Robert Hampton

Another visitor! Stay a while… stay forever!

November 2005

4th November 2005

Thought to ponder
Posted by at 6.14pm | Uncategorised | 3 responses

If we celebrate November 5th, isn’t that technically glorifying terrorism and thus banned under the proposed anti-terror laws?

9th November 2005

Blair defeated over terror laws
Posted by at 6.34pm | Uncategorised | 2 responses

Ha ha ha hahahaha ha!

Seriously, I do think that 90 days is far too long to hold someone without charge and that 28 days is the absolute maximum that should be allowed, so the result was, in my view, a good compromise. Yay for democracy, and all that.

10th November 2005

TV Alert
Posted by at 10.02pm | Uncategorised | No responses

I’ve just spotted that Sky Travel is showing two special episodes of The Tube (not the 80s music show, it’s a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the London Underground).

It’s all about the events of 7th July and definitely worth a look, I should think. Friday at 7.30pm, repeated at midnight. Also on Sky Three at various times.

12th November 2005

Aitch Ess Tee
Posted by at 2.38pm | Uncategorised | No responses

I want one of these for Christmas!

How I spent my Saturday Night
Posted by at 11.28pm | Uncategorised | No responses

I channel-surfed onto an interesting programme on BBC Three (I know, I was surprised too) — End Day, another one of these slightly unconvincing docu-dramas about doomsday scenarios. To its credit, it did shoehorn 5 Armageddons into one hour and still had time to pay homage to Groundhog Day.

Thanks to BBC Three’s unique brand of factual programming, I now know what a dangerous strangelet is. How many people could have said that before tonight?

They also had a bit about a catastrophic supervolcano under Yellowstone, an idea never tackled by any BBC docu-drama before!

14th November 2005

The Internet King… I wonder if he can provide faster nudity
Posted by at 11.07am | Uncategorised | No responses

We finally got blueyonder broadband put in!

I’m off to download lots of porn… I mean, do some vital research.

17th November 2005

Britain Britain Britain
Posted by at 10.33pm | Uncategorised | No responses

Broadband connection went out earlier this evening. I wanted to go online but… computer says “No”.

Which leads nicely into the first episode of the new, BBC One-friendly, series of Little Britain, which I thought was quite funny. The vomiting old ladies have gone (hurray!), only to be replaced with incontinent old lady (boo!), which looks like it will be a similar one-unfunny-joke-repeated-many-times character. Vicky Pollard is getting very tired now too. And they got rid of my favourite character: Dennis Waterman!

But on the other hand: Anne on Stars in Their Eyes, Andy parachuting into his wheelchair, Anthony Head dusting the office wearing a leather thong and the always enjoyable Fat Fighters sketch (sadly without a punchline tonight).

Anyway, Children in Need night tomorrow: I’ll be watching! (lie)

19th November 2005

Concordia Parvae Res CresCUNT
Posted by at 3.09pm | Uncategorised | No responses

I went out for a stroll yesterday lunchtime, and ended up walking along Hope Street.

As I walked past the Philharmonic Hall, an Aintee Coachline bus pulled up and disgorged about 100 Merchant Taylors’ pupils, presumably arriving for Speech Day. As I walked down Upper Duke Street back to the office, another similarly-laden bus passed. Walking down Bold Street I passed some more pupils making their way up to the Phil for the ceremony.

Combined with the person at work who asked me why I didn’t stay on and do my A-levels (and kept harping on when my vague answer didn’t satisfy her), it’s been a week of happy, happy memories for me. 😐

22nd November 2005

Gym fixed it for me
Posted by at 1.11pm | Uncategorised | No responses

A rule which should apply nationwide.

24th November 2005

Oops, you bwoke it
Posted by at 9.00pm | Uncategorised | No responses

Various stuff has changed on the site — mainly behind the scenes changes which will make it easier to migrate the “static” content over to the WordPress Pages system, which I’m planning to do in the near future. Also, I now have pretty Permalinks — no more ugly ? and & characters in URLs for me!

I can’t see anything obviously wrong, but if you see anything that is broken on the site, please e-mail me or leave a comment.

Disappointed Horse
Posted by at 10.20pm | Uncategorised | 1 response

I’m really not sure about Little Britain at all now. I feel almost obliged to like it, since I have a ticket to the live show at the Liverpool Empire this weekend, and don’t want to be disappointed. On the other hand, tonight’s show seemed to rely more than ever on oft-repeated jokes and mannerisms, and thus suffered from the law of diminishing returns.

I spoke too soon about the vomiting old ladies being gone — they were there and still doing the same “joke” tonight. We got Mrs Emery in almost the same sketch as last week (only it was in a Post Office instead of a supermarket, so it’s entirely different) and Vicky Pollard saying “yeah but no but yeah” for the umpteenth time.

I missed the very beginning of the show, so didn’t see the Richard and Judy sketch, sadly. On the good side, we did get to hear Matt Lucas yelling “Margaret! Margaret!” in a Mr Mann sketch tonight. The insulting university worker (“Chewbacca in a bikini”) was good again too.

LB can still be funny, but it lacks the subtlety which made the first series so good. We’ve lost characters like Kenny Craig, Dennis Waterman and Ray McCooney, seemingly because they didn’t provide enough opportunity to refer to bodily functions. To my jaded eyes it looks as though Lucas and Walliams are going for the easy laugh every time, which is a great shame.

26th November 2005

Any excuse
Posted by at 3.50pm | Uncategorised | No responses

Dick and Dom have blamed the BBC production team for the poor quality of their quiz, Ask the Family, which they described as “absolutely shoddy”.

A BBC spokeswoman said: “It wasn’t a good programme and whose fault that was is neither here nor there. We admitted at the time that the show didn’t work and we took it off air.”

Of course, we all know who’s really responsible for this disaster.

Rimming Shakin’ Stevens
Posted by at 11.35pm | Uncategorised | No responses

I think I’ve worked out why the current series of Little Britain is subpar — Lucas and Walliams have clearly devoted a lot of their writing energy to the live shows, and it showed.

OK, it wasn’t perfect, and we had some of the crap characters from series 2 and 3 in there: Ting Tong, Mrs Emery and the vomiting WI lady. But let’s gloss over that and move on.

Some of my favourites from the earlier series were back: Ray McCooney the Scottish hotelier was great (WHY did they drop him after the first series?). Dennis Waterman was there, and brilliantly they managed to stage the skewed-perspective he’s-a-very-small-man jokes live in the theatre. Des Kay (from HTV’s The Fun Bus) showed up and picked a poor hapless man out of the audience to play Hunt the Sausage (use your imagination).

The show was rounded off with an extended Daffyd Thomas sketch, and what could have been just an excuse to trot out worn out catchphrases instead turned into a marvellous Village People style song-and-dance number.

In short, it was great and went a long way to restoring my faith in the show. It’s just a shame the third TV series isn’t matching up to this quality.

Sadly there was no Matthew Waterhouse sketch, but in the theatre foyer I picked up a leaflet advertising a show which could have come from one of his pitches.

29th November 2005

Trams Axed
Posted by at 5.57pm | Uncategorised | No responses

Oh, poo! 🙁