My favourite comic strip of all time is The Perishers . Published in the Daily Mirror from the late 50s until 2006 it could be taken at first glance as something of a Peanuts rip-off. After all, it features only children and animals - and the central characters are a boy and his dog (whose thoughts are revealed to be very human-like). However, in reality the feel and the humour is totally different and entirely British. At its best, The Perishers  is a total delight. One of the strip's features is a series of running jokes, some of which carried on for decades. For example, on summer holiday excursions, the characters regularly take a look in a rock pool, where the crabs believe they are being visited by their equivalent of UFOs which they refer to as 'the eyes in the sky', often having failed protests or attempts to take on the invaders. Other continuing jokes are just small features that bring on a smile, one being the teddy belonging to Baby Grumpling, a cynical toddler...

To get into this topic I have to admit to a guilty pleasure - when I want to have a totally undemanding half hour in front of the TV to unwind, I rather enjoy the quiz show, Pointless . But the last episode I watched made me think that C. P. Snow's ' Two cultures ' is alive and well on the BBC. In 1959, Snow explored the painful divide between the science and the arts - and the imbalance in that divide culturally. He pointed out that while we expect scientists to appreciate the arts - and the vast majority do - those from the 'arts' side of the divide (which includes most broadcasters and journalists) considered it almost a badge of honour that they knew nothing about the sciences. In many ways (and, dare I say it, in part due to good popular science books and broadcasting) that divide is weaker than it once was - but Pointless presenter Alexander Armstrong (a man with an English degree) demonstrated painfully that there is still a strong support for this sad...

I was interested to see that the  Rough Guides folk have declared that Birmingham is one of the top ten cities in the world to visit . If I am honest, my opinion of Birmingham has significantly improved lately. It used to be that I thought of it as a place of awful concrete public spaces like the Mk I Bullring. And it had this bizarre idea that it was the UK's second city, when everyone with any sense realised that the second city was actually Manchester. But I've been visiting regularly over the last couple of years and Birmingham is now genuinely a 'vibrant city' as they say in the guides. (Though still a bit of dump when you drive in down the Hagley Road.) There is, however, from my viewpoint, one strange piece of parochialism in the Rough Guides choice. Because one of Birmingham's selling points was its vast cultural diversity in restaurants and the like. Now, for me, this is certainly a plus for domestic visitors, but a turn-off for the world market. When ...

I agree with Dave (sort of) I will be honest, this does not come easy to me, but I sort of agree with David Cameron about something. Don't get over-excited, I have not gone over to the dark side. George Osborne is still not on my Christmas card list. But I did get rather irritated about the flak Cameron received for daring to suggest that the UK is a Christian nation. The critics point out that most of us aren't practising Christians, and this is true, but entirely misses the point. The enthusiasts for multiculturalism, no doubt the same ones who bemoan Cameron's remarks, are always quick to say that we ought to encourage everyone to cherish their cultural heritage, not to forget it. And to suggest that our cultural heritage in the UK is not Christian is perverse. Of course Cameron got it wrong in the detail. He should have said CofE not Christian as they aren't identical concepts, and that's what is central to our cultural heritage. And of course it isn...

For Christmas I got a DVD set that took me back to my youth. It was the Granada comedy series The Lovers . I hadn't seen this programme, written by the late, great Jack Rosenthal, since it was first broadcast in 1970/71 and was a little nervous, because at the time I thought it was brilliant. In fact, despite the inevitable ageing, going on the first episode (all I've seen so far) it has in many ways stood the test of time, because it was genuinely unique in style and approach. The show features Geoffrey and Beryl, who have just got back together after going out a while before. The basic premise sounds tired and dated - Geoffrey wants to have sex, Beryl wants to get married - but the way it is handled makes it far more interesting. After all, it was a new world. As Geoffrey points out, in the trendy 70s 'everyone is at it', so why not? There are two things that made the series great - and still make it watchable, though not as funny as it once was. The first is th...

I know I am going to infuriate some musical tastes here, but I really don't get the appeal of Bob Dylan. Part of the problem is likely to be that, musically speaking, I am a child of the 70s rather than the 60s. I didn't buy my first album until 1970 (admittedly that was the Beatles, but it was late Beatles), so I never felt any of the emotional attachment that many do to the whole ethos of the 60s - but what that means is that I listen to Dylan as music per se, and to my mind he comes up wanting. My modernised folk (I think folk rock is too heavy a term) heroes would be Simon & Garfunkel and Al Stewart (who I saw perform last Saturday - at age 68, he is still going strong, unlike certain croaky elderly types, naming no names). For me they are streets ahead of Dylan. Now don't start moaning to me how my choices are much too light and fluffy, and not meaningful enough. I'm talking about their merits as songwriters, not as revolutionaries. Don't be an intell...

