In the psychedelic 60s stop-frame animation children’s television series Trumpton, all the characters have identifying proper names – the fireman Captain Flack, the state stormtrooper Police Constable Potter, and the mysterious dungeon-dwelling economist Gideon Pencils Osborne. The mayor of Trumpton, however, was known only as The Mayor, and neither his actual name nor his political…
The terrible massacre of innocent Israelis by sadistic Hamas agents on 7 October last year has set in motion a dreadful chain of events, exploited by bad faith actors on all sides to sow division and hate. Last week the campaigner Gideon Falter tenaciously stage-managed a confrontation with the Metropolitan police by demanding to walk…
The discredited television personality Andrew Neil, formerly the laughing launch-face of the seemingly Ofcom-untouchable, fun-packed, fact-averse, rightwing TV station GB News, floats contentedly in a foaming brown bathtub of bubbling human waste, his Weetabix hair matted with muck, and yet considers himself clean, the nutshell king of infinite filth. On 10 April, Neil told his…
Why should the people of Birmingham have 100% arts cuts imposed on them? Brummies are quite capable of devaluing their own art without official encouragement. In 2020, the director Michael Cumming and I completed King Rocker (“One of my all time favourite rock docs” – Mark Kermode; “the new gold standard for rockumentaries” – the…