Commonsense must prevail

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Regarding the story, Planning sound: mayor, Maitland Mercury, July 27, 201
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I write in support of the comments made by the mayor, Cr Peter Blackmore, regarding the NSW Department of Plannings green paper, which proposes the removing of many planning decisions from local decision makers.

I note that Minister Robyn Parker, to her credit, was recently canvassing the views of some councillors and others, regarding the green discussion paper.

This state government ran and was elected on the promise of returning decision making to local communities, that is, local hospital boards and repealing part 3A.

A reversal of that philosophy would be a retrograde step and some could argue, a broken promise.

I hope commonsense prevails.

Robyn Parker

Robyn Parker

This story Administrator ready to work first appeared on 苏州美甲美睫培训.

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Four lives, one death, a million little choices

Lives slowly unravel in devastating fashion as One Night reveals the connection between four ordinary people.THE butterfly effect, it turns out, has its own body count. The smallest decision, however inconsequential it might seem, can result in someone ending up dead on the concrete of a bleak London housing estate.
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Each of the four episodes of this reasonably gritty new BBC drama focuses on a single character's experience and interpretations of the events that lead to the mysterious tragedy. (The identity of the deceased won't be revealed until later.)

Tonight's first instalment begins with a 13-year-old boy turning in a handgun at a police station and then keeping his mouth shut as the coppers try to interrogate him about the shooting at the centre of everything.

After that, it's all about Ted (Douglas Hodge), a kitchen salesman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It seems he's just had a deal fall through, he thinks he's going to lose his job, his boss is coming for dinner and he's struggled home with the groceries only to realise he's forgotten the charcoal for the barbecue. To top it all off, a group of sassy girls from the estate drops a chip packet outside his tidy little middle-class terrace. When he tells them to put it in the bin, they give him an earful.

It's about this time that Ted should give up, go inside and help his wife (Saskia Reeves) with dinner. But he's had it with the girls being ''all earrings and attitude'', so he drives to their school to complain. This results in Rochelle (Georgina Campbell) being unfairly suspended and brings immediate retaliation in the form of a used condom being pushed through the mail slot in Ted's front door.

Through all this, Hodge plays Ted as a believably sweaty, strung-out and put-upon white-collar drudge, sympathetic if not altogether endearing. But things are about to take a sudden lurch into Falling Down territory.

While Ted and Sally are trying to entertain their guests (Neil Stuke and Kellie Bright), a rock comes through the kitchen window and Ted loses it completely. He runs out into the street, collars a black lad, kicks the stuffing out of him and then locks him in the garden shed.

It's a scene likely to leave viewers as agape as it does Ted's dinner guests, but hopefully they won't tune out. The kid is soon released and Ted realises that pretty much everything is his own fault. Having decided to try to make amends, he walks onto the estate and into this episode's cliffhanger - is he the one who gets shot?

Series creator Paul Smith is intent on moving further from his background in comedy into drama. Tonight's episode might seem a little closer to melodrama at times, but it would be hard to write Ted a perfectly calm meltdown.

The next episode, which focuses on Rochelle, is more satisfying.

This story Administrator ready to work first appeared on Nanjing Night Net.

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Exposing sport’s brand of absurdity

IT'S an exercise in understatement to suggest the ABC has had some difficulties with its Wednesday night line-up in 2012.
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The venerable music game show Spicks and Specks had, until it was cancelled last year, apportioned the public broadcaster a high-rating anchor on which to assemble a big viewing audience.

So successful was it, Wednesdays became known as the ABC's ''Broadway'' slot.

This year, however, could be called a disaster. A succession of shows such as Randling, Outland, Nice, In Gordon St Tonight and Laid have all floundered on Wednesday nights.

It's into this somewhat unnerving environment that one of the ABC's most sturdy, highest-rating - and consistently entertaining - franchises returned last week. But rather than look more broadly at selling, Gruen Sweat announced itself as an irreverent four-week examination of the issues behind the way sport is advertised and marketed at us.

It's a strong idea. In the past few years, the Gruen suite of shows has unequivocally influenced the way we perceive advertising and the tools companies use to persuade us to buy. So a juncture such as the London Olympics, when sport is permeating popular culture even more than usual, looked an ideal time to examine just how influential it is.

Last week's debut, ambitiously pitted against the season finales of Australia's Got Talent and MasterChef, proved the show's audience remains. More than 900,000 watched what proved to be a strong piece of counter-programming.

Gruen was created by Andrew Denton's production company Zapruder's Other Films, and former Fairfax journalist Jon Casimir, who wondered why an industry worth $500 billion a year globally was not examined more often.

This year there will be four sporting-themed episodes, followed by another 10 in the Gruen Planet incarnation - which applies the show's framework of discussing and illustrating the power of persuasion to the world of spin, PR, branding and image control.

There was much to like, however, in the first episode of Sweat last week. Hosted by comedian Wil Anderson with his two mainstays, advertising-executive panellists Russel Howcroft and Todd Sampson, a significant difference was the introduction of two athletes to the panel.

