Brit Hit

Ta! for the nod to EastEnders in [Naked City, "TV Party!" Joey Sweeney, Dec. 15, 2005]. Sweeney's description was pretty spot-on, though he glanced over why BBC America no longer airs the show (inadequate revenue rather than chav-shame) and why WHYY pulled the show three years ago (ditto). I lead a small group of EE addicts here in Philly that watch not on WLVT (as we are cableless) but via a tape train out of WLIW New York. I always knew we were resourceful, but I never dreamed we'd be considered hip! Cheers!

Christy Ellingsworth
West Philly

I've been scrambling through public television for the last 10 years on many a late Sunday night just for a little taste of those wankers from Walford Square! It's so refreshing to see someone who actually has to worry about paying the bills and running into your ex at the corner pub rather than being kidnapped by your evil twin and left on an island only to be rescued by a mermaid and whisked back to your million-dollar mansion. You can keep Erica Kane. I'll take that scrappy Kat Slater anytime!

Michelle Brennan
New Hope

[Loose Canon, "Beyond Stale Air," Bruce Schimmel, Dec. 15, 2005] captured the passion of community radio and the exciting possibilities that emerging technologies present. One thing gets lost in this somewhat false debate of "new" versus "old" media: It has not been limitations of technology but rather the chicanery of greedy corporations and a lapdog FCC that have kept community-based media institutions locked out of traditional means of mass communication. New technologies will not magically change the shady politics of communications policy. For that to happen, people need to actively support the community media institutions that exist, as media consumers, supporters and volunteers. Our government and the corporate media have reneged on their promise to serve the public interest and it's time we showed them how it's done.

Anthony Mazza
Volunteer, Radio Volta

Wrong Turn

As a longtime resident of West Philly with my working-class roots scattered along the Main Line and out in Amish Country, I flipped open to your Dec. 15 cover story ["Lancaster Avenue," Michael T. Regan and Mike Newall] with thirst for a narrative that would reveal and unite various histories along my favorite American highway. Why did you blow it? A street whose name harkens back to the days when roads told you where they were headed, whose trolley tracks are among the few to have withstood the monopolization of our nation's public transit systems by the auto industry and whose point of origin once met with Woodland Avenue at 33rd and Market streets before eminent domain granted entire neighborhoods to Drexel and UPenn and displaced hundreds of black families. Instead, your haphazard photo essay whitewashes gentrification along the Avenue while demonizing African Americans by graphically portraying them as the only people whose communities suffer from "drugs, violence and blight." I'd hoped to read about how the offices and apartments above all the discount stores at 41st Street came to be boarded up while suburban colleges just up the road continue to drown in their own affluence, but instead I'm left with the question, "How come we never see a white person talking about dicks and bitches?"

Morgan F.P. Andrews
West Philadelphia