Stand by – the Lady GaGa Grammy show is heading to town! The awards season is upon us and the stars have been camping on the doorsteps of designers and rounding up the usual suspects when it comes to kitting themselves out. And they all have to up the ante to match GaGa. No camping…
In 1981 serious riots swept the country, but the Royal Wedding still comforted and distracted the great unwashed with sumptuous street parties and lit beacons of hope. 30 years later, thanks to the digital enlightenment and the forces of social media, we might well find ourselves experiencing significant social unrest at the wedding of Prince…
As Andy Gray and Richard Keys reach the desperate end of their careers, Jeremy Clarkson has weighed in to the row, saying that he is concerned about people being sacked and vilified for “heresy by thought”. Is it possible he’s worried about people discovering what he’s thinking? He should be if he is foolish enough…
Andy Gray and Richard Keys were relatively well known sports commentators until a leaked tape showed them uttering sexist comments about assistant referee Sian Massey at the Liverpool v. Wolves game yesterday. Now, their faces are everywhere. There’s no excuse for the sort of behind the scenes off-the-cuff black humour they were indulging in, but…
In the wake of Andy Coulson’s resignation, a number of questions immediately come to mind that have been only passingly addressed by the press over the weekend. How to deal with news organisations owned outright by people such as the Barclay Brothers and Rupert Murdoch comes top of the list for me. We need to…
Ever since Tom Paine’s book Fame: From the Bronze Age to Britney came out, I have been looking more and more at the way celebrity and myth intersect – and now the news, and Katie Price specifically, has presented another killer analogy. In Celtic mythology, the Year King would be feted and loved and cherished…
I think it’s time to act. Consider this, my happy followers. We are being submerged by cliché! Need proof? Just see my post from yesterday: Governor Sarah Palin attacked, as a “blood libel”, suggestions that her political rhetoric contributed to last Saturday’s fatal shootings in Arizona. Blood libel? Glory be! These PR sound bites and…
Reading and hearing about the shootings in Tucson, Arizona I am more and more struck by the awful ironies of this tragic event. That Gabrielle Giffords should be a pro-gun Democrat is strange enough, but the fact that her life has been saved by a trauma surgeon just back from Iraq, whose skills have been…
There’s been quite the hoo-ha regarding the undercover policeman who penetrated the Green movement and ended up a member of the Ratcliffe Six, and the more recent revelations about an undercover WPC who had done pretty much the same, both at great cost to the tax payer. But honestly, what did people expect? There are…
Tottenham Hotspur have pulled off a nifty coup for the New Year, bringing David Beckham in to train after a few weeks of speculation and “will he/won’t he?” in the tabloids. Regarding Beckham actually playing for the team, nothing is certain still, but that is hardly the point. The point is that this is a…