09/01/2014 BBC Points West

George. Thank you. That's all so it's goodbye from me and on BBC One

Welcome to BBC Points West with David Garmston and Alex Lovell. Our

main story tonight: What it's like to have flooding on your doorstep.

More homes are threatened by the incoming water and an emergency

shelter is set up in case people have to get out. I'm really

petrified. I've never had it before like this and it's coming nearer and

nearer the house. We'll be looking at the cost of the clear`up and

asking if the worst is over. Our other stories making the news

this evening: In court ` the lap dancers and their agent accused of

kidnapping a club boss who didn t pay up. I don't want to do this

He's off ` Bath's Don Foster announces his retirement as an MP

and reflects on his roller`coaster ride in politics.

And searching for the secrets of the universe ` the electronic telescope

that can see for millions of miles. Hello. A few hours of dry weather

brought a much needed respite to the West Country today. But although

surface flooding is receding, some rivers are still rising ` and the

risk isn't over yet. The Severn for instance, takes longer to swell than

others ` so many people still have their fingers crossed. And at a

village on the Somerset Levels, an emergency shelter was opened last

night in case things get worse. Clinton Rogers is in Westonzoyland.

It is a very soggy Westonzoyland, as you can see. Some people seem to be

enjoying the water but not many I've spoken to one lady already

planning to leave her house tonight because the waters here are still

rising. Well, yesterday Langport and Aller.

Before that, Muchelney. Today a different village but very much the

same story ` a story of swollen rivers, of heavy rain, of high tides

pushing yet more water those rivers, over spilling onto the ball

land and, frankly, the water has nowhere else to go. `` moorland

Except the places like this that have had to cope with it today.

On the sodden streets of Westonzoyland, they were trying to

carry on as normal today ` or as normal as they could, considering

the floodwaters here are continuing to rise. It's still been coming up

since last night. It was nowhere near as bad as this last night. Last

night a full emergency plan swung into action in Westonzoyland, as

swollen rivers and water draining from higher ground threatened to

flood around 50 homes. Never as bad as this. It flows a little bit last

year but nothing like this. The Red Cross, local councils and

volunteers helped set up an emergency evacuation point in the

community centre. In the event, it wasn't needed. The water stopped

within inches of properties. The Somerset Levels are meant to flood `

water is deliberately diverted here to protect centres like Taunton and

Bridgwater. But it's the sheer volume of water here now that's

causing the problems. It's overflowing to places it shouldn't

go ` like Westonzoyland, where streets have become rivers. The

Environment Agency are pumping it off the moorland as fast as they

can. But the local MP says it's the agency's fault for neglecting the

rivers and water courses in the first place, refusing to dredge

them, gambling with people's lives and livelihoods. But others believe

the problem is more complex than that. It's going to have to be doing

things differently because clearly what they are doing at the moment

isn't working with the weather conditions we're experiencing. What

does different mean? It may be looking at dredging, managing the

land differently. They continue to prepare for the

worst and hope for the best in Westonzoyland. Long term, the

question is, how do you control this water. People living in communities

like this say an answer has to be found ` and quickly.

Unfortunately, we have a problem with the sound and we would remind

you, of course, as much fun as it might look, don't play in the flood

water. It's really not safe. The pictures of the West Country

under water have made headlines around the country. For some people,

it's the first time they've had their homes and businesses flooded.

