Blog posts in total 82
Friday 26 April 2013, 15:03
How Mrs Thatcher constructed a fake ghostly version of Britain's past, and then used it to maintain her power. But also how she became possessed and haunted by this vision.
Read more about MRS THATCHER - THE GHOST IN THE HOUSE OF WONKS
Tuesday 5 March 2013, 16:07
The story of the strange world of Texan oil baron HL Hunt. The richest man in the world, a bigamist who invented right wing TV news - way before Murdoch and Fox News. And the weird role he played in helping to create the vast conspiracies around the assassination of JFK.
Read more about YOU THINK YOU ARE A CONSUMER BUT MAYBE YOU HAVE BEEN CONSUMED
Wednesday 30 January 2013, 18:52
PARADIABOLICAL - HERE WE GO AGAIN ON AL QAEDA'S MERRY-GO-ROUND - The ghosts of what happened in Algeria and Somalia 20 years ago and what they tell us about today
Thursday 20 December 2012, 15:19
I have always been convinced that animal programmes are one of the most powerful ideological expressions of our time - telling stories that both express and reinforce how we understand our relationship to each other socially and politically in powerfully emotional ways.
Friday 30 November 2012, 11:21
HOW THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD, HAMAS AND THE ISRAELI RIGHT BECAME CO-DEPENDENTS IN AN ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP
Last week there was yet another cycle of horrific violence in the Gaza strip. This week there are demonstrations in Cairo driven by fears that the revolution is being hi-jacked by the Islamists...
Wednesday 14 November 2012, 15:22
I have always been fascinated by the way music can completely change the way you watch film - and how you feel as you watch the images.
For the last year or so I have been collecting all sorts of footage of people dancing that I found in the BBC archives. In all I gathered over two thousand shots...
Sunday 21 October 2012, 14:32
HOW COLONEL GADDAFI AND THE WESTERN ESTABLISHMENT
TOGETHER CREATED A PANTOMIME WORLD
Things come and go in the news cycle like waves of fever. A year ago Colonel Gaddafi was killed and an avalanche of camera phone footage of his last minutes was played again and again on the news channels. Then it stopped...
Monday 6 August 2012, 18:22
To celebrate today's successful landing on Mars I thought I would show a film of a man who claimed to have got to Mars a long time ago. He did this back in the late 1950s by communicating telepathically with the beings who inhabited the Red Planet. He also claimed that his mother went there on a UFO...
Read more about MENTAL CHANNEL NUMBER ONE - THE MAN FROM MARS
Saturday 16 June 2012, 15:46
AMERICA'S DANGEROUS LOVE AFFAIR WITH COUNTERINSURGENCY
At the beginning of this year one of the weirdest characters ever to become involved in the present Afghan war died. He was called Jack Idema and he was a brilliant con-man. For a moment, during the early part of the war, Idema persuaded all the...
Friday 11 May 2012, 14:02
Bahrain, along with Syria, has become a symbol of the failure of the Arab Spring to deliver real democracy and freedom across the Arab world. The media in Britain portray a rigid, oppressive almost feudal elite who are stubbornly holding out against the inevitable wave of modern freedoms and political...
Tuesday 1 May 2012, 14:11
This Thursday Londoners will vote to elect a new city mayor, and I thought it would be a good moment to put up a great documentary about how Norman Mailer stood for Mayor of New York in 1969.
It is a lovely film - directed by a brilliant documentary maker called Dick Fontaine, and beautifully shot in...
Wednesday 25 April 2012, 12:06
Today the Rupert Murdoch story has finally reached the issue that has been lurking in the shadows of this whole saga - and what has always made people most uneasy about him. It is the true nature of his relationship to politics and power in Britain and how he may have used that to create his vast empire...
Tuesday 27 March 2012, 19:27
At first sight the search for peace and stability in Iraq, and the search for physical and mental fitness in the extreme contortions of modern Yoga seem to have absolutely nothing in common.
But curiously they do.
Both the terrible structural problems and distortions that underly Iraqi society today...
Tuesday 6 March 2012, 15:45
When you bring God into politics very strange things happen. You can see this now in both America and Iran - in their elections and also in the growing confrontation between them. But it wasn't always like this - in fact for most of the 20th century fundamentalist religion in both America and Iran had...
Friday 24 February 2012, 15:58
Both individuals and societies tell themselves stories to simplify and make sense of the messy chaos of reality. It is naive to think that it is possible to live without the protective bubbles these stories create. But sometimes the stories can become terribly limiting and trap us, and prevent both individuals...
Tuesday 31 January 2012, 15:43
At every moment there are hundreds of thousands of Americans and Europeans floating around the world on "Funships" - superliners like the Costa Concordia that crashed and capsized off the coast of Italy.
These ships are extraordinary creations, millions of ordinary people pay not very much to spend weeks...
Wednesday 18 January 2012, 14:59
Everybody is always remarking about how stuck our society feels these days. The music doesn't change, the political parties are all exactly the same, and films and TV dramas are almost always set in the past.
We are also stuck with an economic system that is not delivering the paradise that it once promised...
Read more about THE YEARS OF STAGNATION AND THE POODLES OF POWER
Thursday 22 December 2011, 11:33
Here is a ghost story for Christmas - it is a brief history of the appearance of ghosts and poltergeists and other spirits on television. Not fictional ghosts - but real ones, or the reports of their appearances, that you find in various news and documentary programmes.
But as so often when one looks...
Thursday 8 December 2011, 14:16
THE RISE OF GEEZER CAPITALISM IN MODERN BRITAIN
It is very difficult to properly see the times you are living through, but it is made more difficult today by the insistence of politicians and commentators that there is no alternative to the present economic system. This almost hysterical mantra closes...
Thursday 3 November 2011, 18:00
In the present crisis over Greece there is a furious argument about whether the Greek people should be allowed to vote on the proposed solution. Many of the voices against this come from the world of finance and economics. They say that the crisis is too dangerous to leave to the will of the people.
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This is a website expressing my personal views – through a selection of opinionated observations and arguments. I’ll be including stories I like, ideas I find fascinating, work in progress and a selection of material from the BBC archives.
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