Fiendish Games

The Royal Institution of Great Britain is doing monthly re-runs of science fiction films on the big screen. You've already missed July's film, Forbidden Planet, and I would not be in any great rush to see Star Trek II: the wrath of Khan on August 8th, either, but in the main I am in favour of old films being shown once again on the big screen.

Consequently I will be keeping an eye on future showings at the RI; not that the web site makes this very easy.

Apparently the Royal Institution exists so you can "explore two centuries of great scientific breakthroughs, and discover the newest big ideas about our universe and everything in it." One scientific breakthrough that seems to have passed them by, judging by their site, is the poor visibility offered by red text on a black background. Hideous.

Other things going on at the RI include the launch of a new book club, another chance to see one of this year's Christmas Lectures from Dr Hugh Montgomery and the opportunity to quench your thirst with the free tastings after examining the science of beer. Mmmmmm, beer. I mean, mmmm, science. No, hang on, I was right first time.

When the series Grumpy Old Men first came on telly, I would often catch Mrs. Fiendish slyly glancing at me as we both listened to popular has-beens on the show moaning about modern life. When I finally asked her why she kept giving me funny looks she explained that 99% of all the complaints she had heard on the programme she had previously heard coming out of my mouth. So, it won't surprise you to learn that I am not a big fan of mobile phones.

I do own one, of course. It's a black one, with a screen and some buttons on it. Mrs. Fiendish insisted I have one so she gave me one of her cast-offs. She also insists I turn it on when I am out of the house, something which I am happy to do as I usually can't hear it ringing anyway and besides which, without it, my kids might - shock horror! - have to be at a prearranged place at a precise time when I drive to Enfield to pick them up of a Friday or Saturday evening.

Clearly I use the phone less than most people but I had no idea just what a low usage customer I am until I read this piece of investment analysis on Vodafone from someone at JP Morgan.

A low-end contract sub needs to cut usage c.40% to save money by switching to prepay. A VOD UK user on the entry level contract tariff (average £18.33/month for 18 months) can make 100 mins of outgoing calls and send 100 SMS. Switch to Anynet prepay and he needs to trim usage by >39% (assuming an even split of peak and off-peak calls) to cut his monthly spend.

Good grief! £18.33 per month? A £20 pre-pay card lasts me about three months. Were I a typical user then we could turn the analyst's analysis around and say Vodafone needs to cut its cheapest tariff by 66% in order to remain competitive with pre-pay.

I suppose on the same basis my sister, who travels into London from the wilds of Essex at most twice a year ought to get herself a £3,000 annual season ticket and Posh Spice should always dine at places that offer all you can eat buffets at a fixed price.

If customers are getting 100 mins of free calls a month and 100 free text messages, no wonder London pavements are chock full of idiots interfacing with their mobile phones rather than looking where they are going.

Then again, I am sure Arthur Smith said much the same thing once on an edition of Grumpy Old Men

Saw this on a PR release today:

A guitar signed by Roger Daltrey CBE, frontman of The Who, is one of the prizes in a charity auction for Teenage Cancer Trust (TCT) at the Northern Design Awards 2008 on 31st May.

Good cause and all that but Roger Daltrey's guitar?

What next? A rugby ball signed by David Beckham? A painting signed by Sting? A shirt worn by Patrick More? A film poster signed by Johnny Vegas?

After a Friday night spent gaming I was feeling a bit rough the following morning for reasons unknown. I initially put it down to the 400cwt of crisps I consumed, but it might have been the beer, though I had just the one bottle. It was an Indian Pale Ale from a very small independent brewery called BrewDog and I was basically attracted to it because it was called "Punk IPA" and the label basically said "if you are a lager drinker, FOAD, matey, because this brew is too good for you."

Well, it made me laugh, anyway, and more to the point it made me buy it, along with a bottle of their "Paradox" stout.

As it happens, I liked the stout a lot more than the IPA. The IPA was very smooth and crisp going down, but left a very sour after-taste which I suppose will take some getting used to.

I went back to Odd-bins last Friday to get some more of the stout and was surprised to find it was twice the price of every other bottled beer on display. When I examined the bottle in more detail it turns out that the stout was 10% alcohol by volume, which makes it the strongest beer I have ever tasted, but oddly enough it did not taste thick and syrupy like, say, Old Peculier or barley wine. It's also matured in malt whisky barrels, which probably helps.

It's a limited edition stout, worth breaking out for special occasions.

Anyway, on the Saturday after the gaming session I was feeling a bit rough. Maybe I didn't have just one bottle the night before, maybe I had the stout as well, which would explain a lot.

Be that as it may, I slept most of the day and missed the FA Cup Final. The days when this was the second most exciting football day of the year (England v Scotland being the most exciting) have long since gone, thanks to the glut of live matches we have now on TV, but I would have liked to have watched it if only to see two teams who really care about the trophy competing to win it.

My ennui at the prospect of seeing one of the so called "Big Three plus Liverpool" doing battle with each other is such that I was seriously considering giving the European Champions-Plus-Numerous-Runners-Up Final a miss, even though - as Rory Bremner aptly put it, it contained one foreign-owned club full of overseas players taking on another foreign-owned club stuffed full of overseas players in what was being billed as a uniquely all-English final.

Part of the problem was that I wanted them both to lose. This is going to sound heretical coming from a Spurs supporter but I actually don't mind Arsenal too much; they play great football and Arsene Wenger is so cash-strapped in relation to his competitors that he can't even afford to replace those spectacles of his that only allow him to see transgressions committed against his players rather than by them.

