Portly comedian Terry Scott was the son of Polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott. This fact explains the ‘tears behind the laughter’ expression visible on the chubby comedy actor’s face in the 1969 feature film Carry on Camping when Barbara Windsor leaves the tent in order to put the top back on her bikini. The same melancholic expression was often evident in snowy Christmas episodes of classic 70s sitcom ‘Terry and June’.

Thank God for Jack Straw. Where would we be without him, eh? I will sleep safer tonight knowing that he’s used his superhuman power as Minister for Justice (does the role come with a Stan Lee designed costume? Something in figure-hugging bright red spandex with a blue satin cape) and denied Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs parole. Thank fuck for that! We don’t want that mad twat roaming the streets, do we? Phew! And I don’t feel that I’m alone in resting easier due to Jack’s vigilance and care. I think the people of Britain will heave a sigh of relief knowing that dangerous bastard is still behind bars and not menacing us all with his geriatric viciousness. Jack summed up the heaving tide of outraged public opinion that still seethes against the train robber: ‘Biggs chose not to obey the law and respect the punishments given to him - the legal system in this country deserves more respect than this.’ Too right. Let’s have more of this.

Biggs, for anyone who has no idea of history or popular culture beyond the size of Jordan’s tits and how many number ones Take That have had, was part of a gang who robbed a Royal Mail train in the summer of 1963, while the Beatles were at number one with ‘She loves you’ and The Great Escape was playing in cinemas, getting away with £2.6 million (about £38 million in today’s money when adjusted for inflation, probably more). Biggsy’s crucial role in the operation was to throw the mail bags into the back of a van after proving to be too thick to operate the train once they had it stopped. This is the Night Mail, get ready to board her, fat with the cheque and the postal order, cash for the rich, cash for the poor, chuck out the bags and stand by the door. Heading for Ledburn, slap bang on time. Mess with the lights and she’ll stop for the crime. Away with the readies and head for the safe gaff, play some Monopoly with real notes for a laugh. Keep our heads low until the fuss passes – but we’ll all do some time ‘cos of our dabs and the grasses. He was arrested in 1963 and sentenced in 1964. Biggs escaped from Wandsworth prison in 1965, went on the run through several countries and through several recordings with the Sex Pistols, before handing himself in back in 2001. Biggs is now 79 years old and has suffered a series of strokes whilst in prison. He’s served 10 years of his original 30 year sentence. Add on inflation and we’re talking about 140 years bird the geezer’s done.

Biggs has applied for parole on several occasions. All denied. This time the parole board had approved Biggs’ application for early release. Namby pamby liberal wets. Not like New New New Labour and their recently found vein of white working class values in the wake of last months council and Euro election debacle. When they lost ground to the BNP and Tories. Oh no, they’ve got their finger on the pulse now, after a mere twelve years in government. Local homes for local people. Kick dole spongers back into employment or cut their handouts. Keep octogenarian train robbers behind bars. No u-turn from rampant liberalism, just listening to the grassroots. Right on. And, let’s not forget, even the leftie-thinking parole board stated of blagger Biggs: ‘there was little evidence, apart from his increased age, to suggest he would not return to his old criminal lifestyle.’ And so Jack stepped in. Too right. I bet Biggs can’t wait to have a meet with some East End hard nuts and plan another big job. I can see it now, Biggs pulling armed capers with shootas, pausing mid-blag to rub Deep Heat into his arthritic knees and pop some glycerine under his tongue to ease his angina. Biggs pulling off daring jewellery heists like a modern day Thomas Crowne. Face contorted behind a ripped pair of 15 demier tights, sawn offs blazing. Screaming at the top of his voice through a blizzard of white fivers: ‘No bastard copper’s going to take me alive!’ And then being assisted into the getaway car by his home help. Come on, Ronnie, let's get you back to the home for a nice cup of tea and some Madeira Cake. You can count your swag this afternoon when you've had a nap.

