There have been suggestions from many that this introduction of advertising within programs could inherently ruin or damage the viewing pleasure for an audience, as the producers have to subtly incorporate products into a program. Whilst this was a simple task for This Morning, as it was merely in the background of the shot, it may not be so simple within soaps, documentaries and dramas, as it may be incorporated into the storyline.

There are of course restrictions set by Ofcom, the regulator for UK communications, the viewer must be aware that they about to watch a program which contains product placement, so a black and white P will appear in the corner of the screen before the program starts. There is also rules regarding the type of product as it cannot not be alcohol, tobacco, edicines, fatty or sugary foods, baby foods, or connected in any way to gambling. This will still leave room for millions of products deemed safe to subliminally advertise to the nation.

The contract between Nescafe and ITV, worth £100,000, allows their products to be shown within the program, to be watched by all the different audiences attracted to the channel. There has been some speculation that the overall annual worth of product placement for ITV could be between £25 and £100 million if they continue to sign with other companies in order to show their products.

There is mixed views regarding the new laws about product placement, as Mike Stevens, head of research at Vision Critical London, said: “It’s to be expected that people will feel uncomfortable at first,” but believes that the public and the viewer will see no difference after a while. Where as Kathy Sweeny from The Guardian suggested the introduction of product placement could lead to an “American-style brand invasion of our TV screens”. Personally, I don’t look forward to watching the whole cast of Coronation Street sipping on Coke Zero, or for everyone in Hollyoaks to be wearing New Look clothing. I believe this change in law could alter television for the producers and the viewers alike, but not necessarily in a positive way, we shall have to watch to find out.

Emily Rogers
Image: BBC

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The Drama Society’s adaptation of William’s Moor at the beginning of April had to err on the side of stunning to rise above the inherent mediocrity of the plot, this is did not do. The decision to re-imagine the play as an exposition of Machiavellian cunning and jealousy at the time of Britain’s wartime excursions into North Africa is a natural if clichéd choice, and allowed those producing the play to retain Othello’s critical ‘otherness’ despite having an Italian, Francesco Piccirilli, as the lead. However, this isn’t a choice that was made, and we are left forcing ourselves to believe that a non-black actor surrounded by non-black actors is somehow a beguiling and exotic outsider. Not so difficult you may think, but when the character is frequently referred to as ‘The Moor’ in both derogatory and fascinated ways throughout the play, it begins to grate. It’s not such an issue, and historically speaking many fine white actors have played the part, and some have won critical acclaim.

It still leaves you wondering however, how hard is it to find a black student lead for a play? Especially when the guy you’ve got isn’t that great at it. Piccirilli plays Othello with all the finesse of a poorly-oiled robot. His performance left me wondering if he was on stage against his will, since for most of the play his arms appeared to be tied behind his back. If he wasn’t inanely charging and bumbling through his own lines, he could be found wandering the stage in the guise of a confused badger, doggedly determined to distract the audience from the performances of other, better actors.

And there were better actors. Danny Topham, as Iago, was both greasy and unpleasant (good qualities for an Iago) and while the performance strayed occasionally into the realms of the absurd, by-and-large the pitch was perfect. Iago strutted the stage like a filthy peacock, monomaniacal in his obsessive envy and hatred for Othello. Topham is capable of stretching his face into the contorted vision of bitterness and resentment required for the part, and left this reviewer (and probably the rest of the audience) wondering what the guy is like when he’s really angry. The duality of Iago was also caught deftly in hand; the performance really came alive as Iago weaves his web around other characters, appearing both magnanimous and reasonable as he bends the narrative of others to suit his ends. Not an easy part to pull off, but pulled off it was.

Another great success of the performance came in the form of Emmy Griffiths, who as tragic and pathetic Desdemona, wrings everything she can out of Shakespeare’s most contemptible female lead. Griffiths gives a steely resolve hardly ever seen in the part and owns the stage. The character’s snow-white pallor and innocence is meant to offset the mysterious dark features of The Moor, but the pure confidence given to the part by Griffiths places Desdemona firmly set against the calculating wretch Iago. By the end, her heartbroken realisation of Othello’s insanity brings us right along, and we feel betrayed by proxy as we watch Desdemona’s unfailing loyalty thrown back in her – and now our – face.

