Viral road safety shock for lollipop man

A short film made for £10,000 for Gwent Police with the assistance of Tredegar School has become a worldwide viral road safety campaign. A girl called COW texts while driving and and collides with an oncoming car.

It's a well-made film and hard-hitting. There is blood everywhere when COW's car is struck by another car and the convincing aftermath belies the low budget thanks to the co-oporation of the emergency services.

Directed by Peter Watkins-Hughes, a short clip on YouTube of the 30-minute film has proved very popular with the US media. Texting while driving is not illegal in the US and CNN, CBS and Time have covered the film.

Less explicit public information films there have not had the impact of this film.

Gwent police originally had approached the director to make a film on joyriding, but the school pupils felt that texting while driving was a more important issue.

In the clip, a baby is motionless and a child asks when his parents will wake up.

COW the 17-year-old driver has to be cut from the car while her friends lie motionless. The film cleverly combines the procedural reality of the emergency services with the emotional and physical consequences for the victims and is brilliantly acted by a young and unpaid cast.

Being distracted while driving usually does not involve a crash and this film shows what can happen. I work as a lollipop man (sorry, school crossing patrol officer) outside a primary school and see people looking their phones frequently as they drive toward me down a little village high street.

When I commute on my motorbike, I sometimes filter between lanes of slow traffic (I used to be a motorcycle instructor). I have often seen people texting and even people trying to read documents as they queue in their cars. Three times in about 30 years of riding, I have moved out of the queue into the centre of the road before a whole queue of cars crashed into one another, in front and behind.

I don't know how many accidents are actually caused by texting, but the film's well-told message highlights the ease with which distractions can cause accidents. This is a much better approach to making a road safety film than the other shockers commissioned by the government to support the anti-speed campaign.

The dead children in those films simply manipulated sympathy for a bureaucratic strategy of practice-based evidence that ignored actual evidence from real accidents that speed was a factor in less than five per cent of crashes.

Driver error and drinking are much bigger influences on accidents.

The anti-speed campaign group Brake once produced a show stand that asked motorcyclists when they would kill their next child. A search of accident data bases by Motorcycle News found no record, not a single one, of a motorcyclist having killed a child.

Watkins-Hughes' film looks really good. It's horrific and portrays the worst that could happen, but it does stress paying attention to where you're going, one of the chief causes of accidents.

Show the whole thing all over Britain.

Hello, good evening and welcome to 1960!

Would a live TV general election debate encourage public political participation?

For the first time, the prime ministerial candidates for next year’s British general election may engage in live TV debates, possibly hosted by Sir David Frost. The first American TV presidential debate was back in 1960 when the young upstart John F. Kennedy took on the then Vice President Richard Nixon. There are similar televised hustings all over the world but Britain has never managed to organise them in the past. What if they had?

David Cameron looks more likely to come off better in a TV duel with Gordon Brown but Tony Blaire would have trounced Cameron in his day. Margaret Thatcher would have taken down Tony and given Harold Wilson a run for his money. To go any farther back would mean comparing politicians of the pre-TV era with those who were formed within it. I never heard Winston Churchill or Harold MacMillan speak live but, from their newsreel performances, perhaps those radio-informed orators would have come across poorly on live TV.

The paths of general elections in other countries have been changed in the past by performances in TV debates; Sarah Palin’s early appearance briefly rallied her party’s outlook in the Republicans’ uneven contest with Obama last year. But supposing who would probably have won previous TV debates in Britain, it’s not obvious how previous election results would have been affected. Obama raised an internet army of volunteers and small financial contributors during his election campaign that ruthlessly focused on obtaining votes. The President has been criticised by some of his supporters for failing to capitalise on this politically novel resource since his inauguration. Just when the US seems to show that electioneers must use the internet to gain significant advantage in political and financial support, British political parties may have finally come around to the last century’s mass communication system.

At first glance, it may seem that the failure of British political leaders to come to agreement about live TV debates confirms our suspicions about them: They don’t really care about what the public thinks; they would only take live political risks if their own parties could gain some advantage in the way the debate is structured; they focus on the demographics of key marginal seats when they want to form a government in our crazy, first-past-the-post electoral system, not on national issues.