But no, we’re safe. Our Jack has overruled the parole board having seen through the villain’s decrepit façade. Dangerous, devious bastard that he is. That Jaguar Mark 2 will have to stop under wraps in a lock up down in Streatham a bit longer. Tuned and ready to knock off that Securicor van. Since 1966. A couple of pounds of jelly and a cosh in the glove box. Because Justice Jack has said: ‘Mr Biggs is wholly unrepentant and the Parole Board found his propensity to breach trust a very significant factor. He has not undertaken risk-related work and does not regret his offending.’ The slag!

I fully agree with prisoners serving out the full term of their sentences. Everyone should do what they’re given by the court. No arguments. And if we’re not going to have a death penalty (for now) then life should mean life. No parole, no get out of jail card, no requisite period. And so, under these terms, Jack Straw is probably right to deny the octogenarian parole. But it doesn’t really work like that. No one serves their full sentence. Someone given five years will do less than three. And good behaviour doesn’t alter the decision to release early any more than general ambivalence does. They simply get let out. And so I have to ask myself the question, does Biggs really pose a more serious threat to society than the killers of James Bulger? Who would I rather have living next door to me, Ronnie Biggs or child-killer Robert Thompson? Who would you? But Thompson has been a free man since 2001 and is still only twenty-five years old, after serving eight years for torturing and murdering a two year old boy. So where is the parity there? Money or human life, which does the criminal justice system prize the highest? When courts are handing out twelve month sentences for manslaughter.

Biggs is an easy target. For Labour to get tough on crime. To be seen to be tough on crime. High profile, few rights, a shed load of potential sentence left to play with. But does the denial of Biggs’ parole really serve a purpose other than to let big Jack stretch his heroic muscles? And what of Bigg’s apparent unrepentance, as stated by Justice Jack and the parole board? Hmmm. I seem to recall Jonathan King showing little repentance when he was released early on parole after being found guilty of four indecent assaults on fourteen and fifteen year old boys, and two offences of buggery and attempted buggery on two boys aged fourteen. Nasty crimes.  Life destroying crimes. King gave a press conference outside Maidstone Prison on the day he was released, three years into his seven year sentence. Did King show regret at his offending during this press conference? Oh no, just a sec, he was saying he hadn’t done it, that’s right. ‘I'm totally, absolutely 100% innocent.’ So how’s that work then? What message is that to send to the victims? To other like minded dirty bastards? To send to the parole board? To send to the Justice Minister? Out after serving half his time without any remorse. So why him and not Biggs? And correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t remember Ronnie Biggs slipping his finger up anyone’s arse when he robbed the mail train.

It might be noted that Bruce Reynolds, the ‘brains’ behind the Great Train Robbery, was sentenced only to ten years, after having been on the run following the crime and enjoying considerably more of the proceeds than Biggs ever did. Reynolds has been a free man since 1979.

It has been revealed that Michael Jackson is working as PCSO Supervisor whilst in London for his series of record breaking concerts at the O2 Arena. Jacko, who became a Police Community Support Officer in March and was promoted to supervisor only last week, is working from the Isle of Dogs and responsible for eight staff.

‘I just want to give something back,’ said Jacko as he filled out a Admin 171 for an off road bike that had been tearing around scrubland.  ‘I love being out here, among the ordinary people, where the city winks a sleepless eye. Well, at least until midnight. I’m doing this for the children of the world.'

Jackson is contracted to work until the end of the year but says he may stay on beyond this. ‘I’m finding it so rewarding. I have several tea stops on my beat and even go into Noble’s Amusements for some time on the dance off machine.’

Jackson is to appear as a PCSO in a series of billboard advertisements in the capital, mimicking General Kitchener’s ‘Your country needs you!’ pose under the slogan, ‘Be careful of what you do 'cause the lie becomes the truth!’

Jacko posing for his ‘know your PCSO’ picture. ‘I’ve adapted the uniform and given it some of my trademark stardust,’ he said.

