Interview: Dominic Crossley-Holland, ITV (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

IT was the last bastion of the long, set-piece interview, the old-school, Sunday lunchtime political slot that reinforced ITV's "serious" credentials long after the BBC dropped On the Record. But yesterday, as predicted by the Evening Standard, the network formally axed the Jonathan Dimbleby programme. It will be replaced at the end of the year by a "less formal" and more "fun" successor.

When On the Record was dropped three years ago for Jeremy Vine's The Politics Show, Dimbleby could barely contain his contempt. "I ought to rejoice in the fact that our principal rival has died, but I don't," he complained in The Times. "The long forensic interview really matters." This time around, Dimbleby has so far kept his counsel. But others in the industry are already mumbling that ratings-obsessed commissioners may once again be dumbing down the schedules.

Dominic Crossley-Holland, the commissioner in question, is keen to set the record straight. "I know it would be handy to write 'ITV dumps the long political interview', but this is not the obituary for the formal one-to-one," the 38-year-old head of current affairs, religions and arts explains in ITV's Gray's Inn Road offices. "The new programme will have at its heart the ability to do the long-format interview, which is something that ITV and ITN pioneered. It's just that it may not always be appropriate that we give someone 20 minutes or half an hour of airtime.

"I'm not trying to dumb down or ditch the tradition, but I do want a far brighter, far more engaging programme, with a lot more wit and attitude."

Dimbleby may well continue as a presenter: he and the channel are in talks, and Crossley-Holland says the new format will owe a certain amount to Dimbleby's Radio 4 programme Any Questions. "No one's done anything wrong, they've done valiant job, we just want a fresh approach," he says. "With a four per cent audience share in multichannel homes, we can't afford to stand still. I need to be proactive."

It is Crossley-Holland's boldest move since taking the job three months ago, having previously run the ITV News channel. An ITN lifer - he joined from York University, and spent 17 years there before jumping to ITV - he has put the show out to tender, with the instruction that it must be a "high impact" programme whose guests "set the agenda and make news". With a new hour-long, 10.30am slot, it will use a panel of journalists working with a big-name presenter to "hold our decision-makers to account".

"We want to attract a range of newsmakers and politicians, and have a bit more fun. Somehow, 'fun' is a dirty word. For 'fun', for 'bright and breezy', people read 'dumbed down'. No, actually - it's about making it more knowing, more engaging and relevant."

But won't this be yet another doomed attempt to sell politics to "youth"? "I don't think there is a magic wand for attracting the youth audience," Crossley-Holland reflects. "Look at the election, when only around 21 per cent of 18- to 34-year-olds voted. It's a question of how you define politics. Do the under-thirties care about student loans? Do they care about congestion charging, transport policy, the environment? Yes, yes, yes. It's like the notion that 'religious broadcasting' somehow has to be a switch-off."

Religion is another area facing a shake-up. Shortly before he joined, ITV negotiated with Ofcom a radical cut in its broadcast obligations in this field. Initially, Christian groups were furious that religion would be integrated into soaps and documentaries rather than treated as a discrete genre. But Crossley-Holland - himself a Christian - rejects boxed-in genres as "a construct of 1970s". As a "modern" alternative, he commissioned Rageh Omaar to travel to the tsunami region and investigate how people from four faiths had been affected. This Christmas, Omaar will visit people touched by the London bombings to examine how their "personal value systems" had coped. Without such topicality, Crossley-Holland insists, ITV will fail in its remaining public-service obligations.

"I don't claim that somehow I can reinvent public-service programming," he says. "But it is under greater siege than ever before, because of the advent of multichannel and the analogue switch-off that's on the horizon. And unless we apply imaginative, ambitious programming skills here, these sorts of programmes are in danger of dying out." In a decade, he points out, there will be no mandated requirement for ITV to produce what we've grown up to know as public-service programming.

John Birt, in his MacTaggart lecture last Friday, argued that ITV was already "clinging on to the public-service tradition by its fingertips". Crossley-Holland found Birt's analysis rather pointless. "He didn't identify any solution, nor any funding model to achieve it, which seems a bit invidious," he says. "Doesn't that slightly negate most of the principles of Birtism?"

But isn't all his talk of public-service broadcasting simply a fig-leaf on the corporate monolith that is ITV plc? Surely the shareholders have little interest in backing low-rated current affairs or religion when their money could be better invested in soaps? "If there was a moment where this monolith was going to act, it would have been when I arrived, when the old political programme was out of contract," he replies. "Not only has that been rejected, but the budget has been increased."

The investments are paying off commercially, too, he claims. "Just look at Tonight with Trevor McDonald. We're producing 92 episodes in peak time, and it gets ratings - [BBC1's] Real Story, which has just 32 episodes, gets about two-thirds of the ratings. They've now remodelled it on Tonight. The BBC governors's own report this year said BBC current affairs had failed to achieve the accessibility and high impact of ITV. And we don't have £3 billion from the licence fee." And no, he says, despite reports, Sir Trevor is not planning to leave.

Next in line for a shake-up is the arts schedule. You might think that The South Bank Show is ITV's arts schedule - and, indeed, an imminent announcement will secure its future. But Crossley-Holland, from a family of poets, composers and artists, has ambitious plans. The channel "missed a trick" by letting Richard & Judy dominate coverage of popular literature. "I'd like to do a bit more literature," says Crossley-Holland. That will begin with a major series from Melvyn Bragg on British books that changed the world.

For the moment Crossley-Holland seems to have a free hand. But as his channel controller, Nigel Pickard, found to his cost this summer, the pressure ratchets up if programmes fail to deliver. ITV, for all its public-service traditions, is now fighting for its place in an ever more competitive marketplace.

And even arts, religion and current affairs are going to be judged on the audiences they deliver.

(Evening Standard, August 31 2005)

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The Times Comment page: Censor the internet? Try catching the wind

Violent pornography may be repellent to most adults but banning it from British computers will be impossible, argues David Rowan

EVIL PLACE, the internet. When not tempting terrorists with sarin recipes, it is irresponsibly serving German cannibals their dinner, leading Japanese depressives to suicide and reuniting blameless friends to commit extramarital affairs. As if we weren't being sufficiently depraved and corrupted, the Home Office has now uncovered a shocking online stash of extreme and violent pornography. It's a wonder that Anglo-American forces have not yet invaded the net in search of the elusive, order-restoring "off" switch.

