THICK AS ONE SHORT PLANK Critics titter at Scottish Parliament's woes
I ’Beamgate' rumbled on as homeless MSPs searched for a temporary but seCUre roof over their heads. From the moment the bolt sheared and a 100kg Damoclean length of oak swung down over Holyrood's sparsely-populated Tory backbenches. the story has given journalists ripe ground for ridicule. The Telegraph called it ‘yet another embarrassment’, while for The Guardian it was ‘the latest calamity’, and none of the papers could resist the urge to remind us of its ‘ten times over budget cost’ of £431 million. surely by now the most frequently-referenced of all unthinkably large figures floating around the media pond.
And there was a further PR disaster when The Scotsman revealed that presiding officer George Reid had chosen Holyrood's Committee Room 2 as a stopgap home, following the forced eviction from the Hub - the mathematical conundrum being how to fit 129 MSPs into 90 seats. Go figure. But thank the Lord of Hacks for sage Ruaridh Nicoll, urging us all in The Observer to stop sniggering and pray for the swift but permanent repair of our national treasure. proclaiming: ‘This is our architectural masterpiece — with its difficult. sculptural centrepiece. Those aesthetic qualities have to be maintained.‘ He also corrected previous reports calling the plank of wood a 'beam'. It is in fact a ‘strut’. ‘Strutgate', however, doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
V FOR VARIETY
(OF REVIEWS)
Comic-to-film adaptation divides hacks I Sometimes the practice of reviewing is thrown into sharp relief by one film, book or play which divides the supposedly sage and reliable critics. The film adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta is one such example. In Cynics’ Corner, The List’s own Miles Fielder called it ‘utterly incoherent’,
while Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian went further, comparing
the viewing experience to ‘having
1 the oxygen supply to your brain
slowly starved over two hours’. The
8 THE LIST 30 Mar—13 Apr 2006
THE SCOTTISH —-
’ffl7rfi83 FARMING MAGAZINES
38,0009ns ‘ Jewel
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Getting off on a lungful of diesel fumes
I With foot and mouth, climate change and now a bird flu crisis on the horizon, farmers could be forgiven for craving a little escapism. And where better to turn than Classic Tractor. Every year, it runs a competition to source readers’ best photos of their equipment, and claims to have become the ‘nation’s most popular photographic competition for people with a passion for taking pictures of farm machinery’. Hmm. The winners and runners up from a staggering 500 applicants are displayed over four pages of crunching, grinding and churning agri-action.
I Even The Scottish Farmer, ‘Business and Professional Magazine of the Year’, allows itself to get diverted for a moment from its woeful tales of rising farming debts and ‘mass hysteria from the anti- farming sections of the media’ to note the arrival of animated family comedy film, Barnyard, which, the paper chuckles, ‘is about a bunch of farm animals who get up to all sorts behind the farmer’s back’.
That’ll pack in the punters, then.
I Alongside the fun, the paper offers a buyer’s guide to Mud Fever products. No, that’s not a state of mind among hallucinogenic tractor drivers, but a skin condition suffered by horses. 80 if your steed’s hooves have ‘crusty scabs, ulcerated lesions or thick, creamy greenish discharge’, you’ll know where to turn. (Jo Caruana)
fimes’ James Christopher declared: ‘I’ve never seen such a deranged satire.’ But the film’s supporters are not just the humble bunch of webmag hacks one might expect them to be. The Pulitzer-Prize winning Roger Ebert, writing in The Chicago Sun- 77mes, praised the film’s ‘audacious confusion of ideas’ and took pleasure in its ‘manic disorganisation’. Another well known media figure stepped forward in the form of novelist Zadie
Smith. Apparently a longtime Alan Moore fanatic, Smith wrote in The
Sunday Telegraph that she was left ‘uttedy engaged, somewhat radicalised and very excited’.
We can only speculate as to the reason for the critical diaspora. The only choice on this occasion is either see it for ourselves, or ignore it and remain, like Switzerland, completely neutral. (Nick Mitchell)
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