Interview: Jeremy Deedes, Daily Telegraph (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

NO sooner has Jeremy Deedes sat down in his office than Aidan Barclay, the Telegraph Group's new chairman, summons him to the phone. Deedes, the genial chief executive brought out of retirement to oversee the papers' sale, is gone for so long that one can only guess what proprietorial decrees he is being handed. The decision about Andrew Neil's future role? Sackings to purge any Conrad Black appointees?

"Actually, quite the opposite," Deedes says as he breezes back in. "It was about the arrival of Murdoch MacLennan." The longstanding MD at Associated Newspapers - publishers of the Daily Mail and Evening Standard - was confirmed yesterday as the Telegraph's new chief executive, the Barclays' first senior appointment.

The group certainly needs a tough decision-maker. Since Black was ousted as chairman last November in the dispute over unauthorised secret payments from Hollinger, the Telegraph papers have been in limbo, circulation tumbling and tabloid plans on ice. With the Barclays in control, Deedes feels they are loved again - although Aidan Barclay, he says, has still to set foot in the building.

"It's been a very low-key and nontriumphant change of ownership, but that's how they operate," Deedes, 60, explains. "The Telegraph has never been a paper that enjoys the panoplies of pomp and circumstance."

Don't expect any editorial change of direction. "The Barclays have bought something very much in tune with their thinking, and while they may want to change things in a business sense, they're not about to turn the paper over." Chequebooks, however, are likely to be opened, Deedes says. "I'd be surprised if, having paid £665 million, they won't be investing in the papers to maintain and improve our position as market leader."

But that dominant position is under threat as never before. The Hon Jeremy Wyndham Deedes, the Old Etonian son of Bill Deedes - the former Telegraph editor - tries hard to minimise the seriousness of the paper's predicament. New presses are needed urgently; the daily must also respond to the challenge of The Times and Independent tabloid editions. Hasn't it been irreversibly damaged?

"Actually, I think our enforced sitting on the fence over the tabloid has been rather good for us," he replies. "Six months ago, I was a great advocate of a tabloid alternative, but the cost of dual publication is far greater than we thought. The Times have rather precipitately gone down that path, and my perception is they've been surprised by the size of the resistant rump of readers. If they force-feed them a tabloid, they have a pretty shrewd idea where they'll go."

However, last month, full-price Times purchases were only 32,000 behind those of the Telegraph. Although the Telegraph's headline sale was 905,000, a third went to subscribers paying as little as £1 a week. For The Times, a much higher proportion pay full price.

Again, Deedes turns his confident charm to pooh-poohing an apparent liability. "Subscription sales are the most important of the lot," he insists. "These are committed readers who take the paper every day." Yes, but at far lower revenue. "That's our problem. Every paper is spending millions on marketing to compete for the promiscuous reader. Subscription locks them in."

Deedes, "custard socks" to his colleagues (he is wearing that colour today), has a positive answer to every difficulty. The Telegraph's ageing readership is not a terminal problem but a boon, as "older people are richer". The paper's perceived metropolitan bias in recent years has prevented it from "becoming a pub bore" on countryside issues. Even the ownership battle was "uplifting"for its positive effect on editorial-quality.

"It cannot have been easy for the editor, Martin Newland, to know that the new proprietors may have had their own editor in mind," he says. "I hope he's given a proper run at it." A decision, it seems, has still to be made.

What of Andrew Neil, who runs the Barclays' other newspapers? "Does Andrew really want another job?" Deedes responds diplomatically. "Even with all his energy, to try to do a serious job here, and his Scotsman stuff, and his broadcasting... I hope he doesn't give up the broadcasting, as he's bloody good at it."

Is Deedes embarrassed for having missed the warning signs about Black? "Embarrassed isn't the word," he says after a pause. "It's disappointing. Even if there were dark moments early on, when one thought this might result in the paper being sold, there's bugger all you could do about it. Most of the things that emerged since, yes, they are a huge surprise."

He suggests adding a few "allegedly"s as "none of this has been proved yet". But haven't US regulators made a convincing case against Black? "Conrad lived high on the hog, that was plain for all to see," he replies. "But if there were improprieties, they took place in the United States. We're squeaky clean."

