Monthly Archives: December 2005

Broken News, coincidentally

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I turned on the TV the other night and low and behold it was the very stunning Belinda Stewart-Wilson in the BBC comedy Broken News. I wasn’t sure at first, but yes, on closer inspection it was my former colleague at the Health Development Agency who back in 2000 welcomed me to my new work place by getting drunk with me in the Barley Mow (just off Great St.Peter’s Street in London). That ranks as the best ever welcome to a new job, take note my new Sift colleagues!

PS: Now in 2009 I see Belinda’s got a man (professional comedian Ben Miller no less) and a son and moved to Somerset, congratulations!

Now the nice thespian coincidence is that around the same time I had a guy called Chris Routh come and temp for me, who was also in the acting trade. He in fact said he was up for an audition for the Harrison Ford/Liam Neeson blockbuster K-19 The Widowmaker. A couple of years passed, I was visiting the States and popped into a cinema in Seattle to catch the film. And yes, you’ll be glad to know, there was Chris now appearing as a Russian submariner called Oleg doing his best to stop the atomic reactor from exploding! What’s more I had the good fortune to bump into Chris on his return, and he said he’d had a great time going drinking with Harrison.

PPS: By a nice quirk of fate at the ICAEW I worked with a guy called Alan who wrote a biography of Harrison Ford. There you go!

X marks the spot

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I know this is old news for the US but it has a timeless quality for me: “CNN apologized on Tuesday 21 November and offered a rare explanation from its control booth for a technical glitch many viewers failed to notice — a large “X” the network flashed over Vice President Dick Cheney’s face.

The wayward graphic, which CNN said lasted for about one-seventh of a second, appeared during the network’s live coverage of Cheney’s speech on Monday addressing critics of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war. A spokesman for the vice president said Cheney had no comment on the incident.” (Yahoo News)

The caption at the bottom of the CNN screen says “CHENEY: I DO NOT BELIEVE IT IS WRONG TO CRITICIZE.” Apparently the technical hitch was caused by a ‘switcher device’ problem. Some CNN guy who answered a phoned-in complaint on the issue was fired after defending the fault on grounds of freedom of speech. I kid you not.

If you’d like to hear what Talk Show America thought about it try their 5 December podcast (63MB). It also includes some interesting pro-Iraq War ‘adverts’.