North Norfolk in February? You Must Be Mad

Weybourne Cliffs

So why do people go to to the North Norfolk coast in thick-grey-skied, wind-lashed, freezing February?

Is it because the cliffs at Weybourne look like a 70s Doctor Who planet? And if you walk along the top of them, dodging the wayward golf balls from the links, you get to a half-shutdown Sheringham? The town's best chip shop doesn't open again until March but the fishermen will stand on the beach all winter. And the ice cream from Ronaldo's tastes just as good for afters no matter how cold it is.

Weybourne Fishermen

Maybe it's because the Skylarks have just started to sing above those cliffs again. Trying to convince the sceptical numb-fingered that spring really isn't that far way.

Weybourne Skylark

Is it the miles of deserted, sandy beaches at Holkham? The notorious naturists don't seem convinced. Or the mobile coffee guy that boosts winter birder business by scattering seeds for the Knot, Dunlin, Black-headed Gull and, on a good day, Snow Bunting clientele of Salthouse?

Salthouse Dunlin

Does the food and drink make the 140-mile trip from west London worthwhile: traditional bhunas and bhajis at The Taste of India in Holt; perfectly charcoaled steaks at The King's Head up the road; a citrusy pint of Blackfriars Spring Tide from Great Yarmouth with sea views at the excellent Red Lion in Cromer; a real fire and pints of Woodforde's Wherry at another Red Lion beside the endless marshes at Stiffkey; hand-raised pork pies from Alexandra Howells' deli in Wells; a pint of Norwich-brewed 80 Shillings Ale at Camra's Norfolk Pub of the Year 2011 - the Windham Arms in Sheringham?

Keep those pints in mind on a 5pm no-sunset visit to the raptor roost at the haunting Warham Greens: ring-tailed Hen Harrier, a hundred-mile-an-hour Merlin and a couple of hunting Marsh Harrier are enough to tempt the triple-layered. Grey Partridge in the fields and Little Egret in the marshes keep it interesting.

And on the way home, at last, the chance of a Barn Owl on the main road through South Raynham.

We'll be back next February. And every month between now and then.

How 34,000 Napoli Fans Watched My Wobbly Video

There's been an incredible response to that video I posted on YouTube showing the remarkable reception the Napoli fans gave to their team in the Champions League match against City.

It's low-res, iPhone and shakey but so far it's had 33,977 views, 56 comments and 88 thumbs up. It's been shared 122 times, favourited by 42 viewers and disliked by two.

The stats say 86 per cent of the viewers were blokes and 72 per cent of them found it when it was embedded on Napoli's website at www.calcionapoli.it. 

Unsurprisingly, 30,753 of the viewers were in Italy when they hit the play button.

Some of the comments have been quite touching:

"Maximum respect to Manchester City supporters, all of you will always be welcome in Naples."

"You too have great supporters... In Naples we are so, we live for football. :D"

"GO GO NAPLES! RESPECT FOR CITY IN PREMIER LEAGUE!"

"Thank you for coming! We loved having you there and hoped that you enjoyed it too!"

And my favourite:

"You're my mast of work!!! But the real mast have to pass a big truble in the middle of legs."

He's got a point.

Good luck to Napoli in the jauntily titled Round of 16. I'm genuinely looking forward to our own Round of 32 in the Europa League, no matter who we get and where it takes us.

The derision that competition gets is baffling. Would fans really prefer their team to be scrapping away for the top four in the Premier League rather than going gung ho for a place in a major European final in Bucharest in May? And we wouldn't have the Poznan without it.

Bring on those Thursday nights on Channel 5.

Why Aren't English Football Fans As Visual As The Italians?

Naples: chaotic city, brilliant fans

The welcome that the Napoli fans gave to their team as they emerged from the tunnel at the Sao Paolo stadium on Tuesday was the most spectacular I've ever seen at a football match.

We were among the first of the 1,000 travelling City fans to arrive at the stadium about an hour before kick off. By then, nearly every Napoli fan was already in position.

By anthem time, at one end, the crowd parted to form an N-shape that was brilliantly illuminated by red flares. At the other, every fan waved a small, blue flag while a '74-style World Cup football banner was unfurled in the middle of the stand. Along one side of the ground, fireworks exploded into the sky.

The crowd noise was deafening. It almost drowned out the Champions League tune until the end when in unison, 59,000 voices blared out "campione". A wonderful, emotional outpouring you just don't see in England.

I put this shoddy iPhone video on YouTube on Wednesday. It's had nearly 5,000 views so far, the vast majority of them from Italy. The comments, too, are nearly all from Napoli fans. They just love their club.

