Easter Meet
March 16th, 2008 at 17:54

I had an excellent day yesterday – I went down to London to meet my nerdy mates from my other website. Here are some exciting photos of me looking really popular in the company of other people:

Chris, Lottie, Barney, Kyron, Ant, Me, Sam, William, Shark, Kat and Dan. Not pictured: Katy.

Dan bothering a mime.

It being Easter, we thought we should respect the religious aspects, and celebrate Jesus’ death by recreating Leonardo’s Last Supper.

As luck would have it, Barney looks a bit like Jesus. And Sam looks a bit like Mary Magdeline. And I played the part of Judas. The other apostles were perhaps a little less enthusiastic.

Spending about eight hours with me is difficult enough for anyone, really. Unfortunately, William’s Jamesomalley tolerance was slightly less than eight hours, so he ended up punching me.

But it was fun. I may have another tale to tell about this in a few days.

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Christmas Drinks
December 17th, 2007 at 16:25

On Saturday, I went down to London to go to the pub with some of the people from my other website who are old enough to get into pubs. It was most excellent, because it means I’ve got 90 photos on Facebook like this, which make me look really like a really popular and easily likeable person:

It was also excellent because I got to meet my friend Matt for the first time – after knowing him online for very nearly seven years:

Despite being in London, we didn’t do anything particularly touristy – we just went to three pubs and a Pizza Express like locals may do, largely ignoring the spectacular views of central London around us.

As the day went on, things got progressively louder, culminating in a drinking game in the last pub (which didn’t really work on me, as I wasn’t drinking alcohol), and Barney, Dan, and Sam getting approximately very, very, drunk. They’d been drinking since 11am, having gone to a pub at Liverpool Street Station before meeting the rest of us, so by 9pm, weren’t walking in a straight line. This meant that me, being sober (I’m straight-edge), and Katy (who I’d dragged along for the day), who was only tipsy, had to try and guide them back to their train stations so they could get home.

It was a most excellent day, really. 10/10.

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Buying Phones
December 1st, 2007 at 02:00

I bought a new phone today, because my old phone is barely functional. It turns out that buying a phone is approximately infinite hassle. I knew what I wanted: a Nokia N95, and I knew that I didn’t want to get a contract of more than £20 a month, because frankly, that’s too much as it is. I’d seen an offer on the T-Mobile website for exactly this – but I thought I’d go around the mobile phone shops to see if I can get the same deal on O2, the network I’m on at the moment, on the basis that it would probably be less faff. How wrong I was.

Scene 1 – the O2 shop

I made the mistake of approaching the trainee sales person, who’s breath stunk (I wasn’t kissing him, you could smell it from a metre away), and enquiring if they were willing to negotiate on contract prices, on the basis that nearly everyone I know has an anecdote about how they bought a phone and got some sort of excellent deal on it after doing some bartering.

“We can’t do stuff like that… blah blah blah… head office… blah blah blah”, says the trainee. I kind of lost interest once I knew he wasn’t going to be very helpful.

Scene 2 – Phones4u

I think mobile phone retail is that sort of intermediary step between being a lowly tillmonkey and swaggering open-necked sales twat. I was hanging around looking at the phones, waiting for one of the sales vultures to try and chat me up, when the manager started talking to me. I explained what I was looking for, the rival deal that I had seen on the internet, and he referred me to the sales guy. “Take a seat”, he said, and I sat down.

It was here I encountered perhaps my first ever first-hand experience of a “hard sell”. It was a very high pressure thing. The salesman got out a contract and started asking me for personal details before he’d so much as asked what I was looking for. He’d even surreptitiously put me down for a bluetooth headset that I didn’t need.

With the details practically filled out, he got out at blank sheet of A4 paper, and began explaining the £45 a month deals to me – and how that if I wanted a cheaper contract I’d have to pay £400 for the phone as well. Despite his writing being near illegible, and the information he was transcribing being nonsensical – just figures that make no sense without context – he persisted in writing stuff down whilst trying to talk me into an expensive contract.