Stepping back though, considering the British political system as a whole, how far back would you have to go before there really was a grassroots tradition of live political debate? The reactionary-sounding refrains that TV turns serious issues into sound bites and politicians into personalities have some truth. Following the MPs’ expenses row, politicians are particularly unpopular. John Riley, head of Sky News, has invited the leaders of the three biggest national parties to a live TV debate that he will share with other TV channels. “Something must be done to restore faith in our political system,” he said. While he has also said that he would “put out three chairs” and film whoever turned up and let the public punish whoever didn’t, Riley has also promised to engage an independent organisation such as The Hansard Society or the Electoral Commission to ensure fairness in the event.

The currently discussed format is comprised of three debates of an hour; one on foreign policy and defence; one on domestic and economic policy; and a final “town hall” event where the studio audience could ask the candidates questions. Welcome to 1960! Should it go ahead, live TV debate is unlikely to duck a situation afflicting all party-political debates at the moment.

None of the parties has much interest in talking about policies, except the Liberal Democrats who are vanishingly unlikely to win. Labour is running what Spiked editor Brendon O’Neil calls a zombie government. The party thinks it is going to lose the election and is focused on damage limitation that will probably do it more harm than good. The Conservatives are favourites to run the country from the spring, but don’t want to lose any support by expanding on their plans for austerity measures. Both candidates with a chance of winning have an immediate interest in letting events take their course, rather than firing up the public with ideas – even if they had any.

Beyond the immediate lack of motivation for the parties is a profound intellectual crisis that has been deepened by the financial crisis and the recession. The management of never-ending slow growth has been the arena of political contention in western economies for two decades. Now that boom and bust has clearly not been managed out of the system, there are no intellectual alternatives except marginally influential left- and right-wing fringes.

It would be more democratic to see the political leaders debate each other live, with as much studio audience and national audience participation as possible – but to what extent is the format capable of producing a genuine debate?

If the TV debates can be organised, and if the leaders can have an argument of substance - two big ifs already – then there is a third difficulty; in what way would the public engage with the issues raised? The public is a very slippery concept. Everyone is in the public but few would confidently predict what it will do in a general sense. In terms of voting, the public is imagined in demographic blocs of people who are more or less likely to vote for a political party, people who are more likely to change their vote and those who may not vote at all. In a broader sense, the public is a problematic concept, distrusted as much as relied on as the underpinning of cultural institutions.

In Jurgen Habermas’s classic book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), the public sphere was being privatised by all kinds of interests such as political lobby groups for business, all kinds of campaigns and an influential advertising culture. The public sphere was the space that had once comprised the intellectual forces that contested the future. It was a very small in its 17^th century beginnings, but later adapted and absorbed the media to encompass the masses in society. As it grew, it emptied itself of broader questions of progress and formal public representation within it became more claimed by organisations than won directly. The public sphere began to organise more limited contests in the name of the people without really involving them. Today, most people more or less agree with Habermas.

Even Habermas, though, thought that the period before an important election could call forth a public sphere that involved a greater percentage of the population in a public debate about the future. The public today is certainly capable of making itself felt, but does not engage in general political activity.

Public outrage about MPs expenses was anticipated and duly reported. This illustrated how unlike previous periods of mass-participation in politics ours is. The expenses issue polarised opinions about whether politics is any use or not. The anger of politically motivated people at least matched that of political cynics because the behaviour of MPs had encouraged further cynicism. Against this background, the result of the general election seems a foregone conclusion, although a huge mistake by Cameron might just conceivably tip it back to Labour.

A live TV debate between three leaders of whom one is thought to have already won, and where two of them have little interest in showcasing unpopular policies, would be interesting but incapable of creating public debate unless the public intervenes in it.

It is hard not to be cynical about politicians when they are shy of saying what they will do when they are power, but politics, in the broadest sense, remains the only way to change things. This makes it doubly unwise for anyone to be cynical about the public; it is largely submerged, but it is still out there. Sometimes it surfaces in all its might to bite someone.

Who will pay for a free press?

To confront James Murdoch's "profit is good" stance with a "public sevice is better" is pointless. James Murdoch has every interest in attacking the BBC, but his parting remark to an Edinburgh media audience that profit was the only guarantor of good news services should not be answered in kind.

The news and its importance to democracy is not to be confused with the various business models that oversee its production, "public" or "private".

