This week's news on BBC cuts.
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First Look: BBC Sport Site's Long-Overdue Reboot Ahead Of Olympics
31 JanpaidContent:UK
The BBC will on Wednesday morning refresh its BBC Sport site for the first time significantly since 2004, with a greater emphasis on live data and visualisations. Preview below…
“This is a sports service custom built for modern sports fans,” the corporation says.
It is the last main BBC online service to get a refresh, following BBC News and the BBC.co.uk homepage. It is also a dry run for the BBC’s Olympic Games coverage.
Further sport and dedicated Olympics products are due to be launched this year on TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO), connected TVs and as mobile apps, as well as the forthcoming Olympics website, all of which the BBC will use to broadcast every minute of every Olympic event.
The sport site in 2011 set about cutting its budget by 25 percent in line with a wider BBC Online budget cut.
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Mediation summit stuns the HR world
31 JanResponseSource Press Release Wire
• The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills clears up uncertainty and educates delegates on Government initiatives for improving workplace dispute resolution and mediation.
• National mediation conference with speakers from UK Government, CIPD, BT, Boyes Turner and The TCM Group enjoys great success and a big round of applause.
On 19th of January 2012, The TCM Group in partnership with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry hosted a Briefing Seminar on the Government’s response to the ‘Resolving workplace disputes’ consultation. The response states that mediation should become a preferred mechanism for organisations to resolve disputes without the need to go to court.
The prestigious event attracted a large number of HR professionals, journalists and bloggers from all over the UK, curious to find out more specific details about the Governments’ response to the consultation, which includes a pilot mediation network scheme for SMEs in Manchester and Cambridge. The latest media buzz about mediation helped set the record breaking attendance, following two popular articles in the Independent newspaper and Working Mums online magazine.
The impressive array of keynote speakers, including Gail Davis from BIS, talked passionately about mediation and how it has the potential to revolutionise the way workplace disputes are handled by cutting out the lawyers, the tribunals and the courts.
Mediation is a process of dispute resolution during which the parties, with the help of a neutral mediator, work together to secure a constructive and lasting solution to a conflict or dispute.
Mediation is voluntary and confidential. The mediator encourages the parties to share their concerns in a non-blaming manner. Mediators facilitate open and honest dialogue at a time when communication has often broken down. They promote empathy and understanding between the parties and as a result the parties are able to resolve their own differences without need for a solution to be imposed.
Most speakers focused on last year’s number of employment tribunal claims and impressed the delegates by demonstrating the amount of money, time and business focus they can save if mediation was embedded in their alternative dispute resolution strategies.
Caroline Waters, Director of People and Policy at BT, commented:
“All the speakers were amazing, the delegates were engaging and the room was buzzing with excitement. This was an outstanding event and I am really looking forward to The TCM Group’s next one.”
Presentations slides are available for download below:
Resolving workplace disputes - Gail Davis, Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS)
Reforming workplace dispute resolution: a CIPD perspective - Mike Emmott, CIPD
Resolving employment disputes - Michael Farrier and Helen Goss, Boyes Turner
Mediation: a common sense approach to dispute resolution - David Liddle, The TCM Group
Breakfast Briefing Brochure
For Editors
•TCM is a leading provider of workplace, employment, business and consumer mediation services. They work with organisations across the UK, Europe and Asia to develop constructive, effective and sustainable remedies for conflicts and disputes.
•David Liddle, Founder and Director, regularly comments on mediation, dispute resolution and labour relations issues in the media including Sky News, BBC News 24, Daybreak, BBC Radio and various trade press.
•TCM has created and sponsors the first UK award for Innovation in Dispute Resolution in conjunction with Personnel Today.
•TCM was invited by the CBI to take the lead on the production of an innovative mediation film, distributed to over 20,000 CBI members. The film’s aim was to improve the way disputes are managed across UKPLC.
•The company trains over 1000 individuals in the art of mediation each year. This includes HR professionals and business leaders. Plus other employees who are committed to improving the way that they resolve workplace and business disputes.
