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Glasgow Prestwick Airport – perhaps better known as ‘Troon International’ – is quite possibly the worst airport through which I’ve flown. I’m not a hugely seasoned traveller, but I was once nearly arrested in pitch darkness at East Midlands at 2am (they’d turned off the terminal lights), and earlier this year was trapped in a small departure lounge at New Delhi, the principle feature of which was a total lack of escape potential from the worst sewage smell I’ve ever encountered. What, then, can Prestwick possibly do to earn my nomination? Let me see…

1. There’s a Ryanair Dublin flight at 06:50 on Monday morning. This is not a good time, given that a taxi to Prestwick costs £35 (ie. usually more than the flight), the trains don’t start for another couple of hours, and hence one pretty much has to drive.
2. Also leaving at or around 07:00 are flights to Pisa, Paris Beauvais, Stanstead, and Prague. Also Ryanair. All of them. Given that the only airline using Troon International for more than two flights a day is Ryanair, this strikes one as spectacularly inept planning.
3. Ryanair typically put on about seven check-in staff.
4. One of the check-in staff is brilliant (top tip: the older lady with the greying hair). The others we’ve timed at three minutes and thirty seconds per passenger. We’ve had plenty of opportunity to check that figure.
5. 3:30mins × 100 people on a 737 ÷ 2 check-in lines (if you’re lucky) = 2½ hours to check in the whole plane. For a 45-minute flight. If your check-in lines don’t include the lady with greying hair, you’re not going to make it unless you rock up at 4am.
6. Did I mention that the check-in staff are surly, uncommunicative, and more intent on chatting with each other than helping passengers? Oh, you guessed, huh?
7. The whole process is, of course, complicated by Ryanair’s customer-hostile policy of requiring payment for checked baggage. In the event that you’ve not prebooked this, of course the check-in desks can’t take payment — that requires a trip to a different counter, with its own lengthy queue… which (obviously, ahem) doesn’t have a luggage conveyor. Hence, having coughed up the dough, one must rejoin one’s original check-in queue to actually check-in the bag. Most customers find this process entirely delightful.
8. Once one’s shuffled through the check-in queue, one joins the security check queue. Which is even longer, and slower. There are two scanners, but before one reaches them Prestwick insists on rifling through one’s hand luggage. By hand. They’re quick (ie. cursory), but 500 people trying to get through security within a one-hour window, with three staff on, gives them only about 20 seconds each.
9. They confiscate all fluids, creams, gels, etc, as per current UK regulations (“Arrgh! Lipsalve!“). If one wishes to keep one’s containers, however, they’ll empty the contents… into a large bin. With all the other fluids. Because, clearly, if you’re confiscating liquids on the grounds that they might be explosives, mixing them together can’t possibly be dangerous, right? Sigh…
10. At the scanners, one must remove belts, shoes, laptops, and outer jackets (including, on occasion, cardigans), and remember to place everything in the right stacking order in the minimal number of trays, since each machine has a stock of only about six.
11. All laptops are swab-checked. I haven’t seen any exceptions to this, yet have never had my PowerBook swabbed at any other airport.
12. Having collected one’s belt, shoes, laptop, outer jacket, bag, cash, wallet, phone, boarding card, and so on, one’s left hopping around trying to redress oneself, with 300 people right behind all intent on missing their flights.
13. The only route from security to the departure lounge is through the duty-free shop, the layout of which is specifically and carefully designed to impede progress. In particular, light and easily-dislodged items are cleverly placed at bag-height, in order that they be most readily knocked off the displays.
14. Once through the duty-free gauntlet, the route through the departure lounge to the gates is similarly blocked… by seats.
15. The seats are almost all covered in chewing-gum, and give every appearance of having been thus disfigured since velour was thought to be modern.
16. The screens displaying gate numbers are, usually, illegible.
17. Gate staff can’t be arsed to help point one to one’s flight.
18. The tannoy is only audible from outside security (ie. while waiting in line for an hour or so), or from inside departures (ie. while running). While one’s actually in security one can’t hear a thing. Hence, one never hears one’s flight called, and only ever hears ‘Absolutely final call, get your arses down here now!’
19. The staff who take one’s boarding card have an amazing knack of doing so without breaking off their discussion with their colleagues, and hence without realising that they entirely block one’s path to the aircraft.
20. On one classic occasion, I emerged onto the tarmac to find no trace of the requisite Boeing. I’d walked a hundred yards across the airfield before discovering that they’d hidden the damned thing around a corner, in the opposite direction.
21. The customer service desk opens after the early-morning rush, and closes before the end-of-day return flights land. Go, as they say, figure.
22. The word ‘dead’ should not, I contend, ever appear in any slogan pertaining to the airline industry.

Given that even Cardiff manages a charmingly petite and stylish little number in the airport stakes, it’s hard to comprehend how Troon manages to cock the idea up quite so completely, but I do have a theory: I think Glasgow Prestwick (sic) Airport was bought lock, stock, and barrel from the Soviet Union, circa 1985.