All in all, Drama Society succeeded in that no act seemed boring or forced, and during intermission I spoke to many audience members who were willing to give tentative praise to the effort. The good outshone the bad by just enough to warrant perhaps a slight pat on the back on the part of its directors; Amber Leape was a revelation as shrieking Emilia, and was good enough to bring us back to the realisation that we were watching a Shakespearian tragedy and not a terrible ‘80s porn film, as the music might have you believe. A mixed bag then, and one that swings wildly through extremes. While not terrible, and not excellent, the production avoided mediocrity by simply being a little disappointing. It did enough things well to make the bad things wholly unforgivable.

“My story being done, she gave me for my pains a world of sighs”, quite Othello, quite.

Gary Barratt

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One legacy of Larkin25 has been to raise the profile of the existing poetry scene in Hull. Muesli Jellyfish, under the stewardship of Peter Knaggs, has been one of the major publishers of poetry in Hull for the last six or seven years. The new anthology, The Hull Connection both looks back to Douglas Dunn’s influential anthology A Rumoured City and looks forward to promoting a new generation of Hull poets. Old City, New Rumours (edited by Ian Gregson and Carol Rumens) also takes the opportunity provided by Larkin25 to look back to Dunn’s collection – which Larkin wrote the foreword for – featuring eleven poets from A Rumoured City as well as many other poets associated with Hull.

But it isn’t just established poets and endeavours that have seen a raised profile as a result of Larkin25, later this year another collection, Fresh Ink, featuring the work of current staff and students of the University of Hull will also be launched. During the celebrations, thisisull.com and Write to Speak teamed up to offer performance workshops to aspiring poets, lead by Joe Hakim and Mike Watts and culminating in performances at Hull Truck and a platform for a new set if poets to build on. Among the projects to come about as a result of these workshops is the Fresh Ink open mic nights which are now a popular monthly fixture at Lattitude on Newland Avenue.

Due to the current funding situation, many projects outside the university are run on very low budgets. Rather than finding this limiting, Hull magazines such as Turbulence and Misjudge Your Limits (both edited by University of Hull alumni) thrive on an almost guerilla approach to promoting the work of writers from both Hull and around the world, using social network sites to support their hardcopy publications.

Larkin himself may have been something of a controversial adopted son of the city, but the Larkin25 celebrations have aided in providing a platform for a newly confident if slightly dysfunctional family of poets in Hull.

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Hullfire: What attention do you pay to reviews once your book is out there in the public domain?

KM: None at all. Reviews are poisonous things, whether they are good or they are bad. Once your book is out there, the truth is, that you have done your best – it was the best book you could have written with the skills you had, with that story, at the time. So if the reviews are good, you don’t believe them, and if they’re bad you believe every word and it’s depressing.

Hullfire: I’m not sure I should bring this up now, but in one of the reviews on the inside cover of Labyrinth, The Guardian called it ‘Chick-Lit with A-levels’. Do you feel that’s fair?

KM (Laughing): It’s really interesting. Some people think I would be offended by that, but I was quite pleased with it. What that said to me was: this romps along, it’s got female stories at the heart of it, but it’s also brainy. So I thought, it’s not a terribly accurate description because I think I write quite male fiction. I’m not very interested by internal stories or traditional ‘This is women’s lives and this is how they fall out.’ I feel I’m an adventure writer and I like writing active books. Therefore I don’t think chick-lit is terribly comparable, but I took it to mean that the women are convincing.

Hullfire: Would you accept that your fiction is genre fiction?

KM: Oh yes, absolutely. Yes, except in France. In France I’m seen as a really literary writer.

Hullfire: What do you think defines the two then? What do you include in your writing, or not include in your writing, that excludes it from being classed as literary?

KM: People often don’t ask those of us who are professional writers how we define these things, but actually that tension between what is literary fiction and what is genre fiction or commercial fiction is at the heart of all of the publishing industry. For me, and this is a personal definition, not just of my work but how I would say I would divide it in general terms: in what is termed literary fiction, the ideas and the quality of the language – the sentence by sentence beauty of the language – are at the top of the list of what matters. In genre or commercial fiction, I would say that it is the characters and the momentum, and the plot are at the top of what matters.

