These awkward cliches and metaphors again

"Gregory's Girl was literally* filmed on a shoe string", we were recently told on TV. Is this a new technique that replaces film or video - and how much footage (that seems an appropriate term) can one record on a twenty-five centimetre shoe-string ? Perhaps the statement referred not to medium but to location: but that would require an enormous, specially commissioned, shoe string. Would it really have been worth while, even as a publicity stunt ? It's all a bit of a mystery.

A politician insisted the other day, in regard to one or other of the serious messes in which government and public services find themselves these days, that what was needed now were "clear and transparent benchmarks". Benchmarks should be clear, certainly; but I would have thought that to provide transparent ones would be rather counter-productive. Or was it at the back of the speaker's mind that politicians and public servants might feel safer if perhaps the benchmarks were virtually invisible ?

* See also post of 25th November below.

These awkward cliches and metaphors again