During the Paul Henry débâcle, I was surprised to find that I had friends who joined the pro-Henry groups on Facebook. This included friends whom I thought were cosmopolitan and internationally minded. It dawned on me that they were probably supporting the first Paul Henry who many of us encountered, when we were watching the […]
Category: UK
Posts relating to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and to her territories.
Is your favourite 1980s’ celeb here?
From the ‘Whatever happened to …’ and the ‘My God, is (s)he still alive?’ files comes this promotional video for the (Norwegian) TV2 show Gylne Tider, with a bunch of celebrities lip-synching ‘Let It Be’ (including, appropriately, Fab Morvan of Milli Vanilli). Sir Roger Moore kicks it off, but right after, you’ll catch (inter […]
Twenty-ten’s TV in eight paragraphs
BBC2’s Mongrels was probably the best thing on telly for me in 2010. Hustle suffered from being filmed in Brum and the scripts weren’t as good (the “Kylie Minogue” scene being one of the few highlights); Ashes to Ashes’ ending was disappointing and the whole series felt cheap; Luther had a few too many […]
Doctor Who’s Christmas ’10 special: US trailer
Matt Smith completes his first calendar year as the Doctor with a Christmas special, inspired by Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Michael Gambon! Best guest star since Bill Nighy. And if that’s Katherine Jenkins, that’s an extra reason to watch this. (Hope she sings, and not the Singing Detective.) You may also like Funny how […]
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Titling Goldeneye 007
This is nothing new to gamers (whose world I am not a part of—unless you count the last time I had a gaming console, which was 1984), though I found the opening sequence to the remade Goldeneye 007 game rather well done, apart from the colons. The Neuzeit typeface looks good here. As we’ve known […]
It pays to read the terms and conditions
Hopefully we can get an answer on this from Doubleclick. I fed the following in to its publisher form tonight: Hello there: we currently deal with Gorilla Nation Media, an ad network that calls Doubleclick code … While we can control the ads that we get via GNM—as we can equally do with Burst Media—we […]
How MG Rover mirrored the developments at Lada
I still have Adam Curtis’s The Mayfair Set, a TV series charting the decline of British power and the rise of the technocracy, recorded on video cassette somewhere. I consider him someone who can see through the emperor having no clothes, and in The Mayfair Set, he certainly saw through the Empire having no clothes. […]
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Eating Google humble pie
Today, I am eating Google humble pie, because it was right about malware on Autocade. Therefore: thank you, Google. (I’m not so petty as to not thank them for when they get things right.) Since Google had cried wolf over this blog, which has never had malware issues, I had to question it. Nevertheless, […]
Norman Macrae, RIP
I learned the sad news that Norman Macrae, CBE, 旭日章, passed away on June 11, just shy of his 87th birthday. Norman was one of the great visionaries and forecasters of the 20th century, and served as deputy chief editor of The Economist till his retirement in 1988. Among his forecasts was the […]
Let the Outrageous Fortune come
Almost any New Zealander will recognize this image: a cast photograph from the long-running TV series Outrageous Fortune. When I first heard of this show from Antonia Prebble, before she started filming, I have to admit I didn’t think the premise would see it last five years (and counting). But for New Zealand television […]