Month: October 2008

  • Issue Du Jour

    I’m loathe to return to this subject because it has been done to death everywhere now. But I think a few key things have come out. 1. The two presenters were exceptionally juvenile doing what they did and should have known better. 2. Although they were employed to push boundaries, they are well aware of…

  • Overblown Nonsense

    So the Ross/Brand things has blown up out of all proportion. Seriously. The scale of the media frenzy is in no way proportional to what actually happened. When I wrote about this the other day, I did so in a way that discussed something that would be of interest to people who read Media Guardian.…

  • Dead Set

    I’ll write more about this perhaps at a later date, but it suitably scary and a thoroughly enjoyable piece of drama. Obviously influenced heavily in style by 28 Days Later, but still excellent. How many times did I find myself saying “If only… If only…”? I see that it got a very strong audience of…

  • Responsibility In Front Of A Microphone

    In the last couple of days we’ve heard plenty about a “prank” that Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross played on actor Andrew Sachs a couple of weeks ago on Brand’s Radio 2 Saturday evening programme. As part of a pre-recorded show, when Sachs didn’t answer his phone for a pre-arranged interview, Brand (new book –…

  • Julie Fowlis Live at Union Chapel

    A great little gig at the wonderful Union Chapel in Islington with Julie Fowlis singing and playing some superb music in Gaelic. It was real toe-tapping stuff. And the support from Emily Smith was excellent too. I picked up her most recent album at the back of the hall on the way out. More photos…

  • ITV

    Far too much has been written about Kerry Katona and her behaviour on This Morning a couple of days ago. I can’t be bothered to go into it, and if she is ill, I’m not about to link to YouTube clips of her being ill on national television. That’s despite whatever I might think about…

  • Early Morning Sun

  • Freeview News

    It’s been an interesting week or so for Digital Terrestrial Television in the UK – or Freeview as it’s better known. SDN has somehow been able to squeeze a little extra space out of the platform and put another channel up for auction, and it was won by Discovery. Before everyone gets too excited thinking…

  • Rankin and Oxfam

    The Today Programme website has a great audio slideshow from photographer Rankin who’s been out to a camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo with Oxfam to photograph some of the people who live there. There are some fabulous photos which have been taken in a very different way to how you’d normally see such…

  • This Is War! Robert Capa At Work

    There’s a fabulous new exhibition of the work of celebrated war photographer Robert Capa currently on display at The Barbican. It features, in detail, several key events that Capa covered from the Spanish Civil War through D-Day to the end of the war. Alongside Capa’s work, we also have that of his partner, Gerda Taro,…

  • When Will We Take TV Criticism Seriously?

    While many papers like the Daily Mail are getting rid of their TV critics, despite the fact that vast parts of their paper revolves around the medium, others provide a fuller service, but I begin to wonder why they bother. My paper of choice is The Guardian. And they employ one of the finest television…

  • CNN Graphs

    In his Guardian column today, Charlie Brooker says that he watched the third presidential debate live on CNN because they had a fancy graph along the bottom showing what some undecided voters thought about what the candidates were saying as they said it. Now I haven’t yet seen the third debate. It’s still on my…