Blog Relations

I was asked by an overseas film company to look into the cost of filming some tourist vids in London. Here’s some costs for permissions from the authorities.

If you don’t have permission, the minute you set down a tripod a van-load of Bobbies will descend on you, and cart you off the the Gulag.  This goes even for open spaces.

The Royal Palaces charge £350 + VAT (17.5%) per hour for filming. They also say that normally we would film before or after opening hours. The Royal Palaces include:

Tower of London
Hampton Court
Kensington Palace
Banqueting House
Kew Palace

Royal Parks Charge Between £750 and £1000 + VAT for up to 4 hours. They include:
Greenwich Park
St. James’s Park
Hyde Park
Kensington Gardens

Trafalgar Square run by the Red Mayer of London is the biggest rip-off of all. It costs £500 + Vat per hour. They said that it can take 4 weeks or more to turn around a permission.

I’m yet to get a reply out of Westminster Council as regards spaces such as Covent Garden and Piccadilly Circus.

These costs might within the budget of a Hollywood Major company, and they might even be within the budget of our potential client – though I await their reply with interest – this is the YouTube age. “We” are the media now, and that means that a video made by one camera operator and a dog can get half a million or more downloads. But whose YouTube can afford these prices?

Come on London. Film-makers want to encourage visitors. Don’t let rip-off Britain scare them away.

Oh the irony !   Helen Bowden,  the BBC manager who decided not to cover the July 7 bombs two years ago, but to keep reporting the official  London Transport’s “delays on the line” message, while Sky was telling the world all about the biggest terrorist attack on London, has redeemed herself somewhat.  She’s on the scene at Glasgow airport where a burning car has just rammed the entrance.

Even so Sky News is still beating the BBC on this breaking news story, with dramatic pictures from phones while the BBC shows library pictures of  the airport on a boring day.

BBC managers are in love with 24 hour news, but I’m still not quite sure that they ‘get it’ – or anything that can’t be planned ahead in a meeting.

If I was a PR man, which thankfully I’m not, Tony Blair would be my Way, my Untruth and my Light. He would be my Great Lord and my Inspiration.

His genius, I believe, was to invent political humility. Alright, it was probably fake humility, but it convinced more often than not. The quality was evident in his self-authored epitaph which he declared yesterday: “I did what I thought was right.”

There is something winning about a leader who admits he is an ordinary, fallible, mortal, who is simply doing his best. I noticed it years ago, when I saw Blair, the young opposition leader, walking around the BBC’s Broadcasting House. He was talking to a producer and a presenter, sprinkling his star dust on them, but really talking to them. Other politicians who came round were more other worldly. They weren’t rude, but they were somehow like other beings. They sort of swept in and out of the BBC. There was something regal perhaps even super-natural in their bearing.

I can tell you something about Gordon Brown. He is never going to say that he thought he was right. When Gordon is forced out to face the public, which not that often, he bangs on about how everything does IS right. He just goes on and on about his record which is not just right, but is THE BEST.

But the conversational tone, which is exemplified by blogs, is now the modern way of communicating. You can spin or not spin, but you have to talk across to people, not down to them. This is why Gordon Brown cannot win a General Election.

The owner of the world’s most self-regarding newspaper has been musing that his NY Times might no longer be in print in five years’ time,

Here’s what Arthur Sulzberger has to say;

“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either… The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we’re leading there.”

The Times’s online readership stands at 1.5 million a day besides its 1.1 million subscribers for the print edition.

But Sulzberger seems to think that people will pay to read his news online…. I doubt that somehow. News is a commodity now, and the NY Times doesn’t do it that much better than anyone else.