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Read 18 hours ago and current, but nothing has been published for 15 months.
It’s hard to remember the decent people doing jobs in an often rotten world A few years ago, I came up with a catchphrase that I would type underneath articles on the website of The Times newspaper: ‘Does anything in this country work?’ It appears thousands of others think the same way and voted accordingly at last year’s General Election to change things (results still pending). Let us consider…
As I prepare to perform the music of Liam and Noel, I wonder why they still matter to people Tomorrow night (May 22), I’ll be performing the songs of Noel and Liam Gallagher to what I hope is a crowd in double figures at the Caxton Arms down in Brighton. I have been assured that the landlord is a big Oasis fan, while the fact that fans of the football team use it as a base might attract some of…
Remember Monday are set for three minutes that will change their lives It’s that time of year again: defrost Cheryl Baker, dust off Johnny Logan and direct your eyes to Basel for the Eurovision Song Contest, which is still, only just, about the ‘song’ part of the name. For all the geopolitics and sloganeering, it’s a fluffy TV show watched by millions of disinterested folk and a few million…
The world’s premier pop performer returns to the stadium, her natural habitat At the end of April 2025, Beyoncé began her Cowboy Carter world tour with five dates at the 70,000-seat stadium in Inglewood, California which usually houses the LA Rams, a team owned by Stan Kroenke, whose money also bankrolls Arsenal FC. Three dates in Chicago and five in New Jersey follow, before six across three…
The local elections take place tomorrow, but what am I voting for? In 1993, The Cranberries put out an album which features the evergreens Dreams and Linger; the latter, which appears on NOW 27, has just surpassed one billion Spotify streams, joining a very exclusive club of just under 1000 songs to do so. Other recent additions include: classic rock from Foreigner, Pink Floyd and Van Halen;…
Would I die for king and country, or merely exercise my right to chuckle at it? I don’t even celebrate St George’s Day, although I do remember it was the birthday of William Shakespeare, who wrote a lot about British kings. It does appear that to be a patriot means acceptance of monarchy, offering no criticism and, dangerously, either fawning over lovely Wills and his lovely wife or brushing aside…
Alex Allison’s new book Greatest Of All Time makes him the new custodian of the football novel My pandemic project has outlived the plague era. Since 2020 I have spent time collecting football books, and I even had one of my own published, on the FA Youth Cup, but I’m not here to plug From Kids To Champions or my book on punditry, with the neologism Banternalysis for a title. Instead, I’m going to…
And the nominations for the perfect pop song are… Since Easter and Passover coincide this week, and I’m off the carbs to remember the miracle of Moses and the Israelites escaping persecution in Egypt (oh is that the ironyometer exploding?), here’s a departure from the normal prosaic column, in memory of Buzzfeed and the other sites that went mad on list articles (listicles) in the late 2000s and…
On April 12, the Sound of Watford will fill the town with music You wouldn’t call Watford a musical town. It used to be known for two things: printing newspapers and making beer. Although The New European newspaper is still printed in the town, the Sun Printers building at the very bottom of Whippendell Road was converted into flats. The Benskin Brewery, just down from the High Street, is now…
Scripted TV is in decline because reality TV has taken over the world Big Brother returns, yet again, this week, but why do we need reality TV when TV is giving us reality? This is not a new observation. In my lifetime, we have gone from cheering on or booing actors in dramas and soap operas – Dynasty, Dallas, Coronation Street, Brideshead Revisited – to watching people-as-brands, whose careers…
