Peaches Geldorf

I read that the breakfast show, Richard and Judy, is moving off Channel 4. So I searched for them on YouTube.

And tripped on this appearance on their chat show:

Peaches Geldorf?!

So by checking out a show I *had* heard of, I found someone cool I hadn't heard of.

Peaches is Sir Bob's daughter, naturally, and she's quite a celeb -- far less serious than her dad. Here she talks about a special she did about about Islam:

I'm Really Not Obsessed with Doctor Who

It might seem like I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about Doctor Who, but it just isn't so. But having said that, I did just hear a preview of an audiobook that kind of blew my mind.

Who knew? It seems that these audiobook-exclusive stories done by the Beeb are well popular in the UK. Sometimes they get other cast members to narrate, like Freema Agyeman, but in a recent one called Doctor Who: Pest Control, the reader is Doctor number 10 himself, David Tennant.

The really amazing thing is, if you like language as much as I do, that Tennant does all the characters (after the fashion of these British audiobooks) and each one is in a different British accent. The narration is in his voice, which is Scottish. And of course, he does the Doctor himself in his semi-posh accent. And he does a cracking job imitating Donna Noble. Throw in some Irishmen and a Northern accent or two and you've got an encyclopedia of speech patterns.

It'll be hard to find this recording at your local Barnes & Noble, but you can download it from iTunes.

Hang on a Mo'

SAgent00Soul alerts me to this mind blowing fact: Stephen Fry ... yes, Stephen Fry of Jeeves and Wooster ... is a Mac-head! So now, in addition to being half of the comedy team of Fry and Laurie (as in Hugh Laurie), and in addition to being a major presence one of my favourite TV shows of all time, Blackadder (which really deserves a posting of its own soon), Fry shares my enthusiasm for gadgets. Oh, and I also left him off the list of cool British Jews. Well, I left Peter Sellers off that list too, but I think you need to be alive to qualify.

Fry maintains a blog called Dork Talk. He claims to be the second-ever Mac owner in Europe and that he never met a smartphone he didn't like. Recently, he waxed rhapsodic about the 3rd Gen iPhone. Fry caused a minor kerfuffle when he criticised the BBC technology editors for not doing enough stories on Apple. In his reply, the head of the section started with a classic line: "I feel a little uneasy disagreeing with a national treasure ..."

Enjoy this minor row, and tuck into Fry's blog with abandon.

Second conclusion to this post: Look soon, dear readers, for love letters to Rowan Atkinson and Hugh Laurie. I especially owe Laurie one. Beside doing a great American accent, he has added to marital bliss here in the Phonybrit household: House is one of exactly two shows on telly that my wife and I agree on. The other one's Mad Men.

Hmmm ... Now I have three things in my life with no visible ties to the UK: the Boss, the Amazin's (as previously mentioned) -- and now Mad Men.

Cool Jews from Cool Britannia

One of my favourite podcasts is Nextbook. An extension of the Jewish culture and literature website, Nextbook.org, the podcast has a lot of thought provoking stories and interviews.

Since they have a smashing correspondent in London, Hugh Levinson, they are able to cover British Jewry in a way you rarely see. Just a couple of days ago, Levinson posted an interview with filmmaker Vanessa Engle, who has recently aired three films about Judaism on the BBC. (As they point out on the podcast, since the films are not yet available on DVD or any US network, we'll have to wait to see the work itself).

Other Levinson interviews that I've enjoyed are:
*A tour of Brick Street, which, like New York's Lower East Side, now houses the latest group of immigrants.
* A talk with Claudia Rosen, author of The Book of Jewish Food, who talks about British salt beef and fried gefilte fish.
* Some time ago, he also interviewed the writer Naomi Alderman, but I fear that one has been taken off of the site.

All of these pieces shed light on a sub-area with which I've been fascinated for all long time, as I'm both a Jew and an anglophile. While there are many, many similarities, the Jews of England and Scotland (I'm not sure if there are any Welch Jews) are so different to us here in the States.

Years ago, there was a dust-up about the Jews of London wishing to construct and "eruv" fence, which is a nearly invisible wire surrounding a community. Attempts to stop the installation of the eruv prompted suggestions of deep anti-semitism in the UK. There was an article in the New York Times about the controversy in which they pinpointed the problem with Jewry in that part of the world. You can be an English Jew, but a Jew cannot be ethnically English. (Although I have a Jewish friend with family in Manchester who's a dead ringer for Pete Townshend.) Remember, when the Jews came to England, it was virtually homogeneous. Today, it's a completely different story. With the influx of Asians and West Indians and Africans, the British Jews seem like right old-timers. The definition of what it means to be English, for example, is changing rapidly.

