The celebrities-in-a-wood show is back on TV. A Page Three girl has eaten a kangaroo's testicle and was worried, rather touchingly, that she might become pregnant. The show is a sort of annual ritual which follows a predictable routine –...
Read moreWith slightly unfortunate timing, that great annual carnival of caring and tears, Children in Need night, has been followed in short order by a survey revealing that the British have distinctly ambivalent feelings towards children. Commissioned by the Barnardo's charity,...
Read moreThe great blubbing debate has just moved to a new, decisive phase, with those of us who hold that crying in public is almost always a form of showing off in danger of being swept away on a tide of...
Read moreFor the nation's ever-growing band of shockaholics, there have been some satisfying moments of outrage over the past few days. Bill Oddie shocked viewers by including a footage of a dead squirrel on a nature programme. The head of BBC...
Read moreThese are hard times for the old-fashioned, money-making operations that were all the rage until a few months ago. It is now a time of doubt and questions for investors. Is the business plan sound? What effect will it have...
Read moreIt is as if we need to be afraid of one thing or another in order to feel alive Three years ago, the Chief Medical Officer announced that a great pandemic was "a biological inevitability". Now the writer Mark Honigsbaum...
Read moreThey are usually polite. They introduce themselves by their first names, and address you by yours. They assure you at every opportunity that they are there to help you. Then they take you into a nightmare world where all normal...
Read moreIt is a rather bewildering contradiction of our increasingly peculiar society that, while cruelty in everyday life is the subject of unprecedented disapproval, it is positively celebrated and encouraged in the world of entertainment. Everyone from primary schoolchildren to chief...
Read morePredictions that those organising our Olympic adventure would learn important lessons from the way the Beijing Games were run have turned out to be alarmingly true. In east London, a local council has been enthusiastically adopting the Chinese solution to...
Read moreNow at least we know the origin of the phrase "a crashing bore". The Great Crash of 2008 will, we have been assured, affect us all; what nobody explained was that its first casualty would be normal, sane human discourse....
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