Same here - my default radio station for about 15 years! Really missing it today
Same here - my default radio station for about 15 years! Really missing it today
Glad it’s not just me! App and website seem to have been down since at least this morning, unfortunately.
In its low-key conservative way it’s one of the most psychedelic British shows of the 60s. Watching it you sometimes feel you’ve suffered a sharp blow to the head. The production values are astonishingly high.
A magnificent series. CofE clergyman with a miniaturising ray fights baddies; action switches randomly between puppets and live-action and script veers into Unwinese. Music from the Mike Sammes Singers. Lew Grade was furious but what on earth did he *think* he was commissioning?
‘Notre-Dame of Paris’ is a clunker of a translated title.
The comparison with Frankenstein is apt as in my childhood, ‘doing’ Charles Laughton’s Quasimodo was a huge staple of sketch shows and comedy impressionists, just as recognisable as ‘doing’ Bela Lugosi’s Ygor. ‘The bells! The bells!’ But somehow NDDP has dropped out of pop culture.
One of the great ironies of the immigration problem is that the people trying to come here think Britain is brilliant, the people most furious about them trying to come here pretend they think it's a crime ridden dump www.economist.com/britain/2025... From The Economist
The huge gap between the frontier of research and the undergrad curriculum plays into this, particularly in maths where much of a degree course is *very old stuff*. Fermat’s Little Theorem might only turn up in your second year and it was stated when Cromwell was still a grumpy rustic MP!
Providing a decent undergraduate curriculum in maths/science at 3rd/4th yr level is really difficult. 20-30 yrs ago I think there were a lot of departments with world-class specialisms whose undergrad teaching had weird massive gaps in certain topics - you can’t get away with that any more.
For context, the natural sciences are already at a low baseline, e.g. the Guardian lists 44 institutions offering physics degrees, vs 95 for history and 108 for English. I'm not sure most humanities folk realise how much science has already been squeezed. www.theguardian.com/education/20...
(guy who has only read two books) this orwellian shit is starting to seem pretty dickensian to me
Think it’s actually ‘Meeting with unknown man’ (Russian grammar is a horror and I get singular/plural endings mixed up)
From ‘To Build A New Jerusalem’, AJ Davies: “When Harry Pollitt was in Wandsworth Prison during the General Strike of 1926 he learnt to fart the *Internationale*.”
Some of the pictures generate a nostalgia that would instantly disappear if you could smell the places. There’s an argument that many such houses could have been made liveable as pollution declined and plumbing improved but you can see where the redevelopers were coming from.
I love the use of 'book' as a header because the word does appear, but not with the meaning you'd expect, in the paragraph. That day when the subs just couldn't be bothered.
On its original UK run, Randall & Hopkirk played to public and critical indifference (this demolition by Mary Malone in the Daily Mirror is a good example of the frosty reception it received).
It was such a treat to discover this at odd times on ITV on late-80s weekday afternoons: a sad but attractive 60s England in glorious colour, and with one of the greatest theme tunes of all time.
There’s quite a lot of pathos now when we look at those illustrations of brand new concrete flats; you can see how attractive the promise of ‘like your tenement but cleaner, bigger, warmer, drier and more private’ must have been.
Actually might be ‘Meeting with unknown man’ I think. Russian case endings are a nightmare!
It shows respect for the audience to have actual foreign language content, as in the Mastermind sketch, so that after a few ‘dull’ seconds the sight gag lands all the better. The Russian version of Blind Date’s caption is ‘Meetings With Unknown Men’. They really put the effort in!
I suspect it came too quick after the appearance of the newsreader to ever get the laugh it deserved, but total non-reaction is odd.
That KYTV bit really put the effort in. Sometimes a studio audience’s lack of reaction can baffle. Why didn’t the appearance of the Swedish sign-language interpreter get a laugh?
Brand new on Dirty Feed: to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Fawlty Towers, here's a look at all the various parodies of the show over the years. "Yes madam, I am frightfully tall." www.dirtyfeed.org/2025/09/herr...
Yeah, there was that notion that everything would be renewed unrecognisably using lots of concrete but would also have solemn heraldry slapped on it for continuity - eg the ‘new’ English counties and the plate-glass universities
That’s a delightful and perhaps unexpectedly provocative image from the Corporation, given the delicate religious situation.
Good, tricky cryptic in the Guardian today from new setter Serenos www.theguardian.com/crosswords/c...
I seem to recall that in the late 90s in the UK, Xena was on Channel 5 early on Saturday evening followed by Suggs’s very-minor-celeb karaoke vehicle Night Fever. It made a great double bill for those of us with literally nothing better to do on a Saturday evening.
Famously, between the first and the second act of Waiting for Godot, the only difference in the stage set is that a previously bare tree ‘has four or five leaves’. So what’s the main note to self I found in this copy which seems to have belonged to a stage manager called Nigel...?
