epic first track ‘Lilies’, piano echoes of which are heard in ‘Winter Fields’, the album builds and soars throughout. It remains full, though, and definitely not hollow in its polish. And this is the way the album ends: with a bang and a whimper.

Sorcha Berry-Varley

COMPANY Andy Burrows [PIAS] UK 22nd October 2012

Without his friends from Razorlight and We Are Scientists, Andy Burrows seems slightly lost on his latest solo-effort, Company, as he latches onto musical clichés and super-producer Mark Ronson for support, with disappointing results. The title track is a Midlakeesque string-fest pushed slowly along by the rap of bongos, comfortingly familiar but instantly forgettable.

The banjo-driven strut of ‘Because I Know That I Can’ is more than just a respectful nod (i.e. a desperate brown-nosing) to the wave of indie-folk bands that led last year. The album then peaks, somewhat too soon, with the elephantine stomp of ‘Keep On Moving On’.

A collaboration between Ronson, Andrew Wyatt and Burrows, its infectious hooks and shredding guitar solo make it refreshingly antique, but also highlight once more that Burrows, much like his music, is more suited in the background.

Either his time with Jonny Borrell left him a shivering wreck or his dependence on others has left him unable to fare his own way, but the limp, pseudomiserable songs that muddy the rest of the album lack in both confidence and originality. I am sad to say that my eyes remained tearless.

George Robb

Melody’s Echo Chamber is the result of a collaboration between French vocalist Melody Prochet and her producer Kevin Parker, the Australian multiinstrumentalist of Tame Impala fame. As the title Melody’s Echo Chamber suggests, the musicians are playing around with different sounds. But the disparate elements that make up each song - echoing guitar riffs, Prochet’s dreamy vocals, quiet drumming and other miscellaneous noises) -do not always quite fit together.

There is an overall lack of a thematic spine and the album really is just an acoustic experiment – one worth pursuing-butfromaproducerandsingerwhohavenever worked together before, the results are inconsistent. In many places it is too ethereal and intangible, causing it to lack emotional resonance and allowing the listening experience to slip into the background. One redeeming feature is that with repeated listening layers can unravel, revealing new flavours previously unnoticed.

There are however a number of tracks where the artists do hit the mark. For example, the timing works perfectly on opening track ‘I Follow You’ , ‘Bisou Magique’ and ‘Quand Vas Tu Rentrer?’ Paradoxically, this is an unspectacular and subdued yet subtle and multifaceted album.

Ben Springett

ASTRAEA Rolo Tomassi Destination Moon 5th November 2012

Sheffield math-rockers Rolo Tomassi return with their chaotic third studio album, packed with riffs and energy. While the band has chosen to move away from jarring math-core to some extent, frontwoman Eva Spence has said this record is ‘still technical’. That’s certainly true of album opener ‘Howl’, which looms in with an unsettling bleeping introduction that crescendoes to harsh vocals backed by relentless bass and precise guitar riffs.

The familiar frenetic disposition found on previous records is present throughout, and used to great effect on ‘The Scales of Balance’, adorned with layers of sparking electronics and jagged, discordant guitar work. Another highlight is ‘Empiresk’, which begins with haunting piano and delicate vocals before the heavier stuff kicks in.

Despite the band’s assertion that this record would be more accessible, there is still plenty here for fans of Rolo Tomassi’s older material to enjoy.

Astraea is a solid, well-crafted album that retains the unsettling changes in tempo and mood typical of the band’s work, while the increased prevalence of epic atmospheric sections exudes a mature sense of musicianship that will be sure to gain new fans.

Rajitha Ratnam

’ALLELUJAH! DON’T BEND! ASCEND!

Godspeed You! Black Emperor Constellation 15th October 2012

You could easily argue that post-rock is the most stale genre of late. There are numerous bands doing the same thing and most were inspired by, among others, Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

After a ten year hiatus Godspeed are back with their fourth studio album ’Allelujah! Don’t Bend!

Ascend! The album features two long pieces of about 20 minutes each and two shorter drone songs of about 6 minutes. Opening track ‘Mladic’ is one of the former. Beginning with a vague vocal sample typical of the band’s previous work, this soon fades into harsh strings and a distorted guitar, building slowly over the course of 15 minutes. Post-rock often focuses too much on the crescendo but Godspeed want you to experience the whole journey through a variety of instrumentation, evoking a multitude of feelings and making the climax even more impressive when you finally get there. The shorter pieces work to break the larger ones apart, and while less interesting they serve an important purpose. Although this album isn’t anything particularly new for Godspeed, it’s good to see them doing what they do best again.

Joshua Clark

10:20 The Twang Jump the Cut 29th October 2012

With 10:20 The Twang return with their third fulllength album, recorded in their own studio and released on their own label. Impressive as this is in the modern world of major labels dominating the charts, the record is not the ‘natural and beautiful’ album that singer Phil describes. For an album supposedly unconstrained by anyone but the band themselves, it seems decidedly lacklustre. The band insist that working with new drummer Ash Sheehan (after previous drummer Matty Clinton was sacked for stealing £10,000 worth of equipment) blew them away and made them a stronger and more disciplined unit.

Unfortunately, the album itself does not blow the listener away. First single ‘Mainline’ attempts to be more politicised and darker lyrically than the group’s previous offerings, but still comes across as weak and ultimately forgettable. Third song ‘We’re A Crowd’ cites the London riots of last year as inspiration but lacks the power or energy to back this up. 10:20 is not a bad album and might grow on you after a few listens, but it is far too distinctly average to make any lasting impression.

Emily Quinn

Available from the Students’ Union foyer or the UBU Info Point.

www.ubu.org.uk

Film & TV

Epigram

Editor: Jasper Jolly

Deputy Editor: Kate Samuelson

filmandtv@epigram.org.uk

deputyfilmandtv@epigram.org.uk

22.10.2012

@epigramfilm

The far-reaching power of propaganda

Edward Carden examines the relationship between film and politics as the US presidential election looms over the industry of the enemy leered down upon audiences, as the benefits and importance of their just war were extolled ad nauseum.

Predictably, dictatorships have proven to be keen proponents of this tactic.

From its inception in 1922, the Soviet Union revelled in the propaganda opportunities that cinema presented, with films like Battleship Potemkin and October. The Bolsheviks even stole film-makers and forced them to tour the country in ‘film trains’. Similiarly, the Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels himself had lines that he had written included in films. Again, films like The Triumph of the Will and Olympia remain almost as cinematically respected as morally reprehensible.

