alanconnor.com/log

I am a panellist on Heat Map this Sunday.

Under discussion: cultural appropriation, Kanye West and The Communist Manifesto.

My choice of intro music:

• See also: 5Live’s Arts Club
• Other episodes
• Image from Kew Bridge series

I am a guest on the first episode of BBC Radio 5 Live’s Arts Club. Tickets for the recording are available from The Bill Murray club in Islington.

Update: More episodes with me —

• 2 Feb 2018: Art for Trump, Dylan v Cohen, What does Banksy look like and is The Bayeaux Tapestry a bit rubbish? (My sacred cow: The Laughing Cavalier)
• 16 Feb 2018: Florence, portraits and the music of our youth (My sacred cow: The Great Bear)
• 18 Mar 2018: Awards Shows, the NME, and TV shows for the Obamas (My sacred cow: Julius Caesar)

• Recording: Thu 1 Feb 2018, The Bill Murray, 39 Queen’s Head St, London N1 8NQ [tickets]
• Broadcast: BBC 5 live, Sun 4 Feb 2018 and on podcast
• See also: The Will Gompertz Fringe
• Image from the RWA Exhibition, 2007

Series 54 begins 9pm, Fri 6 October.

By me for BBC News: Election Lexicon, the words which “caught the ear” in a week of campaigning.

12 May: Battle bus, hovercraft, draft manifesto, shambles, blame
game, Monsieur Zen, airbrushing, photoshopping and The Big Six

20 May: Heineken politician, cockroach, cyber, Mayllenials, Robin
Hood tax, last-chance saloon, unique selling point, rent-to-buy,
insourcing and period poverty

27 May: [campaigning suspended]

3 Jun: Naked in the chamber, glumbucket, Brexit, Frexit, Nexit,
Brixit, hung parliament, negotiating parliament and Kobayashi
Maru

I am proud to have performed the minor role of “crossword consultant” for this excellent episode of Inside No 9, The Riddle of the Sphinx:

I’m further proud to have filled the role of some kind of muse:

• BBC Two, 10pm, 28 Feb 2017
• Two Girls, One on Each Knee
• Steve Pemberton set the episode’s crossword as ‘Sphinx’, which is also the Guardian’s cryptic on the day of broadcast
• Interview with Sphinx at the Guardian crossword blog
• More Inside No 9

I am a proud member of Team 2016 Wipe, which is broadcast after Christmas.

Update 14 May 2017: Bafta winner, Comedy & Comedy Entertainment Programme

• 9pm, 29 December 2016, BBC Two
• More Wipes

Kevin Bishop is Nigel Farage, in a programme imagining his life after resigning. Blurb:

“On the 23rd June, Britain voted to leave the European Union,” added the BBC. “Then, on the 4th July, Nigel Farage, the man who had made it all possible, resigned saying he wanted his life back. But what sort of life has he gone back to, and how does a man forever in the spotlight fill his days now he has nothing to do?”

(more…)

Series 12 of Only Connect, with me in the question-editor chair, begins tonight on BBC Two at 8.30pm.

“It’s a safe space, where a very specifically talented group of people get to show off in their own understated way for an audience of their peers. And this is what makes it so brilliant.” – Stuart Heritage, Guardian

“…that will surely be the highlight of the week for all lovers of uncompromisingly smart television” – James Walton, Telegraph

“What is the link between these numbers? 285,000, 684,000, 1.1m, 2.9m. The answer is they are soaring viewers figures for Only Connect, the toughest quiz on television, which began as a BBC4 obscurity and has now overtaken BBC1 in the ratings.” – Adam Sherwin, Independent

“Only Connect: the best quiz on TV?” – Radio Times

• “Victoria Coren Mitchell on nerd pride and finding Only Connect’s niche”

I’m on The One Show this evening, discussing spying and crosswords with Gyles Brandreth.

• 1900, Tue 15 Mar, BBC1

Update: Luddites can see The Rack Pack on terrestrial TV during the World Snooker Championships c2130, 30 April at 10pm, 16 July, BBC2.

The first drama feature film for iPlayer is out on Sunday [ trailer | playlist ]. It’s about Alex Higgins and these men:

Detailing the complex relationship between Steve Davis and Alex Higgins, and the part played in it by Hearn, the sport’s ringmaster, the film is by turns hilarious and tear-jerking. Its re-creation of an era of quite magnificent sleaze is so precise you can almost feel your shoes sticking to the snooker hall carpets as you watch — Jim White, Telegraph

Delightful… What this is not is a cartoonish romp through snooker’s glory days. For the most part it is very moving. But despite all this, Shaun Pye, Mark Chappell and Alan Connor’s film is still a wonderful nostalgia fest for all us 1980s kids, hearing names you haven’t heard uttered for 30 years — Ben Dowell, Radio Times

Shifts beautifully between laugh-out-loud moments and characters pressing the self-destruct button — Alyson Rudd, Front Row, Radio 4

For 90 minutes of pure nostalgia, this takes some beating — Hector Nunns, Times

…hilariously recounts the tension between the pair.
Hearn has seen the film and says it is ‘absolutely fantastic‘. He goes on: ‘It captures exactly the spirit of that time, the conflict between Davis and Higgins and the birth of modern-day commercial snooker. I had to rub my eyes sometimes; it was as though I was watching the real thing. It’s sensational.
‘The film is brutally honest.’ — Tom Parry, Boudicca Fox-Leonard, Mirror