It’s good and normal for governments to shed people who can’t adjust to the different challenges of opposition after the first year. The Conservatives won after changing leader in 1955, 1959, 1992, 2017, and 2019. In 1992 the leader in question had won two landslides and changed the country!
Beano #618, May 22, 1954
subscriptions >>> shop.viz.co.uk/viz348bs
I watched an episode of Les & Dustin’s Laughter Show the other day, and I have to admit: it was definitely a show featuring Les Dennis and Dustin Gee, so they got it three-quarters right.
imagine getting qt dunked by ed davey. unrecoverable. you’re furious and he is serenely going down a log flume in bognor regis.
The big picture problem for Labour is they are being overwhelmed by a mess they inherited and people think they can't get better. The big picture problem for the Conservatives is that they made it, and outside of a handful of high-profile weirdos, everyone knows that.
It is never a bad time to bring out my favourite illustration of Frankenstein's creature Very come hither.
My 2yo tried fish sticks before she ever tried chicken nuggets, so she calls chicken nuggets “chicken fish sticks.” Today this food product entered our home and does anyone have contact info for Baudrillard
Got this today. It’s allegedly all shows shown on US tv in the period and has the most fantastically mangled summary of Doctor who
Excellent thread that leads me back to my biggest question about Starmer, which is why he's doing this? He seems like someone who would have been very content as, say, a senior judge. He doesn't have the obvious lust for self-aggrandisement as, say, Johnson. So why politics? Why PM?
Discovering computer as an adult makes you go crazy. Discovering computer as a baby makes you go crazy. In all of human history, there will only ever be one generation to discover computer at the correct age: 13
Yes, great fun, thanks. 28 elicited a deep groan of appreciation when I belatedly got it
The curiously spelled Southport Visiter newspaper offers this curiously punctuated advertisement in 1989.
World Tramdriving Championships klaxon (ht Joanna Holman on mastodon). No word yet on the line-up of events, but previous years have featured tram skittles. This year I'm hoping for tram flyball. www.tramwm.com
Quite a few Rediffusion ones still on suburban Bristol streets.
Years ago I spent ages on comedy websites trying to recall the name of this show and I’ve been searching for clips, on and off, for years. This was my white whale, my The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve or Marco Polo.
Since WW2, 19 seats in Westminster have been won with less than 30% of the vote. Ten of those were last year. They'll be a lot more next time.
Genuinely delighted by this: the first clip I’ve seen in 45 years of The Nesbitts Are Coming, a 1980 Yorkshire TV *musical sitcom* about an itinerant petty-crime family, featuring Clive Swift. I remember this song... youtu.be/Nv2hQF2obss?...
Radio Paradise playing Dire Straits’ Industrial Disease. Top track that a school friend of mine was mildly obsessed with.
Herbert Lom #BOTD 1917 & Peter Sellers (along with Alec Guinness, Cecil Parker & Danny Green) have Katie Johnson surrounded in this cast photo from The Ladykillers (dir. Alexander Mackendrick, 1955). 🎬 📷by Hal Hanscombe National Portrait Gallery, London
More than twenty years ago, ISIHAC was doing alternative punchlines to Christmas-cracker jokes. Q: What do you call a man who gets the sack every time he goes to work? A: Peter Mandelson.
And the 19th century Victoria University stretched across the north of England - admittedly, not for long!
At last, Frank Beard and Louise Wener on the same bill
The trailers for this show promised me a superhero who could turn into a stick man with a halo and I’ve never got over my disappointment.
Much ‘study skills’ advice for students is not very applicable in STEM and particularly not in maths - reading a high-level textbook for example is a really difficult thing to do - and I think educationalists conclude on behalf of frustrated students that the lecturers must be doing something wrong.
Beano #1007, Nov 4, 1961
A similar example is that the most talented & experienced cabinet in British history was the Labour cabinet between 74-79; it had really smart people in it but it couldn’t dig its way out of the hole because they were using tools and methods that existed in 1950 and 1960 and no longer work
Some absolute classics in this week’s selection - Noel’s appallingly dangerous car stunts, Pat Phoenix wishing death on a cameraman, and from Leeds, The Cloughie And Revie Show Featuring Austin Mitchell.
The flip side is also that by focusing on net migration, the UK counts its own brain drain of young talent *as a positive* in its own numbers. It's like the economic version of a death cult
I miss when AI meant adobe illustrator Btw I also hate adobe illustrator
Great clue - very clever that the answer wasn’t about cricket at all. That crossword was just about at my difficulty limit!
Brand new on Dirty Feed: today is the 50th anniversary of the studio recording of Fawlty Towers, "Gourmet Night". That episode's famous ending is pictured here. But it wasn't the originally intended finale. Instead, things were going to get rather more peculiar... www.dirtyfeed.org/2025/09/luck...
The lack of a space in WG is sly. I think it parses as W = definition (chemical element) G rejected cricket practice = G + reversed word meaning cricket practice having picked up a hundred previously = a soundalike (‘picked up’) for a slang term for a hundred in cricket, put at the start
Chain Gang was released as a single in March 1956, before Heartbreak Hotel reached the UK. And I think it's rather wonderful.
