I’ve just realised that there was something else I meant to say about yesterday’s discussions on Social Media in Enterprises: not one person said that social media are already in enterprises!
They may not be there productively; they may not even be there legitimately; but they are there.
The people who work in enterprises – people like me and you – are active on social networks. They are on Facebook and Twitter; they look at their favourite bands’ pages on MySpace.
They know their way around the internet, and they are used to performing transactions online: they buy CDs on Amazon, they search for free music downloads, they catch up on TV programmes on iPlayer…
They have social and management skills learnt through gaming.
And they carry the world around in their pocket – because most of them have their mobile sitting in their pocket.
They will be using social media whether their employers want them to or not: they’ll be looking at their friends’ Facebook pages in down time, they’ll be tweeting as they sip their coffee and natter to their colleagues.
The organisations they work for aren’t using their skills; they are not leveraging the knowledge and behaviours their staff have exercised by playing around on the internet.
But like it or not, social media are already in enterprises, and organisations that realise this, and can work out how to put all the knowledge, skills and behaviour to work will have an advantage.
In the space of a week or so, they got together a series of eight speakers (it was meant to be ten, I think, but a couple couldn’t make it), who were each given ten minutes to talk about – well, social media in enterprise.
They had lots of different things to say, but there was a lot of agreement, too. The strict time limit meant that there wasn’t too much detail (useful in an area that could potentially get quite technical) but there were lots of ideas and experience. I would love to write about what each speaker said in detail, but that wouldn’t really add anything. In summary, though, here’s what I heard them say:
Alan Patrick talked about the challenges in implementing social media in businesses, and where the value could come from
Benjamin Ellis covered practicalities of social media in organisations, and the effect of, and on, organisation culture (amongst all sorts of other stuff!)
Umair Haque looked at some fairly fundamental assumptions about how organisations work, and how we ask the wrong questions about them; he reckoned the current organisation structures are doomed
Adriana Lukas explained why she thought any attempts the successfully implement social media in businesses are probably doomed
Mat Morrison looked at the structures of the networks in organisations he’d successfully implemented
Euan Semple spoke freeform – without slides – about the disruptive nature of social media and the need to model new behaviours and ways of working
That’s what they talked about; what I took away was possibly different: the common links for me were all about corporate culture and the way people work – the way they share, collaborate and behave; the way they create and utilise communities. There was a discussion at last year’s Edinburgh BarCamp on the same topic. Are there some organisations which will take to new ways of collaborative working using social media tools better than others?
Perhaps there are some parts of organisations that will do so – that are more open, flexible and able to adapt to these tools. Adriana talked about the need to work below the radar – to try to work outside the prevalent culture and outside the usual organisation processes – in order to achieve a beachhead from which broaden an implementation. I have been in a similar situation, where using blogs and wikis in a large corporation had to be hosted externally and the whole process felt so counter-cultural to be revolutionary. The tools didn’t stick, either.
Adriana reckoned the main pitfall was the behaviour of middle managers; Euan reminded us that people in organisations get rewarded for their knowledge, so they will be wary of giving it away. To change the culture and behaviour in organisations, we need to look at all aspects of working – including the processes and the reward structure. If we don’t tackle these aspects of organisation life, we will have little success: people will work to the outcome they are rewarded for and by which they are managed.
The move to flatter, less hierarchical organisations – even, perhaps, the fabled “virtual” organisations where almost all aspects of business are outsourced – may be the most fertile ground for social media in enterprises: they can be nimble, and they rely on effective communication to function properly. Here, use of social media could provide a real business advantage – and maybe this is where the real value of social media in business will be found.
He was talking about motivation and how it relates to our working lives – and in particular to reward cultures.
I have to say that I was more than a little disappointed. It wasn’t that he was uninteresting or a bad speaker – indeed, he was very engaging; instead, it felt like I had heard his talk before. He didn’t seem to add much to his TEDTalk.