Of course, Hollywood is itself almost as guilty as the cinemameddlers. During the Cold War, Hollywood was ravaged by paranoid McCarthyist witch-hunters, who blacklisted communists, liberals and other lefty do-gooders, and even Humphrey Bogart. Villains were constantly shifted to be the nation’s enemies: horrid Nazis, horrid Communists, horrid Mexicans. A powerful few have often forced the US film industry to remain loyal to their own view of America. It seems as if back in the day cinematic

propaganda was more serious and more direct. Whereas now we have Zach Galifianakis and Ferrell (right) buffooning about in The Campaign, and Josh Brolin giving a 2dimensional ‘funny’ portrayal of a politician (W.), once upon a time Klansmen fought in racist lethal combat (The Birth of a Nation) and Nazis found their sing-a-longs interrupted by irate Frenchmen (Casablanca). Even Chaplin’s comical skewering of Hitler finished with a fiveminute out-of-character speech to the audience on the perils of fascism in The Great Dictator.

Perhaps cinema has softened into a subtler propaganda tool.

Socio-political commentary, fears and aspirations have all been spotted in numerous postwar genres. For example, Italian neo-realism opposed fascism by showing the awful truths of its aftermath in stark reality, as in Bicycle Thieves or Rome, Open City. Film Noir showcased many US citizens’ embittered feelings about the contemporary world, spilling political messages to the audience indirectly (The Third Man). Even 80s slasher films are sometimes claimed to be a metaphor for teenage world angst.

Suddenly Halloween III seems a more worthwhile venture.

In 2012, the political influence of cinema is challenged by other media - notably television and the internet. The motion picture has been reduced as an art form of overwhelming political power. Obviousness, censorship and preaching are undesirable qualities. Perhaps cinema is instead good for satire and mockery, but who knows quite what subtle effects, what undetectable messages films still have. Maybe propaganda is thriving at a less perceptible level, as powerful as ever.

The nominations are in for the best - and worst - political films

HIT

Battleship Potemkin - an almost perfect piece of propaganda, it gave us the image of the pram falling down the Odessa steps.

An Inconvenient Truth - Al Gore turned his sights from the presidency to global warming, with far more success.

Fahrenheit 9/11 - Michael Moore’s documentary on Bush’s presidency was accused of inaccuracy but took $200 million. It is still controversial.

Frost/Nixon - Ron Howard somehow makes a political interview a compelling battle of wits.

MISS

Triumph of the Will - the propaganda paragon, but also justified Nazi rule to the world.

www.allmoviephoto.com

Will Ferrell’s new film, The Campaign, was recently released in UK cinemas. It attempts to lampoon the American political system through a series of slapstick gaffes, outlandish scenarios and farcical political manoeuvring (they hit a baby and punch that dog from The Artist). Audience members will doubtless appreciate this, but what they might not realise is that cinema has been used politically for the past century, as a means of both socio-political comment and governmental propaganda. From Goebbels to the suspected fascist Disney, opinionated hijackers of this art form have sought to persuade the masses to see the world through the lenses of their own biased eyes. But how much has this phenomenon transformed?

Is cinematic propaganda recognisable from one decade to the next, or are the same tactics still callously heaped onto every new generation of unsuspecting cinephiles?

After its invention at the end of the nineteenth century, cinema swept through Europe as the fastest-growing art form.

It was during the First World War that movies were first seriously mauled as a means of mass agitation. The British Government actually pursued this as policy. Twisted caricatures

2016 - Obama’s America - Dinesh D’Souza is making waves in right-wing America, despite deserved ridicule from every reviewer. It is the second highest-grossing political documentary ever.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed - from the same studio as 2016, Expelled posits a liberal conspiracy against Creationism.

Rosa-tinted vision Uni film big failure Harriet Walker: Ginger and Rosa is lifted by Elle Fanning in lead role Adrian Choa: there is little to like in Big Font, Large Spacing Ginger and Rosa Released 19th October Dir. Sally Potter, 90 mins

Big Font, Large Spacing One-off showing at Union Dir. Paul Allen, 81 mins

Watershed

Set in a fragile Britain during the Cuban missile crisis, Sally Potter’s coming of age film about two 17-year-old girls explores the difficulties and intimacies of female friendship and the moral pains of growing up. Friends since birth, Ginger (Elle Fanning, right) and Rosa (Alice Englert) are inseparable; they both wear the same outfits, experiment with cigarettes and both agree to never become like their mothers. Rosa craves everlasting love, whilst Ginger plans to save the world.

However, both influenced by conflicting views of the 1960s, they end up growing apart and the bond that was theirs since birth disintegrates.

Ginger and Rosa is accessible but would have been moderately dull if it were not for the outstanding acting talents of

Elle Fanning, who was only 13 at the time of filming. Her ability overshadows that of everyone else in the film, including that of her parents, Christina Hendricks (Mad Men), who plays her doting and exasperated mother, and Alessandro Nivola, her charming yet irresponsible father. The most painful part of this emotional film is unfortunately Hendricks’ unbearable British accent.

Ginger becomes more and more intrigued and involved in the Ban the Bomb protests, channelling her own anxieties and pains through protest.

Potter therefore concentrates on the politics of the 60s, rather than indulging the audience in a rose-tinted, nostalgic ideal of the period’s fashion and music.

Potter captures the pains of youth successfully, providing a transition from young naivety to comprehension of the horrors of reality. Combining the difficulties of world politics with sexual politics, which both Ginger and Rosa embody,

Potter manages to display a realistic portrayal of young teenage girls, escaping their youth and coming to grips with maturity. However the film deteriorates, leaving a vapid and weak denouement awkwardly staged and choreographed. The film lacks the ability to leave an emotional mark on the audience, as the characters towards the end are unlikable and unsympathetic.

Nonetheless, Potter does manage to represent the situation for women - active or kept in the home - in the 1960s, and their role in society, in ways both poignant or subtle and understated.

The key to good student cinema is to not recognize that it is student cinema. As an experimental project for a Film Production course this is relatively strong. For anything more, this is a weak piece of filmmaking.

The latent cynicism that plagues your average student acts as a potent barrier to the success of productions that intend to garner the sympathy of shared experience. This is a reason why in the natural selection of the television universe only a small collection of university-orientated shows such as Fresh Meat have managed to prevail. Big Font immediately drowns the audience in cliché as the credits run over sweeping shots of dirty mugs, beer cans and weed. moving on to the hilarities of

not going to lectures, gap years and binge drinking.

Narrative involvement is counteracted by the low, unexciting stakes of the screenplay. The basic premise is that the protagonist experiences utter shock when he realizes that both him and his friend haven’t done an essay that he promised his girlfriend he had. A host of questions present themselves at this point. Why is it so terrifying that the girlfriend finds out that he hasn’t done an essay? Is this really a strong enough premise for an entire feature film?

One would assume that in 81 minutes there would at least be serious in-depth character development and a major exploration of themes if the plot itself is so lacking. This is not the case however as the issues under the cinematic microscope are rushed and bite-size. Anorexia acts as the surprise, incongruously serious issue of the film and is discussed for approximately a minute.

