Most of us nowadays understand that the places where we spend most time online — Facebook and Google mostly — charge us no money. Instead, they make their fortunes from the advertisers who pay to sell us their wares while we’re there. For them therefore, we are the product.

What many increasingly object to is just HOW MUCH these tech giants know about us. It would also be wise to think about HOW they know it especially as that is about to become centre stage.

For many of us, the issue of cookies — what they are and what they…

There can be few more critical issues to the country right now than the protection of those in the front line of Covid-19. We stood on our doorstep and applauded them; we require our Government to do right by them.

It looked like it was. Last year, we were told that one of the five criteria to be met before the first lockdown was eased was that the supply of tests and PPE would meet future demand. Quite how this would be done was however left opaque by Ministers who preferred to talk about the number of new contracts with…

For some audiences (of a certain vintage), Christmas TV images start with a prison choir attempting to drown out the sound of tunnelling, a drunken husband’s late-night return home on a fork lift and a hostage drama’s botched attempt at spiked coffee.

The fact that all came from the pens of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais is just one further example of their place at the very top table of British comedy writing.

The three ‘Porridge’ and ‘Likely Lads’ Christmas Specials have endured for over 4 and a half decades because of the timelessness of great writing and acting…

For many of us music is an escape but we also know of course that it’s a business. It always has been and as such it has a history of skulduggery and nefariousness in which the creator is often the exploited victim and the intermediary (manager, label, promoter) the exploiter. Historically, much of this has been the fact that artists were not business-like and so they kept money issues at arm’s length; transactions happened out of sight and in the shadows.

It wasn’t always that way. Back in the 50s and 60s in Jamaica before a commercial market existed for…

When WEA set up Korova records as its pseudo indie label in 1979, it was primarily as a means of releasing material from an exciting up and coming Liverpool band called Echo and the Bunnymen. By the time the first release hit the shops in 1980 however it was also the launch pad for The Sound, a London based band that became its second signing.

Here we are on the 40th anniversary of both bands’ debuts. Fanfares may differ but for both bands they still ring out.

1980 was certainly a time of dizzying creativity in British indieland. Punk was…

In the first three weeks of March, we Brits spent an extra £1 bn on food. Fuelled by fears of shortages and maybe awareness in the back of our mind of a longer-term news thread around ‘food security’ and food riots in distant lands, the pandemic seemed to have caused a short-term panic. In fact, there were far fewer cases of actual hoarding and far more of us simply buying a little more (for ourselves and for our friends/family who may need our help) as the Government told us that we would likely be restricted to home for some time…

There is much current debate about how economies will recover from the Coronavirus recession that the IMF considers will be the worst since the Great Depression. Already most countries have spent and committed eye watering amounts which will likely take generations to recover. These sums dwarf the ‘bailouts’ designed to head off the 2008 financial crash so it’s not surprising that voices have been raised calling for a radically different approach.

How about this one? Instead of traditional loans and welfare acting as a bridge back to our ‘life-as-usual’ capitalism, what if every individual were given, as a right, a…

The recent death of Diana Serra Cary didn’t make too many headlines but her life story should have. A child star in silent films of the 20s, she appeared in her first film aged just two and a half and was signed to a $1.5m contract by the time she was three. The fortune however was not hers. Her parents both pushed her to a punishing workload including doing her own dangerous stunts and then torpedoed her career by falling out with the studio which then cancelled her contract. By the late 20s the family was broke.

There are of…