Is Big Brother's Helen Wood The Most Odious Reality TV Contestant Ever?
Reality TV baddies are nothing new - there's been plenty of characters we've loved to hate on shows such as 'Big Brother', 'I'm A Celebrity' and 'The X Factor' over the years. But watching Helen Wood...
View Article17 Times Nikki Grahame Has Been Amazing on 'Big Brother's Timewarp'
Nikki Grahame is my favourite Big Brother housemate of all time. I love her voice, her tantrums, and her use of words like "buxom" and "sharnt." I love how incensed, impassioned and over excited she...
View ArticleThe Wit of Will: Clown, Comedy, and the Ha-ha of Shakespeare
In 400 years time Chandler in Friends will not be funny. 'I-KEA this is comfortable' will be around the same point on the funny scale as Beatrice telling Claudio he's being as 'civil as an orange'...
View ArticleSlow West (Review)
We've had comedy Westerns (Blazing Saddles), Black Westerns (Posse, Django) and gay Westerns (Brokeback Mountain) - and just when you think there's no more anyone could add to the genre, along comes a...
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Top Summer Read: 'The Myth of Brilliant Summers' by Austin Collings
I am just back from a yoga holiday in Ibiza. Yes, I landed on the party island not to party but to have 'time out', shake my chakras and bend my bones. Between vinyasa flow classes and sunset...
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Thomas Bahler: An Entertainment Legend With a Humble Servant's Heart
Thomas Bähler with this author In a world that seems powered by money, status and celebrity, it is easy to think that anyone who has "made it big" would be all about arrogance, superiority, and "look...
View ArticleWhat Dadd's Victorian classic Can Teach Us About Mental Health Provision Today
The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke is a great work of art. Painted by Richard Dadd, a man in a mental institute who was categorised as a criminal lunatic, it was purchased by the Tate Gallery in 1963....
View ArticleThe Sequel That Eats Sequels: 'Jurassic World'
Jurassic World is a film about films. More specifically, it is a film about film sequels, and the expectations an audience has of film sequels. It plays on these expectations subtly, and, I think,...
View ArticleAs Someone With a Disability, I Disagree That 'The Undateables' Represents...
I heard the British Medical Association (BMA) criticising Channel 4's The Undateables and suggesting it represents 'disabled people as a source of comedy'. As someone with a learning disability, I...
View ArticleWhat The Arts Can Learn From Twitch
"Wait, you WATCH people play COMPUTER GAMES!?" I've become badly obsessed with Twitch. It is replacing the vast bulk of my TV viewing right now and I've been thinking about it almost constantly -...
View ArticleBBC Glastonbury Overload
It may have escaped your notice, but last weekend was the Glastonbury music festival. Let's be honest, it probably didn't escape your notice, especially if you happened to switch on any of the main BBC...
View ArticleCharlotte Church's Voice Isn't Just for Singing
The abuse directed at Charlotte Church amounts to a vile misogyny and intellectual snobbery that's as misguided as the pre-election opinion polls. The result on the 8th of May seemed to spark a fire in...
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London's Quirkiest Summer Events and Exhibitions
Summer in London is all about lazing in parks with an ice cream, heading to festivals and trying to avoid packed Tube journeys where you end up far too close to a perspiring commuter's armpit. It's...
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Untold Theatre's 'The Scar Test': Have You Heard of Yarl's Wood?
If this humble review of The Scar Test, the second production by East Anglia/London-based Untold Theatre, serves to make even a few more folks aware of Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre, then...
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Film Reviews : Slow West - The Third Man - The Overnight - Everly - Hippocrates
John Maclean's feature length directorial debut Slow West is an imaginative, original trail of blood and black humour with breathtaking imagery and terrific performances - The Third Man, one of the...
View ArticleThe Day I Met Sir Paul McCartney
When recounting their experience, anyone who has ever had the pleasure of interviewing Sir Paul McCartney will reveal the one agonising thought that whirled through their mind as they began their...
View ArticleSteve Albini: A Solution to the Problem With Music
Musicians are usually deeply flawed or immensely tedious. Steve Albini is neither. Since the 1980s, he has been a guitarist and singer in three seminal bands and the recording engineer of some of the...
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Something Wicked This Way Comes - On the (Virtual) Set of Macbeth
Did we really need another film version of Macbeth? Probably not, but as one of the bard's greatest plays, when you and I are dust, filmmakers will still be turning out their interpretations of this...
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Review: 'The Motherf**cker With the Hat', National Theatre
For a while now I've been wondering why I go to the theatre. I think it was a Twitter hashtag or meme that started it. "I go to the theatre because _" and you fill in the blank. Only I don't know what...
View ArticleGiving it Back
The Lord has spoken. Not a heavenly declaration from a deity bellowed through some broken rain clouds down a shaft of light from the heavens, but a pronouncement from the man who gave us more Nancy's,...
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