DEEDES faced a new crisis this week. He visited The Spectator, part of the Telegraph Group, to "comfort" staff concerned about coverage of the relationship between its publisher, Kimberly Fortier, and David Blunkett. "I just identified a few first-aid points at the Telegraph if they needed help," he explains. "I said it would be better to ring us for help than the Mail or the Mirror. Then they went and told the Mail what I'd said..." Fortier, he adds, will return "at some point".

He now plans a second retirement, with time for golf and his "bits of horses" here and in South Africa which have recently started to win. "The Barclays were kind enough to ask what I wanted to do, but I said but didn't want to continue five days a week. That might have accorded with their plan anyway."

Besides, having moved from editorial to management - he was managing editor of the Evening Standard and Today, and editorial director then MD at the Telegraph Group - he says there are no jobs left that he covets. "I've had the best of both worlds, though for sheer enjoyment you can't beat being a hack."

He leaves the profession optimistic about its future. "Look how clever are the people coming into our business. You've got sharper minds in the media than among the people they're writing about, from politics to the civil service."

Any regrets? "Well, I did write a headline while deputy editor of the Express," he reflects. "'Charles to Marry Ingrid - Official.' I suppose that's one I'd like to rewind."

(Evening Standard, August 25 2004)

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The Times: Tech column - Voice spam

By David Rowan

The answering machine flashes. "You have 238 messages," the synthesised voice begins cheerily. "And 237 of them are solicitations to buy herbal Viagra, extend your genitalia or to help a former dictator retrieve his millions..."

Imagine your frustration if unsolicited phone calls started bothering you as much as junk e-mails. Well, if internet telephony continues to grow at its current pace, then "voice spam" could be the next bane of our technology-led lives. As voiceover internet protocol emerges to challenge conventional telephony, marketers are seeking ways to mine phones' internet addresses to make automated sales calls. A firm called Qovia has already developed software for detecting these IP addresses and sending phones recorded messages by the thousand.

But that could be just the start. What if, armed only with your landline phone number, spammers could bombard you all at once via e-mail, mobile phone, fax, SMS and instant message? The scenario is not as far-fetched as it sounds. A quiet revolution is taking place in the telecommunications industry that has barely been mentioned in the mainstream press. Yet its outcome will determine your right to privacy -from your freedom to avoid telemarketers to the Government's ability to tap into your conversations.

At its heart is a plan to turn ordinary phone numbers into internet domain addresses. The Government-backed initiative -known as electronic number mapping, or Enum -is designed to let others reach us wherever we happen to be. We would store all our contact details, from fax to mobile, in a single online account attached to our personal phone number. Anyone could use this number to access our personal web page, from where they could contact us.

The Department of Trade and Industry, backed by the telecoms industry, is keen to bring Enum to the UK, and has begun a consultation to determine how. According to the DTI's vision, "any party can interrogate the database with the telephone number of an Enum subscriber, and the database will return a list of identities and internet-related destinations that are associated with the subscriber". In other words, this single database will store your every contact point in one publicly accessible place.

There are some obvious advantages to the system: your business card will contain a single contact number, for instance, and you need never again miss a potentially important call. But before we jump ahead too quickly, some big questions need to be addressed. Who will be put in charge of such a sensitive and potentially valuable online resource? Private-sector monopolies do not have a great track record in protecting consumer rights involving the net. What will be done to ensure that our privacy rights receive the fullest possible protection? And are these individual numbers being seen by Whitehall as the next Orwellian step towards creating a universal identification number for more efficiently tracking us?

Privacy is the greatest immediate concern. The Electronic Privacy and Information Centre claims that Enum could become "a tool of marketers, spammers, and individuals who wish to harass others", who will mine the database for contact information. "The system could," it concludes, "facilitate an unprecedented amount of spam" -as solicitations will be sent automatically to all your communications devices.

And if that suggestion worries you, you have until November 10 to tell the DTI.

