Freelance Writer: comedy and pop culture2024-09-21T23:35:52+01:00

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

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Movie Haiku: My Top 100 Films of the Decade (Part 1 of 4)

What follows is the first part of the hideously overdue rundown of my Top 100 favourite films of the last decade. Not a Top 20, not a Top 50 but a Top 100. You can see why I’m doing this in installments. Most lists like this are published in late-December or early-January, but most lists like this don’t contain lovingly hand-crafted haiku summaries. You get what you wait for. This delay has also given me the chance to catch up with films released in 2009 that I didn’t manage to catch last year. That helps to explain why some films [...]

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 [...]

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