The use of statistics by the media is something that constantly drives me round the bend. (At least, it does 90% of the time.) Now the BBC has wound me up by combining science, gender issues and, yes, statistics. To be fair these are not blatant errors, but rather that hoary old standard, not being scrupulous about separating correlation and causality. As we saw with the infamous high heels and schizophrenia study , even academics can be prone to this, but the media does it every day. One very common example is where they tell us on the news that the stock market went up or down as a result of some event. Rubbish. In most circumstances the stock market is far too chaotic a system to attribute a change to an event that happened around the same time. It's guesswork and worthless. Here, the misuse is slightly more subtle. 'Girls who take certain skills-based science and technology qualifications outperform boys in the UK, suggest figures' says the relatively mild headl...

The shrine of the literary trainspotter I gather Sunday, apart from being Father's Day, was also 'Bloomsday' the day when James Joyce fans with nothing better to do celebrate their master's work. You might suspect that I am not among their number - and you would be right. I have had a couple of attempts at reading Joyce and failed miserably. In part it is because I absolutely hate stream of consciousness. I have never, ever seen it work acceptably. It is just boring . But also because, while I am prepared to put some effort into reading a book - I don't expect it all to be effortless page-turning - I do expect the author to have some expertise in putting information across, and, frankly, I think Joyce is terrible at it. This is rather similar to my beef with the kind of artists where it is impossible to appreciate their work without an instruction book. Art should communicate. If you need help to understand it, it is bad art. It might take time for the langu...

Don't expect much entertainment here I was listening to James Naughtie on his series about the ' New Elizabethans ', being reverential (as he always is about anything arty) about Harold Pinter and his work. There was much discussion of how Pinter's plays represented real life, with all its contradictions, without resolution, without true endings. How it's wonderful that everything is left in the air and unexplained. And it struck me exactly why such theatre isn't exactly commercial. The fact is, we can all experience real life and real conversations and contradictions and lack of resolution. We can all be left in the air and have things unexplained. It happens every day. That's where we live. We don't need to go to a theatre to experience it. The fact that Pinter encapsulates it wonderfully is a big 'so what?' It makes for theatre that is about as engaging as Big Brother. We don't want to go to a theatre to see real life, we want to b...

The other day I was listening to a bit of hard core, or possibly thrash metal, the way you do. At least, the way you do if your children insist on listening to Radio 1 sometime around midnight when you pick them up, even if they can't stand the music. And I had a bit of an epiphany. For a long time I have struggled to articulate why I dislike rap so much - and hearing this stuff made me realize what the answer is. I didn't enjoy the hardcore/thrash sounds that were coming from the car speakers. It really wasn't my kind of thing. The closest you'll find on my iPod is somewhere between Van der Graaf Generator and Pink Floyd at their most destructive. But I could appreciate what I was hearing as music. It clearly was someone producing music, and what they were doing had obvious antecedents in the musical tradition. What I hear when I listen to a rap 'song' has a totally different antecedent. Where those extreme forms of rock grew from heavy metal, which came ou...

Don't get too excited now, but my photograph has appeared in Playboy magazine. (December issue if you're interested.) Here it is: Okay, not necessarily what you were thinking of, but that's definitely my photo and you can take my word for it that it's a cutting from Playboy , specifically the edition shown here. I must confess that I have never bought a copy of Playboy (no, honestly), so I was always very dubious about those people who claimed that they only bought it for the articles - but I must admit there was a lot more text in it than there were dubious photographs (and they were relatively tasteful). And, of course, all the great writers had pieces published in this august journal. As the 'playbill' intro suggests, what is featured is a piece adapted from How to Build a Time Machine , so if you're a regular Playboy reader (for the articles, of course), you can get a bit of a preview of some of the material on offer. They've done quite a dramat...

One of the joys of writing a blog is that years later people can still discover the articles you wrote. Recently I've had an interesting comment on a post I wrote back in 2010 on why I'm not a great enthusiast for opera . I'd like to let you see Mr/Ms Anonymous' comment in all its glory: Appalling ignorance of classical music (its history) in general, and of opera in particular. The author has NO feel for the genre, and how could he possibly understand the funding side of things unless he loved the music? He doesn't, and his ignorance fuels his rant of public support. In Europe, where opera companies and orchestras receive state funding, culture is appreciated with an understanding of its true value. Worthless article.   Now I responded as follows: Dear Anonymous, someone with your obvious cultural depth will obviously understand what 'ad hominem' means and why intelligent people regard it as the most pathetic form of argument. I am also impresse...

