Almost certainly, the good burghers of Dudley in the West Midlands will have used the word "inappropriate" when discussing whether they should allow Philip Ridley's play Moonfleece to be performed at the town's theatre. When they banned it, the reasoning...
Read moreThe heartbreaking spectacle of civil servants stumbling around in the darkness with their trousers around their ankles has been evoked by a news story from Birmingham. Aiming to save energy – and presumably to cut down on lazy staff taking...
Read moreThese days, I awake thinking of the strangest things: sheikhs, fat women, primitive men, sad old bastards with guitars. In less than two weeks’ time, on Sunday 18th April, I return to the King’s Head Theatre, Islington, in the company...
Read moreThere have been some frankly unhelpful comments following the launch this week of the UK Space Agency. Some people have even suggested that it is little more than another pointless government initiative – Planet Quango, a less-than-heavenly body, mainly consisting...
Read moreThe door to the children’s room, to be found on the home page of this site, can now be opened. It leads to pages relating to my children’s books – pages which have been so superlatively designed by Joyce Serrano,...
Read moreWith Mr and Mrs Cameron, Mr and Mrs Clegg and Mr and Mrs Brown lining up with their kiddies as competing models of perfect, well-scrubbed domestic contentment, it has been a good moment to receive a sharp lesson in reality...
Read moreFollowing the great debate about the deployment of the word “retard” by Vinnie Jones on Celebrity Big Brother, more words seem about to appear on the list of words which must not be used in respectable company. In this week’s...
Read more"Simplistic" was the word used by the Advertising Standards Authority to describe an ill-fated government campaign to raise awareness of climate change. It was a polite way of describing the smoothing out of inconvenient truths in order to deliver a...
Read moreOfficial policy statements from Whitehall tend to be bland and full of sincere-sounding generalities, but just now and then something important, perhaps even revolutionary, can be glimpsed in their pages. So it is with the latest paper from Defra (the...
Read moreIt seems that I am in trouble with that estimable organization Mencap. We have fallen out over the tricky question of offensive language on TV after I had written in the Independent in support of an Ofcom ruling which had...
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