The characters themselves are

mere stereotypes: Sportsman, Girlfriend, Stoner and Bullied Anorexic.

The feature’s form contributes markedly to its downfall. The Bob Dylan-laden soundtrack sounds more like it has been chosen as the editor is a fan, in lieu of suitability.

This is post-production for the iPod generation. Aside from these tracks there is an ironic use of genre soundtracks to self-deprecatingly aggrandize the life of a student. This method comes across as far too clichéd to be humourous.

In several instances these are the backdrops to montages, on which the film needlessly relies.

This is all rounded up neatly by awkward and over the top acting, especially perpetrated by the leading role. This is a well-intentioned project that due to shortcomings in writing, performance, editing, cinematography and sound prevent it from being the humourous, effective short it could have been.

Epigram

08.10.2012

30

Frankenweenie’s stop motion resurrection Jasper Jolly hears how Tim Burton and his team of animators are still flying the flag for handmade productions

image.net

Frankenweenie is Tim Burton’s third foray into stop-motion animation, and his first with the backing of Disney. It is easy to see why Disney backed him, as Burton has developed something of a signature style in the form, with The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride both having a similar macabre aesthetic and, indeed, concept. After their success it seems an obvious decision to let Burton try for a repeat performance - especially when Frankenweenie has so much in common. However, this is not the case: making Frankenweenie with stop motion is an unusual, although not unprecedented, decision. Being made in black and white - a brave choice intended as an homage to early horror films - makes it even more remarkable.

These two decisions place Frankenweenie in an interesting position relative to the norm.

Both of these choices are seen as pretty outdated in an industry in which Pixar (owned

by Disney, but not quite under their creative control) rules animation with their bright,

computer-generated characters.

But Burton made two separate, considered choices.

When launching the film as it opened the London Film Festival, Burton justified his decision. It is ‘the purity of stop motion’ that draws Burton to it repeatedly.

That is not to say that it is the only acceptable method, but rather a choice. ‘All forms of animation are still viable. Stop motion is a beautiful art form.’

With that purity comes an incredible effort from a huge array of animators across Britain. The principle of stop motion is deceptively simple.

Every second of film is made

up of 24 separate frames. For every frame the animator must move the character a tiny distance, and then the pictures are all joined up. Everybody knows the flick-book drawings that come to life as the pages are thumbed. 24 frames per second sounds manageable, but there are roughly 125,280 seconds in the entire film. The upshot of this is that it takes the animation team 18 months to complete a feature-length film, at a rate of a measly four seconds a day. Crowd scenes are even worse, as every person and animal needs to move naturally, with the same tiny and uniform

adjustments to their bodies, made from a fully articulated metal frame covered with silicone.

Trey Thomas, animation director for Frankenweenie, is pretty circumspect when it comes to these timescales.

Without them, the film would not have what Thomas calls, the ‘visceral inviting quality’.

However, even then it is still mind-numbing. ‘It is a painfully tedious process, but the results are very rewarding.’ The necessary attention to detail is, in Thomas’s opinion, a positive thing: ‘There haven’t been any throwaway stop-motion movies yet.’

Frankenweenie is a determined declaration of the ongoing power of old methods, a plea to not forget film heritage. The handmade quality, which matches his original sketches very closely, is exactly what Burton wants.

Rather than being a retrograde step, it is positive. “It’s more about creation – that’s what film making is. That’s what stop motion is.”

Monstrous fun

Based on Burton’s own childhood longing, familiar to so many, to bring back a dead dog, Frankenweenie is the story of the life, death and afterlife of Sparky, the faithful companion to the shy Victor (left).

After an unfortunate death, Victor sets out to reanimate the corpse. Of course, the resurrection business is bound to go wrong, and duly does when Edgar (original sketch inset) is involved.

This set-up is excellent, but it is let down by a relatively weak final act, as the plot starts to become slightly strained. The strength of Frankenweenie lies in the relationship between boy and dog, and it is

in the scenes that deal with Sparky’s death that Burton’s vision is justified: they are emotional and genuine. It is only after the resurrection that the concept begins to flag.

Too many antagonists are introduced, and the film finds itself spread too thinly. The second half is not terrible, but lacks the earlier ingenuity.

It is steeped in nostalgia and references, which can be risky, but for the most part it treads the line between witty and overbearing finely enough.

Frankenweenie is still a joy, giving enough for both parents and children to chew on.

Frankenweenie Released 17th October Dir. Tim Burton, 87 mins

Watson’s new film wows

Riley’s On the Road feels real

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is the story of loner Charlie (played by a superb Logan Lerman), who enters his first year at high school. Having had a more than difficult childhood after losing both his aunt, who died when he was child, and his best friend, Charlie finds high school challenging, spending most of his time there alone and ignored.

The story that helped define a generation finally reaches the big screen. Over thirty years in the making, On the Road has seen off countless casts, directors and writers, and even the likes of Brando, Pitt and Depp have shied away from this immense undertaking.

The ramble across post war America does not, at first sight, welcome an adaptation. The meandering narrative won’t appeal to all but it is loyal to the spirit of the book, and at times, the hedonism burns across the screen. For some, its repetitive nature makes the film flat, joyless and drab, yet I can’t help but find that it makes the journey both endearing and real.

Jacob Cooke is impressed by this indie coming-of-age tale

’’

However his fortunes soon begin to change, firstly through his fatherly English teacher (Paul Rudd) who encourages Charlie to pursue his interest in literature. Then he meets Patrick (Ezra Miller, of We Need to Talk About Kevin fame) and

thechairoffame.com IndieWire

The Perks of Being a Wallflower Released 3rd October Dir. Stephen Chbosky, 103 mins

‘‘

The hedonism burns across the screen

’’

It’s a story of friendship and freedom, when aspiring writer Sal Paradise (Riley) meets the irrepressible Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund). As Dean and Sal embark on a road trip, journeying to Denver, Mexico and San Fransisco, Eric Gautier’s crisp wide-screen photography perfectly illustrates what Sal calls ‘the purity of the open road.’ The relationship between Sal and Dean is the heart of the movie, and director Salles gets it spot on. And yet, the two

men never act upon the homo-erotic undertones suggested by their affectionate relationship.

Hedland is a gritty revelation.

His naked entrance into the film is remiscent of Brad Pitt in Fight Club and both scenes exude the same gritty realism.

Dean, though propelled by a feverish energy, has moments of quiet reflection which evoke sympathy for his irrepressible behavior.

The effects of drugs, sex and jazz are seen as positive in moderation. In regards to nudity, it’s about as frank an adaptation as one could hope for; Kirsten Stewart is especially game. It’s evident that Stewart relishes the opportunity to shake off the shackles of Twilight as she throws herself into this gritty, damaged role, exposing more flesh than character. And yet without saying as much, we soon discover she is a tortured soul who finally yearns for the safety of suburbia. ‘There is no more road for me’ she says, and leaves in search of stability, not before giving new meaning to a

image.net

The film remains realistic and believable throughout

backgrounds and emotions all feel very real.

