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Smith or Smith

I followed the Radio London commentary of the Harlequins 24 Glasgow Warriors 7 match, being unwilling to lay out £25 monthly for broadcaster Premium Sports. So I cannot give a total report but – with the Six Nations looming – I thought I might offer my ha’porth on Fin Smith [...]

January 20, 2025 // 0 Comments

The Tanner Report: Leicester City 0 Fulham 2

Though this was not the most exciting of games it was a vital one. Fulham had drawn 6 of their last 9 games and doubts existed why we fared so well against team above us – and so badly against teams below us. As for Leicester, they had lost 6 successive games and grave doubts surrounded the [...]

January 19, 2025 // 0 Comments

The Tanner Report: West Ham 3 Fulham 2

You can lose a game because the opposition is superior or through bad luck (a deflection, an injury or a poor refereeing decision) or through sloppiness. This match was lost by sloppiness because Fulham were the better team but two grotesque defensive lapses gifted the game to the Hammers. Fulham [...]

January 15, 2025 // 0 Comments

El Cid/The book and the film

I was recently given a new biography of El Cid, the Spanish 11th Century knight, by Nora Berend, a Cambridge University historian. Her thesis is that Rodrigo de Viva – far rom being a patriot – was a mercenary. She concedes that many of the primary sources are unreliable. However this [...]

January 12, 2025 // 0 Comments

The Tanner Report: Fulham 4 Watford 1

Reporting on this victory is secondary to commenting on the decline of the FA Cup in my lifetime. The year of my birth (1954) witnessed what many consider the greatest game ever played at Craven Cottage – a cup tie with  the holders Newcastle United which the latter won 5-4. The linesman who [...]

January 10, 2025 // 0 Comments

Foreign detective writing

We tend to assume that only English-speaking writers can write detective novels. In Britain the genre is dominated by women – Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Marjoriec Allingham and recently Val McDiamid. In fact some interesting detective novels have been written by French writers and [...]

January 9, 2025 // 0 Comments

Surprising actors in a 1980 TV series

On Monday I watched Bergerac, now shown at 3.00pm on the UK Drama channel. It featured – as Belle Young, an eccentric boatowner and smuggler – the 1970s actress Judy Cornwall. Yesterday’s episode about a computer convention in Jersey also featured a computer nerd and mogul Jordan [...]

January 8, 2025 // 0 Comments

My Sporting Weekend

The Border-Gavaskar trophy between Australia and India has done much to enhance and elevate the status of Test cricket. India won the First Test in Perth – Australia levelled the series in Adelaide – and the Third Test in Brisbane was a washout draw. Australia won the Fourth Test in [...]

January 5, 2025 // 0 Comments

Top Hat (1935)

Time was when Christmas television would show a ‘big film’ but now these are to be found on Amazon Prime or Netflix and the main channels have to recycle tired old war films or superannuated blockbusters. It was therefore a huge relief that BBC broadcast – at the unlikely time of 8.15 am [...]

January 4, 2025 // 0 Comments

An Officer And A Spy/Robert Harris

This book came heavily recommended by the podcast The Rest is History as a novel about the Dreyfus affaire that you could read in one sitting. In fact it took me a week, largely because the detail of the various trials were so copious. The scandal is seen – not through the eyes of Alfred [...]

January 4, 2025 // 0 Comments

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