Sweet Nothings

Once again, despite having only seen a fraction of this year's movie releases, and despite the godlike Dr Kermode covering the subject pretty much perfectly every week on the wireless, I find myself wanting to put forward my own inconsequential opinions on films from 2008, if only because this blog only started halfway through and missed out a lot of stuff. This stuff included the big Oscar movies, all of which were released literally within a couple of weeks of each other at the start of the year. No Country For Old Men won the most critical acclaim, but for me it was the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of the Coen brothers. In much the same way as I finally decided that, after having the same reaction of "well I thought some bits were funny and it looked fantastic, although there was no real plot" after every new Tim Burton film, I didn't really enjoy Tim Burton films, No Country cemented my feelings about the Coens. Yes some of the locations and cin...

Although I proverbially lost my religion some years ago, I've always missed the churchgoing, carol-singing, communal aspects of Christmas. This year I made do with attending Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People , a kind of secular version of the above. Conceived by comic Robin Ince as an alternative Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, they originally booked one night at the smallish Bloomsbury Theatre. It sold out twice over, so they added another show at the 4,000 capacity Hammersmith Apollo tonight - meanwhile, as Ince ruefully admitted, the event had metamorphosed into something more akin to the Royal Variety Show. The evening consisted of the amiable Ince introducing far more than nine acts, a vastly diverse mix of comedians (Mark Thomas, Josie Long, Chris Addison, and most notably Ricky Gervais), musicians such as Jarvis Cocker and Malcolm Middleton, plus Richard Dawkins, Simon Singh and Ben Goldacre to add some gravitas to the proceedings. The secular, pro-science the...

The issue of fans booing their own players has reared its ugly head again recently - ugly being the operative word in the case of Emmanuel Eboue, a perpetrator of many heinous fouls and a generally arrogant so-and-so. The last high-profile case of booing was directed at Ashley Cole after his error against Kazakhstan at Wembley, a similarly unpopular individual (to say the least). One of the Sky pundits yesterday, possibly Phil Thompson, was asked about the Eboue situation and launched into the usual pundit diatribe, angrily asserting that booing your own player was never justified, only harms their confidence, is detrimental to the team as a whole, and so forth. Ironically enough this had me booing very loudly at the screen (booing in this case being a euphemism for swearing like a Tourette's patient who just hit his thumb with a hammer). This is not a black-and-white issue. Categorically saying that you should never boo your own team is stupid. The fact is, Eboue and Cole are not ...

It wouldn’t be terribly fair to do a musical “best of” list for 2008, considering I’ve only heard a small percentage of everything that’s been released this year. So anyway, here are my top 5 albums of 2008, plus a general round-up of what else has or indeed hasn’t floated my boat over the last 12 months. From the beginning, 2008 looked set to be the year of the somewhat soul-influenced white female solo artist, with Adele and Duffy in particular the focus of sustained marketing pushes. If you were being charitable, you could argue that both girls were talented performers who deserved their breaks, on the other hand it would be hard to disagree with the assertion that neither girl would have got anywhere if the record companies weren’t desperately jumping onto the Winehouse bandwagon. The Adele marketing blitzkrieg was particuarly crass, especially the ultimate PR stunt of giving her a Brit award purely for her “potential” (i.e. marketing budget), and perhaps this contributed to her be...

This is Anastasia Dobromyslova, a Russian darts player and the reigning BDO ladies World Champion. And, you'd have to agree, quite a hottie. For the uninitiated, there are two competing organisations in darts: - the BDO is the "original", its World Championships are televised on the BBC and it governs darts down to the grassroots levels of pub and county games. Critics argue that its owners belong in the dark ages. To give you an idea, the Lakeside club where the World Champs take place is run by a bloke called Bob Potter, a name whose similarity to that of Brian Potter of Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights fame is entirely coincidental I'm sure. (Although you might want to check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Lard ) - the PDC is a breakaway organisation run by wideboy promoter par excellence Barry Hearn, which boasts the vast majority of the world's great players in its ranks and whose exposure and popularity on Sky and now ITV is greater than ever. Th...