City's support is undoubtedly the best in the world for its unswerving loyalty. But it's characterised by witty, self-deprecating anthems (We Never Win At Home and We Never Win Away), irony (We're Not Really Here) and a torch song of lovelorn loneliness (Blue Moon). Inflatable bananas aside, until the newly-stolen Poznan goal celebration, it was all sound and no vision.

Perhaps Anfield is the closest we get. However grudgingly, you have to admit that the Kop end full of red scarves belting out You'll Never Walk Alone is stirring stuff when seen from the away end.

But there isn't much else worth writing home about in my experience: United are noisy by volume but lack much humour; the popular end at Molineux give Wolves fantastic support; West Ham's bubblers are in tune but often groaning; Newcastle is a fabulous frenzy bordering on religious fervour; the Britannia Stadium is stirringly loud when Stoke get a throw-in; Spurs fans are probably too exhausted by the walk from the tube to give it much welly; and the Arsenal faithful sometimes struggle to turn the excellent Emirates into a cauldron.

Maybe it's the weather. Maybe we're too busy boozing to organise such elaborate pre-match pyrotechnics. 

But I bet Napoli don't lose too many at home.

Whistling Wigeon On Cley Marshes

Eerily bright, warm and sunny at Cley Marshes this morning - it's the mid-November that feels like early September.

The highlights: hundreds of whistling Wigeon; vast flocks of Golden Plover looking like blown and sun-dappled leaves; two female and one male Marsh Harrier spooking hundreds of Lapwing; a vagrant Cattle Egret - feathers so white you could see it with the naked eye from the visitor centre half a mile away; flying Shoveler; Teal and Mallard waddling around; hidden Cetti's warbler and Bearded Tit calling from the reeds.

It was warm enough for a least three Common Darter dragonflies to take to the wing to add to the three Red Admiral butterflies we saw in Wells Wood yesterday.

And we saw a Barn Owl near Field Dalling at 9.10am on the way - the first we've clocked for a while in Norfolk.

Wandsworth Common Halloween Beer Festival 2011

Our first visit to the annual event in the rain-spattered courtyard of the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building - a suitably spooky Victorian Gothic pile formerly used as an orphanage and military hospital. Now the home of Le Gothique restaurant and some nice-looking flats.

The 15-minute walk from Clapham Junction was rewarded with:

Dark Star American Pale Ale 4.7% - a hip and hoppy happy glass from Horsham. (I've enjoyed many superb pints at their excellent Evening Star pub near Brighton railway station with my mate Paul.)

Dark Star Green Hopped IPA 6.5 % - strong as Superman and available just as rarely. Distinguished by a combination of Simcoe and green Target hops.  Wouldn't recognise either of them but they make an outstandingly tangy ale. 

Shepherd Neame Spooks 4.7% - a nothing-special one-off. Never been one of my favourite brewers. All tastes a bit ordinary.

Thornbridge Sequoia American Amber Ale 4.5% - tastes like they've picked a ripe grapefruit from a tree in tarty Bakewell and squeezed it into one of the best beers I've ever had. Fabulous. 

Batemans Victory Ale 5.9 % - a fresh and fruity mouthful of Lincolnshire peardrops. Brewed to celebrate Trafalgar Day on October 21. Nelson would think it was all worth it just for this ale. 

Sambrooks Pale Ale 4.2% - The light and refreshing zing of angry young Battersea. And they sponsored the jolly commemorative glasses.

Thornbridge St Petersburg 7.7%. - Back to Derbyshire for a stunning Imperial Stout. The treacly, smokey, roast chestnut taste of foggy Bonfire Nights.

Priced by strength from £1.70 per half for the standard-strength beers through to £2.50 for the less approachable 7 per centers.

A graveyard smash of an event and one for the diary next year.

Why Does Food And Drink On The Radio Work So Well?

Noisy chomping, presenters spluttering things like "astringent" through a mouthful of goat's cheese, gulping down wheat beer at unlikely hours, bottle tops fizzing off. Lots of "mmmms" but very few "eeuws"; on paper it looks undercooked, but lightly coddled on the radio it sounds delicious.

Nigel Barden is the expert on Simon Mayo's Radio 2 show on Thursdays. Our paths crossed briefly at BBC GLR and even back then he had the gift of making tricky recipes sound must-try-tonight simple.

Yesterday I was listening to Bill Buckley on BBC Oxford. A beer expert called Tim Hampson had taken in some local, bottled real ales to try. Thirsty within minutes. A phono with a Hook Norton brewer made me want to book a brewery tour there and then.

And then another phono with Tristan Hogg from Pieminister moved the conversation on to the essential life-skill of matching beer with pies. I had the advantage over Bill because I've eaten a few of Bristol-based Tristan's pies at their little shop on the South Bank. And they're delicious.

The chat was so mouth-wateringly effective that we immediately pulled off the M40 and headed for the Fox Country Inn in Ibstone. Steak and kidney Guinness pie and chips with a superfluous bit of lettuce. £12. Washed down with a couple of pints of local Rebellion beers (thanks to my lovely designated driver).

