Sugar on Sunday

For those who keep Wednesdays free for The Apprentice, some annoying news… Read more

Big Brother

It’s perhaps a case or ironic confluence that a week prior to the debut of Big Brother 3, I was reading Ben Elton‘s book Dead Famous – the story of a reality TV show, House Arrest, where 10 people are confined together in a pressure cooker environment competing for prize money, all thinly disguised caricatures of contestants from Big Brother‘s first series. Read more

Smallpox 2002: Silent Weapon

In the months leading up to Christmas, I’d noticed some changes in the office. My colleagues in charge of opening the post were no longer there. As I ventured out during the morning coffee run, I would see them creeping furtively along the corridor wearing pairs of sinister rubber gloves. “What are those for?” I enquired. “Oh, Anthrax.” Read more

I Love 1994

Saturday night, Saturday night… and I’m sitting in front of the television, recalling a conversation with a colleague at work. “Everything came back in the ’90′s, so the decade never really had a style of its own,” I was informed. So I Love the Nineties was always destined to be problematic. Read more

Big Brother

Really it was inevitable that the merits of Big Brother 2 would be regarded with suspicion. It is a general rule of thumb in television that second series of programmes tend quite simply to not be as effective as the originals. Read more

Big Brother

So who did you vote for? That’s what Ian Jones asked you on these pages last time around, during Big Brother series one. This year, you could even be forgiven for thinking the same question was genuinely about politics. But, if it was, would you have a ready answer? Read more

I Love 1985

1985 – the year my voice broke. Well, not quite, but definitely the year I started to feel the first pangs of pre-pubescent lust, indulging in clandestine kisses with Louise Meadows under the oak tree in the village cricket green.

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The Greeks

“A revolution has begun that will change the world. A moment of chaos and anarchy as the people have seized control of their destiny,” intones Liam Neeson portentously, and we know, this being 8pm, that we’re not yet in I Love the Eighties territory. Before we venture into the terrain of easy-going reminiscence of a long gone era, BBC2 have decided to give us a lesson in classical history.

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Confidence Lab

Have you ever wanted to change your life for the better? Have you ever wanted to be that bit more assertive, authoritative, confident and in control?

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Big Brother Night

“It’s only a game show” chanted the Bow house contestants as the nine weeks rolled by. Yet in terms of its sheer scale, ambition and seeming ubiquity, Big Brother was the television (and internet) phenomenon of 2000. Read more

Attachments

The internet – a signifier for progress or simply a rancid melting pot of cyberjunk? If the new Information Age was intended to usher in innovations in mass communication rather more exciting than the flurry of onscreen e-mail chat we currently understand by it, then the idea of a television drama centred around the web is a beguiling concept on paper. Read more

I Love 1978

In 1978, I was a mere two years old, having just learnt to read with the assistance of Lenny The Lion. It is therefore with some trepidation that I sit down to write this review as I have no authentic recollection of the political or pop-cultural reference points of that year but then again with I Love the Seventies that isn’t really required. Read more