Sunday, November 07, 2010

Proud of the BBC

For the first time in more years than I care to remember, I'm listening to the Radio One chart show. I'm old enough to remember listening on a transistor radio on a Tuesday lunchtime to hear the top ten, before the charts got moved to a Sunday afternoon at some point in the 80s. If I'm honest, there's not a lot of interest in there for me - mostly anodyne x-factor style pop, but I'm not exactly the target demographic. Each to their own, and I suppose there must be enough of an audience who enjoy that sort of thing to make it a viable proposition.

The last time I was excited by chart run down was in 2002 when fans of John Otway (including yours truly) conspired to get Bunsen Burner into the top ten as a 50th birthday present. On that occasion we managed number 9 and were rewarded with a truly amazing performance on Top of the Pops.

This time, we are waiting to see if Mitch Benn will make it. You've probably noticed me twittering about it, and I posted the video a while ago. It was looking promising on download sales earlier in the week, but the lack of airplay and physical sales in the shops will probably have scuppered it. We shall see ...

In other news, last night's movie was the excellent Somers Town, another Shane Meadows film. It stars Thomas Turgoose (from 'This is England'), as Tomo - a runaway from Nottingham who winds up in London and is mugged almost straight away, losing his bag and money and being left with only the clothes on his back and nowhere to go. He falls in with Marek (played with remarkable sensitivity by Piotr Jagiello) - a Polish teenager whose father is working on the Channel Tunnel link and hence absent for much of the time. The pair find they have much in common as they try to earn a bit of cash by doing odd jobs, hanging around in the grimy back streets of Somers Town and trying to catch the eye of Maria, a French girl working as a waitress in the local cafe. It's a short film - just under 70 minutes - but it manages to be funny, moving and affecting in that time. An absolute must see.

Post Script

No sign of Mitch ... :-(

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