You kind of know things are getting bad when London prime time news show anchors appear to have hit rock bottom with what’s on their auto-cue and the only news item glimmering with any hope is a Florida woman rescued from the errant alligator in her kitchen. London mayoral elections are this Thursday, and you have to admit that Rory Bremner’s joke on the subject (or one of his ever clever writers) about the three ugly sisters in search of their prince was pretty funny. We could do with more of that Enchanted in London to stop those shoes slipping down ‘the underground gap’.
Mindless babble of the robots on the Tube
£115,000 down Tube as noise case is lost
Film stars dodged angry Tube drivers at the premiere of a film about suicides on the Underground.
Three and Out, an unfortunate title given last week’s critical response.
The first openly gay senior policeman Brian Paddick, aka the 'Cannabis Cop', here reveals that after the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, he suffered severe depression. Now the Lib Dem is in the final straight of the race to be Mayor of London.
And just in case you missed The Terminal 5 Song (the BA ad with Delibes’ Lakméseems such a distant memory). Or is lost irony?
BAA (not to be confused with BA) set to lose stranglehold on airports
Profits before service – what did you expect?
BAA forced to sell off Gatwick after competition watchdog accuses it of ripping off millions of passengers
You're fired: T5 fiasco proves terminal
Fasten your seatbelts for T5 summer of hell
Robert Wardle will go down in history for caving in to political pressure to drop the investigation of arms giant BAE (what’s an acronym’s capital between friends) over alleged bribes to Saudi Arabia.
And someone who’s had his fare share of acronymic stress Mohamed Al Fayed (Harrod’s owner and the Diana-Dodi inquest) gets a hearing in The Guardian with his lawyer Michael Mansfield.
London commuters left gagging as manure cloud drifts over Channel from France
Gives a new meaning to plus ça change, n’est pas?
BBC’s Newsnight debate over Prime Minister’s tax U-turn, or as Conservative leader David Cameron said on Sunday morning’s BBC: “singled out some of the poorest working people in Britain and thumped them”. It’s hard to be funny anymore when the jokes in the headlines write themselves.
The UK's biggest banks have lost a test case about overdraft charges and the 10p tax row.
Big four stores face third price-fix probe
UK construction firms of accused of price rigging
Banks pull the plug on buy-to-let landlords
Victory for consumers in bank charges
Soldier's mother criticises Government for £2 million compensation claim. How those British soldiers must feel on hearing this.
In his latest book, American Journeys, Don Watson travels around America by train and hire car, eavesdropping on conversations, relating various histories and writing about his impressions of a country both loved and loathed by many.
Sound Proof is a sound art exhibition focusing on the site of the 2012 London Olympic Games. Six artists have been invited to respond to the site in the Lower Lea Valley and to the wider issues and debates surrounding the Olympic project. No glass slippers there, but howsabout some Central Park trivia for New York readers. The Brits Birkenhead Park was designed by Sir Joseph Paxton. In 1850 F.L. Olmsted, later famous as the designer of Central Park, visited the park as part of a tour of Europe and nicked (sorry, was inspired by) the idea. So now you know.
The pioneer plant hunters
The Shirley Sherwood Gallery at Kew Gardens reveals the beauty of botany
Lasers used to make female flies act like males
Casanova: The Myth and The Man
But there’s always The Sunday Times annual Rich List to turn you back into the loving socialist you always were or the tax exile you always dreamed of becoming. Or what about
The 100 most powerful people in British culture, or The Independent on Sunday’s Happy List, happy in the knowledge that their devoted flock manage to keep their wool in the winter of our discontent. I forgot to mention that striking trade union pension anger shut down the North Sea pipeline (one third of Britain’s gas supplies), and the teachers went on strike their first in 21 years, and another tube strike today and tomorrow. Brings on a petit pace? Surely not. I have Amy Adams’ princess ringing in mine ears and polishing my doorknob. Ah sweet mystery of life...blugger, wrong key - I still live in social housing, a world where the artist struggles to dream let alone sleep soundly or write his blog.
Is anxiety about sleep keeping us all awake?
The nature of reality is most certainly mein leitmotif this week (you know you’ve only been in my prologue and Act.1, Scene 1 for the past 18 months and that Wagner was on the watchlist for being a Lefty radical after the 1848 revolutions, don’t you?) Photographer Gregory Crewdson is currently at the White Cube
What dark secrets does this picture hold?
BBC's Front Row (23 April)
Those who’ve never seen Crewdson may well be awed. But for me, the beautiful precision of his ‘film stills’ of everyday American life or rather gesamptkunstwerk stills (a whole movie within one still), always leave me rather cold and remote like his subjects almost an ice chamber in the surroundings of the White Cube. But that may well be the whole point.
At Annely Juda Fine Art is Japanese sculpture by Yoshishige Saito and Time Space Wood (his last show there was back in 1992). Like all great sculpture they appear suspended in time as if these black planks and blocks had been thrown in the air like childrens’ coloured ‘pick-up sticks’ and rescued before they had time to settle. They harbour both strength and the fragility of the moment.
Former editor of The Economist Bill Emmott’s new book
Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade.
Nightwaves interview
Silent Ozu—Three Family Comedies
Back to urban reality and Blek le Rat: This is not a Banksy
Robert Fisk: Painters love martyrs and prophets
And the cry of Katie Paterson’s melting glaciers at Modern Art Oxford
Nightwaves on recent BAFTA winning documentary film maker Paul Watson about one of his new plays for radio, a satire of television called How Now TV. (Sorry, Nightwaves is only up for a week)
BAFTA judges snub TV inquiry to honour filmmaker
The press told me I was finished
Nightwaves
Lord of the fly-on-the-walls
Alzheimer's film-maker to face ITV lawyers
Watson hits out at Cowell
the rest’ll be ready tomorrow :(
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