So, do I care about whether I’m a good writer or not? Yes, of course I do. Do I care about the ideas? Of course. Do I care more than I care about the action? No. So for me, that’s how I square it.

Hullfire: You co-founded the Orange Prize for Fiction. [Best full-length novel written in English by a woman of any nationality] There was a survey by a feminist literary organisation in America called Vida, which showed a heavy bias still continuing towards men in the world of literary fiction. Did you see this?

KM: I did. As you can imagine, I’ve got thirty-eight foreign publishers to start with, and everybody sent it to me. So my inbox was going Ping! Ping! Ping!

Hullfire: So from your experience, having worked in the publishing industry, and your existing knowledge of it as a writer now, is it an inherently sexist industry?

KM: Again, you see, that’s a very good way of putting it. I’m not often put on the spot in that language. I’ve worked in publishing all of my working life since I left university, either in publishing, running the Orange Prize, as a broadcaster, and as a writer. So I’ve seen it, it’s where I’ve spent my grown-up time. And I am still astounded by when I say to the BBC, as I did a couple of weeks ago for the year of books, I said, ‘You do realise that only a quarter of the authors you are featuring are women, even though sixty percent of novels published are by women?’ And they were genuinely surprised.

So, is it sexist? No. Is there an inherent structure that still sees male fiction as neutral and female fiction as being for women? Yes.

Hullfire: Could you ever see a situation where the Orange Prize becomes irrelevant because the industry is completely egalitarian?

KM: Wouldn’t that be great? I’d be so much less tired. The Orange Prize has achieved enormous things in its time. Much more than any of us ever thought it would. But, depressingly – and this isn’t just the case in books, it’s the same in the election last May, the number of High Court judges, whatever particular mechanism you look at – unless there is a conscious decision that society should be reflected in any given organisation, whether it’s books or whatever else, the women start to vanish. It would be really fantastic if actually there were no need for the Vida survey, the Orange Prize or quotas or whatever. But there is, and actually we need to build in the opportunity for women and men. There are as many men who support the Orange Prize as there are women who don’t because people still feel queasy about quotas, and I really get that, but nobody has told me how it might work better.

Hullfire: Those dissenting voices have faded quite a lot though. Germaine Greer and A.S. Byatt and so on.

KM: They have faded because it has been really successful. Well, Germaine Greer was never anti- it, oddly, but she had her own quite weird way. A.S. Byatt, bless her heart…

Hullfire: Then her friend Iris Murdoch came…

KM: That was one of the most exciting moments of my whole life, second or third year I think it might have been, and it was just before she got ill, and that became poignant in a way that it wasn’t even poignant time. She would be up there, Iris Murdoch, for me, a really important writer and I’d studied her at university and all those things. They arrived really early, her and John Bailey. And it had been quite bloody and quite difficult – I was just a normal person that had got involved in setting up this prize. Suddenly I was all over the papers and I’d never done any media before, and it had been really quite shocking. None of us doubted that we were doing the right thing, but it was much tougher. Anyway, in they came – we were at The Liberal Club or somewhere hilarious so you walked up the stairs to the party with a whole load of men with whiskers all the way up, lining the stairs; the environment was ludicrous. Anyway, I looked across the room and I thought, ‘Fuck! That’s Iris Murdoch.’ And I thought I couldn’t go over. Now, I should have gone over.

Hullfire: She’s not exactly a dominating presence.

KM: No, exactly, but there are just certain people aren’t there? I just wasn’t experienced enough. I don’t really have any regrets in life, but I really regret not going over to her that day. But I was just so overwhelmed by it being her.

It was very interesting, I respect A.S. Byatt enormously; I’ve interviewed her a lot, I like her. She has every right to not feel that women-only things are the way to go. She has said to various people who now study the Orange Prize at various universities that she is not an opponent of the prize, she’s tried never to say anything about it, she regrets saying ‘I think it’s a silly idea,’ because it’s not what she meant – it just wasn’t for her.

So yes, the dissenters have fallen away because we were very clear about what we were doing. And it was two things. Firstly, a sensible discourse about gender and reading and writing matters. Secondly, we were very clear that we wanted to try and reverse this issue of women reading men and women and men thinking mostly about reading men. I think a lot of the dissenting voices are falling away because they start to look a bit daft. If they think reading matters and that books matters, they need to put up or shut up don’t they? And they have mostly done the latter.