Two Beatles links which kept me busy last night. The first has an obsessive attention to detail - in a totally pointless and somehow melancholy way - that I can't help but admire. An attempt to dive back inside four years of the 1960s; time travel for the mind. The second opens up a whole new window on their lives during a period that has now been packaged and presented so many times. But the images on this second site are a million miles away from the polished studio photographs and carefully designed album covers.

Gordon Brown is pledging his affinity with rural, carrot-crunching masturbators the length and breadth of Great Britain by promising ultra-fast broadband for every home. Hurrah! Soon, if big Gordon gets his way, you’ll be able to crack one off to crotchless panty-wearing cheerleaders even deep in the boggy bowels of rural Cornwall, download handy-cam-shandy gonzo porn when atop the very peak of Cumbria’s Scafell Pike and live stream triple-X web cams, without the off-putting pauses, pixelization and crashes that spoil your rhythm, direct to the middle of the lonely purple heather-carpeted North Yorkshire moors. The Prime Minister has stated his belief that fast broadband is as vital to our happiness, well-being and prosperity as electricity and water. And he’s right, access to redtube and the BBC iPlayer is fundamental to the Human Rights of this country. During these dark days of recession and financial despair we owe it to ourselves to wallow in porn and velvety repeats of ‘My Family’. Our Gordon is promising lightening fast cyber scuzz for everyone. At last, a Prime Minister who understands the needs of his people.

The plan is to get 50mbs capability piped into the homes of the nation by 2017, investing heavily in Fibre to the Cabinet technology. This will mean that so-called ‘Not Spots’ that are presently denied the pleasures of illegal file sharing and HD quality pornography through poor network capacity will be brought into the 21^st Century and be gobbling gigabytes of illicit downloads before you can type ‘MILF money shot’ into the Google search bar. The speeds will be tremendous. No more irksome, frustrating waits for that Dutch hardcore to buffer, your access to big breasted Heidi in Amsterdam will be immediate and smoother than her shaved lady bits. The upgrades in hardware will be achieved with a 50p per month tax on all landlines, raising somewhere in the region of £170,000,000 per year. The Porn Tax. But it will be worth it, believe me. Those lactating ebony babes will arrive faster than ever. The Latino teens (certified 18) will be performing some girl on girl on your dual CCFL back-lit LCD 17” laptop screen within nanoseconds. It’s going to be seamless. But it’s not just about porn. Watching that Anthea Turner explosion clip on Youtube will be crisper. Scamsters in Nigeria will have quicker access than ever to your personal banking details. Those spam emails for Viagra and pipe lengthening, girth enhancing pills will be dropping into you inbox faster than you ever thought possible. And it’s all thanks to Gordon Brown.

But what is the taxpayer going to get in return for this massive forced investment? Who is going to profit? Who is going to get fat? The taxpayer buys the cables, the taxpayer creates the infrastructure, the taxpayer shovels money into the project and then some corporate branded internet service provider charges the taxpayer for using the network. Eh? In simple terms the taxpayers’ money is a ‘top up’ to private investment but still it buys the taxpayer nothing. It secures the taxpayer nothing. The taxpayer ends up with a stake in nothing. Because Nationalization is bad. Do you understand? Bad. Because to be seen to be progressive and all that it’s vital that we just throw our tax money away without return. We’re progressive, we believe in the free market. I mean, look how well the banking world has conducted itself. It’s the sensible way forward. So the taxpayer will still have to stump up more cash to use the service. Meaning that we pay twice. Sounds reasonable for New Labour’s vision of Britain. Where everything costs more than it should through layered taxation and the scurried vision of private/public partnerships. A vision that shackled us to the monstrous debt of Private Finance Initiatives. That saw National Insurance contributions increase at the same time that prescription charges went up (still, I get a warm glow when I think of how my money is helping fund the needle exchange and the methadone programmes, don’t you?). This is the sort of forward thinking free enterprise I associate with the Golden Age of Thatcherism, when Maggie was selling us back the major utilities and heavy industry that we already owned. British Gas, British Telecom, the National Grid, British Nuclear, British Steel, council homes. Build it and they will come – and then make you pay for what you funded in the first place. A cracking idea. Because there is nothing more reliable than the immutable complacency of the British taxpayer. And you’ve got to admire the sort of innovative thought that manages to get someone to pay twice for the same thing and still end up owning nothing and then take credit for having done us all a favour. I love it.

