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A couple of years ago there was a sketch on a Canadian comedy show (starts at 01:26), the Baroness Von Sketch Show, in which a woman walks into a clothing store and tries on a long, sleeveless black dress. She … Continue reading
Category Archives: Arts
A Twitter defence of James Franco (right), who has been accused of sexual assault explicitly by one actress and implicitly by others: If you read closely, it said it happened during filming of Palo Alto. The movie stars Franco as … Continue reading
An online women’s publication called “The Establishment” last year published an article attacking the editing of Anne Frank’s diary by her father, Otto Frank, for publication in the 1940s after the death of the author and several members of their … Continue reading
Last weekend David Bowie died, and amid the non-stop media tributes (which have been compared to the relentless coverage of Lady Diana’s death in 1997, although they can’t have really approached that — normal TV programming was stopped for most … Continue reading
The Theory of Everything is a bio-pic of Professor Stephen Hawking, the British professor of theoretical physics and former Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge university, who is best-known for his book A Brief History of Time and for being … Continue reading
Back in the 1980s, Doctor Who featured a storyline in which The Doctor was transported to a land ruled by so-called happy people, a land in which sadness is illegal and punished by the Happiness Patrol, who have the TARDIS … Continue reading
Roman Polanski and the sin of simplification (in today’s Observer) Victoria Coren Mitchell tries to make a case that the situation of Roman Polanski, the subject of a book published by the woman he raped as a young girl in … Continue reading
Taking Up Space: Women vs. Men | You think I just don't understand, but I don't believe you. Cathy “Bug” Brennan, someone who I have heard described as one of the most extreme and irrational radical feminists, has done a … Continue reading
Terry Deary on Libraries (from the Guardian) Terry Deary (of Horrible Histories fame) thinks bookshops are closing because libraries are cutting their throats by lending out books rather than selling them. Uh, not so fast. Libraries were much stronger in … Continue reading
I watched Wednesday night’s Exposure documentary in which the claims that have been made about his molestation of young girls in the BBC studios and at a special boarding school in Surrey in the 1960s and 70s were aired. Of … Continue reading
Last night it was announced that the actor Michael Clarke Duncan, best known for playing John Coffey in the 1999 film The Green Mile, based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, had died following a heart attack. … Continue reading
Last Sunday night, the R&B singer Chris Brown performed at the Grammy award ceremonies, having apparently been given an exemption from the terms of his five-year probation to appear. Brown is probably better known for beating up his then-girlfriend, fellow … Continue reading
A shrine for Saint Roald and Saint Rowling (from today’s Guardian) Roald Dahl’s family is seeking £500,000 (US $790,300 at current rates) to transfer the hut in which the late author wrote some of his famous children’s novels to the … Continue reading
I saw an article by Amy Chua, the Chinese-American academic, in which she proclaims herself a “tiger mother” and tells the world that Chinese mothers (or maybe she means mothers from a particular group of immigrant Chinese Americans, I’m not … Continue reading
I got a reply from someone at the BBC Complaints department, which (much like the response to my earlier complaint about male rape jokes) wasn’t so much an apology as a self-justification. It included this: Drama productions like ‘Casualty’ aren’t … Continue reading
After the Gilderdale story made headlines this past January (and the other coverage of assisted suicide and mercy killing that happened around the same time), I was expecting both stories to be featured in some British drama fairly soon, and … Continue reading
A couple of hours ago I went downstairs to chat to my sis who is visiting with her little girl, and one of the new generation of comedy shows, Mock the Week, was on. They were talking about George Michael, … Continue reading
London Design festival: Has British design lost its way? | Art and design | The Guardian There’s a feature in today’s Guardian about the Anti Design Festival, which starts this coming Saturday in London and is a response to what … Continue reading
Yesterday (Saturday) morning, I got to speak on the Late Show with Joanne Good on BBC London (94.9FM). She was doing a feature on bad comedy, specifically an incident in which Frankie Boyle, a former panellist on the BBC TV … Continue reading
Yesterday I had a brief exchange of tweets with Organica, who told me of her enthusiasm for the British comedian, Ricky Gervais, best known for writing and starring in The Office, his stand-up shows, and most recently the critically very … Continue reading