Have you ever heard the story of Emperor Norton? It’s one of those bizarre little curiosities of American history, the San Franciscan who declared himself Emperor of the United States (and sometime Protector of Mexico) in 1859 and remarkably found that many of the inhabitants of his home city accepted him as such. He never achieved any real political power in his lifetime, but made himself a nice living as the Emperor, eating for free in the city’s best restaurants (to whom he granted an Imperial seal of approval), getting balcony seats at the theatre and opera, and being saluted by the city’s police officers when he was on his daily walk around the city, inspecting its infrastructure.

I was reading about him recently, and that got me thinking about the British monarchy and how it could benefit from exposure to the free market.
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Some of you may have been wondering why I don’t appear to have been writing much for The Sharpener in the last few months. It’s because I’ve been working on a new project, and unlike so many of the other new projects that get mentioned here, this one doesn’t involve sitting at a desk typing. Instead, starting next Sunday, I’m going to be walking from John O’ Groats to Land’s End to raise money for the Brain Research Trust. Read More

It happens without you noticing it – you go away for a week or so, don’t get to see any television and then when you come back, everything’s gone back to the 1970s.
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So, it’s a new year, with new programmes and new hopes from TV executives all round that they’ve found the new hit and won’t lose their jobs along with the ratings.
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While other TV reviewers use the excuse of a forthcoming week or two off to round off the year with a review of all they’ve watched over the past 12 months, I prefer to just carry on as normal, if only because reviews of the year in any media provoke only slightly less dread in me than the prospect of having to read through yet another bunch of pages devoted to telling us what every person in the review editor’s address book wants us to think they’re reading. So, let’s proceed with what may or not be, depending on how busy I am for the next couple of weeks, the last Sharpener TV review of 2005.
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“It seemed a good idea at the time” has been an excuse for many people, and television is no exception. FromThe Borgias to Celebrity Wrestling, producers and commissioning editors have used it to justify all sorts of atrocities committed against the tastes of the viewing public.
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‘Reality’ is everywhere on television these days, giving people the chance to sit at home and watch other people going about their lives and wonder whether a mirror might have been a cheaper way of getting the same thrills. But sometimes the lives of real people can make for good entertainment, though usually when there’s a script involved.
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To those of you who have been eagerly waiting for this week’s TV review, my apologies for the delay which was caused by a combination of life getting in the way and my being in a state of shock at discovering that the BBC will be broadcasting two new Stephen Poliakoff dramas next year, which is nice of them, especially as they’ve also got new series from Jimmy McGovern and Tony Marchant too.
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Supposedly, we’re in a golden age of TV comedy. Like all golden ages, though, it doesn’t seem much like one when you’re living through it.
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TV eats itself on a regular basis. Not just through the regular diet of talking head clip shows, but through the process of every good idea being repeated ad infinitum across every channel until its been flogged to death and then thrown out for twenty years until someone re-invents the wheel and the whole process begins again.
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