StephenTall.org

The last time I mentioned celeb-gossip site Popbitch here, it was because they’d drawn attention to academic research on the link between the social mobility agenda and cricket. This time, though, it’s the inside track on how — allegedly — Brian Paddick, the Lib Dem London mayoral candidate, helped restore the good humour of parched journos worrying about their file-by  [ Read More ]

Here’s a wonderful Pathe-style video from the British Council Film Collection entitled simply ‘Oxford (1941)’. The main thing that struck me watching it was that, while the style has dated, the people and place appear almost contemporarily vivid. Enjoy…

I suggested earlier today — in my post comparing ‘Brand Clegg’ against Brand Miliband’ — that the Lib Dems had ‘got used over the decades to being happily tolerated, and usually liked to one degree or another, by most people’. I had clearly forgotten this clip from the scorchingly good Election Night Armistice of 1st May, 1997, exactly 15 years  [ Read More ]

Here’s a graph that neatly illustrates the power of celebrity… From the fantastic geek-curiosity that is the England & Wales Baby Names website, tracking the popularity of names given to babies from 1996-2010, here’s the graph for the name ‘Britney’: Of course the value of a celebrity name can go down as well as up — as this graph illustrates  [ Read More ]

Rupert Murdoch was the cause of my first and only political speech while at university. This was back in 1996, I think, and a motion had been proposed that the common room should subscribe to BSkyB for the football. My pithy contribution was something along the lines: I don’t like Murdoch. I don’t like Sky. I don’t want it here.  [ Read More ]

Last night, when switching off BBC1′s Question Time — no, not even Tim Farron’s barn-storming showing could tempt me to endure a whole hour — I tweeted: In a perfect world, someone would watch #bbcqt for me & filter out the tedious/partisan/audience/Warsi & leave me with the viewable bits. — Stephen Tall (@stephentall) April 19, 2012 Cue only-slightly-sarcastic replies that  [ Read More ]

So says The Guardian today: The culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, was blindsided by Treasury plans to restrict tax relief for philanthropists, the National Theatre’s artistic director, Sir Nicholas Hytner, has claimed. Hytner is one of a number of figures from the arts and charities campaigning for the government to think through the impact of its changes to tax relief in  [ Read More ]

For years my colleagues at The Sutton Trust have been noting how the failure of the British educational/class/economic* system is nowhere more apparent than in the dwindling access to top professions for state school students. Now the satirical gossip website Popbitch is highlighting the increasing social mobility gap in this country between the haves and unlikely-ever-to-haves. Here’s a snippet from  [ Read More ]

I ask the question given the quite astonishing stance of the Cambridge University Students Union to try and pull the plug on the Cambridge Union’s invitation to former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn to come and speak. So far some 665 members of Cambridge University have signed a petition arguing in favour of the reversal of the golden thread of justice,  [ Read More ]

The Guardian reports today: The BBC should have been free to drop Miriam O’Reilly from Countryfile without attracting any accusations of age discrimination, according to comedian Rowan Atkinson, in a controversial intervention into the debate about the lack of older women on television. It appears, though, that Rowan Atkinson has confused two concepts: ‘creative freedom’ and ‘unjustifiable discrimination’. Slightly bizarrely  [ Read More ]