That would explain the predilection for creative queue-optimisation techniques (ie. optimising queues for extreme length and sloth). It would explain the surly and disinterested staff, who merely ape the local accent (but seriously, given that the population of Troon is approximately 74 and eight goats, who’d know if they were way off the mark? Any old Scottish twang would suffice). It would explain the byzantine layout and passenger route planning, designed around the concept of trapping customers in duty-free and, at all costs, barring their onward progress to their flights, lest they realise that the aircraft are, in practice, painted outlines designed to fool American spy satellites. It would also explain why the Pisa flight boards down the end of an extremely long corridor that appears to stand zero chance of ever reaching an aircraft, given that it’s heading in entirely the wrong direction.

Troon International Airport is, I contend, a cold war-era throwback, communist mecca, and Stalinist trudge-fest. So there.

For those who’ve struggling this far, the good news: as of this month, Aer Lingus have restarted their 08:00 flight to Dublin, from Glasgow Airport. Oh, happy day.

Can it be true? A bona-fide Apple Store in Glasgow next year? And a stonking huge one, at that? Be still, my beating wallet. Clearly, the only thing that’s stopped me buying more Apple gear has been… er… ScotSys.

Actually, that sentence started out as a joke but somehow turned into serious comment by the end. Huh.

Meanwhile, Google just bought JotSpot. Which is either the beginning of the end, the dawn of a new beginning, the date we’ll subsequently proclaim as the birth of ‘Web 3.0,’ or completely irrelevant. I’m hoping for one of the middle ones there.

Frankly, my current search templates suck so badly that I can’t face searching The Daily Grind to see if (or how often) I’ve had this rant before: the term ‘User-Generated Content’ is plain rude. If the audience is building your site for you, the least you can do is come up with a more civil form of address than ‘user.’ I can’t begin to say how annoyed at get at all the TV people who insist on referring to UGC as if it’s the next big thing – not if they treat their customers with so little respect, it’s not. I’ve two concrete observations on the term, however:

1. The way TV types talk about UGC reminds me very directly of the way they talked about video to 3G mobiles, five years ago. I don’t expect UGC, in the vague and woolly sense, to have any more impact than Sky News On Demand.
2. Dive into Mark. Spot on.

(via Gruber, of course.)

[update, Wednesday: Boing Boing had a story a few days ago about a Nielsen Consumer Generated Media conference that barred attendees from… er… blogging about the conference.]

The Eepybird guys are back, this time with a Diet Coke and Mentos chain reaction film. They’ve gone the same way as the Spite Your Face Lego film folks, turning a fan flick into something with at least semi-official support. This one is a cross of their original, and the Honda Cog ad Fischli and Weiss (English entry) ‘Way Things Go‘ flick.

Sadly, Eepybird failed to spot the basic problem of these ‘chain reaction’ type films, which is that they’re bastard hard to shoot. You have to design the progression very much around the camera(s), and as soon as the sequence starts you find you really really really want tracks. And lots of cameras. Or, you do what Fischli and Weiss did. Which is… umm… ‘cheat’. This latest Eepybird shot is dashed clever, but loses much of its impact because the photography simply isn’t sufficiently intimate. That, and dodgy Flash compression makes it kinda hard to see what’s going on.

For my money, the people who’ve got this most right – that I’ve seen – have been whoever’s behind the NHK show Pitagori Suichi, as mentioned here several times over the last few months. I could watch their short-but-oh-so-clever marble stuff for hours. And, indeed, I have.

I’m back, by the way. Comments may be, too, though I haven’t checked yet.

Today, I traipsed merrily around Dublin buying clothes. I’d planned to have a big shop in Glasgow last weekend, but ran out of time. This didn’t worry me overmuch, since it had always seemed a bit pointless to buy clothes in the UK only to move them to Ireland the following day. In the end, however, I accidentally failed to pack a whole tranche of clothing. Oops.

Amongst the day’s purchases, a pair of shoes. They’re terribly funky, bearing as a design feature asymmetric elastic laces for which I had to ask operating instructions (conclusion: they’re slip-ons. The laces are just a bit of fancy). Dangling happily from the eyelets, a stylish bundle of swing-tags, one of which reads:

Contact earth: a system which allows the electrostatic energy accumulated throughout the day to discharge and at the same time allows you to be in contact with the earth energies.

Rrrrright. So… the soles are made of some conductive carbon compound, then? Okaaaay. And ‘earth energies’, what would they be, hmm?

[sigh]

The shoes are Campers, should you wish either to increase your contact with earth energies, or avoid contact with utter twaddle.

