Review of the Week – 20 to 26 February 2012

REVIEW OF THE WEEK: 20 to 26 February 2012

That Was The Week That Was

WHAT THE FLIP: A child at the church's Pancake Party on Tuesday prepares to toss their pancake. (IMG_8370) This week being the beginning of Lent, events I’ve attended at church have included Shrove Tuesday’s Pancake Party in the Church Hall and this (Sunday) afternoon’s Lent Lunch in the Parish Centre. With my Grade Five Music Theory exam and Maths GCSE retakes next Thursday, Friday, and a week on Monday, I’ve spent much of the weekend in my ‘learning den’ (aka my bedroom) completing past papers and catching up on other work. But I did manage a bike ride to the river with my mum yesterday (Saturday), a few hours of reading the weekend papers, and have just enjoyed a roast dinner with former St Luke’s vicar Richard Holroyd – in Maidenhead to sing at a concert at Norden Farm, which Mum, Dad, Matthew, and a large number of the St Luke’s congregation attended.

MY BABY: Rupert Murdoch's new paper had a front-page splash about Amanda Holden's 40-second childbirth drama.Normally, this introductory piece to the Review also includes a summary of the week’s bigger headlines. We’re in the strange position this week, though, where in addition to the continuing investigations into phone-hacking and bad press behaviour, Rupert Murdoch has launched a new paper to replace the News Of The World that he and his son killed off last year – and that new newspaper has become news in itself. It’s called The Sun On Sunday (advertised by a frankly brilliant campaign yesterday centred around the song from Annie, Tomorrow, which of course includes the line: ‘The sun’ll come out tomorrow’. The print-run for this first edition: 3 million. The price: 50p. As the BBC’s Nick Higham commented, it looks and feels like The Sun, and features a front-page splash (an exclusive interview with Amanda Holden) continued onto four pages inside.

AN EYE FOR A STORY: Marie Colvin, despite losing her sight in one eye, continued to work in difficult journalistic locations, until being killed on Wednesday.Regardless of whether you do or don’t like Murdoch’s media control, one must commend his journalists. They’ve clearly worked hard – amid an uneasy, to say the least, environment with the recent arrests and challenging Leveson Inquiry backdrop – to get this paper out. Remember, very, very few of those still in Wapping were there during the old Sunday paper’s dodgiest days – the majority are innocent journalists, living under the shadow of those who sat at their desks before them. And yet, in spite of all this, the true hero of journalism, who’ll be remembered longer than almost all Sun hacks, is Marie Colvin (a writer for News International’s other Sunday publication The Sunday Times). She died this week after the makeshift media centre she and her colleagues were working in was, by designed attack or pure chance, bombed by Syrian forces. Fellow journalists have been paying tribute to her since Wednesday – including, rather bizarrely, Katie Price, in the first of her columns for the The Sun on Sunday.


Photo of the Week

This week’s Photo of the Week was taken in the gap between the end of the 10:00am service and the beginning of the 12:30pm Lent Lunch, of Taizé-style ‘sails’ hanging around the deis. It’s only the second portrait PotW ever featured on this blog (the other one was in April 2011, also taken at St Luke’s). Both this and that photo feature in the next edition of InSpire.

PHOTO OF THE WEEK: Only the second portrait Photo of the Week ever, this was taken before today's Taize service at church. (IMG_8550)


Quote of the Week

“Sun on Sunday have clearly put a phoney front page out. Real one will be second edition. Otherwise major ‘is that it?’ problem”

— Alastair Campbell, tweeting about the first edition of The Sun on Sunday, 25 February 2012


This Week’s Number One

This week’s official Number One is Somebody That I Used To Know by Belgian-Australian singer Gotye, featuring Kimbra.

THIS WEEK'S NUMBER ONE: Somebody That I Used To Know. (Click to play in Spotify.)


‘And Finally’ Story of the Week

From The Sun on Sunday:

“An eerie flotilla of boats lies shipwrecked and deserted – in a sea of sand.

DESERT ISLAND SHIPS: Boats lay wrecked in a sea of sand.

This was the world’s fourth largest lake, teeming with fish.

Now the 26,000 sq mile Aral Sea – once the size of Scotland – is a dust-bowl. The fishermen have gone, leaving their vessels to slowly rust among camels in the desolate wasteland.

Russia diverted rivers that fed the lake – in Asia between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan – for irrigation in the 1960s.”

More details about this story are available online from The Sun.

Andrew Burdett

Andrew Burdett is a twenty-something from Maidenhead in Berkshire, working for ITV News.