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Culture Other

Strictly Come Dancing & Darren Gough

I’ve been watching Strictly Come Dancing which, for those who don’t know, is a BBC knockout pro-celebrity dancing competition. Last year it was won by a soap actress, the year before that by a newsreader. This year, for me the pleasure has been watching Darren Gough. Gough is a fast bowler (i.e. a cricket pitcher), and he’s a big beefy cheerful Northern lad. For years, when England were crap at cricket, Goughie could be relied on to wake up the crowd and lift his teammates – but I don’t think anyone ever would have guessed, watching him run in and try to knock the batsmen’s heads off with 90mph bouncers, that he was a natural dancer.

What’s been great, watching him, is that although his dancing is sharp and technically excellent [according to the judges], he never loses the sense of bloke-ish physicality. Doing the jive, he could be a GI at a local dancehall; doing the salsa he could be a Cuban stevedore on his day off. There’s nothing dancerish about it. And he always looks like he’s enjoying himself.

To go off at a tangent for a moment, Brazilians sometimes claim to play football ‘to the rhythm of the samba’. I’ve wondered sometimes if English clubs would do well to take that literally, and to teach the young trainees to samba as a kind of cross-training. If nothing else, it’s good practice at close foot-control and balance.

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Culture

Stupid band names

I’m really getting sick of bands who mispell their own name, or the names of their albums and songs, for some kind of cool-value. You know the kind of thing – Reprazent, M!ssundaztood , sk8er boi, Outkast, A Skillz and Krafty Kuts, Bushwacka, Klashnekoff. It’s cheesy and just so twencen. But the habit has reached a new low with one of the bands on X Factor, who are called Addictiv Ladies. For fuck’s sake, you’re not even trying. If ‘Addictive Ladies’ is too mainstream for you, how about ‘Adiktiv Laydeez’ or ‘Adicktiv Lay Ds’? Just dropping the ‘e’ seems so … half-hearted.

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Culture

Reality. Sort of.

I’ve been watching The X Factor, and I was sure I’d met one of the contestants somewhere. University? A friend’s party? I spent some time trying to place her before resorting to Google – whereupon it turned out that she was in the first series of Pop Idol.

Television – almost like actually having friends.

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Culture Other

Bob Denver & Americana

Bob Denver, the star of Gilligan’s Island, has died. Gilligan’s Island is one of those bits of Americana which feel familiar but I actually know entirely via hearsay. It’s one of the most frequently used pop culture references in other US pop culture – they mentioned it on House just last night – but I’ve never actually seen an episode because I don’t think it’s been shown on British TV in my lifetime (ever?).

Similarly, when I went to the US I felt it was very important to eat a Twinkie, to try and find out what it was about this confectionary that made it iconic. Answer – well, it’s certainly different. Bizarrely artificial and liable to send you into diabetic shock. The O. J. Simpson trial was odd, too. The whole thing was covered in detail in the UK news, partially because they tend to follow big US news stories anyway, and partially because the moment he was chased down the freeway on TV, it was a great story. But somehow, the whole point of the thing was missing; the premise of the story was that a Very Famous Man was accused of murdering his wife – but in a country where few people care about American football, he wasn’t actually famous before the trial. He’s famous now, but famous for being accused of murder.

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Culture Me

hair and stuffing

I went to get my hair cut today, and the barbress said “Your hair’s nice and shiny – you obviously don’t smoke.” She’s right, I don’t, but I’m surprised she could tell by looking at my hair. The conversation turned to a documentary on TV last night that followed various taxidermists in their preparations for what they all called ‘the World Show’ and thus, inevitably, to Jeremy Bentham.

Dead Bentham

The head at the top of the picture is a wax replica, because the real head was damaged in the preservation process. In this picture the real head can be seen between his legs, but apparently it has since been put into storage as it used to be a target for student pranks.