"Remember when you said girls had fleas?" "Remember when you swore you'd never love anyone else? And you'd never cut your hair, or have kids?" " Remember when you said you'd never buy a Renault ?" NO, I DO NOT REMEMBER THIS! Since when was not buying a Renault ever a big deal? If this was an advert for Skodas or Ladas it would make a vague amount of sense. But Renaults? Maybe they're viewed as somewhat girlie cars, but it's not as if men sit around making Renault jokes the whole time. Seems like the only point this advert really makes is that sooner or later we all relinquish our youthful principles and end up becoming the very things we used to despise. If that's really the case, and my destiny is to become a right-wing, Coldplay-loving rugby fan, then pass the whisky and paracetomol now, frankly. While we're on the subject of advertising: Kanye West's new album, 808s and Heartbreaks, is out. I read the 3-star review in th...

I hold no truck with people who don't take pub quizzes seriously. Even if you're thick as mince and only competing "for a laugh", you are presumably still there to enjoy yourself, and would therefore be somewhat pissed off to sit through a badly-organised shambles like the one I went to last night. First thing to note: it started after work at 6:30pm. By 10:45 most of the pub, including the rest of my team, had left with the final results still a mystery, and I simply couldn't be bothered waiting any longer. We had already marked each others' answer papers, so you would think that collating the final scores would be a simple case of totting up the already-written round totals. Apparently not. There were two guys from another department organising and hosting - I play football with the one, who is basically sound, and was actually billed as the sole host. Sadly most of the talking (and I do mean a lot of talking) was done by his colleague and mate. Floppy-haire...

Treasure Island. Captain Pugwash (whose crew categorically did not include Master Bates and Roger the Cabin Boy). Pirates of the Bastard Caribbean. All reasons why pirates have come to be viewed with a teary-eyed romanticism. People are at great pains to point out the differences between the modern form of piracy currently being practiced around the Horn of Africa and the funny, dashing pirates of yore. Even then, some would say, these Somali guys aren't all that bad really. All they do is kidnap defenceless crews and hold them captive until a ransom is paid - and sometimes they even have dinner with their hostages. How very civilized! This is all rather puzzling, because clearly pirates are criminals. As Ian Jack pointed out in the Grauniad yesterday, we don't look back on a Golden Age of Rape or Happy Slapping, but piracy is somehow not lumped in with other crime. It's seen as a gallant, noble enterprise, something akin to what Robin Hood was doing - so what if they were ...

I can't remember a friendly being more derided before the event than tonight's Germany-England match. As somebody who still naively clings to the romantic notion that international football means a great deal, I was not against it, but even so I was struggling to concentrate for long periods. Which was a shame, because as it turned out this was a highly satisfying and revealing performance. Certainly the notion that Fabio Capello is a fantastic manager who knows exactly what he's doing should now have been drummed into even the most xenophobic of Little Englanders (all of whom are now handily available in one big list for our perusal). Tonight England beat another of the "big" nations with what was basically a reserve team. Sure, the Germans weren't at full strength either, but many people have been lamenting our perceived lack of depth - presumably because while the first choice XI is playing so well they need to find something else to moan about. Gabriel Agh...

I've been to see the fireworks display up at Alexandra Palace for the last few years, and mostly been fairly underwhelmed by the experience. Partly this is due to it being too damn busy, and last year I was on a date with somebody I really shouldn't have been dating, but there's also something about fireworks that is inherently underwhelming. The other day I did indeed utter the words "once you've seen one set of fireworks, you've seen them all". The only exceptions to this rule I can think of are the Paris millennium celebrations - whose centrepiece was the fully illuminated Eiffel Tower - and the Beijing opening ceremony ones, which I didn't even see. Doh. Ally Pally certainly doesn't have millions of pounds to throw around for these displays, especially this year, and its old radio mast is not really a match for the old Tour Eiffel. Still, maybe it was down to low expectations, but I really enjoyed this year's extravaganza - and I didn't...

Tiredness thwarted my attempts to stay up late last night. I was mightily relieved when I put the telly on this morning. It's fair to say there's a pretty large burden of expectation on this fella's shoulders. I can only wish him luck.

I was in my local library earlier - a man walked up to the counter and said to the librarian "Can I have a pint of lager please?" "I'm sorry," said the librarian, "but this is a library." "Ok," replied the man, "Can I have a pint of lager please?" Of course not - that never happened! But this "joke" may not make any sense at all in the future if libraries carry on the way they're going. For instance, the one in Crouch End has one of those electronic organ type things (I'm not a musical expert, can you tell?), where patrons can sit, headphones on, bashing away at the keys like Geoffrey Rush in a particularly OTT outake from Shine. I can't explain why, but the sound of keys being struck with no music coming out was far more irritating than the sound of actual music would have been. We are still at the stage where libraries are essentially "quiet" places - I remember an incident a few weeks ago where a ...