He clearly wasn’t having much success, as I was having none of it – I wasn’t going to budge. His manager could see that he was floundering, so slithered over in his slimey way, and I thought he was going to do that thing they do on Rogue Traders all the time, where the crooked salesman asks his boss for a discount, and the boss grants it as a “one time only special offer”, and the customer is pressured into taking it because its such a “spectacular” deal. This didn’t happen though, because £35/month is out of my budget too. Like I said at the beginning.

It got to the point where, in order to illustrate the fact that I’d apparently either have to compromise on price or handset, the salesman turned the page over, and drew two boxes, putting ticks in them, and then drew a dividing line between them, and held up the piece of paper to really illustrate his point.

It was at this point I decided to leave – but not before he insisted I take his card… and insisted on writing a day and time on which I’d come back to see him to finish the deal.

Scene 3 – The T-Mobile Shop

I walked thirty seconds up the road, into the T-Mobile shop, and got a Nokia N95 for £70, on a £20 a month contract. Job done.

The staff in the shop were generally pleasant and helpful (although it did turn out they delayed running a coverage check on my postcode until after the sale because my town has no 3G coverage). What I didn’t anticipate though was the faff involved in making the sale. There was a credit check, many forms needing to be signed – I even had to go to the bank to find out my account number. I love gadgets, but its enough to drive anyone insane.

What I’ve neglected to mention is that throughout this adventure, my friend Katy was with me – and despite being a woman and practically genetically programmed to enjoy shopping, I thought she was going to kill herself (or me) after the first hour and a half of trying to buy a phone.

I was happy though – I’ve got a rather excellent phone out of it, even if the shopping aspect was intensely irritating.

Scene 4 – Back home

Unfortunately it didn’t end there though. Despite being thoroughly bored of hearing about free minutes and free insurance, I had to ring O2 this evening about transferring my number, where before they would tell me my PAC code (the code used to transfer your number to a different network), they insisted on putting me through to sales, who tried to convince me to stay. A woman spent a good five minutes explaining what deals O2 had, before I explained that I signed an 18 month contract only a few hours previously.

Phone shopping is tedious.

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Quiz II
November 29th, 2007 at 21:40

I’d love to tell you what I got up to yesterday, but I’m contractually not allowed to. Today though, I took part in my second quiz of the week – it was a bit more of a humble affair. It was a charity rip-off of University Challenge hosted by my University.

I put together arguably the most formidable quiz team in the country – who coincidentally were my university friends Katy, Sean, Sarah and Michael. And I, as the most experienced quiz player, was the Captain.

I’d been training the team for over a week. This didn’t actually involve any practice quiz questions, and was more a case of drumming motivational slogans into their heads. “It’s not the taking part that counts, it’s the winning”, “We can’t do it if we really try – we can only do it if we know the answers to the questions that we are asked”, “I’ll hate you forever and not be your friend if we lose”, and so on.

Things got off to an unfortunate start when Michael failed to turn up – but as luck would have it, so did someone from the opposing team.

So the quiz began, and we got our first starter question right – but then the other team got two in a row, and it went on like this – much like you’d expect a quiz to. There were bonus rounds on identifying the Simpsons guest stars, and a music lyrics round, a bit like a lower-brow version of the thing on the telly (we are a former Polytechnic, you know).

It got a bit farcical though during one round which was “identifying the place from an aerial photo”. The first slide said “Where in Britain…”, so we thought that all of the locations were in Britain. The first one was Wimbledon, the second was Alton Towers (I thought it was Jodderell Bank) and the third location looked really, really like the Hoover Dam. It turns out that it was the Hoover Dam. Damn.