Hullfire: Richard and Judy’s book club was an incredible phenomenon for a few years wasn’t it? Obviously, it served you very well. But do you think at the time it was healthy for such a small group of people, Amanda Ross, and that small clique, to be such arbiters of taste in the book world?

KM: This is another very good question about cliques. Because truthfully, Amanda is a good friend of mine now, we’re very close friends.

Hullfire: I was going to ask you about that.

KM: We didn’t know each other before, and we’ve subsequently become good friends. I admire her enormously, and there is absolutely no doubt; would Labyrinth have been the best-selling book in the UK, beating Dan Brown even in 2006 without Richard and Judy? No. It sold 1.2m copies in one year alone. And that is thanks to that.

But your question is the right one. If the sales rest on the shoulders of one promotion as opposed to a plurality of mechanisms to sell.  At the height of the book club, and I was completely a beneficiary of this as were a number of other people – many people’s careers have been made by Amanda – it blotted out the sun. It was fantastic for those of us in the light. It did a massive amount for reading; it absolutely introduced new readers to books, no doubt about it.

Hullfire: Do you think we have to fight against the diminishing literary culture? People reading less and less, watching television more.

KM: Well, I’m optimistic. I think I’m more worried about Michael Gove and the EMA etc. I think that there is a pernicious snobbery involved in everything involved with literature and indeed the arts: the idea that only certain sorts of people are brainy enough to read these books or whatever. So the idea that people are reading less – I don’t buy that. I think that people are reading in different sorts of ways. That there is a lot of pressure on people’s leisure time, as it were, but I think that downloads and e-books and kindles and the stuff that we do with the Orange Prize are there to introduce people who feel phobic to the page, but happy with the screen, to great narrative. For me, I don’t actually care whether people borrow my books, they download them, they buy a hardback. I don’t care at all.

Hullfire: Are you not worried by the fact that if something can be digitised then it’s a lot easier for it to pirated?

KM: I know I should be, but I’m not. The stories and the sharing of ideas is more important than what is going into an author’s pocket. Obviously, I don’t want my work to be nicked or re-written in a way that I would find appalling or any of those things. But introducing fear into new technology gets away from the fact that there is an opportunity to engage with bigger numbers of readers. Now when the supermarkets started to sell books, publishers went: ‘Oh my God, we can’t have this – they’re going to undercut lovely independent bookshops.’ I do a lot of work with independent bookshops, but you know what? I’m more interested in people being able to buy cheap books. So, it’s complicated. Authors feel completely at sea, and publishers and agents are shilly-shallying around at the moment.

Hullfire: Do you think if you were a mid-list author the fear would be much greater?

KM: Yes. Indeed. Again, you are correct. But what’s happened is, publishing has changed – so essentially about one hundred of us are sold everywhere. What happens in publishing now is that those of us who sell a lot of copies are discounted heavily; those people who don’t are expensive. That’s bonkers. Publishing has gone the wrong way round. It’s absolutely right that because of my volume sales I can afford to be less concerned about the effect of not being sold at full-price, or discounted. But, there is an element in publishing where the people that sell a lot should be supporting and speaking for the people who don’t. For me, the balance comes in my work with prizes and with literacy, versus me as an author. So, as an author, it’s all fine. Is the industry fine? No. Should they be shutting libraries? No. You decided where you fight your battles, and I’m lucky that I don’t have to fight my battles as an author.

Hullfire: With Labyrinth, the book is being made into a four-part mini-series produced by Ridley and Tony Scott’s production company. Has that been in the works for a long time?

