Words Dept.: archive

Someone sent me a croissant and some jam in a lunchbox today. It’s about the weirdest thing I’ve ever been sent in the mail. It also came with a mug, a teabag and a sachet of instant coffee. Luckily there was a letter to explain. The idea was that instead of dragging me out to [...]

A bewildering choice of headline in the Manchester Evening News, which appears to use Carlsberg Special Brew as part of a punning headline in a story about the “homeless and disadvantaged” today. Man City footballer Didi Hamann is pictured on the back page visiting a “resource centre for homeless and disadvantaged people in Stockport to [...]

While I was away, Jose Mourinho resigned as Chelsea manager. I must confess I felt confused and disorientated by this turn of events. Luckily, there was an excellent distillation of the saga in the Mirror from that renowned expert Fiona Phillips (of GMTV): We truly won’t see his like again. He was so charismatic and [...]

I’m going on holiday this week so don’t expect any further comment on Gordon ‘n’ Ranvir – or anything else – for now. In the meantime, why not have a look at the shortlist for the Manchester Blog Awards. Bafflingly, something called Words Dept. appears to have been nominated. The link comes here so I [...]

Apparently, 112 people complained to Ofcom that Sir Trevor McDonald’s jokey description of Bernard Manning as a “fat, white bastard” was “inappropriate and/or racist”. On News Knight with Sir Trevor McDonald on 24 June, Sir Trev said: “It’s time for Racist and Dead, this week, it’s the turn of corpulent, narrow-minded northerner Bernard Manning. Personally, [...]

There seems to have been a mishap of some sort on the set of North West Tonight. It looks like it’s being broadcast from BBC’s Oxford Road reception area. The big screen has been replaced by what appears to be an Argos special offer £349 flatscreen telly and Gordon Burns, on his cheap red sofa, [...]

Here is an extract from the Guardian‘s January review of the Klaxons’ album Myths of the Near Future, which won the Mercury Prize last night. Nothing like having your finger on the pulse, eh? …The album is a mess of clumsy beats that never settle into a groove, lurching shout-along chants more suited to the [...]

I watched Nigella Lawson on the telly earlier tonight. It was pretty funny, the way she kept going on about how busy and stressed out she is. Well, it must be really tough presenting TV programmes and writing the odd recipe book for a living. Especially when your husband is the multimillionaire art collector Charles [...]

Following Jeremy Paxman’s “what is television for” speech at the Edinburgh International TV conference – and a seemingly endless stream of stories about manipulation and fakery of telly programmes – the focus of fears about how TV is misleading viewers seems to be shifting from entertainment programmes to news. Now Newsnight and Five News are [...]