And so it went on – with us eventually losing by something like 85 points to 65… which is fairly respectable. It was interesting to see Sean, who’s usually calm and collected, and the sort of person who can “work the room” without feeling ridiculous lose his cool slightly as he confronted the host about the aerial photo fiasco, or photogate, as I hope it will become known. She wouldn’t change her mind and admit that it was a travesty worse than naming a teddy Muhammed.

Still, at least there wasn’t any massive cash prizes at stake this time – and it was apparently for charity, so I can’t really complain. The team tried their best, so I can’t fault them. Just a shame its reduced my quiz shows participated in to quiz shows won ratio to 2:1 (50%) for this week, really.

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Impulsive Day
November 24th, 2007 at 01:07

Today I got up bright and early at 8am for university – I had my usual rushed shower and check of my emails, before heading to the train station little over an hour after waking up. Still groggy, after a few hours sleep, I met Katy on the train and went into university for a lengthy two-hour day. Unfortunately, this exposition was building us up for disappointment: the lecture and seminar were cancelled, meaning that we had both travelled into university for no reason.

It was at this point we decided to be impulsive. This isn’t something I do very often – I like to plan things with an autistic level of detail. If I go to anywhere big, I like to have a Google Map printed out, all relevant details with me, a map book, and a back-up plan for almost every eventuality. And I’ll constantly run through potential scenarios in my head: “What if a terrorist appears right now and challenges me to a short trivia battle to determine whether I live or die?”, and so on.

We decided to go to London, more specifically to the British Museum.

So we spent thirty pounds each on train tickets down to London, plus an extra fiver for the tube, and hopped on to the direct train down to London. 15 minutes into the journey, I learnt why being impulsive doesn’t pay off – quite literally. I remembered that I was going to see Mark Thomas tonight (which has already happened at time of writing, and was excellent, if you’re asking), so had to cut the trip short by a good few hours, decreasing value for money somewhat considerably.

But we got to the British Museum eventually, which was pretty excellent, although we’ll have to go again in order to fully appreciate all of the old tat on display there, given that we were rushed for time.

You’d think what with it being a museum full of all the best antiquities that Britain has nicked from around the world, full of priceless monuments to human civilisation, like the Rosetta Stone, I’d have taken loads of photos and maybe even done another stupid video. Unfortunately due to the ridiculously impulsive nature of the trip, the batteries in my camera were running very low. So the only two photos we managed to squeeze out of the camera were the following:

Me, standing in front of a placard looking slightly worse for wear, in order to make a horrendous, horrendous lolcat parody:

And what we bought from the British Museum café. Guess how much a couple of drinks, a chocolate muffin and some sort of strawberry/chocolate hybrid. Go on, have a guess.

£8.20. Eight pounds twenty. Really. I could have cried.

The Rosetta Stone was pretty excellent though. And it was much better than having a boring lecture. So hooray, I guess?

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Parliament / The National Gallery
September 21st, 2007 at 01:32

Today, Katy and I went down to London for the final time this summer to do some tourism, and went to arguably the best place yet: The Palace of Westminster. So I’m going to attempt to review the tourist attraction like a proper blogger would.

The tour was really good – it followed the route the Queen takes when she opens Parliament. It turns out she first walks up some steps and goes into a ridiculously opulent room decorated with paintings of King Arthur. In here, she makes a great faff of putting on a crown, before waltzing on down to the House of Lords through a corridor decked out with yet more pictures of royalty – and two massive paintings of Waterloo and Trafalgar.

After this, we broke with what the Queen does (disappointingly you’re not allowed to sit on the throne), we went to the Commons, and we actually got to stand about on the floor of the House. Which is more exciting than it sounds – sure, you’re just surrounded by a load of green seats, but they’re a load of really exciting green seats. Its pretty amazing being somewhere you’ve seen on TV so often, and knowing whats gone on in there in the past- although one thing that surprised me was how tatty some of the seats were – certain opposition benches looked really well warn.