Perks shows Emma Watson’s development as an actress in her first major role since Harry Potter. Watson still attracts a large following of teenagers, making her a very bankable commodity for teenage films.

I would not say she has completely broken from the Hermione mould, as she is arguably the most ‘normal’ of the three main characters.

Yet this is a completely different genre of film from Harry Potter, mainly because Perks is a film for all age groups and tells a story that really requires the audience to think. Watson is eminently believable in this new role, brilliantly conveying the complex emotions her character is feeling.

I believe there is a part of Charlie in all of us and this film tells us this is OK. The Perks of Being a Wallflower has the rare quality of being a film that is able to change the way we think of people and inspire us to change our lives for the better. aceshowbiz

‘‘

his stepsister Sam (Emma Watson), who accept him into their ‘edgy’ group, appreciating him for who he is.

The film, directed by Stephen Chbosky (who also wrote the book on which the film is based) deals with a number of problems associated with growing up, problems that can be extended to all age groups. These problems include choosing the wrong people to love, being confused by your emotions and feeling different to everyone else.

This is no typical coming-ofage film. The issues raised about outsiders in high school are developed without awkwardness, the film remains realistic and believable throughout. This is partly because one can empathise with the characters and their actions; their issues,

Stephen Pollard: this risky adaptation remains loyal to the book

‘two-hander’. That aside, there is little to do for the women except to follow the boys. Actresses of the calibre of Amy Adams and Kirsten Dunst seem especially underused.

The ending is perfect, finding Sal reflecting at his typewriter, recapping everything about his life with Dean. What is surprising is how emotional this isThe audience realises the strength of the bond that these two young men share as the pain of their fathers connects them on their search for meaning. It’s an affecting and inherently sad revelation that life on the road is unsustainable.

On the Road Released 12th October Dir. Walter Salles, 124 mins

Epigram

What it’s really like behind ‘Reality’ Sophie Jarvis refects on sunbeds and stilettos, and speaks to ‘reem’ TOWIE star Charlie King Once again, a group of fake eyelash/ fake tan/ fake hair-clad men and women in their early twenties have been thrust onto our screens – this time with thick Welsh accents. So, I sat and watched The Valleys and within

‘‘

I naturally dislike how TOWIE has tarnished even further the reputation of Essex girls.

’’

Seeing as I don’t have orange skin, peroxide blonde hair and the letters ‘h’ and ‘t’ are in my alphabet, I naturally dislike how TOWIE has tarnished the reputation of Essex girls even further.

However, after contacting cast member Charlie King from TOWIE, I have learnt that others

clearly think differently from me. Charlie argued that the show has encouraged “more people to dress more Essex, have sunbeds, go gym and look after their selfs [sic]”.

He went on to say that if people are “insecure about people taking the mickey if you’re from Essex, they should move out! [sic]”.

Sophie Jarvis

from the neighbouring county, Suffolk.

The show has accentuated the infamously tarty reputation of Essex girls; even though the home of Tiptree Jam and Maldon Sea Salt has produced legendary actress Maggie Smith (above right), Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery, Ross Kemp and Alan Davies, everyone still asks where my white stilettos and handbags are – and this has certainly worsened since the show’s beginning.

ITV

seconds they were getting their ‘vag’s’ out and rather than The Only Way Is Essex-style vajazzles ( s e e below), it was sheep tattoos on their vaginas.

The episode was rather mundane and repetitive, consisting mainly of orange-skinned and black haired women losing all respect for themselves on national television.

Some may find this entertaining. However, to me anyway, it just seemed like another episode of Geordie Shore – the only difference being the

MTV

MTV

accent. As the episode of The Valleys finished, I couldn’t help but wonder about the impact of these reality TV shows. Firstly ,on the reputation of places like Essex, Newcastle or even Chelsea, and secondly, on the people from these places. Are these programmes t r u e representations of the respective part of the country they are set in, or simply the work of producers exploiting stereotypes to the detriment of various counties, cities and now countries?

As an Essex girl myself, The Only Way is Essex is my main focus. My biggest worry about starting Bristol was having to say I was from Essex. The amount of laughs and sniggers I received after revealing I was from Essex, after the generic ‘What are you studying, where are you f r o m … e t c ’, pushed me into claiming I was actually

Charlie then offered to send me a ‘reem’ picture of himself (see above).

So, clearly depending on where you live in Essex, there are people with different opinions of the impact of the show. But personally I think it gives a distorted image of a very minute part of the county.

Unfortunately this has led to the slightly more normal Essex girls being tarred with the same brush as the cast from TOWIE.

31 29

TV Picks 22nd October - 5th November

The producers of these reality TV shows have a lot to answer for as they have without a doubt worsened the reputation of people from Essex, Newcastle and almost certainly now the Welsh Valleys.

Made in Chelsea, although portrays its characters as classier and more educated, could also be viewed as distorted, as I don’t think that everyone from Chelsea speaks with a plum in their mouth and

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22.10.2012

I don’t think everyone from Chelsea speaks with a plum in their mouth

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goes on spontaneous holidays to the South of France.

With any luck the phenomenon of these reality TV programmes will gradually fade away and classy Geordie, Essex and Welsh girls may redeem their tainted reputations, but until then the jokes, jeers and inappropriate gestures will keep on rolling our way.

The Valleys MTV Tuesdays, 10pm

Family Guys: What Sitcoms Say About America Telegraph writer Timothy Stanley looks at what the sitcom can tell us about the USA as the election looms.

Saturday 27th October 10.15-11.15pm, BBC TWO Spy This British sitcom puts a twist on the traditional family comedy.

Friday 19th October 8.30pm, Sky1 Horror Europa With Mark Gatiss The Sherlock writer presents a feature-length exploration of European horror cinema. n/a, BBC FOUR The Town that Caught Tourette’s This documentary explores what happened when a group of teenage girls from the same high school suddenly developed Tourette-like symptoms.

Thursday 25th October 9.00pm, Channel 4 Panorama - Winterbourne View: The Hospital That Stopped Caring The story of the shocking abuse which took place in a Bristol hospital.

Monday 29th October 8.30-9.00pm, BBC ONE

33

Downton on a downhill spiral

George Smith is caught up in its pastry-fuelled momentum

Anna Lavelle wonders why series three is just not up to scratch

If you are unaware of the latest cookery show sensation, then you need to jump on iPlayer and begin the strange spiralling path of addiction that perfectly accompanies The Great British Bake Off. The programme consists of 12 amateur bakers going spoon to spoon over a series of cooking challenges.

