Simple. You’re allowed to fail in London. In fact, you can even be lauded for it, if you fail in sufficiently grand a fashion.

Jeffrey Bernard - unwell

I’ve written before about one of the most entertaining nights I’ve ever spent in the theatre, watching Peter O’Toole essay the role of a dipsomaniac British journalist in the eponymous play ‘Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell’. Taken from a byline that would appear in The Spectator when the great man was too hungover to file his column, the play celebrates a life put ‘reaching for the ground’. He looks back fondly on arriving in Soho, and from that moment on, ‘never looking forward’, in an era when you could end up, (I’m paraphrasing) ‘drunk, miserable and alone on less than a fiver’.

These days it’ll cost you a bit more than a fiver to attain that condition, and you’ll have to smoke your Woodbines outside in the freezing cold, but something of the old Soho still remains.

Of course, whenever he could find a magazine to stump for the fares and digs, Bernard loved going to New York. continue »

Jet-Set Hobo reels in shock.

‘Sir’ Mick Jagger accepting a knighthood and becoming a gym junkie was one thing. Ron Wood making a fool of himself over nubile Russians is another. All too predictable. Jagger always was the business man of the group, and Ron, well, he’s your true sex-addicted satyr. And fair play to ‘em both. Far be it for me to ridicule a man because of his vices.

But according to both The Guardian and The Sun, the man famous (among other things) for being surgically attached to a bottle of Jack Daniels has finally kicked the sauce, and has been teetotal for at least four months.

You’ll know if you check the links, that the Sun and the Graunian headlines are a couple of weeks old. I only found them because, bored, I was led there by not particularly interesting story about that puppyish hero worshipper Johnny Depp making a film about another of his bad boy role models.

Still, I don’t know how I can have missed this staggering development, unless I was, well, pissed at the time. As in pissed drunk, my American readers. continue »

Clint Eastwood’s tribute to Nelson Mandela and the new South Africa is as dramatic and dynamic as a Nobel prize acceptance speech, writes Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian.

Moment of triumph … Morgan Freeman as Mandela Photograph: Keith Bernstein

The title is that of WE Henley’s inspirational poem from 1875, about one’s head being bloody but unbowed, and being the captain of one’s soul: a kind of Victorian My Way. Nelson Mandela kept a copy of the poem on him while in prison to keep his spirits up, and in this glassy-eyed movie version of the 1995 Rugby World Cup campaign – in which President Mandela sensationally backed the Springboks, as a brilliant gesture of reconciliation with white South Africans generally – the president gives a copy to the rugby captain François Pienaar. Well, if Henley’s poem is good enough for Nelson Mandela, it’s good enough for the rest of us, but I can’t help finding it a stiff, tightly-buttoned piece of ­writing, appropriate for this massively inert ­picture, which looks like a heritage-tourism video.

via Invictus | Film review | Film | The Guardian.

But for New Zealanders, even those as far away geographically and international in outlook as your correspondent, Clint Eastwood’s film is worse than that. Much, much worse. For no New Zealander or Kiwi over the age of say, 4, will have forgotten that the principle reason the Springboks triumphed over the All Blacks that day was not:

1) Because the Springboks, rallying together in a spirit of multi-culturalism, played the best game of rugby in their lives… continue »

Spent a few wonderfully nostalgic hours in the company of one Chris Grant yesterday, a former colleague from 20 plus years back, with whom I worked at various radio stations: Essex Radio, (’Don’t talk to me about Ethics, I own most of it’) and Chiltern Radio (’broadcasting to Hearts, Beds & Bucks’ {Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire & Buckinghamshire}). Both stations are defunct now, gobbled up by the conglomerate GWR.

In those days Chris had a beautifully mellifluous, deep, velvety voice – and that certainly hasn’t changed. Then as now he lives in an apartment near Finchley Central, decorated in such a manner as to be dubbed ‘the old curiosity shop’. All those years ago, Chris revealed to me he was the voice of the narrator in Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life. I was deeply impressed, and in fact I still am. “The meaning of life, part two: Live organ transplants.” And so on.

It’s as remarkable an achievement to me as if I were ever realise my goal to play a baddie in a James Bond film one day, or have a bar named after me.

I’d say that the years have been a bit kinder to Chris than they have to me, given my girth and receding hairline, but that’s to be maudlin. It was indeed a nostalgic afternoon, yet we didn’t cry into our beer about the glory days. On its own, it was worth returning to Britain for – especially after the Lebanon.

On her American Idol debut last month, critics complained Victoria Beckham’s super-skinny appearance was off-putting. But as she returned to U.S. screens last night for another round of auditions, it seemed little had changed. The former Spice Girl look as skinny as ever as she joined Simon Cowell, Kara DioGuardi and Randy Jackson on the judging panel in Denver. Bones protruded from her collar and her ‘Croydon facelift’ hairstyle only served to make her look more severe.

via Gaunt Victoria Beckham gets a ‘Croydon facelift’ for her return to American Idol | Mail Online.

Loathsome as The Daily Hate Mail may be to many, their use of this particular piece of slang is amusing. A ‘Croydon facelift’ refers to women pulling their hair back so tight it produces the same effect as a temporary facelift. I’ve just read online that Traction alopecia, a type of gradual hair loss, can result from using this hairstyle. It is a coiffeur attributed to women belonging to the lower end of the socio-economic classes, or ‘Chavs‘ as they are sometimes known, and about which, more anon.