Month: February 2019

  • BritBox

    ITV plc has just reported its annual results, and it was for that reason that we got the announcement of BritBox pretty much simultaneously. Because, from the careful phrasing the in the press release, you can tell that the deal hasn’t quite been done and that there is a final bit of finessing to do:…

  • Where Next for ILR?

    When LBC launched in 1973, it was the first Independent Local Radio (ILR) station in the UK. Capital Radio was the second station, launching just a eight days after LBC. In due course, there would be more than 200 such stations across the country. Today, we must wonder whether we are beginning to see the…

  • Walking in Berlin by Franz Hessel

    I picked up a copy of Walking in Berlin over Christmas having become fascinated by the period after reading the first couple of Volker Kutscher’s Gereon Rath novels and watching the superb TV dramatisation Babylon Berlin. A recent trip to Berlin also got me even more interested in the period. This book, newly translated by Amanda…

  • IP Contributions on the Radio

    This morning I Tweeted this, and it got more than a few likes: (NB. I apologise for the misplaced apostrophe in end’s – it should have been ends’. And using both today and this morning was tautological.) This came after I heard two interviews on Radio 4’s Today programme, and a third on Five Live,…

  • The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

    This book lays out the horrifying facts about climate change in a compelling and urgent way.  In The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells takes a comprehensive stroll through the very real perils that the world is facing from climate change. He opens with a devastating picture of just how quickly we’re going to see real suffering and destruction,…

  • Berberian Sound Studio

    Berberian Sound Studio was a very fine 2012 horror film made by Peter Strickland. Set in the seventies, Toby Jones starred as Gilderoy, a sound mixer who has been employed to work on an Italian film called The Equestrian Vortex. He believes that he was employed because of his sound recording and mixing on a documentary about…

  • Undercover Advertising

    In the UK, we have some really tight restriction on what and how we are able to advertise. Ofcom has a Broadcasting Code. The Advertising Standards Authority has both Broadcast and Non-Broadcast Codes. Beyond these, there are EU wide codes, and industry codes. But frankly, the internet still appears to be the wild west. Panorama…

  • Das Boot

    I first saw the original 1981 Wolfgang Petersen version of Das Boot on TV sometime in the late 80s. But it wasn’t until a 1998 re-release of the extended director’s cut of the film, that I saw in a cinema on Lower Regent Street, that I can honestly say that I saw it properly. That version…

  • My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing

    A twisted thriller about a couple who are not all they seem.  The set-up for My Lovely Wife is intriguing and it’s hard to avoid giving away too much in the way of spoilers. ‘Tobias’ narrates this story. He’s married to Millicent and they live together in an idyllic gated community in Florida with their two kids…

  • Tangerine by Christine Langan

    The cover of the paperback edition of Tangerine has a quote from The Times claiming that the book is like a cross between Girl on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley. This was one of those books that I absolutely did pick up based on the cover – but that strapline also sold it to me. Tangerine is Waterstones’ fiction book…

  • Normal People by Sally Rooney

    When a book receives as much hype as Sally Rooney’s Booker longlisted, Costa winning and Waterstones winning novel, it can have a reverse reaction for me. The book sounds like it’s being over-hyped. I begin to think that it can’t possibly live up to expectations. I tend to actively avoid such titles. But then, I…

  • Turbulence by David Szalay

    This is essentially a book of short stories with a clever over-arching mechanic that links them. Each chapter tells a different story about someone who is somehow travelling between airports. So the first chapter starts with a flight from London to Madrid. The next story will take us from Madrid to Dakar. And so we…