Perhaps the most notable and easily describable thing (that isn’t already written about on Wikipedia) was the tour guide. She was a rather posh woman, who was undoubtedly a Tory voter. It was the lack of references to the system being corrupt, unfair and a desire to smash it that gave it away.

Throughout the tour, she was keen to make as many references to David Cameron as possible, simply dismissively referring to Gordon Brown as “The Government” whilst sneering. When showing us the statues of famous Prime Minister’s in the Common’s lobby, she said “But this is the one everyone wants to see – the marvellous statue of Margaret Thatcher” whilst wiping away a tear and going weak at the knees. Metaphorically, I mean.

Sensing the end was near, I thought I should ask a question, as its not every day you get to ask questions to people who are experts on the Houses of Parliament. Unfortunately, the best question I could muster was “Are the green seats in the ‘No’ lobby [just outside the Commons chamber] upholstered in the same way as the seats in the chamber? They were really comfortable.” I even said the second sentence which really, is unnecessary detail and isn’t part of the question. The tour guide said that they were.

Like all of the best tourist places, the last stop on the tour was the House of Commons gift-shop, which was located in the chamber that used to be where the Commons sat. What used to be a hall where laws were made, the place where slavery was abolished, where all men regardless of land ownership were given the vote, where representative democracy began, now contains a stall hawking teddies dressed as Yeoman warders and, bizarrely, baseball caps with the Parliament portcullis logo on it, which no doubt does wonders for your street cred. I’d have bought the latter as a hilarious prop to wear “ironically” if it wasn’t a ridiculous £7.50.

I wonder what Charles James Fox would think if he knew that his statue is now surrounded by stationary with “House of Commons” written on in Tahoma?

The tour was dead good though – I’d recommend it. But does that constitute a review? I don’t know.

After Parliament, we took a trip to the National Gallery, in a bid to look a bit high cultured. I mean, I’m already pretty damn cultured, but Katy was making decisively low-brow references to tabloid newspapers and greyhound (instead of horse) racing, so we had to sharpen her mind.

One thing the National Gallery does better than the Louvre is that it puts all of the famous stuff in one room. Top tip: walk in, first gallery on your right, is where all of the famous shit is, the rest is mostly filler. They’ve got some Van Gogh’s: one of the versions of sunflowers, Van Gogh’s chair and another, er, famous one, that, er, escapes me.

I was also shocked to see a Monet hanging on one of the walls. Specifically: the one of the bridge over the river. I was sure I’d seen it in Musée D’Orsay in Paris. Disappointingly, it turns out that Monet painted no less than seventeen of them. I didn’t realise they were so ten-a-penny. There was also a massive picture of a horse. You know the one. You’d know it if you saw it. Yeah.

As you might have guessed, I’m not an art critic. The National Gallery was pretty good too though. Parliament was better though.

* Yeah, I know, everyone else already knows too.

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London Open House: TV Centre and the FCO
September 16th, 2007 at 23:50

This weekend was London Open House – for some reason loads of places in London decided to let in members of the public for free. So Katy and I did the most obvious thing and pursued my favourite hobby: being an awful tourist in London.

There was a lot to choose from – we could have gone to the top of the Gherkin, or to the Bank of England, or even to the Argentinian Ambassador’s official residence. Presumably if we’d gone to the latter, we would have seen tourists taking photos of a man lying on his sofa watching Last of the Summer Wine and the Antiques Roadshow.

So we decided to go to BBC Television Centre, and the Foreign (and Commonwealth) Office.

BBC Television Centre

Before the tour began, we walked over to the BBC Broadcast Centre (where transmission actually happens) and the Media Centre. It was here when I visited TVC a few years ago that I saw Director General Mark Thompson striding across the plaza like he was crushing the lives (and jobs) of tiny people. Unfortunately, rather than celebrities this time, we bumped into a woman who looked a bit… stoned. “Can either of you two do me a favour? If you do it, I’ll give you my phone”, she said, waving her phone at us. “…”, we replied. “Do either of you have a bus pass?”. We didn’t, as we’re not proper Londoners, so she had to keep her stolen phone and go and pester some more people.

