I had a week off in mid-September and, boy, what a week of weather. I enjoyed several sea dips in Dorset in glorious sunshine and the whole week was the recharge I badly needed after a summer of domestic stress and dubious weather.
In work news, I’ve been busy with the Warm Welcome Campaign as we geared up for an online launch yesterday evening, which as a huge success with 570 people tuning in. We want to ensure everyone in the country has a warm welcome within a 30-minute walk of where they live – so we’re on a mission to sign up even more than the 4,000 already registered community spaces, libraries, sports centres, churches and other spaces offering a free, warm and welcoming place to go.
Such a project seems even more important after the dreadful race riots of the summer and in an, at times, divided society. That said, I was truly heartened as I expect you were by the counter-protests to the far-right riots, the way they died down as quickly as they started, the mass exodus from X (Twitter) which has become a hotbed of right-wing sentiment, and the general sense that, actually, there are far more good people in the world than there are bad people – who want to improve the lives of everyone on this planet without exception and are willing to use our resources carefully and diligently to that end.
Hoorah to that.
In other news
TV production income is down as programme budgets have been cut. I had an old maxim, back in the day, that TV and media generally is first into and first out of a recession. This suggests we’re not out of the woods yet – which chimes with The Observer’s fantastic headline at the end of August that ‘Things Can Only Get Worse’ as Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves gave us all the message that things would get worse before they get better, managing our expectations (as Gordon Brown did when he became Chancellor back in 1997).
The Guardian has warned that Treasury brain has taken over from common sense brain in the Labour Government – as for example winter fuel allowance is cut for thousands of pensioners, saving very little from what I can see and losing Labour support in the process.
This was fun to read, about millennials using Gen Z lingo to market various things including a bat-crazy zoo in Northumberland.
I was away for a week, as I said, in mid September and had a delightful week that was almost a total news blackout.
When I got back to my desk on Monday 23 September I became aware of James Harding’s Tortoise Media bid for The Observer newspaper. This was a fascinating read from Press Gazette, about the ownership of Tortoise Media. Full disclosure: I initially subscribed to Tortoise but can no longer justify it with all my other subscriptions and with one daughter back at home and another being supported at university.
I also rubbed shoulders with James Harding when he was media editor of (was it?) The Times or the Financial Times and, sort of, consider him “one of us”, although other colleagues from those days in the late 1990s and early 2000s reckon he was always one apart from us mere mortals.
It will be interesting to see if he’s successful in buying the (much bigger than Tortoise) business of The Observer, and what he might do with it.
I was shocked to read this story, about tax fraud earlier this week. I’d be very annoyed if someone submitted a fraudulent tax rebate claim in my name with a different signature. I don’t mind paying the tax I owe, but I would quite like an NHS dentist appointment, seeing as I haven’t been able to get one since 2019.
That’s it for this month. Toodle pip.
Lucy Rouse PR Blog 