•TCM delivers mediation services to an unrivalled list of some of the world’s leading brands including: Lloyds Banking Group, BT, The Arcadia Group, Marks & Spencer, Vodafone, HSBC and The Co-operative
Press enquiries and social media
For press and media enquiries, please contact Panos Papakostis on
020-7404-3195 or Email: Panos@thetcmgroup.com
Keep in touch with The TCM Group online:
twitter.com/TheTCMGroup
www.facebook.com/TheTCMGroup
TCM’s Founder & Managing Director online contact details:
Twitter: twitter.com/#!/david_liddle
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/pub/david-liddle/14/366/94b -
Pop vicar Richard Coles preaches the virtues of cycling | Bike blog
31 Janwww.guardian.co.uk
Former Communards star turned vicar on how he has had a number of epiphanies by simply getting on his bike
The accomplishments of Rev Richard Coles – writer, broadcaster, chart-topping musician with the Communards, and now Vicar of Finedon, Northants – are so diverse that it came as no surprise to discover life's cleanest pleasure among them. He has, he tells me, "always loved cycling". From his earliest cycling experiences, "I liked that it took you further than your unaided legs would go."
Turning points in his life have often been reached by bike. "I once ran away on a fat-tyred little bike and got as far as Martin's the newsagent on the new estate before turning back," he recalls. "One Christmas (1974?) I got an orange Raleigh Chopper and that was my first experience of 'cool'."
He has always enjoyed exploring by bike. "When I was fit and had the time, I used to cycle a lot, touring round Northamptonshire and off-road biking with Smiffy and Alison and a slightly mad bloke whose name I can't remember who used to cheerfully cycle off precipices without looking. He told me a highly indecent joke about George Michael I've never forgotten. It still makes me laugh."
God is also in his thoughts when he's cycling. Like many cyclists, he finds time in the saddle a great opportunity for reflection. "One of my most enduring memories is cycling from Grafton underwood to Slipton on a sunny winter's day and being struck, out of the blue, by a sense of the presence of God and that all would be well. More common is problem-solving. If I can't quite get something to work out, I cycle on it. Forward motion under one's own steam seems to work for me."
Today he often combines cycling with trips in his camper van. He and his partner take a pair of Bromptons – "the finest achievement in British engineering since the Holborn viaduct" – to cycle wherever they park up. They have explored Britain thoroughly. "I love it round here in Northamptonshire – good cycling country – but I think we'd like to end up in Norfolk eventually. Scotland we love too, and try to take the van and the bikes up to the west coast once a year."
Closer to home, Coles has rekindled his affection for Finedon, his current parish, while out cycling. "I've known Finedon all my life, but rediscovered it on my bike in recent years. I remember seeing the vicarage I now live in and thinking, 'in another life I would have loved to be here'." He adds that in Finedon, the bike is an "indispensable ministerial tool. I'm visible, but I'm not stopping, so if I have a lot to do and I'm half-time in a parish which could use my full-time attention – I can sail by with a cheery salutation," he explains. "Most people like to see the vicar out and about, I think."
I ask Cole how he regards the church's stance on environmental issues. Though the Bishop of London, among others, has made the environment a priority, at local level the car tends to dominate. (In Westminster recently, several churches campaigned against the extension of parking restrictions.) As John Major infamously observed, the church has traditionally welcomed cycling: "I'd love to see old maids cycling to evensong," Coles says, "but round here they're more likely to come on a mobility scooter. We don't really have a problem with cars because most distances in Finedon are walkable. Or scootable. As a church we try to be as environmentally responsible as possible – we are, after all, stewards of God's creation, so more nurture, less exploitation would be good."
With his rare combination of showbiz experience and the Church of England, Coles has been advising actor Tom Hollander in his role as Adam Smallbone in the BBC2 sitcom Rev. "I have helped Hollander with getting the technical stuff right. He was rather crestfallen when I once said he wielded his aspergillum like a Methodist."
We agree that for a comedy filmed in Shoreditch, they'd be foolish not to have a cycling episode, in which Adam Smallbone, perhaps with Colin and Adoha, learns to cycle with the local fixed-gear posse, then goes on a critical mass ride. Coles is not persuaded that the deliciously intimidating archdeacon could be cut down to size a little by spending more time on a bike and less in the back of a cab. "He's a very cab account sort of cleric – more likely to be seen on rollerblades than a bike. In Fire Island, perhaps?" he suggests.
But Coles has less sympathy for the procession of intimidating characters in dark vehicles down the road, at the Royal Courts of Justice. "I think one of the most enduring spectacles from the phone-hacking scandal has been the editors and proprietors and cops turning up to give evidence at the Leveson inquiry in black Range Rovers. They make them look like Balkan warlords – horrible," he says. Though he resists the idea that cyclists are by definition any humbler, and won't be drawn on my fanciful parallel between the bike and the biblical donkey, symbol of humility. "I've found cyclists to be no less prey to human frailty than motorists," Coles says, "so I would hesitate to draw a direct parallel between two wheels and virtue."
