Off Topic TV, Entertainment and Arts thread

Do they still have the sax player flying around on wires? I imagine he's a bit old for that now!

Some of my all-time faves by Madness include Embarrassment, Shut Up and Our House. Baggy Trousers is just about the best song they ever did.
It rang so true about school days back in the 1970's.
Their cover of It must be love was a classic as well. Lovely song.

 

He wasn't on a wire but he had the audience in stitches. It was like a live wire version of Uncle Albert on only Fools and Horses.
Baggy Trousers takes me straight back to secondary school. Nailed it!

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61914167

The novelty has worn off, and many folks can no longer afford expensive subscriptions.

 

Suggs spends a lot of time down here in Tankerton , always tempted to do the silly walk behind him when I bump into him in the Tesco queue

 

He'd probably not think anything less of you

 

Saw Madness at the NEC in Birmingham January '93, that was a decent gig.

 

Saw??? Was you standing on a box ?

 

Switching to the subject of poor quality entertainment,
I started to watch that 'Matrix Resurrections' on a movie channel the other day.
Had to give up about half an hour in.

How can such a great original movie lead to such dire sequels?
And a whole genre of inferior rip-offs.

Same thing happened with 'Highlander' in the late 1980s.
Terrific first movie (Lambert's Scottish accent aside).
Abysmal sequels.

 

I thought the first Matrix was great, but there are only so many repetative fight scene's based on martial arts and blokes in sunglasses I can watch before I start thinking about waytering the garden or cleaning the fridge as being more fun.

On a positive note, I am currently up to season 7 of Game of Thrones. Generally I start these things after a recommendation, and after a couple of seasons, my attention wanes and I read a book. But GoT has kept me glued to the box. I believe my wife may have left me a month ago, and come back after a couple of weeks, but I was more worried about whether the dwarf would get beheaded in Game of Thrones. I'll give her a call when season 8 is finished

 

One of my (several) gripes about the last Bond movie was that the big shoot-out scene was far too 'matrix-like'.
We waited a long tome for 'No time to die' and though I enjoyed it generally, it wasn't the best of the Craig era movies.

I still think 'Casino Royale' was the best, though 'Skyfall' was very good too (if you take out the silly underground train crashing set-piece).

 

I hear that Nutflix (the future of entertainment) is launching a discount subscription service with adverts.
This is because half their audience has twigged they're paying far too much.

And their latest new blockbuster series is ... the life & times of David Beckham
Narrated by the great man himself, and directed by some really famous movie directors.
They're really on the case aren't they?
Beckham dropped out of sight and mind after the Russia & Qatar World Cup draw debacle. When was that, about ten years ago?

 

Can't take a joke #1 Jenny Eclair

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-62552706

You'd think she would have a sense of humour, being a comedian and all...

 

You wonder how an ad like that would help sell the product, but these agencies do their market research. No such thing as bad publicity?

 

I thought it was funny.
Not offensive in any way.
As for helping to sell the product, I'm not sure any advertising works very well.
A huge industry that doesn't seem to improve or enrich our lives in proportion to the money spent. Hey ho.
Keeps some people off the streets.

But the people who complained about this ad are a bit sensitive in my view.
Bit similar to those who got offended by Greame Souness saying the Chelsea Spurs match was a "man's game".
No way was he ever implying that all of football is a man's game.
It was obvious he was speaking in relation to that match - or about men's football.

The only people who got upset about that were the kind of people who go looking for things to take offence at.

 

Mostly they don't so much get offended as just decide that something is offensive. That someone somewhere will take offence. As if there's nothing worse happening to people than being offended.
I don't agree that advertising doesn't work- otherwise why spend such huge sums of money on it?

 

I heard that some of the England women's team were upset about what Souness said.

Perhaps they were ill-informed and believed his remark was about all football, not men's football - and two specific matches in particular.
I wonder whether any of the high profile criticism has been withdrawn, once the context has been made clear.
Sadly I doubt it.

 

Jeremy Paxman to leave University Challenge after this series. Not surprising- his speech has been affected by Parkinson's, and he doesn't get up to breakneck speed in the final 2 or 3 minutes. And his sense of humour wasn't the same in the last series. I'll miss his saying "Yes of course" on the odd occasion he knew the answer.

 

I would probably say it's never been the same since Bamber Gascoigne left, but I wouldn't know as I haven't watched it since then.
Bamber,
Magnus,
Brucie,
Parsons,
Wogan,
Bowen.
all impossible acts to follow on the game/quiz shows they presented.