Come spring, chances are there’ll be driving tours in fake panda cars along the A646 between Halifax and Todmorden, with overnight stays in dodgy-looking farmhouses. Happy Valley has done for Calderdale what Peaky Blinders did for Birmingham, and dark telly tourism is all about ticking off locations and looking the part (though I’m not sure hi-vis tabards will catch on). But there are three better, more active ways to explore the Calder valley. Two of these use the Calderdale Way, either the northern section or the southern, both of which involve hill climbs and traverses across fields, hedgerows, stiles – the usual argy-bargy of agricultural rambling.
Category: Travel
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Rollout of BBC One HD for the English regions on TV platforms
In November last year, we announced plans to roll out BBC One HD for the English regions on TV platforms by Spring 2023.
Today marks the start of this roll-out – with the first English Regions variant, BBC One South launching in HD on satellite platforms (Sky and Freesat). This means viewers who get South Today as their local news programme (covering areas including Berkshire, Dorset, Hampshire & the Isle of Wight, Oxford, Surrey, Sussex and Wiltshire), will get their local news on BBC One HD – rather than the red slate which was previously there at this time.
The rollout of the new versions of the regional BBC Ones in HD then continues over the next six weeks, with the full rollout completing by end of February.
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Quarter of global population used site daily in December
The number of people using Facebook daily grew to an average of two billion in December – about a quarter of the world’s population.
The bigger-than-expected growth helped drive new optimism about the company, which has been under pressure as its costs rise and advertising sales slump.
Shares in parent company Meta surged more than 15% in after-hours trade as boss Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 the “year of efficiency”.
He said he was focused on cost cuts.
“We’re in a different environment now,” he said, pointing to the firm’s revenue, which declined in 2022 for the first time in its history after years of double-digit growth.
“We don’t anticipate that that’s going to continue, but I also don’t think it’s going to go back to the way it was before.”
Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, announced a major restructuring last year, including reducing office space and cutting 11,000 jobs or about 13% of staff.
The firm said those moves cost it $4.6bn last year – hitting its profits, which were almost cut in half. It still brought it in $23.2bn in profit for the year.
“2022 was a challenging year but I think we ended it having made good progress,” Mr Zuckerberg said.
In the three months to December, the firm said revenue was $32.2bn, down 4% year-on-year.
But that was better than many analysts had expected.
Meta alarmed investors last year when it posted the first-ever decline in daily Facebook users in its history and signaled it was focusing investments on virtual reality, known as the metaverse.
But in December, the number of users on the site daily was up 4% from a year earlier, adding users even in Europe and the US, and Canada.
Meta said the number of people active across all of its apps each day was up 5% year-on-year.
Mr Zuckerberg said the company was making progress with its video product – Reels – which it has been focused on as it faces off with rivals such as TikTok, which have gained traction, especially among younger users.
Mr Zuckerberg said those efforts were starting to pay off, and ad dollars were starting to follow users to the videos.
Investors seized on the company’s forecast of lower costs and stronger sales than expected in the months ahead, helping send shares higher.
The company also said it would spend an extra $40bn to buy back shares, which dropped sharply last year amid investor doubts about the direction of the company.
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The images that reveal male fears
Three new exhibitions explore how the femme fatale in art reflects evolving anxieties writes Cath Pound.
The figure of the femme fatale is one of the defining literary and artistic motifs of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Artists were drawn to historical archetypes of female seduction such as Cleopatra or Lucrezia Borgia, characters from Old Testament stories including Salome, Judith, and Delilah, or mythical figures such as Circe, Helen of Troy, and Medea. Others were conjured from their male author’s imagination – Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen, Émile Zola’s Nana, and Frank Wedekind’s Lulu being some of the most notable.
Her emergence is frequently seen as a response to anxieties arising from profound social change as women pushed for greater economic, political, and educational rights, challenging the established patriarchal order. Middle-class women who sought education were, according to the British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley, likely to damage their reproductive organs, turning them into monstrosities who threatened the survival of the human race. Fear of contagious diseases such as syphilis was another factor, with working-class prostitutes being seen as contemporary femmes fatales who could lure their clients to their doom.
The 19th-Century image of the femme fatale was largely shaped by the Pre-Raphaelites in images such as Edward Burne Jones’ The Beguiling of Merlin (1872-77) or Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith (1866-68). The latter sees the disobedient first wife of Adam transformed into a vain bohemian beauty admiring her luscious locks in a hand mirror.
Were they responding to a trend or instrumental in shaping the narrative? “I think both,” says Carol Jacobi, curator of Tate Britain’s forthcoming exhibition The Rossettis. “They were responding to social trends, both the reactionary ones and the whole idea of the ‘fallen woman’, and also the women in their circle who were the New Women. At the same time, I think Rossetti creates a new visual language for the femme fatale that brings it to the mainstream and was picked up by a lot of other artists.”