Aged 18, Coles was badly injured after being knocked off his bike by "a careless driver" – "that was the injury for which I got compensation and bought a saxophone – the beginning of my career in the music industry," he points out – and was so nervous of the road afterwards that he "would flinch if a lorry passed as I walked along the pavement".
While it made him "more aware of how vulnerable cyclists are", he sees fault on both sides. "Considerate driving – and cycling – is rarer now than it used to be," he suggests. "There's more competition for space on the road and a general attitude of 'fuck you' doesn't help. Cyclists not abiding by the law or the highway code does nothing to ameliorate that."
He ends with an aspiration we should all share; one far too easily lost in the normalisation of road injury and death. "I think all road users are responsible for creating safer environments for cyclists – and reducing to zero the number of fatalities should be our urgent priority," he says.
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Audiences flock to 'difficult' contemporary classical music
30 Janwww.guardian.co.uk
The Southbank, Barbican, ENO and BBC4 are catering for the new-found appetite for sonic adventure
When Swiss conductor Baldur Brönnimann was a student 25 years ago, "if you had more than 30 people at a concert it was a failure because it was populist crap". Today, there are growing signs that contemporary classical music is shrugging off its elitist reputation, with audiences flocking to work previously regarded as austere and impenetrable.
"It's the weirdest pieces which get the strongest reaction," says Brönnimann. "Prometeo by Nono is an extremely difficult piece to listen to – two hours long with no break, either extremely soft or extremely loud, and with the audience in darkness surrounded by the performers – but it gets an amazing response. People are looking for something to get their teeth into."
Programmers are working hard to meet this appetite for sonic adventure. Last week, the Southbank Centre in London announced a year-long festival which will bring to life The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross's 250,000-selling history of 20th-century classical music, accompanied by a series on BBC4.
Before that starts in 2013, a plethora of "difficult" works will be performed in UK concert halls. From next month, the English National Opera (ENO) is staging four operas written in the past 30 years, including John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer, about the 1985 hijacking of an ocean liner by the Palestine Liberation Front, conducted by Brönnimann and staged by War Horse director Tom Morris.
In March, there are festivals of minimalist music in Glasgow and north-east England, and a John Cage-inspired "happening" called Musicircus will be staged at the ENO, involving audience members, with musicians including John Paul Jones, formerly of Led Zeppelin.
In April, a festival devoted to Conlon Nancarrow hits the Southbank. Nancarrow, whose fans include Stephen Fry, composed music which is impossible to play except by a mechanical piano. "It makes you laugh out loud," says the centre's head of contemporary culture, Gillian Moore. "You've got two or three completely different time signatures going on. You think there must be a third hand, they must have three brains, and then you realise it's a machine – but it's music of amazing accessibility."
In May, Philip Glass's opera Einstein on the Beach – five hours long, with no plot or interval – will make its UK debut at the Barbican in London. Last weekend, the venue offered "total immersion" in the work of British composer Jonathan Harvey, who melds orchestras and electronics.
Moore says the increased audience for these works is the result of a campaign to reach people interested in the cutting edge of other contemporary art forms, rather than those who prefer to hear Beethoven. In 2003, when artistic director of the London Sinfonietta, Moore inaugurated a series of concerts which programmed avant garde classical works alongside music by artists on Warp records. "We were hugely nervous but we wanted to make the connections between Aphex Twin and John Cage, Squarepusher and Stockhausen."
The concerts were a success, and Moore found the people who attended had "an almost unlimited appetite for music of richness and complexity". Better still, they kept coming back. "Immediately afterwards we did a weekend of Xenakis and it sold out. A lot of the people had been at the Warp project, including a lot of the artists themselves. I remember picking the Aphex Twin out of the returns queue for tickets because it was so mobbed, and that was wall to wall Xenakis – no frills."
Brönnimann confirms that many people arrive at the avant garde of contemporary music via the wilder shores of pop. "I did a tour with Joanna Newsom, 15-minute songs arranged by Van Dyke Parks, and the audience who came are the ones who look at contemporary music. They look for something that goes deeper, to undiscovered worlds – the bottom of the sea."
Such audiences have a hunger for the new, says Esa-Pekka Salonen, principal conductor of the Philharmonia. "There's a trend in our culture to be constantly up to date because we're connected through the internet, and an art form that would be entirely backward-looking and museum-like would make no sense. People are interested in what's happening right now."