This latest internet panic concerns pornographic images that unquestionably go beyond what society, certainly the Obscene Publications Acts, would consider morally acceptable: images depicting bestiality, necrophilia, rape or torture, all now electronically available in just a couple of mouse-clicks. Material of this nature would not be permitted in licensed sex shops or in films, yet until now it has not been illegal to view it online. Hence the enthusiasm of the Home Office and the Scottish Executive to legislate to ban UK citizens from pointing their computers towards their hosts' mostly foreign-based web servers.

It is, superficially, an attractive notion that criminalising the sight of "extreme" images will cleanse the national psyche. The "net porn pervs" demonised by the popular press for accessing these often repulsive websites will find no support here: personally, I find the sites' profitable existence worrying, the ever-growing demand for them more so.

But however well-intentioned, the Government's desire to play censor will meet technological, cultural and practical barriers that simply were not there in the battle to confront illegal child pornography. The online exploitation of children for sexual gratification, by international consensus, is so closely linked to their physical exploitation that a global effort continues successfully to limit its availability. Try achieving a similarly agreed global definition of "corrupting " adult porn - and then consider how Ofcom, or our strained police forces, can ever secure Britain's digital borders.

It is always unwise to legislate in response to a single emotive crime, and the current government consultation owes rather too much momentum to the brutal murder of Jane Longhurst, the Sussex teacher strangled two years ago. Her killer, Graham Coutts, was a regular visitor to such charming websites as Necrobabes, Death by Asphyxia and Hanging Bitches, and the day before the murder he spent about 90 minutes exploring images of necrophilia and asphyxial sex. Jane's mother, Liz Longhurst, believes that the internet "normalised" Coutts's disturbing sexual fantasies, convincing him that "he was not alone in harbouring these sick thoughts". Her remarkable campaign, including a 35,000-signature petition, has persuaded MPs that the solution lies in criminalising the possession of such images, blocking access to the sites and giving Ofcom a new role as internet policeman.

These websites certainly appealed to Coutts's disturbingly violent sexuality. But does that really justify the conclusion, as voiced by David Lepper, Jane Longhurst's MP, that the internet "doubtless led to Jane's death"? It is an assumption that needs to be thoroughly tested before a neutral communications channel is blamed for inciting, rather than reflecting, one of the darkest aspects of human nature. Murderers enacted their horrific fantasies long before a few million computers were linked together: maybe we should have been blaming books.

The internet undoubtedly makes such degrading images easier to find, and reinforces a sense of community among those stimulated by them. Yet there is simply too little convincing research to demonstrate that extreme pornography initiates acts of violence. Indeed, some psychologists argue the opposite - that it provides a safe outlet for those who might otherwise enact their malevolent fantasies.

There is also a wider question of definition. As Baroness Scotland of Asthal, the Home Office Minister. pointed out in a Lords debate last year, "there is no international consensus on what constitutes obscenity, or when the freedom of an adult to have access to obscene or pornographic material should be constrained". In our increasingly atomised media culture, built around ever more niche consumer segmentation, who is to determine where "regular" pornography becomes "extreme"? Now that would be a fun Ofcom committee to sit in on. If a simulated rape sequence is unacceptable today, what about consensual S&M or even gay sex tomorrow? What tends to deprave or corrupt one person may prove perfectly inoffensive to another. Yet once the Government begins to pull down the curtains on the legally permissible internet, how can we prevent short-term political pressures determining what is safe for our private consumption?

Where children are involved, there is no such moral ambiguity. Few national governments or police forces would not consider child pornography a degrading and exploitative evil. That is why it has proved relatively easy to win international co-operation to close down such websites.

But try reaching agreement on unacceptable adult violence. If one jurisdiction accepts the Home Office view, the pornographers will merely move their web servers to another. Unless Britain adopts a Chinese-style firewall, that digital detritus might just leap over our national borders. And with barely 250 specialist police officers to examine computers in suspected child-porn and terrorist cases, who in practice is going to enforce the ban? You can bet that the profit-driven pornographers will find ways of remaining one step ahead.

When the Lords considered the matter, Baroness Buscombe, a Tory peer, had an answer: force computer shops to pre-install government-approved filters. Forget, for a moment, the limitations of such software, which will inevitably block entirely innocent pet-care pages. The notion assumes that undesirable content will be accessed only on static web pages, rather than through email, news groups, peer-to-peer networks or whatever mobile technology follows tomorrow. The Lords also appear not to have noticed the extraordinary boom in content created by ordinary citizens.

The internet needs to be understood simply as another communication channel for those depraved, flawed sexual beings called adults. We already have clear and effective laws against murder, rape, bestiality and any other crimes that pornographic websites are supposedly inciting. To legislate for a digital black pencil may satisfy immediate demands for action. But where the internet is concerned, legally enforceable bans rarely achieve their goal. Just ask the next eBay fraudster or penis-extension spammer who contacts you.

(The Times Comment page, August 31 2005)

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Trendsurfing: Tech trends (The Times)

By David Rowan

A year ago, when this column began, a respected magazine editor offered a quiet word of warning. "Good luck trying to find your trends," he said with a world-weary headshake. "The first few ideas will be obvious enough, but in my experience you'll soon struggle to find any real innovations."

Ha! In fact, the tough part of writing this column has been to decide which trends to squeeze out each week to keep to the word limit. There are just so many new ideas emerging from the worlds of business, marketing and technology that 52 columns a year barely skim the surface.

From pod hotels to pop-up stores, sensory branding to the Scoubidou craze, the recent pace of invention has been extraordinary. It's partly the marketing world's desperation to reach an atomised audience in creative new ways, partly the new social possibilities offered by digital technologies. And even if some of these trends disappear as quickly as they emerged - how many more "advertise on my forehead" auctions can eBay take? - there are enough, from video blogging to "long tail" retailing, to last us for years. So, with thanks for your tips, here are some of Trendsurfing's favourite tech-related themes that somehow haven't yet found space. If you spot more over the next year, do e-mail me your insights. Because readers-as-journalists is a hot new trend, apparently.

Podcasting goes mainstream: Since we first mentioned podcasts last November, these amateur audio web shows have shaken up the professionals. Back then, there were just a couple of hundred Google references to podcasting; today, there are almost ten million. A big boost came when Apple rejigged its iTunes software to make it easy to download shows. The current growth area? "Porncasts", whose hosts share erotic stories and review pornographic websites. Just wait till the Daily Mail discovers there is no mechanism for keeping out the under-18s.

