Today is the twenty fifth anniversary of the very first airing of Hardwicke House. And tomorrow is the twenty fifth anniversary of the very last.
 

 
Hardwicke House was a star filled, high-profile comedy set in a comprehensive – Gr[…]

Firstly, an apology: this is a post in which I am unambiguously trying to promote something – my shaky defense is that it is primarily the work of other, very talented people, and that it is a project with which I am very proud to be associat[…]

In Barcelona, some time before the Brazil team caught the plane home, browsing in FNAC, the HMV of the continent.  Suddenly, this!
 There were loads of them, a pile of – oh, fifty – taking pride of place on the counter, and more dotted[…]

I’ve a petty irritation entirely of my own making, which makes it as vile to me as it is feeble: I seem to have an unyielding inability to discard fine packaging. Not any old thing – cellophane wrappers go straight in the bin, of course, […]

The mists that surround stories heard in childhood can lend them a mystic significance, and this is never more true than for those magical tales of socio-economics. Imagine the youngster, eyes open with wonder, hearing yarns of reckless, inflation-ha[…]

Funny rain is quite reserved as strange phenomena go. The usual suspects – frogs, fish, clams and whelks and so on – may be nonsensical, but it stops short of the hard stuff: no anvils or grand pianos; a herd of cows is as outrageous as it&#8217[…]

Top? What does that mean? Cutest? Best in a fight? Most legs? Apparently our scientific method needs nothing as impecunious as a yardstick – these animals are top. That’s all you need to know.
Perhaps the absence of criteria hides a mess […]

A handy, if dubious, piece of advice I once received (slightly too late to be useful, alas) was this: when encountering a subject for the first time, have no shame about the triviality of the source. Brief, simple sources are less likely to be opinio[…]

An experimental graphic novel based on blogs?

That sounds thrilling! And its automatcially generated from harvested Blogger text, creating the art on the fly from themed computer graphics – geek heaven!
But the execution turns out to be a jum[…]

FT TOP 100 FILMS
7: WARGAMES
Would you like to play a game?
WarGames did. It played with the fear that the western military is a self-absorbed doomsday machine whose only job is to drag the world into annihilation. It toyed with a grim technophobia, […]