Murdoch's wrong to say the BBC is killing professional journalism with free news because it's dying even faster in the US, where newspapers are shutting and local coverage is disappearing. The US already has a market-oriented news landscape.

The BBC seems free and public, but it is not free and the public influences it more through projected viewing and listening figures than with its votes. Leaving aside the question of whether it is good value or not, the BBC is funded by £142.50 from most families every year in the form of a separately collected tax on TV and computer ownership. Because it has a guaranteed income set by the government, the BBC isn't facing the same difficulties as the private parts of the mixed, public and private, British media system.

The huge BBC website isn't killing national or local papers; they have been in decline for decades. But the BBC does occupy a big part of the online space into which all media businesses must expand if they are to adapt to digital reproduction.

BBC news is funded by the licence fee payers but is rolled out across the global media landscape, free to some of its audiences online. Terrestrial, cable and satellite TV, Freesat and freeview all have competing private TV channels funded by subscriptions and/or advertising. All the accompanying news is either paid for by subscription or by advertisers, the costs being passed on to consumers of goods. And BBC TV, although available terrestrially and digitally to licence fee payers, is paid for again when received by subscribers to cable and satellite services. This is a very mixed market from which to extract funding for news.

Newspapers may be free or have a cover price, but they rely on advertising. The many news channels online, and online versions of newspapers, offer similar text-based news services that are free to users. News is expensive to make because you need professional journalists that have to be trained somewhere in the system and when privately owned news companies feel the pinch, they train less of them.

Murdoch's dad Rupert has said much of his newspapers' content will have to be paid for by users in the future. Although the technical difficulties of micropayment systems for news seem no nearer to being solved, this is interesting because news organisations have so far struggled to find advertisers to fund free news online or in print. Among the difficulties facing the ITV companies and Channel Four and Five is that advertisers may continue to spend less on broadcast in the future.

Murdoch Senior's long-range warning of charging for content suggests that it is both risky but, from his perspective, unavoidable.

Most content, including gaming, is free on the internet and business models in that medium reflect that. Many commentators echo points from Chris Anderson's book, Free; youngsters will just not pay for content they can download free. The very low cost of digital reproduction encouraged many organisations to put their content freely online, but they now have to find a way to make it pay. The BBC, of course, does not.

The internet is culturally very powerful because of its cooperative potential. So far, it has provided various free services that are then monetised by their providers being able to charge for related products and services or attract advertising. Users can buy currency and equipment for their gaming adventures, for example, and premium or professional versions of services such as Flickr, which can fund the whole concern if successful. Google takes ad revenue by click, encouraging more use and revenue by offering more and more free services.

Internet models of business or cooporation that have been exploited so far may be unsuitable for news. The Huffington Post could launch online without the expense of print reproduction and distribution, but it is a news brand now because of the demand in the market for its kind of professional reporting, not because it started as a website or blog.

News is the basic information that informs society what it knows about itself. It is the most constant, day-today, minute-to-minute experience of our public sphere. News organisations, however they are funded, must gain at least some respect for their role of informing the public about itself within the larger domain of what is discussed and contested throughout society. The practice of journalists, taken as a whole, must meet external standards of objectivity and authority regardless of how the news is funded.

That role of a free press can be supplemented by so-called citizen journalists, especially by their ability to digitally eye-witness events. But the free press simply cannot be replaced by them wholesale. A crowd sourced cloud of microviews from citizens is very interesting but it is not journalism, nor anything remotely resembling it.

The nineteenth and twentieth century business models that funded the newspapers and broadcast have faltered in the new era of many-to-many publishing, but the news itslef has no loss of function.

The many difficulties facing us today require a public engagement as never before, and there are creative possibilities for pooling expertise on the internet. However, the conciousness of the public is not informed by millions of little discussions. News is intrinsically incapable of becoming a huge process of trial and mostly error. News organisations, in their plurality, can only expand and step up to play the role of a free press if the professional standards that the public expects of news are maintained by training journalists and sending them out to work. Someone has to pay for the news.

If we assume news could be free, who will make it? Who will bother to read it and would it still really be news? To have a US-style market place would be a culture shock in Britain, but a monoculture of Beeb would be equally bad.