Some also clearly enjoy the challenge of pitting themselves against some of the most forbidding art works in the world – an attitude encouraged by soprano Barbara Hannigan, whose performance of Boulez's Pli Selon Pli at the Southbank last year had, she says, even musician colleagues in the audience "saying 'I was scared.' But afterwards, they said 'My God, I was touched.' "
Hannigan cites a 2010 Guardian piece by Alex Ross bemoaning that modern classical music is not widely enjoyed in the same way as modern art or architecture. "He said that audiences expect classical music to be 'a spa treatment for tired souls'. I was thinking, maybe the public needs to think of it as a deep tissue massage. It's almost violent – but you know you're going to come out of it feeling a sense of release. If they go in knowing it's going to be intense and heavy, they come out with a feeling of being changed, of accomplishment, of going through something which was quite good for them."
The composer George Benjamin, whose opera Written on the Skin will debut in July, points out that modern classical music relies on individuals to champion it, like Salonen and Vladimir Jurowski, principal conductor of the London Philharmonic. "I came out of Pli Selon Pli very deeply fired up and inspired by it, but it only gets played once or twice a decade in the UK. Even more so than film or visual arts, we have to have not only promoters but performers who are willing to pay the extra expense of rehearsing new pieces and of taking a risk and knowing how to conduct these very difficult works – it's not only the public that are part of this equation."
Cellist and music curator Oliver Coates says that while contemporary classical music has lost the academic air which made it so off-putting, it still requires effort. "I don't think classical music should be put on in bars and clubs – people shouldn't drink or talk over it, they need to be immersed in it. It remains quite serious music."
Moore recommends listening first on Spotify (see her picks below), adding that some awareness of context is required. "That's why The Rest is Noise festival is going to be great, because it shows why certain music was made at certain times, like Stockhausen after the war saying he couldn't write four beats in a bar because it reminded him of jackboots.
"So he exploded everything and created rhythms which were like stars and harmonies – constellations of sounds from the scientific world."
Brönnimann and Salonen agree that the shock of the new has worn off some works, making them more accessible to modern audiences. "So many of these sounds have become more daily for us," says Brönnimann. "Just as contemporary art has filitered into fashion or design, if you listen to film music or video game music, people are getting used to expecting sounds not to be straightforward but to have a life of their own."
Nevertheless, works like Role Player by Christian Lindberg, in which Brönnimann was "shot" by the soloist, then carried offstage while the piece finished without him, are clearly not for everyone. "The great thing about contemporary music is that no one walks out and can't remember what they heard," says Brönnimann. "Some people hate it, some love it, but they all talk about it. That's the response you want from art."
Curious?
Gillian Moore picks five modern classical piece to get you started
Shimmering clouds of orchestral sound, the soundtrack to Kubrick's 2001
Conlon Nancarrow, Player Piano Studies
Superhuman piano music, hilariously impossible, crazy rhythms
Jonathan Harvey Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco
The sounds of a boy's voice and a bell morph into each other through computer magic
Gorgeous, exquisite Japanese modernism tinged with impressionistic harmonies
Louis Andriessen, De Staat
Hardcore Dutch minimalism: brass, voices, electric guitars
Listen on Spotify: http://spoti.fi/Ao9Fbm
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BBC 6Music
29 Janwww.guardian.co.uk
BBC 6Music marks its 10th anniversary this year – a birthday it nearly didn't reach. Miranda Sawyer joins in the celebrations
It's 9.02am on Friday and I am being given a refresher course in live radio DJing by 6Music breakfast show host Shaun Keaveny.
"When I say, 'Now,'" says Shaun, "press that button there. That red one." His producer, Lisa Kenlock, looks at us over the top of her computer screen. She is smiling, but her eyes are grave. Phil Smith, the other producer, and Matt Everitt, who does the music news, are also watching. Ooh, the pressure. "Now!" says Shaun. I press the button and M83's "Reunion" segues into a 6Music trail. Everyone cheers. I curtsy and sit down. My work here is done.
This small stunt has come about because BBC Radio 6Music will turn 10 years old on 5 March. Happy birthday, the 6! Home of credible alternative music, of clever, off-beat, older presenters, 6 Music enters its second decade with its confidence and its listenership high – around 1.2 million regulars, tuning in for longer hours than ever before. But such upbeat days were born of tricky times; today's easy-on-the-ear listen disguises the work behind the scenes. And so my job this morning is to observe how difficult live DJing is by watching Keaveny at work.
Unfortunately, he makes everything look easy, biffing banter at Matt, picking up a guitar for an impromptu rendition of "Wonderful Tonight", interviewing a sleepy Brian Cox on the phone, composing two-line poems for Middle Age Shout Outs – all in between pressing the right buttons at the right times. Middle Age Shout Outs is a regular Friday morning item: listeners get in touch to say what they're up to at the weekend and Shaun turns this into a dancehall-style rhyme. One listener informs that he's going to buy a Henry hoover. "Hoover with eyes/ It's a pet surprise," raps Shaun. "Cos they always scare dogs, don't they, those hoovers?"