(The Times, August 24 2004)

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The Daily Telegraph: Own your own Quebec hotel room

Let it snow, let it flow, let it grow: A property offer on Mont Tremblant. By David Rowan

Here's the deal. For £330 a night, you can indulge in a sumptuous, two-bedroom suite at North America's newest boutique hotel, your personal lakeside veranda nestling serenely between award-winning ski slopes and some truly glorious restaurants. But stretch to £270,000, and you get to keep the suite and all its stylishly furnished contents, which the hotel will rent out for you whenever you are away. Either way, a complimentary breakfast is included.

Welcome to holiday-home ownership Quebec-style, soon to target Britain's more affluent skiers. Intrawest, the Canadian developer of US mountain resorts such as Whistler Blackcomb and Mammoth, is busy expanding its year-round playground at Mont Tremblant in the Laurentian mountains 80 miles north-west of Montreal.

Until now, the 2,200 hotel suites, condominiums and houses so far built at Tremblant have mainly been marketed to North Americans, but Intrawest sees the UK as one of many new sources of owners. Working with the British ski specialist Erna Low, it wants to convince us that properties in this French-speaking province will make a better investment than any on Europe's slopes.

Which explains why Michel Naud, a local real-estate broker, begins his tour today wielding financial spreadsheets audited by the accountants KPMG.

Leading the way through Ermitage du Lac, the lakeside hotel nearing completion beside the weatherboard village church, M Naud explains that a basic studio room can be yours here from Can$185,000 (£77,000), or a one-bedroom suite from $300,000 (£125,000). This buys you full, deeded ownership, entitling you to check in or invite guests whenever you like.

Now that Boutique Hotels & Resorts International has started to manage the 67-suite building, your unoccupied nights can also be placed in the hotel's commercial rental pool. For each dollar the hotel earns from paying guests, 50 cents goes back to the owners of rooms made available.

"You choose when you stay, which, on average, amounts to about 14 nights a year," M Naud explains. "The revenue from the rest of the year will cover all your expenses, and a good proportion of your mortgage payment."

If you can put down half the purchase price in cash, M Naud estimates that the rental income should cover your full mortgage payments from day one. Should you need a bigger loan - and non-residents can borrow up to 75 per cent of the property price - Intrawest can arrange "favourable rates" through its partner banks, currently about 5.1 per cent on a three-year fixed term. It will even register your apartment as a rental business, allowing you to bypass Quebec's steep 15 per cent purchase and property taxes.

At first glance, the deal looks a no-brainer: a holiday home on which you effectively hold the freehold and which pays for itself through a year-round stream of hotel guests.

The small print, however, reveals a rather more complicated picture. You are liable for a vast tranche of "costs" - ranging from $1,107 for cleaning the corridors to a $1,377 "resort association membership fee". For the two-bedroom suite, it all adds up to about £7,000 in annual extras. So even if you put down a third of the purchase price in cash, and then make your suite available most nights to paying guests, you can still expect to finish the year £4,200 out of pocket.

But it is the potential for capital appreciation that Intrawest hopes will clinch its sales. Since buying the mountain at a knockdown price in 1991, the company has spent Can$500 million (£208 million) to turn Tremblant's once neglected centre into a full-blown luxury resort.

For Neil and Ava Penkower, it was the skiing that sold Tremblant. Three years ago, they paid Can$535,000 (£223,000) for a 1,530 sq ft apartment at the L'Equinoxe complex overlooking the village, which has recently been valued at Can$735,000 (£306,000). Now, the couple, from Long Island, New York, are building a 9,000 sq ft house on one of Tremblant's two golf courses, complete with a home cinema, a 1,000-bottle wine cellar, a gym, steam and sauna rooms.

"From an investment point of view, there's a change taking place," says Mr Penkower, 56, a retired "wealth management adviser" to some of America's richest families. "You're seeing a lot more wealthy people up here, building bigger homes and moving off the village. I see an influx of big money."

(The Daily Telegraph, August 14 2004)

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Interview: John Humphrys, BBC Radio 4/BBC TV (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

John Humphrys refuses to stay on the fence any longer. The Conservative Party, he believes, has been spouting "complete tosh" simply to attract attention. This outburst, it should be stressed, is not a new BBC initiative designed to convince No 10 that Today is now safely onside. It was prompted by remarks by the shadow culture secretary, Julie Kirkbride, last week that Mastermind, under Humphrys, has dumbed down.

