If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!QI takes two whole hours to record. That’s not two hours of stopping, stalling and chopping bits out, but two hours of full-on, unbroken chat. I know because we got tickets to see a recording tonight, at the London [...]

So if I reckon the UK on the whole can’t pick a winning Eurovision entry, how did our party do? We voted each song and performance on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 obviously being the best and 0 the worst. After collating them at the end of the night, these were our [...]

So my prediction came true. The UK didn’t win Eurovision last night. In fact, we crashed out and came joint last, polling votes from just Ireland and San Marino.
There has since been the inevitable talk of block voting by Eastern Europe, which saw Russia triumph, and Wogan is hinting that he may call an end [...]

Because we have a crap song. And a rubbish stageshow. I am so sick of people claiming that we don’t win any more because of some imaginary block voting going on in Eastern Europe. Stop with the paranoia.
Yes, they do all vote for each other - that I won’t deny - but it has nothing [...]

OK, so a long shot this one, as I think the first minute will put off a lot of voters, but get past what your grandmother might call ‘noise’ and it’s surprisingly catchy. Chances? Better than 50%, I think, but probably not better than 75%.
Still, here’s the official video, which is better than the [...]

…but then again, while I’d love for the Ukraine to win, there’s a good chance it could go to Sweden. They’re putting forward Charlotte Perrelli with Hero, which is about as stereotypical a Eurovision track as you can get:

And you know what? She won it once before already. In 1999 she sang Take Me to [...]

Well, perhaps, but I think the Ukraine has a very good chance of winning it this year with Shady Lady by Ani Lorak. Like Greece in the year they won, she seems to be touring pretty much the whole of Europe to get us familiar with the song.

The UK, unfortunately, is once again putting in [...]

Oh, Delia. What have you done? We don’t want to see you opening up packs of ready-mashed potato and laying them on top of minced beef you got from a tin. You’re about frumpy food made properly, using recipes that work, regardless of our lack of culinary expertise. Tonight, though, you were one step away [...]

The National Theatre did a special Valentines screening of Brief Encounter last night. It was a chilly outdoor showing, projected onto the wall of the Fly Tower, which looks out over the Thames, to an audience sat about in deck chairs, cocooned in blankets and rugs.
I’d never seen it before (although I thought I had), [...]

So the new Bond film is called Quantum of Solace. A strange choice, it sounds like sci-fi, but the actual story behind the name was nothing of the sort. It first appeared as a short tale in For Your Eyes Only, the volume of stories that also contained A View to a Kill.
But just as [...]