Yes, and in America you can get locked up for walking around while being black. This isn't about the outrages of the system, it's simply the way people feel about their country. Plenty of Russians realise that there are definite benefits to not living in the Soviet state anymore. But for the majority the Soviet union…

Michael Gambon of course, barring his turn as Dumbledore, he's at his best playing generally quite unpleasant people.

The issue is not the purges or the gulags, but the malaise of the eighties and the subsequent wilderness years of the nineties. If you want to understand why Putin still has popular support you have only to go back to that period. During the eighties everybody knew that socialism had failed, and that the government…

Well considering the mess that was Russia in the nineties and the awfulness of the eighties, I'm not surprised by Russians still sticking up for Putin. It's depressing for sure, but with the state of the media in the country it's only natural that people don't have a realistic view of the situation.

I wasn't really thinking of the effect on men in the media, but rather the consumers of media. All this trend is really, is the media industry discovering that male bodies can be sold and marketed like women's bodies. The difference is in the subtext, but people's bodies are still being treated as a product.

Excellent point, but isn't the effect of both that people are not allowed to be ordinary people? I mean, yes, women are for looking at and men are to be envied, and all that noxious nonsense, but in both cases, our bodies are not allowed to be anything but extraordinary.

Yeah, as nice as a set of abs is, there's a toxic mix of bullshit that very often comes with it. Lots of boys and young men swallow that crap wholesale, along with their overpriced supplements. And what you end up with is a bunch of effed up dudes obsessed with looks, and a stupid idea of masculinity.

Exactly! Ultimately, I think the best way to interpret 'inbred' is to see it as a reference to people from very isolated environments that haven't moved along with the times. This could mean mutant weirdos from Pennsyltucky as well as chinless freaks with a peerage.

The thing that annoys me is when people claim they don't have time to (learn to) cook, and anyway, they don't care about food. Well, maybe if you actually took some time to learn how to make good food for yourself, you'd start to enjoy it. So often I come across this weird macho-puritanical attitude where spending all…

Let the eating of spicy Mexican food commence!

Probably because John Gielgud came up with it first.

Actually Cumberbatch is quite wrong, the English actor whose name sounds like a fart in the bath is Edward Woodward.

Well, what does Miley have to rebel against? She's a brat with a silver spoon, the only thing she has to rebel against is the general public's sense of good taste. It's all rather pubescent, this whole quest to see how vulgar she can be, possibly with a vague intent of trying to be authentic.

Oh good, I always turn to ambassadors to the U.N. when I need to know something about diapers. And when it comes to Samantha Power, that's all I really want to know. I mean why ask her about her experiences as a journalist in Bosnia during the civil war there and how that shaped her opinion on humanitarian…

It's because we can't tackle the big problems collectively that we feel this need to become so fastidious with what we eat and how we live. It's not entirely dissimilar from the situation in the seventies. Hippies tried to change the world, but when the world proved to be too big and angry to change, they turned…

Or just say no if they don't offer you a serious budget for your work. You can keep letting companies and employers decide for you, or you can try and change the environment for freelancers for the better by deciding for yourself what you are worth. It doesn't do anyone any good to simply accept whatever they're…

Honestly, I don't know. Capaldi might be just the Doctor the show needs at the moment. With its 50th anniversary coming up, a, shall we say, more traditional Doctor could be a good jumping off point for theshow's future. At the very least it's a change from the very young Matt Smith.

As a children's book illustrator I've always tried to include more than just white people in my work, whenever it was possible. Though frankly I prefer drawing anthropomorphic animals over people as they're more fun, and you don't have to worry so much about getting the hands and faces right.
But I think that in…

Yep, that's exactly it. The first clue was his appearance on this show a couple of years ago.

Well, you have to pay those. And generally people who selfpublish their own children's books are not that forthcoming in the financial department is my experience. Not to mention that this project is about TEACHING AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE, rather than telling a story, the actual quality of the book is perhaps more of a…