As the corporation's "rottweiler-in-chief", Humphrys naturally has his own views. "It's absolute rubbish," he declares. "I invite her to appear on either Celebrity Mastermind or the non-celebrity version, to choose her subject, and at the end to tell me whether she thinks it's been dumbed down." He grins mischievously: "How could she refuse?"

The value of a John Humphrys interview is his rare freedom, as a senior BBC freelance, to speak his mind openly - often to the corporation's own embarrassment. This morning, for instance, he is questioning its decision to drop his BBC1 political interview programme, On the Record, 20 months ago, in pursuit of " youth friendly" political shows. The BBC's arguments for cancelling the series have been shown to be "entirely spurious", he says. "[Greg] Dyke got it completely wrong with his idea that there was out there somewhere this great mass of young people desperate to watch political programmes, if only they were presented in a 'cool' way," he says. "Well, as history has shown us, there wasn't."

Jeremy Vine and Andrew Neil are "first-rate interviewers", but neither now conducts "the long, serious, sometimes boring, but nevertheless in-depth" political interview.

Nor is he entirely respectful of planned reforms following Ron Neil's review of BBC reporting, such as a journalists' training college. "My little boy [aged four] starts school in September, so I'm sure he'll lend me his pencil sharpener," he says in that cod-serious sceptical tone familiar from his Today links about No 10's latest terrorism warnings. "I'm sure he'll help introduce me to the culture again, because clearly I'm going to have to learn. And if that Paxman thinks he's going to sit in the front row, he's got another thing coming ..."

He misses his Sunday Times column, which the corporation compensated him handsomely for dropping, although he admits now that he was " struggling to cope" with print deadlines, 4am radio starts, television commitments, and a young son (he also has two adult children from an earlier marriage). Still, although he turns 61 next Tuesday, he has no intention of slowing down: he signed a new three-year Today contract last December, is completing a book about the English language, and is currently drafting his MacTaggart Lecture for delivery at the Edinburgh television festival later this month.

This has caused certain challenges for the festival's organisers, as Humphrys has not owned a working television for almost five years. He is now catching up, having been sent 10 tapes by each of 16 channel controllers and a TV set. "I had thought The Office was something quite different, but what struck me was how deeply sad it was," he remarks. He has even brought himself to watch Big Brother live, although traditional drama is more his thing.

"It's like a Martian landing on another planet," says Dawn Airey, the festival's chair. Humphrys insists that he has not been making "some great protest" about TV, simply that radio has met all his needs. He will not preview his lecture, although one might guess its tone from his earlier writings about t e lev i s ion's "toxic mix of sensationalism, conformity and fakery".

He insists that Today, which he has presented since 1987, has lost none of its bite since the Hutton Report. "I don't feel from where I sit that the programme's changed at all," he says. "Does a little red light come on in my head that says: 'This is the post-Hutton era, we have to go easy on this Cabinet minister'? The chances of that happening are about as likely as the minister resigning to become a nun."

IN Helen Boaden, the BBC now has a head of news "who's as tough as old boots and won't be cowed"; and although he has had his runins with Today's editor, Kevin Marsh - notably over cuts made to an interview with Rowan Williams last year - they now get on "terrifically". He still thinks Marsh was wrong to cut the Williams interview, which provoked threats of resignation from Humphrys, but he respects his editor's "real integrity". As for Andrew Gilligan, whom he interviewed on last May's notorious 6.07am two-way: "I thought then, and I think now, that he was a good reporter."

Today's loss of 300,000 listeners since last year was to be expected, "as the Iraq war pushed the audience past 6.5 million for the first time, which was never going to be sustainable". The format, he believes, still works well. " Sometimes it's bloody good, sometimes it's dire, but people like it," he says.

THERE is, though, one story that Humphrys seems unable to bring in: the Today interview with Tony Blair. "Maybe I'm entirely mistaken and this is not a deliberate policy by No 10 [to avoid me], and perhaps it's just a coincidence that it's nearly four years since I had an interview with him," he says.

