Wun Wossy Wun

Happy New Year!

Two weeks since my last blog and my fingers are jittery with blogging cold turkey. I've done nowt cultural since the festive period (I don't think munching on pork scratchings down the pub on New Year's Day counts - you can take the girl out of the north etc). And I don't want this blog to be banal bletherings about what I ate for breakfast. I'd like it to be entertaining and informative and focused on all things poppy, arty and music-y (I could write about my dating disasters for instance but they're so numerous that I would end up blogging only about dating).


So, back to the entertainment news of the day. Jonathan Ross is now touting himself about for business (join the club) having left/lost his £16.9m BBC contract. Poor Graham Norton has taken a £1m pay cut to stay on (times are tough). And über-film critic Mark Kermode (if you've never heard his ace film reviews on 5 Live then download his podcasts here) is rumoured to be taking over Film 2010/11. Hooray!

As an ex-Beeb journo I came across both Wossy and our Graham due to the nature of my job. Graham Norton is as delightful and funny off-screen as he is on. But then the magazine I worked for were paying him an absolute fortune (five figures) to host their posh annual celebrity event so he was hardly going to tell us to F-off backstage. Funnily enough Ross had hosted the very same event a couple of years earlier but was deemed to be too expensive and not enough value for money. Funny that.

And when Ross threw his toys out of the pram a few years ago (well, sent a narky email to the editor of said well known national magazine) because Terry Wogan was on the esteemed cover for a radio feature in which they both took part, well that was it. No one was bigger than The Togmeister on radio. Wossy's reputation was going downhill in media publishing circles. And that was before the Andrew Sachs/Russell Brand debacle.

There was the feeling in the BBC and the wider industry that he was getting too big for his boots (fuelled by his "I'm worth more than 1,000 BBC journalists" comment). Sachsgate was seen as his comeuppance. And we all know how the British media like to bring those in the public eye down. The higher the climb, the greater the fall.

It appears his final comeuppance is losing his £17m contract. Having been to recordings of his chat show I've seen what a professional, funny and talented broadcaster he is. Ross rarely needs to retake interviews unlike many other chat shows where you leave with red-raw hands from so much over-clapping. While his banter and wit were consistently excellent on Saturday mornings on Radio 2 (his show was so much funnier than Russell Brand's ever was).

It's a shame Ross occasionally lets his ego get the better of him. Let's hope he's now humbled and bounces back - à la the excellent Chris Evans - perhaps on a more suitably risk-taking channel like C4, where his career began. And the man's an entertaining tweeter too.

Why Do We Talk?

I was going to blog about a talk I went to last night but actually that can wait. It ain't breaking news (although it featured an interesting conversation between an eccentric artist and a clever writer if that whets your appetite).

Speaking of conversations and talks, I highly recommend watching Why Do We Talk, a Horizon programme which will be on BBC iPlayer until next Tuesday. It looks at how us humans started learning language.

Scientists are gradually piecing together the first map of the complex language functions in the brain. Did you know that babies listen to their mums in the womb? They get to know her tone and cadence which is why, in the programme, a one day old baby's brain responds to her mother's call "hi baby" but not a computer's.

Apparently the origin of language lies in our genes. There's a single gene that controls the tiny movements in our faces that enable us to talk. If we're born without it then we can't talk properly. All vertebrates have this gene but two tiny changes to it mean that we can communicate verbally but other animals can't. And probably around the time these changes happened (like waaaaaay back, thousands of years ago) is when evidence of art and culture started appearing. How cool.

The programme had many more examples to bring it all to life, like Christopher who "collects languages like butterflies". He's autistic and can speak 20 languages. It also trotted out some well-I-never-type stats - there are more than 6000 languages in the world and 800 of those can be found in Papua New Guinea alone. Worthwhile banking for future pub quizes methinks.

On a separate, but sort of related, note I've just started dipping into The History Of The English Language again, like you do (it's a reference book which has been lying dusty on my bookshelf for yonks). Did you know limousine is so called after the name of a province in France? Tabasco sauce is named after the Mexican river Tabasco, and the Charleston dance after the American city. And we can't forget the good old hungry Earl of Sandwich who first invented our lunchtime staple.

But back to the programme…watch it to find out what the forbidden experiment is.

In The Thick Of It

It was Yes ex-Ministers last night when I went to a preview screening near Westminster of the first episode of semi-improvised political satire The Thick Of It which returns for a second series on BBC2 on Saturday (the first series went out on BBC4).

Jacqui Smith (former Home Secretary) guffawed two seats away (occasionally looking slightly uncomfortable) while Hazel Blears (former Communities Secretary) kept turning round to laugh with her from the row in front. Caroline Flint (former Minister for Europe) made it three ex-Ministers in the house. All have been involved and (subsequently reshuffled out of cabinet) in the MPs expenses scandal. Nice to see they've still got their sense of humour.

It's well known that The Thick Of It is popular in Westminster. As the show's creator Armando Iannucci said last night, privately MPs always tell him how true to life it is but publicly they say the exact opposite.

Vile spin doctor Malcolm Tucker (played by Peter Capaldi) is the snake-like whirlwind at the centre of it all. The script is funny, fast-paced and often filthy with Tuckerisms like "He's so dense light bends around him," bound to become required pub banter. The show famously has a swearing consultant who seems to be earning his or her keep given Tucker's increasingly inventive and hilarious rants.

Writing in The Independent, Rebecca Front who plays new Secretary of State for Social Affairs and Citizenship Nicola Murray says "You never forget the first time you get "Tuckered" – screamed at by Malcolm. But I found it strangely exhilarating". Front has taken over from the now disgraced Chris Langham who used to play blundering minister Hugh Abbot. And her character looks set to give Tucker some trouble.