Thoughts for the day

Man On Wire is about 30 minutes too long and Philippe Petit is an unpleasant narcissist. (Good wire walker though.)

Gavin and Stacey has me frenziedly looking around for a noose and a hook. Alison Steadman and Rob Brydon: GET THE HELL OUTTA THERE!

Leonard Cohen at Mercedes Benz World, 11/07/09

Was Mercedes Benz World in Weybridge, Surrey the least appropriate place ever for a Leonard Cohen gig? Could the poetry of the Priest of Pathos sit well against this huge shrine to high-class motoring? Surely not.

But perhaps he’d carry it off. There is, after all, an inextricable connection between Cohen and this particular brand of car. (As I’m sure you don’t need reminding, at some point before or after she’d given LC head on the unmade bed of the Chelsea Hotel, Janis Joplin asked the Lord to buy her a Mercedes Benz…)

Well, anyway. It’s fair to say that in the end, it felt strange. Suzanne with her tea and Chinese oranges (they grow them in California too, Suze!), Marianne with her mild hysteria (the only explanation for laughing and crying in such quick succession) – they felt misplaced.

Tonight’s TV: Extreme Male Beauty, 10-11.05, Channel 4

Capturing the zeitgeist in a single image is never easy. But if one must be chosen to define our blessed age, it is surely a pair of man boobs. Moobs are not only a mainstay of conversation but, thanks to Virgin Active’s latest campaign, they’re even appearing writ large on the nation’s billboards. And now, along with hairy beanbags and shrivelled winkles, they’ve taken over the small screen. Exploring the pressure men face to look good, the format of ‘Extreme Male Beauty’ is tired (make-overs, plastic surgery, modelling competitions etc). By dint of following men rather than women, however, it just about succeeds. Expect lots of locker room chat about steroids, whether to coif down there and, of course, the moob – the biological name for which is ‘gynocomastia’. (Who knew?)