This story is undoubtedly the three of us at our creative peak or our most outrageously self-indulgent, depending on your opinion, and involves a slew of celebrity appearances and pop culture references.

The celebs mainly consisted of people we had a fondness for, but in the case of O’Leary it was simply somone we thought was an idiot. I’ve always loved Sir Bobby Robson, so he was the obvious choice for a hero. The sadly-departed John Peel and Tony Wilson had been in the news recently, as had Alexei Sayle, following some unfortunate comments about Liverpool.

Pop culture references include Alexei Sayle’s Stuff, Undercover Brother, Ghostbusters, The Five Doctors, Kill Bill, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, The Beatles, The Royle Family, Ali G and Transformers, though there are probably half a dozen others if you look closely enough.

Eagle-eyed readers may notice Blackman and Robin and Uncle Bobby sharing a jacuzzi with Sting and Jimmy Nail, both of whom have breasts. I’m not sure why.

• You’ll need to click on the links to view them at full size. They’re fairly hefty, so may take a few seconds to load. Click on them again to view them even larger.

Blackman & Robin Part 3 – Ham Spanner

• If you’re wondering what the hell this is, click here.

Rather than going completely Web 2.0 mad, I wanted to check out various blogging software for a work thing, and I wanted to write about things other than cultural stuff that’s going on in Liverpool.

I started Creature Features the other when I legitimately spent a day wondering what Mike Catt would look like if he actually was a cat. There’s about five posts on it now, I’m not really promoting it, it’s traffic is zilch and its pagerank will never venture beyond the very lowest figures.

That’s all OK as its purpose is to allow me to brush up on my neglected Photoshop skills and blogging knowledge and for me to amuse myself.

I’ve had a few comments from friends and colleagues but received one today, apparently from an Ant and Dec fan linking to a Mirror story about Dec’s new charidee single.

I consider myself fairly well-versed in the ways of spam, but as the benefits of spamming my lowly site are so insignificant I didn’t think anyone would go to the bother. Besides, it’s for charity, right?

It took a wiser hand to point out that spam is exactly what it was, and a quick Googling confirmed it. It’s from Passiton Media, apparently experts in viral marketing, who I assume are running a campaign for Mirror Group.

There’s no particular reason why this should be particularly annoying, it’s not the end of the world and it may be a one-off – but I don’t really want my experience of the web to become cluttered with desperate PRs trying to shill their rubbish to me and pretending to be someone else.

So, anyway, I’m calling you out Passiton. This isn’t really what viral marketing is and it’s pretty irksome. And it’s made me write another post that’s not really about Liverpool. Don’t do it again.

Paper trail: 1, 2, 3

Selected grey goo from around the web:

• Digital Spy

Dec’s cover of Wake me up before you go go; nostaligia and happiness is me! If you want a copy you can get it here http://www.mirror.co.uk/dec/ for only 79p and remember money goes to charity! Go Dec! (lets get ready to rumble…….)

Well i’m loving Ant and Dec’s new stuff! I loved the show on saturday and think this weeks challenge is blooming marvellous! My vote is for dec! You can too by getting his single from here http://www.mirror.co.uk/dec/ (just 79p) and the money goes to charideeeeeeee. cool. Come on, you know you want to. xxx

• ITV

Hey guys, anyone catch Dec on This morning. I really like the Saturday Night Takeaway challenge this week as both ant and dec are singing for charity. Personally think Dec’s song is better. have downloaded for 79p from here:DEC SONG!!!

For those of you who stay in on Saturday Nights (er…), you’ll know that Dec is releasing a charity single this week as part of his challenge.

Despite it being Wham!’s ‘Wake me Up Before You Go-Go’ (leaning to the other side, Dec?), it’s all for a good cause and of course Dec will, well, WIN!

Perhaps it’s me that gets so excited about these things, but hey ho.
Go here to hear him in action: http://www.mirror.co.uk/dec/

Come on, you know you want to

• Guidestar

Did anyone see Ant and Dec on Saturday night? I have loved Ant and Dec since the Pj and Duncan days, so i’m loving their challenge this week! I’m supporting The Mirror and Dec Team (hes the cute little one!) http://www.mirror.co.uk/dec/ as he is singing “wake me up before you go go” one of my all time fav songs! Anyway, all the proceeds go to charity, so go support Dec eveyone! x

• Unreality TV

I am so glad its back! Im a massive Ant and Dec fan and have been since the days of byker grove (lets get ready to rumble!) Did people see the show on sat? Miley Cyrus forgot her lyrics, but at least she sang live. Im loving this weeks Ant vs Dec also; as a big Dec fan im supporting him in the mission to see who can sell the most singles.

