Northern Lights

Sunday, January 04, 2026

nancy and me 2021

doesn't matter, not important #2

Another Ricky Gervais special, this one's called Mortality. Same old. What everyone (everyone important) says about him is true - constantly whingeing about being cancelled when he is clearly entirely liberated to do whatever he fucking wants (a reality he touches on when he boasts about being so rich).*

Remember Extras, which was the last really good thing he did IMO, and it was really good, part of the tragedy of success was that he was compelled to go lowest-common-denominator with lame catchphrases and audience-pleasing tropes? That is literally where this prick is at now. He's not the first fool to become the thing he once satirised, but the one-noteness of this clueless time-wasting is shocking. Once again, I fear getting old precisely for this reason. Be vigilant, don't be a Ricky.

The fact that I make sure I always put in screenshots with Finnish subtitles is, yes, my version of virtue signalling. At very least I could have easily cropped that out. It translates as 'I couldn't do anything'.

*Proof of his lack of awareness - he keeps saying no-one wants to be thought of as racist. Look around you Ricky.

Saturday, January 03, 2026

it doesn't matter because it's not important

...that this new 'official' Wings book 'by' PMcC is just a rehash of all previous Wings books, so there is precisely no new information for anyone who's read those, of which I'm one. I think it's been shown by previous PMcC biographers that he often retells stories he's read about himself written by others, so you can't really trust this stuff but I will also say, it's not that important. Sadly I suspect the general understanding that PMcC is a charming, intelligent but superficial bloke, seems true (or at least: he projects that in the world, including in publications like this. It's hard to imagine that behind closed doors he's not more nuanced).

This book is available on spotifuck as a freebie so I have taken it as far as the time in-between Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway but seriously I don't think I can proceed any further with it because it's just a sanitised version of a story which is only interesting if there's analysis of motives, etc which this doesn't really do.

I don't know if you're wondering why my spotifuck is in Finnish, I sometimes wonder not why exactly (it's the kind of thing I'd do, obviously) but I don't remember doing it, and so I don't know how to put it back to English, but I am managing ok with how it is.

hal kanter

Referred to this memoir by US tv producer-director-writer Hal Kanter the other day for a book I'm writing. Kanter gets so many things wrong on one page it's hilarious, but that usage of 'indigenous' to mean local is the bit that has worn least well, isn't it. He mentions three cast members of Last of the Australians and misspells each of their names. The weirdest bit is he is claiming credit for direction. I wonder if he did direct it, but they weren't permitted to say so? Seems unlikely that the union would allow that, or that Crawfords would be that deceptive. Well, in the scheme of things it's not important really.