Oh, the wretched topic of death, such a frustrating interloper, especially at Christmas, damn you. Alas, there is no point in pretending that we improve with age. In his colossal autobiography, Ben Hecht expressed the ageing process thus: “the years diminish us, time rots our body, cools our blood, darkens our brain, and, like a…
As Simon Cowell’s ‘Red or Black?’ approaches its end, the viewing figures tell an interesting story. The nosedive from its inaugural 6.4m audience to 4.47m on Sunday was splashed gleefully all over the press and the show was proclaimed to be Cowell’s first failure (certainly not true: remember Rock Rivals? Battle of The Stars? Of…
As executives from Twitter, Facebook and Research in Motion (developer of Blackberry) prepare to meet Theresa May for a chat about possibly turning off operations during times of crisis (as if…), the former company has capitalised on the confusion with a publicity coup that places it streets ahead of the other two in terms of…
Fabulous out take from Michael White’s Guardian commentary this morning. Haunting Back catalogue material. “I always get uncomfortable when David Cameron talks about the sick society. He was a member of the Bullingdon Club with George Osborne and Boris Johnson and they used to go round trashing restaurants”
One person who understood deeply and passionately about making the most of publicity – and who would have livened up the coming election no end if he had cared to participate in the process – was Malcolm McLaren, who died yesterday. A non-conformist who enlivened punk with his arch brand of anarchy and who helped…
I was asked to comment on the fallout from Tiger Woods’s bad week in the press by the Guardian last week – the resulting article appears in today’s Media section and online under the headline In Need of a Tigerish Attorney. I took a critical look at the way he and his lawyer, Mark NeJame,…
With a profile piece in The Independent and an extract from book in The Guardian today, the promotion for my book has really started. I have already done a number of interviews and have some more lined up, but what I notice most is that it’s very odd being on the other side of the promotion…
Lance Price nails the problems at the “Team Brown” in today’s Media Guardian . “As the government lurches from one crisis to another, the string-pullers and spin doctors are noticeable by their absence” The issue is that Gordy lacks charisma and the bunch of heavywieht advisors around him, do not have the collective ability to…
Two great opinion pieces in the Guardian today written by Peter Wilby on the subject of Alastair Campbell’s Cudlipp memorial lecture last week – http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/feb/04/media.pressandpublishing – which neatly seg-ways into Nick Davies op ed rant to help push his book Flat Earth News. The opinion feature “Our media have become mass producers of distortion. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2251982,00.html…
I notice the Guardian has picked up on my blog over the weekend about Tom Cruise, Scientology and the web community. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/04/news