HDTV redefining beauty: High-definition television does wonders for picture quality, with up to ten times the resolution of standard sets. The trouble is that the razor-sharp image also highlights every wrinkle and facial blemish. As the sets have become cheaper, and more programme-makers have switched over to HDTV, cosmetic surgeons in the US have reported rising demand from thirtysomething newsreaders demanding Botox. One trade newsletter even maintains a list of the "ten scariest celebrities in HDTV" - among them Tommy Lee Jones, Cher and Keith Richards. Cameron Diaz with make-up might look great on conventional TV - but will her skin pass the more demanding aesthetic standard that's emerging?

Online confessionals: Murdered next-door's dog? Lied about your job qualifications? Now you can confess anonymously to the world via the booming online confessional. These strangely compelling websites - such as www.postsecret.com,  www.notproud.com and www.e-admit.com - have become almost an art form over the past year. We're still awaiting the first newscaster to admit secretly to some HDTV-inspired nipping and tucking.

Virtual girlfriends: For a while, lonely Japanese salarymen have been able to "date" imaginary cocktail waitresses or flight attendants who sent love notes to their mobile phones. Now the virtual girlfriend (and boyfriend) is going global, thanks to companies such as Artificial Life, based in Hong Kong. If you want to win your virtual girlfriend's heart, you have to seduce her via your 3G phone with flowers, chocolates and small talk. She'll text and voice-message you back - and best of all, she looks flawless on your high-resolution colour screen.

(The Times Magazine, August 27 2005)

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Interview: Sarah Montague (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

SOMEONE warn Michael Buerk - the Today programme looks perilously close to becoming his feared "femocracy". As Sarah Montague and Carolyn Quinn divvied up the interviews yesterday morning - between news bulletins from Carolyn Brown - BBC Radio's flagship sounded unusually like Woman's Hour. Maybe the men really have become redundant.


For Montague, Sue MacGregor's successor as Today's main "female" voice, Buerk's comments about women's growing dominance prompted evident concern. After dismissing him to a reporter as "another white, middle-aged male", she confronted him on last Thursday's programme in a feisty, impatient interview. Pressing him on whether women seriously held the upper hand in government and society, she never quite elicited a satisfying answer. So what does she now say to his complaint that men have been marginalised by "women's rules"?

"I think it's fantastic that Michael Buerk said those things, because it's what he and people like my mother think," Montague, 39, says after yesterday's show in a TV Centre coffee bar. "His quotes in The Radio Times seemed to suggest that the feminisation of society was leading to a drop in sperm count - which may well be true, though it seems rather unlikely - but there are serious issues worth raising."

There are, she adds, "interesting" questions to be asked about why senior journalists like Buerk are no longer considered suitable to present the TV news. But as for his substantive concern, she sees it only as "refreshing" that women increasingly hold senior managerial and presenting roles in an organisation like the BBC.

"Let's put it this way: is there too much oestrogen at the Today programme? Has that ever been a criticism? I'd prefer to think it shouldn't make any difference. Perhaps naively, I cling to the belief that I wasn't picked [to present] only because I was a woman, but because of my potential."

Nor is she happy about the "Sue MacGregor's successor" label. "Why should there only be one female on the Today programme?" she asks. "Nobody thinks there should be only one male. The joy this morning was that I didn't even notice there were two women presenters."

But if John Humphrys's interview style is occasionally criticised for its testosterone-fuelled aggression, it remains the preferred choice of Today's editors, along with James Naughtie's, for the serious 8.10am political slot. MacGregor used to grumble that she felt unfairly denied her share. Montague, too, is insistent that such decisions should not be made on gender grounds. "The idea that men are confident, aggressive, brash, while women are considerate, soft and emotional ... I don't see that clear categorisation, and I don't see why we can't all strive for a mixture."

All nicely idealistic - but the reality is that Montague is still failing to get as many 8.10s as the men. "There's no doubt about that," she replies, "but how long has John been doing the programme, how long has Jim? And how long have I?" She joined in 2002. "I still see Sue, and I understand that she used to get annoyed. But there are other things at play. John is a brilliant interviewer ... I'm not saying that I'm not, but there are differences ... It's less of an issue than it has been. When I started, I was more wound up - I thought I was never going to get better if they didn't show a bit of confidence in me."

MONTAGUE is a surprisingly uneasy interviewee. She openly questions why she let herself agree to meet, and frequently asks to go off the record. In person, though warm and thoughtful, she is also less forcefully articulate than her radio persona would suggest - she worries at one point: "I feel I haven't finished any of these thoughts," and tends to leave her answers hanging in mid-air.

Perhaps it's nerves - she has, after all, faced a difficult press since joining Today. Her confidence has taken a few hits, with media critics accusing her of being "hopelessly out of her depth" in big interviews, nasty letters from "the green ink brigade", and what she calls "evil" gossip items delighting in her every fumble.

At times, she admits, she misses the smaller audiences of News 24, which she joined at its launch. "Sometimes the vast [Today] audience has felt like a curse rather than a blessing," she confesses. "You get the interviews, but sometimes you just think, 'I wish I were doing this in a vacuum.' Not least because you know you'll probably do a better job, and that's to do with confidence and being knocked, all that sort of stuff. I've got a much thicker skin than I had."

She claims not to have been bothered by reports that Carolyn Quinn, sitting in during Montague's most recent maternity leave, won greater acclaim from listeners and producers. "No, that wasn't hurtful. I remember sitting at home with my second baby, reading a newspaper story which began, 'Pity poor Sarah Montague ... ', but feeling blissfully happy and wondering why. Perhaps it was the effect of progesterone. It just didn't feel as if Carolyn was 'usurping' me - I've always been a big fan of hers, and was pushing her. I don't feel the queen bee syndrome. I want more female voices on Today."

Reports of their supposed rivalry, she says, are absurd, if inevitable. "You think, 'For God's sake, why should it be presented as any more competitive with Carolyn than with Ed Stourton or other males?' If Stephen Sackur comes on the programme, nobody says, 'There's Sarah, scratching his eyes out.'"

Montague came late to broadcasting. She grew up in Guernsey, and after studying biology at Bristol University became a stockbroker. She hated it. She then went into business with a friend who owned Charles Tyrwhitt Shirts, again with limited success. Aged 24, at a crossroads, she decided that radio current affairs was her passion. Unable to find a job, she offered to make coffee at Guernsey's local TV channel. This led to shifts for Reuters and ITN, and a business correspondent's job at Sky. The BBC headhunted her to join News 24 as a presenter; then came Newsnight and Today.

"I'm phenomenally lucky to have got Today so young. You think, 'Bloody hell, this is exactly what I want to be doing,'" she says. "Then you have children." She has two girls, aged three and 18 months. "I defy any woman who goes through that not to question whether they can do it all. I have a brilliant nanny and supportive husband [a rural-business consultant], and because of my hours I have a fantastic balance compared with friends who work conventional hours in the City. But it's knackering. The number of times I've thought, 'Jesus, this is the wrong time in my life to have children.'"

