Words Dept.: category

The BBC appears to have spent much of today debunking its own story about the National Bullying Helpline allegedly taking calls from members of Downing Street staff. I listened in amusement at lunchtime as a reporter on Five Live quoted several issues about this charity that were raised last night on Adam Bienkov’s Tory Troll [...]

The growth of a beard obviously signifies a psychological problem within the wearer. Not my words, you understand, but those of former England football manager and beard expert Graham Taylor, who thinks people who “grow beards for no reason” are undergoing some kind of ongoing, possibly catastrophic, mood change.
Taylor was talking about Roy Keane, who [...]

There’s a new video that’s been produced to show what MediaCity in Salford is going to look like in 2011. As this is the year the BBC are due to move in, one can only conclude that the broadcaster is planning to employ a load of cartoon turtles and legions of weird flourescent blobs. The [...]

I feel like I’ve sat through both episodes of ITV1’s The Duchess on the Estate, an unimaginative piece of factual entertainment in which the Duchess of York spends some time on a housing estate in south Manchester and jabbers poshly for a couple of hours about “broken Britain”.
I haven’t, of course. But helpfully the BBC [...]

For all BBC middle managers thinking of moving up north, of which there really aren’t that many, please be aware of these facts, all verifiable on Wikipedia:

The last known “art gallery” closed in 1987
The crime rate rose by 900% last year, driven by a shocking trade in aggravated pigeon theft
Jack Duckworth reads the ITV regional [...]

This must surely rank as one of the most remarkable and ridiculous moments in the short history of 24-hour news channels. Carrie Gracie, a presenter about whom I’ve had my doubts for a while thanks to her uncomfortable flirting with fellow anchor Simon McCoy every morning, gets completely flummoxed during an interview and admits to [...]

I’ve just spotted Stephen Fry talking a load of arse, poo and widdle (bollocks, in other words) about the issue of MPs’ expenses on Newsnight (video clip here).
According to Fry, MPs doing things like claiming £2,000 of public money to have the moats of their manor houses cleaned (Douglas Hogg), or £35,000 for a “second home” in [...]

BBC Three is plumbing new depths of kiddy-brained stupidity with its current series My Life As An Animal, where grown adults voluntarily live as animals for four days in order to… well I don’t know what the point of it is, to be honest. In an episode the other week, I watched some people living [...]

As Jonathan Ross returns to our screens later, both ITV and the BBC’s flagship current affairs programmes have scheduled timely and hard-hitting investigations into the issue of very rich famous people saying “he fucked your grand-daughter” and stuff.
ITV’s timely attempt to tackle to hard-hitting subject, part of the Tonight strand, was on earlier and was [...]

Just before going to sleep last night I attempted to have a US election-based multimedia experience, which involved taking the laptop to bed (my intentions were pure) and surfing various sites to do with the vote. This, I am led to believe, is the done thing among web-savvy news hunters of the 21st century.
Twitter, in [...]