Honest Weight's Best and Brightest Just Keep on Giving...

There is so much to marvel about when it comes to the governing Board at Honest Weight. First, there is the fact of the Board's purging of staff members from its ranks by proclaiming the need for it because of supposed conflicts of interest. They did this despite the fact that there is no evidence that this has ever been a problem with staff serving on the Board of the Corpop over its forty year history. There is nothing like replacing empirical reality with a fabricated one.

Second, there is the fact that Boards for years have ignored and continue to ignore real conflicts of interest. For example, Honest Weight Boards have ignored Board members wives serving as managers of departments at the Corpop. Honest Weight Boards have ignored the fact that a child of one of the members of the LT, the Corpops leadership team, was given a job in one of the departments at the Corpop. Honest Weight Boards have ignored the fact that there has long been a situation at the Corpop where members of the Board and the members of management at the Corpop developed and continue to develop close relationship with one another undermining the objectivity of at least some Board members in the process. Let's call this the theory of Board aristocracy. These real conflicts of interest are such a problem that any objective observer would recommend getting rid of the membership programme entirely given that real conflicts of interest are woven into the very fabric of the Corpop.

Third, while the Board was fixated on imaginary or hallucinated staff enemies within, they apparently forgot to appoint or call an election when Simon Moon offered his resignation from the Board in what seems like a year ago. If the current Board had simply done this there might be no problem with governance at the Corpop today. If the current Board had done this they might have the five member quorum they need as mandated by the corporations by-laws.

Frankly, all of these examples raise valid questions about the competence of the Board...It also raises questions about opiates...

Under the Big Top: Life at Honest Weight

In the last few days I have been reminded how happy I am not to be a member of the Honest Weight Food "Coop", aka, the Honest Weight Food Corporation. Recently, two members of the Board resigned. The two who resigned, Kate Doyle and Rebekah Rice, wrote letters to the letters to the editor section of one of the Coop 'newspapers", the Coop Voice, stating their reasons why the resigned. Long story short: Finances. A day or so later these letters disappeared rather like commissars in the USSR and Board members in the HWFC to be replaced by a statement about the need to avoid conflict at the "Coop". Now, however, the letters are back again, by popular demand the Voice says, showing, I suppose, that repressed history inevitably reemerges at some point.

Genre and Academia: The Case of Deborah Jermyn's Prime Suspect

Genre, a repetitive style, is at the heart of popular literature, popular film, and popular television. It turns out it is also very much at the heart of modern academic life. This was made very clear to me recently as I was reading Deborah Jermyn’s BFI TV classic monograph on the ITV detective show Prime Suspect (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

All the usual genre suspects from film and television studies are present in Jermyn’s monograph  including a discussion of realism in Prime Suspect, a discussion of the representation of gender in Prime Suspect, and an exploration of the detective and crime genre as it relates to Prime Suspect. Given that such repetition can prove tedious and tiresome to some of us after awhile it was a welcome relief when Jermyn turned to her attention to matters that are often far too peripheral in contemporary academic film and television studies including the role creator Lynda LaPlante played in creating Prime Suspect, the difficulties LaPlante met while working on and writing the show, the role real life DCI Jackie Malton played in bringing greater realism to Prime Suspect, and the increasingly important role actor Helen Mirren, who played DCI Jane Tennison, the central character in Prime Suspect, played in the production of the show as it went on.

Jermyn’s Prime Suspect is a good if repetitive paint by the theories of the moment in academia book. Prime Suspect itself, which I have been re-watching on Blu ray is, in its first, third, fourth series first episode, and fifth series, extraordinary. Ironically, it breaks certain aspects of the genre mould it has been poured into.