TVC though, is an incredible building, because there’s so much famous stuff in it, and best of all, there’s a metal detector and security guards who keep the nutters out. Being the massive BBC nerd that I am, I’m already pretty well versed on the history of the building, the BBC and what goes on inside, but its still pretty spectacular to actually be there. The tour took us first to the central doughnut area where Roy Castle famously broke the world record for… tap dancing or something.

“The ground is covered in glitter as last night we hosted The National Lottery Awards Ceremony… which you might have seen on BBC One”, the tour guide told us, shortly before losing eye contact with everyone in the group.

Next, we were led into studio 2, the smallest studio in the complex. It wasn’t being used so there were no sets erected in there, but it was still interesting to see. Apparently it had been used for filming Red Dwarf, and they didn’t have the money to actually build a set, so they just ran around the gantry as it looked quite space age anyway.

Next stop was the former main reception and current “star entrance” that lead to the dressing rooms and so on. We all managed to crowd in one of the poshest dressing rooms, which was a bit like a rather upmarket hotel room with no windows. The tour guide explained that a lot of celebrities who come to TVC make demands on what is in their dressing room – Paul McCartney apparently demanding a bowl of fruit when he visits. He told a story, and I’ve no idea how much of this is verifiable fact, about Madonna when she came to appear on Top of the Pops once, demanded a life-size cardboard cut-out of Pope John Paul II. Apparently the BBC had to borrow a waxwork from Madame Tussauds.

Next up, we went to the Blue Peter garden. Its pretty weird seeing something you’ve seen on TV hundreds of times in the, er, flesh. It turns out that the vast majority of the stuff in the garden is bunched into one corner, as that’s where the camera tower points. I wanted a photo of me doing a thumbs up next to the pets graves, but, alas, there wasn’t really time, and I guess the BBC wouldn’t have been too pleased with me.

Interestingly, just outside the garden was a mural on the wall of Studio 9 (the former CBBC studio) of all of the Blue Peter presenters (and pets) past and present – including Richard “Sacked for Cocaine” Bacon.

The final stop on the tour was the news centre. We got to sit in the conference room whilst they told us about the news. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see any actual news studios, but then, I guess its pretty difficult to present a rolling news channel if you’ve got some tourists turning up to look around.

The tour was excellent though – the icing on the cake was the TARDIS in the BBC reception. Apparently it isn’t just a replica, and was used as the, er, actual, TARDIS for quite a while on the old series of Doctor Who. I dare-say that it was a little bit disappointing that there’s nothing inside, but I guess I’ve just been deceived by TV, again. First faking Bargain Hunt, now this!

The Foreign Office

We also went and had a look around the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, which was formerly the India Office. This was especially cool as its usually closed to the public, because its quite difficult to manipulate weaker states for your own evil ends if the general public are watching – they might blow the gaffe.

A couple of things surprised me about the building. First of all, it wasn’t just a load of offices with out of date computers covered in post-it notes like other branches of government. It was one of the most ridiculously ornate buildings this side of Paris. There were statues of famous generals everywhere, opulently decorated domes and the walls were practically caked in historical tat and nicknacks.

There was one particularly fancy room that had apparently been used to sign a treaty to ease European tensions in 1925. Needless to say it couldn’t have been a particularly effective treaty.

The second thing that surprised me was the massive courtyard in the middle of the FCO – which seems to be the same for most massive governmental/palace buildings in London (and indeed Paris). They look like huge structures from the outside – yet get inside and there’s just a big empty space. One advantage of being allowed into this courtyard was that there’s an archway that links both it and the front door of 10 Downing Street. So you can get a front-on view of Number 10, rather than an obscured sideways view like you get from standing on Whitehall. It was like watching telly, only from slightly further away, on an arch-shaped screen, without Nick Robinson jabbering on in front of the door.