For others it's become an all too familiar situation. Our business

correspondent Dave Harvey has been to meet just a few of the people

starting to count the cost of the floods. It got up to this level

halfway to the champagne labels They were all swimming in water

Champagne shouldn't be swimming in water. It should be dry, with some

nice salmon and canapes. The champagne survived ` of course `

but for two weeks, this Sicilian restaurateur has been mopping the

floors ` not popping the corks. For the busiest week of the year, these

tables lay empty and silent. Tonight, after a fortnight with the

squeegee, Vito will open for business once more. And he knows

plenty of others in the same boat. A few restaurants in the area I know

are closed over the Christmas period and are still closed because they

haven't managed open. It's devastating for them and for the

economy. We haven't had tides as big as this for seven years now. It came

over on Friday. It's flooded most of the farm. You find Richard Few's

farm down an aptly named Gloucestershire backroad. His fields

are underwater but he's not moaning ` the crops can take it, for a few

weeks at least. All established crops can survive underwater for

about four weeks. If this was to go on for eight to ten weeks, it would

start killing the grass. I have some wheat that won't survive the water,

which will cost quite a bit of money to replant. A world away from cattle

and crops ` Swindon's car factory. But the same floods have brought

production here to a standstill too, until Monday at least. But the

biggest bill may come from the little things. The rest country s

roads have taken a battering over the past ten days and after the

rain, there could be a freeze. In the spring, highways engineers will

come out and inspect potholes like this and try to work out the bill.

At the moment I couldn't envisage what this current flooding will cost

us but what I can say is that the 2007 flood, which was considerably

more than this one, cost the county ?20 million in road repairs and

investments to put the interest to write.

Back in Bradford on Avon, there was a determination in the air today.

The spirit? Get on with it, and get a mop out.

Ian will be with us later with your forecast.

Three women who were working as lap dancers during the National Hunt

Festival in Cheltenham have denied kidnapping a man they claim owed

them tens of thousands of pounds. The dancers, their agent and two men

have gone on trial at Bristol Crown Court. Our Gloucestershire reporter

Steve Knibbs was there. The Embassy nightclub in Cheltenham

was hired by Curtis Woodman during the National Hunt Festival in 2 12

to entertain race goers. Charlotte Devaney booked dancers and hostesses

for the week. But the court heard that the club was closed down

because it breached its licence when some of the dancers insisted on

taking their clothes off for customers. On the last night, one

customer paid ?42,000, which, under their contract, should have been

split between the women. But the jury were told they weren't paid by

Mr Woodman. The court heard that three of the dancers, Stephanie Pye,

Rachel Goodchild and Mandy Cool along with Charlotte Devaney,

planned to confront Curtis Woodman. The court was shown text messages,

in which Charlotte Devaney told an unknown contact...

The court was then told the four women went to where Curtis Woodman

worked with Alex and Robert Morris, who bundled him into a car. A police

video interview with the victim Curtis Woodman, was shown to the

court, in which he described what happened to him after he was taken.

He said Charlotte Devaney kept screaming at him, "Where's my

money?". He talked about how Robert Morris kept hitting him and how Alex

Morris threatened him with a Stanley knife. At one stage he told police

he was taken out of the car in a headlock and hit. He said, "At this

point blood was pouring out of me". Mr Woodman claims he was then forced

to phone his bank and transfer ?4,800 into Charlotte Devaney's

account. All six defendants deny kidnap and the trial continues.

One of the West's best known political figures has announced he's

to stand down as an MP. Don Foster was first elected to represent Bath

in 1992. He's won five successive elections. He's currently the

Liberal Democrats' chief whip. Our political editor Paul Barltrop has

been looking back at his career Donald Michael Ellison Foster,

Liberal Democrat, 25,000. His defeat of top conservative Chris

Patten in 1992 thrust him into the spotlight. But Don Foster's

political career had begun a decade earlier, when he was elected to

serve on Avon County Council. He led the Liberal group and later, as an

MP, sought to become national party leader. Instead he was given

important roles ` but his fame often came from his willingness to perform

for the cameras, whether taking to two wheels, or riding a roller

coaster at a seaside party conference. I don't want to do this.