These pressures, rather than any "glass ceiling", are what limits highflying women's progress in an organisation like the BBC, she suggests. Yes, men such as Nick Robinson and Andrew Marr have tended to take the most senior political roles - but then there is a greater pool of male competition. "Among women, there's Kirsty Wark, Martha Kearney, there's Carolyn and me ... but you're searching about. And with television, if you're going to select on looks and a certain ability in front of the camera, then you are going to perhaps preclude a lot of people. So women think, 'This is bloody difficult, perhaps I'll take a few years out.' It would be nice to know when a woman will present the general election coverage - but it's difficult to see." Would Montague like the job? "That's a long time down the road," she says hesitantly, "but provided I'm not too old and ugly for television."

In the BBC, she says, she has finally found her "spiritual home". A short time after joining News 24, she was trying to work out what it was that created such a different atmosphere compared with Sky. "Then," she reflects, "I realised that 50 per cent of the newsroom were women."

That would be the feminised BBC that so troubled Michael Buerk, then? "Yes. Actually, society's been feminised. Is that such a bad thing?"

(Evening Standard, August 24 2005)

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Trendsurfing: Reverse shoplifting (The Times)

By David Rowan

How does an artist get noticed when everyone is too busy shopping? Increasingly, by naughtily subverting the shopping trip itself. In a trend that's causing a buzz in the international art world, growing numbers of pranksters are placing their messages directly on to the supermarket shelves. They are leaving behind anything from creatively re-labelled cans of beans to specially recorded musical CDs, awaiting their serendipitous discovery by shoppers. The cleverest exhibits even carry barcodes intended to confound human intervention at the check-out. Score one, then, to art over commerce.

The practice is known as reverse shoplifting, or droplifting, and as a form of retail sabotage it goes back almost 20 years. Remember the Barbie Liberation Organisation, which in 1989 swapped the voice boxes of hundreds of Teen Talk Barbies with those removed from Talking Duke GI Joe action figures? They were returned to toy-shop shelves, so that US Army hunks declared, "I love shopping" and Mattel's blonde bimbos screamed: "Vengeance is mine!" Mattel's lawyers were not too happy, but the artists neatly conveyed their message about gender stereotyping.

That was just the start. Since then, the genre has attracted mischief-makers such as Packard Jennings, an American artist who created the Il Duce Action Figure (in Benito Mussolini's likeness) and smuggled it into Wal-Mart. Part of the subversion was in the packaging - other titles in the "Fascist Collection" apparently included George W Bush and Margaret Thatcher - but the main fun centred on Jennings's attempts to buy his invention, which he secretly filmed. The resulting footage - involving confused staff debating a suitable price - proved a hit at a subsequent gallery exhibition.

The latest reverse shoplifter to create a stir is Ryan Watkins-Hughes, a Brooklyn photographer whose "Shopdropping" project has become an internet hit. Watkins-Hughes buys canned foods and replaces the packaging with "art objects" based on his photographs, but retaining the original barcode. There is a serious point, Watkins-Hughes insists: "Shopdropping strives to take back a share of the visual space we encounter on a daily basis, [and] subverts commercial space for artistic use." It is also a democratic art form, allowing anyone visiting his shopdropping.net website to submit drawings or paintings for his next reverse-shopping trip.

For most practitioners, the main attraction of reverse shoplifting is simply the disruptive thrill of inserting tiny hand-made sundials into a jeweller's watch displays, or replacing cat-food cans with cute pottery replicas. The French, however, have more serious intentions. The Babyrul Foundation has droplifted hundreds of home-made CDs into record stores and mash-up DVDs into Blockbuster branches. Being French, the foundation naturally has a deep philosophy underpinning its oeuvre: retail profits, it suggests, are "set aside in favour of critical thinking about the way this activity's production is distributed", challenging "the commercial space-time of a store". More Marx, then, than Marks & Sparks.

The nearest we've come in Britain is the bookcrossing movement, in which favoured books are dropped in public spaces for others' discovery. Clearly, then, it's time for us Brits to get creative too. When you're out shopping today, remember that it's what you leave behind that counts. And when security hauls you aside, mumble something about reinventing a new commercial space-time. Just don't bother mentioning that The Times sent you.

(The Times Magazine, August 20 2005)

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Evening Standard: Not such an Easy Living at Condé Nast

By David Rowan

THEY were the £33 million gambles that rocked the women's magazine market. When Condé Nast launched Easy Living last March, it brashly promised a "revolutionary new concept" that, with £17 million behind it, would "redefine" women's glossies. Two weeks earlier, Emap launched Grazia, its "gorgeous and compelling" fashion-and-celebrity weekly on a slightly lower budget. It, too, would change women's reading habits.

Tomorrow, six months on, their first ABC results will reveal whether the risks have paid off. Circulation numbers will, after intense subscription and advertising campaigns, be sufficiently respectable for both newcomers to claim early success. But within the industry, there is already a widespread view that Condé Nast - publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair - will have far less justification than Emap for uncorking the champagne.

Although Easy Living will considerably exceed its declared minimum circulation target of 150,000, there is some unease within Condé Nast that the magazine may still not have found its pace. Edited by Susie Forbes, a former deputy editor of Vogue who had previously never run her own title, it aims to "hold a glamorous mirror up to real life" with sections on food, fashion and "emotional intelligence". Yet early issues have left some media buyers and advertisers distinctly unimpressed. Competitors, needless to say, have delighted in the schadenfreude of a rival's perceived vulnerability.

"I don't think they've made any impact at all, certainly not on the newsstand," says Trish Halpin, editor of Red, similarly targeted at women over 30. "It just doesn't look dynamic and exciting." Sue James, editorial director of Woman & Home, believes that Forbes has ignored her instincts in favour of Condé Nast's 12,000-person pre-launch research. "It seems to have been researched to the Nth degree, but you've got to have that vision through the editor who smells her market and connects with readers. For me, there's a question mark over whether that's there."

Off the record, rivals are even more dismissive. "Condé Nast was so arrogant about this £17 million launch that was going to revolutionise the women's market, and it had us quaking in our boots," says the editor of another monthly glossy. "But when I saw the first issue, I skipped round the office with joy. Easy Living's tone is so bland, so patronising, and that has to come from the editor, who sets the emotional connection with readers. That's why people are asking if she is the right person."

