Culture Politick

Shakespeare’s lost play

The little-known 18th century play Double Falsehood was propelled into the literary limelight yesterday when it was claimed as a lost Shakespeare. Professor Brean Hammond of Nottingham University will publish compelling new evidence next week that the play, a romantic tragi-comedy by Lewis Theobald is – as the author always maintained it was – substantially based on a real Shakespeare play called Cardenio.

Hammond has been backed in his assertion by the Shakespeare publisher Arden and there are unconfirmed rumours that the play will open at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theatre in Stratford when the venue reopens after its three-year closure. The claim represents 10 years of literary detective work by Hammond:

‘I don’t think you can ever be absolutely 100% but, yes, I am convinced that it is Shakespeare… It’s fair to say it’s been something of an obsession.’ More in The Guardian HERE; Times HERE and HERE; and Telegraph HERE.

Tech

Google should obey Chinese government rules even if it decides to retreat from the country over hacking and censorship complaints, a Chinese government spokesman said today. In what appeared to be a reminder that China would not welcome any abrupt steps, a spokesman for the Ministry of Commerce said Google should follow rules even if it decides not to stay in the country:

‘On entering the Chinese market in 2007 [Google opened its Chinese search portal in 2006], it clearly stated that it would respect Chinese law… We hope that whether Google Inc continues operating in China or makes other choices, it will respect Chinese legal regulations.’ The spokesman said those rules included one that a foreign company report to the Commerce Ministry about plans to pull out.

Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said last week he hoped to have an outcome soon from talks with Chinese officials on offering an uncensored search engine in that country of 384 million Internet users. Many experts doubt China’s ruling Communist Party would compromise on censorship. The Financial Times reported at the weekend the talks had reached an impasse and Google was ‘99.9 per cent’ certain to shut Google.cn. More in The Independent HERE

Meanwhile, Twitter is working on a way to allow Chinese users to sign up to the social networking site in their own language, a co-founder of the site said Monday night, in response to a question by Chinese avant garde artist Ai Weiwei. Ai has been an outspoken critic of Chinese authorities and their continuing efforts to impose censorship. Since it was founded in 2006, Twitter has emerged as a tool for digital activism in messages of no more than 140 characters. Ai has used it to demand answers about the number of young children who were killed in the Sichuan earthquake.

Access to Twitter remains blocked in China, and co-founder Jack Dorsey said he has no idea how Twitter would get around the firewall, admitting he didn’t even know the site was blocked in the country until three weeks ago. More in The Independent HERE and HERE.

Broadcasting

The Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee has warned that Digital Economy Bill plans to expand Channel 4 would significantly increase its influence and will call for oversight over the state-owned broadcaster to be strengthened. Proposals will extend Channel 4’s PSB remit to platforms other than its main Channel 4; including E4, More4, Film4 and online services.

John Whittingdale, the committee’s chairman, has said he favours the creation of an external regulator to oversee both the BBC and the public service elements of other channels. The committee will also criticise Channel 4 for showing too little public PSB on its main channel, citing the prevelance of US shows. More in The Times HERE; and Telegraph HERE.

The row between Bob Geldof and the BBC escalated into a diplomatic dispute on Saturday as the Ethiopian ambassador called for an apology from the World Service after it reported claims that aid money meant for famine victims had been spent on weapons. Peter Horrocks, director of the World Service, has said he fully supports the report, which featured one former Ethiopian rebel saying 95% of the money that flowed into famine-hit Tigray in 1985 was spent by the TPLF militia on guns.

