Indeed Sir George went considerably further than employers who had agreed a deal worth

Indeed, Sir George went considerably further than employers who had agreed a deal worth 16 per cent but which was vetoed by ministers. Almost every element of firefighters’ working conditions were to be changed in return for a pay increase of 4 per cent from last November and 7 per cent from next November. After all, the Government has registered its determination to bring in sweeping reforms to the fire service and if necessary, it seems, sweep away the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) at the same time.If he has harboured such misgivings, the left-wing general secretary of the FBU is not letting on.
Mr Gilchrist and his executive have prepared a contingency plan for months of strikes, varying from two-hour walkouts to stoppages lasting four days.”We are prepared for a lengthy period of industrial action,” Mr Gilchrist says, “and that is because our employers make it clear that the only negotiations that can take place are on the basis that we unreservedly commit ourselves to their agenda. It boasts that it has more people working on its games than any Hollywood studio employs in film-making.Take Two is the other gorilla of video games, dominating the “guts and gore” segment with the bestselling Grand Theft Auto 3 and Grand Theft Auto 3: Vice City.Past Duke Nukems were popular among PC gamers, but nowadays the majority of players use games consoles. Though the sector boasted worldwide sales worth $20bn (£13.3bn) last year, analysts say the phenomenal rate of growth is slowing and that the vast majority of sales go to just two companies – Electronic Arts, which took in about $2bn last year, and the New York-based Take Two Interactive.Electronic Arts is emerging as the Disney of the interactive world, with a stable of family-friendly hits and sporting titles such as Fifa Soccer, Madden NFL, Harry Potter and James Bond. The hyper-competitive video-game industry is littered with struggling companies producing good games that attract too few buyers. “There is very little pent-up demand – people have moved on,” explains Brown.

Spending years on developing a game is no guarantee of success, points out Abe Rahey, a Duke Nukem enthusiast who runs the fan website PlanetDuke. “It will have to have a phenomenal level of interactivity, with a lot of interesting things that get triggered – or an open-ended game-world – to be a real success.Even veteran fans doubt that 3D Realms can pull it off. Predictably, only Duke Nukem can save the planet.But it will take a lot more than that to get 21st-century gamers excited, notes Brown. It takes time to innovate – it doesn’t take any time to shovel any old crap out there,” Joe Siegler, the company’s webmaster, has said.

But in the Short and Powell case this was impossible.One of the first flash points was just before polling day in 1970 when “Nigger Neighbour” stickers started to appear round Wolverhampton, prompting Short to denounce these Fascist tactics. Normally two MPs albeit of different parties have a decent working relationship. And this is why years later she was given the privilege of the invitation to be a lay member of the Medical Research Council. There was some dispute whether this was bestowed upon her by admirers – she was sponsored by the Transport and General Workers’ Union – such as Jack Jones, who had been in the Spanish Civil War, or by Sam Watson, the veteran leader of the Durham miners, who most certainly did not admire what he regarded as unrealistic pie-in-the-sky Home Counties Socialist Utopianism. He directed 30 episodes in two years, and he was to direct many other TV shows, including episodes of No Time for Sergeants and Lou Grant.Crenna gave one of his finest screen performances when he played the dour, duty-bound gunboat captain in Robert Wise’s The Sand Pebbles (1966). “Radio actors always got residuals, but TV actors didn’t,” he said: I felt that residuals meant more employment, not less Reagan didn’t want to face the issue at first. On the long-running comedy series Our Miss Brooks, he played the dim-witted student Walter Denton and, when the show transferred to television in 1952, its star Eve Arden insisted that Crenna be in the show, though he was really getting too old for the part.At the same time Crenna began a lifetime battle for actors’ rights, taking on the Screen Actors Guild President Ronald Reagan to ensure that actors received residual payments for their work.