This article was written for Liberal Conspiracy, and comments have been left on that discussion.

If there is one thing I detest when it comes to TV it is adverts that make spurious claims about a product based upon the dismal opinion of less than a handful of only one demographic; also usually people that at the same time are reading a magazine or buying at a store that has a heavy advertising deal with said product. Be it hair products where 93% of 140ish people surveyed in Marie Claire said it was definitely the most awesome hair care product (that they received a free trial of with the magazine), or butter that less than 50% of people say they preferred (yet the loop hole of those 7% of people that "don't care" allows the brand to claim "most" people like them best).

So then, with that lengthy precursor to the article, perhaps you can understand why Hazel Blears and her team of community action planners have so frustrated me this week, publishing a report about the attitudes of white working class people in the UK. Well, I say published but the master of making information accessible to the public has yet to even ensure that even the news is reported on the communities.gov.uk website (as of Midday, 5th Jan), let alone the actual report, methodology and findings.

So we're back again for another dose of Kevin and his Castleford project. Last week we saw how the council and local community could clash and pull together, in one episode, to build a much needed bridge in the town. This week it's all about three public parks in the area, all with a distinctly different starting point and execution, and their apparent need to be revitalised after "Thatcher pulled the plug" on these spaces...as Mr McCloud puts it (I may paraphrase slightly).

The question you instinctively have going in to the program is just how much simply building public recreational space can help a community, especially with regard to crime and perception of crime. Unfortunately the program never really answers this, merely alluding to a drop in delinquency in certain areas. Perhaps the program never could answer this question, at least not before a full generational turn over to see the effects of a new set of children on an area they have no real ownership over.

But what was amazingly interesting was how different parts of this same town took to these ideas and ran with them, with very different solutions.

I'm not going to be long posting this, for those reading regularly I'm afraid that I can't guarantee a regular week of posting as work is particularly heavy at the moment...but for now see my thoughts on Monday's program Kevin McCloud and the Big Town Plan.

The program (first in a series of four) focused on the iconic bridge built at Castleford to connect an island just off the main town centre, affectionately known as duck island, to the rest of the town. Spanning almost 5 years the work was fairly fast but bureaucracy and division manages to bog down the task for the first 3 and a half of those years. Who was to blame, who saved the day?