Our village church has relatively recently had a new stained glass window fitted (the one pictured) and it has made me realize what an undervalued artform stained glass is. If this had been an ordinary painting, hung on the wall, I would have glanced at it once as I passed it, but probably not looked again. But in the stained glass form, time after time I've stopped and looked. The glowing colours just cry out to be stared at (much more so than in the photograph). When you think about it, this is a kind of art with so much going for it - it doesn't just deal with image and colour, it deals with raw light. This is painting with light, and a light the varies with time of day at that - it can be stunning. Back in Victorian times there was huge amount of bad stained glass produced (and some excellent stuff - quite well known artists like the Pre-Raphaelite Burne Jones indulged), which I think gave stained glass a fusty, old fashioned image. I know there has been some excellen...

I heard an academic moaning on the radio the other day that some programme was about Western civilization. 'Why should we single out the West [to talk about]?' (s)he whinged. Why not? Yes, we should be fair and tolerant, but what's wrong with having a particular interest in our own culture and background? Take this down to a smaller scale. I'm more interested in my family than the Blinge family of Clacton-on-Sea. I'm sorry, but it's true - and it would be ridiculous if I weren't. I can understand the importance of being inclusive, and all those good things, but it is equally important that in the process of appreciating everyone else's culture and history we don't lose sight of our own. We have a great cultural and scientific heritage in the UK. We did things wrong. Lots of things. Just like everyone else. Only they get on with their lives and don't beat themselves up for dubious moments in history. (How often do you hear Scandinavians saying...

Many moons ago, when the world was young and children nonexistent, we had a family outing to Washington D.C. to stay with friends who were living there. I can promise we did not set out to offend, yet looking back, in just two days we managed to get in trouble with military police, risked seriously offending the locals... and committed what surely is an offence with a kite. The military police episode verges on the farcical. We were driving to Arlington Cemetery and took the wrong turn, driving into the military base next door. So sure was our host of his navigation that we swept past the security gates without a second look (no doubt these days we would have been shot). But having found out we were in the wrong place, on the way out we stopped by military police with big guns, asking what we were doing and how we got there. They couldn't understand how we had got in without being questioned, but eventually took pity on us as foreigners. As for being offensive, we later visited...

As I've observed previously, I've been involved in music in my spare time as long as I can remember. My particular favourite genre is Tudor and Elizabethan church music - rather specialist, I admit - though I'll happily sing (and have sung) practically anything. I also conduct a village choir, and it's indirectly from this that my concern arises. The choir is affiliated to an organization called the Royal School of Church Music , which sounds very grand (and sometimes considers itself to be very grand), but is really just a practical support group for choirs performing church music. Every quarter, the RSCM produces the imaginatively titled Church Music Quarterly . In the most recent issue it was suggested we should all investigate church music from different cultures, which is fair enough in principle. But one of the articles went further and told us that every service ought to involve a piece from another culture, preferably involving singing a language we don'...

I was listening to an analysis of BP 's rising problems of anti-British antagonism in the US over the oil spill yesterday, and couldn't believe what I heard. In hindsight, said a commentator, putting (British) chief executive Tony Hayward in the US media was a mistake. They would have been better to have used an American executive to be the voice of BP. There were lessons to learn. This is a terrible excuse. It's a bit like saying after spending millions developing a perpetual motion machine , 'We should have learned the lessons of thermodynamics.' It's not news, guys, it's basic stuff. You should have known already. Have these people never watched an American movie? Generally speaking, if a man has a British accent, he's a baddy. (Women are allowed to have British accents and not be bad - this is apparently less threatening.) US culture hammers home time and again that you can't trust the British guy. Even the way they speak isn't right -...

I accused my agent of being a hi-fi geek the other day, because his sound recording equipment has a valve in its amplifier. He made the observation that no one bothers about hi-fi anymore, and it got me thinking - as is all too often true, he's right. When I was at university I had individual component hi-fi. I had big, chunky speakers, which I carefully positioned so that I got a good stereo field when sitting in the right place. My first decent speakers were heavy. I know this because I lugged those Monitor Audio beauties all the way from the specialist shop near the railway station to my college - and anyone who knows Cambridge knows that this is a serious walk to be carrying speakers with the approximate weight of a large dog. Now, what you see is what I've got. A titchy Sony mini system, which I've not even bothered to separate the speakers on. And half the time the input is coming from that little box on top, which feeds MP3s or WMAs from my PC via the wireless netwo...