Shaun has been on 6 since 2007 and in that time his show, and the station itself, has been through fundamental identity crises. Brought over from Xfm by then-controller Lesley Douglas, Keaveny spent his first year on Breakfast in a thorough-going funk. In those days, his show was followed by another Douglas protege, George Lamb, a talented broadcaster whose mickey-taking, urban geezer attitude was all wrong for the station – but got a lot of attention. Lamb played mad ragga tunes and shouted: "Shabba!" Shaun seethed and carefully wrote jokes into his script.
"Actually, I learnt a lot from George," he says now. "Things about having more of a relationship with people you work with and with the listeners. I was brought up on overnights at Xfm where I was by myself. I didn't have anyone to bounce off, so I used to script my links. I slowly learned to relax and create an environment where you can be spontaneous by including other people."
That inclusiveness, that sense of understanding between presenters, producers and audience is now part of 6's DNA, as it is with all brilliant radio stations. But for 6, it came about through a series of calamities. So let's go back to the start.
Andrew Collins, who had the teatime show when 6Music began, and who still presents shows for the station, recalls the reason why the station is here at all. "It was a canary-down-the-mineshaft thing," he says. "The BBC, to its credit, thought the best way to publicise digital services was to create some digital stations. The Asian Network, 1Xtra, Radio 7 and 6Music came out of that."
Then, the station felt anarchic, almost unknown, anonymous enough at least to be able to do what it wanted. Its producers were young and learning; its DJs were older, but still working out what to do, what 6 was for. Supposedly, it was a bridge between Radios 1 and 2, but it never felt like that. It felt more muso, more chin-scratchy, silly and sincere. And it was small. I was a stand-in presenter for a couple of shows and I thought I'd rely on listeners' emails for a sense of what to talk about. But only a handful of regulars got in touch (though those who did did a lot). 6 really was a niche concern.
The BBC was never going to let 6Music continue in its haphazard, stuff-the-audience-figures way. Douglas brought in Keaveny and Lamb to increase ratings and, supposedly, to appeal to women – but then had to resign, when another of her proteges, Russell Brand, brought the radio world crashing down with Sachsgate. Bob Shennan became 6's controller. Though there were initial mutterings about his lack of music background (his longest previous stint was at 5 Live), Shennan has proved astute. His first move – to replace George Lamb with Lauren Laverne in 2009 – was inspired and he's gradually tweaked the station, pruning the cutting-edge dance elements, growing the musician-turned-presenter pool (it now boasts Jarvis Cocker, Cerys Matthews, Guy Garvey and Huey Morgan among its roster), shaping it into the cool, sure-footed offering it is today.
It was in 2010, though, that 6Music really faced disaster. The BBC, asked to make massive savings by the government, proposed closing the station altogether. Or, if not, then turning it into Radio 2 Extra, broadcasting during the day and joining up with 2's output in the evenings. It was a genuine threat and the reaction of listeners was huge. They marched on Broadcasting House, they sent petitions to Parliament, they marshalled support on Twitter and Facebook… And they won. The BBC Trust concluded that the station must continue. And the trust's codicil – that 6 must employ more DJs who knew their music – was even more of a validation.
The boost to the station was immense. Not only did the protest serve as a publicity campaign, doubling 6's audience in a matter of weeks, but it gave the whole place a status, an "approved by" legitimacy. "The station being threatened, and then saved, changed everything," remembers Shaun. "It brought the best out of everyone and made us realise how culturally significant 6Music is. We knew we were part of something that everyone believed in."
This new confidence made Shennan's subsequent high-profile hirings – stars such as Jarvis Cocker, veterans such as Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie – seem natural. Now 6Music feels, if not like a cringe-worthy family a la Radio 1, like a bunch of people who understand one another. A collective that gets it, that represents a small, but significant, segment of Britain's population.
"It's not like we're all going out in central London getting drunk together," says Keaveny of the 6Music team. "We're all quite old. We've got lives, families, some people are up in Manchester. But we've all got respect for what everybody does. We've all got the same attitude to life. And so have the listeners. Some people get to their 40s and become entrenched, start reading the Daily Mail and listening to Magic FM. But if you've still got a restless intellect, you're still excited by life, you're still reading books, you're perhaps a person who's started a record-playing evening at your local pub… that's what everyone's like at 6. That's why we all get on."
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