Am I an arsehole for thinking this whole Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand "scandal" was funny? How come this fills me with apoplectic rage, yet the first one doesn’t? Is it because both Brand and Ross possess fantastic wit and verbal flair, whereas George Lamb is just a crass, hateful sack of shite? But, why was this material even broadcast? Surely shows like this are pre-recorded for this very reason? Still, I found it funny. But I can also see why Mr Sachs would find it deeply offensive. I can see why the Mail and especially ITV, for whom this was the MAIN ITEM on their early evening news yesterday, are getting so worked up, because it’s an excuse to lay into the Beeb, but I can’t see why anybody else is complaining, because quite frankly what’s it got to do with them? Sachs has complained, they’ve apologised. I still find Ross and Brand hilarious, but I somehow feel like I shouldn’t, because everyone is telling me they are just childish idiots who are too big for their boots,...

To Vicarage Road yesterday for Watford-Wolves. The PA announcer persisted in referring to the home team as "the Golden Boys". Two things: (a) you play in yellow, and (b) what the heck was wrong with the Hornets as a nickname?? Quite aside from the fact that the football you play could never in a million years be described as "golden", and in fact can more accurately be summarised as "cynical long-ball thuggery". To be fair to Adrian Bothroyd though, I'm sure he doesn't expect their flagrant rule-bending to be condoned by most refs, and it's not entirely his team's fault that the ref yesterday was letting them get away with BLOODY EVERYTHING. Oh well, we did win the game despite our defence looking no better than the last couple of games. It's a rollercoaster of a life being a Wolves fan.

If I tried to list every social faux pas I made I would probably break the internet, but here are a couple of choice recent ones. The scene: a pub somewhere off Tottenham Court Road, last weekend. Went along with my friend Dave to meet some of his old uni coursemates. It was established that they were in their early 30s - although one of them was a super-trendy gay guy who despite being 31 looked about 15, and was bragging light-heartedly about how he always got asked for ID. (Although I bet he must need like 5 hours to get ready for a night out so hah! - the joke’s on him.) Another guy had brought along his new ladyfriend, with whom I’d been attempting to converse. Bear in mind that she was some kind of frustrated singer/songwriter type who was on the fringes of the music scene, and that she was going through a messy divorce process from a guy who’d apparently treated her like shit. Anyway, the above was her cue to chuck out, missile-like, that most loaded of questions - “How old do y...

Moving on to the morass of mediocrity which makes up the majority of the league, which now seems set to include Everton . It’s hard not to feel sorry for David Moyes, as the pragmatic approach his team have used to overachieve and reach a high level is now putting off the kind of player he needs to push the team on. Thus their sheer desperation to sign players, any players, before the end of the window saw the arrival of Screech out of Saved By The Bell and Louis Saha, who should at least ensure that the club physios earn their wages. The bubble may well have burst. Blackburn are also on the way down - although probably not as far as many thought when mischievous reports began to surface about Paul Ince losing the dressing room after just a couple of weeks. Ince is clearly no mug, although it would only take the loss of another couple of key players to for them to be teetering on the brink of utter crapness. Plus, Incey has not yet figured out that smaller clubs can’t play wide open a...

Now we have another international break, it seems like a good time to assess the general state of the Premier League, Premiership, EPL or whatever you want to call it. Chelsea and Liverpool currently lead the way. I still have something of an aversion to watching both of these teams, especially the former given their ruthlessly efficient, football-is-for-winning-rather-than-entertaining philosophy under Jose. And under Avram, who didn’t really change anything. Scolari on the other hand does appear to want to actually play a bit of football, with full backs running past the halfway line and everything, so I may have to give them a go again. The BestClubInTheLand (TM) appear to have bucked their ideas up somewhat after my furious rant at them - having beaten Everton and both Manchester clubs on their own patches using varying degrees of skill and luck, they may just be actual title contenders. Torres is back on last season’s form and Robbie Keane is too good a player not to settle in th...

Everyone and his blog has something to say about The Wire, but I have to add my tuppence worth. Very seldom comes the time you can genuinely say something is The Best Thing... Ever in its field, but to say this about The Wire is almost selling it short. In a nutshell, here are the main reasons why we all agree it's so good: (1) It plays like a novel - the story builds up organically with no mandatory big action sequences or cliffhangers to end episodes. (2) It's brutally honest. Nobody is perfect, pretty much every character is morally compromised at some point, and institutions never operate the way they should do. Power always corrupts. (3) Completely believable characters, and terrific performances. A lot of the supporting cast are actual Baltimore natives, many of whom have been involved in escapades on which the characters are based. (4) It's one of those works where us fans end up jealous of newbies watching for the first time - they have all this magical stuff ahead...