His main thesis is that businesses focus on the wrong things to motivate people. They generally use the carrot-and-stick approach to performance management, relying heavily on financial reward packages, rather than using more subtle, and possibly more effective, methods which utilise other needs – our desire for autonomy, the reward from mastering skills, and our sense of purpose.
He quotes work done by Ariely and co [PDF] which demonstrates, for tasks requiring higher cognitive skill, increasing financial incentives actually have a negative effect on perfomance. (For manual, physical skills – despite the move to “knowledge working”, a large proportion of jobs even today – the link between increasing financial incentives and increased performance still holds.)
The Economist recently reviewed Pink’s new book with a rather successful critique. People need money. Even Pink isn’t giving away his book (though I’d better check that…). I haven’t read the book – though I intend to – my comments are only based on his talk.
In his talk, Pink pointed to a flaw in his argument: if appealing to workers’ higher level needs for autonomy, mastery and purpose, you need to get pay people enough so that money isn’t an issue. How much “enough” will be is clearly a personal matter – but I would bet that for most people, their jobs don’t pay nearly enough to clear that hurdle. If you pay below that hurdle, financial incentives will probably work. For some people, that hurdle might be very high.
It also felt like Pink was guilty of treating everybody the same, just as most common reward systems do. But different people will have different drives and motivations. Maybe people who do respond to financial incentives are those who will be good at jobs which have that reward structure. We might all scoff at the large bonuses paid to investment bankers, but whilst we might covet the bonus, would we be willing to do the work? I doubt it.
There are other businesses Pink could have discussed – WL Gore, the makers of Goretex and other hitech PTFE solutions, springs to mind: they have a very different approach to organising staff and operations, and from what I have seen have clearly won the hearts and minds of their staff that I have met.
The thing is, this isn’t new. WL Gore was founded in the 1950s. The last large corporation I was employed by went to great lengths in its attempts to bring its staff into the fold – to make them feel they belonged to the organisation and its culture (albeit a culture that was dominated by financial reward), even as they went through serial rounds of restructuring and redundancy. The practice of “human resource management”, which dates from the 1970s, is all about tying employees into the culture, locking them in so that they will go far beyond what is normally required – and to do it by themselves, internalising the motivation and control.
I’m not saying Pink is wrong – just the opposite, I think he is spot on. I just don’t believe what he’s saying is particularly new or radical, and I don’t think it is universally applicable. Perhaps reading his book may prove me wrong.
The managing director of a business I used to work for once demanded from the firm’s staff that they would enjoy working for the firm: he told everyone they had to “have fun” in a droll, distinctly unhumorous Mancunian accent. It sounded more like a threat than anything else.
Barbara Ehrenreich would have sympathised with us. In discussing her latest book “Smile or Die” at the RSA last week (and all over other media as well – she was on both BBC radio and tv the same day), she attacked current orthodoxy that one had to think positively about everything – to see every knockback as an opportunity, and every kick in the teeth as a positive event.
It was an interesting thesis, though she didn’t wholly win me over: it is generally easier to get on with our lives if we have a positive outlook than otherwise, albeit that, in Ehrenreich’s words, we are deluding ourselves.
She started her war on the positive after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She reacted strongly against the advice to keep a positive outlook, and started to investigate the culture of positive thinking. She found that there was no evidence to support the view that maintaining an optimistic view would increase the likelihood of survival. She reckoned her scientific background (she used to work in cellular immunology) enabled her to sceptical view proposed mechanisms through which positive thinking is said to work: there is no link between optimism and a healthy immune system, and no mechanism by which a healthy immune system could have helped her survive her cancer (as she had been told).
She like she was treated as if she had two diseases – the first, an aggressive and pernicious cancer; the second – her bad attitude.
She railed against the view that a positive outlook can influence the material world – “the secret” used to sell self-help manuals around the world. She said that those seeking to prove the benefits of positive thinking were guilty of cherry picking – presenting only the evidence and examples that support their arguments, ignoring evidence against it.