Jane Flemming and Steve Moneghetti - champions in their own right - were able to provide insight, humour and context to the marketing theories expounded by Howcroft and Sampson.

Sampson declared that the organisations sponsoring the Olympics are collectively paying the International Olympic Committee hundreds of millions of dollars to promote the International Olympic Committee.

''In the commercial world, it would be like Apple paying Coca-Cola to promote Coca-Cola,'' he mused.

As it goes, the Olympics brand is second only to Apple as the most valuable in the world. So the panel eagerly dissected just how companies can go about exploiting that.

There was intriguing information relating to the thinking behind spending money as a sponsor. In typical Gruen fashion, however, many laughs were drawn out of the protectionism taken by the IOC. Elements such as London's so-called brand exclusion zones and, most amusingly, its ''brand police'' - employed to ensure members of the public do not inadvertently engage in their own brand of ambush marketing - were pursued for comedic value.

Indeed, in dissecting the construction of the world's biggest McDonald's outlet or the inadvertently hilarious Qantas Olympics safety videos, we were exposed to both ''sides'' of the marketing equation. Sampson and Howcroft winced at what they deemed to be cheesy footage of athletes participating in a Qantas safety demonstration. Tellingly, the former athletes Flemming and Moneghetti considered it an amusing diversion.

It will be interesting to see how far the show goes in the next couple of weeks in its exploration of polarising sporting figures and their brand damage. Last week much time was devoted to both Stephanie Rice and Nick D'Arcy. Sampson's utter disgust and outrage at the mere concept of representing D'Arcy was something to behold.

The series' inspired closing segment - a weekly look at the worst performance of an athlete in a TV commercial - has almost limitless potential.

Sweat will surely halt the ABC's Wednesday ratings decline in coming weeks, and the Gruen brand and its franchises have established an impressive legacy. Whereas some may have deemed advertising an annoying but necessary evil, the show has demonstrated that the ad world is often a sharp, forward-thinking and intelligent contemporary workplace.

This story Administrator ready to work first appeared on Nanjing Night Net.

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Doctor in the house

Laura Leighton and Thomas Calabro have returned for the rebooted Melrose Place.DR MICHAEL Mancini, the baby-faced love rat of '90s drama series Melrose Place, has been good to his alter ego, actor Thomas Calabro. The role for which Calabro will forever be recognised propelled his career from jobbing LA actor to prime-time star. He was the only original cast member to stay for the show's entire run, from 1992-99. But over the decade since, Calabro has found it hard to shake the scheming Mancini. Television roles have been confined to guest spots on shows such as Nip/Tuck,Cold Case,Without a Trace, and, most recently, Glee, or appearances as himself on nostalgia shows such as I Love the '90s (2004). When I spoke with him in 2010, as the series relaunched to lukewarm reviews in the US and was scheduled to screen on Channel Ten (which then shelved it for two years), Calabro said it was with trepidation that he agreed to resurrect his role as a regular on the redux version of Melrose Place.
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''I think any actor who has been on a successful series would say there's a very small, small chance that that would ever happen again, and so I felt very fortunate and shocked to be asked back,'' he said. ''My ex-wife actually lives in the huge success of the first time around. We bought a big house and now she has it.''

Revisiting Michael Mancini and his various loves (Laura Leighton reprises her role as the voracious Sydney, and Josie Bissett appears in a guest role as Michael's two-time wife, Jane), was confronting Calabro's own past.

''Michael's everything I wouldn't want to tap into,'' he said. ''Just like I wouldn't want to tap into myself 10 years ago. They say every seven years, every cell in your body rejuvenates, so for me there was no need to go back and repeat that. It was most important that I find out who he is now.''

The pilot episode sees an older, wiser Michael doing a very good imitation of a family man with a wife and five-year-old son, but there's the complication of his fraught relationship with his now grown-up son David (Shaun Sipos), who is embroiled in a love affair with Sydney, who has replaced Amanda (Heather Locklear) as queen of the apartment building.

''Michael has got more self-confidence than he's ever had before,'' Calabro said. ''The first time around he was always seeking greater heights and doing things to achieve [positions such as] chief of staff or a new kind of love, to see how he could get ahead and serve himself. Now he's on top of the world. Now he's in a position where he's got more to lose, so he's defending the castle rather than trying to attack it … But Michael is Michael and in any incarnation of Melrose Place, he's going to be Michael and he will get what he wants just the way he wants to get it.''

Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) directed the pilot episode for producers Todd Slavkin and Darren Swimmer (Smallville), who have faithfully re-created the late Aaron Spelling's glamorous world of troubled young things. The series opens with all the familiar elements: a love tryst, fracturing relationships, a moral dilemma, and a dead body in the pool.

''What I really enjoyed about Darren Swimmer and Todd Slavkin's vision was that it is their own,'' Calabro said. ''They were going to bring back a sort of high-pitched drama but they certainly had their own world that they were going to try and create … They weren't trying to be Aaron Spelling.''

Melrose Place screens on Sunday at 10.30pm on Channel Eleven.

This story Administrator ready to work first appeared on Nanjing Night Net.