Their creations are then consumed and critiqued by two judges: cookery goddess Mary Berry and professional baker Paul Hollywood, a man whose name would better suit a wrestler or an adult film star rather than someone who can make a good flan. Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins present the rest of the show, although their actual necessity is unclear, other than to p r o v i d e the occasional humorous comment.

Entering its third series this year, Bake Off seems to have found a pastry-fuelled momentum which has soared it to the top of the ratings for BBC Two midweek, but the question must be asked, why?

On paper it would be difficult

I was an avid watcher of Downton Abbey series one and two, hooked by the subtle British acting, lavish outfits and superb one-liners of Maggie Smith (right). Excited for the 1920s costumes and Mary and Matthew finally tying the knot, I eagerly anticipated series three, the hype behind it suggesting it could be the best one yet.

Despite a few minor faults, the first episode did not disappoint.

Mary and Matthew’s wedding was captivating; the interaction between the two lovers was touching and Carson (Jim Carter) was on top form.

to distinguish the originality from the likes of Masterchef or the similarly named Great British Menu; however there is just something about Bake Off which makes it so captivating.

You build attachment to the

tvjam.com

The Great British Bake Off BBC Two Catch on bbc.co.uk/iplayer

‘‘

It is easy to get caught up in this period drama, even if you are just clinging to the hope it will get better.

’’

Since the wedding however, Downton Abbey has gone downhill, becoming even - dare I say it - a little boring. There was always going to be a problem when the series’ main narrative (the tenuous relationship between Matthew and Mary) came to an end. The crucial will they/ won’t they glued us to our screens, and now the couple are wedded, Downton simply has nowhere to go.

The Downton Abbey writers have attempted to create some suspense and tension with other, slightly random plots, from Robert (Hugh Bonneville), the Earl of Grantham and Downton Abbey’s owner, temporarily entering financial ruin, to Lady Edith’s painfully short-lived engagement. There were some dramatic scenes with Sybil and her husband, the political hothead and, controversially, ex-bulter Tom. As a whole however, the show is stagnant, dull and predictable, the random subplots failing to ignite any excitement.

In spite of the show’s shortcomings, there is still enough of what makes it so

loved to demand continued viewing. The usual bustle and gossip carries on downstairs and the arrival of a sexy new footman adds spice to the mix. Maggie Smith remains as excellent as ever and the costumes are superb. It is easy to get caught up in this period drama, even if you are just clinging to the hope it will get better.

JG/Alamy

BBC

various contestants hoping your favourite will produce a great quiche, and you feel the agonising tension as Paul Hollywood tastes the dish and his face remains tantalisingly emotionless - is it good Paul, is it bad? Mary Berry too, with her wrinkled face containing more lines than a barcode, makes the show, immediately becoming somebody you wish was your Nan, if only to have had some of the nicest looking cakes in the world as a child.

So even in attempting to come to grips with why this programme has

dominated evening television over the last few months, it is hard to think of the sole reason.

Perhaps it simply comes down to the fact that as a nation, we love food. Visually the hour is delectable and certainly stirs up a desire to get out the cook books. Mel and Sue, although apparently only there for the craic, provide friendly humour and Paul and Mary are not as abrasive as Gordon Ramsay or as pretentious as Heston Blumenthal, making a nice balance.

Even the setting of the programme is oddly comforting, as the contestants whisk up their food in a large tent in the middle of a garden, giving the sense of a children’s programme set in a fantastical world. It doesn’t quite make sense why it is so popular on paper, or even when watching it, but I guarantee that if you enjoy cookery shows to any extent, this will more than likely become a firm favourite, and if nothing else, make you hungry.

PBS

Why is Bake Off so tasty?

Downton Abbey ITV One Sundays, 9pm

?

N O S AT’

WH

reader offer: m ra ig p E e v si lu c Ex Drink Live & d o o F ll a w rn o C en Cornwall

Halloween horrors Just off the A4 to Bath, is the gloomy Arnos Vale cemetery.

A walk around the listed Victorian Pippa Shawley

Arnos Vale Cemetery

graveyard is a spooky trip in its own right, but this Halloween, Cine Features are screening the Woman in Black, starring Daniel Radcliffe,

November, wh north east this aturing Cornwall moves el’s Old Station. Fe un Br er ov es tak e afood, Liv se k sh in Food and Dr m teas and fre rites such as crea from ou gs fav in ay th lid ho rre za er summ re some more bi tu fea o h of als nc ll lau wi e tival sees th the weekend ighbours. The fes take ne n ca rly u ste yo we d han ut s our so flavoured crisp sty pa ish rn Co the world’s first singing session. part in a shanty y will e bar on each da aders to get to th re eing b am igr Ep 20 The first ably to sip while presum nt pi lf ha e fre a t ge -a-go istol’s finest have serenaded by Br e your tak to et rg fo n’t shanty singers. Do r with you! copy of the pape mber, 10am-6pm Saturday 3rd Nove ber, 10.30am-5pm m Sunday 4th Nove n, Temple Meads Brunel’s Old Statio vember) No £5 (£4 before 1st drink.co.uk/ live/ nd da oo llf wa www.corn

Free Festival o f Ideas tickets

in the Anglican Chapel (pictured

The University of Bristol ha s teamed up Festival of Id eas to offer with Bristol’s students free upcoming ev ents, as well tickets to tw as o a free drink. Th author of Schi omas Keneally ndle , winning Schind r’s Ark, which was adapted into the Osca ler’s List, visits rthe Arnolfini new book, Th to e Daughters of Mars, which off talk about his on the First ers a fresh fo World War. In cus N ovember, Coun Clive Aslet, lo try Life edito oks at how on r, e Dartmoor vi with modern llage has cope warfare, from d the First Wor war in Iraq. ld War up to the To book, emai l ideas@busi nesswest.co. www.ideasfes uk tival.co.uk

left), which promises to scare the bejesus out of all who dare to attend. Turn

Festiv a

up in a Halloween costume to receive a free bag of popcorn.

l of Id

Wednesday 31st October, 7.30pm Tickets £6 in advance or £7 on the door www.cinefeaturesuk.co.uk

Thomas Kene ally The Daughters of Mars 25th October, 7.30pm Arnolfini

eas

Clive Aslet War Memoria l: The Story of One Village’s Sacrifice 5th November, 6pm Watershed

Sean Pollock

Dates for your diary Though it may no longer be socially acceptable for us to dress up as vampires, witches or ghouls and march round our neighbourhood demanding sweets from total strangers, there’s still plenty to do this Halloween.