I really don't want to do this. He's had other scares too ` including

being treated for cancer. Fully recovered, he hit a new high, with

senior posts in in the coalition and praise from colleagues. He's so

widely liked and respected across Westminster. He's got a very

mischievous sense of humour. He s very resilient and is now working

very effectively as chief whip in my party. He'll be massively missed but

he's done many, many years of outstanding public service in Bath

and nationally, too. All Lib Dem MPs faced anger over their decision to

treble tuition fees. Being in government nationally could hurt the

party locally. He's taken his bid to retrieve from around 3000 to around

11,000 over the years. He's transcended politics for quite some

time, until 2010, when he became involved in a lot of sticky

situations. On the streets of Bath he's gone to quite some lengths to

catch voters' attention. It seems to have worked. I'm not very much a

Liberal Democrat person but he has been one of the better ones. He

seems to be very proactive and speaks to people when they approach

him. All the best to him. He's been a bit of a stranger to

forward`looking people so some new blood would be good. He was

re`elected last time with his biggest ever majority. The party's

search for his successor starts today.

Earlier I spoke to Mr Foster outside the Houses of Parliament and asked

him for some of his career highlights. Very many. Helping

individual constituents, obviously, has been the most important thing

I've done. Probably the thing that's been the greatest fun has been to

have played a part of the member of the Olympic and Paralympic board and

to be the deputy mayor of the Paralympic Village. That was an

amazing opportunity. You spent most of your parliamentary career in

opposition, when you could promise the world, frankly. The last four

years, you've been in government where it's been very tough. Which

did you prefer? I far prefer to be in government. It's important to

remember that MPs on the back inches, whether in opposition or the

government side, can get a lot achieved and I was able to change

legislation, to do things that have helped people in Bath from the

backbenches. But obviously in government, you've got an even

greater opportunity to make things happen. For example, a campaign that

I run the years to try to get better regulation of gambling in

government. I was able to achieve it and we've now got the legislation on

the statute books. The irony is that you caused a political earthquake

when you snatched Bath from the Conservatives, Chris Patten. Now

thanks to the Liberal Democrats the Conservatives are effectively in

government. They are government in coalition with the Liberal Democrats

and the result of our involvement, we've made a huge difference.

Getting a stronger economy, getting it out of the economic mess left by

the previous government, but doing it in a fairer way, and we're

doubling the green agenda, which is important. So I'm delighted we're in

government. Being able to raise the tax threshold, taking less well off

people out of tax altogether and many other things. Some say they

will never trust the Lib Dems again. They would be wrong to say that

Nick Clegg has apologised for what we did over tuition fees but let's

remember that four out of five of the key things we said we wanted to

achieve if we were in government, every one of them has now been

achieved. What happens to you next? I've no idea. One of your BBC

colleagues just invited me to come and take over your job so I look

forward to doing that. But I want people to recognise that there are

17 months still to go and I'm going to be working very hard as the MP

for Bath and then after that, one of the things I'm very keen to do is to

spend a bit more time being able to help a really important charity

called WaterAid, helping to bring safe, clean water to billions of

people around the world who don t have access to it. He's not having

my job! I'm bolting the studio doors from the inside.

We'd have to audition him anyway and I would be on the panel!