I also have a soft spot for Liverpool, partly as a result of an infection picked up from Oakes, a keen Liverpool supporter who is probably going to have to top himself when ManUre finally rack up more title wins than Liverpool (in about 4 seasons time).

ManUre I hate because, although they generally play good football, they have had what seems like the whole of the English press on their side for the last 50 years, deifying them. Plus they have all those glory hunters following them.

I suppose I ought to hate Chelsea because they have bought success, but I am not bothered about that. I have always disliked them for their glamorous association with the King's Road and the fact that any visiting celebrity who gets dragged along to watch "soccah" is always taken to Stamford Bridge rather than Upton Park, but most of all I hate them more than Arsenal because Spurs so rarely beat them. Spurs rarely beat Arsenal either, but that's because they have always been a strong side but Spurs could not even beat Chelsea when the likes of Dave Beasant were playing for them.

So, I started watching the Euro Final just to see whether I could get interested in it, and to see whether I would end up reluctantly rooting for someone.

The first-half was embarrassingly one-sided and it was the prospect of Avram Grant getting it in the neck from the British press for "not being able to win the big one" that swung my sympathies Chelsea's way, and I was quite chuffed when they came out in the second half and actually started passing the ball instead of hoofing it up to Mad-dog Drogba all the time. I don't suppose anything is going to dent the Sir Alex Ferguson legend in the eyes of the British press, but it would have been nice for them to have been obliged to explain how the Old Master got outwitted.

Sadly, it was not to be but it was a fairly enthralling match that came to a most satisfying conclusion.

First we had John Terry, a man who probably even his own mother regards as an arrogant dick who should have been suffocated at birth, kicking off the whole string of events that got Mad-dog Drogba sent off for a girlie slap.

As the self-appointed guardian of all that is finest about the English game, John Terry felt compelled to offer his strident views to Tevez on just how possession should be returned to the opposition after the ball has been kicked out of play so an injured player can be seen to.

Seeing as Tevez had done nothing wrong and the match was, in any case, draining away to a mutually agreed draw, this naturally got up the noses of the ManUre players.

I always get the impression that Mad-dog Drogba would travel to the ends of the earth to express a didactic opinion even if it were, for instance, on the sexual needs of white European lesbian midgets, and so I was not surprised when he lived up to Rooney's pre-match claim that he (Drogba) is not right in the head. And Rooney should know ...

At this point chickens prepared to come home to roost.
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It went to penalties and for a while it looked like it was going to be an ideal result. Ronaldo, a lad with a face one could never tire of punching, was in the frame to be the man who lost ManUre the European Cup. Serves him right for being absurdly talented, self-consciously good-looking, a bit too cocky for his own good and, most of all, foreign.

What could possibly be better?

Wait! It's John Terry trooping up to take the "winning" spot kick because Drogba was no longer on the field.

Why was he no longer on the field? Because Terry had started a needless argument because of his demented need to dictate how everyone else should behave. Sophocles would have appreciated the drama.

I presume most of us know what happened next. As Frank Lumphard put it, "It took bottle to stand up and take that penalty kick."

Er ... except he didn't stand up and take it, he fell over and took it, and missed.

Nice one, JT. At least he did not point at the turf like that over-rated dead-ball specialist David Beckham did when he skied one over the bar in a crucial penalty shoot-out.

So it came to pass that Ryan Giggs, who must be some kind of saint because I can't find anything to dislike about him after his long career at ManUre, scored what effectively was the winning goal for ManUre on the occasion when he set a record for most appearances at the club, while the "goals for hire" forward Nicolas Anelka failed to score for Chelsea.

Sport as drama. Somehow it still has the ability to hook you back in after you've sworn off it.

Yesterday was a happy day for me. Without any hint of exaggeration I reckon I spend about an hour a day watching episodes of US hospital based sitcom, Scrubs, and most of these I have seen before, but yesterday I found two episodes that were new to me.

Better still, Channel 4 ran a trailer saying "Scrubs returns to Channel 4". Some of us were under the assumption that it had never been away, though it has not yet quite achieved the level of omnipresencee of the bafflingly successful Friends.

This led me to believe that C4 are running new episodes which by my reckoning would be series 7. However, the web site seems to imply they are running series 6. Surely that's already been broadcast? With so many channels around these days it is hard to tell.

Series seven was one of those shows that was affected by the writers strike but the show appears to be back on course with new episodes airing in the States. This was supposed to be the final series, with NBC decided to can it but ABC, which makes the show but does not broadcast it, is supposed to be picking up the rights to the show.

This is good news for my Scrubs addiction but as I seem to be quite happy to watch each episode dozens of times and still find each one funny I can afford to harbour a few small doubts about whether extending the life of the show is actually a good idea. One only has to look at the death throes of Happy Days to see how a show's legacy can be undone by flogging a dead horse.

Still, the US broadcaating business seems to be a thoroughly ruthless industry with shows getting cut halfway through a series; if Black Adder or Red Dwarf had been produced on American TV neither would have seen a second episode, never mind a second series. So, if it stops cutting the mustard, we can be sure it will be terminated in short order.


Of course, if Dr. Elliot Reed continues to attempt to look more glamorous every series then her character will completely lose any plausability. In the early series she was a chunky, pasty-faced by still attractive woman but some time in the middle series she had changed into the sort of woman who clearly spends 6 hours applying make-up and choosing her outfit every morning before travelling to her exhausting place of work to put in a 12-hour shift.

Bring back the old Elliot. Er .. .the young Elliot. Whatever.

Meanwhile, can a film be long in arriving?