iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I hope the upcoming Swap Shop anniversary celebrations will feature the moment when Noel misheard a phone-in swapper as wanting to exchange their Spirograph for "two women and a BMW".

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Which LP caused you the most embarrassment when asking for it by name at a record shop counter?

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Only just realised Alan Parsons (of Project fame) is the son of Denys Parsons (of paperback books of amusing misprints unwrapped on Christmas days throughout the seventies fame).

Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Dear sir, I have before me your pasty of the 4th Ginst.

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Thomas á Becket, á female Becket, Henry, a priest-beheading king...

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

That comedian who looks like Isaac Asimov disguised as a Bee Gee is pissing me off already. #celebritytraitors

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

That's Life may be unique among factual TV shows in getting more baroque as the years progressed, going from gas board complaints plus musical numbers to wacky songs about postcodes followed by children with lukemia, then Doc Cox forcing people in a garden centre to sing The Sun Has Got His Hat On.

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Really excited for this. With the Doctor Who business already covered elsewhere, hopefully we'll get lots of Anne Hathaway commandeering the gallery when that Underground actor carks it, shitting herself over the terrible sound recording on Eldorado, and setting her massive dog on Alan Bleasdale.

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

She looks like Bernie Nolan In On the Waterfront. Reading out comic dialogue Supplied by a jobbing Russell T Davies.

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Last year I rewatched Dennis Potter's Karaoke and found it to be much more fun, and subtle, than I previously thought. Today I'm on the really hard stuff: Cold Lazarus, which I couldn't stand at the time. It certainly starts making more sense when you know Diane Ladd is basically playing John Birt.

Diane Ladd in Cold Lazarus as evil 24th century media mogul Martina Mathilda Masdon, basically a cipher for the BBC Director General John Birt (with a side order of Marmaduke Hussey).

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Does anyone else now read every instance of "x denies any wrongdoing" as "x has been caught bang to rights and they know it"?

Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

It seems tonight's first episode of the new Channel 5 Plays for Today is a homage to the original's Peter Terson/Brian Glover Fishing Party trilogy. So here's the most enduring image from that series: Janet Suzman with a brown ale and a fag on the go.

Janet Suzman in Shakespeare or Bust, with a brown ale and a fag on the go.

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Current earworm: that bit in The Look of Love where Martin Fry goes "the *one* thing, the *one* thing" except he's been replaced by Neil Kinnock going "a *Labour* council, a *Labour* council".

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Is there a clumsier lyric than "Sorry, but she left no forwarding address that was known to me"? The only person I can imagine actually saying that line is Percy Sugden.

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Remember that sect of millenarian Christians in the thirties who tried to get a Tom Baker Doctor Who LP released some forty years before it was due? They wanted to immanentise the Pescaton.

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

That story about the dodgy new Fall album features the most extreme act of burying the lede I've seen in ages.

Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The worst earworm yet: the seven note refrain from Herb Alpert's Keep Your Eye On Me.

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I'd have gone with the more elegant "Annaesque".

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I was in Barking today and had to make use of the SL2 bus route. I wonder if there are any other public transport services that come with their own earworm?

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

If the Beeb do end up canning Strictly, here's an idea they could try.

John Junkin, late of Hello Cheeky, is obsessed with Scrabble. So it seemed a good idea to match him against the reigning British Scrabble Champion to see how he would fare

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

All this talk of The Young Ones reminds me: thanks to heavy rotation on MTV in the '80s and Comedy Central in the '90s, it's just as well-known (and for folk under 40 maybe slightly more so) in the US as the UK. Which is mad, as it must be one of the most specifically "Briddish" shows in existence.

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Grand stuff, of course. As John says, it's extremely hard to see how this record groove sketch would physically look, which might be a factor in its binning from the show: it might have either looked shoddy (in the wrong way) or the results might have been too hard to visually read.

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

John here makes a great argument that All in the Family was so much better than Till Death mainly because it had, to use my least favourite cliche of modern TV journalism, "heart".

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

When "scary things from the old television programmes" conversations happen, how many of them bring up the "Pork Air" skit from The Lifeswappers? Not enough, I expect.

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Uncovered this the other day after two decades. Imagine trying to explain it to anyone under thirty. Where would you even start? In many ways the early twenty-first century seems more remote than WWII.

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Tonight's lesser Play for Today: Buffet by Rhys Adrian. Tony Brittan is a middle-aged depressive having a desultory affair with Amanda Barrie and getting pissed in assorted railway station buffets as the oil crisis and rampant inflation loom in the background. So far, so blah. But...

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Why is the image on the left nostalgic, but the one on the right isn't?

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I'll never understand American newspapers' pathological aversion to the ampersand. Is it supposed to make things appear more urgent and "newsy" or something?

Look out Charlie Brown, here come Calvin, Hobbes.

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Trial & Retribution, Lynda La Plante's follow-up to Prime Suspect, is a refreshingly theatrical throwback after the cinematic atylings of PS, but lord the split screen gimmick is annoying.

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Not so much a magnum opus, more a quincy falco.

Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Managed to struggle through an edition of A Stab in the Dark. Nowhere near as "dangerous" or offensive as the publicity of the time made out, more embarrassingly awkward for all concerned. The only real shocks are the cast's po-faced delivery, that ridiculous set, and Michael Gove sounding Scottish.

A Stab in the Dark. Sorry, that should be "a stab in the dark". It's all modishly lower case Helvetica round these parts.

That absurd TW3- meets-The-Cube set in full.

David Bladdyblub impersonates the Samuel Smith's Alpine Lager man.

"What will survive of us is Gove." - Philip Larkin, An Arundel Twat.

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Reporter devastated to discover one of his subject's biggest hit songs was not actually written about him.

The Elton John AIDS Foundation 25th Anniversary Gala by Zachary Weiss.

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Phil Norman @mrphilnorman.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

So much beauty, so much precious information lost forever, but I can still recall all the lyrics for Savlon Cares For Two Kinds Of Skin.

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Any wrongdoing, Any wrongdoing, Any any any wrongdoing...

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Pre-school children's merchandising idea: The Punch Lunch. Soft toys, yoghurts, stationery and lunch boxes depicting lovable characters like Alan Coren, Basil Boothroyd and Miles Kington getting pissed in Ludgate Circus.

This book on eighteenth century literature has got to notoriously lousy poet Sir Richard Blackmore, and I keep thinking I'm reading an old Q Magazine article on Deep Purple.

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