Have written a short blog today for The Guardian about The Apprentice and the show’s attempts to re-brand my home town of Margate. You can read it over at the TV blog page.

One of my photographs (seen below) is in an exhibition in Margate that opens this Friday evening.

The picture is from a set I took when I went to Margate with Tracey Emin to talk about shared memories, arts regeneration and the seafront/Dreamland. You can pop along and buy it for a bargain price: framed and everything.

I have a piece in today’s Sunday Express about the future of Dreamland, in my home town of Margate. Plans are now afoot to re-open the site as a heritage theme park and my article is about that, as well as my grandfather who worked there for 30 years.

Bill Sedgwick working by the Scenic Railway

I have an entry in a new book called TwitterTitters that is published today on the web publishing site Lulu in aid of Comic Relief. The story is a monologue entitled The Big White Telephone, which is the story of two girls and one toilet cubicle (easy, no, not that) in a nightclub in what I suppose is Margate in about 1990. It contains expletives, vomit and general filth.

The book is £4.99 to download or £9.00 for a print edition. It was all organised and commissioned on the hip new social networking site Twitter, where you can now follow me and every inane thought I may have. The book also contains new material from Dave Spikey, Nat Coombs and Sid Vicious*. I never ever watch Comic Relief on TV, as I cannot stand it. But I won’t judge you if you do. Honest.

*this is an outright lie.

This week’s Private Eye (that most superior of news and satire sources) contains a lengthy piece on Margate blogger Tony Flaig in its Rotten Boroughs section (as reported on here by fellow Thanutian blogger Eastcliff Richard).

Flaig recently suspended posts on his blog, following what looked, in my opinion, to be heavy-handed legal snarling from Sir Bob Of Geldof’s production company Ten Alps over criticisms of Kent County Council’s KTV service, which Ten Alps makes. Geldof has been an outspoken critic of Margate and even of Kent as a whole, which has made him pretty unpopular in the seaside town and elsewhere.

Flaig was awaiting some confirmation of what he had done to so upset bigwigs at Ten Alps and Kent County Council before he carried on blogging. He recently recieved a letter from KCC, which Private Eye reports as: “an opaque missive from Geoff Wild, Kent CC’s director of law & governance, containing the line: ‘If you continue to choose to exercise your right to free speech in the manner that you do - as is your right - you must expect to take whatever consequences the law provides…’” Hmmm.

Flaig is now back writing on his excellent blog, providing an insightful working class perspective on all matters Kent and Thanet. Long may he continue to do so, hopefully unhindered by legal letters from KCC or Ten Alps. Add his blog to your reader and watch what happens next.

The George Osborne saga is a great news story that probably won’t go away until Osborne gives a full and frank interview or falls on his sword, but the story is not actually the story, for me at least. The public-facing story is the portrait of the British political system that this provides: shadow front benchers sucking up to oligarchs, their best mates mostly being millionaires, the new Business Secretary hanging out in the same company (shorn of his Militant-style moustache and any socialist principles long ago), the chief Tory fundraiser being an old Oxford chum of David Cameron and 99% of those involved in the world of Westminster either having their nose in the trough (admittedly often on behalf of ‘the party’) or trying to press their snout in amongst those already feeding. Not one of them can answer a straight question with a straight answer. This is a world so far removed from the man or woman on the street that it is little wonder that election turnouts are so low.

Growing up in Margate, Kent as a working class boy I saw sleaze as the way that politics ran. The local MP, William Rees-Davies, was known among his constituents as The One-Armed Bandit, which was a delightful conflation of the fact that he did, in fact, have one arm, was representing a seaside constituency where the slot machine was king and was rumoured to like the odd backhander. One of his cohorts at Thanet District Council was Cyril Hoser, a man, if memory serves, convicted of forging everything from dollar bills to ‘O’ level certificates. As I was too opinionated and distracted at school to stay on to take my ‘A’ levels (and not rich enough to buy any of Mr Hoser’s) I attended the local college in Ramsgate. Here, my first student political action was to occupy the office of Jonathan Aitken MP. His secretary said he was not in, but as he was the man who lied and lied and lied he may well have been hiding in the broom cupboard.

Among the local populace, Thanet District Council always had a reputation somewhere below that held by the residents of the London boroughs of Hackney or Lambeth about their councils. The locals expect political promises to fade and die and for politicians to feather their nests. I have no idea of the moral state of the current administration, though Private Eye did recently describe the council as ‘supine‘ and has also commented on its activities over a recent large scale development in the area.

Anyway, a return to Tory sleaze is great news for bloggers and satirists alike. It can’t be too long before shadow ministers are telling more intricate lies or throwing themselves on prostitutes while their backbench colleagues attempt to see who can swing from the rafters while eating citrus fruits (hopefully not air freighted, as that would spoil the party’s green agenda).