The royal pain

When John Deacon, Brian May, Roger Taylor and Frederick Bulsara changed the name of their band from 'Smile' to 'Queen', they couldn't have known how appropriate the moniker would be. Not because of Freddie's camp flamboyance, but because they are as likely to appear at an extravagant, patriotic event as the monarch. From The Olympics to Live Aid, if a rock act is required to stir the nation, we turn to members of Queen. Her Majesty herself even suffered the indignity of Brian May and his homemade guitar wailing away on her roof as part of the golden jubilee.

Tears of a clown

Quite when the crisis started, it's hard to say. That, I suppose, is the nature of a crisis. But somewhere between the last episode of Extras and this weekend, TV comedy stopped being funny.

There have been glimmers of genius like 'Peep Show' and 'The Inbetweeners', but they are merely the diamonds in the manure. The whole reeking heap reached a pinnacle this week with the first half of Channel 4's fortnight of late night humour. The format was sound enough: air some brand new shows then follow them up with vintage material into the early hours. But in execution, an unintended consequence struck. The retrospective programmes threw the staggeringly inept nature of the unseen work into sharp relief. Night after night, it was abundantly clear C4 had invested heavily in original scripts and substantial performers only to be left holding a collection of embarrassingly poor television without so much as a chuckle to offer. 

The sell out

I hope you enjoyed your Bank Holiday, thunder storms and all. I did some light shopping on Sunday, such is my hectic rock and roll lifestyle. My good lady wife and I wanted to make a couple of specific purchases: some reading glasses for me and a make-up mirror for Mrs.Shaw. We don’t live in the heart of a throbbing metropolis but are very close to a thriving town centre, so we imagined these two objects would be fairly easy to acquire. How wrong we were.