Category: BBC

London in a Minute

We love our laidback Bodrum life even when huddled under a duvet watching BBC Entertainment on a loop. There’s just enough to do in Bodrum to keep us entertained during the short days of winter – cafés, restaurants, cinema, people. The summer hassle has been replaced by a more civilised, gentile pace and we will savour it before the heat and the hustle returns. However, this winter has been different; we’ve been spending our days beavering away to plug the book to death. You’re probably fed hearing about it. I know I am. They’ll be no more talk of it until 2012, unless something dramatic happens like a nomination for the Booker Prize or a call from a TV executive asking to buy the rights. Of course, this is as likely as me losing my virginity, but if the impossible happens, Liam wants to be played by Jude Law. He’s suggested that Danny DeVito might step into my pink slippers.

We’re really looking forward to our flying visit to Blighty for our big city Christmas fix. Bugger the doom and gloom and the whinging soothsayers who seem to wallow in the misery of others. We’re going to have fun in our home town.

Cue the cute London in a Minute video courtesy of Travel Yourself

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Perking the Pansies – Jack and Liam move to Turkey

Blighted Blighty

Blighted Blighty

 

I received a witty email from Blighty life friend, Ian. No, that’s not him in the photo. As youngish singletons, he and I cruised across Europe and beyond, seeking high jinks and low frolics. Amsterdam, Paris, Gran Canaria, Sitges, Istanbul, Croydon – nowhere was safe. These days we’re both hitched and respectable pillars of the community.

Ian wrote:

Hope all’s well in your world and you are gearing up for an uneventful Brit visit. It’s relentless doom and gloom here, of course, with a daily update of Angela Merkel’s hair-do on the News and Cameron getting redder and redder as the weeks pass. The British media are loving exploring all the Doomsday scenarios, obviously. Still, Harry from Mcfly is still in Strictly so there’s something to swoon over as we all sink into the abyss. Hope your launch is massive. The Champoo is on you!

Strictly Coming Dancing, the opium of the masses. Good old Auntie Beeb. Harry is rather fetching, though. He’d certainly keep my mind off the overdraft.

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Perking the Pansies – Jack and Liam move to Turkey

Beautiful People

Laugh Out Loud Stuff

I took a much-needed break from promoting Perking the Pansies. I switched on the TV, put my feet up and settled down to  watch Beautiful People on BBC Entertainment. The series is from the magical pen of Jonathan Harvey, the creative comic genius behind Beautiful Thing (one of my favourite films) and Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, the deliciously wicked, surreal TV comedy starring James Dreyfus and the inimitable Kathy Burke. There’s a reason I’m wittering on about this: something interesting cropped up in one of the episodes, How I Got My Water Feature, inspired by the British national obsession in the late Nineties with Ground Force (a gardening makeover programme featuring the bouncing, bra-less breasts of Charlie Dimmock). One of the characters came out with the immortal line ‘We’re just planting perky pansies.’ I recoiled in horror. I’d never seen this episode before I started the blog. Honest, Your Honour. Will Jonathan sue me for breach of copyright? I hope not. Maybe a case of great minds think alike? Even if Mr Harvey’s mind is a significantly greater than mine.

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Will the Real Jack Scott Please Stand Up?

Google sits astride the internet like a leviathan. Forget Yahoo or Bing or a host of smaller search engines, only Google counts. Their search algorithms can make or break an online presence. If you don’t show up in the first few pages of Google, you may as well not be on the internet at all. It’s all about search engine optimisation (SEO) and ways to make it better. There’s an entire industry dedicated to improving it (or trying to cheat the clever geeks at Google). How’s a humble little jobbing blogger in a faraway country most people couldn’t place on a map ever going to make his mark? Well, Perking the Pansies does well. Google favours fresh, frequently renewed content and my content is frequently renewed, if not fresh. Sorted.

1923 -2008

Little Jack Scott, though, struggles. The name is a curse. It’s eclipsed by other more illustrious Jacks plastered all over the web. Who are these pretenders to my rightful throne? Well, there’s Jack Scott, (AKA Giovanni Dominico Scafone Jr) the Canadian singer ‘undeniably the greatest Canadian rock and roll singer of all time,’ apparently. I’d never heard of him. Sorry. Then there’s the late Jack Scott, buck-teethed weather man who died in 2008. He was everyone’s favourite weather guru and brought magnetic weather symbols to live broadcasts on the BBC. Unfortunately, they often slipped down the board or dropped off altogether. My final Jack is the now infamous Mayor of the little town of Cordova in Alabama which was flattened by killer tornadoes earlier this year. Mayor Scott refused to allow trailers into the town to house the newly homeless because he didn’t want to encourage trailer trash. Sounds like a fine and upstanding pillar of the community.

So, what’s a diminutive, washed-up ex pretty boy with his best years behind him to do? Change his name to Dick Stillhard (no wait, that’s already taken).

Thanks to Spainstruck for the inspiration for this one.

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Pussy Galore

Continuing the pussy theme from yesterday, Liam came across this splendid little video montage of Mrs Slocombe from Are You Being Served, played by the marvelous Mollie Sugden, a jobbing comedy actress who sadly died in 2009 after a long illness. Many people will remember that Mrs Slocombe was always having a bit of bother with her pussy. Obvious, lewd and unsophisticated? Certainly. Funny? Absolutely. A bit like me. Sit back and enjoy.


