Words Dept.: archive

I’ve written some words in celebration of the motorway, on recently relaunched car website Motortorque, which is a fine site for petrol-heads everywhere. The piece is inspired by the recent BBC Four documentary The Secret Life of the Motorway, which sounds like the most boring three-part series ever but really wasn’t. When the Preston bypass [...]

Alcohol Concern says it wants to ban all adverts for booze before the watershed in order “to give parents the peace of mind of knowing that their children can be kept safe from the influence of advertising”. I have a few problems with this entire line of reasoning. Firstly, how many kids decide they want [...]

The Sun reports today that “Junkie Pete Doherty has been banned from a PRISON gig – because he is a bad influence”. It’s an “EXCLUSIVE by Danielle Lawler”. Or, at least, it’s an EXCLUSIVE in the sense that the same story was in the Independent’s arts section last week. It was also here, and here [...]

This is a real beauty. Somehow, the Liverpool Daily Post has got hold of an e-mail from Liverpool council leader Warren Bradley to council chief executive Colin Hilton demanding that the chief executive of the Liverpool Culture Company, Jason Harborow, should resign over the fiasco involving this year’s Mathew Street festival. Gleefully, they have printed [...]

Lots of people round here have been touched by the death of regional TV superstar, Factory Records supremo and all round good egg Tony Wilson last week. I came into contact with him a couple of times. When I was at university I worked one time as a runner for the In The City music [...]

World Architecture News claims its servers have been attacked by the Chinese government after “ruffling some feathers” over its reports on Beijing. The London-based news service this week ran a comment piece by editor Michael Hammond, which suggested the Chinese are “deliberately courting controversy” by hiring Frankfurt-based AS&P, to redesign part of Beijing. The practice [...]

I’ve noticed that almost all TV producers are now frantically admitting to faking bits of reality shows lest one of the tabloids rumbles them first. The latest is one Simon Cowell (never heard of him), who says he staged a bit of the new series of X-Factor. Apparently, a scene where Cowell discusses rehiring Louis [...]

Is it fair to say that coverage of the outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the South East has been overblown as a result of the so-called “silly season”? According to Peter Wilby in the Guardian yesterday, the excitable tone of coverage, especially in the Daily Mail – which, a fortnight ago described a [...]

…will be resumed imminently. I’ve been on holiday (Lake District, since you ask), which is why I haven’t posted for a while. Glad to see the thing about the Dispatches programme is still attracting interest. The Liberal Democrat Voice says this blog hosts an “interesting online discussion” about the programme (ha!), while David Ottewell of [...]

Vodafone, the world’s largest mobile phone company, has pulled all its “skyscraper” adverts from Facebook today because one of them was positioned on the British National Party’s page. Vodafone’s official line is that it doesn’t want to be associated with “any” political party, although something tells me the BNP’s “send ‘em back where they come [...]