| Five For Friday/8 January 2010 |
| Written by Shabby Culture |
| Friday, 08 January 2010 09:57 |
 Our theoretically weekly
selection of things to hear, see, read and think about as we put on our shoes
and get ready for the weekend.1 A Camp - Love Has Left The Room One day someone is going to come along and give Nina Persson a present of - not a cardigan, you clever scamps - a big box of recognition. She's been churning out wide-eyed catchy songs of Neil Finn-like artistry for some time. This is one of them. "I'll let go if you just let me/I will forget you if you will forget me/I'll slip your mind/I will slip your mind". 2 Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting The Pyramid A football book free of tedious inter-tribe point-scoring or glum stories of turds in socks written by turds in socks. Wilson's book is a super-readable history of shape shape shape, starting with the heads-down dribbling at football’s birth then moving through decades of remoulding by various squat, shell-suited masterminds to arrive at what we recognise as Soccerball today. Wilson also updates the book once a month or so in his excellent Guardian column. 3 The 11th Doctor There are only so many times a man can save the universe, so Russell T Davies has left the TARDIS – oh, and so has David Tennant. While sci-fi dilettantes the world over can thank Davies for doing a sterling job bringing Doctor Who back, each “IT’S THE END OF THE UNIVERSE” series climax was getting hard to stomach. Great things are expected of new showrunner Steven Moffat and kindergarten timelord Matt Smith, but can those “great things” be on a more subtle level, please? The trailer shows promise. 4 Ed McBain All the young people with their Wires, Shields, Juliet Bravos may be aware that in the past - before watching murders on laser discs - people used to read crime novels. All of your Hill Street Blues, Homicides etc began with Ed McBain's Cop Hater in 1956. The first of the 87th Precinct books and the first realistic police procedural. As well as writing about 100 brilliant novels, McBain (real name Evan Hunter but born Salvatore Lombino) also worked as PG Wodehouse's editor and wrote 76 scripts including A Blackbird Jungle and Hitchcock's The Birds. In short, a genius. 5 E.R. (The Whole Bloody Thing) Snowbound and with a severe, erm, intestinal complaint, we have been subjected this week to three full seasons of classic horror-soap E.R. by a life partner with a DVD controller. No matter how bad you may be feeling, this parade of cradled dead kids, serial granny-rapists and long and protracted deaths of firemen, unleavened by any exciting ladies or any happiness at all, is making everything else seem so much more bearable. CBC! Chem 7! Lytes! Utter Despair! Stat! |