Author Archives: Paul

Not strictly true. I saw her perform live at the first Comic Relief Show in 1986. She sang a “comedy number” with Rowan Atkinson which wasn’t quite as good as this sublime duet with Peter Gabriel from the same year. Kate Bush is almost universally admired. When she first came to fame with Wuthering Heights, […]

Radio 2 DJ Richard Allinson and I had kids at the same school and, at the school fete, we always did the music. He played a few, I played a few and so on. I was playing this just as the headmaster joined the adjacent queue for a hot dog. He was loving it – […]

Well, not me but my place of birth – London NW2. In yesterday’s budget, the Chancellor promised funding for a £4.5bn regeneration of Cricklewood. Most of my schoolmates’ parents were Irish but my mum was a real Londoner. She came from one of those huge, old-fashioned families that don’t exist any more. So as a […]

It’s 30 years since the first broadcast of Spitting Image, the greatest satirical TV programme ever made and there’s a documentary to celebrate this on BBC Four tomorrow night. I was talking to John Lloyd, who produced Spitting Image and mentioned the old maxim of politics being “Show business for ugly people”. He said that, […]

I saddened by the death yesterday of Clarissa Dickson-Wright. She found fame relatively late in life as a TV chef and one half of the Two Fat Ladies but she was so much more than that. Ferociously intelligent, she was, at 21, Britain’s youngest female barrister before becoming a “dedicated alcoholic”. But I fondly remember […]

Though there was a time when, in my “community”, it would have been heresy not to. Among the North London Irish, St. Patrick’s Night was like Christmas Eve but with more Guinness. People would pile into Biddy Mulligan’s on Kilburn High Road before crossing the street to the National Ballroom for the Paddy’s Night Hooley. […]

Well, Earls Court. But the Ideal Home Exhibition really is the Seventh Circle of Hell. I think was there for about two hours in a sea of suburban slacks but I’ve expunged most of it from my memory. I vaguely remember a cretin demonstrating some sort of cleaning implement, “Perfect”, he declared, “For hosing the […]

I’ve spent a lot of time in football grounds. Unfortunately, much of it has been at Loftus Road watching QPR snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. But most games are enlivened by chants from the stands. Some so witty that if they were written for Radio 4 comedy shows, they’d be hailed as genius. […]

On the day of Tony Benn’s death, this seems a kinder way to describe him than “The man who shut down the pirates”. But in 1967, that’s exactly what he did. Before he was regarded as a wise and grandfatherly figure, Benn was seen as a wild-eyed bully who wanted practically everything under state control. […]

You know exactly what I mean. A shirt with a jazzy – though not too jazzy – floral pattern. The type worn by around 60% of the people who appear on QI. So I’m just waiting for the call. I know the show’s creator, its host and most of its regular participants. I know that […]