It’s almost certainly just over-excitement, but here I am at last eating at one of those Japanese sushi-snack bars where the food goes past you on a little conveyor belt (Kulu Kulu on Brewer Street). It’s like watching Grand Prix – […]

Further to Mark’s point b2 below: The visuals at one point were particularly noteworthy. Voiceover: Such-and-such spent ages looking for an equation. Cue pic of (absurdly handsome) actor leafing through a tome apparently at random, searching, a[…]

THEORY OF EVERYTHING: more faults

OK so I watched ep two with a VERY SMART PERSON who fears maths but wants to understand string theory, and we agreed that:
a. the order this story is being told in is totally confused and bizarre (on a paragraph lev[…]

Women be shopping! And lose their minds!
So buying expensive things make women crazy, and yet bargain hunters are crazy, too? But don’t you need math skills to figure out real bargains? And men only want to buy cars and electronic gadgets? And […]

The problem with The Bill, these days, is that even LISTING its problems is hard enough, let alone solving them. Let’s see: no interesting or even likeable new characters; the unease abt when stories are exciting (= endless Kilroy-style folk-pa[…]

Things that do not make me proud of my home town. Well apart from it being the burning people alive capital of Britain, there is this lovely story of the convicted football hooligan playing for the local football team. This has caused a slight proble[…]

An update on my cookery course is long overdue. Things have pretty much settled into a rhythm, and most of the narrative interest is anthropological rather than gastronomic.
We’re not really competing on the quality of our cooking, and there&#[…]

Turning a book into a film presents the adapter with a fundamental problem. How do we represent internal narration and monologue on the screen. The usual method is to not bother, and just be content with cramming the screen with the action. But what […]

OK, I ‘fess up: professed Timberlake-hata that I am, even I warmed to him on the MTV Europe Music awards. I can see there’s something about him — the little boy lost looks and the floppy-limbed mobility — which is going to win[…]

Too much reality? The most extraordinary piece of TV I’ve seen recently was Matthew Kelly turning the tables on his host on the Frank Skinner Show. The shaven-headed giant had a sinister grin on his face as he demanded that Skinner repeat the l[…]