I went to use a cash machine at the local HSBC this lunchtime to find that the gentleman before me had left without taking his £10 in cash. He was already long gone when the money came out and I was left waving it in the air rather pointlessly as a queue of amused and bemused expressions stood impatiently behind me. I completed my transaction and handed the £10 back to a member of staff, despite one or two peoples' urgings for me to do otherwise, and then I remembered an article I read the other day. Apparently GMTV were recently compiling what I doubt was a balanced and well-reasoned report examining whether Britons are becoming more selfish and less inclined to help their fellow citizens. Part of this report involved candid camera-style secret filming where an actress fell down, pretended to be injured and waited to see if anybody would help, and predictably in these celebrity-saturated times they tried this set-up on Russell Brand. He ended up helping the lady in question, altho...

"Jade Goody has decided not to tell her children that she has cancer as she does not want to scare them", reports http://www.digitalspy.co.uk . Somehow, love, I think they might find out.

There is a fine line between good-natured, sporting patriotism and aggressive, mean-spirited nationalism and at the Andorra-England match in Barcelona on Saturday (my first England away fixture) that line was crossed a bit too often for my liking. It would be ludicrious to tar all England fans with the same brush, but there were enough boozy hard-man types in that crowd who seemed to be itching for a ruck to make me feel very intimidated at times. The crapness of the match didn't help matters either. The "plucky" Andorrans played an unbelievably cynical brand of anti-football and too many of the English players either weren't good enough or totally uninterested (I'm honestly not trying to be controversial when I implore Frank Lampard never to play for England again.) Plus, the standard of Olympic stadia has clearly increased dramatically since the early 90s. It was amusing to witness the outrage of some fans who were not only forking out 10 whole Euros for a larg...

I saw two young lads in Newcastle United shirts outside Kings Cross last night. Given the the current situation at the club - merely the latest chapter in a seemingly endless comedy of errors - maybe they had come down to London to try and "sort out" their pikey lager-chugging chairman Mike Ashley and his miniature chum Dennis Wise. The thought of this may not be funny, and I don't normally advocate violence, but after an utterly rubbish day yesterday it cheered me up no end. King Kev for Chairman!

Two posts in one day, I hear you cry? (In my head, I actually have a readership.) Don't worry - this one is purely a rant. I now hate Liverpool FC more than any other club. Of course I can't stand Chelsea, who've bought their success and are chock-full of despicable characters, or Man U, who are just Man U - too arrogant and too damn good. (Arsenal are the only member of the "big 4" who I have any time for, as I like the fact that Wenger sticks bloody-mindedly to his principles even though they might have become a detriment to the club's success.) But the Scousers are even more detestable precisely because they're not very good. Four games so far this season, three very lucky victories with the winners coming in the final minutes, and one godawful boring nil-nil today at Villa Park. Despite having spunked hundreds of millions on several new teams, they're still no nearer to playing decent football and challenging for the Prem under Rafa as they were un...

Went to Twickenham yesterday to see REM. As a pro-football, anti-rugby man I really wanted to have a moan about the venue but annoyingly I could find nothing wrong with it. Even though the station isn't as near the ground as Wembley, the crowd control and journey home were as good as they could realistically be. Curses! I arrived just in time for Guillemots , between whose songs the screens either side of the stage displayed adverts for their album and downloadable songs, which even in these days of commercial saturation seemed a tad vulgar. The 'Mots (as nobody calls them) are as erratic a proposition as you'd expect from a band whose members include a fat Brazilian drummer, an impossibly exotic double bassist/percussionist named Aristzabal Hawkes, and a hyperactive indie-boy leader who goes by as strange a moniker as Fyfe Dangerfield. Take Kriss Kross , which begins with a killer keyboard riff that proceeds to go missing for a couple of minutes as the song tears through a...