KM: Erm, no. The thing is, if I’d written twenty novels it wouldn’t matter how good or bad an adaptation was. But, I haven’t. I have a lot of friends who feel that their writing career has been damaged by the quality of film or television. The thing that I care about most is books, and the second thing I care about is theatre. Film is quite a long way down for me.  So, my agent and I, we met with all the Hollywoody people, and we came out, and I said, ‘If one more person says to me that Orlando Bloom would be perfect…’ And who does he play? My agent was brilliant because the dollar signs were everywhere. He said, ‘You know, you sell to Hollywood, you have no control over this. It’s up to you – we don’t have to take any offers.’ And I said, ‘The only things that matters with Labyrinth, and Sepulchre, and Citadel that I’m writing now, is that they’re adventure stories, the history is accurate, and they are female adventure stories.’ So when somebody said to me, ‘We see Orlando Bloom in the lead role.’ You go, ‘Really?’ Why don’t you just write your own story, this is… you know.’

We said no to all of those things, and for Sepulchre as well. I’d always said to my agent if Ridley Scott comes, he can have it because his attention to historical detail and real determination to do those things. Everyone in movies knows that he is still going on about all the things that were wrong with Kingdom of Heaven. As we all know, Orlando Bloom could not lift a battle sword, bless his heart – he’s just too puny. He’s a poppet, I’m sure he’s lovely. He could belong in The Winter Ghosts, but not the others. So, we just decided we would sit on the rights; it wasn’t a priority for me. The priority for me is selling books because that’s what I am – a writer rather than a screenwriter. So, when, only a year ago, Ridley Scott’s people said, ‘Can we all have lunch?’ I thought, fine; you don’t take these things seriously. We’d had the similar lunch with Angelina Jolie’s people.. You know, these things don’t come to much, mostly. Each time something else has happened, I’ve thought that there is no point getting excited, lets just be calm – all the rest of it, and now they start shooting in September.

Hullfire: It’s going to be shown on British TV?

KM: Yes. But it’s an international co-production so the French television company, the German television company etc. and HBO.

Hullfire: There are hordes of students around the world now, including myself, that are being taught Creative Writing. Does this trend mean we’re going to get better fiction in the future?

KM: No.

Hullfire: Perhaps a lot of very similar fiction being produced?

KM: What will happen is, it will be no different. I absolutely think creative writing is something that should be taught. There has been, until recently, a sense that unlike every other arts discipline… that sort of old Egyptian idea almost, that writing comes directly from God, it is a gift. It’s not true. It’s the same as anything else – it’s about skill. If you’ve got a musical child, you get that child a teacher. They might have that thing that makes them the soloist, the Nigel Kennedy or whoever it is. They might not. Writing is about skill. The bricks and mortar – this is how you put a book together. The talent, and that thing that makes one book sing and one book not, belongs to you and yourself. So I do think that there will be a lot more quality of competency in the writing field, absolutely. I think that you can teach creative writing, you can teach how to The thing is, it’s a brilliant thing because the respect that is owed to writing, and how hard it is, and it as a job will be shown. It’s put on a par with artists, potters, and dancers – everyone else who is trained. But there has been this idea that somehow writers don’t need anything. At the same time, you can’t teach creativity. You can teach the skill of it. So, good luck.

Hullfire: Thank you.

Tristan Vere-Hoose
Photo by: Lizzie Bentley

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Jay Gatsby of The Great Gatsby.

There is something disconcerting about a man that is willing to do *anything* for you. Gatsby would be cool and sexy if it wasn’t for his forced Sprezzatura all in the name of love for the most worthless, time-consuming wench in the history of American Literature. We see Gatsby reach his demise at the hands of Daisy Buchanan after years of planning how exactly he will obtain her.

Like a true dandy, he gets rich quick and buys more than enough material possessions all in a manner of sheer desperation like a crack head in search for his last fix. Gatsby is the kind of man that will commit an act solely for ostentatious reasons. I have a cream car and a mansion, but this is all effortless. He is too pathetic, too ridiculous, too unapologetic, and frankly, too good to be true. An example must be made of Gatsby about the risks of hope in excess. He must either be shot or stripped of his cream suits and thrust back into poverty. Fitzgerald went with the former. We thank you.

Marianne Dashwood of Sense and Sensibility.

A particularly excitable broad, like Gatsby, Austen’s protagonist Marianne Dashwood is that one bitch that will love you until the bitter end. Naive and encompassing far too much sensibility, Marianne makes this list because of her incredible ability to give rise to the facepalm time and time again. You see, Marianne lives in an imagined utopia where impulse rules over practicality and emotion is everything. It is obligatory by Marianne law. If you feel it, you must show it.

