Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
[Another TV Group meeting, this time discussing the seminal Grand Designs]
Good evening, and welcome to another week of Watch With …, the weekly feature in which we take a hour of UK television and review it in real time, and try and decide if it’s all worth it or not.
This week, we’ll be lapping up the adventures of Kevin McCloud and his merry band of invariably self-assured and unrealistic self-builders in Grand Designs, from 9-10 on Channel 4. If you have any opinions on the show or the episode, during or after the event, any observations, wittisations, dissertations or condemnations - do leave a comment - otherwise press refresh for updates and new comments….
(more…)
Television, Minute by minute reports |
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
[Another TV Club outing, this time for Torchwood]
Good evening, and welcome to Watch With…, our regular kind-of-weekly-ish feature delighting in, dissecting and digesting a different piece of television every week, in real time. So like a bit like television review, but live, and faster, and less considered, with fewer clever bits (um - in a good way).
This evening, we’ll be watching Torchwood on BBC2 from 9-10, indulging in a bit of the Doctor Who spinoff that probably keeps wishing we’d stop calling it that. So what will happen? Will there be thrills and spills and the fighting of aliens? Or will it mainly be sex, sex, sex, like last series. And most of the first episode of this series. Only time, and us, will tell.
(more…)
Television, Minute by minute reports |
Friday, January 18th, 2008
[For another week, TV Club is in session, this week watching a live ‘cookalong’ with Gordon Ramsey]
With adverts splattered all over the 4’s and commercial radio, it’s been trailed more than my uncle Barry’s caravan, Gordon intoning ‘Three days to go…’ in a voice that suggested we were all going to die rather than, say, do some cooking.
(more…)
Travel & Food, Television, Minute by minute reports, Pop Culture |
Saturday, January 12th, 2008
Holiday cover for Weekend magazine Columnist, January 12th 2008, 600 words
There are four weeks to go until Valentine’s Day, and this is causing some considerable amount of worry in my tiny brain. This is unusual, given that a) it isn’t a real holiday that any rational person would concern themselves with; and b) there being many more pressing things to worry about: being hit by falling frozen toilet waste from an overhead aeroplane, for example. Or the ever-present fear of choking on a peanut while alone in the house. You know, the normal, everyday stuff.
All of these concerns, however, are currently put on the back worry-burner while I concentrate my considerable anxiety on Valentine’s Day.
The problem is that last year I bought my beloved a ukulele. This was a mistake, because he liked it. He liked it a lot. It arrived in a cardboard box the size and weight of a rabbit coffin - and after getting over the initial disappointment of not having been given his own dead rabbit, he immediately set about becoming one of the leading exponents of modern ukuleleing in the UK, if not the world.
By the weekend he’d learned something by the Beatles. He was very pleased with this, so he played it to me. Many times. It was at this point that I realised that being trapped in a small room with an amateur ukulele enthusiast is only slightly less irritating than having your nose attacked with a cheese grater.
Throughout the year my dear boy and his tiny toy have come on in leaps and bounds (”leaps” and “bounds” being, in this case, extremely small spatial measurements, such as the leap of a tiny crippled spider or the bound of a heavy oak coffee table).
If there is a ukulele version to be found anywhere on the internet, he has uncovered it. George Formby, obviously, the Smiths and, strangely for a normally vehemently anti-U2 household, large swaths of the U2 back catalogue. The U2 oeuvre is apparently ideally suited to the ring-a-ting strings of the uke. Bastards.
Having learned that I flinch whenever the rabbit coffin is opened, he has developed the art of stealth-serenade. So just as you’re coming to the critical moment of CSI, he’ll sneak up behind you and strike up Killing Me Softly with the volume turned up to 11. I have been woken more than once by a music-hall version of the Bon Jovi classic Sleep When I’m Dead.
Or (and this was the final turn that snapped the final string in the life of the ukulele and me), the moment when, on a weekend cleaning purge, I finished vacuuming and announced to the nice man cleaning the kitchen that I was going to clean windows.
Half an hour later, pissed off and covered in vinegar, having risked life and limb to bring light to our lives, I re-entered the house to the same half-clean kitchen and the announcement that he’d just learned When I’m Cleaning Windows specially as a tribute … and did I want to hear it?
I am glad that he likes it. Honest I am. I’m so happy to have given him something that brings such happiness. I just sometimes wish that it could make him happy in some sort of soundproof bunker several miles underneath the house.
Which is why, this year, I have to give something for Valentine’s Day that will surpass the great majesty of last year’s gift. It has to be something that is a) quiet, b) brilliant and c) capable of distracting someone long enough for someone else to, say, set light to a ukulele in the back yard.
Humour, Features |
Thursday, January 10th, 2008
Jason Donavan in a soap? Martine McCutcheon? In a soap? Johnny Briggs out of Corrie? And all created by Mr Eastenders, Tony Jordan? What IS this, some kind of pot luck super made completely out of soaps? That sounds icky. I’m going to end up with a scummy mouth. Or, you know, more scummy than usual.
That’s right, it’s Watch This, our generally-regular feature where we take a hour or so of UK television, dissect, digest and deconstruct it live, as it happens and try and figure out what there is to be gained from British light entertainment on a weekday evening. I’ll be here from 9-10, this week watching ITV’s new concept series, Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach.
(more…)
Television, Minute by minute reports, Pop Culture |