What a fascinatingly bad trailer.

But non-commercial films don’t usually win
the Oscars. Except where there’s one or two clear, unignorable masterpieces in the
running one highly specific kind of extremely commercial film, of which the
King’s Speech is archetypal, tend to win the Oscars – solid period/issue dramas
that make bank by having the good fortune…

Anybody reading ‘Long Earth?’ I love Stephen Baxter, but he
really is one of the most wilfully gloomy and humourless authors working in SF,
and I remain bewildered as to how their collaboration came about.

All artists who take what they do seriously react to the tradition of their art (in my particular area of interest I frequently come across would be poets who ‘don’t read poetry’ because they ‘don’t want to be influenced’. They are, invariably, shit.). It’s neither bogus nor disrespectful to discuss exactly how they…

Why are we all pretending we don't know how old Sigourney Weaver is? If she's in it, either she isn't Ripley or not only did 3 not happen, but she got to some form of safety and has been carrying on with her life for several years.

I'm not sure how else the film could have ended, to be honest. Yes, it's cynical but for those kind of shenanigans to have come out publicly would have placed the film in a parallel universe.

This is precisely why the Government insisted they use the term

Yeah, it's sort of a gateway drug for Radio 2.

That's hip hop in general, though. It's always seemed such a niche-y genre that with the exception of the unignorably stellar material, the stuff that gets popular is what the many people who don't mind it don't mind, rather than what the small number of people who love it love.

'A Grand…' was a lovely album, although it really is one that you can't listen to when you're older without feeling a bit self conscious. Which probably means it did it's youth culture thing properly

Normally, yes, but the thing with big space opera like this
is that they stand or fall on the worlds they create. Not so elaborate that
they can’t be grasped without a lot of clumsy exposition, but sufficiently
strange that you want to know more about them. Possessed of a sense of internal
consistency that makes them feel…

So it pretty much sounds like they asked a six year old child to describe the
Phantom Menace to them about a week after seeing it, and then made that film. This is
going to be awesome. Or, possibly, terrible. Better than the actual Phantom
Menace, either way.

I have a rather more subtle categorization of awsomeness :

There are bits of 'Together' I can live without - Valkyrie in the Roller Disco and Electric Child of Witchcraft Rising are both a bit…dull. But on balance you've got 'My Shepherd', 'We End Up Together', 'Crash Years', 'Bite out of my Bed'…

Sing me Spanish Techno's chorus would like a word, and may have it. But it only happens twice, and the rest of the song doesn't quite measure up (although in fairness what could?)

Oh god. The village names. When it was first broadcast I laughed so hard at that I thought I was going to have a stroke.

“You may now kiss the bride. CLEAR THE AREA!”

‘Grandma’s House’. Extraordinary Simon Amstell thing. Very
comedy-of-embarrassment but she manages to tread this beautifully exact line
between ‘actual human character’ and ‘broad comedy Jewish mother’. She loses
out a bit, alas, because she’s not all that good on panel shows – she’s more of
a comic actress than a…

It sort of fell between two stools. The original idle East
London trustafarian scene was based around internet advertising and content
creation – but by the time Barley made it to telly (it was originally a parody
website thing), the big boys had started to work out how to do all that
properly and stopped feeling quite so…

"…these riders, who look like cattle in a mad way. But cattle on bikes."