Sweet Nothings

I really need to be more proactive in my blogging. I always try to watch University Challenge and was transfixed by Gail Trimble (above) from the first show she appeared on. Now of course she has at least temporarily been elevated to the position of celebrity, especially after her almost hustler-like performance in Monday’s final in which she only managed one (incorrect) answer in 20 minutes, but then proceeded to correctly buzz in on what seemed like 20 starter questions in a row to steer her Corpus Christi, Oxford team to victory. If I’d have written about her back when I first saw her (and if this blog had a readership, obviously), I might have actually been at the forefront of the debate rather than flailing around in its wake. Hey ho. The reactions to Ms Trimble have been decidedly mixed. For all the deserved praise she’s received in some quarters for her quite incredible knowledge and powers of recall, there has also been some pretty vicious sniping at her perceived aloofness and...

Back in the last millennium, there were comparitively few celebrities. A clear dividing line existed between famous people who did proper jobs that happened to put them in the public eye - be they sportsmen, actors, TV and radio presenters, whatever - and the general public. People who made a living out of being famous were either born rich or had accomplished something to earn their place in the spotlight. Now fast forward to Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, which seems to have become an exercise in seeing how many micro-“celebrities” can be pointlessly shoehorned into one hour of programming. In the midst of this maelstrom, Jade Goody is dying. In her own ordinary way, Jade has led an extraordinary life. After being thrust into the limelight as a naive teenager during her time in the Big Brother house, it seems like her entire existence has been documented on our screens and on the magazine racks ever since. Indeed, her return to the BB house, this time on the Celebrity edition...

They're currently repeating Early Doors on BBC4, Tuesday nights at 9:30pm, just before Mad Men, in fact. You'd be forgiven for not knowing the first thing about Early Doors , because unlike Mad Men it's a series that existed almost completely without hype. Originally, 'Doors (as nobody calls it) was set to be Craig Cash and Caroline Aherne's follow-up to the multi-award-winning, insanely popular Royle Family , with the writing duo playing the landlord and landlady of a northern watering hole. That idea was scuppered when Aherne's well-documented "issues" got the better of her, and she buggered off to Australia and wrote a near-identical Aussie version of the Royles while she was there. Undeterred, Cash drafted in Phil Mealey as his new partner and carried on writing the new show, which can fairly be described as the Royle Family in a pub. Perhaps BBC bigwigs perceived the show to be too derivative and lacking in star power after Aherne's departure,...

I know I use the Daily Mail as a touchstone for a lot of my rage and anger, but the fact remains that it's a nasty, bitter and reactionary rag that pines for an imagined lost golden age in which everybody was nice to each other, and had white faces, and nothing bad ever happened. As I went for a walk through the park and up to Alexandra Palace today the thought struck me that Mail readers must fucking love snow. Just think about it: hundreds of people out walking and playing in the deep white powdery stuff, experiencing a kind of shared cameraderie that was otherwise lost the day National Service ended. All those kids who would normally be out menacing right-thinking folk and being up to no good, now channelling their energies into building whacking great snowmen, trading in their guns for snowballs and hotwired cars for sledges. And those who don't have sledges improvise, making do with plastic bags and bits of cardboard - brilliantly, I even saw someone tackling the imprompt...

Wrestling is a funny old thing. I can never satisfactorily explain why I enjoy watching it, beyond a few lame-sounding lines about male soap operas, the primal (male) love of combat, etc. The Wrestler isn't going to change anybody's minds about the sport (or "sports entertainment", or whatever), especially after the genuinely gut-churning hardcore bout involving glass, barbed wire and a staple gun. However, the film is far more concerned with universal themes of fear of getting old, and the struggle to find one's place in the world, and Marisa Tomei's single-mom stripper is just as important to its success. The role of ageing fuck-up Randy "the Ram" really does fit Rourke like a glove and an Oscar win would be well deserved. Ultimately the story is fairly generic, the sub-plot involving Randy's daughter being especially predictable, but as a wrestling fan I can attest that this film has been made with care and attention to detail, and as a viewe...

The BBC’s coverage of the Masters snooker this week is happening without one of its most recognisable voices. The decision to dispense of Clive Everton’s services is the latest in a long line of such moves by the Beeb, who have now got rid of nearly all of their long-serving commentators. Bosses insist that age has not been a factor in their decisions, but there is a general televisual drive towards pushing younger, supposedly more dynamic personalities into the foreground and your Bruce Forsythes and Peter Allisses are very much the exceptions that prove the rule. In sporting terms, the modern trend is to appoint famous former stars to replace the veterans who’ve been forced into retirement. There have undeniably been successes on this front, Sam Torrance, Steve Cram and Andy Jamieson to name a few BBC examples. But equally there are those that confirm the belief, which applies to commentators and pundits/trackside interviewers alike, that just because you’re famous for excelling at a...

I slagged off the Mail in my last post and with very good reason, but just to show that I'm not a complete limp-wristed wet liberal, I'm going to have a go at Simon Hoggart and his diary piece in today's Grauniad. I quote [comments added in square brackets]: In fact, the market for recycled paper has collapsed, so there's no point in sorting that [okay...], and that glass is mainly used for road beds, since it is hard but permeable. No point in recycling that anyway: there is no world shortage of sand. [Good grief, where do you start with this? No, there is lots of sand. There is also lots of glass that gets buried in landfill when it could quite easily be recycled, thus reducing the need for more landfill space.] Most household rubbish around the country still goes into landfill anyway. [True, but that doesn't mean you have to add to it.] Like so much associated with the green movement, this procedure has a religious quality. It even takes as long as the average ch...

Take a look at this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1107290/Revolt-Robbed-right-buy-traditional-light-bulbs-millions-clearing-shelves-supplies.html "Millions of Britons are finally waking up to the fact that their beloved light bulb will disappear for good after 120 years", indeed. I'm not very good at jokes, but if I were to ask "How many Daily Mail readers does it take to change a lightbulb?" then the punchline might be something like "Change? Never! Them European bureaucrats can take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom!" What in the name of sanity is going on? Somebody on the Popbitch messageboard said it best - in 1889 the Mail's headline would have read "Millions of Britons are finally waking up to the fact that their beloved gas lighting will disappear for good after 120 years." It's not just the Mail though, there was an item on BBC Breakfast this morning full of people complaining that the new eco-friend...

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 ...