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Private Passions/Radio 3: Hannah Rankin

As previously noted here, if you seek the formula of interview coupled with musical choice Private Passions, not Desert Island Discs is for you. Yesterday the subject was Hannah Rankin who combines two unusual accomplishments: she is the IBF Super Welterweight  boxing champion and a concert [...]

May 4, 2020 // 0 Comments

VE-Day commemorations and something quite different

With the 75th anniversary of VE Day coming up on Friday (8th May) I had in advance ‘scheduled for recording’ last night’s 8.00pm offering on Channel Four of VE Day in Colour – Britain’s Biggest Party but then watched it as it went out anyway. As it happens I found its mix of colour and [...]

May 4, 2020 // 0 Comments

Coventry 3 Spurs 2 1987 Cup Final

Yesterday afternoon ITV showed extended highlights of the 1987 Cup Final, generally acclaimed as one of the great Cup Finals. Can it be 33 years ago that I attended that Final with my now departed mother? My late father was medical advisor on inoculation and foreign travel to the England team. What [...]

May 3, 2020 // 0 Comments

You win some … and lose some

Listening to the radio overnight I thought I heard that sales of jigsaws – according to one interviewee, a representative of that industry – have soared over 800% since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, particularly among the 24 to 35 age group. This figures, because – if [...]

May 2, 2020 // 0 Comments

NOTORIOUS (1946)

I am sure that I have seen this Hitchcock/Selznick production starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman before but it was sufficiently long ago that I did not recall much of the plot. It was showing on the excellent Talking Picture channel. Ingrid Bergman plays the daughter of a Nazi convicted in a [...]

April 30, 2020 // 0 Comments

The Battle of the Atlantic/Jonathan Dimbleby

There is a new type of historian about – one who is not an academic but in the media, like Sir Max Hastings or Jonathan Dimbleby who has written the above account which I read as an audio book  narrated by him. Like most history books it is far too long and would benefit from editing. It is [...]

April 29, 2020 // 0 Comments

The Reunion/radio 4

Yesterday was the last in the Reunion series presented by Sue MacGregor. I have written before how much I enjoy it. A group gather before Sue MacGregor and remember a past event in which they were all involved. Yesterday’s topic was the young girl singers of the sixties: the contributors were [...]

April 27, 2020 // 0 Comments

A momentary diversion …

For any Rusters unfamiliar with it, Saturday Night Live is a decades-old American broadcasting institution. My half-baked effort at suggesting a British equivalent might be a mix of the very best entertainment segments of the Graham Norton and/or Jonathan Ross chat shows combined with a human [...]

April 27, 2020 // 0 Comments

Becoming Matisse/BBC 2

In any art programme the presenter is all. Will he/she let the paintings speak for themselves or will they interpose themselves? In this programme it soon became obvious that the presenter Sophie Matisse was the latter. She’s the great granddaughter of Henri Matisse, the granddaughter of Pierre [...]

April 26, 2020 // 0 Comments

Philip Roth/aid to constipation

I am reading Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. To be more exact I’m reading it on the loo and finding it beneficial to the mild constipation from which I suffer. It’s a mighty tome and like many of Roth’s novels about his upbringing in Newark, New Jersey. The story  is of a magnificent [...]

April 25, 2020 // 0 Comments

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