Despite being a direct deviation of English repression, perhaps what is most annoying about Marianne is Austen’s accuracy in depicting a typical emotional female at her most extreme. Though thanks to the apt piss-taking of her sister Elinor who is her complete opposite, we can read Austen’s characterisation of Marianne knowing that someone shares our pain. Nobody likes an uncontrollable wench. No wonder Willoughby ran for those long picturesque hills. You probably should too.

Jane Eyre of Jane Eyre

Speaking of uncontrollable wenches, you should be scared of Jane because she has one of those things that women should never have; intelligence. Couple that with independence and that makes for one frightening bitch. Poor Jane is trapped in a realm of false accusations and patriarchy. I mean really, she gets bitch slapped by her cousin. It is like a literary session of ongoing unenjoyable Bukkake of which Jane is the victim; you have to feel for her.

The only act in the text that could have made this more disrespectful to the female audience is if the characters symbolic of patriarchy began their own interpretation of ‘Bitches Ain’t Shit’ by Dr. Dre. Jane always strikes us as someone that ought to be tamed and that must almost ‘learn her place.’ Her place being of course the attic where Bertha Rochester has been confined that we get the sense of Jane being shackled in too if she’s not careful. Generally, Jane poses the problem of being unmanageable, to the distaste of those who just want a bitch that speaks when spoken to. Though Jane’s haters frequently confuse her righteous morality with passionate anger, if you have no preference for a female with an opinion, then run like hell.

Peter Pan of Peter and Wendy

A flaming dickhead and probably the most irritating on the list, this boy is something, and I don’t know what that is. Peter ‘Poomplex’ Pan is a bit alien to me, sort of like British porn. Dwelling in my ignorance, if I don’t know what you are then my natural instinct is to run. The ambiguity of The Boy That Everyone Seems To Love But Me is troubling and darker than Disney fanatics would like to believe.

If you strip away the green overalls and shit-stained brown sacks for shoes, all you get is a nondescript annoying hermaphrodite banging on aimlessly about childhood. Peter has a childish quality that is enduring, but he is also a massive prick. One example being that he does not remember his ride or die chick (Tinker Bell) after she is seemingly dead. When you read Peter’s tale, there is a looming sense of something grim, something not altogether there. Further understanding will only result in a sure condemnation that Peter Pan is probably one of the most troubling protagonists in literature. On that, literary discrimination is advised. One of the defining quotes Peter declares in the novel is ‘to die would be an awfully big adventure.’ Then die. Please.

Blanche DuBois of A Streetcar Named Desire

Stuck up and a mild classicist, washed up basic bitch Blanche DuBois is one of the more intriguing protagonists. With Williams’ amusing play on words on her name meaning ‘white wood’, we come to see that Blanche is more tainted than her name suggests in her promiscuity. She is further tainted as somewhere down the line, her family were slave owners and it is suggested that she is homophobic.

Already, Blanche is proving to be someone that I would not like to hang out with. Still, it is always satisfying to see Disney-fied characters detached from reality, so when a broken Blanche proclaims ‘I don’t want realism. I want magic!’ with conviction, then fire engine red alarm bells should be ringing in your head to leg it.

Flee from this literary entrapment, escape this annoyance, close the damn text. Of course, such fatal flaws are where the charm lies in texts, so keep reading. She gets carted off to a mental asylum in the end anyway. Three cheers for the establishment.

So there you have it. Five great, but eye-gouging protagonists. Read their stories if you must, but might I suggest a dose of primary school literature in between.

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I first picked up an SLR camera after a girl I was dating let me play with hers (any euphemisms are your responsibility). Being the man of the world that I am and knowing that having things in common with a girl equals sex, I decided to shell out £300 on a second hand Canon 400D. Whereas I didn’t get the insane amount of sex that I believed artists got, I instead received a passion for art that I had never had before. Being a man whose year 9 self-portraits more resembled ‘Sloth’ from the Goonies, I’ve never been too interested in committing myself to being an ‘artist’, however photography lets the non-paintbrush and pencil types to still be creative.