Everyone agrees on a free press but no one wants to pay for it. Hard news is never going to be mined for the multitude freely. Taxes like the licence fee or profits from selling news are currently the only two ways to fund a democratically vital journalism. It is sensible to exploit both funding models rather than have a phony "public" verses "private" debate.

Ashes heroes celebrate calmly as a unit

Straussy, Cooky, Ravi, Belly, Trotty, Colly, KP, Matty, Freddy, Broady, Swanny, Monty, Oniony, Jimmy and Harmy - heroes all.

The Sun says they are all heroes and that's right. But because 2005's victory celbrations were over the top, 2009's will be sadly muted.

He was hobbling about by the end, but that one priceless run-out at the Oval by Freddie turned the game and the series. Even when relatively inactive, he's been described as standing still "massively" on Test Match Special. What a hero. Real ale pumps through his solid oak heart. Let's hope the op will sort the knee out.

Broady - from cricketer to gay icon in one magical spell of fast swing bowling - who saw that coming? He's had to assure the press that he won't be stripping off like David Beckham. Stephen Fry, Lily Allen, Harry Potter and Draco, even Russell Crowe - all on TMS. Steady on. Fry went all Death in Venice over Broady on Twitter. Lily fancies Oniony and Broady. They must be heroes, but let's not get too carried away, right? But I want to get carried away.

Struassy. You beauty, you Boys Own hero of the first water! No one famous fancies you yet but you are the man. You're so steady. Is it your steady stewardship that keeps the unit from really letting go for proper booze-up? Are you the calming influence?

The whole team contributed to a famous victory over a good team, however you look at it, but we should not get carried away. Shame.

They've done the open-top bus thing and the honours were inappropriate last time. Freddie should have been made the Prince of Wales and KP should have got the Duchy of Cornwall. And Viscount Vaughny at the very least.

But couldn't we have had a bit of public celebrating? If you think that England're always going to beat the Australian Test team at home, then you're getting carried away.

The privacy factor

Below is a letter to the MediaGuardian by me that was published in response to Jeff Jarvis's column on the publicness of his cancer.

While I wish Jeff Jarvis the best, his belief in the benefits of publicness should not blind him to those of privacy (Transparency benefits us all – even when it hurts, 17 August). He says it will one day be considered selfish not to disclose cancer and that he thinks he has become as transparent as a man can. Social pressure to reveal and share everything because of its potential benefits to others cannot admit that any area of life should be private. That sort of pressure would undermine your control of self-publicity.

I think Jeff is brave rather than attention-seeking. But there are far more difficult and embarrassing things affecting both the body and the mind suffered by many, and their disclosure could not be justified by the benefits of publicness. The ethics of transparency as they apply to companies and governments do not apply to all relations between people. People, if not all the collaborations they may form, need a little privacy.
Sean Bell Brighton

Psychologists 'protect' X Factor acts from the public

Is the public gaze so dangerous that exposure to it isn't safe without psychological backup?

The X Factor talent show has kept psychologists on standby throughout the recording of its shows to help its contestants deal with the pressures of public exposure. After Susan Boyle was admitted to a private clinic following her appearance on Britain's Got Talent and 10-year-old Hollie Steel broke down in tears on the same show, the move is pitched as a protective measure.

Because of the extra pressure on the acts resulting from auditions for the show now being recorded in front of a live audience (of 2,000), X Factor executive producer Richard Holloway told the Guardian that "the pressure came from the huge interest [in Susan Boyle]" (Holmwood, L., 'Reality check: X Factor contestants to face judgment on their mental health', p9, The Guardian 19/08/09).

He added that Internet video sharing sites and social networking sites had driven the increased interest in reality shows, piling on the public pressure for its contestants.

The nervousness of appearing in front of thousands live, and millions on TV, is completely understandable to anybody, but this concept of public interest creating a pressure that unbalances people's minds is very interesting.

Sree Dasari cut his wrists after being evicted from Big Brother but still managed to appear on a spin-off show that evening. Hollie Steel broke down during her first attempt to sing in the Britain's Got Talent semi-final and appealed successfully to the audience and judges for another go. Susan Boyle spent five days at The Priory suffering from exhaustion after coming second in the final of the same show.

What exactly is public pressure? Not being famous, perhaps I wouldn't know, but the incredible interest that reality and talent shows have generated in recent years make them among the most public of events that now occur in our society.