China has been accused of many things in the last couple of weeks. We've had the lip-synching girl at the opening ceremony (as blogged earlier). There was controversy over the gymnast who allegedly did not meet the 16 years and over rule and actually fell into, shall we say, the Gary Glitter target bracket. And there have been plenty of instances of somewhat "eccentric" marks being awarded vis-a-vis Chinese athletes, none more so than in this mornings Taekwondo quarter final which team GB's plucky Sarah Stevenson managed to lose by a point, despite kicking her Chinese opponent squarely in the face for a two-point score just before the end of the contest. A complaint was duly lodged, but nobody seriously expected anything to be done. Homefield advantage has always been a factor in the Olympics, no matter how farcical the result. Ask Roy Jones Jr, who somehow only won boxing silver in the 1988 Seoul Olympics despite pummeling his South Korean opponent in the final and l...

It's actually quite hard to know what to make of this rush of British gold medals, since we are so unused to such sustained success as a nation. On the one hand, it brings out the best/worst strains of rabid flag-waving patriotism - we're above the Krauts and the Aussies in the medals table! How do you like them apples, guys?? On the other, the sports at which we're excelling are either somewhat elitist and frankly elicit zero interest save when we win medals in them every four years (rowing, sailing) or have had tons of money thrown at them in order to scientifically develop unbeatable technologies and training methods (cycling), which somewhat takes the fun out of a sport. That's what's so great about us Brits - we can find the cloud attached to every silver lining. I'm bracing myself for another tidal wave of anti-Paula Radcliffe vitriol tomorrow. Never mind that she was injured and probably shouldn't have even been racing - she didn't win! This makes...

Right-wing think tank Policy Exchange has published a report which pretty much suggests that several northern cities are absolute shitholes, and aren’t worth the bother of redevelopment. From BBC online: Cities in northern England such as Liverpool, Sunderland and Bradford are "beyond revival" and residents should move south, a think tank has argued. Policy Exchange said current regeneration policies were "failing" the people they were supposed to help. The Policy Exchange report said the three million affordable new homes planned by the government should be built in London, Oxford and Cambridge to enable people to migrate south. People should be told the "reality" to avoid them becoming "trapped" in less prosperous parts of the country. Clearly none of the authors of this report live in London, or else they would know that it’s not exactly lacking in people already, and the last thing we need is a million Scousers coming down and clogging it up...

I'm not exactly sure why I've gotten into golf. The combination of having Sky Sports, a flat of my own and not enough friends certainly helps. I would never call myself an expert and right now I'm a Major whore who can't be frigged with any other tournaments (oh, except that the Ryder Cup is on soon and I'll be having some of that), but even so: The final round of the USPGA last night was fucking amazing . It was one of those sporting occasions where all the right factors fell into place to ensure a dramatic conclusion. Harrington and Garcia resumed their battle from last year's Open, Sergio gunning for revenge but Padraig looking every inch a two-time Major winner and now with a taste for more. Behind them, the evil Ben Curtis - a man with absolutely sod all on his CV except, somehow, a flukey Major win. Surely he couldn't claim another? Player after player had denounced the Oakland Hills course after falling victim to its brutal difficulty level, and yet l...

Let’s get the disclaimers out of the way first: I am a straight man, I love Abba, I’ve seen Bjorn Again live supported not by a band but by a showing of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, despite this I’m perfectly comfortable with my sexuality, etc etc. I saw Mama Mia! (the ! is very important) at the cinema last night. After the first 10 minutes it was already the campest thing I’d ever seen, and it went on from there. Words cannot adequately explain just how ludicrous, nor how compelling, this thing was. Every shot is so gaudy, every gesture so broad, every line so acted , that you will either be overwhelmed and swept up in its ocean of camp, or end up running away screaming after the first scenes. Dr Kermode explains it far better than I: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61UolzFTVPI It has to be emphasised that Pierce Brosnan’s singing really is the worst you will ever hear in a professional production. You’d think as a trained actor he would be able to at least hold a tune. You would b...

The empty takeaway shop beneath my flat has finally been let, and construction work has begun. For reasons way beyond my tiny mind's comprehension, this led to the water pressure in my flat "going a bit funny". In layman's terms, my shower works on a "knob system". You turn the bath taps on, you pull the silver knob, water comes out of shower head at sufficienct velocity for knob to stay up until you're done. Come Tuesday morning, and the water came out of the taps so slowly that the knob refused to stay up . This is not what you need on what felt like the hottest day of the year. I ended up showering at work, after baulking at the £3 demanded by Kings Cross station for the use of their (previously free, I'm thinking?) showers. The shower room was stupidly hot. I had my shower, I got out, I attempted to dry myself. The water dried, my skin did not. I was sweatier than I had ever been in my lazy, exercise-deficient life. Hopefully this will be the onl...