A second man claimed that the TPLF (Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, now the ruling party of prime minister Meles Zenawi) had made a fortune selling sand disguised as grain to the aid agencies. Live Aid founder Geldof and other leading charities have also demanded that the BBC retract the claims and have called for its reporter, Martin Plaut, to be fired. Ambassador Berhanu Kebede has said he expects a full apology from the BBC, which has ‘destroyed its credibility in Africa’:

‘To question the integrity of organisations like Band Aid, the Red Cross, Christian Aid, it is laughable. If the BBC want to investigate something from 25 years ago, they should have talked to a lot more people who were there… In Ethiopia, people on both sides laugh at this idea. They know it would have been a suicide mission to divert the aid money and let people starve; it makes no sense and it is unacceptable. For the BBC’s own credibility, it has to apologise for this disgrace.’ More in The Observer HERE; and Telegraph HERE.

The BBC has commissioned architects to build a lavish, pentagon-shaped glass studio in Cape Town for its World Cup coverage, at an estimated cost of £1m. The Sunday Times reports a BBC source saying they had chosen to position the studio in Cape Town – 1,000 miles away from the logistical centre of the World Cup – because it found the Johannesburg skyline ‘a bit ugly’. More in The Sunday Times HERE; and Telegraph HERE.

John Simpson, the BBC’S world affairs editor, has expressed his fears that the critics of the BBC are winning:

‘I’m very pessimistic about the future of the BBC… This is something I really disagree about with Mark Thompson… He’s very upbeat about the future of the BBC, not just for public consumption but also in private, but I’m not because I think it’s an anomaly in today’s world and the licence fee is under such an intense amount of pressure… It all seems quite childish to me, but nevertheless those voices are louder than they’ve ever been in my life, and I’ve watched these things for 44 years.’ More in The Guardian HERE.

Meanwhile, BBC1 controller, Jay Hunt, talks about the career prospects for women in television HERE.

Tech

Facebook has more than 400 million members and industry predictions have it that revenues for 2010 will exceed a billion dollars. The Observer asks whether it could become ‘too big to fail’, pointing out it’s one of the paradoxes of networking technology that the aggregation of billions of free choices made by millions of free agents can lead inexorably to the emergence of a single, monopolistic behemoth. We saw that with Microsoft’s dominance in the operating systems and office software markets; we saw it again with Google’s dominance of the market for search and query-based advertising. Are we now seeing it with Facebook in the social networking sphere? More HERE.

Meanwhile, Jason Hirsch-horn and Mike Jones, MySpace’s newly elected co-presidents, say ‘Myspace is not dead’; together they have spent months plotting how to reverse the site’s fortunes and make it relevant again over the coming months:

‘We have a huge audience, which is fantastic – there are over 100 million users on MySpace,’ says Mike Jones, a serial entrepreneur and a former vice president at AOL, who became the company’s chief operating officer last spring. ‘But it’s at a precipice where it needs to jump to the next level of evolution.’ Hirsch-horn points to other companies that have come back from the brink – and reports ‘Focus is everything… When I look at Apple, when I look at Nintendo – when I look at the great companies that have turned themselves around and re- defined themselves – it’s because they have focused on a specific market, a specific set of things and partnered for the rest.’ More in The Guardian HERE.

Guardian Media Group is preparing to take a £150m loss on the value of its investment in Emap, the publisher and events organiser. The talks with auditors to write off part of the £300m that it spent on Emap is expected to send GMG heavily into the red this year. More in The Sunday Times HERE.

Music

The British music industry enjoyed good news yesterday when it was revealed that the growth in digital music royalties had outpaced falling CD sales for the first time last year. Royalties generated by online music sales grew by 72.7 per cent last year to £30.4 million, as increasing numbers of consumers downloaded music from sites such as Apple’s iTunes. About 16.1 million albums were downloaded in 2009, up 56.1 per cent on the previous year. PRS for Music, which collects royalties for 65,000 British songwriters, said that the £12.8 million growth in digital music revenue had more than compensated for the £8.7 million loss in royalties from falling CD sales. It announced an overall 2.6 per cent rise in annual revenue in 2009 to £623 million. Robert Ashcroft, chief executive of PRS, said:

‘2009 was the first year in which the growth in revenues from the legal digital market compensated for the decline in revenues from traditional CDs and DVDs, though we remain cautious as to whether this represents a true turning point… The next decade does, however, promise further growth in earnings from the legal digital market as well as the use of British music overseas.’ More in The Times HERE.

