{"id":323,"date":"2007-01-31T23:35:15","date_gmt":"2007-01-31T22:35:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=323"},"modified":"2007-01-31T23:35:15","modified_gmt":"2007-01-31T22:35:15","slug":"party-animals-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=323","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Party Animals&#8221; (2)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;The West Wing&#8221; it ain&#8217;t, but BBC2&#8242; s series <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/pressoffice\/pressreleases\/stories\/2007\/01_january\/12\/party.shtml\">&#8220;Party Animals&#8221;<\/a>, looks authentic and entertaining enough to keep a political junkie like me tuning in each Wednesday night. This evening saw the screening of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/pressoffice\/pressreleases\/stories\/2007\/01_january\/12\/party_episode.shtml\">episode 1<\/a> which was good enough to wet my appetite.<br \/>\nThe series is all about the activities of House of Commons political researchers in their 20s, something with which I can really identify since I worked as a researcher to a member of the Labour Party&#8217;s Opposition Front Bench from 1972-1974. The only aspect of the show that I found really wrong was the Junior Home Office Minister having a new Government policy worked up by her Commons researcher.<br \/>\nAfter working in Parliament, I did spells as a Special Adviser in the Northern Ireland Office (1974-76) and the Home Office (1976-78) and I can tell you that a party researcher would not be able to develop a Government policy or draft a Ministerial speech. That would be a matter for the Department&#8217;s civil servants possibly assisted by the Secretary of State&#8217;s Special Advisers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;The West Wing&#8221; it ain&#8217;t, but BBC2&#8242; s series &#8220;Party Animals&#8221;, looks authentic and entertaining enough to keep a political junkie like me tuning in each Wednesday night. This evening saw the screening of episode 1 which was good enough to wet my appetite. The series is all about the activities of House of Commons [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}