In the corporate world, delusional optimism is a necessary prerequisite to succeed. Any form of realism is seen as dissent. Failure to smile and spread good cheer means that you will be perceived as “not being a team player”. She met Wall Street bankers who were aware that the pre-crunch boom could only lead to disaster, but who couldn’t say anything for fear of being fired. (Paul Moore, former head of regulatory risk management at HBoS was apparently fired for raising his similar fears – effectively, for doing his job.)
She described the “mandatory optimism” required in America, in all walks of life. She thought it was rife in politics, citing the need to toe the line and remain positive (rather than realistically critical) as key to the USA’s failure to adequately plan for the aftermath of the war in Iraq: conceiving of failure and planning for its possibility simply wasn’t an acceptable option to the strategists in the White House. Any politician who failed to exhibit a positive attitude today would be doomed to fail, whatever their manifesto promises.
Ehrenreich had lots of issues with this prevailing positivism. Firstly, it is delusional, which could only be a mistake. Secondly, it is cruel: it implies that people’s problem lie within themselves – that it is their bad attitude, their negativism, that lead to personal disasters (be that redundancy or tsunami – Ehrenreich quoted an American commentator who believed those caught up in the Asian tsunami of 2005 had only themselves to blame). And thirdly because such wilful ignorance stops us taking reasonable mitigating action. It provides a sticking plaster for society rather than tackling the real issues facing us.
She described positive thinking as a system of control, rather than the empowering personal tool practitioners portray. This crosses into the area of emotional labour, such as when supermarket checkout staff are exhorted to smile, when employees are told they will “have fun” whether they want to or not – when our very emotions become a commodity.
Everything that Ehrenreich said made sense. And yet… When push comes to shove, I would rather have, and be with others who have, a positive attitude than not – albeit one which is tempered with a healthy dose of realism. If we believe that positive outcomes are possible, it seems clear that we are more likely to work towards them than if we don’t – for instance, if we really believe that whatever we do we cannot hope to survive climate change, society would not work towards mitigating climate change.
Ehrenreich also seemed to conflate positive thinking with positive psychology; she expressly disagreed with much of the views of Martin Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology as a practice. As I understand it, positive psychology is about looking at and working with what works well, rather than looking at situations in which people are not functioning well, and building psychological models around that. That seems to be quite different from the dogma of positive thinking. Perhaps her book explains her views on positive psychology – in her talk, her focus seemed clearly on the very different, and clearly delusional, positive thinking. She believed that a focus on happiness was misjudged – happiness is too vague a concept and subject to whim: small changes can greatly influence our happiness.
The announcement this week that Google has produced its new phone reminded me that I have been meaning to review my phone for months. I am not a real technology person: for me, gadgets are tools to be used; so I’ve not written any reviews before, reckoning that these are better written by technical experts who can explain what all the bits and bytes actually mean. On the other hand, I have months of experience of using my phone – so here goes!
In the UK, there has been a Google-branded smart phone for a year or so – T-mobile’s G1 (indeed there is the G2, too – the G1 is no longer available…), running Android OS and manufactured, I think, by HTC. (Incidentally, the new Google Nexus is just a Google-branded phone: it will of course be made by a phone manufacturer – and that will also be HTC.)
It is the first smart phone I have had, and it has changed the way I interact with the internet; I cannot imagine not having unlimited, usually instant access to the web. I use it the whole time, and my phone has probably become the main means by which I use the internet.
There were other smart phones I could have, but I particularly wanted a physical (rather than touchscreen) keyboard. The G1 has cantilevered touchscreen which flips up to reveal a small QWERTY keyboard, so it has the advantages of the touchscreen and a keyboard when I need one.
I love it.
It isn’t perfect, though.
It has a rollerball for moving the cursor around the screen. This is completely useless – it is very hard to control, being far too sensitive with no drag at all. I hardly ever use the rollerball, and frankly it just gets in the way
headphones connect the G1 through a mini-USB port, using an adaptor. Why? WHY?!! This frankly makes the phone useless for listening to music. If I have to carry the adaptor cable (which just gets tangled up in my pocket or bag…) I might as well carry my iPod. Which is what I do, though manly because…
…the music player is appallingly bad. I mean, really very poor indeed. I have tried it a couple of times, and frankly I don’t know why they would bother creating a music player if it can’t cut it. I am pretty sure that there are other players available from the Android store, but I am not going to bother to look.