"Though Alastair Campbell made it very clear after the last interview that he was not best pleased. Yes, it was pretty abrasive, but I can't see any reason why there shouldn't be abrasive interviews with prime ministers. He kept saying that [sleaze] was not what people wanted to talk about. And I take the view that the interviewer decides what the questions are."

His toughest political encounter was with Jonathan Aitken, who, as a Tory minister in 1995, accused him of "poisoning the well of democratic debate". "I was worried sick, for if he was speaking on behalf of the Cabinet, I was dead meat." He recalls the pressure vividly - and the week it took his BBC bosses to offer their backing.

As for today's allegations of bias, Humphrys is "baffled" that the BBC defends itself against accusations of being " outrageously liberal". "Do we want to return to capital punishment or to see homosexuals persecuted? No. That is a broadly liberal position. And that's what the nation is. I bloody well hope the BBC is broadly liberal."

(Evening Standard, August 11 2004)

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The Times: Tech column - Penguin vs Katie.com

By David Rowan

CORPORATE TYPES still don't get it: if you make heavy-handed legal threats against popular web properties, you will damage only your own reputation.

Twice this week lawyers have been made to look foolish across the vast, instant judgment pool that is the popular chatroom. In both cases, the protagonist is now famous for all the wrong reasons.

Stephen Galton, a Los Angeles attorney, objected to some anonymous postings about him on a Yahoo message board, following his own appearance on the board to defend a client. So last week he launched a possible class-action lawsuit against the company for allowing chatroom identities to remain secret. Unfortunately for Galton, this has only amplified the level of personal abuse targeted at him, including around 700 mostly foul-mouthed attacks at Yahoo alone. There is also a campaign to make Google searches for "shyster" link to his website. Not a tremendous result.

Separately, the publisher Penguin was forced on Friday to announce that it was renaming its bestselling 2001 paperback, Katie.com, after an embarrassing public spat with the longstanding, unrelated website of that name. The site's British owner, Katie Jones, recently received what she called "very unpleasant" letters from a US lawyer working with the book's author, Katie Tarbox, demanding that she hand over the domain. Only when the popular Slashdot bulletin board dismissed the demands with contempt last week did Penguin belatedly admit defeat. But by then both Penguin and Tarbox's lawyer had damaged their standing among thousands who had read the posts.

* The Rapiscan Secure 1000 is the latest in full-body security scanners, designed to detect anything from guns to explosives hidden beneath a potential troublemaker's clothing. It uses "backscatter" X-rays to generate detailed images of whatever the person might be concealing, and has shown such promise in US airport trials that the Metropolitan Police wants to bring them to British schools. Sir John Stevens, the Met Commissioner, intends to offer the force's £100,000 machines to any heads who identify "a problem with knives". But does he realise that, by using them, they may inadvertently be breaking the Sexual Offences Act? So powerful is the Secure 1000 that it can display everything - absolutely everything -that the person being scanned has covered with clothes.

That, according to children's-rights campaigners, means that schools using these scanners will be creating "indecent images" of children. "We have seen examples of scans so intrusive that they clearly reveal genitalia," says Ian Dowty of Action on Rights for Children, who is threatening legal action under child pornography laws if Sir John goes ahead. Now that should make an interesting court case.

* Weblogs? So last year. The latest trend among technophiles is to communicate through video logs -online journals replete with film clips shot on digital video cameras. The comedian Adam Sandler has one, but mostly this is an amateur medium, used by "citizen journalists" to report from last week's Democratic National Convention, or as a way for budding film-makers to build an early fan base. "Video logging" may well explode when the mobile-phone networks offer it (as Orange intends to), but in the meantime you can meet the pioneers via websites such as demandmedia.net and vidblogs.com.


(The Times, August 10 2004)

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Interview: Jana Bennett, BBC director of television (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

JANA Bennett has called the Evening Standard into Television Centre for a diplomatic telling-off. The BBC's second-most-powerful executive is troubled by suggestions in Tom Mangold's media column last week that BBC One's "slide downmarket" will cost her colleague Lorraine Heggessey her job as controller.

