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Robin Hood
Filming’s just started on the BBC’s new version of Robin Hood – there’s a press release about it here. This version is written by Dominic Minghella, brother of Anthony. I was a big fan of the Michael Praed/Jason Connery series back in the eighties, and with all the growing coverage of his Alex Rider books…
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One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
Last week, just after (re-)opening night, I got to see Christian Slater reprise his role in the stage adaptation of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. To many people, it’s hard to get beyond Jack Nicholson’s screen version of it from 1978. That’s not such a great problem for me, as it’s simply many years…
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Green Wing
Green Wing is another of those comedies that really has just sailed past me. I suppose The Mighty Boosh would be another recent equivalent. The first series of Green Wing, recently repeated in the run-up to the debut of the second series last Friday, ran around 60 mins per episode including ads. While I wasn’t…
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Sony Awards (and Ed Reardon)
I work in the radio industry, and Tuesday night was a very important night. Arsenal completely trounced a tired, lacklustre and aging Juventus team in the first leg of the Champions’ League (I prefer The Fiver’s “Big Cup”) quarter final. But that’s not what this is about. Tuesday night was also nominations night for the…
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Waterstones/Ottakers
The Competition Commission has provisionally cleared (PDF) the sale of Ottaker’s to HMV (owners of Waterstones), and I for one am pretty disappointed. I used to love Waterstones – it was a great bookshop to browse at – but bookselling’s changed and it’s lost the sparkle now in places like Waterstones. I’m very lucky to…
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Partial Eclipse of the Sun in the UK 2006
They’re in my Flickr stream anyway, but here are the best of the photos I took this morning out in Golden Square of the eclipse. I’m pretty pleased with the results considering the lack of proper equipment and heavy cloud cover. The maximum magnitude of the eclipse in London was only 16.8% at 11:33 BST…
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ITV Battles C4’s Paul O’Grady Show With…
…Paul O’Grady Show repeats. Yup. ITV really is so devoid of ideas that the best it can do to combat C4’s signing of Paul O’Grady is to run repeats of previous shows directly up against it in the 5pm-6pm slot. Brilliant. I seem to remember them doing something similar when they got miffed that Tricia…
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Free Books with The Times
The Times seems to love giving away free books at the moment. They’ve been running a promotion with their sister company HarperCollins whereby you can pick up a different book each week for 99p when you buy The Times in WH Smith. This is nothing new, as they’ve run this promotion a couple of times…
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Music in Podcasts
A quite hilarious “Crib Sheet” from last week’s Music Week about Radio One making unsigned artists available on a special podcast. It’s all behind a pay-wall, so here are a few choice extracts with my thoughts: Isn’t that illegal? Hardly the kind of behaviour I would expect of the nation’s favourite. Well not if –…
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TV Gaming
There’s a worthwhile piece in Mediaguardian today about my new latest bugbear – “participation television”, or rather, premium rate TV quizzes. We all know that Richard & Judy and GMTV have for years run premium rate competitions asking you to answer a trivial question with the promise of many pounds if you win. But things…
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Parallel Worlds
Michio Kaku is one busy guy. When he’s not presenting a weekly programme on US radio, he’s presenting a four part BBC series on Time. In the meantime we’ve got this book, who’s subtitle is The Science of Alternative Universes and Our Future in the Cosmos. What we get is a whistlestop tour through basic…
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The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick
The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History to give the book its full title, explains how one of the most famous tricks on earth has actually never existed yet has continued to develop a life of its own. Let me direct you to a great review from a last…
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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