Yet there was a time when British Jews (and here's the bit that's very different to what I grew up with) seemed to hide in the background: "Oh, don't notice us and our twisty bread on Friday nights." There was a time when nearly every black cab in the capital was driven by a Jew, but you'd hardly hear him chatting about going to "shul." My friend Edward, who grew up Jewish in London, tells a basic schism due to the fact that football matches used to be held mostly on Saturdays ... the rabbis had a difficult time keeping people in the pews and away from the pitch.

Today, being British and Jewish is becoming quite cool. Just ask Sacha Baron Cohen, Amy Winehouse, Joss Stone, Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), and Rachel Stevens (pictured above). And don't forget Madonna lives there, and she's sort of Jewish too!

Spaced Out on Ali G and More

Good news: Spaced is out on DVD. The BBC show was a very intelligent comedy that served as a launching board for director Edgar Wright, plus Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, all of "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz."

Of course, lots of the show is already available on YouTube. I reckon the BBC have worked out how to deal with YouTube in a way that's good for both parties. Here's a little taste of episode 2 (picked only because it's funnier faster ... feel free to go back and start with episode 1 of series 1).



But getting started on YouTube is pretty dangerous if you're me. French and Saunders interviews; the Mighty Boosh; Dead Ringers. I'll go out on a limb. British comedy is just much funnier than anything produced here -- I can't imagine how good it would be if I actually understood all the references. My other favorite thing to explore on YouTube is the original Ali G show. Below, please find a travelogue Ali did of Wales ... which, as everyone knows, is "the fish with the biggest dick in the ocean." That Cohen is one funny bloke.

"They Said I Should Go to Glasto, I Said 'No, No, No'"

Since my Mac's hard drive is bullocksed up, I'm blogging a couple of updates to previous posts.

Glasto A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned being excited about the Glastonbury Festival. Seems some people didn't share my enthusiasm. "Glasto" (because cool indie rockers are too cool to say "nbury") had more than its share of controversy. First, Noel Gallagher and Jay-Z traded barbs. The Oasis guitar player questioned the appropriateness of bringing hip-hop to the chilled-out concert. The rapper retorted by doing a tone-deaf version of "Wonderwall." But after seeing the performance itself, the Manchester native said that Jay-Z was "great."

This was amongst a huger-than-normal meltdown by Amy Winehouse. She's now a total mentalist. While she was on a brief reprieve from the London Clinic, she performed and had time to slug yet another fan. I've lost count of how many that make it, but she has to keep her hands to herself. She only weighs about 3 stone (1 stone = 14 pounds) not counting the beehive, and someone is going to hit her back.

Oh, and Lily Allen now has a new hair color.

The Beeb After the post about the BBC's annual report, I saw that BBC are experiencing a row over pay rises and bonuses. This is especially acute due a big scandal that I didn't know about until just this week. It seems that they have got themselves into several "phone-in" scandal. Among other things, it seemed that they rigged a contest to name a cat on the afternoon kids' show, Blue Peter. The viewers voted for Cookie, but he's called Socks. I'm not kidding.

BBC 7 / BBC Heaven

It's annual report time for the Beeb, and just like every year, there's a kerfuffle over the licence fees. According to this report from American Public Media's Marketplace, the the networks take in $6 billion -- 6 thousand million. And the bulk of that money still comes from the license fee.

The license fee is a mandatory fee for anyone in the UK with a television set, and it's been going on for decades. Instead of fund drives, the authorities have developed all kinds of technologies for
detecting if a given household has a telly and they cross reference that to make sure they're not freeloaders.

It's amazing to me, in the age of Sky TV and cable and dishes and Internet that this is still going on. But they must be doing something right. Just off the top of my head, look at what they've produced over the last few decades -- and this isn't even mentioning the news:
Doctor Who
Monty Python
Upstairs Downstairs
Red Dwarf
As Time Goes By
French and Saunders
The Vicar of Dibley
Coupling
... I could keep going for pages ...

Yet, today, when I've been lucky enough to get to somewhere carrying BBC America (my local cable company doesn't carry it and I can't get the dish) it's all been reality shows and games shows -- not my cup of tea.

And don't they get money from BBC America and the exports of all the great shows over here (I'm including the documentaries that they co-produce with the Discovery Channel and PBS)? I guess not enough, not if they want to keep making the amazing documentaries and other expensive programming that rarely makes it across the pond.