Jeremys #2: Brett

Second in a series of short tributes to well-known people called Jeremy With the BBC’s Sherlock on our screens, it’s worth reminding ourselves just how great Jeremy Brett was, both in and out of the role. Brett was a truly fine actor and one of British television’s most recognisable faces, having put his sharp features […]

Plastic not-so-fantastic, then

Another childhood illusion shattered, another comfort zone wrecked. Belgian punk “sensation” Plastic Bertrand has admitted he wasn’t the singer of his one and only UK hit ‘Ça Plane Pour Moi’. Is there nothing left we can believe in? This is far more devastating than the Milli Vanilli ‘scandal’ of 20 years ago. Poor Plastic (real name Roger Jouret, […]

Waiter, there’s a woman in my soup

It’s hard to believe that the boom-time obsession with spas hasn’t gone away. Glossy mags, weekend supplements and the provincial press are still plugging these idiotic, aery-faery dens of self-gratification, a hangover from what already looks like the tackiest bygone era in history. We’re already well into the first year of a new decade, and a more […]

Oui, je bored… think I’ll just commune with the dead

Whenever my friend and I were bored during the long, winter nights of the early 1980s – when we were restless teenagers, fed up listening to Tears For Fears and there was only Bergerac on the telly – our thoughts inevitably turned to talking to dead people. Out would come the little table, the Scrabble […]

Tea-time tale

A few days back, a colleague and I were discussing the timing of some inconsequential matter, and I happened to estimate it occurred “around dinner time”. He smiled and said, “so that would be tea time for me”. It reminded me of a recent piece by an Irish journalist I’m fond of reading, who disparaged the type of people who have […]

Pipe down, it’s a no-shit Sherlock

Benedict Cumberbatch sounds gloriously anachronistic, a name to do a little more than conjure with. He should be a Dickensian cartoon character, if such a thing could possibly exist. Crazy name, crazy face, he must surely be a crazy guy. How perfectly cast he is, then, as Sherlock, the latest TV incarnation of Arthur Conan […]

The terrifying beauty of the Monopods

I was at primary school when I read John Christopher’s brilliant sci-fi novel The White Mountains and it terrified me. This was around the time I’d first heard Orson Welles’s The War Of The Worlds broadcast, and a good few years after I’d had my first nightmare about a Dalek invasion of my village, so […]

Alex “Hurricane” Higgins 1949 – 2010

R.I.P. Alex “Hurricane” Higgins. No matter what happens in world snooker, we will never see your like again. There will be many tributes paid to the most entertaining player snooker has ever known and most of them will speak of a great, if wayward, man who tore up the rule book, transgressed the written laws, […]

Jeremys #1: Paxman

First in a series of short tributes to well-known people called Jeremy Why do I love Jeremy Paxman? Let me count the ways. He’s fiercely intelligent. He’s fiercely articulate. He’s fiercely bad tempered at times. He presents two of my favourite programmes, Newsnight and University Challenge. On the former, he’s the scourge of most politicians […]

It’s the demon drink talking, again

Three pieces in the morning papers got a rise out of me today. First and foremost, an excellent opinion piece in the Irish Times by Brian O’Connell about the appalling situation regarding cut-price or below-cost alcohol sales; then, a shocking (to my eyes) report on how the Irish are apparently at odds with the rest […]