You can get his song here http://www.mirror.co.uk/dec/ for just 79p and proceeds go to great charities like childline. His song is wake me up before you go go; I keep playing it in the office as it puts a massive smile on my face! Anyway, im on team Dec, whose are you on?

In amongst editing, picture editing, subbing, proofing, pagesetting, outputting and liaising with printers and ad execs I drank heavily, slept lightly and lived off the wares of the Hardman Pizza company around the corner. I became ill with stress and the lifestyle that came with editing the paper.

So half way through the year I tried to find something to take my mind off the in-fighting, political intrigue at the unions and universities and general stress of it all. Much as I enoyed the job, worrying about third team JMU soccer results and the lunatic political dogma bored me as much as it probably bored our readers after a while.

The result of all of this was Blackman & Robin, dreamt up in a pub between myself and Che Burnley. Ben Hau and Paul Hardman helped with the design and suddenly Liverpool Student was publishing an outrageously stupid and deliberately provocative comic strip that became an instant hit.

A heady blend of parody, pop-culture references, bizarre celebrity cameos, deliberately shoddy design, a preference for the scatological and a desire to offend the kind of people who hang around students’ union political offices; the strip soon grew from three panels to a whole page.

Later the strip was published in a magazine that a group of us created between 2003-2005 – Black+White Magazine. Che became a minor celebrity in the city as a result. We retired it before the last edition before we genuinely offended someone.

Blackman isn’t a massive extension of Che’s personality – he likes bacon, booze and wrestling – but ‘Robin’ is a foot-high chain-smoking homosexual. Their natural enemies are people who embrace political correctness for all the wrong reasons and, as Che is black and Ben is Chinese (via Leicester), we felt qualified to poke fun at these types.

An unlikely cast of characters grew from the original concept, including Bobby Robson, David O’Leary, Tanni Grey-Thompson, Ricky Tomlinson, Alexei Sayle, darts player Les Wallace, Alex Ferguson and Gerard Houllier sprang up, based on people we liked, disliked, or were in the news at the time.

It’s hard to discern now, but B&R’s modus operandi was to point out the hypocrisy and cant evident among many of the people who aspire to be student politicians. If we got a rise then so much the better.

When I look back now I’m not sure B&R is even defensible on the grounds we set out at the time. While our intentions may have been noble enough, the result is pretty much an obscene tits’n'willies comic strip that wouldn’t be out of place in a Viz knock-off.

Thing is, I still find it hilariously funny. Admittedly it’s my creation – the fairly obscure references will leave most nonplussed, the celebrities make sense only if you share our likes and dislikes and there’s a huge parade of characters based on people we knew.

Nevertheless, I’ve decided to republish them on the blog, if only for the benefit of the people I made it with.

We weighed up a Capital of Culture edition of the strip last year as a limited run, but the results were so absurdly over-the-top, and likely libellous, they didn’t really merit it.

Maybe one day, Blackman & Robin will be needed again. Until then, wonder at the two strips below.

• You’ll need to click on the links to view them at full size. They’re fairly hefty, so may take a few seconds to load. Click on them again to view them even larger.

Blackman & Robin Part 1

In that fine tradition, here’s an original use of Twitter that doesn’t involve co-worker disparagement, another link to a post on how to be better at PR on a PR blog, or another opinion of Channel 4′s best course of action regarding their funding shortfall. (And lest someone accuse me of piss-taking, I make posts like that all the time).

It’s a mash-up of data from the River Mersey presented as a Twitter feed, displaying data on the comings and goings in the Mersey’s shipping channels.

I’m at a loss to explain why this is interesting, but along with my burgeoning interests in wildlife, industrial architecture and pistons it can only herald a rapidly-approaching mid-life crisis.

• Via The FACT blog

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Like anyone suddenly confronted with the mainstream media’s take on a subject they’re fairly well-versed in, I’ve been somewhat bemused and irritated by some of the uninformed, crass and plain bizarre opinions I’ve read in papers and on the web, not that the regional newspapers who have been campaigning on the issue have got much wrong.

There’s a cornucopia of ill-informed comments after Robert Peston’s blog that are indicative of how keen people are to shoot their mouths off about things they know nothing about.

