Words Dept.: category

There’s been a not wholly positive reaction to Manchester Confidential’s “redesign” today. It looks quite a lot like the old site although it’s somehow more grotesque. It’s cluttered, it’s dominated by an almost misanthropic shade of yellow and looks like it was conceived in about 1999. By a drunk. ManCon has unleashed the dogs of war [...]

For some reason I got annoyed about the ITV ad break during injury time goal mess-up last night although in retrospect I’m not sure why. It actually spared me the horror of seeing Everton score.
Everyone has surely suspected for a while that ITV was going to do something like that. Everything about its footy coverage is slightly [...]

As I’ve nothing better to do and 2008 has now definitely finished, I thought I’d provide you with my list of my favourite things from the year just gone. Happy New Year, by the way.
Film
I thought Wall-E was surprisingly deep for a kids film and was also technically flawless. But There Will Be Blood blew [...]

By far the most hideous aspect of this year’s I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here is the various idents for Iceland that appear around each ad break. They feature a range of party food that looks so disgusting it could easily become the subject of a Bushtucker Trial.
Firstly, what the hell is a [...]

Jay Rayner, the Observer food critic, is researching a feature on genetically modified food. The reason I know this is that he’s written a post on the Guardian’s Word of Mouth blog asking for pointers. It’s the first time I’ve heard of a national newspaper doing such a thing. Rayner describes it as “a different [...]

James Corden, co-writer and co-star of Gavin and Stacey, says in this month’s Esquire that he doesn’t, er, have much time for the cast or production team of Hollyoaks, having spent an unhappy two months on the show several years ago.
His character was, perhaps inevitably, supposed to be a tad overweight. But in a terrifying [...]

For all-round wrongness, Carol Vorderman advertising cheapo chicken from Farmfoods in the ad-break for Dick Fearnley-Whittington’s Be Nice to Cocks programme (or whatever it was called) was bad. But professional dimwit Danielle Lloyd’s recruitment as the “face” of a new campaign for Rustlers’ Microwaveable Offalburgers (TM) surely trumps it.
Ignoramus Lloyd famously said, during an appearance [...]

Words Dept. is a fan of egg-shaped ex-greengrocer Gregg Wallace, the co-host/judge of TV’s Masterchef. So it is with great embarrassment and personal sadness that I must recount the claims this weekend that in addition to a penchant for “plates of food”, the renowned “ingredients expert” is a fan of sick bottom spanking action for [...]

What the hell was Carol Vorderman doing advertising Bernard Matthews Chicken Drummers – six for a quid at Farmfoods – during the ad break for Hugh’s Chicken Run tonight?
This was a programme exploring the issue of chicken production that illustrated the conditions in which standard supermarket chickens are reared – shit-and-piss-covered, fat, immobile and devoid [...]

Time for the new series of MasterChef (which is no longer called MasterChef Goes Large, for some reason). This is my favourite place to hear the mysterious phrase “plates of food” repeated endlessly for half an hour. It sounds like it should be Cockney rhyming slang. Plates of food = dude (or something). Sadly, it [...]