You're a beautiful woman probably...

I recently splashed out on a box set of 21 Laurel and Hardy DVDs. As they haven't been on TV nearly as often as they were in my childhood, I've enjoyed reminding myself why I love them so much. In case anyone reading this has never heard of Laurel and Hardy (unlikely but possible) they were a comedy film double act who started in silent movies in the 1920s around the same time as Charlie Chaplin , had their greatest successes with their sound short films of the 1930s and ended their joint career in the 1950s with stage tours of the UK. While Chaplin's films have dated fairly badly and now come across as clever but very rarely funny, L&H's films are still hilarious for people with a certain sense of humour. At their best (which means in the 1930s Hal Roach films, almost all of which are included here) they aren't just funny - behind the slapstick is a warmth, somehow an affection for each other and the viewer. This also comes across in Stan Laurel's rep...

I was sad and shocked to hear that Jack Pickard had died suddenly at the weekend. His online postings as a whole were the most insightful and somehow fair of any I read. My sincere condolences to his family and friends.

Unfortunately the bad weather is not bringing out the best in our TV newsreaders and weather forecasters. After getting it completely wrong with their forecast of a "barbecue summer" last year and then, again, saying the current winter was likely to be mild, they don't sound nearly apologetic enough about the current freezing weather (in Gateshead, one single snow-free day since 17 December). Apart from inaccurate forecasts, it also seems they're unable to sing from the same hymn sheet. Just after Christmas the Radio 4 forecaster said "a thaw is on the way" with a temperature in Newcastle of 5 degrees celsius. Ten minutes later, the BBC TV forecaster said "No let up in the cold weather" and predicted temperatures around zero. Guess which one was right? In addition, the BBC has taken to using irritating clichés like "the big freeze" (something I may be guilty of as well) as if it was a tabloid newspaper. More than once lately I've n...

Another rant, I'm afraid. I think I've said here before that the Tyne and Wear Metro doesn't provide the service it should, or that it used to. I have quite a list of grumbles: fares going up well above the rate of inflation every year; distorted station announcements with the beginning cut off for months at a time; ticket machines that don't work and no published timetable for the supposed investment in new ones; dirty and overcrowded trains; services that finish just when you need them most; having to wait 20 minutes on more than one occasion with the board saying "Next train 2 minutes" for the whole time and no spoken announcement. From the dismissive replies I've had to a couple of letters about Metro's shortcomings, I get the impression that the Metro management is not really interested in customer service. The thing that gets my goat the most - and this applies to the buses too - is that there are no trains on Christmas Day or New Year's Da...

There's a TV newsreader that arouses mirth or complete bafflement in me whenever I see them. The mirth is because this person's diction is so bad that the news reports often end up unintentionally hilarious. The bafflement is that anyone would employ a person who speaks so badly to read the news! This person has a speech impediment like Jonathan Ross, but that's not all. It's coupled with a tendency to gabble incoherently for a few words at a time, so that the content is reduced to gibberish. Any news story is now impossible to follow because I'm listening for the next bit of 'Stanley Unwin' . Anyway, this person usually pronounces "Yesterday" as "Yisterday", something I've never heard in any regional accent. I choked on my cereal a few months ago when a story about the Nissan Ka somehow came out as "the Nissan fuckaa" . More recently, we had a sentence apparently about the "decisiona moth bollock orus-plant" ...

I often find that Christmas arouses "non-traditional" feelings in me, such as gloom and irritation. Since late adolescence I've found the whole thing a huge chore, and the traditional bonhomie of the time often strikes me as fake. Commercial interests have had their way in getting us all to believe that it starts earlier every year, to the extent that even local authorities now put up street lights in November - several weeks too early in my book. It seems so unfair on the many people for whom Christmas isn't all sweetness and light - I have an aunt and two work colleagues who've all been bereaved in the last few weeks: I'm sure all the exaggerated cheer is going to seem bitterly ironic to them. Recently it struck me that one reason for my finding Christmas such a pain is probably SAD (Seasonally Affective Disorder). I can't remember ever enjoying winter much, and the excitement of Christmas probably fades for everyone from the age of about ten, but the...

Recently I bought a DVD set of the ABC/Thames Television series Mystery and Imagination . Although this dates from the late 1960s, I'm (just) old enough to remember it. I particularly recall being scared out of my wits as a child by a scene in which a long-dead man was discovered preserved in a locked room, with cobwebs over his eyes! I now find that this was a tale called The Tractate Middoth from an M R James story, and that this programme was sadly lost (or thrown out) from the archives years ago. The surviving episodes were released this year on DVD, and watching Dracula (the remaining one I was most keen to see) got me reminiscing on its various versions. Probably the scariest was the original Nosferatu (1922). Full of German Expressionism, this virtually invented a lot of horror film conventions such as long shadows, stark lighting and grotesque variations on the human form. Being a silent film, it's less accessible than one with a soundtrack and doesn't hold up ...