Never mind the global systemic catastrophe
Look, I probably ought to put up something about Credit Default Swaps or LIBOR or something but, honestly, I just can’t. So—by way of light relief—here’s this week’s Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Laugh? You’ll probably find yourself unwinding your long-term leverage or increasing your tier 1 capital. Sarcastic grammar school charmer Simon Amstell is outstanding: [...]
Greg Dyke on Nye Bevan
This isn’t actually the show I planned to put up. I wanted to link to a really marvelous feature called The NHS: a Difficult Beginning, which originally went out around the Sixtieth Anniversary earlier this year and was repeated on Wednesday. That programme, though, is unaccountably not available on iPlayer. Probably some kind of rights [...]
Factory: Manchester from Joy Division to Happy Mondays
It’s easy to tell how old the people running British TV are these days: they’re all my age. I know this because they keep commissioning programmes about the music and culture of their formative years, which are my formative years. Here’s a great big (seriously: it’s an hour-and-a-half long) piece of Manchester mythography: a documentary [...]
Springtime in an English Village (1944)
I heard about the BFI’s YouTube channel on the radio this evening and rushed over to have a look. There are dozens of short films and clips from a hundred years or so of British film, including some funky stuff from Germaine Greer and lots of themed material like these London films. I’ve chosen a [...]
Blood & Guts: Into The Brain
Part one of a very promising-looking history of surgery that seems to share only its name with Roy Porter’s excellent short history of medicine, published in 2002. Lots of excellent close-up brain surgery…
