Tendring Topics…….on Line

Cheap and Cheerful?

After my early retirement from Tendring Council’s service in 1980, I pursued a new career as a freelance writer. In the 1980s and ‘90s I wrote five commercially successful books about domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage, as well as the plumbing sections of such d-i-y manuals as The Reader’s Digest Complete DIY Manual. I also wrote a great many articles on the same subjects for Do-it-yourself and later for Practical Householder magazine. For twenty-three years I wrote Tendring Topics in print for the Coastal Express, and I also wrote innumerable ‘advertising features’ for all of Essex County Newspapers, now the Newsquest Group, as well as for other East Anglian magazine publishers.

The last of these, although not the best rewarded, was often the most challenging. A voice on the phone would demand ‘Can you do 500 (or 350 or 200) words on this, that or the other, pub, restaurant, hairdressers, jewellers, undertakers or whatever and a thousand words on shopping in Frinton, or some area within the district or elsewhere?’ often adding, ‘Oh, and can you get mugshots of the proprietors and a general view of the pub, shop or shopping centre?’ I could and I did. Often I’d be writing with enthusiasm about businesses for which I felt no personal enthusiasm whatsoever. I regarded myself as being in the same position as a barrister. It was up to me to stress my clients’ good points and see if I couldn’t manage to turn their bad points into well-disguised blessings. My contributions were, after all, labelled ‘advertising feature’ and while I always tried to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, I sometimes took comfort in the thought that no-one could ever hope to tell the whole truth!

Here I am, at the ‘workbench’, with a ‘Brother’ electronic typewriter I think, which places it about twenty years ago and me in my late sixties. Around me are some of my plumbing books and just behind my left wrist, a copy of ‘Coastal Express’, ‘The read one’ as its banner headline proclaimed.

There were some words that were absolutely taboo in advertising features. ‘dull’, for instance, was never used as a description of the weather at any of our holiday coast resorts. Our skies might, very occasionally, be ‘cloudy’ but nothing whatsoever about one of our holiday towns was ever ‘dull’. Similarly nothing, whether food, clothing, entertainment or any kind of service to the public, was ever described as ‘cheap’. ‘Cheap’ implied, at its best ‘Cheap and Cheerful’, with overtones of fish and chips with a sprinkling of salt and vinegar, eaten with the fingers out of a greasy newspaper on a windy beach. At its worst it meant ‘Cheap and Nasty’, the sort of gadget that claims to have half a dozen purposes but actually performs none of them. Goods and services might be ‘competitively priced’ or ‘inexpensive’. In the world of advertising features though, they were never cheap.

All of this is why I felt nothing but dismay when I read in bold headlines in the Daily Gazette CLACTON IS CHEAP AND CHEERFUL RESORT with, underneath it, a picture taken just west of Clacton Pier of a crowded beach and a lower prom so crammed with holiday makers that movement must have been all but impossible. The caption said Busy - Clacton is the cheapest UK holiday. We Clactonians were, no doubt, expected to greet this with gratitude and enthusiasm. My own thought was, ‘while we’ve got friends like that, we certainly don’t need enemies!’

The news story, that accompanied the headline and the picture, was in fact quite cheering. A survey, commissioned by Virgin Money Travel Insurance had revealed that Clacton was the least expensive holiday resort in the whole of the UK, followed by Orkney, Bournemouth (that was a surprise!), Morecambe and Bognor (and so were they!). The survey, which took into consideration hotel and restaurant availability and charges, quality of beaches, and the overall cost and number of nearby tourist attractions, also listed the ‘best’ holiday resorts in order.

In this list Clacton-on-Sea was 19th best, well ahead of Southend-on-Sea who were 28th. The survey also praised the quality of Clacton’s beaches. The news report doesn’t say how many resorts were surveyed but as we know that among them were resorts on the south coast and Orkney in the far north, it may be assumed that 19th was well towards the top.

Had I been writing that story in my advertising-feature days, the illustration would have been of children enjoying themselves on a busy, but not crowded, sandy beach in full sunshine. This would have been my headline and my news story:

HOLIDAYS AT HOME?….CLACTON’S THE BEST!

An independent survey, conducted by Virgin Money Travel Insurance, has rated Clacton-on-Sea, whose beaches were specially praised, as the best holiday resort in Essex, and among the ‘top twenty’ within the UK. It was also declared to be the least expensive resort in the whole of the United Kingdom!

The survey took into account the weather, the cost of a week in an hotel, price and availability of restaurants, quality of beaches, and the overall cost and number of nearby tourist attractions.

