The Iron Lady of Liverpool town

As public opinion will still be divided up and down the country today, we continue to live having lost a truly tenacious woman.

People will think of her from the contentious world of the 1980s. As a person she took on a broken system and reminded us that things needed to be changed for the better of the nation's well-being  A deep-rooted change was desperately needed because, as things stood, everything was pretty rotten.

She shook the English political classes from all walks of life in their boots.

As a woman, she was born in a typically brisk provincial English town, and she wasn't afraid to put the fear of God up a male-led world, as it was her legacy that grew stronger with worldwide praise and attention.

As a mother, she will be remembered when her son famously went missing. On our TV screens, in its aftermath, her passionate pleas were enough to make the hearts of the most iron-willed sing.

Her name? Who would dare forget? Her name was Anne Williams.

Today, Anne lost her battle against cancer at the age of 62. But that battle must have seemed inconsequential compared to the war that the English Establishment brought to her doorstep. The war began just before 4 p.m. on 15th April 1989 when her son, Kevin Williams, died at Hillsborough. According to WPC Debra Martin, who helped get Kevin away from the Leppings Lane stand, his last word on earth was "mum".

Anne, like the mothers who are made to send their boys to war, never got to hear him say it as she was at home in Liverpool. Anne, along with 95 other family members, didn't fully expect to lose her child to an organised football match in a developed country with a developed infrastructure of safety certificates and police protection.

But this was the late 1980s, and Britain wasn't a pretty place to live in. In the week leading up to Anne's passing, we've seen those memories dredged back up, reminding us of the deep-rooted bitterness forged by surface skimming Tory social policies. The people of Liverpool, and the supporters on its football terraces, were precise targets for the sharp suited, sharp elbowed Thatcherites, all of whom frantically ripped up the country with a Rottweiler's appetite. 

In a week where a great deal of blind faith has been dubiously invested in the misnomer that Thatcher did untold good for women, an analyse of Anne's life would cast great doubt on this assumption. True, Anne was  a mother to three children before Kevin's death - she was a housewife too - but she stepped out of this role for her family, because like anyone who is forced to fight, she did. And what she fought for was a deeply hidden truth at the heart of the world where Thatcher was adored. 

Anne Williams was 47 when her son, whom she had brought up for 15 years, was taken from her. She was 61 when the Hillsborough Independent Panel struck a tangible victory in the dogged fight against an intransigent series of authority enemies. Her life was a swing from the comforts of normality to the often purgatory madness of British political campaigning.

As the evening news rolls on tonight, Anne's story, and Anne's death, gets fewer mentions. And this, you'd think, reflects on our media's reporting of the truth. The more a person leads a valiant life - a life that looks outward toward their society instead of turning its back - the farewell on the television screen drifts out of view. The more venal, greedy and narrow-sighted legacy you leave, however, just screams and shrieks at you until you have no choice but to believe in nothing else. And for 23 years we believed in nothing else, until that one day in September last year when Anne and her fellow campaigners found out something very different. 

With hindsight, Britain will probably regret the tears some of its people shed last week and this. I didn't cry about Thatcher, because Thatcher didn't stir any compassionate feelings. I was one from the large, unrepresented number who the Daily Mail arrogantly flogged for showing dissent. With petty, greedy politicians like Thatcher, what went around came around. But with the death of Anne Williams, I did cry; I shed 96 tears to be exact, and all of them meant something real.

The last eight months of Anne's life got somewhere after years of wilderness. We expect an afterlife, and life certainly went after Anne. But for now, let's just think of her with Kevin, and her hearing him say "mum" for the rest of eternity.

The sullied goods of the grocer’s daughter

The obituaries were never going to be direct, only directed. 

Margaret Thatcher shrewdly corralled the British media: “Labour isn’t Working”, “Gotcha!”, “Up Yours, Delors” weren't instances of chance. An entire union movement wasn't tickled to death; it was strangled in its sleep. 