The Olympic silver medallist Heather Fell, who was part of the successful

modern pentathlon team based in Bath, has also announced her

retirement. To mark the end of her career she's been asking other stars

about the challenges they faced packing away their trainers and

giving up the day job. Competitive sport has always been

part of my life. It really is all I've ever known. Pony club when I

was tiny lead to modern pentathlon and full`time training at the

University of art. Giving that up and looking for a real job is

daunting. As a UK sport athlete my funding ended exactly three months

after my retirement. From that date, access to the doctors, the physios

and the gym here also ended. To cope with such a gear change, I've been

trying new things ` working with schools and charities and getting

experience in the media. I've found it harder than expected to adjust

and I wanted to find out how others have faced this sleep into the

unknown. Injuries forced Lewis Moody to hang up his boots in 2012. He

reached the pinnacle of his sport but retirement has taken time to

sink in. You don't realise to what extent you have competition in life

until it's gone. I'm getting more and more frustrated but I don't

realise it because I'm pretending that I don't miss rugby. It's your

wife that has to tell you to go and disappear to the gym and release

some testosterone. So it's a realisation that part of my life is

still having to find that competition and find things that

test me and push me outside of rugby. Rower Stephen Rowbotham

retired in 2008. He is now working for Siemens. It incredibly difficult

for some you take your last stroke can be of the games and somebody

turns round and asks you what you are going to do now and that's all

you have known. You walk into a room when you're rowing as Stephen

Rowbotham the other big medallist and now people don't even know your

name or hear you are. They don't even care. Brian Moore had a legal

career to fall back on when he gave up his sport. I moved to Soho and

went wild for years and had to go into a treatment programme. It's

much better to deal with these issues, which are quite terrifying

when EULA could then, when you've got that comfort and structure

around you. `` when you look at them. People who cope best with

retirement are people who plan before it happens. Helping athletes

find jobs is now the focus for sporting bodies. I attended this

careers fair last year, the first of its kind pairing Olympians with

blue`chip companies. UK firms say support like this will continue

So there is some support for athletes out there, but does it go

far enough? The Olympic gold medallist Dame Kelly Holmes retired

as a middle`distance athlete eight years ago. And she told me why she's

set up a trust helping former athletes find work. My trust brings

the athletes on board to give them a sense of their team spirit back

They work on our personal development programmes with

disadvantaged people in the community. And with that

connection, we're able to utilise the skills of the athletes and the

position they've been in to really motivate and give the kids a sense

of self`worth and opportunity. What do you think is the hardest part of

retiring? I found it pretty hard, just because the fact is that for

many many years you had one goal and that is to be the best you can be.

When you then make that decision to retire, really, everything you've

ever had changes the camaraderie, the team support, the focus, the

structure. When that goes, people seem to have a real loss of

identity, a loss of confidence and a lack of self`esteem to know where to

go next. Anybody who's lost a job might get that feeling of lack of

self`esteem so what would your advice be? Firstly, not to be

scared. It's a new life and it's different, definitely, but it gives

you new opportunities. Talk to people who have been in the same

position before, and there are many athletes who have retired in the

past and have gone through different journeys. What you get from that is

a sense of not being alone and that you're not the only one and

sometimes you need to hear those things. Although in the sporting

world you don't always know when you're going to have to retire,

there is an inevitability. So how much do you think you can forward

plan? I think because the area of retirement is becoming more and more

relevant now, because we're having so much profile on sport, there is a

sense that you can do a lot whilst you're an athlete in terms of

looking at other interests and maybe making that stepping stone, whether

it's going on a cause, reading about things, and actually preparing for

what you might like to do. But it is very hard because you remember when

you were at the top of your game and if you don't commit to your sport

100%, you would always be second best. So there's a real balance

Sports have their part to play in the fact that they do support

athletes when they leave for about three months, the English Institute

Of Sport. . But it is said to take two years for athletes to settle and

start to respond to that retirement phase in their life. There's a lot

more that can be done. Dame Kelly Holmes, thank you so much for

joining us. Makes you think, doesn't it? It s so

hard on sport, when you have to retire at such a young age.

Bristol Rovers will play Championship club Birmingham City

next Tuesday after finally completing their FA Cup second round

replay. They came from behind to beat Crawley Town by two goals to

one. Both Rovers goals came in the last ten minutes of the match, with

John`Joe O'Toole scoring the winner to send Rovers through to round

three. Rugby ` Bath's 20`year`old fly`half

George Ford has been called up for the England squad for the first

time. He's one of a dozen West Country players included for a

training camp ahead of the Six Nations Championship. Ford only

joined Bath during the summer from Leicester but has been in sparkling

form and feels he's ready to make the step up to international rugby

Way up on the roof above the physics laboratory at Bristol University,

there's a large telescope trained on the sky.

I feel like I'm in a good place I've been involved in tests in

international rugby and you don t know what to expect. It's a massive

learning curve for me but I feel like my game is a good place.

