Category: Personal (Page 8 of 16)

‘Roadside’ 14-06-09

number six in the series of roadside photos. At the start line of the excellent MG’s in the Trees event organised by South Staffs MG Owners club.

at the starting line for MG's in the Trees

85 Years of MG

To continue on with the recent Midlands theme…
last week as a part of Three Counties MG (Staffordshire, Worcestshire and Shropshire if you must ask) myself and a small group friends were lucky enough to be given a tour around the MG Motor UK Limited Longbridge plant.

I was actually surprised just how much of the place was still left. I grew up about fifteen miles away and it seems every time I’ve gone through Longbridge over the past couple of years there is another massive area flattened away. So it was good to see that cars are being built there, and also that the space to build more is still there too.

My own history with the place is limited to a somewhat chaotic job interview about eight years ago, for work on their website. I arrived with about three other people to much confusion with no one there expecting us and everyone who was there, unsure as to where to send us, I mostly remember a French exchange student running back and forth doing her best to figure things out. I didn’t get the job, in the end, which given how things went on, was maybe for the best.

Visiting the plant last week we got a chance to see where and how our own cars were put together and take a look at the new MG TF’s being built there. The walking tour through the factory that we we’re taken on was very honest, open and entertaining, we got to walk along the production line which was somewhat of a novelty. It was also nice to see and hear facts about the cars and the business rather than the chinese whispers [no pun inteneded, honest] that had been floating about online and in the press. The new cars do look more solidly built, certainly more so than my ten year old F, and the interiors, which are rarely refered to without the word dated, looked good too.

We also got a chance to see the upcoming MG TF 85th Anniversary model, if I only had £15,664 lying about the place (I know I haven’t, I’ve had the place upside down this week looking for a pair of swimming trunks I need for the Screamin’ Festival next week) It does look a fantastic car, photos don’t do the paintwork justice and even the graphics, which I was none too keen on, do look quite good in person. with less than a couple of hundred a hundred only fifty being made I can see myself spending many hours scouring the autotrader website in a few years. Anyway, heres hoping for a sunny summer, which can only help things along all round.

In the meantime, if anyone’s stuck for a Birthday present for me next month…

MG TF 85th Anniversary, press car

Many thanks to Ian for organising the day and to Ian Pogson for the tour, I’m now reading Ians book ‘Carry on car making…’ which is availible from all good book stores, and here.

Normal music related posts and maybe even some comic book work, here shortly.

Talk Radio – The Midnight Line

Under the cover culture lover was going to be the title to this post but I was worried about what kind of hits I might get from google.

I’m not sure quite how I came across Ian Perrys Midnight Line, I think a friend of mine was a listener, once I’d heard it I soon became hooked, an under the cover culture lover as Ian would say. Broadcast from Wolverhampton on Beacon radio and also on WABC via medium wave, I could only pick the show up when the winds were blowing in the right direction and when I really should have been getting some sleep for school the next day.

Weeknights from midnight until 2am the show would run with either topical national or local stories or else one of its regular feature formats. One of these was a roughly bi-monthly show featuring John Starkey [who sounded at the time to me to be a man in his sixties]. These we’re some of the most genuinely ‘spooky’ shows I’ve ever heard, while you could argue on some calls he was reading the persons responses on the other end of the line, more often than not he’d pluck something completely off the wall, but very specific, and be spot on. I think during just about every show there would be a hair standing up on the back of the neck moment. I see from his website that John is younger now than he sounded at the time, given this was nearly twenty years ago, and is still doing the odd radio show, I must try to catch one, a lots changed in the media since then and it would be interesting to hear how the show is received today.

The show was a true local programme, providing both a service for the local community to air gripes and complaints with local issues as well as opinion on wider national and international news and more importantly provided entertainment and a sense of community for the housebound, people working unsociable hours and for people like me, who should really have been asleep. Most of all, it was always great fun, Regular callers like Eric, the Captain, Wing Nut, Johnny Morris & Jammo the parrot would always give you something to laugh about. Ian was a very good host, managing to make hosting such a show seem effortless and being able to draw peoples opinions out of themselves in an era where people were far less ‘media savy’.

I don’t know when or why the show ended, I went away from the midlands for a few years and when I came back there was no mention of Ian Perry to be found anywhere. Since then I did read he was working for BBC Shropshire Though I’m yet to be up at 5am to listen and the show didn’t seem to be podcasted when last I checked.

Listening to a few shows again now, I used to start the tape recorder at midnight, which given the fact that most of my tapes we’re C90’s meant I always missed the last half hour, the shows are much as I remember them. One thing that stands out is just how much general opinion and society has changed in the past fifteen years, and how un self aware most of the callers we’re, it was very honest and open radio.

The other thing that struck me is how the callers who we’re ‘characters’ on the show, we’re genuine characters, they weren’t frustrated performers phoning up with made up personas(Well…), which unfortunately seems to have become the norm on most modern talk radio shows.

It was everything that can be good about radio, it was intimate, gimmick free and offered a genuine insight into other peoples lives. Listening to the Christmas Grotto show with a friend on a road trip a while back we still we’re reduced to tears of laughter.
Its a shame that there is so little ‘local’ radio today, let alone so little good talk based radio. Heres a couple of links to some archived shows;

‘Free For All’
‘Commision for Racial Equality’
‘John Starky’

Tony’s maitreya never did show up mind.

2015 update!

Okay, so megaupload is long dead. Someone on the Facebook Group mentioned YouTube so… Playlist

So there are three tomatoes walking down the street…

The Chapel at Butlins Minehead on a cold December day
surprisingly I have actually completed a couple of pieces of artwork in the past couple of weeks. Sadly the photos I took didn’t come out too well so I’ll have to take them again.

Until then I’ll just upload a couple of pics from the second fish-eye film I took, here, here and here. Came out okay, a little dark at times.

I also had a go at constructing my own matchbox pinhole camera from various items found around the home, and a couple of things from poundland, with the very excellent guide on matchboxpinhole.com. Sadly though when I picked up the photos I only received a roll of developed film back and no printed images. Annoyingly, it was my own fault, I wasn’t winding on the film enough and most of the photos are overlapped. I remember when I was younger photo labs used to just process films like that, giving people ‘spooky’ photos to send in to the ghost section of ‘Take-a-Break’. But apparently its all done by computer now and the computer can’t cope with out gaps in the film. Hooray for progress.

So I’ll have another go at that. Meanwhile my Tomatos are growing well…
Week 1
Grow in the bag tomatos, week one.
Week 2
Grow in the bag tomatos, week two.
Week 3
Grow in the bag tomatos, week three.
Week 4
Grow in the bag tomatos, week four.
I’m starting to think that dispite how the packet reads I am going to have to re-pot them as this just isn’t going to work…

St Georges Day

I could tell by all the Chinese polyester flags on the BBC Radio cars parked in Stratford-upon-Avon this morning (Shakespeare’s birthday too today.)

It reminded me of a conversation from last week with a guy who sold me a piece of signage from a flea market. He said I was definitely buying an antique as it was made in Taiwan and wasn’t any of this modern Chinese rubbish…

Stalking Alan Caddick?

this sight did cheer me up on the way to hospital visiting tonight.

Page 8 of 16

All images and artwork copyright ©1998 - 2024 chris hathway, illustrator& Hathway/Creative