I was first alerted to Brian and Charles in the middle of last year when a trailer happened to drop into my twitter timeline to pique my interest. Sadly, though I very much wanted to go and see it at a cinema, it didn’t manage to find its way onto…

Another whiffy dead cat dropped on the table — There may be some amongst you who may and raised a quizzical eyebrow and wondered why yesterday, in the midst of the maelstrom of public discontent that is making itself evident through strikes, and the ongoing politically motivated destruction of the NHS, our bonsai Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak has decided…

Welcome to the age of Technofear — The late 1970s and early 1980s were a time of huge social and political upheaval. A political generation who had grown up in the shadow of World War II were beginning to take the reins, and remake the culture in a very different way to what had gone before. In…

Middlesbrough Town Hall, 11 November 2022 — After a three year hiatus Dave Gorman returns to a slightly different Middlesbrough from his last visit. For starters, it’s about 10 degrees warmer, and a whole lot less pissy wet. Another significant difference this time is the lack of a support act, perhaps to shave costs in an increasingly…

My first tweet was posted sonetime in May 2007, dipping an experimental toe in the water while I was browsing in the office between teaching sessions at work, when I used to play at being an academic. Twitter was still called twttr then, and I first set it up so…

When I was at school in my teens, a bunch of us used to listen to Late Night with Graham Robb on Radio Tees¹. Weeknights from 10pm were blocked out for listening to mad Teesside phone callers, and a strange mid 80s proto zoo radio format with characters like Cecil…

“Eye watering” decisions are easy if they don’t affect you at all. — Back in 1992, before he went a bit “rogue”, Roger Waters released the album “Amused to Death”, which is probably the most complete and coherent piece of work in his solo répertoire as far as I’m concerned¹. Amongst the righteously angry, sparkling gems on that album, is this song…

Forty four days Boy was I ever the optimist, thinking she’d struggle to make it past Alec Douglas-Home’s 362 days as Prime Minister. Now she’s destined to be barely an historical footnote, relegated to being the half-recalled answer to a pub quiz question sometime next decade. But you can’t say…

On the morning after the EU referendum result, back in those distant, hazy times of 2016, David Cameron washed his hands of his own disastrous tactical balls-up, and announced his resignation. I remember being struck at the time at the imagery he deployed, casting himself as “the captain of a…