And since the trifle-smearing was unrehearsed, it’s quite possible it went a bit wrong and they decided not to clean up and do it again at the end of a long day. Cleese wouldn’t want to end on a muffed scene.
Give Us A Clue (6th September 1983). Leonard Rossiter has to contend with 'Have You Met Miss Jones?'
Beano #1620, Aug 4, 1973
Found this week’s Guardian Prize Crossword by Vlad quite tough but enjoyable. Not entirely confident of some of my parsings www.theguardian.com/crosswords/p...
becoming a bit of a pet complaint at this stage but I'd love to see a study that shows that British readers actually prefer a massive chunky book, because I love a little paperback so much I can't imagine everyone else loving these huge editions
Municipal guide cover of the day (possibly an all time great!): Croydon, 1971. Countdown typeface klaxon!
Radio Paradise playing all 16 minutes of the Abbey Road medley, oh yes
The new issue of Viz is on sale today, and there's a serving of intergalactic adventure with Bacon, Clegg and Beans
Airwolf had a first-rate theme tune and title sequence and whenever I see Ernest Borgnine in anything I go ‘ooh, it’s Dominic Santini!’ Loved it at the time but dare not rewatch it.
Its more of a saxophone solo than a question really
You know, the BBC's description of his former metier could have been a lot worse.
all the best windows software in history is called something like "joe's thing doer". it does the thing and nothing else and is available on a html website in plain text and takes up under a megabyte of space and uses default windows ui elements and will work until the heat death of the universe
The only P.A. on the Station… (1960) A ‘ten-pound pom’ on taking her experience of Associated-Rediffusion to TVW in Perth in 1960
One of the all-time great You’ve Got School Tomorrow theme tunes of British TV Sundays, though in my head the late Mark Snow’s theme for Hart to Hart runs it a close second.
This is very much my jam, thanks!
In 1965 Stanley Bielecki took a series of photos of The Zombies walking around West London. This is the best shot. Colin Blunstone, Hugh Grundy, Paul Atkinson, Chris White, Rod Argent Love those skinny black ties!
This is really interesting, and made me think of how a) Victorian pop-science culture loved a Eureka! moment that fits nicely into a Samuel Smiles-style tale of innovation and self-improvement, and b) it’s an odd coincidence that Hamilton’s quaternion epiphany, a few years later, was also on a canal
I haven't read the whole thread yet but it must have been a wild journey
trump booked himself a remote cabin with no devices and is going to have a proper go at middlemarch
Radio Paradise is playing Queer by Garbage, than which there is very little more mid-90s. Great track.
Just removed the date label from an old book and discovered that someone has drawn a design for a teapot that can serve either tea or poison how's your day going?
We moved down the alphabet for Fuzzy Logic. I like Penguin Books but as soon as they’ve published the pop science book, the topic’s a busted flush
I keep meaning to read more about Catastrophe Theory, whose vogue as a glorious topological theory of all the soft sciences lasted surprisingly long - references to it in A Very Peculiar Practice! - and which is a really interesting example of mathematicians and popularisers getting overexcited
“I just sat at the drums and said, ‘Can I have a go?’ I just took to it.” — Honey Lantree #BOTD Lantree, hairdresser turned drummer for the Joe-Meek-produced (boy) band The Honeycombs. A boy band w/a girl drummer is still rare. In the 1960s it was unheard of. A wee thread on this inspiring figure!
Beano #719, Apr 28, 1956
JICTAR Top 20 for the w/e 26th August 1979. With ITV still off air, the BBC had the field to themselves (Seaside Special topped the charts with nearly 18 million).
My go-to reference for the Andalusian Cadence descending chord sequence in popular music is: not even Angelo by The Brotherhood of Man, but the Barron Knights’ parody of it. “Long ago… outside a chip shop in Walthamstow…”
Frankly it’s also reckless - you have growing numbers of people exhibiting delusional behaviour toward chatbots, and this straight up encourages it.
70s childhood: a complete absence of so much Disney from popular culture. Classics only ever turned up in clips on Disney Time, while we had to make do with The Cat From Outer Space, and a bit later Condorman.
That initial preview of Lace 2 is quite unbelievably long. I remember Drummonds, rather a dull series for the Friday 9pm slot.
Very tough Guardian prize crossword by Enigmatist today: needed crosswordsolver dot org’s thread on the puzzle for help, though did complete it eventually www.theguardian.com/crosswords/p...
this is the kind of thing that would cause a folklorist in 1919 to declare that the Dalek costume goes back to pagan times
meanwhile, astonished that the Leeds Magnet's alternative to 'Births, Marriages and Deaths' notices did not catch on (1880s)
L.S. Lowry walking through the back streets of Salford, August 1957. In the background are Oldfield Road Dwellings.
