Looking back, I feel profoundly pleased that I was a hottie when I was: after the Pill but before AIDS. The Seventies brought to the masses the sexual free-for-all that the “Swinging Sixties” had only really offered the few. A …
The Sandman is coming for you
Letters pages are the secret history of comic books: a contemporary snapshot that’s almost never reprinted. When Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman debuted in November 1988, it immediately attracted ardent fans who wrote poems, floated theories, discussed literary references (Marlowe, Aeschylus, …
Ricky Gervais doesn’t punch down
The curse of the literal-minded strikes again. This time it’s Ricky Gervais’s new stand-up special SuperNature which has sent the congenitally humourless into conniptions. Predictably, Pink News led the charge with a report that disapprovingly quotes the most offending lines. …
Kanye West’s tragic victory
It took me a while to figure out what the first two instalments of the new Netflix documentary jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy reminded me of, this portrait of the artist as a young man trying to get ahead in the …
Nothing can save the BBC
It’s Valentine’s Day, 1922, and we’re in a rain-soaked field in the village of Writtle, deepest Essex. Night is drawing in. The clock ticks towards 7.15. In a low, chilly army hut, a man in a thick tweed suit leans …
Why comedians stopped being funny
The most exciting stand-up comedy show I’ve ever seen was Bill Hicks in a student union in the autumn of 1992. Being a comedy naïf probably helped. I had seen Hicks’ sensational Channel 4 special Relentless earlier that year but …
