If Shakespeare…

It was personal. Of course, it had to be. What could be more intimate than homicide? Sex, perhaps? But on a raw December night at that altitude murder seemed somehow more– fitting.

Death, then, and it was close. In Hampstead’s petite New End Theatre everything is, and all the better for it.

We gathered for an evening of mystery and fear as Miles Barden and Joshua Dickinson delivered their well-judged programme of stories told in classic fireside fashion: A Winter’s Chill. Read the rest of this entry »

moar funny pictures

Thanks of Jon Pinnock for pointing out nobel prize winner Paul Klugman’s measured response to news in general and his prize in particular:

Pure KLARRSS!

Greetings denizens of the British Space Empire!

Just when you thought that the universe of Space Captain Smith couldn’t get more exciting, what do we fid, but ‘When Slay Bells Ring’, in which Isambard Smith, Polly Carveth, Rhianna Mitchell and, of course, Suruk the Slayer look forward to the arrival of Santa on the good ship John Pym.

With Polly still upset at missing her first Christmas, Suruk troubled by visions of elves and Rhianna in the unlikely role as voice of reason, what will Smith do to bring festive cheer to his chums? And exactly what is the Deepspace Operations Group up to?

Find out by downloading ‘When Slay Bells Ring’, by Toby Frost - and then feel free to pass it on to all your chums, especially if they are yet to discover the wonderful world of Space Captain Smith.

Enjoy!

Download When Slay Bells Ring

A basic human right is surely that to tell one’s story. Let’s hope other corners of the publishing industry are paying attention to this,

Amid the horror emanating from Mumbai, it is nice to see The Times maintaining a sense of proportion. Apparently the only thing needed to prompt respect for local name choices is a terrorist outrage.

Setting aside the crass insensivity of both the timing and the manner of its reporting, it is one thing being conservative and quite another being just-plain-rude to Jonny Foreigner.

“This is Margaret. Can you guess what Margaret does?”

The barbarians appear to be massing at the gates once more. I don’t as a rule read The Daily Telegraph, but I came across this piece recently (love the Abu Ghraib reference, by the way). In the wake of the recent BBC trust report on the Ross/Brand/Sachs affair, this has been followed up by a further piece, which reiterates the intention of a Daily Telegraph journalist to break the law by refusing to renew his TV licence.

I’d like to start by pointing out that this has NOTHING, repeat NOTHING to do with the sodding Ross/Brand/Sachs affair. If you seriously believe that the idiotic behaviour of a couple of presenters (or -to be more accurate - the negligent behaviour of their superiors who let the programme go out) means that we should immediately tear down one of our greatest institutions (for that is effectively what this would mean), then you are seriously missing the point. No, there are more deep-seated ideological issues at stake here. It is all about the long-standing antipathy of a certain section of British society towards the way that the British Broadcasting Corporation is funded.

The BBC is one of the things about this country that makes me most proud to be British, and it is simply inconceivable to me that any of my fellow countrymen could think otherwise. Have these people never considered what life would be like without a publicly-funded BBC? Earlier today I jotted down ten things off the top of my head which were each probably worth the cost of the licence fee alone. Here’s what I came up with:

BBC News (think about it: which other news outlet is so scrupulously impartial that it regularly washes its own dirty linen in public?)
Radio 3 (very rarely listen to it, but I love the idea that it’s there)
The World Service (ditto)
The Today Programme (obviously)
In Our Time (the exception that proves that we ain’t really dumbing down)
Dr Who (of course)
Sounds of the Sixties
John Simpson
David Attenborough
Michael Palin

Go on, make your own list - it’ll probably be even better than mine. And pay your licence fee. OK?

Waterstone’s in Cardiff cancelled a signing by by Patrick Jones after some particularly odious religious fundamentalists, in the shape of Christian Voice, threatened to turn up mob handed. The triumphalism of the despicable Stephen Green is unmistakeable:

“Just the knowledge that we were on our way has put the fear of God into the opposition.”

A perfectly rational part of me wants to understand the stance of Waterstone’s and the desire to protect its staff from harrassment.

The greater part of me thinks that this craven act of cowardice is an affront to the principles of freedom of expression embedded in Britain’s culture and that perhaps somebody at Waterstone’s is in the wrong line of work.

It is all too easy to imagine the hoo-ha if a different religion had been calling for a book to be suppressed and much harder to imagine Waterstone’s caving in…

If there’s one thing guaranteed to turn me off a book, it’s having the word Dark in the title. Is there any more overused description in media these days?

What does Dark mean? Pretty much nothing anymore, except that it isn’t the Teletubbies. Anne Rice is Dark, Heroes, I am told, has become Dark, and the bookshelves are stuffed with it.
Read the rest of this entry »