tipper gore was a friend of mine;

Weekends are rarely long enough, and so it was that I ended up sleeping in and missing the first installment of mine and David’s planned Saturday film fest. However as it was merely Will Ferrell’s latest attempt as a COMEDY! AND! HE! WILL! BATTER! YOU! OVER! THE! HEAD! WITH! EVERY! SINGLE! PUNCHLINE! UNTIL! YOU! LAUGH! LAUGH! DAMN! YOU! LAUGH! I think I’ll get over it. I did, however, manage to see Little Miss Sunshine (a darkly comedic family road trip movie, which with its DeVotchKa soundtrack is the current talk of the hipsters) and Right At Your Door – a tense, claustrophobic nightmare of a film made even more horrific by the fact that it might just happen. Starring Her What Was Kate In The West Wing, the camera angles made me a bit dizzy but it’s well worth a watch.

Saturday night Fi and I caught up with some of her favourite bands at King Tut’s. I should stress that I am by no means referring to opener Jack Butler under that broad description – they played T in the Park and doubtless spam you on gheyspace (maybe it’s just me?), but apart from their drummer playing dressed as a zebra for some reason their performance was completely unremarkable. Maybe they’ll get the message and stop bothering me now.

Edinburgh’s The ACUTE are a band who wear their influences firmly on their sleeves, or in frontman Stephen’s case scrawled across his chest in thick black eyeliner. Not kidding: every number in their set sounds like a speeded up version of “If White America…” devoid of a catchy chorus. A beered-up crowd who mere moments ago had been bellowing ZEBRA! ZEBRA! GIES A WAVE! at the openers seem unsure what to make of Stephen’s tirade of obscenity between songs, but you can’t say that the ACUTE don’t know how to entertain. While the music doesn’t do much for me at the moment the band are lovely people (drunken lapdances aside, but that’s a whole other story) with the potential for greatness once they’ve found their own voice.

Headliners Drive-By Argument are like an Ayrshire Fall Out! At The Disco only minus the lacklustre sheen of commercialism that deadens the eyes of the poster boys of nu-emo. Not my thing but you can tell that they love what they do and they do it well, and the band seem to have picked up quite a following since the last time I saw them. London dates and an album beckon, and good luck to them.

I don’t tend to watch a lot of television, but when I do I watch it obsessively and then buy up the DVD boxset and watch it all again. So when one of my favourite shows starts back, it tends to be a really big deal. Last night marked the return of the BBC’s fabulous spy drama Spooks with what all the TV guides would probably refer to as “the first of an explosive two-parter”.

This morning’s Metro’s review of the first instalment made the comment that the show was getting more and more Americanised and I could see where they were coming from – not only due to the slicker feel and faster pacing of each episode, and what is clearly a substantial effects budget, but because its nonsensical and convoluted plots laden with juicy conspiracy theories are resembling my dearly-departed and beloved X-Files more and more as time goes on. I have to confess that I found the start of the episode so hard to follow that I was ready to write off this series as another Season Three since last year was just too fantastic… and then they threw the sucker punch. If there is one thing that Spooks has always done well it’s deaths, and from the loss of one particular longstanding cast member I was hooked.

It’s interesting to observe Spooks‘ development: the show started out with its five regular cast members, one of whom (Matthew McFadyen’s Tom Quinn) admittedly had a little more prominence than the others. As the show progressed, and actors moved on, it became much more of an ensemble piece with once minor characters (like my personal favourite, the lovely Ruth) given their own episodes to carry, and Anna Chancellor’s wonderful, sneering Juliet drafted in. On the evidence of last night though I worry that Spooks is in danger of becoming the Rupert Penry-Jones show. I hope not, because he’s beginning to irritate me as much as he did when he was first drafted in again. Also, anything that means more screen time for Hermione Norris’ loathesome new character (she looks like a robot constructed purely out of foundation, lipstick and a bleached blonde wig) is to be discouraged.