At the Ryebank Fields protest camp dawn breaks like an unrevised second year Town Planning exam day…though the hardy souls still taking the fight to Manchester Metropolitan University sense a powerful new presence in The Force: former New Labour architect, Peter Mandelson.
Readers will recall the university is Mandelson’s Wednesday afternoon, where as Chancellor he gets to stroke his white cat by the great hamster wheels of British higher education.
It was when letters plopped through tent flaps announcing the public consultation that protestors decided to research Lexington Communications, the PR company who had written to them. “We just went on Powerbase,” says activist Stephen Alton. “And looked up the boss, Mike Craven. He was Chief Media Officer in Tony Blair’s first government. The woman we actually dealt with had worked in Jack Straw’s office. The man who funded the firm, Lord Stevenson, is listed as “a lifelong personal friend of Peter Mandelson.”
The green space on the Chorlton-Trafford border is earmarked for 120 new homes after the university decided to sell the land in order to buy a sports car. There’s been a permanent camp there since spring last year – though for activists the inevitable began to loom larger once the contract to build the housing estate was awarded to Step Places and Southway Housing in July.
Then came the letter. 
Though yet to have been spied walking his hounds on the site, Mandelson might now reasonably be thought to be an actor in the affair, activists believe…as a man with form politically speaking, and known to be at home in a web of service provision, private money, public relations and gossamer straightjackets.
So is the campaign steeling itself now the Things Can Only Get Better gang are on the case?
“The campaign is as strong as it’s ever been,” says Stephen. “People join, people leave, but the resistance is still there. The camp was intended to stop the university fencing the place, and that seems to have worked, but we’ll have to see what happens with this consultation. Sounds like it’s going to be a drawn-out process.”
What’s needed is greater scrutiny, he insists.
“We had a journalist at the MEN who wanted to do an expose, but it looks like she might have been put off the story. It’s like that report on Ancoats and the Abu Dhabi United Group…that didn’t get in the paper either.”
Good cop sad cop
Time was when Korean cinema meant not much to no one on these shores…but times change. For just as K-Pop is now the fastest-growing music sector on the planet, offering Western kids a hypermodern slant on bubblegum manufacture, and just as the TV series Squid Game this year became the most popular series in Netflix’s history…so the nation’s Tinseltown walks tall, these days, on the global stage.
In 2020 the satirical comedy Parasite shocked the world by becoming the first foreign language film in history to bag Best Picture at the Academy Awards. And on Saturday night Cinema 1 at HOME was sold out for the latest offering from the man who kicked off the K-Wave in the first place: Oldboy directior Park-chanwook.
What do we see when we watch our culture reflected back at us from the East Asian peninsula? A projection of the Gen Z identity conversation? Or just an industry thrumming with vitality and at the peak of its game? In the case of the new film it’s a Hitchcockian cop sizzler complete with strong sexual undertow.
Park Hae-il stars as a good cop who goes doolally for a woman he suspects may be responsible for her husband’s murder. Which is the plot to Basic Instinct, of course, except with its clever camera angles (ants shot through a dead man’s eyeball) and dreamy logic (it’s loose as a goose in the second half) this one is a bit like the director studied the shot list from Vertigo and said hold my beer. Not necessarily the destructor of any box office records, potentially, but still another piece of a broken mirror winking brightly back at us.
