I am one of those people for whom Nik Kershaw’s “I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” is a heartfelt anthem. I once heard a joke linking that song to Freud’s work on the Oedipus complex, but the sentiment is no laughing matter for a sufferer of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), the medical […]
Read MoreStand-up Dylan Moran takes on the world What do you do when you hate celebrity, advertising, technology and interviews? Start telling it like it is, says the Black Books star on the eve of his tour By Julian Hall Tuesday, 23 September 2008 Approach with caution, is the advice of those who have encountered Dylan […]
Read MoreI wrote for the British Comedy Awards magazine between 2006 and 2010, including the 2008 edition where I interviewed Michael McIntyre. To read the 2008 magazine click here: bca.digitaleditions.co.uk/britishcomedy2008/
Read MoreA little bit of politics On the eve of the local elections, Julian Hall takes a look at political comedy Legend has it that when a Nazi officer confronted Picasso with a print of Guernica and asked him: ‘Did you do this?’, Picasso replied: ‘No, you did.’ Whether true or not the exchange defines political […]
Read MoreWas Lenny right? Julian Hall on the future of black comedy The recent speech by Lenny Henryabout the lack of diversity in TV raised some uncomfortable and contentious questions about the lack of black comedy talent. Claiming that talent scouts weren’t digging deep enough for new stars, Henry said: ‘Do they go to the Hackney […]
Read MoreInterview with Chris O’Dowd for SW magazine, before he went ‘global’.
Read MoreIn the mid-Eighties, when that small club, the Comedy Store, was solidly part of the comedy establishment, an 18-year-old Rock was spotted at New York’s the Comic Strip Live by Eddie Murphy. Rock has eventually taken Murphy’s mantle of the US’s highest-profile comedian, first paying his dues on Saturday Night Live and surviving a career […]
Read MoreMatchbox Contributors, Matchbox Events, Matchbox Tribes and Rant; all examples of contributions to Matchbox, a lifestyle magazine for West London, over the course of 2006/2007 The new Marc Jacobs store on Mount Street, Mayfair, is the designer’s second European store, after this year’s Paris opening. To mark the occasion Marc Jacobs will show his diffusion range Marc by […]
Read MoreShe describes herself as something “between an entertainer and part of the populace”; a fellow commentator has called her “the insider’s outsider”. Sandra Bernhard’s dichotomy is plain for me to see as soon as I arrive at our meeting point, a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue, in her New York neighbourhood. The grand dame of spoken-word […]
Read MoreA copywriting agency asked me to pen a series of reports on the state of the property market in various countries. This report on Egypt was just one of a number of examples. The work involved extrapolating the most relevant information from dense amounts of technical briefing copy and turning it into an accessible report […]
Read More