Music

Pink Floyd have secured a legal victory for the much-maligned genre of the concept album against the apparently inexorable march of the instant pop download. In yesterday’s high court ruling it was ruled that EMI can no longer sell the songs from any Pink Floyd albums as single downloads or mobile phone ringtones; in adherence to a clause in its contract with the group intended to ‘preserve the artistic integrity of the albums’.

The verdict means the band’s music may now have to be taken down from the iTunes online music store which requires that album tracks are for sale individually. It could mean a further loss of revenue for EMI. More in The Guardian HERE; Independent HERE; Times HERE; Telegraph HERE; and FT HERE.

Cinema

Cineworld, Britain’s second-biggest cinema operator has reported results that were comfortably ahead of City expectations: earnings per share rose 11 per cent in 2009 on underlying revenues up 9 per cent to £333 million. The dividend was raised 11 per cent and net debt continued to move in the right direction: down £13.1 million to £104.3 million. Where Cineworld has been able to outperform its peers is through its early investment in 3-D, the format in which 13 films were released in 2009, against only four in 2008. With 3-D films commanding a premium price — an average £5.90 a ticket, compared to £4.54 for normal 2-D screenings — a 7 per cent rise in Cineworld’s admissions brought a 15 per cent rise in box office receipts. The current year has started well, too, with most of Avatar’s sales falling into 2010 and Alice in Wonderland, which opened last weekend, raking in nearly £15 million to date. More in The Times HERE whilst the Telegraph questions whether Cineworld’s 3D success will fade away HERE.

Media

Facebook is today considering legal action against the Daily Mail, after the newspaper published false claims that a criminologist who had posed on the site as a teenage girl had found himself immediately inundated with sexual messages from adult men. Facebook last night issued an unprecedented statement expressing its ‘extreme concern’ at the damage caused to the company’s image. The Mail yesterday published an apology for the article which, attributed to former police detective Mark Williams-Thomas, carried the headline ‘I posed as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook. What follows will sicken you.’ In issuing its own statement last night, Facebook said it was still weighing up the damage caused by the article and considering whether to sue the paper for damages:

‘We are extremely concerned by the behaviour of the Daily Mail, who have since corrected the story somewhat and made some clarifying statements…We are in discussions with them and have not ruled out legal action.’ More in The Guardian HERE and Independent HERE.

Capital of Culture

Academics have found Liverpool’s year as European capital of culture earned the city bumper visitor numbers and a multimillion-pound boost to its economy. A five-year research programme published today analysed the social, economic and cultural impact of the 2008 title and found that the festival year saw 9.7m visitors to the city, an increase of 34%, and generated £753.8m for the economy. Media coverage of Liverpool’s cultural attractions doubled and for the first time in decades, positive stories outweighed negative ones focusing on social issues. It found 85% of Liverpool residents agreed that it was a better place to live than before. Dr Beatriz Garcia, director of the research programme, Impacts 08, said:

‘We found that general opinion of Liverpool was informed by very dated images of the city, which ranged from positive but fixed associations with the Beatles in the 1960s to more negative views of social deprivation in the 1980s.’ More in The Guardian HERE.

Music

Former ITV boss, Charles Allen, is taking control of EMI’s music business, after the surprise departure of chief executive Elio Leoni-Sceti. Leoni-Sceti will be leaving at the end of March after just 18 months with the firm. Allen’s previous experience at ITV, which he created by merging Granada with Carlton Communications, is likely to increase speculation that EMI is being lined up for a merger with Warner Music.