Photography is technically considered an art, nobody argues with that, but it’s the way in which it is placed below other art forms that I take issue with. Nobody tells a painter that he’s simply flicking his wrist about with a brush in his hand, no, he’s creating a masterpiece. Yet when I am taking a shot, people are constantly telling me all I’m doing is pressing a button. Ignoring the fact that they probably aren’t too interested in learning the logistics of shutter speeds and focal lengths.

The amount of derogatory things said about my pursuit of photography as an art is something I wasn’t expecting. If there is one thing that I have learnt since I started doing photography is that it is not at all easy, and despite the armchair photographers who will say anyone can do it, simply trying to get what you have in your head onto the LCD screen of that camera is one of the most frustrating things I have ever had to face. This is one of the reasons photography should be recognised as much of a valid artistic endeavour as other art forms such as drawing, painting and sculpture. All of these ‘higher’ art forms require the artist to try and capture the image that they have in their mind and translate it to their chosen medium. Just because my medium happens to be a photograph, doesn’t make it any easier to get the translation from creative thought to final product.

Ideally, I would love to see more praise for some of the more talented photographers, holding them in a higher regard in museums and at a national level. The only photographers that appear to be recognised outside of art circles are the journalistic ones, and where I recognise the tremendous work they do in their field, I’d still like for more overall recognition of the field of photography. I’d also like for it to be taught as a different art form within school.

Currently the only exposure I had at school to photography was the option to do it as an A-level in a college rather than the sixth form I was attending. Within my Art lessons in earlier school years we were taught varying art techniques, yet photography was not even mentioned once. I know it would be difficult to teach every different type of art form, but at least a passing mention of photography would have been nice, considering it seeps into every part of life.

Art can invoke emotion, tell a story, teach a lesson and do any number of things that many art aficionados will attest to. Photography for me strikes this belief home hard. Whereas a canvas allows for an unrestricted opportunity to do this, photography forces you to work with the real world. The ability to draw out the emotion, or the many other aspects art can invoke, out of the things around you makes it an even more beautiful and humanistic art form. So the next time you see me taking your photo in asylum or any of the other photographers in the clubs, spare them a thought and stop photo-bombing their shots.

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Admittedly some people may find the lifestyles and aspirations of the cast repugnant and their personalities obnoxious, but the fact that people like this can exist fascinates and entertains me in equal measure.

The show’s main allure is that it is ‘real life’ however, the warning that “some scenes have been made for your entertainment” could not be more apt. As our union president Aidan Mersh pointed out to me Sam and Billie’s shop Minnie’s isn’t actually real and coincidentally the cameras are always there for every argument and secret snog. Being forced to confront these failings in the show did diminish the magic somewhat however I still avidly follow the tosses and turns of the turbulent relationships of Mark and Lauren, Kirk and Popey, Joey and Sam and Lucy and whatever she can get her hands on! What’s more as a regular Sugar Hut patron, Aidan has actually MET Joey Essex – one of the latest additions to the show – my jealousy really does know no bounds. During one recent episode Kirk even shouted at Maria “who even are you, you’re just an extra” which I felt showed how it actually is real life and that the relationships which the show portrays are genuine ones. This hasn’t stopped the popular speculation around Mark and Lauren’s engagement; is it a genuine love or is it just for the show as they both desperately clamour for fame?! Who knows!?

Bi-weekly episodes with just a one week lapse between filming and airing the episode keep you constantly updated with the latest of what’s going on with the gang constantly bringing new story lines and new characters. All the while Denise Van Outen’s dulcet tones narrate the show and constantly reassure us that they ARE real people and whilst the show has come under criticism for its caricaturing of the population of the local population, the people in the show are undeniably from the area, Kirk even said in one interview (not with me unfortunately) “We are Essex people so what you’re watching is Essex” even if it’s just a small corner it makes great TV. If you take it with a pinch of salt and just enjoy the drama then I genuinely don’t see how you can’t love the show.

Many of the cast have highly entertaining twitter profiles which you can follow here:

@MissAmyChilds  @kirk_official
@MarkWright_   @SamanthaFaiers
@LaurenGoodger  @RealJamesArgent
@HarryDerbidge  @LaurenPope
@Chloe_Sims   @JoeyEssex_

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Skyline is released on DVD on the 21st March.

Sam Langan

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Holly Johnson

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Luke Taylor

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