Screen and scream again as Boston publishes its video nasties

It came as little surprise that Boston missed the boat this week when the government handed out cash worth £100,000 a time in its £10 million High Street Innovation Fund grant.
The money – which is in addition to the Mary Portas Town Team project, which Boston Borough Council is also bidding for funding from - includes among its aims dealing with the problems of empty shops.
Regular readers will recall that the council was given more than £50,000 a few years ago with exactly that idea in mind - and despite lots of fine words ended up with little to show for it.

So now it's all down to Boston’s bid for £100,000 from the Portas Pilot scheme which has been sent to the Department of Communities and Local Government for consideration.
The phrase “third time lucky” holds significance for many – and that may be why the application that eventually found it way to Whitehall had been redrafted a couple of times before.
We mentioned earlier how a committee of the great and the good was formed to approach this task – almost twenty of them in fact … which we considered was far too many.
That this may have dawned on the committee as well, for, by the time the third draft was done, it was apparently overseen by a group numbmering fewer than ten.
Whether this steady distillation of the application will achieve the desired goal is hard to say - as there is scarcely a town in the country that is not making a bid to be a Portas Pilot.
However, from what we have learned, there are a few flaws in the town’s case.

It begins with a peculiar claim that “biased” information has been circulated about Boston – especially by the national press.
The word biased is misplaced – as the stories that have been published are ... by and large ... a series of unpalatable home truths … which is not the same thing.
Having accused the press, however, the application goes on to place an almost childlike faith in how the hacks will want to publicise Boston should it win the money.
There are lots of buzzwords such as “café culture,” “footfall” and “dwell time,” and whilst our 500 year old market is mentioned, the equally historic May Fair is not.
On the other hand, the Farmers’ Market – which must be one of the worst around for a county that feeds the nation  – gets a plug … as does the defunct continental market.
The huge amount of investment in road improvements and the Market Place regeneration, and the promise of much more money to come – coupled with a bewildering slew of figures - raised the question in our minds of why Boston is still struggling. Let’s hope it doesn’t occur to Ms Portas as well.

And let us hope that Ms Portas knows Boston well enough to know what “The Stump” is – as nowhere is it defined … other than as a partner in the report's preface, which may well go unread.
After a first draft which allocated £10,000 for a part-time project manager, the sum for that post has now risen to £23,000. There’s £15,000 for website and social media development – and we have to say that as the world and his wife now have their own websites and Facebook and Twitter pages -  that it is hard to see what can be gained by forking out so much to become yet another page among millions.
However, as winning the bid would mean painting the town red, perhaps that’s what the entry under consumables - £3,000 for “paint and materials” - is for.
Overall, we have the feeling that - despite so many rewrites – this is a back of a fag packet production, and that peoples’ hearts weren’t really in it.
It could have used an eye-catching title to make it stand out from the rest.
Even humble Market Rasen has come up with “MR Big” which we liked a lot (MR = Market Rasen ... geddit?)  and which makes you want to read more.
And then there is the video, which the Boston BID website is begging us to view.
It’s a series of captioned shots underpinned by a musical score that  that to us sounds like a marriage between the Eastender’s theme and Chopin’s funeral march ….
Screenshots from the four and a half minute video nasty are posted throughout the blog.
View it by clicking here and make your own mind up!

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Our former blog is archived at: http://bostoneyelincolnshire.blogspot.com