The third surprising, and perhaps most worrying thing was that at the FCO I didn’t actually see anyone working. I mean, obviously there were security people and guides, but there didn’t seem to be anyone doing any actual foreign policy. Because it was Open House weekend, did they just send all of the staff home? Do foreign affairs not happen on a Sunday? Do they tell Iran to call back on Monday? What if North Korea were to ring up and threaten a nuclear war… will they just get an answer phone message? “Thank you for calling Britain. Our opening hours are weekdays from 9am until 5pm. Please leave a message after the tone or call back later. BEEP.”

Either way, the FCO was pretty good.

London is excellent.

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London Again
September 1st, 2007 at 23:53

Over the summer, I think I’ve been to London more times than I have to the town centre of my own town. Yesterday was no exception; I went to London to be an awful tourist again with Katy. The day was alarmingly expensive, as rather than go to free museums like skanks, we went and had a look at attractions that you have to pay for.

First of all, as it was an important day – Princess Diana was supposed to be descending from Heaven or something. So we went to Buckingham Palace and the Chapel where the service was being held to see what was happening… she was the Queen Of Our Hearts after all. There were just a lot of people about, so we didn’t stick around or see any celebrities, unfortunately.

We decided to go to the Tower of London. And it was pretty good – it damn well should have been for the £13 entry fee. A Yeoman warder gave a brief tour of the grounds. He was more “fun” than you’d expect him to be – making jokes about the horrible murder of the two Princes at the Tower a few hundred years ago, that sort of thing.

The tour had four stops, and concluded in the church that’s within the grounds, where Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Lady Jane Gray and her husband were buried. As a republican atheist, I think its safe to say that it felt a tiny bit awkward.

The Crown Jewels are housed in the Tower too – you can tell where they are as they’re the only bit where the guard outside, rather than being an old beardy chap in a dress, hold a machine gun with a bayonet, marches and never smiles. The jewels themselves are pretty good, if not a little bit gaudy. I mean, I get it, the Royals are an anti-democratic institution who have a fair bit of cash – there’s no need to flaunt it that much.

After the Tower of London, we decided to head to the London Eye, but we took the river boat rather than the boring old tube. It was expensive, at £12, but well worth it. Not because of the views – I’ve been to London loads of times recently, and know the area like the back of my hand – it’s got to the point where I no longer get excited when I see the Royal Institute of Civil Engineers. I liked it because of the commentary.

It wasn’t a tour boat. It was essentially a train that could float and inexplicably carries exclusively tourists. A voice came over the tannoy explaining that whilst it wasn’t a tour, the driver felt compelled to give a commentary to not let down the tourists. He was a proper cock-er-ney too, and this made it excellent.

He said “Nahh” instead of “now”, and dropped the leading ‘H’ on words. He even said “Not a lot of people know that”, a few times, sounding exactly like the Dead Ringers impression of Michael Caine (aka Greg Dyke). He also had exactly the mindset you’d expect a proper Londoner to have:

“Nahh, this ‘ere to your right is the London Ass’embly. It cost forty-two mill-yon pahnds ahnd two mill’yon of ‘at was spent on consultants to come up with a name. Ahfter ahll ‘at, they called it City ‘all”.

It was hilarious. I think cockneys are generally hilarious. I guess this might become a problem if I ever live in London.

The London Eye was excellent, narrowly justifying the £15 it costs to go on it. The views it gives are pretty incredible – you can see everything from the ground directly below the Eye to the roof of the Houses of Parliament, where bang in the middle is a portacabin. Classy. Apparently it’s where Parliamentary employees go for a smoke now that it’s been banned indoors.

Unfortunately, this was the one trip to London where I forgot to take my camera. Its a good job I didn’t see anything terribly famous I might want to have a photo of me in front of.