Another women's magazine publisher is equally dismissive. "I don't know anyone who spends their time making wrapping paper or who needs to be shown how to crack an egg," she says. "Tell me who this magazine is aimed at."

To make the business plan work, advertisers' views are what count. After six issues, the jury is still out, according to Claudine Collins, press director at MediaCom, which buys advertising space. "It's got better, but I don't think Easy Living really delivered on its promise and launch strategy," she says. "They've done well with their huge subscription drive, but the gift is often worth more than the magazine."

Officially, Condé Nast will say only that it is "very pleased" with Easy Living's performance, dismissing suggestions that the growing daily involvement of Nicholas Coleridge, the company's managing director, reflects a lack of confidence in Forbes. But a rival publisher, on condition of anonymity, claims that Condé Nast is close to panic. "We're hearing from advertisers and journalists everything from the possibility that it may shut down by the end of the year, to plans for an entire revamp, or that the editor will be replaced. There's a considerable backing away from it. The concern is that it's worthy, gloomy, with features about funeral etiquette, and a feeling among advertisers that it's perhaps missed the point of the rather affluent and enjoyable times that we live in."

In the bitchy world of women's glossies, you would expect rivals to be sharpening their stilettos. Forbes, for her part, says she is baffled by suggestions that her job is under threat. "Condé Nast hasn't shared with me if they think I'm not the person to edit Easy Living," she says. "Nor are there plans for a relaunch unless I'm unaware of them."

As for Coleridge's role, he is her "great friend who has been by my side since they asked me to do the job. As a first-time editor, I defer to his experience." Advertising targets have been reached, Forbes insists, Thursday's circulation figures will be "strong and respectable", and reader feedback is "incredible".

"These criticisms may be the industry's views, but they're not the readers'," she says. "And I know whose side I'd rather be on."

The spat, at least, has taken the spotlight off Grazia, whose early issues were widely criticised for their uncertain mix of low-brow celebrity and high fashion. EMAP expects to announce a circulation several per cent above its initial 150,000 target. "We were going into a new market, it was uncharted territory, and all the critics were snapping around us," admits an Emap spokesman. "Now we're very happy that Grazia's got the balance right and has become a hot book for high-end advertising."

This is not immediately apparent from the magazine's own pages, which carry only a handful of premium ads. A recent cover-price rise, too - from £1.70 to £1.90 - looks distinctly like an attempt to recoup revenue at the expense of building circulation. Could the heavy celebrity coverage be putting off the Guccis and Armanis? Not at all, the spokesman replies: the cover-price rise is simply "a sign of absolute confidence we've got a formula that works that readers will buy into even at the extra price", with barely any circulation impact. Advertising, he adds, is seasonal, and will bounce back with the September fashion shows, including three eight-page inserts for Esprit.

But whatever its commercial prospects, Grazia's most remarkable achievement, under editorial chiefs Jane Bruton and Fiona McIntosh, is to have earned the rare praise of rival editors. "It's working," says Red's Trish Halpin. "I had my reservations at first, but it's really tightened up in the last couple of months, and it's now quite an exciting magazine for the bus or coffee break." Sue James, too, is impressed: "Grazia's definitely finding itself a bit more each week. For a quick-flick weekly read, there probably isn't another mag like it."

Tomorrow's circulation results will only begin to determine which of the two newcomers will prove the long-term winner. But six months on, Easy Living's launch certainly isn't proving the industry-shaking "revolution" promised by Condé Nast.

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On August 18 2005, Grazia announced an audited circulation of 155,157 (150,900 of them at full cover price), Easy Living 171,038 (156,144 at full rate).

(Evening Standard, August 17 2005)

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Trendsurfing: The celebrity designer (The Times)

By David Rowan

If you knew how tough it was for a celeb to get noticed these days. Forced to house-share with Germaine Greer, mocked by Ant and Dec through the jungle, encaged as deep-ocean shark-bait ... Jeez, there has to be a more dignified way for a limelight-craving star to get some press. Here's a hot trend from Hollywood that might just supply the answer: tell the world that you're also a "conceptual designer". All of a sudden, it's not enough simply to act or make records. Now your creativity must also embrace architecture and interior design, the latest fields to lure A-listers in search of complexity.

Brad Pitt is the poster boy for the new celebrity design movement. If Frank Gehry's £250 million seafront redevelopment in Hove gets the planners' nod, Pitt will be there to help the renowned architect sketch out a restaurant and a penthouse flat. "I'm really into architecture, structure and design," Pitt recently declared in Vanity Fair, the magazine to which the Wilshire Boulevard set devotes a Talmudic scholar's obsessive textual analysis. "Give me anything and I'll design it. (Gehry) said to me, 'If you know where it's going, it's not worth doing.' That's become like a mantra for me. That's the life of the artist."

Sadly, Pitt missed out on the chance to help redesign downtown LA earlier this year, when the Gehry bid - to which he was party - failed to make the final cut. Still, he is currently reported to be designing a Las Vegas hotel with some vital input from George Clooney. Funny thing is, no one is bothering to question these guys' qualifications. When you're pulling in $20 million a movie, it isn't done to ask exactly how long you spent in architecture schoolI so let's just forget that Pitt's college major was journalism.

Still, the showbiz rush is on to join his adopted craft. Hayden Christensen, the current hot property after his leading role in the latest Star Wars film, has announced that he's considering abandoning Hollywood to study architecture. Jade Jagger, better known for her Garrard baubles, is now designing rooms for Philippe Starck's Yoo apartment chain, while the musician Lenny Kravitz has been sketching out his own hotel complexes and recording studios. Heck, even celebrity milliner Philip Treacy is in on the trend, accepting the role of "design director" for a new 96-room hotel on the west coast of Ireland. "I started by designing the door handles," explains the man with the hats. "It was exciting to start with a door handle because hotels are full of them. It's a fluid, elegant door handle. And it's ... very me."

It's not difficult to understand what's going on here. The talent longs to appear creatively gifted, and architecture and design convey an attractive aura of artistic intrigue. Commercial developers, meanwhile, know that a famous name attached to a building brings in the cash. A similar logic explains why the musicians Damon Dash and Nelly have successfully extended their empires into clothing brands, and why every celeb from J-Lo to Sarah Jessica Parker is striking deals to market personalised fragrances.

J-Lo as an amateur perfumier, you can perhaps understand. But scents from David and Victoria Beckham, Donald Trump, even Sir Cliff Richard's concoction of ylang ylang, rose and jasmine "inspired by his childhood in India"? Good grief. Can you imagine how his skyscrapers are going to look?