So, if you’re holidaying in Britain and have been flooded out (or ripped off!) in the Lake District, the West Country or the Scottish Highlands, try Clacton-on-Sea next year. It’s the best in Essex and rated among the best in the UK, it has the lowest annual rainfall in the British Isles, some of the best beaches – and the lowest prices!

‘Cheap and Cheerful’ never!

This picture, of my younger son enjoying himself on a Clacton beach in the early ‘60s is the best illustration that I could find at short notice. I am sure that the ‘Gazette’ has many much better and more recent ones on its files

Our Man in Nanjing!

Much as I might have liked to forget Essex County Council for at least a week, its members force themselves upon our attention. They have sold off all their old people’s residential homes, are eager to turn their schools into privately controlled ‘academies’, have incurred Colcastrian wrath by closing two schools and bussing their displaced pupils miles across the town, and have been severely criticised for the standard of their child care and social services. Unabashed, triumphant in fact, they have now established a ‘company’ in Nanjing, in Jiangsu Province of the People’s Republic of China. This must surely be ‘a first’ for local government enterprise!

It is going to cost the County Council (which means, of course, that it’s going to cost us) £40,000 a year. £26,000 of this will go as salary to a Chinese citizen, and the remainder to running his office in Nanjing. As a life-long trade unionist and a retired life-member of UNISON I hope that existing staff at County Hall, Chelmsford will offer their new Chinese colleague membership of our Union!

The purpose of the County Council’s new overseas venture is to help Essex businesses meet potential buyers and sellers and it seems that under Chinese law, the county council cannot operate unless it has a company there. Lord Hanningfield, eloquent as ever, explains:

‘Essex has a long-standing relationship with the province (of Jiangsu) and the establishment of a permanent office there will allow us to identify potential inward investment and opportunities for local businesses. The downturn has shown us we must look at alternative ways to sustain our local economy and keep local businesses thriving, and we have taken the initiative on this.’

That is all very worthy and done, I am quite sure, with the very best of intentions. When, many years ago, I was learning about the nature of local government, I was taught that a big difference between a local authority and a private person was that while a private individual was permitted to do anything that wasn’t prohibited by law, a local authority could lawfully only undertake tasks specifically entrusted to it by central government. Anything beyond that was ultra vires, or beyond its powers, and illegal. Essex County Councillors have, I am sure, the very best legal advisers in their employ. Perhaps the law has since been changed. If not, the County Council must surely have found some statute that permits a local authority to use public funds to establish a company on the other side of the world, in a country with laws and traditions completely alien from our own.

Common sense tells me that such a venture should be funded by the businesses hoping to benefit, not by the council taxpayer. Council tax and Government grants should surely be spent on tasks entrusted to County Councils; social services, education, highways, refuse disposal and so on; admittedly pretty boring old jobs compared with jetting round the world, running banks and post offices, and founding and managing businesses in faraway lands.

‘It was us wot won it!'

Most people will remember The Sun’s proud, and deliberately semi-literate, boast after supporting John Major’s successful general election campaign. The sad thing about it is that that boast was probably justified. Whatever politicians may say, I have no doubt at all that daily newspapers do influence public opinion.

At the very least they reinforce and strengthen opinions and prejudices already half-formed. To some extent readers are influenced by leading and feature articles; even more though by large black headlines and brief punchy reports that never tell more than a fragment of any news story. Such reports distort the truth, as much by omission as by anything that actually appears in print. I think that I have demonstrated this in this blog in my piece about advertising features. At least my contributions to the press were labelled 'advertising feature'.

Why is it that Eurosceptics can be confident that referendums held in England on the Lisbon Treaty, or on the adoption of the Euro, would almost certainly produce a large ‘No’ vote? Certainly not because a majority, or even a sizeable minority of us, have carefully studied the pros and cons and have decided that they would be to Britain’s disadvantage. The reason is simply that in a large section of the press; The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Daily Express, the Daily Star and, though rather less stridently, The Daily Telegraph, never mention the Treaty, the Euro or the European Union without a sneer.

For that reason I think that the Government has every reason to be angry (however much they may claim not to care) not only at The Sun’s change of policy, but at its having been carefully timed to fill news bulletins that might otherwise have been occupied by reports of the Prime Minister’s speech at the Labour Party Conference.

I don’t think that regular readers of this blog are likely to accuse me either of uncritical support for New Labour or of mindless xenophobia. I do feel very strongly though that the means of moulding/manipulating/distorting public opinion should not be in private hands and under private control. This is surely particularly important when those hands are based in, and that control exercised from, a foreign country, even if that country is one with which we are said to have a ‘special relationship’.