The Website of 'Greenwich Book Place & Gallery'

By David Greenbook

July 08th 2012 - 02:18pm

 
  All the terrible things which usually spoil the enjoyment of hard-end weekend leisure-time ---- the disasters, accidents, the starting or renewal of conflicts attacks, brutality, bombing, crime. This weekend, somehow or other they’ve all been stopped! I couldn’t believe it at first but I checked with both BBC and ITV. Last night and Today there was simply NO bad news from anywhere: only the weather (which, of course, no one can help) and tennis playing! I had (because I couldn’t escape) seen some of that (between 4 players). It was pretty dire. In fact the most boring thing I’ve ever seen on T.V.
I would almost welcome the old news bulletins...

 June 26th 2012 - 07:22pm

  I think we’ve all had our fill of
self-or-party-justifying party political
 spokes - err - people, saying ‘Let’s
be clear about this […]’ or ‘I don’t
deny that […]’ and then coming out with a flood of
 evasive, paint-missing prevarication with the smug false sincerity of a Tony Blair smiling demeanour. Even if they are trying to be honest at the moment (which I don’t suppose is very often) the habit of obfuscation leaves them mired in implausibility.
So it was a pleasant surprise this morning (Ca 12:30am or so) to hear the Egyptian spokesman for the Muslim brotherhood Freedom and Justice Party, Gehad El-Haddad, answer the really determined onslaught of relentlessly probing and antagonistic questioning from the ‘Hard talk’ interviewer, who has nothing to learn from Jeremy Paxman.
With the events of the last few years, fresh in all our minds, it’s quite a job to persuade us Europeans to see a Muslim government in a favourable light. But he clearly knew everything he needed to know to do so and presented it in a way that removed my doubts at least.
Congratulations!

-BBC-

 May 27th 2012 - 07:00pm

It’s all very well to say “Never mind the buzzcocks” - but I do mind them.

There are few better examples on T.V. of the way surroundings can bring down people who inhabit them - in this case inhabit them occupationally. I’m forced to admit that it was my own laziness that caused me to be the reluctant observer of this abysmally pointless, charmless show last night. Even the usually brilliant, amusing and, in various ways, entertaining, Bill Bailey was dragged down to the level of saying (after someone remarked to Sophie Ellis Bextor that (so and so) “made you pregnant with his ‘large penis’ “), Bailey added “I could have said with his ‘enormous cock’ “.
I would have thought the whole phrase was unnecessary. How else is anyone usually made pregnant?
Sophie Ellis Bextor, by the way, was unintentionally responsible once, for to getting me to go to rather a lot of effort. I wanted to find out (with respect to what I thought a rather beautiful record), its title, and some of the words which I couldn’t catch. The title turned out to be “groove Jet” or something like that, almost as pointlessly obscure and bewildering as the title of the program I’m talking about. The words I couldn’t catch, I found, were “Why don’t you bring back - why don’t you bring back” which puzzled me since they sounded like “ring back”.
Because Radio presenters are often so cavalier and difficult to follow, it took me days phoning the BBC and enquiring of friends to find the answers.
Thankfully Sophie Ellis Bextor didn’t seem to allow the company she was keeping to do too much harm to her personality; and she still looks great.
The chairman, team-leader, or whatever he is, looks as if he has really had it. The program seems to have obliterated any coherent character he may have had and substituted for it the complete persona of a bumptious school - leaving teenager who has done better in his secondary school than some others and wants to impress on everyone that not only is he scintillatingly witty but grown up enough to talk about sex - and that sort of thing.
The idea of the program seems to be for two co-operating individuals to represent a particular pop tune with vocal sounds and rhythms of various kinds so that the others can identify and name it. yes quite an amusing game for children and even, adults, at a party, but quite boring when repeated too much and accompanied by torrents of such ‘brilliant’, self lauding and mutually approved and confirmed “wit” specially contrived to demonstrate the fascinating insider knowledge they all have. For some it’s a bit of an ordeal.
By the way, what is a buzzcock?