Tesco Infernational

In which one recently unemployed blogger from West London congratulates himself on insubstantial statistics…

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair… just don’t ask for the rather unimpressive figures which constitute this picture of Internet imperialism. As the wordpress-savvy (is there any more depressing a qualification?) amongst you may have already established, these are my latest stats. With your help, Tesco Inferno’s hit rate is now as global as that of the Maxim machine gun circa 1900: my dears, I cannot but thank you.

Anyway, I was probably drunk the night Tesco Inferno was supposed to celebrate its birthday party, and since the staff consists of… me, the event went unmarked. Two and a half months on, however, it seems a good time to mark its belated birthday with the news that… I’m off. Not permanently, you understand, but for the next few weeks I shall be handing the singed, shrinkwrapped reins of this blog over to my esteemed colleagues Jon Dilworth and Marcus P. Hernandez. These gentlemen have somehow obtained press accreditation for the London Film Festival, and as I’ve been writing a fair amount about crap cinema over the last month, it seems a good moment to hand over to two semi-professionals relatively well-versed in this particular arena of criticism.

Meanwhile, I’m off to Portsmouth to check out the local Hip-Hop scene. I shall be contributing occasionally at most, but in the meantime, I wish you all well. You’ve made this a blog over which the Sun never sets, for which I am eternally grateful- even if that phrase does conjure up a lot more images of lonely people eating pizza at 3am than it did whenever it was the British used to boast about such rubbish.

Stay tuned for extensive film reviews, interviews (I am not joking) and most probably a whole load of other self-involved shite: when I return, we can compare notes on these two beef assholes’ performance.

A+

Digby

PS:Sorry, WordPress, but isn’t that the worst world map you’ve ever seen? If it were accurate, my flat would be about the size of Malawi; I’ve just paced up and down a couple of times, and although it is what an estate agent might call a ‘spacious environment’, Malawi it is not. Unless, of course, Malawi is actually much smaller than my assumptions would have me believe. Well I don’t bloody know, do I?

Shards of Truth

Here’s something spooky:

Anything look familiar? Much as I’d love to turn this into a conspiracy theory, I’m feeling a bit too sane this morning, but I am rather taken with the thought that Renzo Piano might be a fan of this BBC adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. When it was broadcast in 1953, this sequence would have struck Londoners for other reasons entirely: at that point, St Paul’s Cathedral was the tallest building in the city, and the Tower of the Houses of Parliament wasn’t far behind (or below, whatever). The scale given by the juxtaposition of the latter with the crudely superimposed Ministry of Truth might well have seemed improbable to contemporary viewers, even as the first high-rise council estates started to appear across the crater-ridden capital.

I still can’t get over the novelty of the new-look London skyline; The Shard still seems to me as though it had been pasted onto a panoramic photo, as impressive and alien as these eerily prescient images must have appeared to the few British families who possessed television sets in the early 1950s. Uncanny architecture aside, at least nobody’s watching Big Brother any more…

NW6’s most Rock’n’Roll sidestreet

Do you know of any other cul-de-sacs named after second-rate British rockers of the 1950s? If so, you know who to call…