So, I thought I’d put the record straight as I see it because, well because this is my blog and I can.

Although I’ve read a lot about JLR being ‘troubled’, I don’t really think that’s the case. Since it was sold by Ford to Tata last year for a fairly pitiful £1.15bn, Jag has brought out the fantastic sports saloon XF, is in the process of quietly retiring the underwhelming X-Type, revamped the XK coupe and roadster and has a revamped XJ in the pipeline.

As a result of this strong product line-up, the Big Cat was one of the very few manufacturers to actually increase sales in the UK last year.

Land Rover, which has admittedly seen sales plummet by around 50 per cent in the UK over 2008, has the Freelander, Discovery, Range Rover and Rangey Sport and the hybrid LRX to come. Frankly, all of Land Rover’s models are the best in class. The company has a formidable line-up of models and is making significant strides towards greening its products.

The trouble that JLR appears to be in seems to be down to parent-company Tata’s unwillingness to commit cash to its prize acquisition.

Black Swan

Like most manufacturers, Jaguar Land Rover has been caught out by a Perfect Storm (or Black Swan event if you prefer your metaphors more melodramatic) of rising fuel prices, environmental and political pressure to reduce CO2 emissions, wildly fluctuating exchange rates and, of course, what’s being called the worst economic crisis since the ’30s. As a premium manufacturer JLR is right at the sharp end of the car industry’s woes.

As a result JLR is widely thought to be seeking around £1bn from the British government, on top of an injection of around £600m from parent company Tata. Some commentators have suggested that such a significant injection of cash amounts to a de facto nationalisation of the company, as that’s not far off the asking price Tata paid for JLR twelve months ago, since when the value of the company has likely tumbled. Some have even advocated this idea. (Curiously Wales Online has chosen not to publish my comment explaining why this won’t happen.)

I don’t think there’s much likelihood of the government not providing what JLR insists is purely and squarely a loan (you can read a fairly vague but likely indication in one of Mandelson’s boring speeches here), although there are likely to be some stiff conditions to prevent other manufacturers going cap-in-hand to business secretary Peter Mandelson.

I don’t have a lot of time for Mandelson, he was without doubt the most unpleasant man I ever interviewed, and I found his re-re-entry in the government astonishing given his record – but he’s no chump.

Mandy will stump up the cash for JLR, but there are some important questions to be asked first regarding why a multi-media conglomerate like Tata can’t find any cash to plough into its most recent significant acquisition, especially at a time when Tata has decided that the time is right to enter Formula One as a sponsor, a notorious money pit for manufacturers.

Lessons from MG Rover

Unlike 2005, when the government allowed MG Rover to go under in a set of circumstances that can only be described as murky, the government has woken up to the reality than JLR is one of the few remaining bastions of British manufacturing and design ingenuity and vital R&D – and therefore worth preserving.

The fallout of Rover’s collapse continues to pose problems in the West Midlands relating to its former staff - most of whom are highly-skilled – and their search for skilled employment. And it should be remembered that when a car manufacturer goes bust it takes out a whole supply chain and raft of dealerships too.

In the current economic conditions the government has often chosen to intervene in such situations; saving jobs, skills and taxes, so I don’t believe a fate similar to Rover’s is likely to befall JLR.

Nor do I think the government has any intention of taking control of JLR. Seeing Jag and Landie through the 12-18 months should make economic sense. The government gets its money back and JLR’s product line-up starts to sell strongly on a global scale. At that point, assuming the global economy has picked up, Tata will need to plough billions into JLR in order to maintain the company’s competitive advantage. The government should get in as quickly as possible, and get out again as soon as conditions allow.

Why we should not bail out JLR

So we’re all agreed – the government saves two British institutions and everyone’s happy. Even the Tories have absurdly tried to align themselves with the public mood, despite vociferously decrying the government’s decision to save Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley.

But if Ford could not make a success of Jaguar over the last 20 years and after investing billions of dollars, runs a popular argument, how can Tata make anything of it?

And haven’t we been through all of this before, with BMC and British Leyland? The short answer is no -
the circumstances behind this crisis are a world apart and if the government stumps up the cash it won’t get its hands dirty.

Another train of thought goes that the government will set a precedent of bailing out struggling firms if it provides the cash for JLR, a concern Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has voiced. While that may be true, a loan for JLR is very different from bailing out Woolies, for example.

Without putting too fine a point on it JLR has a strong product and its workforce highly-skilled on a global level, while the decline of the UK’s car industry would likely be a final nail in the coffin for British manufacturing and a big blow to R&D work in the UK. JLR says it spends £400m on R&D annually.

