Words Dept.: category

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 [...]

Here are a few instantaneous thoughts on the sad closure of Crain’s Manchester Business, which was announced today. As a local business journalist who was very occasionally (ahem) scooped by the paper, it goes without saying that I have lots of respect for their journalists. But here’s a few quick thoughts on what went wrong: 1. They [...]

Earlier this month, as part of its Manchester Celebrates Jaguar event, Jaguar lent me a sixty grand supercharged XFR for the night (complete with 5.0-litre, 510bhp V8 engine). So I thought I’d make a short film out of it. The journey starts at the City of Manchester Stadium in east Manchester and continues through Manchester [...]

My memory of the General Election this year is going to be dominated by Salford. As previously mentioned, I’ve been making a documentary about the local campaign in Salford and Eccles, focusing mainly on the anti-Hazel Blears candidate. As a result, I managed to get into the count on Thursday night/Friday morning and witnessed, at [...]

There have been a couple of interesting developments on the local web publishing scene in recent days. Firstly, it looks as though Manchester Confidential’s paywall model has rather sheepishly fallen over after three months because boss Mark Garner finally realised some time after everyone else that it never had a hope of working. Commenting on [...]

Following my earlier post on the subject, radio DJ Steve Penk has this week received a justified bollocking from Ofcom over his decision to play the song “Jump” in reference to a woman threatening to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge over the M60. Unfortunately, they’ve not fined him or his radio station a [...]

I’m currently working on a film about the general election campaign in Salford. It struck me as a good idea for a documentary after Salford MP Hazel Blears got embroiled in the expenses scandal last year. The film isn’t really about that, though. It’s about how ordinary people respond to politicians and the candidates themselves, [...]

This table shows how MPs in Greater Manchester voted over the Digital Economy Bill. The only Manchester MP who voted against was Liberal Democrat John Leech, MP for Manchester Withington. Of the 28 MPs across the city region, more than half (17) didn’t actually bother to vote. Of those who voted, all the local Labour [...]

If you live in Manchester, you cannot fail to have been swept away in recent weeks by the hot topic de jour of the day. Namely: Which one of them two fast food places in town that specialises in burritos does the best burrito? I speak, of course, of Barburrito and Pancho’s and will now [...]

I’ve just got back from Bolton, where Unite Against Fascism have organised a counter-protest to a demonstration by the English Defence League in the town centre. I’m making a film about someone on the UAF side, so I was there as an observer. It was my first time at a protest of this sort and [...]