Way up on the roof above the physics laboratory at Bristol University,

there's a large telescope trained on the sky. It's scanning the heavens

thousands of light years away and is helping us to understand the speed

our galaxy is spinning. As part of the BBC's Stargazing Live, we sent

science and technology broadcaster Jheni Osman to take a look.

You get some amazing views of Bristol from up here. Although it is

a bit windy! But I wonder how many people walking on the streets below

have ever bothered to look up, and seen this. It's a device so powerful

that with its data we can find out amazing facts about distant parts of

our galaxy. I went to meet Professor Mark

Burkinshaw, who showed me the six metre high radio telescope that sits

on top of Bristol University's School of physics. It looks

specifically at the radio signal given off thy auto molecules as they

rotate and vibrate at different speeds, at different temperatures

across the galaxy. The movement of these molecules coming towards us is

a bit like an ambulance siren. As an ambulance moves towards you, the

sound waves in front of it become bunched up, hence the siren sounds

higher pitched. As it moves away, the sound waves get more stretched

out, and so it's lower pitched. This so`called Doppler shift is the same

effect that happens with the radiation from the vibrating water

molecules in a moving gas cloud By knowing how fast the water

molecules are moving, the scientists can work out where in the galaxy

they come from. All the data collated here is centre experts in

the US, who can also work out how fast the galaxy is actually

spinning. The galaxy is held together by Gravity and that

swirling motion tells us how much mass varies within a given radius of

the galaxy. By comparing the total mass with the mass we see in stars,

the difference is enormous. We can see whether dark matter is. Why

should we actually care about this? It's always embarrassing if you

don't know where 95% of the stuff is. If you only see 5% of the

universe, what's going on in the other 95 cents? It's amazing to

think that just this one radio telescope alone can tell us so much

about the galaxy we live in. And if it's whetted your appetite, then

tune in to Stargazing Live. It's on BBC Two this evening at eight

o'clock. If you don't know where 95% of your

stuff is, you should be embarrassed. Well, I am! But a man who isn't is

Ian. He's on the roof without a the Met Office has operated a

Doppler radio recently, which says there are some showers around at the

moment across the West Country. A dry, chilly start to tomorrow. The

rainfall amounts are not going to be in any way significant, many of you

will be glad to hear. This is how things are set up under what will

become an increasingly cold night. Into tomorrow, after a decent

morning you can see the front moving in from the West, which will make

rather erratic process into `` progress into our districts. Not

looking like anything to scare the horses. For the rest of the night, a

question of clearing the showers away ` some might linger across

western districts ` and more importantly watching the

temperatures tumble away. They are already starting to do so and will

continue into the early hours, so we can expect that by daybreak tomorrow

temperatures are down in the range of somewhere from about one Celsius

to four Celsius. As a consequence, the road temperatures will be down

to freezing or below, so anywhere away from the coastal fringes is now

under a Met Office and advisory for some icy surfaces. If you see

gritters out tonight, that is why they are there. We have seepage from

Broadwater across country lanes but that aside, a decent start. ``

seepage from flood water. You can see the progress of this front as it

moves its way in from the West through the late afternoon, through

the evening, and a damp end to Friday will be a safe description,

rather than thoroughly wet. Another cold night into Saturday morning but

temperatures tomorrow should get up to around eight or nine. Beyond

that, a beautiful day on Saturday, after a cold start. Sunday looks OK

until the afternoon. More rain comes in, some of which could be

significant. It raises the spectre of local flooding issues again. Next

week, every mess in the forecast models. Some headlines talking about

an arctic blast but it doesn't look anything like as bad as that.

As the BBC's stargazing programme approaches for its last hour, we're

going to be gazing at the stars ourselves. We have our own universe

above and apparently the aurora borealis is going to be visible from

some of the UK. I think we'd be lucky to see it down here but

nevertheless... From a moonlit Points West, good

night!