2010 — 13 April: Tuesday
Next time I look, it's just gone midnight. I've returned with a feast of viewing and listening — Brian is an assiduous frequenter of car boot sales, and has found many a bargain, including a boxed set of the BBC "Lord of the Rings" CDs for (if I heard correctly) a mere £6. Haven't heard that for quite a while.
G'night.
Plans for a walk...
... on this lovely, sunny morning are underfoot (as it were) but not yet in the GPS unit. Still, time enough for breakfast and to pack a lunch. It's 09:03 and counting.
Len tells me the remake of "The Prisoner" starts on ITV this weekend, and I notice the excellent "Thunderheart" is worth making a reservation (ouch) for, on the goggle box tonight. That film introduced me to some fine music by John Trudell. Though how it can be 18 years ago beats me. My copy of Radio Times was still open at the Sunday programmes. Tut, tut.
This rings horribly true:
But what else could he do in the BBC? There are all sorts of terrible jobs in senior management at the BBC that involve nothing but going to meetings. He's exactly the sort of person who would like to run a college at Oxford.
As for the "rings true" — I refer you to the opening page of Chapter 1 of Antony Jay's 1972 Corporation Man for — inter alia — the description of a BBC meeting held to solve a problem described as having "the monstrous beauty of the hindquarters of an Elephant".
The gormless (ex-marketing of fizzy drinks) chump who's still being paid half my lifetime earnings per year for being in charge of the BBC's music and audio says the BBC is fully committed to digital radio. So why's he rolling out 60 further transmitters still using the obsolete DAB system in the UK while planning to axe two of the five digital-only networks? Perhaps all those bubbles went to his head? (Source.)
The hedgerow warriors...
... return, some 6.9 miles further along Life's little sun-lit highway. In plenty of time, in my case, to have a little mooch down in Soton in idle search of my next "fix" of The Word magazine. The goldfinch I spotted for Mike took off just as he'd spot-focused his box of pixels on the little devil. Shame.
Crikey. Leafing through my latest freebie Waterstone's BooksQuarterly before consigning it to the great green bin in the sky, I see that Michael Winterbottom has filmed Jim Thompson's evil little noir story "The killer inside me". Not surprisingly (perhaps) this was badly received at the Sundance festival. What did people expect from this corrosive combination, I wonder? Even more surprising, while poking around on IMDB, is to learn that Neil LaBute has directed a remake of the Frank Oz film "Death at a funeral". And I've just skimmed through the excerpt (a PDF file, available from here) from a book — Justin Cronin's "The passage" — that Ridley Scott has just optioned. 784 pages...
It's 18:15 and I'm thinking an evening meal would be a good idea.
And, at 20:52, Mark Radcliffe is talking about the Word's current little feature on the best and worst of kids' cartoons in TV history. I haven't figured out who his guest is just yet. Aah, it's Mark Ellen. Should have worked that out sooner. Anyway, here's the literary oddity I picked up today:
