Accountability

Everyone’s a critic

Sperm Crooked Vultures

#WhaleSupergroups

Very depressing/infuriating chat on the Jimmy Mulville/Peter Fincham podcast about their readiness to embrace AI in the face of ‘luddites.’

I really liked #Mint on BBC ONE - its oddness, its beauty, sense of place and the star quality of the young leads

Very excited to receive this in the post just now @4hundredblows.bsky.social

Peter Capaldi?

Doctor’s Orders by Carol Douglas from Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco

Melody (aka SWALK) is great. Somewhere between Children’s Film Foundation and Gregory’s Girl.

I see Giles Coren - very much the gobshite’s gobshite - is being a gobshite again.

So it’s basically like War Games?

Nukes?

Oh lord yes. This is in my office. I think of it as more noir than melodrama though which is why I omitted it from that particular list.

I love that movie. I have the poster hanging in my bedroom. All those Hollywood on Hollywood melodramas: Two Weeks In Another Town, The Big Knife, The Bad & The Beautiful, Sunset Blvd - they’re so cynical and so glamorous. Irresistible.

I just read a log-line for an in development film that went from intriguing to stupid so economically it read like a joke. I laughed. Then I realised it’s gonna get made and cost more than the combined budgets of everything I’ve ever worked on.

Implausible Deniability.

I was always workin' steady but I never called it art
I got my shit together meeting Christ and reading Marx
It failed my little fire but it spread a dying spark
Go tell the young Messiah
what happens to the heart

The Gospel According to St Leonard.

Same for me. Anti histamines first couple of months (and occasionally still, 7 years later) and an inhaler (which I was already using for asthma). I still react badly to other cats but at home I’m mostly fine and she’ll like, sleep on my chest.

I took a while with this book, mostly reading long sections, very late at night. It reminded me of Gordon Burn’s Happy Like Murderers, in that it’s brilliant and horrifying. #BookSky

I am not digging The Pitt. Noah Wyle is great but no one else, staff or patient, is holding my interest.

Catching up with the repeated Young Fathers artist in residence shows on @bbc6music.bsky.social which are even better than you might expect and you’d expect a fuck of a lot.

Thatcher.
I know that sounds a bit ‘people’s poet’ but she was a huge figure in British life, everything felt defined in relation to her - strikes, riots, nukes/CND, Reagan, Orgreave, Hillsborough, Ireland, culture, media. I was 9 when she came to power, 20 when she went, still live in her legacy.

Supergran
Sapphire & Steel
Morph
The genie from Bernard and the Genie

Days Without End is one of my favourite novels. The central relationship is so beautifully depicted, and the action sequences are as thrilling as anything Leone or Ford put on screen.

Oh yes, deeply problematic. I’m not advocating for a repeat run, just noting it seems to have left no cultural footprint (whereas eg It Ain’t Half Hot Mum has)

This photograph is as almost magical and beautiful as the film itself.

Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads still (rightly ) celebrated but Bolam’s other sitcom Only When I Laugh is largely ignored. Ran for 4 years, Peter Bowles and Richard Wilson co starred, Eric Rising Damp Chappel wrote it.

That’s a beautiful photo and a beautifully written tribute.

Your Take That inspired art is wonderful.