Category Archives: Worlds Shortest Radio Show

A memoir entitled “Rock Stars Stole My Life”. Mark is one of the greatest music journalists this country has ever produced and one of the nicest blokes you could ever wish to meet. Given his astonishing CV: Record Mirror, the NME, editor of Smash Hits, Q and The Word; presenter of the Old Grey Whistle […]

It’s because “My fair” is how Eliza Doolitle, with her cockney accent, would have pronounced “Mayfair”. So now you know. And this song is, of course, from My Fair Lady. Last night, I went to see something very different: “A View from a Bridge” at the Young Vic. So what connects this tune to that […]

I was going to say “King of the Jingles” but Jimmy Helms was far more than that. A fantastic American singer who settled in the UK, Jimmy was every bit as good as his more famous Motown and Atlantic contemporaries. If you’ve worked in advertising in the last 40 years and were making a commercial […]

….in less than six months. Let’s salute the astounding success of Crystal Palace manager Tony Pulis. When he took over, Palace were bottom of the Premier League with practically no hope of avoiding relegation. And yet Pulis instilled discipline and organisation into a ragtag bunch of players which made them pull together and hoist themselves […]

So that’s all right then. If the weather’s good, Bank Holidays are wonderful. If it’s not, then they can seem pointless and rather depressing – harking back to a time when we worked in fields and factories and were all forced to take our holidays at the same time. Those factories would shut down for […]

I’ve been to America many times but mainly to either the East or West coast. Yesterday, though, I was transfixed by feature in one of the Saturday travel supplements entitled The United States of Adventure. Now suddenly I want to visit every one. I’m gazing at it now, feeling like the wide-eyed child I once […]

80 today. Thanks to the huge success of Jersey Boys, the hit musical based around his life and work, we’re all familiar with his story. And we discovered that songs made famous by others like Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, Bye Bye Baby and Working My Way Back To You were originally recorded by […]

Never have. I don’t disapprove, I don’t want it banned, I just don’t like it. I don’t like scrambled eggs either but I do like Blurred Lines. I loved it from the moment I heard it. However, I wasn’t fussed about the now infamous video that accompanied it. Though hardly hard-core, it came under fire […]

So we have to play his one Top 20 hit. Along with Sir Laurence Olivier, he provides trademark vocals on Paul Hardcastle’s long-forgotten follow-up to 19. I worked with him a couple of times and he was exactly the same off-screen as on it. So he was either genuinely like that or else he was […]

Is the welcome return of the butcher. Another new one has just opened in Kentish Town, suggesting that people are finally turning their backs on supermarkets when looking for good, responsibly-sourced meat. Though the term “Family Butcher” still makes me think of the sort of murderer seen in films like Friday 13th. So why pick […]