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The Trial of Christine Keeler

I’m 3 episodes into the The Trial of Christine Keeler and am underwhelmed. Superficially it has all the elements of a powerful drama: sex, power, scandal , interesting personalities and no need to create any characters. The problem is that the story line is actually quite complex. The shooting [...]

January 8, 2020 // 0 Comments

University Challenge

We Rusters seem to have our own way of getting through the festive period and mine was University Challenge whose celebrity version of alumni appeared as contestants around 8.30 pm every evening. Following the excellent article on sit-coms I recollect and review that other staple of telly – [...]

January 7, 2020 // 0 Comments

On the way out, but laughing

Being a Ruster, my relationship with large swathes of the modern world – including technology, a bug-bear mentioned recently by my colleague William Byford – is generally tentative or somewhat hit-and-miss and so I set out to compose my post today with positive intent but also with [...]

January 4, 2020 // 0 Comments

All that jazz

Michael Stuart, our music man, is eclectic and you can read anything from Rod Stewart to Rigoletto in his column but rarely – if at all – jazz. This mirrors the general attitude to jazz. Major jazz figures and bands are still relatively unknown. It has more of a cult following. This is [...]

January 3, 2020 // 0 Comments

Farewell to a member of the Fab Two

Overnight came the sad news of the death of Neil Innes – a talented musician, humourist, former stalwart of the Bonzo Dog Do-Dah Band, Monty Python collaborator and all round good egg – at the age of 75. One way or another, had the cards fallen his way, he could easily have become one [...]

December 31, 2019 // 0 Comments

The Longest Day (1962)

We resourceful Rusters have various ways of getting though the festive period, mine was the film The Longest Day. I had seen the 1962 movie but it was some time ago. Various attractions  led me  to select it from the World War 2 section of my DVD box. The first was the cast: virtually every major [...]

December 28, 2019 // 0 Comments

The festive spirit

Here’s a bit of fun for this time of year. Sometimes I go on the YouTube website in order to entertain myself or remind myself of musical or other performances from the past. Like many websites, YouTube continually ‘remembers’ the choices you make and then offers you new items, on [...]

December 28, 2019 // 0 Comments

Rembrandt / the Complete Paintings

My Xmas present for myself was a handsome volume of all of Rembrandt’s paintings published by Taschen. My plan was that I would have an hour to myself to savour these wondrous works. Yet when I  did so it was with a slight feeling of disappointment. The problem with Rembrandt is that he produced [...]

December 27, 2019 // 0 Comments

Wimpole Street’s song traditions

You think of Wimpole Street more of a medical quarter than Tin Pan Alley but it can lay claim to two famous songs. The first is Yesterday composed by Paul McCartney when he lived in a flat there with Jane Asher whose father was a famous consultant. The tune came to him in a dream which posed a [...]

December 25, 2019 // 0 Comments

The hazy days of a summer long gone

Back in the day I once worked with Simon, my immediate boss who was something of a fish out of water – an unworldly accountant, debuting in the crazy world of television, who suffered a degree of difficulty in accepting the norms of an industry that didn’t really have any. Because the [...]

December 25, 2019 // 0 Comments

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