There’s all this talk of Marco Pierre White being totally 4 real in the kitchen and everything, but it’s left to one half of Two Fat Ladies to raise the authentic culinary stakes: Clarissa Dickson Wright (um, right - you know, the one that's not dead) is being prosecuted for alleged hare coursing, which has been illegal since the fox-hunting ban.
You don’t get that sort of nonsense from Jamie Oliver.Read more...
...because there may be changes afoot, because for a whole host of reasons this isn't working like I want it to. In the meantime, the Gossip just posted this on their MySpace bulletins - Standing In The Way Of Control being performed on Australian Idol. It's a strange old world.
They say it's a "total embarrassment". I say it's kind of awesome. Tomatoes, tomatoes.
Nnnghgh: Katie Holmes is in talks to star in the Wonder Woman movie. Why is this so irritating? I’m not one for hating on a sister, but she’s kind of on my list. She’s a sponge of a woman, absorbing those around her until she has no identity of her own and then stepping back into meek silence when it’s brought into question. Or she could just be dignified and content. Whatever. I’m picking a side.
This much-mooted big-screen WW will be a huge disappointment if 'Kate Cruise' takes the lead, because it’s hard to see her as anything other than a simpering accessory. But it’ll probably be a huge disappointment even if she doesn’t get it, since Joss Whedon is no longer on board (he left citing the old “creative differences”).
And his leaving the project is a tragedy of modern movies. Seriously. Joss Whedon’s a smart Hollywood player who’ll actually speak up against things he disagrees with. I remembered a post he made to his fansite Whedonesque back in May, an eloquent post about violence against women. It made me do a swoon. Among the highlights:
I watched the trailer for Captivity… Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is “I’m sorry”… Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence – is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished… [more]
After licking the screen with love, I went back further to a speech Joss gave in 2006 to Equality Now, who recognised his awesomeness with an award. And Meryl Streep only bloody introduces and lauds him. Permanent life motto: if it’s good enough for Meryl, it’s good enough for us. And it's well worth the 10 minutes or so it takes to watch:
This is all a very, very long way of saying that I wouldn’t like Katie Holmes to be Wonder Woman, if that’s alright, thanks. Rebecca
The Famous Five series is being “reimagined” as an adult drama with the crime-busting posh kids all entering middle age.
So a bit like that This Life +10 then, except it’s probably better, because, well, it was the worst programme ever made, ever, in the history of TV, ever.
One thing – George, she of boyish persuasions, had better be banging the beaver drum. She was such a lez.
A couple of years ago I broke my leg and ended up convalescing in a house with a 4-year-old who had a dictatorial reign over the TV remote. I watched a lot of CBeebies: Balamory, Big Cook Little Cook, Bob The Builder (obviously) and mine and the little one’s favourite, Boogie Beebies. For the uninitiated, Boogie Beebies’ hosts Nat and Pete make you dance to songs like Pirate Gang and Go Go Mango. I didn’t do much dancing. I was crippled. Keep up. But the point is, the little one did, and he loved it.
It was the best show on CBeebies by miles. Grown-up dancing is mostly rubbish because it’s all posing and posturing for others to see, but kids just throw themselves around because it feels good, and it’s the nicest and funniest thing in the world.
And then today I watched a YouTube clip of MIA teaching her dance moves to the kids on the wonderful Pancake Mountain. This led to a couple of hours of online PM catch-up, as the show’s been running since 2003 and has had everyone from Metric to Scissor Sisters to Arcade Fire to Juliette Lewis to… well, it’s had everyone. If Top Of The Pops had got a goat called Rufus Leaking to present and roped an audience of under-fives in, it might have stood a fighting chance. The show’s creator, Scott Stuckey, got the show together in 2005. It airs sporadically on public access TV in Washington, though you can buy DVDs of episodes from the website. “Good music is good music no matter what your age,” he reasons. That’s true. But there are other reasons why a music show for kids works much better than one for adults. First, stupid interview questions elicit the best responses. They’re more probing. They catch people off-guard and there’s no way bands will have a stock answer prepared for something like, “Where do you park the mothership?” (as Rufus once asked George Clinton). And they’re funny. I’m not interested in, “Tell me about your new album.” But I appreciate Rufus asking Shirley Manson, “Are you even happy when it’s a little bit cloudy?” I suspect she does, too. Second, bands like White Stripes and Shonen Knife are childlike in so many ways that when they played the show, it looked like they’d come home. They loved it. Gigs should be made compulsory for under-10s and illegal for anyone older. Pancake Mountain’s Dance Parties prove this point. And third, don’t you wish this was around when you were a kid? That you could say, “oh I was on TV playing drums with Iggy Pop when I was 6, and then Fugazi taught me to spell”. No? Shut up. You do a bit. Here are some good bits from the show. 1. Metric hosting a Monster Hospital singalong.
2. Scissor Sisters doing karaoke to Aretha Franklin with Rufus.
3. Jenny Lewis really, really enjoying her Dance Party.
Buy DVDS for the young ones in your life, or else pretend you know some kids, buy it and then watch it yourself. It’s so good that it made me a bit sad for everything else. Rebecca
There’s all this talk of Marco Pierre White being totally 4 real in the kitchen and everything, but it’s left to one half of Two Fat Ladies to raise the authentic culinary stakes: Clarissa Dickson Wright (um, right - you know, the one that's not dead) is being prosecuted for alleged hare coursing, which has been illegal since the fox-hunting ban.
Nnnghgh: Katie Holmes is in talks to star in the Wonder Woman movie. Why is this so irritating? I’m not one for hating on a sister, but she’s kind of on my list. She’s a sponge of a woman, absorbing those around her until she has no identity of her own and then stepping back into meek silence when it’s brought into question. Or she could just be dignified and content. Whatever. I’m picking a side.
The Famous Five series is being “reimagined” as an adult drama with the crime-busting posh kids all entering middle age.
A couple of years ago I broke my leg and ended up convalescing in a house with a 4-year-old who had a dictatorial reign over the TV remote. I watched a lot of CBeebies: Balamory, Big Cook Little Cook, Bob The Builder (obviously) and mine and the little one’s favourite, Boogie Beebies. For the uninitiated, Boogie Beebies’ hosts Nat and Pete make you dance to songs like Pirate Gang and Go Go Mango. I didn’t do much dancing. I was crippled. Keep up. But the point is, the little one did, and he loved it.
