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...