Words Dept.: category

According to a tweet by Charlie Brooker, Adam Curtis’ new documentary series is going to be called All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. I don’t know what it means but Brooker is a very credible source and the title sounds very Curtis-like. The title is the same as a poem by Richard Brautigan, [...]

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 [...]

It’s the last day of the year, so here are my top several things of 2010. I haven’t bothered to create an artificial five or ten of everything, partly because my consumption of cultural artefacts doesn’t really merit it and partly because I like to keep it fresh and unpredictable, like a game of snooker [...]

I don’t really like Kelvin MacKenzie. He’s a loudmouthed, right-wing, rabble-rousing reactionary. He’s also someone who seems unwilling to recognise the universally accepted truth about the cause of the Hillsborough disaster which, as a Liverpool fan – and even simply as a football fan – I find both bizarre and abhorent. But regardless of all [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

It’s that time of year when a list of some sort becomes very much the order of the day. I also recently realised that virtually all people on television are deeply awful. Bearing these things in mind, I’ve come up with my top 10 most awful people on television 2009. In reverse order, natch. 10. [...]

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 [...]