Tom Lennon • Freelance Writer: comedy and pop culture

Freelance writer specializing in comedy and the geekier end of the pop culture spectrum.

Latest Stuff

Pancake Daze

The historical roots of Pancake Day (contains shameless falsifications)

The Minister of Information Returns

Gil Scott-Heron's new album I'm New Here has been on heavy rotation since I bought it earlier in the week. It's an absolute blinder, real return-to-form stuff that I heartily and unequivocally recommend. If you fancy listening to it yourself, an official streamed version from Scott-Heron's new label, XL Recordings, is available online. Here it is: (If the above widget doesn't appear on your browser, then you can also try here) If you like it, then please do the decent thing and go out and buy it. Streamed albums - official or otherwise - are all well and good, but [...]

Disney’s ‘The Wire’

I came home from work today to find my wonderful stepdaughter Lily on the Internet. She was visiting the Disney Channel website, and - as one of those unfortunate people burdened with a certain kind of political temperament - I found myself experiencing an involuntary muscle spasm somewhere in the region of my social conscience gland. This soon passed, however: I may be relatively new to this parenting malarkey, but if there's one thing I've learned is that smart, 6 year-old girls like Lily have little time for humourless lectures on the evils of cultural imperialism. Plenty of time [...]

Sesame: Life on the Street

This evening’s Archive Hour on Radio 4 celebrated the 40th anniversary of the seminal children’s TV show Sesame Street. The programme featured healthy dollops of insight about the visionary goals that underpinned the show and how the Children’s Television Workshop revolutionised children’s TV through the medium of animation, bad puns and felt glove puppets. The one thing that wasn’t discussed, however, was an aspect of the show that most media pundits are either blissfully unaware of or would prefer just to ignore. I’m talking, of course, about the way in which the seemingly benign and wholesome inner city world of [...]

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