Susan Boyle's debut was reportedly watched by 120 million people on YouTube, but that hides the other media forces that probably helped drive that big number. The British press follows these contests very closely, finding stories about anybody who catches the eye and the situations backstage. The shows are often much repeated or have spin-off shows that run through the week. When Boyle's debut was put on YouTube it initially had about 60 million hits over the first few days. Then the whole British press ran stories on the debut; whether it was a bit of a set-up and on the remarkable interest internationally. This press controversy and coverage, further TV coverage and good old word of mouth drove the interest further. One Guardian Guide TV review of that edition of Britain's Got Talent, obviously written before the show aired and the controversy broke out, did not even mention Boyle's appearance.

What else can take over public discussion these days with the immediacy of a controversial piece of 'water cooler' reality TV? Only a very famous pop star's death or the death of reality TV's first and only real star, Jade Goody. Perhaps even the next General Election will not match those events for public interest.

Even celebrities have difficult moments with the level of interest that their appearance on these shows can generate. John Sergeant, unflappable political reporter with a lifetime on live TV, was shocked by the public response to his appearance on Strictly Come Dancing. And he was popular!

As he won over a large section of the public to vote for him, Sergeant found himself at the centre of an increasingly volatile public discussion. The judges criticised the public that voted for him, emphasising that Strictly is a dance competition and Sergeant can't dance. Some fans responded that they could vote for who they liked, others that Sergeant's continuing presence on the show was kicking out more talented competitors earlier than they should have been. At first, Sergeant responded that he was working entirely within the rules of the competition and that the judges should check their rulebooks.

But when Sergeant unilaterally withdrew from the show, causing a media feeding frenzy that dwarfed the coverage of all other news for two days, he had changed his tune. He told reporters that he knew a little about how elections can run and that he felt there was a serious risk of his winning the competition - so he had best withdraw.

This suggests that someone who completely used to raising controversy on live TV, is popular and relaxed with the public eye and understandably believes he knows a bit about the public and the media, can still find himself shocked by the action of public interest when it reaches a very high level.

If this level of public interest can make John Sergeant retreat then it's perhaps understandable that ordinary people, thrust into the brightest of limelight almost instantly, might have problems. When the gaze of millions of people is shared, when the object of that generally public scrutiny is subjected to the intensity of that gaze, concentrated by the great lens of the world's media, then perhaps the person on the receiving end may burn like an ant under a magnifying glass.

Whether psychologists can really protect vulnerable people from the interest of the public is yet to be seen. One might have thought that they should have Max Clifford standing by instead. But the classification of the public interest, hyped by the media and expanded by the Internet, as an environmental, almost elemental, force, capable of unhinging minds is alarming.

The news ecosystem has many forms of life, some of a lower order than others, but this story goes beyond the usual idea of a rapacious media trying to satisfy the curiosity of a prurient public. The X Factor producers' decision that it would be irresponsible to continue to thrust talent show contestants into the public eye without psychological backup suggests we have all developed a fear of public scrutiny. We regard fame, and even popularity, with the suspicion and fear that these things, for so long considered desirable, may be toxic.

The point of a talent show is that it plucks someone from obscurity and gives them the chance to be famous and appreciated for what they do. If success in entertainment now comes with a mental health warning, why should we expect people to enter into other areas within the public sphere, such as campaigning, political and otherwise? If living in the public eye for even a limited time can be so dangerous, I fear many people will attempt to avoid the public sphere altogether.

A public that is scared of the public may well conduct itself and act in its perceived interests in ways that circumvent public scrutiny and have profoundly discouraging consequences for democracy. The possibility that the public sphere could come to be seen as too dangerous for ordinary people seems an overreaction to the actual risks and a cynical dismissal of the advantages of the achievement public recognition.

If you saw a gang attack someone, would you stab them?

A man has been charged with attempted murder after a youth was multiply wounded in an altercation outside his home. Reporting of the apparent facts in newspapers breaks the usually strict rules of pending prosecutions, but it appears that the man charged was woken when his wife told him his stepson was being attacked by a number youths outside their home. He ran out to confront the youths barefoot, reportedly grabbing a letter opener before the confrontation in which the wounds were sustained. He is on bail as I write.