The touchscreen is sometimes hard to control: sometimes when I am scrolling, it opens links on the web page instead, which is irritating; sometimes (probably due to my inattention to grease marks…) it doesn’t scroll at all. Like I say, possibly my fault.
In particular, the touchscreen doesn’t do some of the fancy tricks that I have jealously seen people do with their iPhones – pinching and opening fingers to zoom in and out, for instance. This may be gimmicky, but I think it could also be very useful – particularly with maps.
I often – really very often – don’t hear incoming calls ring, despite the ringtone being set as loud as possible. This even happens when I am expecting calls, and listening out for them! It just seems very quiet.
the dialer/contact list isn’t intuitive for me; it takes two or more actions to dial from the contacts than just one, which is just daft, frankly. This could be much better designed.
So whilst I love it, it isn’t perfect. It has changed the way I use the internet – but with a little more thought, it could have been so much better.
A couple of weeks ago saw the culmination of the work people from Tuttle have been doing with Counterpoint, the think tank of the British Council, to celebrate the British Council’s 75th anniversary. There was a morning spent in the ICA participating in the outputs – through engaging conversations, creative videos and in-depth discussions.
There were four projects which grew out of a series of conversations with Counterpoint, and I was involved in the project management. These projects variously involved
producing a couple of films raising issues of cultural relations (one of the core interests of the British Council)
instigating and recording a series of cascading conversations on cultural issues
exploring the British Council’s rich film archive
introducing members of the British Council to a variety of social media tools – so they can get on and do it themselves.
This Thursday early in December brought all four strands together.
“Culture” is one those concepts that seems to be haunting me a bit. A while ago I went for a contract with Creative Scotland, which has been tasked to represent “the development of the arts, creative and screen industries across Scotland” – a very broad remit. In the background research for the project (which I didn’t get!), I saw that the committee scrutinising the Scottish Government’s bill for the creation of the agency noted
They have my sympathy, actually. “Culture” is hard to define – it is one of those words that we all know what it means (or think we do…) but is actually hard to define. The British Council’s 1948 charter [pdf] doesn’t define it.
And I’m certainly not going to try, either!
But there are strands… I have worked in “organisation culture”; I am a great user of “high culture” (ballet, dance, jazz, classical concerts… even opera!); and I have travelled to experience different cultures abroad – and within the UK, our regional – and national – cultures being diverse. Culture is all the things we produce and create – high and low, good and bad; the things we like and the things we don’t.
The morning at the ICA started with Catherine Fieschi introducing Counterpoint’s take on the Social Planet. Her keywords were “relationships”, “sharing” and “conversations” – that is what she reckoned created culture, and were central to our modern, social planet.
Lloyd Davis took up the flame and put a context around the work people from Tuttle had done. For him, the interesting space lay in the disintermediation of ideas and artefacts – that is, culture – within the the internet: the “ideas sitting in the cloud”, a rather romantic view! I think there is something else here, too. Much of the work we did with Counterpoint was around the theme of “conversations”. Before writing, conversation was transient; then people could record conversations and, once Guttenberg invented the printing press, share them, too; now we can talk to people around the world, record and share in real time. Conversations have become cultural artefacts, too.
Steve Lawson, who lead the project introducing members of BC to social media, then explained his philosophy for social media and its disruptive potential. Social media can be subversive and bottom-up: nowadays, with smart phones and wifi access, anyone can access the net, and using the tools available depends, as Steve says, on literacy rather than policy. He talked about the serendipitous nature of new media, the ability to combine disparate ideas to create something new, and how that opened that communications.
Debbie Davies and Penny Jackson had each created videos for Counterpoint, and we watch those next. It was a wide brief: produce something relevant. The two videos we saw are very different; but relevant they both were.