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Threats of physical violence
August 14th, 2007 at 01:53

When I was down in London the other day, I was with Katy, and we went for lunch at Pizza Hut – it was the one near the site of the failed Tiger Tiger nightclub bombing in Piccadilly Circus, so we were really living life on the edge.

As we were sitting waiting for our food, for some reason Katy made a vague punching fist gesture towards me (you’d be surprised how often my friends seem to do this to me) for conversational reasons that escape me (for the sake of context, assume it was after a hilarious sexist quip).

Suddenly, one of the waiters chipped in: “No fighting in here, please… you’ll have to take it outside”. He was perhaps 40 years old and sounded like a proper cockney – I imagine he is the sort of person who would use rhyming slang as a matter of course rather than when trying to sound like a Londoner.

“What have you done?” he asked in his best cockney accent, to which I could only manage to respond with genuine but perhaps slightly over-forced laughter. “Do you want any help?” he said to Katy, as he himself clenched his fists and mimed a punching motion.

Its not that I don’t mind receiving threats of violence from strangers… it’s just a little odd. And it made me worry as he looked like the sort of bloke who might “know some people”.

Maybe he used to be a contract killer, but work dried up when the made murder illegal a few years ago, so he’s turned his hand to waiter-ing (waiting?), and has a lot of pent up aggression?

After we’d finished eating he came back. Rather than ask if we wanted the bill or whether everything was alright, he again made his hands into fists and said directly to me with some faux-indignation “Are you still alive?“. It was almost as if he’d expected me to be a bloody corpse by the time he returned.

I don’t know what it is about Piccadilly Circus – first terrorists try (and fail) to bomb somewhere close to where I was two days after I was there, and now a passive aggressive threat. Weird.

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The Simpsons Movie
July 25th, 2007 at 22:39

I went to see The Simpsons Movie with Katy today. When I first heard they were making it a couple of years ago, I approached it with a similar level of caution as I did Die Hard 4, but as time grew closer to release day, having seen the trailers and so on, I set my expectations ludicrously high – it was apparently written by some of the earlier writers after all. They were mostly met.

It was 84 minutes long but didn’t feel like it was long enough – there were a number of plot lines that felt unresolved, such as Abe Simpson experiencing the “prophecy” in church (I’d have liked a pseudo-scientific explanation rather than the assumed supernatural one), and I got the impression that the ‘Lisa has a boyfriend’ sub-plot could have been explored in more depth – as could ‘Bart prefers Flanders to Homer’. These latter two would make excellent stand alone episodes of the series but they felt underused in the film. I wonder if Lisa’s boyfriend will pop up in the series now? And Homer’s pig for that matter – they didn’t resolve that either.

As I’m a big Simpsons nerd, here are some minor quibbles with an otherwise decent film:

President Schwarzenegger (not Wolfcastle) – previously the Simpsons has always claimed that the current real President was President, and would retcon the timeline appropriately – or perhaps more accurately, exist on a floating timeline. A fictional President is most definitely a break from the norm.

They also appeared to be retconning Homer and Marge’s marriage – Homer and Marge’s wedding video features at one point, yet it doesn’t look how it did in the series. The first time they got married in a casino – but Marge actually divorced Homer in one episode and they remarried in their own home. So I’m not sure where this wedding video came from, but then again, continuity has never been the Simpson’s strong point. Jon Stewart on the Daily Show when he had Matt Groening on mentioned that Homer is supposed to be 38… and he met Marge in high school, but Bart is only 10.

(Obsessive compulsive) fans will also know that the layout of Springfield regularly changes to suit the plot, but there was a truly atrocious example of bad continuity when early in the film it shows the Church and Moe’s being next door to each other, when only a few minutes later it is shown to be on the edge of the area covered by the Dome the EPA lower on to Springfield… and Moe’s has vanished.

It was a really good film though – tonnes of excellent gags. To name one, the blackboard gag at the start: “I will not illegally download this movie”.

I would: recommend it. Even if you are lining Rupert Murdoch’s pockets.

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