I love Stone, Vine & Sun of Winchester. They keep winning awards for best independent wine merchant; they have a knack for finding delicious wines at excellent prices from places you haven’t heard about yet but very soon will. I love Stone, Vine & Sun of Winchester. They keep winning awards for best independent wine
In the past, television battle scenes consisted of half a dozen men in armour knocking seven bells out of each other. Then the camera angle switched and the same six men were still bashing the others, but from below. Next one of them fell (‘Aaaargh!’) and the other five kept on. It was not altogether
I love Stone, Vine & Sun of Winchester. They keep winning awards for best independent wine merchant; they have a knack for finding delicious wines at excellent prices from places you haven’t heard about yet but very soon will. They’ve always been terrific on unknown France, but they’ve branched out into the New World, especially
Jonestown (BBC 2); Moving Wallpaper & Echo Beach (ITV); Harry Hill’s TV Burp (ITV) ‘Shut up and drink the Kool-Aid’ is an American slang phrase — tart, cynical and funny — used for telling people to get on with something they must do but would prefer to avoid. It refers back to the mass suicide of 909 members
Foyle’s War is back on Sundays, sporadically, with Kingdom filling in the gaps on ITV. The BBC has followed Cranford with Lark Rise to Candleford, a series which makes the intervening Sense and Sensibility look harrowing by comparison. The danger to television is not dumbing-down but, on Sunday nights at least, a sort of down-filled
Extras (BBC 1), Parkison: The Final Conversation (ITV), Sense and Sensibility (BBC 1), David Cameron’s Incredible Journey (BBC 2), The Hidden Story of Jesus (Channel 4) We said goodbye to Michael Parkinson and Andy Millman over Christmas. Andy Millman was the hero of Extras, whose finale went out on BBC1 on 27 December. This was what
No doubt one reason why British people like Kath & Kim (often on BBC2, now on Living, Thursday) is that it takes the mick out of Australian suburban life. That makes those of us who lead British suburban lives feel superior. But it’s more than that. It’s very funny. It’s worth watching just for the
You cannot trust a single frame of any reality television show. I don’t mean they are deliberately mendacious, though some are, but nobody behaves normally when a camera is on them. Take those spontaneous conversations on speakerphone as someone bowls along in the car. You’re talking, you’re wondering if your hair is right, the poor
Years ago, during what had become an intolerably hot summer, we found ourselves in a pub garden in a village near the Thames. We were all dressed in minimal clothing — shorts, T-shirts and sandals. Even so we felt suffocatingly hot. At a table nearby a group were waiting for guests, who turned out to
Joe’s Palace (BBC1), A Room with a View (ITV), River Cottage: Gone Fishing (Channel 4) The word ‘dream’ has different meanings, as in the greetings card: ‘May all your dreams come true, except the one about the giant hairy spiders’. Martin Luther King never said, ‘Brothers and sisters, I have a dream, and in this
I cannot imagine anyone who looks less like Father Christmas than Adam Brett-Smith, the managing director of Corney & Barrow. Adam is slender instead of fat, his face clean-shaven rather than covered in a fluffy white beard, and he would no more wear a red fur-lined suit and a silly hat than you or I
I wish Mary Whitehouse were still among us. In my teenage years, she was an invaluable guide to where the filth could be found on television — though to be frank most of what she disliked was disappointing: hardly titillating, and far from filthy. I suspect that if she were invited back to earth to
This is our last mini-bar before we start to get ready for Christmas. I have chosen four medium-priced but excellent wines to see you through to the serious festive season. They come from another of our favourite merchants, Tanners of Shrewsbury. One of the attractive features of the wine trade is the way that people
There is no end to the programmes about the land we live in: we have had portraits of Britain, the Britain we built, the coast of Britain, and journeys around Britain. There seems no aspect of the country that’s not been covered. The Beeb must be desperate. How about Underground Britain, Around Britain on a
This is a cellar that looks like a cellar, with stacks of wine in wooden cases, some of it covered in dust and cobwebs, the finest stored in a locked cage with a creaking door. In spite of that, they have a modern approach to pricing. The business has an enormous turnover, and the inevitable
I once knew a young woman who worked for a large public-interest organisation. She was clever and well educated, but funds were tight, and she feared she was about to lose her job. In which case, she planned to follow a university friend and become a high-class prostitute. It sounded marvellous, she said. The agency
For some reason I like to have a theme for our mini-bar offers, concentrating on a particular country, region or grower. I couldn’t think of one this time, but I did want to bring back Private Cellar, one of my favourite merchants, whose small team seems to have pretty unerring palates and who can nose
Watching television as a critic is an artificial way of watching television. For the most part we see DVDs supplied by the television companies. We start and finish when we like. If the phone rings, we don’t groan and bark ‘yes?’ — we can press pause and settle down for a leisurely chat about our
Southwold has just been voted the finest seaside resort in Britain, and it’s easy to see why. Southwold has just been voted the finest seaside resort in Britain, and it’s easy to see why. Even in the rain last month people looked cheerful, and in the bustling dining-room of the Crown you’d imagine that the
The most egregious example of cheating in wildlife photography was the 1958 Disney film Wild Wilderness. They wanted footage of lemmings throwing themselves off cliffs into the sea — heaven knows why, since lemmings do no such thing. Since the crew were in Alberta, where neither sea nor lemmings can be found, they bought the