What are the limits of dramatic license when editing together yr footage in a documentary abt animals? In Natural World (Sunday 30 November, 6.25pm BBC2), “Monkey Prince” told the glum tale of Bobo, an existentially tormented fellow with […]

I keep watching Charmed, as I’m easy meat for anything like that, as I was for I Dream Of Jeannie and Bewitched and Buffy and almost anything else with magic on TV (do they have to star women? I’m not sure). But tonight’s episode on[…]

Stop, And Listen
You might hear something you’re missing
Well its quite possible that you missed this, the fantastic highpoint of the fraggle band Mega City Four’s career. It managing to tickle the charts at number 34 in 1992. Which is a […]

Well it wouldn’t be an alphabet of crap if the Beatles did not make the cut. PS I Love You comes from the stage of their career when they were not being feted as the single most important cultural event of the twentieth century. The beginning o[…]

I was trying to work out what it was about Elf that reminded me of Ghostbusters. I loved Ghostbusters as a kid, and really rather like Elf. Perhaps it is the slightly fantasy setting of both films. The fact that both are firmly rooted in a vision of […]

Take a journey back in time
Leave the western world behind
Cross the mountains to Peking
Where the paper laterns gently swing
Leaving aside the fact that the Chinese prefer Beijing these days since Level 42 wish us to travel back in time, has there e[…]

Cheery Van Morrison.
The harder edged Cocteau Twins Songs.
The Farms Greatest Hits.
British Hip-Hop.
All phrases and concepts which make no sense I think you would all agree. Oxymorons even. And in British Hip-Hop nothing puts the morons in Oxymoron […]

I’m sure most rock stars were better when they were dorks, but luckily for them we don’t usually get to see that. With Depeche it was all terribly public, and I can’t think why anyone with the vaguest affection for their gauche Goth[…]

SEND FOR THE HATING TABLETS! My annual battle with misogyny gets underway with the release of this year’s Lambrini adverts. You know the form by now: three women enjoying ‘girly night out/in’ with bottle of stomach-wrenching pear pl[…]

I have a slim vol on my bookshelf called Genes, People and Language by a fellow called Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. Using genetic tests, one can draw trees which show how early man spread around the globe. Using linguistics, one can plot very similar t[…]