Democratic plurality in the Britain Thatcher gave us favours the successful first. Although we have heard the opinions of the Scottish, the northern Englander and the Catholic Irish, the voices of the elder statesmen, the businessmen and the homeowner have come first.

Like newspapers, TV news editors know that the audience often skim the body of the story and only follow the ledes. Those with idle concentration spans will be therefore left malnourished in their ideas about Thatcher and what she really did to this country.

Watching the obituaries roll in, you would think that you’ve stepped back into the 1980s again. The problem, however, is that twenty three years since her own cabinet sacked her, Britain has lost all sense of ideology thanks largely to the economic and cultural molestation Thatcherism – and New Labour -  performed as its one and only peccadillo.

What Thatcherism involved was enough to warrant a further autopsy - to roll back the frontiers of what we missed, or was not told in the first place. Like Reagan, Thatcher’s hands got dirty. Did the Belgrano really pose a military threat? If reported fully at the time, what damage would the Westland Affair have done to her reputation? And the Irish, the Scousers?  How close were they to being purged by the sheer propaganda heard in the words “terrorist” and “hooligan”? 

The library footage we have seen appears as a highly-charged episode of “I Love the 1980s”; all the ideological nutrients have been sucked from our memories during what was a terrible time for the many, not the few, under the Iron Lady grip. Instead, it’s become a television-shaped essence of history. 

Margaret Thatcher was the grocer’s daughter, whose only real wish was to sell us down the river.

In its reflection of the politics we had to suffer under her, the country is as it was in the 1980s: divided. 

The idiots' guide to parenting

Channel Four's sinkhole slot at 8 p.m. has not only gone full circle, it's become a garishly large lollipop that spirals into the middle. And it's given that lollipop to parents who can't control their children's sleeping routine.

Bedtime Live shares a similar format to last year's live "experiment" with drugs, taking what is nominally a closed-door activity and giving real parents sat at home the chance to remark with stifled mirth and scorn. 

It hopes to "put your kids to sleep", a claim as dubious as Channel Four's decision to commission this show for a five-week run.

The concept and delivery is crass. It uses candid cameras shooting in night vision (which brings backs memories of 1990s standards such as Noel's House Party and, perversely, Ghostwatch) to reveal, as what would be classed as its USP, parents struggling with the apparent rocket science of putting their children to bed. 

Its presenters include the standard issue "child psychologist" and - somewhat bizarrely - a man who normally stands trackside at Formula One races.

In its essence, Bedtime Live shares the traditions to the lost Raj of Channel Four reality television. Big Brother, for all the debate that surrounded it, was scintillating voyeurism. Now, it seems children are the contestants, along with the handpicked parents picked on by headphone-wearing, self-serve checkout characters, glibly letting generalities spill out of their mouths. When the parent has mastered the impossible, and put their child into a target-driven state of slumber, platitudes wrapped up in cliches are dished out like treats in a supermarket aisle. 

This format is not new to the London-based producers furiously scratching their heads around a whiteboard, in a world far removed from the subjects they wish to cheaply exploit.

In 2007, Channel Four aired Supernanny; a show dripping in so much Marmite it can still readily burn the inside of our gawping mouths. Jo Frost was the person who swept in from America to rush our children to the "naughty step", very much like how George Bush barracked quivering Iraqi men, women and children into accepting democracy from the end of the barrel of a gun. Frost didn't get to know our nation's young to justify this pitiful army camp drill, but parents, you sense, did it anyway. In the process she trampled on innocence, and left vulnerable parents confused at their kids' future ambivalence towards them. But, Frost presumably got enough media exposure to shift tie-in books.

Bedtime Live will, on a production and entertainment level alone, be panned. But again, from shows like this a peculiar smell lingers, very much like a soiled nappy. This, presumably, will be dealt with in the next show on Channel Four's roster: Nappy changing Live.