EMI has run into severe problems, with key acts defecting and profits crashing. The company has suffered turbulent relations with some of its top acts, most recently ending up in court with Pink Floyd (on which more HERE) and plunged £1.75bn into the red last year (more HERE). Allen says he has been closely involved in the creation of the company’s new business plan:

‘Elio and I have worked together for the last 14 months and he has decided that he has done what he came to do… what you have now got is a real focus on how do we drive new music, a focus on hits. These things do not happen overnight, you have to nurture new talent but the early signs are pretty positive.’ More in The Guardian HERE and HERE; Independent HERE; Times HERE and HERE; Telegraph HERE; and FT HERE.

Tech

Microsoft has raised the stakes in the battle to win over those who watch television on the internet by introducing the first serious rival to BBC’s iPlayer. The MSN Video Player went online today and will feature a thousand hours of television programming aimed at young people, young families and professionals. Rather than providing a ‘catch-up’ service similar to the iPlayer, on which people can see programmes for only a few days after they are shown, Microsoft says its service will let viewers to watch a full series.

The service is free, but viewers will be shown single 30-second advertisements before, during and after programmes. The player is available only in Britain. Ashley Highfield, now Microsoft’s UK consumer and online MD was previously one of the key figures behind the development of the iPlayer, which regularly processes more than 40 million programme requests a month. But Highfield now says that Microsoft’s product is superior to the internet offerings of other broadcasters:

‘Not all video players are equal… we’re doing more than slapping on any programme for people to watch. Our content is aimed at those who are tech-savvy and young. We want to feature content that goes down well with young couples and families who want to watch together.’ More in The Guardian HERE; Times HERE; and Telegraph HERE.

Google is to scan up to a million old books from national libraries in Rome and Florence in what it says is its first such partnership with a government. Flooding in Florence in 1966 destroyed thousands of books in the Tuscan city’s library. Mario Resca, from Italy’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage, said that the deal would help to preserve for ever the contents of books, including works by the 17th-century astronomer Galileo Galilei. Digitising the books would also help to spread Italian culture throughout the world, said Mr Resca. Google will cover the cost of scanning the books, all of them out-of-copyright Italian works, including 19th-century literature and 18th-century scientific volumes. More in The Guardian HERE; Times HERE; Telegraph HERE.

India is to embark on an ambitious scheme to provide all its 630,000 villages, no matter how remote, with broadband internet access. The plan is to use the internet to improve education and health services in areas blighted by poverty and to help to bridge the cultural chasms that still separate India’s regions and castes. It would also enable the country’s outsourcing businesses, clustered in cities such as Bangalore, to serve Western clients from the most isolated hamlets.

The government-run scheme will focus initially on the northeast, an area in the grip of several insurgent battles, as well as the poorest tribal and border regions, which often lack reliable mobile telephone coverage, let alone the internet. A spokesman for Sachin Pilot, the Minister of State for Communications and IT, confirmed the plans yesterday. A deadline of May 2012 has been set for giving broadband access to every village with a population of more than 300 people. Analysts say that the target is extremely ambitious. According to official figures, there are a mere 7.2 million broadband subscribers in India, a country with a population of 1.2 billion. Across the world about a quarter of the population is using the internet, according to a recent UN report. More in The Times HERE.

Theatre

Eleven-year-olds are to learn Shakespeare using techniques employed by Royal Shakespeare Company actors, and English teachers will be encouraged to let pupils walk around the classroom rather than reading the plays while sitting at their desks; exercises devised by the RSC and the Globe theatre will see children aged 11 to 14 mirror the methods of professional actors at rehearsal. RSC director of education, Jacqui O’Hanlon, says focusing on how actors came to understand the playwright’s language has been a vital inspiration:

‘Actors have the same nervousness around Shakespeare’s language as young people in schools do. We looked at how they get from that to a place of utter conviction, confidence and eloquence in six to eight weeks… Within the English curriculum you tend to look at a play text as a piece of literature rather than performance. But you can’t possibly understand Shakespeare’s words if you’re just reading it in your head. He wrote these plays to be spoken and performed. Shakespeare is difficult; it’s not a 21st-century text. You’ve got to use different mechanisms to access it.’ More in The Guardian HERE.