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| Friday 5 March 2010 |
Why everyone laughs at Canada
With giant beavers and Alanis Morissette, the closing ceremony of the Winter Games was a feast of stereotypes.
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| Thursday 25 February 2010 |
Why we still love the ‘man in black’
A radio series on Johnny Cash explains why this singer of dark’n’moody country songs still lives in our affections.
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| Friday 19 February 2010 |
The Brit Awards: nostalgic for nostalgia
With the pop stars being either old or imitating a time when nostalgia was in, the ceremony was a postmodern pastiche.
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| Friday 5 February 2010 |
Does anyone believe in Danny Dyer?
In a programme that was as much about the much-mocked cockney as UFOs, Dyer showed an unidentified side of himself.
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| Thursday 28 January 2010 |
The BBC: there is no agenda
A question for all those who think the Beeb is just one big liberal-left conspiracy: have you actually watched TV lately?
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| Friday 22 January 2010 |
Sports commentary: they think it’s all over
The death of ‘the voice of rugby’ Bill McLaren has prompted too much nostalgia for an era that never was.
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| Friday 15 January 2010 |
A minor hiccup for freakshow television
A film about a man trying to cope with a distressing condition suggested we’re only really moved by the truly weird.
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| Friday 8 January 2010 |
Punk music: never mind the cynicism
There was more to the punk scene than sneering, swearing and affected nihilism. There were some decent tunes, too.
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| Friday 18 December 2009 |
Cooped-up kids? Don’t blame it on the box
BBC Four’s Hop, Skip and Jump suggested that risk-aversion is a bigger problem for kids than TV and gangs.
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| Thursday 26 November 2009 |
Revisiting the Great Tennessee Monkey Trial
Ignoring the BBC’s implicit anti-Americanism, its radio play on the 1925 creationists-v-evolutionists trial was excellent.
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| Friday 20 November 2009 |
Never mind the guest presenters
The fashion for using a variety of hosts to replace a familiar front man reveals the BBC's indecision.
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| Friday 13 November 2009 |
Communists can’t make cola
The Secret Life of The Berlin Wall was gripping, but it didn’t explain anything new, like why East German coke was so bad.
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| Friday 6 November 2009 |
The Noughties: 10 years of nostalgia
The most striking thing about this decade is how much of it we spent looking back at past decades.
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| Thursday 29 October 2009 |
Steve McQueen, without the car chase
BBC Radio 4’s brave choice to rework the ultra-visual Bullitt showed that old-school noir can still be entertaining.
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| Friday 23 October 2009 |
‘My name’s Josie... and I have a penis’
Age 8 and Wanting a Sex Change took an unusually empathic look at ‘gender dysphoria’ amongst children.
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| Friday 16 October 2009 |
Giving animals human motivations: that’s Life
Like so many nature series, David Attenborough’s latest show is visually stunning but built on childish storytelling.
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| Friday 9 October 2009 |
‘To coventrate’: destroy a city from the air
A documentary about the Luftwaffe bombing of Coventry in 1940 challenged prejudices about both Germans and Brits.
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| Thursday 24 September 2009 |
Not anti-war so much as anti-hope
Slaughterhouse-Five, a fatalistic, despairing work, is perfect radio listening for a Sunday afternoon.
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| Friday 18 September 2009 |
Keith Floyd and the end of an era
It’s not the death of the wine-soaked celebrity chef that has been changing TV cookery shows, but the recession.
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| Friday 11 September 2009 |
A TV postcard from Dublin
Forget about the Lisbon Treaty vote and the economic crisis, the burning topic in Ireland is the new Late Late Show host.
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