Ben Wilkinson

There can be weeks when I find very little to engage on BBC2's The Review Show (formerly Newsnight Review , though the name change seems to have accompanied nothing more than the sickly new colour scheme of its redesigned set), so it was a pleasant surprise to see Chris Morris , Britain's foremost satirist and creator of series The Day Today (1994) and Brass Eye (1997), featured on the show this week, having finished his latest project, a darkly comic film about a bunch of hapless, amateur terrorists based in Sheffield. I'd almost forgotten about the movie, having last read about Morris's current project when I stumbled across a letter, "The absurd world of Martin Amis " , in the Guardian a few years back, in which Morris takes the bestselling author to task for "prowling the thickets of his research [into Islam and terrorism] like a demented flasher". But as Morris's first film, and given his reputation for dealing with difficult topics (su...

A friend pointed me to this the other day, and quite funny it is too - footage of the BBC's popular reality show The Apprentice , painstakingly edited so as to make a monkey out of Sugar and its contestants (though they often do a fair job of that themselves). Contains some strong language though, so don't watch if you're easily offended. And while we're on the subject of The Apprentice - does anyone actually know what job it is that the winner gets? Organising the stationery at Amstrad HQ? Or perhaps researching new areas for Sugar's businesses to expand into - as in Harry Hill's gag about 'Amsstairs' ("No, we don't sell 'amsters, we sell Amsstairs")? Any suggestions welcome.

J.C., who writes the N.B. column on the back page of the TLS , is renowned for his wicked, witty and acerbic sense of humour. So it was with some suspicion that, in reading through back issues of the supplement recently, I approached his coverage of 'the Nicholas Mosley Award for the most inadvisable book title of 2007-08'. Sure enough, Googling its title only brings up another blogger's speculation as to the award's existence, which looks almost certainly to be one of J.C.'s inventions. What's best about the whole thing, however, is the seemingly unlikely titles of the award's shortlisted contenders, including Foreskin's Lament: A memoir by Shalom Auslander, Shut Up He Explained by John Metcalf, and Random Deaths and Custard by Catrin Dafydd, with previous winners including How To Shit in the Woods by Kathleen Meyer and Pox Americana by Elizabeth Fenn. Too ridiculous to believe? Well, though the award may not, all of these books do actually exist ....

OK, OK... I know there are easier targets to pick on in the world of hackneyed, cliché-ridden song lyric writing than the otherwise talented Dizzee Rascal . I'm actually a pretty big fan of some of his work, particularly 'Fix Up, Look Sharp' from his precociously impressive first album, Boy in da Corner , and the unfortunately titled but belting Brit-hop Grime single 'Pussy'Ole (Old Skool)' from his third release, Maths + English . But this little snippet of comedy gold is just too good to ignore, revealing as it does the way in which music artists half-disguise such lyrical junk with their vocalisations - which in Dizzee's case, is through rapid-fire, often double dutch style rapping. Get a well-spoken, middle-class radio presenter called Carrie to 'rap' along to the song's tune, however, and what makes for highly danceable Brit-hop descends into the complete farce it lyrically is, and not just because the girl can't rap or sing. I'd rec...

With the Hay Festival in full swing the Guardian have devised an interesting little article that I guess must appear in one of the paper's supplements today (almost always reading the Guardian online means I've pretty much forgotten the format of the thing). The gist of it is as follows: one 'sharp and intelligent mind' from the festival asks another just one question, and the responses (as indeed the questions) vary from the insightful and illuminating to the downright ridiculous and hilarious. See Will Self's question to Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire on the ancient aurochs of Chatsworth, for example. Anyway, here's poet and novelist Simon Armitage showing his northern roots, questioning fellow poet Glyn Maxwell: Armitage: Q . Where's that 20 quid I loaned you in Reykjavik? Maxwell: A. I put it all on Londoners one day electing Boris Johnson to run their city. We're millionaires, man. Sad but true. What bookie would've given any less t...

It’s partly just me being selfish, but I’m slightly gutted that I arrived on the poetry scene (have I arrived? or am I about to? I’m not really sure…) and, unless I’d been precociously intelligent, by extension on planet earth, too late to enjoy a subscription to Tim Kendall’s wonderful magazine, Thumbscrew . The mag ran from 1994 until (from what I can gather) 2002, and in that time carved itself a niche in publishing often excellent and sometimes refreshingly unusual and off-kilter poetry, but most of all, in mocking the hype, soundbytes and absurdities that often surround poetry, poets and their reputations / egos. I’ve been reading the issues uploaded on the wonderful resource that is poetrymagazines.org.uk recently, and absolutely love what must have once been the near-legendary ‘Odds and Ends’ section. Here’s a smattering of pieces drawn from it: Beware the Blurb “Vendler is arguing for a depoliticisation of [ North ] that robs it of much of its power to provoke as well as merel...