Anyway, it looks like Angelika’s bonk booth in Prague is finally buffered. I’d better go before I lose my connection.

Graffiti artist Banksy has caused a media storm today with his latest exhibition in Bristol. Banksy goes to great lengths to conceal his identity. The reason for this is because Banksy is already famous in another guise. Banksy is in fact shamed TV presenter Michael Barrymore. You can see it in the humour of such works as his hitchhiking Charles Manson. Straight out of the ‘Strike it lucky’ manual. Awight?

It's easy to take a cynical view of The La's singer/songwriter Lee Mavers - especially if your ideal of success in the music industry is chimp-legged Robbie Williams, smarming up to the masses to pick their pockets, hawking out musical flem into the willing faces of the musically illiterate, and your only measurement of musical success is in terms of chart placings, sales and money earned, together with the column inches dedicated to so-called news of the latest actress/model that your reported to be fettling between the sheets of 'The News of the World' and 'Hello'. Lee Mavers: A wasted talent. A spent force. A musical footnote. A mythical charlatan.

But that is, perhaps, to miss the point of what Mavers is about. Music. Fundamentally - music. Not business, not industry. Music.

To the uninitiated: the La's were a Liverpool group formed in the 1980s, who signed a recording contract in 1986, then through various personnel changes recorded and re-recorded, and recorded again, their first album under three different producers and in several different studios, together with trying out the acoustic potential of the occasional kitchen and cattle shed. Some singles were released, including the now ubiquitous 'There She Goes', but mainstream success eluded them. As did a release date for the first album. Still not happy with the results, the eponymous album was released from the final recordings produced by U2 collaborator Steve Lillywhite and against the wishes of the group late in 1990. The La's - and especially Mavers - were withering in the criticism of the album at the time, a stance that's never altered. 'Our album is crap.'

After the album's release the La's continued stutteringly. There were some hit and miss live appearances. Thoughts on the future of the band were kept alive by varying stories surrounding their activities - they were recording the next album in their own 8-track studio in Liverpool, they were back in yet another recording studio giving the first album another crack to get it right, new material was being laid down via the Beatles' mixing desk from Abbey Road. And so on. Curly ginger John Power left the band to form Cast and start his own story after a couple more years and more elaborate tales of Lee Mavers' perfectionism. Mavers carried on with new and ever varying band members before slipping into obscurity and from there into Syd Barrett-like cult status. No further new releases from the band or Mavers.

You listen to the album not sure what to expect on the back of the stories, but when you get down to it then it's difficult to see what Mavers was so upset about. Apart from 'Freedom Song' - which I've never liked - the collection of songs is solid. The obvious set-piece is 'There she goes', but 'Son of a gun' and 'Timeless Melody' are equally statuesque, the rest pull the experience together and absolutely nothing disappoints. In some ways the 60s based music is anachronistic but in so many other ways it is ahead of its time (especially considered in the light of Britpop and beyond). If you're into the sound of layered harmonies, chiming guitars, rockabilly drums then the album is a classic. Given the music that surrounded it at the time - drum machines and programmed synths, looping lifts from 70s disco and a sampled soul melody - the album today now sounds fresher than ever. The La's, like the Stone Roses, were part of a renaissance which would later spawn Oasis and Britpop.

So what was Mavers' problem?

