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Bunny and the Bull
I got invited to a bloggers’ screening of Bunny and the Bull, and went in knowing little to nothing about the film. The film’s writer and director, Paul King, has directed nearly every episode of The Mighty Boosh, but although I like that programme, I’ve only seen it intermittantly, whereas some live and breathe all…
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Radio Radio
I’ve been listening to a few fascinating bits of radio recently, most of which are no longer listenable and may never be in quite the form I heard them, but are largely available to hear in one format or another right now. First up has got to be a short fifteen minute programme called Runaway…
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Paranormal Activity
Paranormal Activity is a great little film that seems to have sprung up out of nowhere. It was actually made a couple of years ago before it was snapped up from a festival and has had a little gloss added to it. But not much. Like The Blair Witch Project, everything we see is from…
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Why Can’t I Download A Film and Burn It To DVD?
As Peter Mandelson continues to show us that he completely misunderstands the nature of the internet, a general failing of “content-owners” can be seen when you try to do something very simple that you should be able to do in this day and age but can’t. At the weekend I thought I’d try to get…
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RAJAR Q3 2009
Today sees publication of the latest RAJAR figures and there are a few things that are food for thought. FIrst of all, it wasn’t the greatest RAJAR for commercial radio which slipped back a little against a strong BBC which saw increases in share for all its national analogue networks with the exception of Radio…
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London Newspapers
Associated Newspapers has just announced that the London Lite will shortly be closing. This has surely been inevitable since the Evening Standard went free a week or so ago. Clearly as well the journalists mentioned in the The Guardian’s report, there are also an awful lot of part-time distributors losing their jobs, as well associated…
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The Informant!
The Informant! (I guess the exclamation mark is important) is the latest film from director Stephen Soderburgh, and if I said that it was about one man taking on liars and corporate greed, you might wonder if Soderburgh was revisiting the territory he first examined with Erin Brokovich. But this is a very different film…
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Dear Lemon Lima & Capitalism: A Love Story
Dear Lemon Lima is one of those many films that you have see completely blind at a film festival. According to IMDB it’s only had a screening at one other film festival and I can’t see details of a release date which is a terrible shame. Vanessa Lemor (Savanah Wiltfong) is a young teenage girl…
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Compare My Radio
I was in Sweden recently, presenting at Radio Days 2009, and letting a Swedish audience know what we’d been doing in the last 12 months as we morphed from Virgin Radio to Absolute Radio. One of the things I noted was that Absolute Radio publishes its playlist online, and includes the number of plays the…
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The Permanent Way
After I recently saw The Power of Yes, it became apparent that this was not the first production that David Hare had produced in this way. In 2004, there was The Permanent Way, a National Theatre/Out of Joint co-production that carried out a similar dramatised investigation into the state of British railways following privatisation and…
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Steampunk
The Oxford Museum of Science is currently home to a great little exhibition on the subject of Steampunk – seemingly the first collection of such artworks ever collected like this in the world. I’ve always found steampunk to be an interesting area with the wonderfully creative machines that they built. I suppose my introduction would…
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Fantastic Mr Fox, Topper and Dirigible
The London Film Festival opened on Wednesday, and this week I caught a few films: Fantastic Mr Fox, which was the opening film of the festival (I wasn’t at the premiere sadly), a UCLA restored version of Topper, and a Columbia restoration of Dirigible. Fantastic Mr Fox is a terrific stop-animation version of the Roald…
Podcasts, Radio, TV, Books, Cycling, Photography and More
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Yellowface/All The Lovers In The Night
Yellowface by R F Kuang I first came across R F Kuang with last year’s very enjoyable Babel, an alternate history of the British Empire told in a world where magic exists and is controlled by an elite group of individuals. Yellowface is very different, but no less enjoyable. It’s a book about books, and…
Hadrian’s Wall
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