"Perhaps he was just responding to the fact that something he wanted to do didn't get commissioned," she says bluntly. The former Panorama reporter has evidently hit a raw nerve.

As director of television, Bennett has good reason to feel defensive. Last month, a Governmentcommissioned national survey found a "startling ... unanimity about the sense of decline in quality of BBC television".

The report, contributing to Lord Burns's review of the corporation's charter, identified concerns about repeats, "dumbing down" and "copycat" programming, with fingers mostly pointed at BBC One.

The reinvigorated governors, meanwhile, used this year's annual report to express their own worries over "perceptions that the quality of BBC television is declining". A governors' inquiry is already under way into BBC One's peaktime schedules.

"We're not going to jump to quick conclusions," explains Bennett, an elfish 48-year-old from New Hampshire who wraps infinitely rambling answers in a soft American accent.

Still, she has already decided that her friend Heggessey is safe until at least the end of next year. "I want her to be the longest-serving BBC One controller, and I think she does too," she says. "She absolutely loves her work and is doing a good job, and there's a lot more to do."

Far from "discarding" current affairs, she says, Heggessey has increased investigative budgets and scheduled serious journalism in primetime, such as tonight's Panorama alleging Olympic corruption. Rather than sliding downmarket, she has added "breadth and range" to genres ranging from drama to art - combining Rolf Harris's populism and Alan Yentob's more highbrow Imagine "as different ways of opening up windows".

"What we are trying to do with BBC One is increase the number of types of experiences," Bennett explains. "With drama, say, it's about not being dependent on one type, but also encouraging short series which can be more author driven, like The Canterbury Tales.

"What is true of drama is also true of current affairs and factual, where we've built on consumer journalism, like Watchdog, through to landmark series, like British Isles: A Natural History. Compare the schedules of BBC One with a few years ago, and you'll find there is more variety than ever."

THE autumn highlights, announced last week, suggest an uneasy reliance on the sort of "event" programming that tends to infuriate broadsheet critics - from a " nailbiting" national spelling bee to the "Fat Nation" challenge and Rolf 's live "paintathon". Does Bennett worry that the governors themselves have decided to "assess" BBC One's peaktime schedules, amid wider concerns about perceived decline?

"If you read their review of BBC One in the annual report," she says, "it points to quite a lot of good things, such as increasing reach, the arts ... " Yes, but it also questions why the channel drops innovative programmes "when initially faced with disappointing ratings".

"The governors' job is to be on the case of management," she replies. "It's right that they are prepared to say things clearly and to direct attention to things, whether we agree or not. We should look to increase the perception of quality programming. But you do that by sticking with the right number of things, while killing things off at the right time to make way for new ones."

Ratings, she insists, are only one of a "basket" of measures of success. "We are not driven by overnight ratings nearly as much as people say. What we want is for people to appreciate what they see." Measurement of programme "reach" matters greatly, she says, as do surveys of "memorability" and audience approval.

Yet here again BBC One is looking damaged. Executives were concerned in April when approval ratings reportedly fell to an alltime low. Bennett's explanation? It was merely a "seasonal" decline that has since been corrected.

Equally convenient is her spin on public concerns identified in Lord Burns's survey: audiences often assign programmes to the wrong channels, she says, so their criticisms probably relate to " television in general" rather than the BBC specifically. She clearly learned a few tricks up at Oxford from her music-scene friend, Tony Blair.

After university, where she read PPE, she took a graduate degree at the London School of Economics, co-editing a journal of international relations before joining the BBC as a news trainee in 1978. She has stayed ever since - apart from a three-year gap running the US Learning Channel - making her name launching series such as Walking With Dinosaurs, The Human Body and Animal Hospital.

She is married to Richard Clemmow, former head of BBC TV News, and they have two children.

As for her expertise in international diplomacy, that must have come in useful when Mark Thompson arrived earlier this year as director-general.

Only last year, Bennett publicly rubbished his strategy, when he was her predecessor as director of television, as "a mistake". Under Thompson, she declared, BBC One "took its eye off the ball" by neglecting the arts, and he was "frankly too blunt" in designating channels for particular genres.