Bill Buckley and BBC Oxford. Job done.

How Alan Partridge Destroyed Local Radio And Why I Love North Norfolk Radio

North Norfolk yesterday

The cheery DJ with a smile in his voice gives a generous chuckle as caller Annie from East Runton half-heartedly practises a scream down the phone line.

"So, Annie, who do you think it is?"

"Is it Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker in Star Wars?"

Cue some echoey footsteps, a very creaky trapdoor and a loud splash.

"Sorry, Annie - it's not Mark Hamill which means tomorrow's breakfast show jackpot goes up to £510! Thanks for trying to guess who's on the red carpet here on North Norfolk Radio."

Mystery voice competitions; free, no-obligation fireplace quotes; news headlines about fireworks being sold to children in Fakenham; eye-witness travel brought to you by a cycle shop in  North Walsham - North Norfolk Ray-Dee-Oh is local commercial radio as it should be.

Broadcasting from a farm in the tiny village of Stody near Melton Constable, it's a no-airs-and-graces triumph of community broadcasting - not the quasi-national programming-by-numbers foisted on us by Heart, Kiss, Galaxy and their ilk.

Compare it to the next station along the Liquid Crystal Dial - BBC Radio Norfolk. At 6.30pm last night their presenter was joined by a local magistrate and a solicitor for their Good Week, Bad Week slot. And what burning local issues were they debating? The anti-capitalism protests at St Paul's Cathedral, protocol during the Queen's tour of Australia and a woman in The Sun who'd spent £10,000 on Gary Barlow tattoos.  Not even a rural whiff of a Norfolk postcode.

Meanwhile, North Norfolk Radio's drivetime man was appealing for the owner of a V-reg Ford Galaxy in Thursford to claim their free car valet for sporting a sticker in the back window and the newsreader was telling us that the Travelodge in Norwich is Britain's favourite hotel for illicit affairs. Brilliant.

I grew up on Piccadilly Radio in Manchester in the 70s and 80s. I loved it. The DJs were proper local personalities - Phil Wood, Mike Sweeney (who's rubbish punk band The Salford Jets were a joy), curly-permed Dave Ward who once brought his unforgettable roadshow to the English Martyrs youth club in Whalley Range.

Some of the slicker ones were passing through on their way to bigger, national things - Andy Peebles, Steve Penk, Susie Mathis, the bar-setting Mark Radcliffe, Gary Davies before his execrable bit in the middle on Radio One.

And Timmy Mallett. His evening show was an unmissable masterpiece of self-made, multi-layered, madcap jingles punctuating interviews with local bands and bigger celebrities. He was the Kenny Everett of Piccadilly Gardens.

I made my radio debut on his show. A bit-too-serious appreciation of Yazoo when I was 16. I never forgot that thrill of walking into the dimly-lit studio with the big, red light over the door and sitting in front of a giant microphone which partially hid the great man from view. He asked me to stay for the rest of his stint after my bit and do some jokey inserts. They were hopeless but I was hooked.

Nine years later I managed to get a dream job as a reporter on BBC Radio Leeds, crafting what the boss called "colour radio" with a strip of tape around my neck, a razor blade in one hand and a role of sellotape in the other. Back then there was a budget for actually going out and gathering local news with a German Uher tape recorder on the passenger seat of a branded Peugeot radio car.

Magistrates and solicitors talking about what the Queen was up to on the other side of the world were rarely required.

From there it was the achingly cool (and therefore shut down) BBC GLR in London for me - James! Playing live! In the basement studio at lunchtime! - and then the fabulous Five Live in the glory days of Garvey, Allen, Mair, Sybil and Inverdale.

And it was all started by that love of pre-Partridge local radio. Maybe it was Alan who did for it. His devastating savagery of radio sports reporting began in Radio 4's On The Hour and ended in that self-same Travelodge in Norwich on BBC One.

Now he broadcasts on a YouTube version of imaginary North Norfolk Digital. Maybe local radio never truly recovered its confidence.

Instead the commercial stations have become national brands and the BBC's local stations are easy targets for job cuts - 280 were announced this month. Threaten to shut down a trendy national network and you guarantee a noisy Twitter campaign; lose ten jobs at Radio Cumbria, despite an incredible audience reach of 39 per cent, and who's complaining?

But confidence is brimming at the real North Norfolk Radio. Where the prize of a meal for two at the Dunstable Arms in Sheringham is something worth winning. And it's good to know that P&S Butchers in Holt have probably the largest selection of game in the area. Probably.

Which leaves just one question: is it Paul Gambaccini?

(The author was appointed Managing Director of Sky News Radio in 2007. Funding was pulled before the station launched.)