A little more digging into alternative recordings and mixes gives food for thought. Compare the earlier version of 'I.O.U.' with the one that appears on the Lillywhite version (both available on the 2001 CD re-issue of the album). There is no comparison. It's like a recording on vitamin 'C', friendly bacteria, and a 12-month fitness regime, lifted, brighter, better. And those granite-like Pete Townsend guitar chords on the end of the verses, Keith Moon (or in this case, Chris Sharrock) cymbals splashing over them like breakers on the shore. The vocals have more impact and the melody hits harder. A seemingly better song, but the same song. And Mavers wasn't happy with this one either - mixed from the 'missing' Mike Hedges [1] sessions .

This re-evaluation is backed up by other recordings. 'Over', with Mavers sounding (intentionally or not) unbelievably like John Lennon (in the same way that Northern Soul legend J.J. Barnes sounds like Marvin Gaye on 'Sad day coming'). This track was recorded in one take in a barn in Liverpool. A shocking lo-fi production, but the moments shine through. The sound you heard when you listened to songs as a child is there. That magic. And a Mavers approved release. For that reason?

So is it the quality of the songs rather than the production that shines through to make 'The La's' a classic inspite of itself?

Consider this and then maybe you get to thinking that Mavers had a point. But he's taken this point to an extreme and for nearly twenty years and seems unable to let go.

The refusal of 'There she goes' to disappear but continually return in several inferior cover versions, adverts, films and TV programmes, raises the perennial question, 'Whatever happened to the La's, and what is the songs writer Lee Mavers doing now?'

The La's story was revived in 2003 with Matt Macefield's 'In Search of the La's: a secret Liverpool' (ISBN 1-900924-63-3). The book both gives and takes away from the La's and the Lee Mavers' legend. The sense of discovery in the book is palpable - conversations with former La's band members and associates in various Liverpool pubs, old and half-forgotten articles from music magazines, the elusive search for what Mavers and his music was and is all about. Culminating in the bitter/sweet sight of Mavers - still enthusiastic, with his kids, his guitars, and a home-built, eclectic studio, with the tantalising sight of completed reels of recordings. And then just as you get a glimpse of him and hear his Scouse tones tell the story, Mavers disappears again. Up his own arse or into his own future? Take your pick.

There have been stirrings which gave hope of a second album of new material. Perhaps doubled with a Mavers-sanctioned re-recording of the first album. A series of live show in the summer of 2005 with John Power promised much. I saw them at the Leadmill. Aficionados flooding the place. Big expectations. Mavers looking no different that when he'd last been glimpsed a decade before. The songs faultless. The drummer stood up with the longest cigarette in the world.

But nothing happened.

In 2006 the band's old BBC sessions were released. They came at the songs from a different angle. A better version of 'Son of a gun' than on the original album. In 2008 as many available recordings from labyrinth of sessions from 1986 to 1990 bundled together with Steve Lillywhite's original offering. The same songs, fresh perspectives. Worth having. But no new tracks.

Recent news has Mavers recording again. This time with Babyshambles bassist Drew McConnell. A second album brooding. We'll see.

For me, Lee Mavers remains an attractive enigma. Living in a semi in Huyton on Merseyside - the suburb of Liverpool where he was born and grew up - clean from the hard drugs that dogged his mid-1990s, a family, still writing, royalties rolling in (primarily from 'There She Goes') meaning that he?s free to walk his own path, no one sure how much is getting recorded, but rumours of new material filtering through. 'Human Race', the song that's better than 'There she goes'. 'Raindance' and others. Perfecting what he wants to do, what he needs to be.
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1] The second recording sessions for the debut album, c.1988/89, down in Devon at Hedges' house, a keynote to the session being the use of a mixing desk from Abbey Road studio 2 in the 1960s, used by the Beatles. Hedges was at the time working for Devon and Cornwall Police. He would, like Mavers, subsequently turn his back on the music industry and become Chief Constable of South Yorkshire. It's rumoured that he produced tracks for Pulp in Sheffield during 2003.