(The Times Magazine, August 13 2005)

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Interview: Stuart Murphy, BBC3 (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

AT 26, he became British television's youngest channel controller. At 31, he launched BBC3, the celebrity-packed "young adult" channel initially blocked by the Government as "undistinctive". Now 33, Stuart Murphy rattles energetically through its track record - including six Baftas and five British Comedy Awards - as proof that his two-and-a-half-year-old is finally playing with the big boys. "Not that I feel young here," he reflects in his White City office. "I feel as if I'm about 45."

After a shaky start, BBC3 now has nine million weekly viewers and a 2.6 per cent audience share among its target 25 to 34 age range. It has spawned distinctive comedies such as Little Britain, original drama such as Casanova, and riskier adventures including Flashmob: The Opera.

Yes, the evening news has struggled, and ratings still rely rather too heavily on the hardly cuttingedge EastEnders. "But it's like a two-year-old in nappies at sports day," Murphy enthuses. "We're supposed to be running 100 metres against seven- and 15-year-olds, and in some areas we're beating them."

Murphy wants to shake things up. "It really annoyed me as a white lower-middle-class lad in Leeds that the BBC newsreaders, the voice of authority, came with a southern accent. It must be doubly annoying for a smart black kid from Leicester. So I wanted to do something where I could make a difference."

Rivals complain that Murphy has disproportionate amounts of cash with which to distort the market. His £93 million budget lets him risk licence money on shows which competitors say could never be justified by their audiences: according to one calculation, some BBC3 programmes have cost £1,300 per viewer.

Disingenuous, he replies: such calculations ignore the huge audiences which his more popular programmes attract when repeated on BBC1 and 2. Besides, he adds, his budget matches an "expensive" remit of developing current affairs, animation, original drama, factual and comedy shows.

"Yes, sometimes we've done things that were incredibly expensive that didn't work," he says - series such as Fightbox, a ratings disappointment which cost millions to make. "If you take big risks, you do get big failures. Equally, we came up with Little Britain. I'd like to see Five's Little Britain - they're on a similar budget, so there's no reason why they shouldn't have one. We've already won more awards than Sky One, ITV2, Five and E4 put together in their 20-year history."

Despite moans from commercial rivals, BBC3, he insists, is not simply staking out the same turf. "Where does the commercial sector make original drama for this audience?" he retorts. "Sky One doesn't. It makes Mile High, about people having sex on planes, without using new writers. On Sky One, ITV2, E4, Living, it's almost all bought in, and when they do do original stuff, it's either big analogue programmes spun off, or a superficial bit of crap like [Sky One's] Celebrity Snatch.

"Show me an animated satire like Monkey Dust, or something like our new thriller Funland, from a writer of The League of Gentlemen, directed by the director of Shameless, with The Royle Family's executive producer. That's something new that's adding to our culture, not simply buying in foreign culture."

But why spend licence money targeting the already well-served young-adult audience? They hardly represent the "digital refuseniks" whom the Government demanded the BBC attract. Indeed, the DCMS report last year into its digital channels, by Patrick Barwise, concluded that BBC3's "obsession with 25 to 34s" was "a creative straitjacket" from which it should be released.

"If you're in your mid-fifties, you'll love the BBC," Murphy says. "If you're a teenager or in your twenties, you've got Radio 1, bits of Radio 2 and BBC1 and 2, but no service which speaks to you about your distinct life stage, where you're old enough to have kids and a mortgage, yet still young at heart. You're part of a generation that's increasingly relaxed about drugs, or has seen your parents get divorced. That audience is feeling increasingly disengaged from mass institutions like politics ... or the BBC."

They're not watching the youth-oriented 7pm news, though, a key element in the Government's service requirement. Some days it has drawn too few viewers to measure. The Barwise report said the bulletin "achieves nothing and attracts tiny audiences" and represented poor value for money; the BBC governors, too, recently acknowledged that it "has not yet succeeded".

It sounds as if Murphy, too, is ready to give up. "We were asked to supply a news service that pulled in an audience, but we've got to be honest about the environment we're in, with seven rolling TV news services, hourly news on the analogue channels, the internet." He will not disclose his plan, only that it has been submitted to the DCMS for approval. In the meantime, he points to the ratings success of the channel's 60-second mini-bulletins.

IT IS odd to think that this fast-talking "creative wunderkind", as he has been described, once planned a diplomatic career. He took the Foreign Office exams while at Cambridge, only to mess up the final paper. Instead, he joined BBC Manchester as a tea boy, fortuitously catching the eye of Jane Root and Roly Keating. At 26, after spells at MTV and The Big Breakfast, he was running the music and comedy channel UK Play, before taking on BBC Choice. (He also found a BBC wife: Polly Ravenscroft, with whom he has two young sons, used to be head of press at Radio 1.)

His declared mission "to change people's perceptions" may not be the obvious inference from his autumn schedule. Yet he sees a factual series such as Honey We're Killing the Kids, which "scientifically" predicts how diet will affect a child in adult life, as "a catalyst for parents to alter their lifestyle". On Little Britain, back again but premiering on BBC1, the characters Lou and Andy "make people a lot more relaxed about seeing wheelchairs on screen".

It is tougher to divine any grand attempt at social engineering in Julia Davis's returning dark comedy Nighty Night, or a new allwomen sketch show, Tittybangbang. His biggest gamble is Funland, the thriller set in Blackpool, which, in Murphy's view, is his edgiest show yet - "very dark and Twin Peaksy, and a lot of people just might not like it".

So how will he measure the season's success? "It's a fair point. Success isn't an easy thing to define at the BBC. If you rate through the roof, generally you'll get criticism; if you don't rate, you'll get criticised. How would you define the channel's success?" Probably by the smile Mark Thompson gives Murphy at his summer party.

"That might be a worrying sign," he jokes. "Look, you're always going to be criticised. When senior BBC management vents anger at newspapers for criticising the BBC - well, it's so boring, as they say in Tittybangbang. Just get over it, and produce great shows that make a difference and take a risk."

(Evening Standard. August 10 2005)

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Trendsurfing: Pod hotels (The Times)

By David Rowan

You cannot see your hotel room while you're sleeping. So does it really matter if it is half the size of a conventional bedroom? Size is suddenly no longer everything in the battle to entice the budget traveller. Inspired by the compact simplicity of Japanese "capsule hotels", a new wave of tiny, functional bedrooms is about to hit the hospitality market. Some of these "pod hotels" trade on chic design touches, others on bottom-of-the-range prices. Whatever your tastes, they offer another option for those seeking clean, unfussy accommodation pitched somewhere between traditional urban hotels and gruesome city-centre hostels.