Debbie’s made me laugh; Penny’s made me think. There was something very humbling – and moving – about hearing the effect that multi-culturalism had had on people – hearing the story one person told, it struck me that multi-culturalism really does make Britain quite a special place. Living in metropolitan London, it is something I take for granted, so seeing others’ reactions to it is chastening.
This theme continued as we split into groups to have our own curated conversations. Lloyd was strict: to make us listen and engage deeper than we otherwise might, he said we couldn’t ask questions (my default setting!), instead responding with comments or our own observations. This was hard, but it worked: I think our concentration and listening was improved. It was a wide-ranging discussion on how culture affected us – in all sorts of different ways. The conversation was energising and energetic – it was hard not to jump in. My fellow conversationalist and I got excited!
We then saw some more films, this time from the British Council’s film archive. The conversations had been about how we relate to culture, and how cultural relationship make us aware of culture; with these films, it struck me the cultural relationships were through time. Al Robertson has already written about the work he has done exploring the British Council’s film archive; he pulled five shorts out for us to look at, all dating from the 1940s. They were largely propaganda – four were about the war and how Britain was coping, the last about the excellence of Britain’s car manufacturing industry. These films made me acutely aware of what had changed (attitudes towards women in the workplace, for instance, and the loss of much of Britain’s manufacturing); but also what hadn’t – the continuity which is Britain. Even 65 years on, WW2 still defines a lot of our culture. (What’s the betting the Great Escape will be on over Christmas?) Since the 1940s, Britain has been involved in several wars – though it might not affect how we live our lives in the ways the films showed.
Cultural relationships in the present; and with the past.
The work Tuttle did with the British Council was all loosley based around social media and the internet; so maybe there are links to the future too.
I have been trying to gather my thoughts around the recent £1.40 Unconference for several weeks, and not really getting very far.
There are probably several reasons for this: a lack of creativity or desire on my part; but also a reaction to one of the themes of the unconference: the immediacy of new media.
This was the first Amplified event I have been to, and I really liked the unconference format. There were lots of good conversations and lots of good ideas – which is what I look for in a gathering like that.
On the other hand, though, it wasn’t clear what would happen next. Was this just an exchange of thoughts or could we do something more concrete?
There were three sessions: one on the role of social media in politics; one on social media and news; and a plenary discussion trying to tie the whole thing up. The idea of the immediacy of social media ran through it all: the fact that social media let you get information out there, quickly.
I come from a different place: I value reflection and analysis; I like to let things lie and filter thoughts and ideas through my unconscious. Some don’t surface again, but some – like this post! – do, and get conjoined to other thoughts or events.
In this case, the Wave – a protest march I went on yesterday in support of governmental action to combat climate change. I’m not going to go on about climate change or politics here – I have done that before, and others do so more eloquently. But for me, it brought home the occasional need for immediacy.
During yesterday’s march, I tweeted about what was going on, where we were and what I thought. Several people tweeted back saying that they appreciated my comments, and some of them got picked up and retweeted by organisations involved in the Wave, too.
I also took photographs of yesterday’s march. I take a lot of photographs, and, coming from a tradition of processing and editing pictures (after years of working in the darkroom), I usually take the same approach to processing digital photographs. It is because of this that I have hundreds – possibly a thousand – unprocessed digital photos going back to June. The photographs I took yesterday, though, have a certain currency: they are only of use now – well, yesterday really. So when I got in from the march, I sat down and edited them quickly – not quite immediate (I didn’t post them directly from my phone to Twitter, for instance), but a pretty fast turnaround for me.
I also thought about trying out some “social recording”, too, using Audioboo (now available for Android phones like mine as well as iPhones). I decided not to – I am more comfortable producing writen and photographic media than audio (that inability to edit…).
To have any currency, then, my thoughts and images from the Wave as it happened needed to get out there quickly. My further consideration, ponderings and analysis can easily be postponed, filtered and synthesised.
We need both. As the £1.40 unconference discussed, Twitter provides an information stream – it isn’t journalism (and I would never, ever pretend that I was a journalist. Not even a very poor one!). Journalism needs that further consideration and analysis of the information gathered. We need both the quick, unthought-through gossip that Twitter provides – the stream-of-consciousness information flow – and in-depth, journalistic coverage.
