Words Dept.: category

There’s nothing especially unusual about the Daily Express producing an entirely confusing and off-beam front-page. This, after all, is the paper that splashed with Princess Diana for the best part of a decade after she died. However, I couldn’t help noticing this morning’s effort, which manages to juggle tragedy, absurdity, bad taste and utter irrelevance [...]

It’s been a bad week for banter. But I’ve had my suspicions about the concept for a while and should banter suddenly die, as it rightfully must, its passing will not be mourned round my house. It strikes me that banter has changed. It once involved elements of wit and intelligence, perhaps the odd pun [...]

Did Mick Hucknall actually sleep with 3,000 women in three years during the 1980s, as the Guardian claims today? Plainly the mathematics, if you care to consider them, which I don’t especially want to but sadly must, isn’t on his side since it involves somewhere close to 2.75 “insertions” per day – and Viagra wasn’t [...]

I see there’s a new trailer for Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow on. It consists of McIntyre making some observation about revolving doors or DIY or flushing the toilet and then has a caption that says “Ring any bells?” Like the fact these things that happen to him also sometimes happen to other people makes it [...]

Help me. I’m worried I may be one of those “Morrissey apologists” you sometimes hear about. None of my best friends are Morrissey, yet I can’t help empathise with the erstwhile Smiths frontman. To make matters worse, I’ve got form in this area. Three years ago when, in an NME interview, Morrissey expressed some rather [...]

I always thought the Labour Party was about achieving things on merit, rather than as a result of an accident of birth. That’s why the dismal tokenism that resulted in Diane Abbott scraping together enough nominations to get on to the ballot paper for the party’s leadership makes the Labour Party look ridiculous. The idea [...]

It all started on Sunday morning, when I began one of my usual rants on Twitter about the terribleness of deathly Tim Lovejoy vehicle Something for the Weekend, which culminated in this tweet: Unpredictably, this comment led to direct contact from Nicky Campbell and, since I’m not one to pass up the chance of wringing [...]

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, [...]

Britain’s cleverest man. Polymath. National treasure. All descriptions applied at various times to Mr Stephen Fry. To celebrate the first episode tonight of Fry’s new BBC2 series Last Chance To See, I’ve gone to the trouble of assembling some of this intellectual giant’s most illuminating quotes. There’s something here, I feel, for us all to [...]

The internet webosphere has been awash since Tuesday with the astonishing revelation that a 15-year-old boy and his friends don’t use Twitter. Since this apparently proves that teenagers don’t use Twitter, perhaps it’s time for a breakdown of who does use Twitter. (Yes, it’s another of those cantankerous lists that will offend almost everyone at [...]