Next month, the people behind the YO! Sushi restaurants plan to announce their first three London "Yotels", where £75 will buy a tight space packed with design statements. You won't get a view - windows look inwardly on to corridors - but rooms do have stylish rotating beds, flat-screen TVs, and "aircraft-cabin mood lighting". That's because the company chairman, Simon Woodroffe, was inspired not just by Tokyo capsule hotels, but also by British Airways' first-class recliners. So he hired Priestman Goode, designers for the Airbus A380 and Virgin Atlantic.

"Affordable luxury is the key, but usually the numbers don't add up," explains Gerard Greene, Yotel's chief executive. "So we've shrunk the size of the room to around 10 square metres." This compares to 18 to 25 sq m in a typical boutique hotel. "Plenty of facets of the room will remind you of a four-star hotel," he says, "yet with a very contemporary design - not trendy, but very mellow, meant to be calming."

Greene, formerly a hotel analyst, has waited 12 years to fill the gap between budget hotels and high-end design temples such as Ian Schrager's. So who are his customers? "I don't know," he confesses. "It will be a huge cross-section. When the first budget Travelodges opened, people expected them to attract second-hand car salesmen and builders, but it's proved much wider than that. I'm sure we'll get the architect down from Birmingham who earns £100,000, but we've also had inquiries from families, who can take a second room for the children and have some privacy."

It is becoming a global trend. Yotel is talking to prospective franchisees on the Continent; on New York's East Side, meanwhile, a renovation of the historic Pickwick Arms Hotel is similarly packing tiny rooms with high-tech accessories, such as iPod docking stations, then charging accordingly compact prices. For those on a particularly tight budget, there is now even an option to pay for sleep by the hour: a company called MetroNaps has installed "sleeping pods" in the Empire State Building and at Vancouver airport. You lie back in the sleek black-and-grey pods, snoozing in semi-privacy while wearing sound-blocking earphones.

But London is where the action is. Stelios Haji-Ioannou has just opened his first easyHotel, a 34-room pod hotel near Hyde Park that had just 18 rooms before it was converted. A basic bed, shower and toilet will start at £10 a night, plus the cost of disposable linen. "I believe Stelios has copied us, but his is a lowest-common-denominator deal," Gerard Greene says rather disapprovingly. "I'm not really into that. I'm very much into design."

(The Times Magazine, August 6 2005)

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Interview: William Sitwell, magazine editor (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

FOR a contract magazine with barely 6,000 paying customers, Waitrose Food Illustrated has been making rather a noise lately. Last week, almost every newspaper covered its announcement that an obscure 11-year-old cookbook had beaten the Nigellas and Delias in a poll to find the all-time culinary bible. Before that, you will have read about Luke Johnson's scandalous assault on restaurant critics as jealous alcoholics, or Marco Pierre White's headline-grabbing attack on rival chefs (think Gordon Ramsay) for spending too much time on TV.

WFI, as it styles itself, has a knack for attracting attention not normally apparent in the promotional "customer publishing" sector. Its unapologetic goal may be to shift more "product" from Waitrose's food shelves, but its combination of imaginatively contrived "scoops" and lavish celebrity photoshoots has made it one of the few marketing-led publications to become a talking point in the magazine world. In an ever more crowded lifestyle magazine market, it's all part of a deliberate strategy to shout for readers' attention, explains William Sitwell, editor for the past three years, and also an ES Magazine food columnist.

"We're competing against the likes of Olive and Delicious as well as Good Housekeeping and newspaper food sections," explains Sitwell, 35, in the Ladbroke Grove offices of John Brown Citrus Publishing. "We may have been the first glossy food magazine, but now we're having to compete that much harder. In every creative meeting, I ask what scoops we have to generate newspaper coverage."

Previously a reporter for the Express and the Telegraph, Sitwell is well aware that the contract sector is widely dismissed as the soft end of journalism, a murky world of undeclared product placement and compromised editorial integrity. Almost all his magazine's 300,000 copies are given away to Waitrose and John Lewis account holders, and he has to make sure that every item featured is available in stores to buy. Yes, he says, the magazine is "there to shift product", but his generous editorial budget allows a quality of writing and photography that more commercially exposed titles can rarely afford.

Sitwell has also attracted media attention for his own impressive social connections. Family ties found him an early job helping to run Conservative MP Bill Cash's anti-Maastricht campaign office, and a close friendship with George Bingham, son of Lord Lucan, provided some lucrative journalistic commissions. Not long ago the magazine featured Viscount Linley - for whom William's wife Laura sells bespoke furniture.

There is also, of course, the family name: Edith and Osbert Sitwell, the celebrated aesthetes, were his great aunt and uncle, Sacheverell Sitwell his grandfather. The Sitwell name was not so much a journalistic door-opener, he says, as an additional spur to earn the respect of suspicious colleagues. "The trouble now is that people are less likely to have heard of them, so it doesn't make a huge difference," he says regretfully.

Not that they were universally respected even in their time. "You know, [the critic] FR Leavis accused them of being part of the history of publicity rather than poetry," says Sitwell. "But sometimes you have to play that game."

It could be a metaphor for Sitwell's own achievement. His magazine continues to win awards, and is respected not simply by the food industry but by the wider media. Yet it remains at its core part of Waitrose's publicity machine. And as Sitwell knows, that brings its own compromises.

"Contract publishing deserves to be taken seriously," Sitwell insists. "Yes, we're part of the marketing world, but this is a magazine with some serious journalists writing for it. We've had people like Max Hastings, Ross Benson, AA Gill writing. People want to work for us because I can pay more than a lot of newspapers - typically £750 a day for photography and £500 for an 800-word piece." Gill, he confesses, demanded rather more - his "commercial rate" of £5 a word. "He said it was justified because he couldn't write that Waitrose was a terrible shop. I said, 'Well, you probably couldn't denounce Rupert Murdoch in your Sunday Times pieces either.'"

Each month, Sitwell meets the supermarket's representatives to pitch his editorial ideas. Very rarely, he says, are they vetoed - on the last occasion, because a tribute to Australian cheese by Sir Les Patterson was "just a bit too strong". A magazine staffer also travels to the supermarket's buyers' surgeries to discover which new sausages or pates merit the reader's interest. Waitrose meets the editorial costs and pays a " publishing fee"; John Brown sells the advertising. "And I," Sitwell adds, "just spend the money."