Squeaky Hills Annual Halloween Ball

Have you got a cultu Email editor@ ral secret to share? epigram.org.u k Pop Confessional’s Bad Taste Halloween Party

Flickr: Groovnick

Wednesday 31st October, 8pm-1am Start the Bus, Corn Street Free entry www.startthebus.tv

Saturday 27th October, 9.30pm-4am Thekla £5 entry before midnight www.theklabristol.co.uk

For a Halloween with a Mexican twist, head down to the Harbourside for Bristol’s inaugaral Day of the Dead festival. The day features the best of this Mexican holiday, from mariachi bands to salsa lessons, and also includes regular activities like apple bobbing, pumpkin carving and ghost walks. The whole fiesta is rounded off with a fireworks display.

Saturday 27th October, noon-late Bristol Amphitheatre, Harbourside £8.75 for students in advance www.dayofthedeadfest.co.uk

Words: Pippa Shawley

Turn your pumpkin into a carriage this The flyer for this party shows a derangedHalloween and head to Start the Bus for looking Jimmy Saville, which sets the tone an evening of face paint, fancy dress and for this year’s Pop Confessional Halloween burlesque. Take part in a Thriller line Party of bad taste and bad beats. dance, or have your future predicted MC Hammered plays classic hip by a mis-fortune teller. Entry and hop upstairs for those body face painting are free, so this is the popping pumpkins, while place to head for those whose loans the main area plays the usual sinful pop music. have magically disappeared.

Bristol Day of the Dead

Epigram

10.10.2011

Epigram

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22.10.2012

33

Views from the Dugout...

This section is for all things random. Have you got any tweets of the week, interesting photos or simply want to show off the success of your sports club?

Email us at sport@epigram.org.uk Highlights of this fortnights BUCS fixtures Wednesday 24th October: University of

Cardiff Metropolitan

Bristol Men’s 1st University Men’s 1st 14:00 Coombe Dingle

University of Bristol Women’s 1st

Email us at sport@

Epigram Sport’s tweets of the fortnight We follow them so you don’t have to

Oxford University Women’s 1st

14:30 Coombe Dingle

epigram.org.uk

Bristol Uni Problems looks at the Pay-As-You-Go story at another angle,

Something we wish we could do when we’re stuck in the Epigram office late on a Friday afternoon. ‘Game Time’ of course meaning go home to study, rather than discover the second room at Lizard Lounge.

Not quite sure who at the Bristol University Korfball Club decided on this cuddly thing to be their mascot...

Olympics tales: Behind the scenes at London 2012 Bristol’s involvement at the Olympics and Paralympics wasn’t just limited to the athletes themselves. Various students found themselves involved in all sorts of ways, from being Games Makers at the Olympic Park to serving drinks at Wembley Stadium Name: Ally McBeath Subject: Economics Venue: Athletes’ Village Role: Transport Mall Games Maker Rather than spending my summer at an internship with UBS or having awkward encounters with sexually ambiguous Thai ladyboys, I worked as a volunteer with L.O.C.O.G. If you were anywhere around London this summer you would have seen us, wearing that garish purple uniform, and generally being very excitable and eager. Uniform and excitability aside we received a fantastic press and I even received a letter from Dave Cameron himself, written by his secretary’s secretary. I was a volunteer in the Athletes’ Village working in the Transport Mall, which basically involved getting athletes on the right buses to get to the right venue. Glamorous I know. It was, however, a great experience and I saw quite literally all the athletes. There was a fantastic ambience in the Village and all the athletes were happy to interact with us. The other volunteers were predominantly retired which led to me getting plenty of life lessons… and phone numbers.

My dismal GCSE French was put

into use when a Sierra Leonean judo athlete was hopelessly lost, and I was also given a pin

by Aries Merritt, who won the 110m hurdles. If you’ve ever seen the Olympics depicted on TV you’ll see pins are a big deal, and they really were, people was practically demanding them of athletes and each other, and outside Stratford Station there were hundreds of American men buying and selling pins.

awe-inspiring moments of my life. Not only did it open my eyes to the beauty and diversity of humanity, but it showed me

understood how special it might be. The room was slowly filling up with a diverse range of people; young and old,

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”

If you think that’s a weird hobby to have, there were also bus watchers, who came to see all the different buses that went past, noting down their serial codes looking at them through their binoculars. Overall, it was a great experience and I was able to see first hand the greatest sporting event in the world Name: Ellie Gosgave Subject: Engineering Venue: Olympic Stadium Role: Paralympics Opening Ceremony dancer Taking part in the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games was one of the most

would be the disabled female actress Nicola Miles-Wildin. I was overjoyed. Not only would we be showcasing the diverse beauty and creativity of science to the world, but it would show a woman as the scientific explorer.

I am passionate about encouraging a diverse range of people to study science and engineering, not only because it offers a wonderful career, but because if we are to solve the world’s major global challenges, we need a diverse workforce that can devise creative and innovative solutions.

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that with the right support, dedication and passion, any dream is attainable.

It all started in February when I went along to the audition in east London’s Three Mills studios. From the moment I walked in, I knew this was going to be something specialand I danced my heart out to make sure I got a place. It wasn’t until the 1st of July, our first rehearsal, that I really

disabled and able-bodied, and many different nations and races were represented. We would dance together in unity on the world stage, proclaiming that no matter who you are, you have the right to be heard and valued.

It wasn’t till about six weeks later that we found out the theme of the ceremony. It was to be a journey through science, and the protagonist

”

The ceremony showed that science is a creative endeavour and that anyone can excel in it. I was so proud to be part of spreading that message to the world.

Name: Laura Lambert Subject: Geography Venue: Greenwich Park Role: Event Services Games Maker After numerous training days across London I was ready to get stuck into the Olympics and

Paralympics as a member of the 70,000-strong purple army of volunteers.

Among my friends, I was the butt of everyone’s jokes about the uniform I had to wear, the 12 hour shifts and most ridiculously to them that I was to end the summer with less money than I started with.

But while many of my friends did waitressing and retail jobs, I was greeting the hundreds of thousands of spectators that entered arguably the best venue of the Games, the picturesque and temporarily transformed Greenwich Park. While a lucky few had bought their tickets late the night before, in LOCOG’s valiant attempt to reduce the number of empty seats, most spectators had waited a year or more for their trip to the Olympics.

A far cry from the negativity that seemed to surround the decision back in 2005 that London would host the Olympics and Paralympics, most people seemed truly happy that we had the honour of a home Games in our lifetime - although it now seems that as Britain did such a good job it might not be too long until the next one!

Epigram

22.10.2012

34

Hockey Club sticks to goal of promotion

George Moxey talks to Club captain Eugene Malthouse about the exciting new squad and the outlook for the 2012-2013 season George Moxey Sports Reporter

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So you must be aiming high this year? ‘Promotion! In the Davis Wood Saturday league we need to be improving on the fourth place of last season.

We’re already in the top league in BUCS, the southern premier.

Exeter A looked so good last year; they’re definitely the team to beat. Oxford and my home town Bath will be up there too.’