There may well be more to this case than meets the eye. The man’s wife photographed the youths, she told reporters, but this did not prevent their allegedly continuing their attack on her son. I don’t want to join in the judgmental media speculation about what constitutes heroism but, if it is true that the man decided to arm himself (however poorly) before confronting these youths, it speaks of our contemporary fears. Young men fighting are considered these days as necessarily a potentially fatal risk. One-sided punch-ups may well prove lethal, it is true, but considering the number of fights there are it’s more surprising there are not more deaths or serious injuries. The story has appeal for newspapers because of the sympathy they anticipate for the man charged. It also shows that police balance this fear we have of violent youths by bringing such a serious charge against a person who injured one of five people allegedly attacking his stepson. All five, including the one that was wounded, were all charged with assault and criminal damage. That police arrested six of the eight people involved in the incident is unsurprising.

I should emphasise that the reporting of facts on this case appears astonishingly presumptive (Steven Gerrard’s and Amy Winehouse’s acquittals of assault charges were clearly unexpected by sections of the red-top and black-top press). I anticipate that coverage may change its character between the committal hearings in a magistrate’s court and any eventual trials at Crown Court with juries. Comparison of different reports shows some papers are twitchy about certain things while others are not, which raises suspicions about the coverage. However, if the injured youth did not sustain life-threatening wounds, as has also been reported, an attempted murder charge looks like a sharp warning to the public to think twice before aggressively asserting themselves - even when they apparently have grounds to believe that someone else is quite seriously threatened.

Leaving aside the particular circumstances of that pending case, one of many issues it raises is that of what is legally risky to contemplate for someone who intervenes in an altercation. Given that most people would hope that, if they were set upon by a gang, someone would help, a sensible balance between the moral obligations to defend others and the use of a reasonable amount of armed force is required. If intervention by the private citizen is a serious legal risk as well as physical one, it does not just contradict the consensus that most people would have, it also establishes a legal barrier to maintaining the consensus of conviviality that we rely on for much of our day-to-day ability to get along - without recourse to higher authorities.

Some years ago while working as a local newspaper reporter I was invited by police to a presentation on the uses of the then newly installed CCTV cameras around Sussex. I was shown a tape of an incident in Brighton where a group of six or so young men armed with sticks rounded a corner and attacked two others. “This view shows the scene that confronted officers who were nearby,” a policeman told me. “But when you view the start of this incident from the viewpoint of the camera that covered the other side of the corner, it looks very different.”

The tape showed the six young men (none of whom appeared to be white) walking peacefully along the street, laughing and joking with each other like any group of friends. As they passed the two lads (both white) who were walking in the opposite direction, one of the white lads, inexplicably and without any warning or provocation, spun his foot around in the air and high-kicked the nearest of the group of six in the face, then adopted a bouncing, martial arts-style stance. The larger group showed great presence of mind and immediately rounded on the attacker, arming themselves with pieces of wood from building works right beside them, and drove the pair away round the corner.

The implication of this presentation was that CCTV had helped to establish the natural justice of the altercation. Had police relied on what they had first seen, the version of events that the larger group would have given would have seemed unlikely. Their assertion that they acted in self-defence might have been difficult to believe. To leave aside the now well-documented uselessness of CCTV in reducing street crime, it appears that today the assumption of what was justified might be very different and the legal risks of defending oneself might be much higher than they were in the mid-1990s.

Today it seems there is no consensus on the basis of what Andrew Calcutt calls conviviality, the ability to of people to socially negotiate their private interests in public space, and get along with each other. The reflexive response, of both the state and a section of the public, is to attempt empower or re-empower the individual by the use of regulation and its enforcement. This contradicts the social processes that produced conviviality in the first place and drives away what it seeks to recover. The outcomes that are sought are the peaceful co-existence of various tensions or the suppression of harmful ones, but the unwritten, culturally inculcated basis of conviviality that existed previously, within and between the minds of individuals, has no way of re-establishing itself in anything like its previous form.

The increasing regulatory and legal interference with people intervening to preserve their own interests against transgression, as part of a broader, common social harmony, is corrosive to the fabric of society. To irreversably remove the right and freedom of action within the public space - in which we must all persue our legitimate and private interests - creates a non-public, regulated space that cannot avoid arresting everyone at once and subjecting them to the faulty panopticon of a population on remand.