In pure commercial terms, the model appears to work well for the client. Waitrose attributes up to £4 million a year in extra sales to the magazine, including £300,000 on oranges and lemons from one issue alone. Yet equally importantly, Sitwell explains, it "defines and extends the brand". He then disappears hazily behind marketing jargon about the supermarket's "pyramid of excellence" and how "sales uplifts" can be traced directly back to articles.

Only when he returns to his magazine's subject matter does the passion resurface. Sitwell is the ultimate foodie, harvesting baby carrots and blueberries on his Notting Hill roof terrace, and waiting for his olive tree to produce sufficient quantities to make his own oil. He tries to sell me a £15 tin of imported olive oil, apparently a little sideline. "I baked bread at the weekend, and it's the most magical mixture of chemistry and art, hugely satisfying," he says, beaming. "And if you're trying to pull women, you will with a fresh loaf you've made yourself." This is not, he stresses, a mating ritual that he practises himself, being married with two young children.

"I would like to see more people cooking, taking an interest about where their food comes from, understanding seasonality," he says, fired up. "I see people wanting to return to simplicity, which means buying the best ingredients and not messing with them." And guess which supermarket advertises itself as place to go for higherpriced, higher-quality ingredients?

Marketing aside, the supermarkets - including Waitrose - are often blamed for squeezing out small local greengrocers and butchers. If he were serious about promoting fresh, locally sourced food, shouldn't Sitwell be lamenting the chains' dominance? He wriggles a little. "The realities are difficult, but the produce you find in a corner shop isn't as good as what you find in Waitrose," he attempts.

Such faith befits a man who does appear to be on a mission - albeit one which happens to fit remarkably closely with his client's commercial interests.

(Evening Standard, August 3 2005)

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The Times Comment page: The morally dubious ban on medicinal cannabis

By David Rowan

HOW SHAMEFULLY callous is the Government's policy on medicinal cannabis use? Just ask Pauline Taylor, a former Macmillan nurse who for 20 years has suffered increasingly debilitating pain from multiple sclerosis. Seven months ago the 53-year-old wheelchair user from Durham discovered an unapproved medication which, as she movingly recounts, "has finally given me my legs back". Too bad for Ms Taylor, then, that her agony-deadening "magic medicine" last week became the latest officially sanctioned target in a renewed legal assault on cannabis-based pain relief. After all, as the Home Office coldly points out, the law must be enforced.

A number of volunteer networks dedicated to supplying vulnerable patients with medicinal cannabis have attracted unusually close attention from the police. Most recently, it was the turn of Ms Taylor's suppliers, a five-year-old non-profit group based in Cumbria that enhances home-made chocolate bars with 2 per cent by weight of donated cannabis. Around a hundred "cannachoc" bars have until recently found their way across Britain each week, sent on medical proof that the recipient had MS.

Cumbrian police and the Home Office have known about the operation for years, but only now - 1,600 clients later - have the authorities decided to act. Last week three of those involved were charged with conspiracy to supply a controlled drug, an offence that carries a possible 14-year prison sentence. The timing suggests a pungent whiff of political interference.

Certainly, there remains considerable medical concern about cannabis; pot smoking has been strongly linked with an increased risk of schizophrenia, psychosis, depression and other mental disorders. The British Medical Association insists that raw cannabis is not a "suitable medicinal product", despite the "anecdotal" claims of its efficacy. Unscientific, personal accounts they may be - yet among Britain's estimated 85,000 MS sufferers, many who in desperation have tried cannabis to relieve their symptoms perceive a clear, life-enhancing benefit.

Even the most coldhearted policy-maker would be moved by some of the tearfully grateful letters received by the chocolate supplier, which calls itself Therapeutic Help from Cannabis for Multiple Sclerosis. "Dear whoever," writes an elderly woman in Wokingham. "Thank you so much for my first supply of cannachoc. It is wonderful. For the first time in many, many months I do not have 'jerking' legs in the evenings and can sit still and watch TV."

From Essex, an elderly woman says that she can finally get to sleep again, the physical pain having temporarily subsided, "and I don't feel any high-ness at all". As Ms Taylor sees it, the Home Office bureaucrats whom she suspects of ordering her supply chain broken have clearly never experienced chronic, total body pain. "I'd like Charles Clarke to have my MS for 24 hours and see how he'd feel," she says. "He has no goddam right to tell me what I can put into my body."

The Home Secretary does seem to be on an extraordinarily ill-conceived trip. The new hard line on suppliers of medicinal cannabis echoes a wider unease within government at last year's reclassification of the drug by David Blunkett. Before the general election the Prime Minister suggested that cannabis "isn't quite as harmless as people make out", and Mr Clarke wrote to the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs demanding that it re-examine the reclassification in view of new health concerns. Could this current assault on medicinal use - backed by a recent Court of Appeal ruling that users have no defence of "necessity" in relieving their pain - be a deliberate attempt to distance Mr Clarke from his predecessor's more licentious era, when the spliff became as morally tolerable as the impregnation of another man's wife?

Nothing of the sort, insists the Home Office. Any decision to bring charges is a matter for the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS, in turn, says it would act only after receiving a file from the police, and that on no account would there be a political decision to prosecute. Because cannabis remains illegal, that decision would rest simply on the quality of evidence and whether it would be "in the public interest".

Forget passing the joint: this is passing the buck until any logic fades into an embarrassing blur. For all the "public interest" in breaking up these altruistic if unauthorised networks, the practical consequence of prosecution will be simply to send the "clients" - typically elderly, middle-class, otherwise law-abiding citizens - to criminal dealers. Or, alternatively, to lead them to suffer in silence until an "official" cannabis-based medicine is approved for use. Based on recent experience, they could be waiting some time.

This has always been the favoured get-out clause, from the Health Department to the Home Office. Because users of raw cannabis risk addiction and chronic health effects, ministers point out, only a properly tested medical preparation can be allowed. All that is needed is the approval of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).

So where is the MHRA's approval for the most promising cannabis-based medication under development, a mouth spray extensively tested by the British company GW Pharmaceuticals? In April, Canada gave the spray formal approval. It was expected to gain its UK licence long before now - but, well, the MHRA just needs a few more test results before it can be absolutely certain.

Bureaucracies, by their nature, favour delays over decision-making. People, on the other hand, feel the intense, life-shattering pain of disease very much in the here and now. Those unfortunate enough to have MS - or Aids, arthritis and any other severe condition where cannabis may alleviate symptoms - should surely be allowed to bear the risk of side effects and possible long-term damage in exchange for the pain control that cannabis might bring.

Until a legal medicine is made available, how can it make moral sense for the authorities to target the well-intentioned volunteers offering a short-term alternative?

(The Times Comment page, August 1 2005)

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