Daily News Channel
There’s a certain Margaret Mahy quality to the latest series of Dog Squad, TV One, Mondays: The Snake in the Panelbeaters and The Burglar Who Needed To Go Wee-Wees. These true and rather alarming cases are not really the stuff of children’s books, despite the starring role of brave and clever animals.
INFORM EDUCATE ENTERTAIN Public Service Broadcasting (Southbound) The novelty of mixing soundbytes from archival British propaganda material and public information films could so easily fall flat as a musical project but the curiously named J Willgoose Esq and Wrigglesworth, the electronic duo behind PSB, have the sonic nous to “teach the lessons of the past through the music of the future”. The late Margaret Thatcher features prominently on both the title track and Theme From PSB, while the strongest two tracks – Everest – a dazzling synthesizer soundscape about our own Sir Edmund Hillary’s climb to the top of the world, and Night Mail, which blazes with punk fervor and blazing guitars showcase the expansive compositional skills that PSB use to give the past meaning in the present.
Margaret Mahy could be posthumously honoured this year with an award now named after her. New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards today announced the top prize would be renamed ‘New Zealand Post Margaret Mahy Book of the Year award’
A campaign by opponents of late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to get the song Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead to the top of the British pop charts to celebrate her death failed on Sunday (local time) although it did manage to reach second place. Thatcher, who died aged 87 last Monday, deeply divided Britons and while some have paid warm tributes to the achievements of her right-wing Conservative governments, others said her privatization of swathes of industry had destroyed communities.
Britain’s public broadcaster came under fire on Friday for compromising over the song Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead that was sent flying up the UK charts by a campaign to celebrate former prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s death. The song from the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz is vying for the No 1 slot in the UK’s weekly list of the top 40 best-selling singles that are usually played in full on a BBC Radio 1 chart show on Sunday
Margaret Thatcher was not just a political titan, she was a cultural icon – skewered by comedians, transformed into a puppet and played to Oscar-winning perfection by Meryl Streep. With her uncompromising politics, ironclad certainty, bouffant hairstyle and ever-present handbag, the late British leader was grist for comedians, playwrights, novelists and songwriters whether they loved her or – as was more often the case – hated her
The movement she started will grow to be, a hundred years from now, the most influential of all time,” predicted futurist and historian H.G. Wells in 1931
A beautiful day for a wedding — crisp, clear and, for China in midsummer, relatively cool. The latest typhoon’s high winds have swept away the air pollution, and under a brilliant blue sky the guests are chatting in the hollow of a terraced field beside a single spindly tree — symbolic decoration in a country whose scant arable land continues to disappear
My copy of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind — a 114th printing, now a bit tattered — carries an inscription from my mother: “A good book is timeless.” Mitchell’s novel, whose 75th anniversary has arrived amid many reconsiderations and even more sales, may or may not be a good book. But it has always been a popular one.
The man jailed for trying to kill British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in a hotel bombing in 1984 appeared in Parliament Tuesday with the daughter of one of his victims. Patrick Magee, a former Irish Republican Army activist, held a public discussion with Jo Berry, whose father died in the bombing in Brighton, southern England 25 years ago Monday.