Immediacy and impact v consideration and analysis. It isn’t either/or – it is both.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to the RSA twice in a week: first to see Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner on their new book – they rather painfully described it as a “freakquel” – Superfreakonomics. I would tell you about it but I couldn’t do it better than they do, so if you’re interested keep an eye on the RSA’s event page where they said a video of the talk would be posted.
break up conglomerate banks into their retail and investment bank constituents
regulate the retail banks to prevent them risking customers’ deposits and creditors’ assets
make it clear that investors in the investment banks could lose their capital
McGregor was a bit more optimistic than Kay, though neither believed that government of whatever flavour would have the guts to do what was necessary to prevent a recurrence of the banking crisis.
Kay in particular believed that retail banks should take a leaf out of general retailers’ books and sell their customers what their customers want. I thought they had done – they provided cheap credit and enabled borrowers to borrow 125% of the value of their house, thereby creating an asset bubble. They provided credit cards to people who couldn’t actually afford the repayments.
Kay didn’t mention that HBoS, one of the collapsed UK banks which was taken over by Lloyds, was run by Andy Hornby prior to its collapse. Before joining HBoS, Hornby was managing director of retail of Asda, one of the UK’s largest food retailers. He had a solid retail background. This wasn’t what HBoS needed.
Kay’s view of retail banks providing products that customers want seemed to ignore the recent mis-selling scandals: endowment policies, personal pensions, split capital trusts – there is a long list of financial products which have been designed to provide customers what they thought they needed and which ended in disaster for those customers.
I am also not certain that the fundamental proposal – splitting retail and investment banks – would prevent contagion between the two. If we let investment banks fail – as happened to Lehman Brothers – how would we stop the effect ripple through the financial system?
McGregor believed that an essential prerequisite for more stable markets was increased competition in investment banking. She reckoned that investment banks such as Goldman Sachs made excessive profits in an uncompetitive market. She then went on to discuss, however, that the market was bound to be uncompetitive: if a company is trying to raise capital, they can’t very well do the rounds of bankers – indeed, it would possibly violate insider trading rules.
Both she and Kay put the one necessary condition for a return to confidence: trust. This has also been a recurring theme of Mike Mainelli’s recent lecture series at Gresham College. Lack of trust explains why the wholesale money markets froze last year (lending banks didn’t trust borrowers to pay back), and explains why banks aren’t lending to retail borrowers despite record low interest rates (ditto). McGregor pointed out that the word “credit” is derived from the Italian and Latin words for “trust”. No one seems to trust bankers much at all; not even other bankers.
Winning back that trust will be difficult. I am not sure that governments can legislate for it; I am not sure that splitting up conglomerate banks will accomplish it. Kay and McGregor believed that sorting out the finance industries many conflicts of interest might bring it up about.
What interested me most was Steven’s description of the Enlightenment mileu: an ecosystem of interested individuals and environments – largely coffee shops – which promoted the free circulation and sharing of new ideas. With open discussion and scepticism testing their ideas, these environments promoted a new synthesis; the whole was greater than the sum. Johnson reckoned that the discovery of photosynthesis and its roll in releasing oxygen into the atmosphere was down to the sharing of ideas between Priestley, Benjamin Franklin and others.
This seemed to resonate with those in the audience interested in open source technology and working, free-flowing ideas and co-operation being central to their working methods. (This also reminded me of Mike Masnick’s talk in Edinburgh learlier in the year, where he said that it was the sharing of ideas around Silicon Valley that made the area so innovative.)
Johnson also believed that dissent and scepticism were important qualities which facilititated innovation. This requires a tolerant society, able to accept dissent – not something that was guaranteed in the Enlightenment: Johnson described how Priestley had been chased from his Birmingham home by rioters who took exception to his dissentng religious views; they burnt down his home and he took exile in the young USA.