Away from the pitch for a brief moment allows a few words on the new location for the infamous Wednesday night socials - courtesy of Lizard Lounge, Rileys, and Garam Masala. ‘It’s going to be so tough to replace The Bank; it was a brilliant venue for the

Club Captain quickfire: What’s your favourite night spot? Lounge.

Favourite music? The playlist at lounge. Love a bit of R&B and I’ve been getting into the Channel ORANGE album by Frank Ocean.

Social network fan? Here and there. I use twitter a bit.

How many followers do you have? 130 Who’s been the most promising fresher this year? Jez Williams (Wales junior) Who’s the worst dressed on the team? Alun Welsh What about the least? Haha, fresher Rhys Davies!

Who’s the laziest? Alex Gamble! club, they were good to us,’ he laughs. Malthouse’s easy going nature isn’t dented when he sees replays of Walcott’s clattering, nervous moments for a keen gunners fan.

You’ve accomplished quite a lot in a short period time, what’s been your favourite moment to date? With no hesitation comes the reply of ‘my first cap for England.’ No surprises there. What about the worst though? He mulls it over but it’s evidently been a smooth ride as no proper reply materialises. You mentioned your dad played here at Bristol, is anyone else in your family a keen sports person, or do you play any other sports?

‘My brother plays rugby for Richmond and my Dad used to play hockey, he even captained

the British universities team at one point! Oh, and I play a bit of golf.’ What’s your handicap?

‘14. No, put 10!’ he giggles again! After a quick bit of research I discover modest

Malthouse leaves out the fact that Richmond is one of the founding members of the RFU and a club immensely rich in history. Is there anything you’re hoping to achieve in the sport?

‘I’d love for the team to get to the national league this season or next.’

Laura Lambert

Accompanying the start of a new, slightly wet, academic year in Bristol, are the ever popular BUCS leagues, intramural sports and, of course, a new season of hockey! In fact the club has been training since September 10th; hitting the ground running wasn’t going to be left to chance as they push for promotion to the national league. And so, during the half time interval of the England vs.

San Marino game, I caught up with first XI midfield maestro Eugene Malthouse. The Bath resident, 20, who finished last season as top goal scorer, is in his second year of a degree in Spanish and Italian.

Surprisingly fresh from a training session Eugene is clearly excited to be back on the pitch after a long summer break. But what made him pick up the stick in the first place?

‘My dad was a keen player and I took it up from that.’ So you had a good first season at Bristol, have you ever played at a level higher than university?

‘I played for England U-18s. The training commitments for U21 level were demanding, I decided to pursue other interests off the

pitch, like studying at university.’

With that comes a rare moment when a smile isn’t etched on the 20 year old’s face, although it’s still a decision without regret.

So you’ve played at national level, what about the rest of the team? ‘Some of the guys have played at national level too; we’ve got a great squad.

James Bailey has played for GB U21s and Alun Welsh and Jez Williams have both played for Wales’ junior ranks.’

In ship-shape: Bristol sailors looking good for BUCS Sailing Club Captain Charlie Makepeace gives Laura Lambert an insight into the squad and their prospects for the season Laura Lambert Deputy Sport Editor It would be foolish not to break the ice with a first question about last season, as I gather the Sailing Club had some decent results. Charlie proudly tells me that the team came 2nd in BUCS (British Universities & Colleges Sport), a competition which involves hundreds of

thousands of the UK’s students in a range of sports across the academic year. However, he then he goes on talking about fleet, team, match and yachting categories. Having admitted I’m a bit out of my depth with the sailing terminology, a nonpatronising lecture ensues and two minutes later I’m almost an expert. Whilst it’s necessary to appreciate the brilliant performances last year, the

important thing is whether the Sailing Club is likely to win BUCS this year. This is obviously at the front of his mind, as Charlie responds ‘Hopefully!

Southampton have won eight years in a row, but this is our year. We have a good depth of talent across the squad in all the different disciplines.

Southampton have lost a few, we’ve gained a few so we should smash it!’

Social Secretary quickfire: Whats your name and subject? Hugo French, Geography Where does the Sailing Club go for socials? Mbargo Lounge then Dorma.

Anyone a bit of a loose cannon? Oli James needs looking after!

As mental advantage is clearly important, who is the cleverest person on the team? Poppy Maxwell, she does chemistry and is secretary of the committee. She’s a bit of a whizz.

Who is the worst dressed? Oli Nainby-Luxmoore, he sails in skiing salopettes!

What’s the most annoying thing that happens in sailing? I’d say capsizing with your phone on you!

Nigel Vick

Such is the quality of the sailors that have come to Bristol this year that many of them can’t find the time to race often for the University, as they have commitments with the Olympic Development Squad.

So, can we hope to see any of the current Bristol sailors reach future Olympics, following Iain Percy’s success in London 2012? Charlie gives a long list of Olympic hopefuls, including James Peters (49er), Phil Sparks (470), Stuart Godwin (Laser) and Jess Lavery (470).

Our conversation moves to how the Bristol squad trains, and it seems the shortage of boats is the only thing stopping this squad from training more often. ‘We train every week down at Chew Valley Lake, which is about 12 miles out of

town, but only two of the four teams can train each session as we only have six boats’.

Charlie is quick to point out that theory-based training is of equal importance to training on water, as sailing is ‘more mentally taxing than any other sport’. A detailed knowledge of the meteorology of each venue and the trim and balance of the

“

”

boat is key to gaining a mental advantage on the water.

This begs the question, who is the coach? Charlie coaches the 3rd and 4th teams, and an

ex-Southampton sailor Sam Maxfield occasionally trains the 1st and 2nd teams. However, due to a dearth of funds, the squad ‘self trains pretty much every session of the year.’

The club attends many ‘events’, which essentially consists of a weekend hosted by one of 16 teams across the country, involving two days of competitive sailing and a big dinner in between. Presumably spending an entire weekend together makes the sailing squad pretty close? ‘Yeah, I think that’s why we are known as a clique, because we spend so much time together. We’ll leave on Friday evening and won’t get back until Sunday evening, and in that time we can spend up to eight hours on the water with one other person!’

Epigram

10.10.2011

Epigram

22.10.2012

34

Your views on the pay as you go pass Theo Gentilli: “The pay as you go system is a must - I use the gym occassionally so its nice to have the flexibility”

Charlotte Stephen: “The more encouragement you give students to do sport the better, as they’ll do better academically”

Eloise Jackson: “It seemed ridiculous for people not to be able to pay per class - I think its great that it has changed back”

Charlotte Ritchie: “After going to the gym I work much more efficiently”

Joe Kavanagh: “I thought I was going to have to buy a whole year’s pass so its great to hear the news that I can just pay when I fancy a work out”

Rob Capron: “I’m not such a regular visitor so I save lots of money over the year by paying when I go rather than getting a whole year pass”

Isla Pullinger: “My life wouldn’t be the same without they gym”

Pippa Shawley

Steve Sanghera: “I’m a big fan of using the uni pool so it’s nice to hear that this has all been sorted. Looking forward to it being refurbished”

Serena Baer: “I wouldn’t be interested in using the pool or any of the rooms, literally just a running machine once a week but 250 pounds seems far too much to pay for just that”

Are Newcastle United in the Wong?

