Freelance Journalist

Page three story on the cost of higher education per hour of contact.

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I’ve spent large periods of the last three years at Manchester twiddling my thumbs. In my first term, I wasn’t expected to write a single piece of assessed work until nearly Christmas. By the end of my third year, I’ll have only sat through 386 contact hours.

My courses are typically divided into an optional weekly lecture and a weekly or fortnightly tutorial, which is compulsory.

Lectures are very poorly attended. This suits the university because some courses don’t have venues that will accommodate all their students. Tutorials are different as the emphasis, conveniently for the university, is on peer learning. For the first two years of my degree I often sat in the only compulsory component in an uneasy silence with ten or eleven undergraduates as a PhD student desperately tried to catalyse some sort of debate between us.

Undergraduates themselves are as guilty as the university in this regard. Students are expected to complete two or three specific readings for discussion in each tutorial, but I can honestly say that I’ve never attended a tutorial where more than a third of the participants appear to have any knowledge of the core texts.

Despite cutting contact hours to a raw minimum, universities are still searching for ways to use technology to further reduce their contact with students. I finish my degree this year feeling like a cash cow who has subsidised more expensive degree programmes with my fees, in exchange for participating in an elaborate box-ticking operation.
I could easily have completed my degree from a computer in London and commuted occasionally to Manchester.

“Forget weights and Lycra, veteran fitness freak Jack Cagney uses his brain to stay in shape after a quadruple heart bypass”

Jack Cagney is one of the more peculiar people I’ve met during my time at the Times. I arrived at his smart semi-detached home in a quiet street in Nazeing to be greeted by photographer Matt Lloyd who was unpacking his gear with an expression of grimace. I hadn’t been told much by my editor; all I knew was that Times Journalist Kaya Burgess was going to be taken through an exercise routine with a pensioner who had stumbled upon the solution to the nations weight problem, using just the power of his mind. Matt warned me that the geriatric mister motivator inside the very normal, straight laced, lace curtained detached house in Essex seemed to be slightly unhinged.

I struggled to bite my tongue through most of the first few minutes of interview with the former Czech strong man. Jack Cagney is a real character, and I failed fully to dam a streams of tears from cascading down my face as the showman played up to the camera, flexing his muscles and lifting his broom stick. Within five minutes I was sweating profusely and had a bright red-face, as Matt played furiously with Jack’s cat to distract himself from the display of lunacy which was going on in front of us. I managed to mess up recording sound on my Zoom H4N as a result of being distracted, credit to Kaya Burgess for keeping a straight face throughout the whole interview.

By the end of the morning’s shoot I’d changed my mind about “Gentleman Jack Cagney.” Cagney is a very savvy businessman, who is playing at being a loon. He’d had a BBC camera crew round in the previous week and now had three Times journalists at his beck and call for a morning. Maybe I’m crazier than Jack, driving my self mad, messing about with cameras, sitting for hours in front of a damned computer; when the pensioner from Essex has made himself a cheesy DVD and welcomes the world’s press to his comfortable home.

Captain Geriatric perhaps should be known as Captain Savvy.

I shot Canon 5D mk2 as usual and a big thanks to Matt for letting me dip into his lens bag after I traveled light with a skeleton gear bag on my motorbike.

A couple people have commented on my slightly odd music choice in this video. Maybe I should have added something to the video, or commented originally. The music is by Jack himself. He’s a singer as well as a former body builder and fitness fanatic.