One of my very favourites in a long, long list of literary anecdotes is drawn from the late Dick Seaver's posthumous memoir The Tender Hour of Twilight. Seaver more or less discovered Samuel Beckett in Paris after World War Two, at least in terms of the larger world markets, and...
There are certain shows on television that are, generally speaking, beneath the radar of Proper Reviewers. Good luck finding a printed opinion of Countryfile or Celebrity Juice. Well, two points to be made. First, such shows attract millions of viewers and second, the next time I'm called a Proper anything...
Where Can I See It?: Channel 5 (UK), FXX (US) Who's In It?: Stars Chris Geere as Jimmy Shive-Overly; Aya Cash as Gretchen Cutler When Is It On?: Wednesday 9PM (US), current series TBA for C5 (UK) I suspect it was a very deliberate choice when Stephen Falk, the showrunner...
Where Can I Find It?: Netflix (UK), NBC (USA) When Is It On?: New episodes uploaded on Netflix weekly; Thursdays at 8:30PM (NBC) Who Stars?: Ted Danson, Kristen Bell Of all the sitcoms that have ever been presented on television, The Good Place has the biggest, juiciest, best of all plot swerves. This creates a...
The re-launched Star Trek: Discovery contains scoops of every element that made the previous Trek television series and movies memorable. Now that may or may not be a good thing as not all those memories are fond ones yet this new series is deliberate in re-voicing the sounds of the...
No, this is not a review of the former Secretary of State's new book What Happened. I rather doubt I shall ever get around to reading it, which actually is not that unusual, even by its purchasers. There was an interesting article by Walt Hickey on the political data site FiveThirtyEight.com...
I suppose it's a rather good thing that George Martin had lousy taste in neckties. Had he worn something a little more fashionable than a black tie with a red horse motif on June 6, 1962 then presumably after slagging off The Beatles' first demo recording session when Martin then...
For those of you who have come to this review expecting to read about the newest novel featuring The Silence of the Lambs' Dr Lecter, oh dear. So sorry to inform you but the book we're looking at doesn't have anything to do with cannibalism. (Thinking) Which is rather a...
There's a grand old romantic comedy, released on April Fool's Day in 1958 called Teacher's Pet. In one scene, Clark Gable playing a crusty newsman named Jim Gannon growls and sneers at Doris Day's journalism professor Erica Stone about the whole idea of journalism schools. 'The only way to learn...