grumpyf1

Two words can strike terror into the heart of any parent – School play. If you’re lucky, it’ll be a tolerable affair, with some half-decent acting and not too many fumbled lines, set disasters, or one of the actors falling down and/or throwing up. At their worst, they can feel like they’re going on for days, and you start to wonder if the drama teacher is deliberately trying to get themselves fired. The choice of play often doesn’t help. An earnest Shakespearian outing, Guys and Dolls with awkward faux-American accents, or an ill-advised performance of Grease, anyone? Thought not. A school in the US has upped the stakes somewhat, by performing an adaptation of scary 1979 sci-fi blockbuster, Alien. Yes, it had the chest-bursting junior alien scene, too. Originally starring Sigourney Weaver as tough-as-nails spaceship Nostromo warrant officer Ellen Ripley, the film did a fine job of scaring the hell out of cinema-goers. In the following four decades, the alien-slowly-wipes-ou...

I like things to be neat and tidy. Half the fun of playing with toys as a kid was making sure I’d packed them neatly away in the box afterwards. Take Monopoly; banknotes in denominational order, all the right way up and round. Property cards in the order they are around the direction of travel on the board (although I always had an existential crisis about the utility companies – mixed in with the streets, or grouped together as a set? I can feel my anxiety levels rising just thinking about it). Thankfully, I’m all grown up now, and if you’re presuming that my record collection is filed in alphabetical order of artist, then sub-ordered by year of release, and that I iron my underpants then you’re wrong. Only one of those is true. It’s comforting to know that it isn’t only other humans that have a need to keep things tidy. There’s a mouse near Bristol who seems to have taken it upon itself to keep Steve Mckears’ shed neat. After mixing up some bird seed, Steve was surprised ...

Formula 1 roars back into the lives of armchair motorsport fans this weekend, with the first race of 2019 taking place in Australia on Sunday. If you’ve paid up to watch the races on Sky, congratulations – you get all of the races live, and an extra Button too, with the former F1 champion, Jenson, joining their presenting line up. If, like me, you’ll be watching it on Channel 4... well, there’s less to be excited about. Only the British GP will be live, as a deal signed by former F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone kicks in, giving Sky the rights to show all other races exclusively live in the UK. Instead, Channel 4 will have highlights only. Cue the tricky task of trying to avoid picking up your phone, turning on the laptop, or watching TV/listening to the radio for half a day after the race has finished, to try and avoid an unwelcome “and the winner was...” situation. Plus, some awkward late-night timeslots. Formula when..?! Sky’s big promo film also conspicuously used Fleetwood M...

1745. That’s how many CDs I own. Yeah... that is quite a lot, isn’t it? Whilst prices vary enormously, at a rough estimate that means I’ve spent around £10,000 on music. Of course, that ignores the cassettes, CD singles, and vinyl 7”, 12” and albums. If only there had been some handy way of just paying a sum each month and listening to whatever I wanted – I wouldn’t have a wall full of shiny silver discs. Just to depress myself, let’s assume a streaming music service (like Spotify) costs £10 a month. On that basis, I could have used it for 1,000 months for the same outlay as the CDs alone. Or about 83 years. Ah. Still, there’s something nice about having a physical product, and I’d always presumed I was the righteous one – until I got the calculator out a couple of minutes ago. For those of you fortunate enough to be growing up in the time of streaming services for music, and video content, you can get just about anything recorded, ever, to enjoy whenever and wherever you w...

There’s a pretty good chance that you’ve never heard of Mark Hollis. Even though he was in the news this week, following his untimely death at the age of 64, the passing of the 80s musician briefly made the front pages of news websites in the UK, but was quickly displaced by Brexit shenanigans, the unseasonably warm weather, and yet more Brexit. Hollis was the lead singer of the band Talk Talk, who formed in 1981. Over roughly the following decade, they released a couple of dozen singles and a handful of albums, with top chart positions of 13 for a reissue of the “It’s My Life” single and 8 for the “The Colour Of Spring” album. Somewhat hard to categorise, calling them “synth-pop” somewhat unfairly implies an overtly poppy, lightweight, sound – and they were far from that. As their music became more experimental in the mid-eighties, “post-rock” or “art rock” might be fairer. They did sound different to everyone else – and hypnotically so in some cases, with hints of early Rox...

They don't write 'em like that any more, do they..? I don’t want to imply that I’m some sort of tough guy, but I didn’t even sniffle when Jack slipped into the icy depths at the end of “Titanic”. There was no lip-trembling when Bambi’s mum died either. Excluding the time I realised I’d run out of coffee and the shop was shut, I’ve avoided tears for some considerable time. A story from America tested my resolve this week, though. A chap called Matt, from St. Louis in Missouri, sold a VHS player on eBay. (Don’t laugh – we only got rid of ours last year.) His old-school tech sale received a similarly vintage-format response from the buyer, in the form of a letter through the post. It came from an 86 year old man In Phoenix, Arizona, who praised Matt for “your care, your efforts, and your promptness”. Wow –someone actually thanking someone for something. That’s got me pretty emotional already. The old chap’s story is so much more than that though. Having found a pile of...

Cumbria is home to many amazing visitor attractions. The county boasts myriad places to go and things to do, including delights such as the World Of Beatrix Potter, the Ravenglass & Eskdale Railway and historic Dove Cottage. Hell, we’ve even got the Cumberland Pencil Museum. But lurking over the border in North Yorkshire, something new is coming, something so daring, it could steal away our valuable tourist trade. It is... ‘Sausage World’. Go on, admit it – you want to go already. Food producer Heck have had plans for a visitor attraction and expansion of their factory in Kirklington approved by councillors, and the new building for groups will doubtlessly draw in the crowds seeking a sighting of sausages, or cheeky chipolata-based action. It’s bound to go with a bang(er). Co-founder of the company, Andrew Keeble, reckons it will attract “loads of school trips”, before revealing that their machine can turn out a staggering 1,300 sausages every minute. Who doesn’t want to ...