Is it fair to condemn the Magpies’ deal with loan shark?

Patrick Baker Deputy Editor

and consumers of the game.

Or, perhaps such companies should be banned from sports, as they prey on low-income families in a way which is deeply damaging and divisive.

Whatever the answer, it’s for the governing bodies of football to decide. However, it is important that we recognize that Wonga’s wrongdoing is contextualised by hundreds of businesses and companies which are equally exploitative, equally predatory and equally immoral both within and without the sporting arena. In addition, it seems

that the criticism has been heightened by the involvement of Mike Ashley, the infamous owner of Newcastle, a vulgarian renowned for his inimitable lack of class – renaming the Toon’s beloved St. James’ Park to the Sports Direct Arena, for example. Indeed, the lucrative £8m-a-year deal has grabbed the media’s attention far more than when Wonga agreed to become Blackpool’s sponsor two years ago, in a far less profitable agreement. Much of the criticism appears to be based on a dislike for Mr Ashley

and the sheer size of the deal; in one sense, Newcastle is being punished for being a bigger club than Blackpool.

It is difficult to justify the recent outrage at a company like Wonga, without acknowledging that we are all participants in a capitalist economy and that, by the very nature of our system, we are indirectly promoting the wrong kinds of thing all the time, in terms of what we sell and what we buy. From Nike trainers to battery chickens.

That’s life. The point is this; we live in a society where people

are poor and people are rich, people are good and people are bad; to single out Wonga and Newcastle for their partnership seems excessive. What’s legal and what’s moral is now alarmingly interchangeable in the modern era. Yes, Wonga’s deal is yet another example of mindless, profit-driven capitalism and, yes, it would be far better if they were sponsored by a green energy company but – and here’s the sad truth – this is how society works.

Photo: FlickrDannyPipe12

Photo: FlickrDannyPipe12

Since Newcastle United’s recent announcement of their sponsorship deal with Wonga – the highly controversial legal loan shark – the club has been the subject of widespread condemnation. Wonga is a company that lends money with an astronomical interest rate of 4,124% APR to people who are strapped for cash as they wait for their paydays. The argument is this: is it deeply immoral to allow Wonga to advertise itself on such a large and visible scale in a city which is home to a disproportionately high number of Britain’s poor?

Many have argued that with their logo emblazoned on the shirts of Newcastle’s most idolized multi-millionaires week in week out, the deal is cynically exploiting the impoverished and the desperate in the name of cold-hearted economic profit.

Looking at the issue in isolation, the deal certainly feels morally unhygienic; it seems wrong that Wonga are purporting to ‘support’ a team whose fans are the likely victims of their company’s steep interest rates.

But do Newcastle deserve their recent stick? I don’t really think so. The debate is asking a bigger question. We need to work out whether or not sports

teams - and society - should feel an ethical responsibility when it comes to sponsorship, advertising and the marketing of a product. If so, this would of course be problematic; how far should the regulations go? Many of the Premier League’s football teams have been sponsored by highly questionable corporations and yet have avoided media scrutiny; Carlsberg for Liverpool, Betfair for Fulham and Wonga – again - for Blackpool two years ago to name but a few.

Alcohol and gambling companies form a huge part of the sponsorship that football clubs receive. In fact, a survey conducted by the British Medical Association (BMA) discovered that more than 10% of all sports sponsors are alcoholic drinks companies.

If we’re going to attack the Toon, shouldn’t these alcohol sponsors be banned? What about tobacco deals or fast food sponsorships – like McDonalds with London 2012 for instance?

There’s no easy solution.

Imagine if the FA put such a ban in place; perhaps then, we would have a dangerously wide-reaching authority, a wet, paternalistic control of our sports teams, which compromises our autonomy both as suppliers

Epigram

22.10.2012

Sport

Editor: David Stone

Deputy Editor: Laura Lambert

sport@epigram.org.uk

deputysport@epigram.org.uk

Students win back Pay as You Go Sports Pass

@epigramsport

Inside Sport

Alex Bourla, one of the founders of the petition to reverse the University’s decision, talks to Epigram Sport about the rationale behind the lobbying campaign

We’re not in a hurry to forget the brilliant London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, so we’ve got some brilliant first-hand accounts of Bristol students’ experiences. From dancers to ticket scanners we’ve been listening to your Olympic tales.

Page 31

Hockey Club Captain Eugene Malthouse offers some insight into the exciting new members of the squad, his experiences with the GB Squad and his high hopes for promotion this season.

Page 32

As well as hearing from those spearheading the Pay As You Go campaign, we also wanted to hear your thoughts on the issue. Whether you’re a full gym pass member, or a casual gym user that relies on the Pay As You Go system, we are always keen to hear how these University Sport decisions affect you.

INSIGHT page 33 When we first heard of the changes we instantly knew that they spelt real danger for The University of Bristol Underwater Club. However it was only once we spoke to the other club captains and casual users that we realised the sheer number of people affected by the new system. We wanted to make sure that we didn’t go down without a fight and since it became apparent that

most people didn’t even know about these changes, a petition seemed the obvious place to start’. Over the years various student campaigns have quickly fizzled out. This time however, the petition caught on and soon spread throughout the campus. ‘We were absolutely astonished by the level of support we received, there was one point where the number of signatures was going up faster than we could refresh the page!

It was really amazing to read some of the great comments on the petition from both staff

and students alike. It should be said that the petition alone was not solely responsible for the university reinstating the pay-as-you-go system – if it wasn’t for the support of Hannah and her team who met with representatives from the university then this campaign could not have been such a success. While the university has clearly listened to the student voice and reintroduced pay-as-you-go, albeit only for off-peak, in the future more needs to be done to fight the trend towards increasing prices

Laura Lambert

Casual gym users argue that they cannot afford to buy a full Gym Pass and will therefore exercise less, and become less healthy

and decreasing accessibility.’

This is as an example that should help to inspire other students to do more in the future against injustices.

One of the most frequently asked questions we received about the petition was ‘Why bother do you really think this is going to make a difference?’

We really hope people will look at our success and realise that they actually can make a difference and that it’s never too late to fight!

Page 33

Epigram met the Club Captain and Social Secretary of the Bristol Sailing Club this week to discuss the club, fresher talent, and an informal discussion about socials! With some Olympic hopefuls on the squad it will hopefully be plain sailing for them in the 2012-2013 season as they hope to de-throne Southampton, who have dominated BUCS in recent years.

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