When I saw the news that John Sergeant had apparently fallen on his sword and retired gracefully with a bow from Strictly Come Dancing, I initially thought to myself ‘What a magnificent publicity coup!’ With a little time and distance from that first reading, I have changed my mind – I am no longer convinced that Sergeant…
The Borkowski poet in residence imagines what Prince Charles would like for his birthday… I’d like tea with Lord Mountbatten I’d like a gin with dear old gran I’d like a brand new book by van der Post I’d like poetry to scan I’d like a son who didn’t dress up like Max Moseley just…
What is the best present could Prince Charles hope to be unwrapping on his 60th birthday, today? He will get many, but I suspect that the period of calm that has prevailed at Clarence House over the last five years, interrupted occasionally by the binge drinking bouts and going-to-parties-dressed-in-Nazi-regalia adolescent antics of his 20-something sons,…
I’m intrigued to see that I have been placed in a poll of influential PR Twitterers, intrigued and a little surprised. This is because I didn’t join Twitter to become part of the PR churn that pings out statistics through the site; I joined more to allow anyone who might be interested an insight into…
The Daily Mail today extended their puritanical approach, newly fired up and raring to go in the wake the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand hoo-ha, to Carnage UK, a company which promotes themed pub crawls for students in university cities in which the students dress up in outrageous costumes, coat themselves in vulgar slogans and drink themselves insensible through a…
The cynics are suggesting that Sarah Brown’s PR experience and guile was ably deployed to pilot her husband, Gordon Brown, through the rapids of a tricky by-election. OK, the first lady has a history of working in PR; in a previous life she was a capable operator in the art and publishing world. But she…
Why You tube is a beautiful thing – the birth of another fabulous nobody
When I first visited New York 32 years ago, I was strongly advised against walking through Harlem. 40 years ago, Martin Luther King was assassinated for daring to dream about racial integration. 13 years previous to that, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white woman on a bus and tipped the…
The Borkowski poet in residence’s reaction to the American election. I don’t want a White House, I want a light house, a right house. I don’t want a White House, I want a beacon ‘gainst the night house. I want a dream in every heart house, a no one kept apart house. I want a…
On Friday morning, hours after Lesley Douglas’s resignation, the controllers of all the BBC radio and television networks were called together, and asked to look carefully at everything they were broadcasting. “We’re all jumpy. We’ve not been told to change or become more conservative. But we are being encouraged to talk about any shows which…