Now that he is back as her boss, how well are they getting on?

"Mark and I absolutely have a good relationship, and he agrees with my strategy," she begins, launching into an extended and uninterruptible detour taking in factual programming, comedy, and BBC Three's raison d'être.

WHEN she took her present job in 2002, Bennett admitted that her " toughest challenge of all" was Saturday night entertainment on BBC One. Yet, with Johnny Vaughan's latest vehicle bombing, even the governors recently acknowledged that entertainment "continues to be a challenge".

Why can't she and Heggessey get it right? "It's starting to turn a corner," she insists, citing Strictly Come Dancing as "a funny, sincere, cross-generational show" that has a key role to play.

Would she have wanted Big Brother? "I don't feel that, in its current evil guise, Big Brother has enough content or purpose to be on the BBC," she says. "It's a great format that's lost its purpose - it's not to me a huge curiosity factor whether people are bonking under a table or on top of it."

What about that other Channel 4 hit, Wife Swap? "The first series, yes," she says. But now? "Your treatment of people matters. There is a nasty route you can go down - people might watch it, but I wonder what they feel about the experience. For me, whose side you are on is important. With [BBC One's] What Not to Wear, you end up with a transformative experience on behalf of the ordinary citizen. What I like is television that invests in humanism, so you come away with something more than shock value."

(Evening Standard, August 4 2004)

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The Times: Tech column - Blackberries/Google tricks

By David Rowan

THE Blackberry season has arrived early. Sales of the wireless e-mail device have more than doubled this year, meaning that 1.3 million people are now checking their messages neurotically whenever you try to talk to them. With internet-enabled phones and wi-fi hotspots providing diminishing opportunities to log off, we are rapidly losing that work-life separation. So do yourself a favour this summer holiday: leave the battery rechargers at home. You'll feel better for it.

Motorola has defined this always-on phenomenon as "the blurring of life segments" and, like much of the tech industry, is working hard to ensure that your life is as "seamlessly connected" as possible. Planning a drive? Soon the motor industry hopes to keep you online via Intel's "Connected Car PC". Listening to music? As you do so on the next generation of mobile phones, prepare for interruptions from e-mails as well as voice calls.

Yes, these developments can be useful if you are awaiting an urgent message. But they are also eroding that vital ability to switch off and keep "play" time to ourselves. If your boss asks why you ignored the e-mails he sent to you at the beach, explain that The Times advised that it would be better for your soul. Just don't mention that this column was written on a laptop in a remote Canadian mountain resort ...

* YOU PROBABLY know to put quotation marks around phrases that you want Google to search for. But have you discovered some of the more advanced search tricks?

If you can remember only part of a phrase, for instance, you can use an asterisk as a wild card: "A Nightingale sang in * Square" will tell you it was Berkeley Square. To find results within a numeric spread (such as a price or date range), put two full stops between the lower and higher numbers: "Hitler 1933 ..1938" will focus on the prewar years. You can discover a word's meaning by typing "define:" and the word; you can also make Google find the word's synonyms by preceding the term with the tilde key ().

Play around with the search engine's more advanced tricks if you want to be really clever. Type "intitle:" before a search term (without a space) and you will be given only web pages whose title contains that term. Do the same with "inanchor:" and you limit your results to pages that include the term in anchors, or links, to that page. So typing "iPod inanchor:bargain" will find you pages to which somebody has linked using the word "bargain" in the link text -a neat short cut.

Similarly, "inurl:" bvrings up only pages with the term in question in their web address, or URL.

Learning Google grammar will bring greater benefits than school French. A good place to start is an unaffiliated site called Google Guide (www.googleguide.com) - although Technobabble will continue to offer further mini-tutorials.

* A CODA to the recent item about Matthew Somerville, the web "accessibility" campaigner forced by Odeon Cinemas' legal threats to dismantle his far superior interface to its film searches (Technobabble, July 20). This week, plenty more alternatives to Odeon's site have been springing up in sympathy. Odeon's logical next step can only be to get the internet closed down. Why, it could be the summer's biggest blockbuster.

(The Times, August 3 2004)

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