A few of you have commented on the paucity of postings here of late. There’s a word for this, but words don’t mean a thing. There’s a name for it, and names make all the difference in the world. No, wait, that’s Talking Heads. Let me see if I can retune this a bit…

OK, we’re back. I’m in Dublin, as I’ve probably mentioned. I’m making a series for RTÉ called Scope, a science magazine show aimed at teenagers. This is the fourth series, and it’s a charming show – which is, of course, a euphemism for ‘it’s done intimidatingly well for three years, and I’m trying desperately hard not to screw it up this time around.’ The people are lovely, I’m enjoying the city, and the Guinness is entirely incidental to my views on either of these subjects. Clearly.

Doubtless I’ll have more to say anon, but in the meantime, here are some pictures:

This arrangement of fruit was found lurking on the production manager’s desk one morning this week. I couldn’t help thinking that it would make a fine corporate logo.

The Board. I much prefer working with index cards and pin boards than with white boards like this, but needs must – and everyone else on the production is obsessed with the word ‘matrix’ anyway. So be it. There’s no blow-up here, just the thumbnail, but you can see how many gaps there are in the series. We’re making twelve shows; the columns to the right are for the ‘celebrity’ strand (for which we have an idea and, hence, are pretty happy about), and a strand called ‘Burning Questions’ which I’m supposed to be writing by milking my back catalogue. You’ll notice I’ve not done much of that yet. Eek. However, the rest of the board is looking pretty healthy… as of this afternoon. This morning, it was scaring us silly.

The view from my head, typing the previous entry about Studio 60. The AP recced a possible location, a new eco-building designed by funky architects here in Dublin. There’s not enough new to the story for us to make much of it, but the funky architect was chatting away about how he’s just renovated his house using all the same techniques – wool cavity insulation, solar water heating, and so on. He was looking for lodgers pronto, seemed like a nice guy… and a week or so later, here I am. The orange thing to the right is the terribly clever zero-carbon wood pellet burner doohickie.

So far it’s been lovely – the landlord appears to be just as laid-back, interesting, and witty as I’d thought, and it’s causing no end of amusement that he’s entirely coincidentally dating a friend of one of my office colleagues. Ireland is, after all, a small place.

The other new American TV show I’m trying to keep up with, via the vagaries of the torrent networks, is Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Sorkin, you will recall, was the driving force behind The West Wing, and the new show follows the now-established style of rompingly sharp dialogue, implausibly long walk-and-talk discussions, and layers of character interactions. West Wing regular Bradley Whitford stars alongside – no, no, he’s better than you think – Matthew Perry, with a supporting cast of the sort of people you can more-or-less recall from other shows but never quite place. Now five episodes in, the show’s starting to settle down, but my opinions of it remain in some flux.

The first couple of episodes are utterly astonishing television, beautifully crafted to a degree that suggests the rest of us, frankly, might as well give up. Every line, every nuance of performance, the detail of every shot – all drive the narrative with a momentum that could be relentless, yet in Sorkin’s hands becomes joyous, even bravura. I found myself cheering at the sheer audacity of it. Which probably marks me out as a sappy television cheerleader, but never mind.

Whereas The West Wing sustained this level of production for perhaps the first three series, however, Studio 60 is starting to show wobbles surprisingly early. The premise is that the Whitford and Perry characters are hired, at the end of the first episode, to head up a late-night US network TV show that’s modeled closely on Saturday Night Live. And here Sorkin starts to offer easy targets for the critics. The show-within-the-show, you see, simply isn’t very good – Sorkin can write sparkling business exchanges, but he’s never going to compete with a roomful of professional hacks when it comes to comedy sketches.

In truth, this is only a niggling irritation – the show within is merely a driver for the real narrative, yet it’s here that my doubts are strongest. Studio 60 is every bit as magnificently crafted and exquisitely performed as the reported $3m/episode budget would suggest, but it’s not yet clear what it’s about.

Is it an exploration of the rôle of the TV networks in the fabric of American society, portraying their inner workings and the wrangling between editorial control and the power of advertisers, to the detriment of the viewer? Or a portrait of television, cohesive social force, in the throes of (presumed) self-destruction while the upstart new media yaps at its ankles? Or a study of the contradictorily disruptive and uniting nature of high-pressure creative endeavour?

It may not matter. It may just be a rompingly good yarn. But at the moment, magnificent as the writing, performance, cinematography and editing are, Studio 60 is feeling more than a little indulgently self-referential. If it’s not careful, it’ll end up commenting on – and hence parodying – nothing more significant than itself.

Simon Jenkins pulls no punches about Iraq, the Baker report in the US, and the bizarre arguments in the UK about whether the army chief’s comments should have been said, rather than about the comments themselves.

The EU are – according to the Times, so take with a pinch of salt I suppose – considering extending the definition of ‘broadcast TV’ to include web video. Which would, of course, bring web video under TV compliance rules. Which would be unwieldy and barking.

Luckily, it seems that Shaun Woodward, the Broadcasting Minister – as well as OFCOM – are adopting a position that may be characterised as ‘rolling one’s eyes and saying “Oh, for heaven’s sake!”,’ which is likely a good thing. Still – worth keeping an eye on this one, I think.