Month: January 2003
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Classic Telly
Sunday mornings are worth getting up early for at the moment. At 8.00am we have The Adventure Game (also on Saturday mornings) being repeated for the first time since it was last shown in 1985. Challenge TV have shown 4 so far, but they’re scheduled for the next couple of weeks at least, and there…
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Gangs of New York
This new Martin Scorcese epic has famously been in production for a long time, and in the editing suite even longer. Now it finally reaches our screens (after a Christmas Day release in the US), but has it been worth the wait? Well a qualified yes. It is undoubtedly a spectacular film, and Daniel Day-Lewis…
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The New Rulers of the World
I picked this up in the Waterstones sale quite cheaply. I quite like John Pilger, but was annoyed with myself when I missed his last TV documentary – a documentary that Michael Green, Chairman of the TV company that made and aired the programme, attacked! The book is in four sections, covering many of the…
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Causa Belli
Latin still has so much to offer us. Today the poet laureate, Andrew Motion, published a new poem on the front page of The Guardian. “Causa Belli” translates as “causes, motives or pretexts of war”: CAUSA BELLI by Andrew Motion They read good books, and quote, but never learn a language other than the scream…
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When Internet Recommendations Go Bad
Just had the shock of my life. I went to Amazon and because of cookies and what not, it knew who I was. Nothing unusual there. And knowing who I was, it tried to recommend stuff to me. Fine. I have no objection to this. And what was number one? Freddy Got Fingered!!!! Possibly the…
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Balham to Bollywood
I must admit that the only reason I bought this book was because I saw it for just �2.99 last Thursday when I was shopping in Tesco (incidentally, this seems to have been an instore only deal). Well the subject matter interested me – an Englishman making a Bollywood epic, and it was serialised on…
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Tomorrow’s World
Tragically, Tomorrow’s World has been cancelled by the BBC. This is a terrible state of affairs, leaving no popular science programmes on mainstream terrestrial television. We have hour long specials with Horizon on BBC2, and that’s about it. We’re told that the programme name will remain for specials, but the problem with these is that…
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TV in 2002
The following is my response to the review of the year published by OTT. A great review of the year. And now, permit me to go through some of my own highlights, but mostly lowlights. This is a very snobbish set of views, which I stand by whole-handedly. Apologies if this is sometimes rambling, and…