I think Sam and Josh trying to look cool while watching it is the worst thing about it.

To see or not to see? Every single Shakespeare play – ranked! Antony and Cleopatra? Exhausting. Lear? Magnificent but flawed. Hamlet? Limitless. For Shakespeare’s birthday, the Guardian’s former theatre critic ranks all the plays

Disagree with this quite a bit.

www.theguardian.com/stage/ng-int...

Early stroll. Horizon like a one-bar electric fire. A curling wave of orange peel. That snail’s long journey. A blackbird’s sculpted song. A dropped piece of string as long as a piece of string.

I'm not sure we would have most of Othello, actually. He was a soldier first and foremost.

Watching that now, as it happens. Definite West Wing and Studio 60 vibes. It is nice to have a bit of that Sorkin dialogue back.

It was a political drama, as you say, but it had more laughs per episode than most comedies.

#BartletforAmerica

RIP Victoria Wood, who died on this day 2016.

And what a late career masterpiece performance from Harrison Ford

‘She’d been drinking with Julie Walters. I heard a crash’: Victoria Wood’s genius – by her friends, fans and actors Dazzling performer, brilliant writer, maddening perfectionist, Easter Egg hunt maestro … on the 10th anniversary of Wood’s death, those who knew her best celebrate the shy introvert who redefined come...

Ten years ago today. What a loss.

#VictoriaWood

www.theguardian.com/stage/2026/a...

Certainly. The lottery isn't an investment/future planning strategy.

Isn't that the bridge where Paul Simon wrote Bridge Over Troubled Water?

Bohemian RhapZody

It was pretty decent. Better than pretty decent, I would say. Generally speaking it has been well-received.

Though their payout rate has dropped recently.

Andor is a good example of this.

And I love the way Vince Gilligan took a side character in Breaking Bad and created the exceptional Better Call Saul.

I kinda liked it.

I’ll never forget watching The Wicker Man with my outer Hebridean mum. “I just don’t know where there got all that wicker from”

I will have to catch this. I think about Bayliss's line about "the usual darkness" a lot.

In a couple of days it will be 10 years since Victoria Wood died. In a couple of months, 10 years since we lost Caroline Aherne. Both felt out of the blue, and hit hard. They were golden, and I wish they were still here.

His brand of ecstacy, Ulyss Es, didn't catch on.

Food of the gods

I'm rewatching it at the moment. It is such high quality, and really stands up.

As a member of the teaching profession myself, I would like to confirm: I and many of my colleagues think that Lee Anderson is a scumbag.

Dunning-Kruger...

Sunday Afternoon, Hyde, painting by Harry Rutherford, 1903-85 (Salford Museum and Art Gallery).

Image from a BBC news article which states: "we used an AI voice to read the audio version of this article."

Finding this little caption on BBC articles from time to time now:

"We used an AI voice to read the audio version of this article."

Well, BBC: don't.

Use a real person, and pay them for their labour.

Brexit, schmexit - this is the kind of stuff we should have had a referendum on. See also: suddenly calling coleslaw 'slaw', and pubs calling something a pie when it is just a stew with a hat.

Each edition of Question Time should have a Susie Dent type fact-checking expert at a separate desk with a big pile of books, pointing out the lies of the last panelist.

A scene from the film The Grapes of Wrath, 1940. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext

"To California or any place— every one a drum major leading a parade of hurts, marching with our bitterness. And some day— the armies of bitterness will all be going the same way. And they’ll all walk together, and there’ll be a dead terror from it."
---John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
#novels