The third objection I’ve seen is that instead of a loan for JLR the UK should plough money into green technology, a pretty woolly argument that ignores the fact that car manufacturers are best-placed to develop such technology and already spend billions on R&D in this area. Throw the car-makers on the scrap-heap and you wave goodbye to all of that shared and concentrated knowledge.

The JLR loan does have its pitfalls: an extended recession will see off a good many otherwise-healthy manufacturers. Fiat boss Sergio Marchionne recently predicted a massively-consolidated and contracted car industry in the hands on half a dozen mega-companies within five years’ time – and high-end manufacturers are likely to feel the pinch most. If that happens JLR may struggle, government loans or not.

Further, there’s absolutely nothing to prevent Tata shifting production to India, even after a £1bn government loan. Indeed, the threat may be implicit that if Mandelson does not stump up the cash Tata will simply asset-strip the company and lay off all workers.

Lastly, the rest of the UK’s car industry will be watching closely. If parent-company GM, itself receiving billions from the US government in a last-gasp bailout, goes under UK manufacturer Vauxhall will be left with no choice but to go cap-in-hand to Mandelson. Add in Volkswagen-owned Bentley, BMW-owned Rolls-Royce and Mini, Proton-owned Lotus and privately-owned Aston Martin as ‘British’ brands and the JLR precedent may start to look worrying.

All of that ignores the fact that Toyota, Nissan and Honda all design and build cars in the UK too. If Indian-owned JLR, US-owned Vauxhall, German-owned Bentley, Rolls and Mini, Malaysian-owned Lotus and Middle-Eastern sheik-owned Aston get cash, why not them?

It’s a tricky conundrum that’s based on the supposed British-ness of foreign-owned manufacturers, despite the fact that the likes of Vauxhall hasn’t been in British hands for nearly 100 years and the likes of the Toyota Avensis is British-designed and British-built.

But more than that it begs again the question as to exactly why Tata is unable to find the money itself. Might the Indian conglomerate simply to prefer to use government-backed loans at cheaper rates than hard-to-come-by commercial loans from banks?

Why we should bail out JLR

There’s no meaningful catch-all answer to those questions, and Mandelson must know it. But he must also know that, despite the potential ramifications, he must not allow JLR to go to the wall. The feelgood factor of saving a company that a suddenly-nostalgic public is swinging behind will make for a rare ray of light amid the financial gloom. Not to mention key constituencies in the Midlands that Labour will need to win at the next election.

But most of all, stripped of the hysteria, the headline-grabbing campaigns and the false nostalgia is the fact that saving JLR makes good financial sense. For the devastation a ravaged manufacturing base can bring Mandelson must only look to the Welsh Valleys, Midlands, North-East or Scotland – or Detroit for that matter.

The company made a sizeable £300m operating profit as recently as the first two quarters of 2008, has a strong and desirable model range and some of the best automotive minds in the world at its disposal. Land Rover has largely been in profit for some years, though Ford never released actual figures.

Jag has not, due to the FoMoCo’s woeful mismanagement of the brand in an attempt to make successful synergies from its various brands. The results were the naffly-retro S-Type and Mondeo-based X-Type, the latter of which made a mockery of Jag’s supposedly upmarket image. With both of those models going or gone, the symbol of a resurgent Jag is the XF, which was won industry plaudits and sold strongly.

Partly as a result combined UK JLR sales in 2008 were higher than those of volume manufacturers Hyundai, Kia, Mazda, Mini, Seat and Skoda and comfortably ahead of executive/sports/luxury manufacturers Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, Bentley, Cadillac, Jeep, Lexus, Porsche, Rolls-Royce and Saab combined, according to figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).

The bottom line is that, before the credit crunch, JLR was a viable business and the likelihood is that it will be again – assuming the company make it through the next 12-18 months of economic turmoil.

With Tata unable, or possibly unwilling, to seek funds elsewhere to plough into JLR whether it does is down to Peter Mandelson. Where the Labour government once stood back as a British manufacturer went bust it must now intervene, despite the risks.

• While more cynical commentators than me may question the motives behind various media campaigns, there’s a Facebook group on saving JLR and a Downing Street petition.

I’m going to be a little more ambitious and complain about Liverpool culture. Occasionally there’ll be some praise. Other people may join in from time to time.

Mainly I will be acting as a multimedia node.