Strictly Come Dancing

We logged on to the VPN, plugged the laptop in to the widescreen and relaxed with tucker on trays for an unadulterated pleasure night of British TV. We’re making the most of it before the dull hand of the Turkish censor bans our innocent fun. Top of our bill was the class act that is Strictly Come Dancing live on Auntie.  A gay boy needs his fix of spectacle, salsa and sequins on a cool autumn evening. For us, Russell Grant, the frockless fat drag queen, was the astrological star of the show. Mystic Meg never predicted that.

Liam and I were fascinated by Lulu’s fabulous facelift, so much better than the trout pout sported by Felicity Kendall last year (to who, by the way, I used to sell light bulbs to in Habitat circa 1979). You really do get what you pay for.

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No Frills Thrills

Today’s the day we bid au revoir to our friends in Bordeaux and board the no frills flight to Gatwick, stay overnight in a no frills Sussex hotel and board another no frills flight home to thrilling Bodrum. This is a no frills post. Normal broadcasts will be resumed shortly.

This is most famous test card of all, Test Card F, still in use today by the BBC and used in 30 other countries. Designed by George Hersee and featuring his daughter Carole Hersee, it made its first appearance on BBC2 in 1967. I remember this so well, growing up before 24 hour multi-channel TV took over our lives. I wonder where she is now?

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A Star is Born

The Homecoming

We’re All Asians Really

We’re All Asians Really

Geographically, Anatolian Turkey is in Asia and Thracian Turkey is in Europe. A simple glance at a map confirms it. Istanbul is not called the city that straddles two continents for nothing. For commercial convenience, the whole of Turkey is often classified as Europe for such things as travel insurance and flights. Lonely Planet lists Turkey under Eastern Europe and the Caucasus when it is part of neither (apart from Thrace). Is Turkey also part of the Middle East? This is less clear. The Middle East is an ill-defined term that always includes Arabic countries, but may or may not include the nations of North Africa (who speak Arabic) and may or may not include non-Arabic Iran. Where does Cyprus fit in? It’s closer to Asia than to Europe and the Greek side is part of the European Union (nominally on behalf of the whole Island but that’s another story).

Does any of it matter? Certainly not to long gone conquerors who marched across Asia Minor from all points of the compass at the drop of a helmet. Take a look at this to see what I mean.

It only matters to me when trying to catch the weather forecast on BBC World. The Beeb doesn’t seem to know where Turkey is either and generally ignores us altogether. Consider this. Geologically, Europe isn’t a continent at all. It’s an appendage to Asia with an arbitrary border drawn along the Ural and Caucasus Mountains. Those in the know describe the entire landmass as Eurasia. You see we’re all Asians really.

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Mobiles and Megaphones

A short and narrow lane runs along the side of our new house leading to a modest block of flats rented out to itinerant workers. Judging by the constant throng of virile young men who pass to and fro, the building is either the TARDIS in disguise or these poor boys are topping and tailing in sardine shifts. Understandably, such enforced intimacy presents privacy problems. My enjoyment of the latest edge of seat clinical dilemma in Casualty (or Doctors or Holby City)  is regularly and loudly interrupted by a Kurd bellowing down his mobile phone outside our window. Anatolians use their mobiles like megaphones. When our new neighbour, bubbly Beril, talks to her friends she doesn’t really need to use her phone as they can hear her in Ankara without it.

The Wedding

We watched the royal nuptials with friends surrounded by homespun bunting, Union flags lovingly coloured in felt tip pens and attached to straws, and photocopied mini-flags on cocktail sticks. We feasted on a celebratory spread of British fare with a Turkish twist – spicy Cornish pasties for the fellas, scones for the ladies, fairy cakes for the pansies. Intellectually I’m a republican but emotionally I’m a true blue royalist. It’s a contradiction I manage to fudge with typically British pragmatism.

We had a joyous time stuffing our faces, sipping Pimms, waving our patriotic pennants and whooping at the hotchpotch of heavenly and hideous frocks. Princess Bea’s head dress could pick up intelligent life on other planets and Anne wrapped herself in her granny’s tablecloth that she’d run up on a Singer. Her Maj, of course, is above fashion. Harry looked dapper in his uniform. He’s the best of the bunch even though he’s a ginger. I’ve forgiven his faux pas with Nazi party attire some years ago. I put it down to youthful exuberance and stupidity. The Windsor-Mountbattens aren’t blessed with much up top. The Abbey looked magnificent and the majestic pageant was delivered to perfection in a way only the British know how. It gladdened my heart to see Elton John and his Civil Partner, David Furnish, in attendance. The final nail in the coffin of bigotry? Well, perhaps.

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I’ve heard it said that the whole jamboree was a waste of time and money in these days of austerity and the terrible events occurring around the globe. What’s wrong with forgetting the woes of the world just for one day and enjoying the fairytale moment? I hope the dysfunctional Firm have learned the Diana lesson and gorgeous Kate will be allowed to flourish in a thoroughly modern way.