Johnson reckoned that the equivalent to the coffee house is now to be found online – natch. Modern media open up access to anyone with an internet connection, and we can all contribute, borrow ideas (copyright or not…) and play around with them, creating new syntheses in exchange.
His description of the coffee shop sounded to me very much like Tuttle: I think the face-to-face, social aspects of meeting together add a lot to the online fora the internet facilitates. I think it helps the serendipity and the fluidity of conversations. One never knows who is going to be there, and it is easier to explore and disagree face-to-face than it is online. The offline gathering engenders trust – and that is important if you are sharing ideas, debating and arguing.
I was in a film about race relations in London – set in Notting Hill Gate. This was the time of the Notting Hill race riots; Notting Hill was a run down area, not home to politicians and film stars as it is now. In 1965 – when my story is set – the Second World War was still memory rather than history; people were still arriving on ships from the Carribean like the Windrush; tension was high.
But really, it was just a story about a little boy and a little girl: Jemima and Johnny. I played Johnny (and originally it was called Johnny and Jemima, which is how I still think of it…); a little girl played Jemima (obviously enough). In the film Johnny’s father was a rabble-rouser for the National Front (the precursor to today’s voter-friendly, unracist BNP); Jemima’s family recently arrived from the Caribbean. The film was set among the rubble in bombed streets of Notting Hill and Westbourne Park (no Trellick Tower; no Westway); the two warring families on different sides of the race divide had to work together to rescue us.
I don’t actually remember much about making the film: early November mornings, dark and cold; walking through Portobello market to buy chips; playing with a white rat; having to be taught how to skip down the street.
Me. And “Jemima”. Not quite skipping.
It was only by chance that I was in the film. The director, Lionel Ngakane, a South African emigre, was a friend of my parents; he saw me at a party and exclaimed “that boy must be in my film!” So I was. My brother was too, part of a gang of kids running through the streets.
It was a low, low budget film. Lionel couldn’t afford to record sound, so it was overdubbed afterwards. For reasons I never understood, he used an actress to speak my lines, and the voice never really sounded right. They spelt my name wrong in the credits and couldn’t afford to correct it: my one shot at fame and IMDB have my name wrong!
Lionel was an interesting character. I saw a lot of him over the years; he often talked of making a sequel to Jemima and Johnny, but nothing came of it. The film was shown at various film festivals and won a prize at the Venice.
I was never certain why Lionel was exiled from South Africa. He was an active supporter of the ANC, and there was a story that he had been gun-running, smuggling guns into the country. It is possible a much younger me made that story up, though. For whatever reason, he had to leave South Africa, unable to return; he believed that he was being watched by South African agents in London.
One of my earliest political memories involves Lionel. When I was about ten, Lionel’s father died, and Lionel applied for a temporary visa to return to South Africa for the funeral. He surprised that he was given permission to visit. On arriving in South Africa, however, he was arrested, questionned and put on the first plane back to London. Young though I was, I thought this was unbelievably cruel and mean-spirited; I could half imagine the South African authorities not allowing him back, but to say he could return for the funeral and then to stop him on the brink seemed incredibly mean.
I remember speaking to Lionel in April 1994. He had just cast his vote in the first democratic elections for South Africa at South Africa House in London. He was ecstatic – he couldn’t believe it. Not only was he able to vote in a South African election for the first time, but he had been actively welcomed into South Africa House – a building he had picketed many times and which he had never been allowed in before. Now they were happy to have him enter! He wept down the phone.
He returned to South Africa permanently in the late 1990s and died a few years later.
Jemima and Johnny is still being shown – it can be found in the BFI. My then-partner saw a screening in the Edinburgh Filmhouse when it was shown as part of a series about Black Britain a few years ago – I couldn’t go. It has recently been discussed on Radio 4 in a programme about black British cinema. I have a copy on video tape somewhere, which I really should get transferred to DVD, I guess.
1I must declare an interest – I am involved in the Counterpoint projects, but not in an editorial or content-creation role – it is just that my involvement has pricked these thoughts!
Posted by Patrick 
