Eyes & Ears Extra 06.07.25

It's what you've been missing

We have a plan

‘One wish, one paragraph, one hundred people - one year on’ was a feature in last week’s edition of Eyes & Ears Extra. In the run-up to the General Election last July, The QT asked 100 people that if a genie could guarantee that the new PM would grant them one wish, what would they ask for.

Two weeks after that wish list was published, and after Sir Keir Starmer’s election victory, we published a Strategic Plan for the region and asked three QT columnists, Professor Bob Hudson, Bethany Usher and Arlen Pettitt, to review it.

We only told them later that the plan had been written using AI.

The Strategic Plan was presented to us by one of the 100 contributors, Stuart Lynn, a non exec director of Newcastle Building Society and former chair of the North East LEP. He said: “All I did was point ChatGPT at the contents of your web page containing all the individual wishes and asked it to produce a strategic plan from the content. It then did the analysis, consolidation, and transformation into a strategy.

“I thought the output was pretty amazing as it’s a plan based on the inputs of 100 people rather than a handful, which is how strategy is generally developed.

“Arguably, your idea and exercise has led to the creation of the most comprehensive plan I’ve ever read for the North East. The local government and powers that be should seriously look at this and use it, or part of it, as they will never have a richer, more diverse, and more valuable stream of inputs.”

You can bear in mind what the Starmer government has done in the past 12 months when you read the plan in full - plus what our columnists made of it - by clicking on the link below their photographs.

Fact and fiction

Steph McGovern has been on quite a media tour in recent weeks promoting her debut novel Deadline, a fictional thriller which draws on elements of her real life experiences - including being stalked, as she told Ben Shepherd and Cat Deeley on This Morning,

The plot centres on a TV reporter who is about to conduct a live broadcast with a powerful politician when a voice in her earpiece informs her that they have her child and that she must do exactly as they say during the interview.

Steph said it was therapeutic writing her stalking experience into the storyline. “This was a guy who just used to turn up everywhere I went,” she told the ITV presenters.

He thought he was in a relationship with her and the “final straw” came when he made contact with her dad and asked his permission to marry her.

Deadline, is published by Pan Macmillan, and available in all good bookshops. You can also read Steph’s interview with David Whetstone in Cultured. North East here.

Year-long journey

Newcastle International Airport has launched a year-long programme to commemorate its 90th birthday, starting with an exhibition in its terminal that charts its journey from a single hangar in 1935.

Chief corporate affairs officer Alice Andreasen said: “The exhibition gives a fascinating insight into how far we’ve come – from our first eight-seater aircraft flying to and from London, to welcoming 5.2 million passengers last year and offering direct flights to over 80 destinations and more than 300 onward connections worldwide.”

The terminal display will remain in place throughout the year, leading up to the official birthday on July 26 next year.

A second exhibition will open at Newcastle’s Discovery Museum in late July, before moving to the Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens then The Word in South Shields.

Keith Merrin, director of North East Museums, said: “We’re proud to showcase innovation and the resilient spirit of the region in our museums, and Newcastle Airport has been a large part of that story.”

A quick word

Plans have been lodged to convert the site of the former Federation Brewery in Gateshead into a three-storey golf and entertainment complex.

Greggs shares took a dip on Wednesday after they issued a trading update for the first half of 2025 — sales are up, but the heatwave has taken a bite out of profits.

The Lib Dems have won a seat from Reform UK in a Durham County Council by-election. Terry Rooney won the seat vacated by Reform’s Andrew Kilburn, who resigned after it was discovered he worked for the council.

In Friday’s Eyes & Ears I reported that a six-month trial of a four-day week had resulted in all 17 companies saying they will continue with the system. Now South Cambridge Council are to make the four-day system permanent following a two-year experiment - despite the Daily Mail injecting some headline “fury from residents”.

THE WIDER VIEW

Lion hearts and minds

With the British and Irish Lions currently on tour in Australia, it’s a good time to recall their Test series against South Africa in 1997 which was captured in the documentary Living With Lions and included the dry-wit of the late great Doddie Weir.

It was an instant classic of the sporting fly-on-the-wall genre and has rarely, if ever, been bettered this side of the Atlantic, writes Alan Tyers in The Telegraph. The documentary came out during rugby’s era of the amateur game turning professional and the film reflected a sea-change in the way people have made documentaries.

The cameras are right up in the dressing room huddles and the team meetings, capturing the gritty and intimate moments in a way that is no longer really possible with elite sportspeople and the huge media and marketing operations around them.

To put the film in a broader context, this is three years before the first series of Big Brother and 10 before the first iPhone: sportspeople (and indeed everyone else) would later become hyper-aware of their image, how they come across and how they are packaged. There’s no way a group of youngish sports stars today would be as guileless and open as the 1997 Lions.

The camaraderie, the triumphs and disasters and the rawness make for a unique sporting film which also features some spine-tingling speeches including the legendary “This is your Everest” one delivered by coach Jim Telfer, which you can see and hear in all its glory by clicking here.

Why is that then?

Have you noticed that Nigel Farage doesn’t talk about DonaldTrump anymore, asks Martin Farr, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary British History at Newcastle University.