Last night I saw the first hour and a half of Martin Scorsese’s Il Mio Viaggio In Italia, which has convinced me that if Marty ever gives up directing he is a shoe-in for film school lecturing. It is basically a personal history of Italian cine[…]

TOM’S TOP TWELVE (Part 2) (As Promised) (Before the big pre-honeymoon decks-clearing pop roundup) (Now where were we…)
A-TEENS – “Upside Down”: I now suspect it was just a kind of wilful perversity that stopped me liking[…]

Vainly searching for some coverage of the FA Cup replays last night I stumbled onto Sky Sports News who were mainly covering the Carling Cup. Down at Highbury it was all getting a bit tense, after what was effectively Arsenal’s youth team had […]

CHEAP FOOD WE LOVE: Supplementary (Crisps, Post-Colonial Theory and): I’ve been trying to pin down the recent branding shift in Phileas Fogg snacks, and I can’t do it, I don’t think, without invoking the late great Edward Said: I th[…]

SPACE: FLYING VISITS is a little ten-minute filler programme on BBC2 (Tue, 9.50pm) which allows them to play around with presentation and formats, CGI, cartoons, talking heads at thumbnail size next to a multicoloured diagram, in ways they never do w[…]

God forgive me for discovering this, but the CBBC channel is currently repeating one series per week of early Eighties schools’ programme Look and Read. Sadly you’ve missed Dark Towers and The Boy From Space but ‘ even more sadly &#[…]

Another Mysterious Brand: except this one I do like. Tastes like nothing else, has heroically resisted the tides of ‘brand expansion’, has never IIRC changed its packaging, and you never see adverts for it. Every time I see it I’m d[…]

There, thus proving the blinkered prejudice of fellow publogger. Think about it, would the mighty Coca-Cola Company, even if trading thru Schweppes, be so stupid as to continue making and marketing something if it did not sell. Before you say “[…]

Life’s Cruel Lottery: related to Dave’s anguish below – brands that refuse to die! I reached for a can of coke this morning as I picked up my paper, but the newsagent was temporarily out. Of Cherry Coke, however, there was no end. Y[…]