As a teenager the journalist Viv Groskop dreamed of being a stand-up comedian but life, along with the need for proper paid work, got in the way. Years later, as a mother of three approaching middle age, she set herself a challenge: 100 gigs in 100 days. At the end of it, she would know for sure whether stand-up was a viable career move or merely a pipe dream.
Read more...
When it comes to science it doesn't take a lot to blow my mind. I'm still reeling from what happens when you chuck a load of Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke (if you haven't done it, you have yet to witness one of life's miracles). So I've got a lot of time for the long-running Radio 4 show The Infinite Monkey Cage, a programme that manages to simultaneously expand your brain power while lulling you into thinking you're chuckling away at a panel show for simpletons.
Read more...
I've been putting off listening to Radio 5 Live's Bump Club with Edith Bowman and Colin Murray for some time. You might even say I've been giving it a wide berth (ho ho). Why? Well there's the problem of the name. Bump Club sounds to me like a Cath Kidston-smothered NCT get-together complete with Keep Calm... coffee mugs, a knitted uterus and couples cooing over sinister 3D ultrasound photos. It has an air of wholesomeness and exclusivity about it, a gathering of the ferociously fertile.
Read more...
Burt Bacharach, the Grammy and Oscar-winning composer famed for hits including "Walk On By", "What's New Pussycat?" and "Do You Know The Way to San José", certainly has some tales to tell. There's the time he found Marlene Dietrich in his hotel room washing his socks. There's also the time he was invited to perform at a reception at the White House, during which President Reagan fell into a deep sleep.
Read more...
There are times, with Radio 4, when the only way to listen is while lying horizontal in a darkened room with a cold compress on your head. I find this to be requirement while spending half an hour in the company of Melvyn Bragg as he pontificates over the concepts behind Dutch humanism or prophecy in the Abrahamic religions at 9 o'clock in the morning straight after the three-hour hard-news assault that is the Today programme.
Read more...
Massive stadium shows by massive stadium-filling pop stars tend to come with a concept. When fans are paying upwards of £60 a ticket, it pays to put in some effort and go all out on spectacle. Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Madonna festoon their shows with fireworks, crazy hydraulics, "meaningful" am-dram narratives and a vast supporting cast of choirs, dancers, and circus performers. Rihanna, who has had more No 1 singles than Beyoncé and Gaga combined, does none of this. Rihanna's concept is her vagina.
Read more...
It's possible that, when the Welsh actor Rhys Ifans gave "the interview from hell" to a journalist from The Times recently, he was having an off day. It's possible, as his people subsequently claimed, that a combination of medication and some unspecified bad news had made him behave out of character. It's also possible that, as a man who tells an interviewer to "fuck off", that he's "bored with you. Bored. Bored", and then exits in a rage, that Ifans is a rude, self-regarding pain in the backside who joins that exclusive club of stars (members include Tommy Lee Jones, Lou Reed, Philip Seymour Hoffman) that all that the most masochistic journalists would swim through molten lava to avoid.
Read more...
"It was a very small room, 10 by 15 feet, without light, without a door," said the mayor of Bangalore, recalling the moment last October when he watched a man with schizophrenia being rescued from 10 years of solitary confinement in his family home outside the Indian city. "(There was) one very small window, it was kept only to feed him," the mayor continued. "You wouldn't even call it a room as there was no exit. There was no way for him to get out. It was not a room that was locked, there was a wall all around him."
Read more...
