Archives for October 2005
Stubbing out smokers
It’s jazz festival time and a good day to relax in the sun soaking up the sounds and the rays. Trying to find somewhere nice to sit by the lake today, I had to wade through a sea of cigarette butts on the shoreline. Which got me thinking.
One of the pleasures of living in New Zealand is its recently introduced smoking laws. Smoking is not allowed in bars and restaurants, and there’s none of this foolish ’smokers room’ nonsense proposed for England. After a night out in Queenstown clothes still smell fresh, or at least of beer rather than fags, and passive smoking is history.
But… I wonder if things are the wrong way round. As a non-smoker – and as somebody who has trouble understanding why you’d want to start smoking when all the evidence points to its downsides, perhaps I’m just not cool enough – the places where I find smoking most annoying and intrusive are outside. Walking down the street behind a smoker and smelling their second hand smoke is foul, those who leave cigarete butts on the beach or next to the lake are dirty and socially irresponsible. (What a bloody whinger I am.)
On the other hand, I choose to go into a pub and sit in the company of smokers, and most places provide non-smoking areas if serving food. Banning smoking in pubs will probably have public health benefits but it won’t stop littering and my quickened step past that unfit smoker dawdling along the pavement.
Shouldn’t smoking be banned outside rather than in?
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50 photogenic years
It’s been ages since I’ve taken a decent photograph. For the staff of World Press Photo, it’s their job and they’re celebrating 50 years of shooting. The slide show is well worth exploring.
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Happy birthday, Neighbours
For anyone who’s ever been a student, or under 15, happy news: Neighbours is twenty years old this week. From the brighter side of soap opera land, the importance of Neighbours to the modern world must not be underestimated.
Before it hit British screens in 1986 our knowledge of contemporary Australian life was limited. Sure, we could watch The Sullivans, yet that was about Melbourne life in the second world war. (I can still remember the opening titles.) If you were a little older you might have watched Prisoner, however life in an Australian womens’ prison presented a limited world view unless you were a butch lesbian failed criminal or a wannabe prison guard.
Neighbours was the first programme to show Australia as an English-speaking eden, a land of sun, beer, big houses and big hair. Later programmes, especially Sylvania waters, presented a different view of Australian life – although The Castle or Kath and Kim are probably as realistic – but coinciding with falling longhaul airfares and a greater willingness to travel it’s likely that the soap played an important part in stepping up British interest in Down Under Land, driving a new generation of migrants and washed-up celebrities (except, of course, Joe who has just got his pilot’s licence).
Neighbours has given a first break to some of the world’s finest performers. Guy Pearce, Kylie Minogue, Alan Dale, Mark Little, Jason Donovan, Stefan Dennis, Craig McLachlan. Er, well, at least five of the actors have had jobs since they left.
Yet the most important contribution for all most many Britons has been the part Neighbours played in our daily lives. It was the cheery soap with young people that was a warm contrast to Coronation Street or East Enders. It was on at tea time so students could fit it in with lectures and teenagers could sulk in front of it whilst eating their fish fingers. It never clashed with the inferior Home and Away.
I dropped out of watching/kicked the addiction of Neighbours after my first year in university but it will always have warm memories for me. You see, I watched Neighbours before it was famous. In one of the first week it was broadcast (back at 0905 and 1330 in those days, a real daytime soap) I was off school, sick – the same week I watched all of the Police Academy movies, twice – and my mum and I got hooked. We’d set the video every other day (since the previous day’s lunchtime episode was repeated in the morning) and when we got back from School, Laura, Mum and I would watch it. An addiction was born, and the consequences weren’t much less severe than a sugar craving developed from the ten penny assortments I ate whilst watching. After all, how else would I end up spending so long in New Zealand?
Hold on, different country.
Happy Birthday, Neighbours.
Edited to add: How can I forget to mention that the only celebrity I served on Coronet Peak this year was Julie Martin! Yes! You know, the second one, who went nuts when her kids pretended she was forgetting things. Wow. A genuine Neighbours actor in the Brasserie.
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The view from my office window
Nic (Rupert Murdoch’s latest adopted son) writes
During my first and quieter week at Easynet, I was very impressed with the view from my desk over the City of London and my new camera phone. Hence the attached. Bit sunny, but you can get the jist of it.Then I got thinking, I wonder what Joel’s “work view” is like. In fact, what’s your house/room, local pub, etc. look like. Any chance of some photos on your site of “every day Joel” rather than “naked Joel on a roof”?
Always with the naked photos. Anyhow, that’s Nic’s photo on the right. Good question, so here we go.
Firstly for some context, I’ve written before about the home office and here was my MORI office just over a year ago. Look at the clock and you’ll see it was another late night.
Depending on what I’m doing each day, my office view will be one of three things. If I’m flying, it will be Queenstown airport from 3,000′:
If I’m working at the Skyline bar, it would be a view across Lake Wakatipu. I snapped this shot from the gondola on the way back from an afternoon’s free luging earlier today.
Or most likely it will be another evening in Tatler, where the lights are so low that this is the best picture you’ll get. That would be me in the mirror if you could see better.
An interesting question Nic. I’m curious to see other people’s office environments. For example I believe Mat Hakl-Law’s desk is appearing in the Da Vinci Code movie. Matsy, is this true?
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