Snooker is famed as the perfect TV sport, but it never looks as good as this — Andrew Collins, Guardian

Snooker fans will have tuned in to the final of this year’s Masters on BBC Two, but over on iPlayer a more thrilling portrayal of the sport was playing out — Rachel Ward, Telegraph

…the only puzzle about The Rack Pack is why the corporation [is] uncertain how to categorise what is simply superb drama — Martin Hoyle, Financial Times

• A film by Brian Welsh
• Luke Treadaway, Will Merrick, Kevin Bishop, Nichola Burley, James Bailey
• Created and written by Shaun Pye, Mark Chappell, Alan Connor
• Producer Barney Reisz
• Executive Producer Peter Holmes
• Executive Producers Shane Allen, Victoria Jaye, Gregor Sharp

• BBC iPlayer, 9pm, 17 January 2016
• BBC2, 10pm, 16 July 2016

Here‘s a quickie Smashed Hits for the BBC News Magazine about Motörhead’s Ace of Spades:

Never mind what Lemmy said – with respect, Ace of Spades can be viewed as a metaphor. You could look at it as the Lemmy philosophy of living just how you want, in the full knowledge of the inevitable consequences.

(more…)

I am a proud member of Team 2015 Wipe, which is broadcast tomorrow.

• 9pm, 30 December 2015, BBC Two

A Smashed Hits piece for the BBC News Magazine about this year’s X Factor Winner’s Song, Bob Dylan’s Forever Young:

The Dylans decamped to rural New York state for some peace. They didn’t get it. The presence of Bob Dylan gave the tiny town of Woodstock such countercultural kudos that its name was given to an “aquarian exposition” – the famous 1969 festival in a neighbouring county which didn’t feature Dylan, but did bring half a million people into his back yard.

For some of them, “Dylan’s back yard” was no metaphor, and they never went away. The Dylans soon wearied of finding hippies in the trees around their home and Dylan became frightened that he might have to use his “clip-fed Winchester blasting rifle” to keep them from his family. Onwards, then, to an Arizona ranch.

(more…)

Tomorrow night, Live From Television Centre, a four-play theatrical collaboration with Battersea Arts Centre, is on BBC4.

I am proud to have made a contribution to the last part, Jess Thom‘s Broadcast from Biscuit Land, which also features Jess Mabel Jones and, fleetingly, me.

• 9pm, Sunday 15 November 2015, BBC Four
• Battersea Arts Centre blog post | BBC press release

Series 11 of Only Connect, with me in the question-editor chair, begins tonight on BBC Two at 8.30pm.

A piece about the origins of Louie Louie and the FBI’s investigation for the BBC News Magazine.

The Kingsmen noticed that their audiences now included middle-aged men in suits and shades and were soon questioned by the Feds, apparently being told: “You know we can put you so far away that your family will never see you again.”
They insisted that Louie Louie was innocent, but as ardently as they’d sought reds under the bed, and over the course of two-and-a-half years, the G-Men contrived a series of eye-wateringly unpalatable images and practices from Ely’s mumbles.

(more…)

I am a proud member of Team Election Wipe, the fruits of whose labours will be broadcast shortly before the polls open.

• 9pm, 6 May 2015, BBC Two

I am a proud member of Team 2014 Wipe, the fruit of whose toil will be on BBC Two on 30 December:

Update 29 Jan 2015: The new series of Weekly Wipe begins tonight:

• More episodes

On the 40th anniversary of Nick Drake‘s death, a short piece for the BBC News Magazine:

His first album, the pastoral Five Leaves Left, correspondingly begins with the lines: ‘Time has told me you’re a rare, rare find / A troubled cure for a troubled mind’.

The second, Bryter Layter, is purposefully upbeat and the last, Pink Moon, ends: ‘So look, see the sights, the endless summer nights / And go play the game that you learned from the morning’. This is music of comfort, not of despair; rebirth, not death.

Here’s the documentary mentioned, A Skin Too Few:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrmR_F5XgwQ

And there’s a John Peel version of my favourite track, Cello Song, at the Guardian.

• See also: Why does Everybody Hurt?
• A more fanciful piece on Drake, from 10 years ago
• Tree photo taken on the Thames, 3 Feb 2007

A piece for the BBC about how Brian Wilson and Tony Asher composed God Only Knows.

These conversations were fractured. Wilson, who had been denied a childhood, would break off to show Asher his mechanical parrots or to watch episodes of Flipper, an “aquatic Lassie” series about a dolphin which invariably reduced him to tears.

In time, Wilson played Asher the pieces of music he had in mind for an album called Pet Sounds and Asher essayed some lyrics to fit the themes Wilson had in mind. When they got to God Only Knows, things didn’t start well. Wilson felt that “I may not always love you” was absolutely the wrong way to kick off a love song. Too negative, he insisted.

Indebted to Nick Kent’s The Dark Stuff, Kingsley Abbott’s Pet Sounds: The Greatest Album of the Twentieth Century, Timothy White’s The Nearest Faraway Place: Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys and the Southern Californian Experience and Brian Wilson’s Wouldn’t it be Nice: My Own Story (with Todd Gold (and Eugene E Landy)).

• Other 60s pop dissected: What a Wonderful World; A Whiter Shade of Pale; Flowers in the Rain
• Much more on Murry Wilson at WFMU
• Image: South Pointe, Miami Beach