“Paedophile priests – The wrath of the Pope” screamed the headline in La Repubblica last week, mirroring the general news coverage of Papa Ratzi’s stern words on the topic addressed to visiting Irish Bishops. A two page spread followed in the paper, informing Italian readers who, perhaps behind the times, may not have heard about […]
Unilever’s public-spirited campaign to make women feel the need to purchase their beauty products continues. The latest manoeuvre is an interview on the subject of beauty and self-esteem with a sociologist in Wysokie Obcasy, the teeth-grindingly awful ladies’ weekend supplement to the crusading Gazeta Wyborcza. This colour magazine specialises in finding women who are (or […]
When writing, or even reading, history there is always an inclination to interpret the past teleologically–that is to assess the importance of events according to how they contributed to some apparently pre-ordained outcome. This inclination veers into overwhelming impulse when the history in question is that of Germany’s. Given that the Third Reich’s reign of […]
This week’s Nie tells of the predicament of an Armenian small trader in Poland. In brief, he has been refused permission to continue residing in the country because, well yes, he is paying his own way, and yes, he is employing a few Polish people and no he’s no burden on society and he’s not […]
The story goes like this: Le Iene, an irreverent investigative/satirical programme (which given the restrictive nature of Italian TV is no mean feat), posing as a team from a fictional TV channel, outside Italy
Italian TV schedules have over the last four or five years fallen prey to the ‘reality’ format. The initial success of Grande Fratello [Big Brother] led executives in both the public (RAI) and private networks (most noticeably Berlusconi’s Mediaset) scrambling to import various other simple, and most-importantly, tele-votable formats. An industry has sprung up providing […]
There was an advertisement for a mobile phone company before this film in the London cinema where I saw it. It presented a sequence of life-changing moments. A father stares from the screen and falteringly embarks upon a momentous confession, to a child ‘old enough to know now’. Or an actress, fixing the camera with […]
Southern Romania. On the buses that carry you between the small towns along the bank of the Danube a curious arrangement is in operation. At each stop the driver passes up and down the aisle collecting new fares. He offers me a student fare, for example, and then knocks ten per cent off that. To […]
Maybe Neil Hannon has lived a charmed life.Right now he's in London doing promotional work, appearing on Later with Jools Holland and the Jonathon Ross radio show, to promote his latest work under the guise of the Divine Comedy, Victory for the Comic Muse . He's back where he ventured more than a decade ago […]