Coming Soon: The Ducie Bridge Podcast

Yes folks.. I was expecting to upload it tonight, but errm, it requires some editing: it's the first ever podcast recorded at the Jucy Ducie comedy night in Manchester. Drunk hecklers... stage humiliation... and the firing of guns - don't miss The Ducie Bridge Podcast...

I Pity the Fool

Just read this on Media Guardian:


Format of the week: I Pity The Fool, in which the A-Team's Mr T gives advice and a helping hand to people in tricky situations. Really. It goes into production in the US next month.

What connects Madonna and John Shuttleworth?

A splendid evening was had by all last night, as we went to see 'versatile singer/songwriter' John Shuttleworth at the Lowry in Salford Quays. John is in fact a comedy character who is something of a cult figure. He sings ditties such as Shopkeepers in the North are Nice, Betty Turpin, and his very own Eurovision entry, Pigeons in Flight. My favourite of his new tunes has to be Shepherd's Pie: "That shepherd's pie was stunning/ But I'm half way through my pudding/ I can't go back to savory now..."

But to add to our excitement, we spotted a celebrity in the audience! None other than local popster Badly Drawn Boy. Now this isn't the first time we've bumped into Mr Gough - for we also spotted him at one of the Madonna gigs in Manchester last summer. So now I'm assuming that he has similar tastes in popular culture as me and my friends, and I will document any other sightings so that we may build up a profile of what the Drawn one does for fun. I'm going to see Johnny Vegas on Friday, and so will be sure to look out for him there...

Ritchie puts a gun to his head...

You know when you hear bad things about a film, but you kinda want to make your own mind up, then you find yourself thinking 'yup, the critics were spot on'? Well this afternoon I went to see Revolver. Put it this way: the crowd must've been psychic when they started booing at the premiere. The film really is absolute pony. The first third of it was kind of 'okay', but then it just descended into complete and utter nonsense. It takes a big dog to drop a stinker of that magnitude.

But I am a born optimist, so in a desperate attempt to be fair to Mr Ritchie he is definitely a very talented director, and the film's 'look' is pretty cool and stylish. For his next project I believe he just needs two things: a) a script he hasn't written himself, and b) a producer who isn't afraid to say "No!".

Sky News finally gets something right...

6.6.04

Check out this short film, but watch the film before reading the comments:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/filmnetwork/A3753579

Grim up North

Someone sent me this description of Manchester from Lonely Planet. It has to be one of those most colourful blurbs I've ever read on this fair city:

Manchester is looking up. Gone are the Dickensian days of grinding poverty. Gone too the gloom'n'doom of the 1980s indie punk scene and its Joy Division pessimism: over the last 15 years the city has developed a champagne-for-breakfast insouciance and an almost giddy attitude toward fun.

That's ridiculous. I haven't had a champagne breakfast for weeks.

Which mother f*cker ate all the pies?

Northern English industrial towns continue their invasion of popular culture. I've just heard of a somewhat bizarre situation last week, where hip-hop gangsta superstar 50 Cent, fresh from performing a gig at Manchester's MEN Arena decided to go lay down some tracks at a recording studio in Wigan! Now Wigan does have a proud musical heritage, being home to Northern Soul and the Wigan Casino in the 60s, but nowadays it's better known for its pork pies and pier, than world class gangsta rappers. Nevertheless, Fiddy and the G-Unit recorded 6 tracks at Red Cat Studios, and were "really down to earth, very friendly, very funny and loved their sweeties", according to manager Allan Murrell.

No Sex Please, We're British?

According to Media Guardian, the UK now has 5 times as many porn channels as anywhere else in Europe. While British viewers have a choice of 27 blue movie outlets, the Germans have 5, the Spanish 2 and Italians just 1. That's right folks: 27 channels with nothing on!

Incidentally, there are now 416 TV channels beaming into UK homes; that's 170 more than French viewers have and 323 more than German viewers are treated with.

Preston Federline?!

Congratulations must go to Britney Spears-Federline on the birth of her baby boy. But people across the UK are asking: is Britney trying to copy the Beckhams by naming her child after his place of conception? Or does she simply not realise that Preston is an industrial town in the north of England?! Personally, I suspect the latter. But she can be proud that her first born shares a name with the town that housed the first ever KFC on British shores, and where R2D2 now lives. Or maybe she's a cricket fan, for Preston is also home to England's latest hero, Andrew 'Freddy' Flintoff...

More about Preston here.

With Bush accepting responsibility for the slow response to the Katrina disaster, this article published by National Geographic in October 2004 makes chilling reading:

http://www3.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/feature5/