Steve Bowbrick

Great first try from Nathan McBeth there, although I'd prefer it if the commentators called him 'the Scottish prop' as superstition dictates. #SixNations2026

LOVE ISLAND IDEA. We fly a drone over the compound and drop a couple of bags of Banagrams in there.

Such a treat, on my cycle to work, to see the crocuses and daffodils in the verges. Lifts the heart!

Yes, I'm sure it's to do with the fact that none of the main roads in that quadrant of North London has any cycling provision at all! (although tbh I quite like it that way - I find the cycle superhighways terrifying!).

On my commute into central London I don’t encounter another ordinary pedal-cycle until approximately Maida Vale. It’s fascinating. Before that it’s all delivery kids on lethal-looking e-bikes. The outer boroughs are the domain of precarity and electricity.

Our stupid toy poodle Topper, who also made it to 16, did exactly the same thing, once too wobbly to actually come down the stairs on his own. We're were summoned like Uber drivers to bring him down.

Yeh but I wouldn't want to live there

No clocks in Evri HQ

In Britain I think the Winter of 1962/63 caused a big shift. My parents told me they urgently installed central heating (taking out a loan to pay for it) after that. Always wondered if there's any research into the effect of that terrible, long Winter on heating becoming a more widespread thing.

What is she, three feet off the ground?

The regal gold emblem of Donald Trump's Board of Peace with the words 'Board of Peace' replaced with 'Bored of Peas?' in a similar style

One thing that I think is important, for those of who are not American, is to at least act like what happens there isn't important to us and that it is, in fact, laughable. I mean we live in a sovereign nation a long way away and we really shouldn't defer so pathetically to American pathologies.

Except, hold on a minute: Amanda's cop skills were ridiculed. It was one of the show's best comic elements and it resulted in her early eviction. And the FBI thing was made up, just gameplay, the opposite of copaganda. I mean am I missing something?

Telephone exchange? Always extra tall to accommodate all that clicking-clacking mechanical switching gear!

Au Pairs
Raincoats
The Gossip
Big Joanie
Patti Smith

@dmandl.bsky.social Hey Dave, I was just leafing through my copy of Radio Text(e) and noticed for the first time that you were an editor of the book! One of my faves!

BORED OF PEAS?

Only learnt about her myself the other day. Another hidden genius.

Crimewave still running out of control in London

We probably have Jaws editor Verna Fields - chief storytelling problem-solver to the New Hollywood elite - to thank for the way the verité footage showing holidaymakers arriving for that fateful 4th July weekend - is so cleverly interleaved with scripted elements… More: bit.ly/4qeluJh

GROSS/66 1975 - Jaws - Spielberg’s suburban Moby Dick Exemplary movie-making and a career of moral cowardice

Right, let's get into it. Steven Spielberg is a superlative storyteller and a shallow, moral coward (also, Jaws is a suburban Moby Dick). New on GROSS: bit.ly/4qeluJh

A million interviews with Ken Burns. Nobody ever asks him about his effect.

White, spiral-bound notebook with the phrase 'Nationalise Taylor Wimpey' printed on the front cover.

You work at a housebuilder and you're concerned about the housing crisis in Britain. You'll want to ostentatiously whip out one of these 'Nationalise Taylor Wimpey' notebooks in your next meeting. It uses the actual Taylor Wimpey typeface, natch (and also on about 50 other products bit.ly/3Y8il1m)

Smiling young woman models a t-shirt with a design using a still from 1956 film Moby Dick and a quote from 1975 film Jaws: "we're gonna need a bigger boat, right?"

Design combining a still from 1956 film Moby Dick in which the whale picks up a whaling boat in its jaws with a quotation from 1975 film Jaws: "we're gonna need a bigger boat, right?"

Allow me to sell you a very good value t-shirt (or a mug or a badge or all the usual stuff) with this design that uses a still from Moby Dick with that phrase from Jaws.

bit.ly/3XScz3Y

I live in Britain and the railway companies here have always dealt with the risk of burns from hot beverages by serving them at about 15 degrees below boiling. Very few burns, very unsatisfactory coffee.

At GROSS I’ve got as far as 1975's Jaws. There’s essentially nothing left to say about this movie, so to find an angle I’ve gone back 20 years to John Huston’s 1956 Moby Dick, an oddball masterpiece in its own right and, in many ways, the origin of Jaws: gross.ly.

The Towering Inferno is a charmless brute, totally without wit, but its finale is a tableau from Dante - the venal and stupid plutocrats trapped in the tower are offered redemption by flood but many will die. It's a winnowing of the San Francisco elite… bit.ly/4oGIgI9

Snow White changed everything, collapsed the wild, barely rational space of early movie animation into something that resembled our own, where the laws of physics applied and where the market, the individual and the logic of capital prevailed: bit.ly/49Vgv7S

The Exorcist isn’t a horror movie, it’s a strident Catholic evangelical text. And from 2025, when an aggressive and confident new Catholic fundamentalism has made its home in the Silicon Valley elite and in The White House, it looks scarily prescient. More of this in GROSS: bit.ly/48cxVO8

Framed black and white photo of a boat steaming on the ocean, against a scruffy painted wall in a cream colour

21 August 2019

I also love the 1922 Fairbanks version, even sillier if that's actually possible. And how is it possible that this fabulous work of art was directed by the same guy who made The Walking Dead, Mildred Pierce, Angels with Dirty Faces and Casablanca (and 140 other films?)