Category Archives: Worlds Shortest Radio Show

One of the best bits of “Boyhood” is when Ethan Hawke’s character makes his son a CD which he calls The Black Album – a compilation of tracks by John, Paul, George and Ringo post-Beatles. This morning, myself and four like-minded anoraks have been compiling our own Black Albums and debating which tracks should be […]

August 2014 is a very unusual month. It contains five weekends: five Fridays, five Saturdays and five Sundays. This hasn’t happened for more than 800 years and it will be another 800 years before it happens again. So in celebration of the number five, it seems only right to revive the work of Five Star. […]

A couple of years ago, I had to pick my daughter up from a party. She came out with three other girls and I agreed to drop them all off home. I dropped one in Islington and the next day, I notice she’s left her purse in the car. My daughter texts her and the […]

And commemorations are everywhere. If I’m honest, I’m finding the BBC’s Great Warfest – an opportunistic theme park of death and suffering – just a little distasteful. Countless songs have been written about the evil futility of war and this one is perennially powerful. Written about Vietnam, of course, but its sentiments can be applied […]

It’s amazing. If you don’t already know, it was shot over a period of twelve years using the same actors, so we see them actually age during the course of the film. The actor who plays the central character, whose boyhood we follow, is six when the film begins and eighteen when it ends. It’s […]

One of the most adroit broadcasters this country ever produced has died, aged just 59. In the 1980s, Mike Smith was everywhere. Star Breakfast Show DJ at Capital Radio, quickly poached by Radio 1 where he went on to present their Breakfast Show too, plus a whole host of TV shows including Live Aid. In […]

Paul’s the most laid-back person I know. He left school and worked in the City. Probably because it was the first job he found but then discovered that his calm couldn’t-give-a-toss attitude made him a brilliant money broker. Never motivated by money, he ironically amassed a small fortune, then jacked it all in at 28 […]

….is British Gas reporting a sharp drop in profits. Hooray! This means people aren’t being forced to spend their money on heating and can use it instead for more frivolous pursuits. Making life, ironically, a “gas”. I recall seeing this version of Life’s a Gas as child and thinking that Marc and Cilla made a […]

Because sooner or later, it’ll get banned from the airwaves for the recklessness of its lyrics. Namely “Have a drink, have a drive” and “Do a ton or a ton and twenty-five”. But they were written in a very different era. Back then, people weren’t quite so judgemental about drunken drivers doing 125 mph. Or […]

…but it could just as easily have been about London. I’ve always loved this record. It sounds as though it was written on the fifth floor of an outdoor fire escape, way above the gritty streets below. On a hot night like tonight, you can almost feel the urban heat it gives off. It’s put […]