What a Monday morning to receive this most dire of all unwanted news – Bill Oddie OBE, flown the nest at 85. Clown. Musician. Footlighter. Naturalist hero. Pun-slinger without parallel. Old-time Music Hall hater and adorer. Activist. Humanitarian. Clever bugger. Banaman's Crow sidekick. Scourge of the humbug, the selfish and the pretentious. Owner of the…
MEN BEHAVING BADLY: It Does Me Good…
Old man at Barn. Nostalgia, I have always felt, must be a luxury: a sweet treat for those contented with their current lot, but a terrible vice to the discontented. Since embarking on my Histories of Britain ‘journey’ – and yes, the Anglo Saxon Chronicle is taking an age to appear on Audible, I’m almost…
SOUPY TWISTS: 7th Surprise Bit
SOUPY TWISTS! A BIT OF A SAGA: • 1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • STOP PRESS! AUDIOBOOK IS NOW LIVE, LOVES! https://youtu.be/va38hl1qpcQ?si=m0iYpYMU7uC6CTzX Weeeeeeell for all the sakes of goodness, let me expound, expose and exposit. May I? I think it would be useful to backtrack somewhat. Can it truly…
Loving Tony Slattery Longtime
I was clearly not alone in there being a certain degree of complex aesthetic approval of the late and very very great Tony Slattery as a teen in the 90s – in fact, since the news broke of his fatal heart attack at the weekend, the 'my god he was dishy' tributes have been so…
Get It Right: Audiobook Perfectionism
Just a little housekeeping squib of an update from me in these somewhat seismic times of upheaval here in Writhlington BA3. On one positive note, those lovely people at Erudio have cancelled my student loan after 25 glorious years of never earning enough to pay back the few grand I begged back in 1999; at…
THE FROOD: Fit The 42nd
I come to say "Bloody big congrats, Kevin!", not to blubber. It seemed wrong somehow to say nothing to mark the passing on of the Hitchhiker baton, as it were – as if the Adams legacy meant nothing to me, and I had nothing to say on the matter, a decade on. So here we are.…
FAB FOOLS: Dead Again
In most ways, I could not be less of a typically machismo-oriented man (to my delight, two separate old flames of mine independently described me as a butch man-hating lesbian trapped in a big man's body) but I often wish I was better at crying. I've spent most of this week feeling on the verge…
Bath Plug Award 2023: Julian Clary
Fatherhood out in the Bath bush makes it easy to feel all-but retired from leaping up on stages and making loud noises these days, and yet, besides the approaching joys of Tales of Britain in Ludlow in June and FAB FOOLS LIVE in Clifton in July, I have just survived a couple of the old…
FAB FOOLS: LIVE AT LAST!
What with a global pandemic and moving out to the Somerset sticks, getting married and producing a disarmingly cute small person, the LIVE! section of this website isn't one I'd been expecting to bristle with much activity ever again, compared to the years when shenanigans with The Unrelated Family begat playing burlesque filth on the…
Bath Plug Award 2022: Sandi Toksvig
https://youtu.be/iLXS_zig8q8 After losing Neil Innes, and then having two years of pandemic hiatus, to be honest, I thought that after a short run, The Bath Plug Award had had its day. We had tried, over the years: from Terry Jones in 2015 to Arthur Smith in 2019, but the original plan to have guests interviewed…
Jem Roberts 