thisispop

John Lennon: Here, there and everywhere There's nothing wrong with rock biopics – but how many more John Lennon dramas do we need? By Gerard Gilbert Independent.co.uk Wednesday, 16 June 2010 http://www.independent.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00394/16lennonBBC_394229b.jpg A day in his life: Christopher Eccleston and NaokoMoriin BBC4's 'Lennon Naked' Is everybody looking forward to the new John Lennon biopic on BBC4 next week? It's called Lennon Naked and stars a slightly too old Christopher Eccleston as the acerbic mop-top, in a drama charting the demise of Lennon's marriage to Cynthia, his bonding with Yoko Ono, and his tricky relationships with son Julian and absentee father Alfred – a merchant seaman played by Christopher Fairbank of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet immortality. But then maybe you still haven't got round to watching Sam Taylor-Wood's 2009 Lennon biopic, Nowhere Boy, which harked back to John's boyhood and the influence of his mother substitute, Aunt Mimi (a slightly too posh Kristin Scott Thomas). Or perhaps you're thinking that Lennon has enjoyed more than his fair share of biopics – a canon that also includes Backbeat, a film admittedly about the so-called "fifth Beatle", Stuart Sutcliffe, but dominated by Ian Hart's uncanny portrayal of a pre-stardom Lennon. Hart was reprising a role he had played three years earlier in The Hours and Times, Christopher Munch's drama about a holiday to Spain that Lennon took with his manager, the gay and besotted Brian Epstein, in the summer of 1963. Did he give way to Epstein's advances? Just about every stage of Lennon's life and career has now been turned into a movie or TV drama – all except the "lost weekend", when Lennon temporarily split from Yoko, decamped to California with their personal assistant, May Pang, and spent 18 months bar-crawling with Harry Nilsson and Keith Moon. A script about this episode is probably already in development. Indeed, irony of irony, the only "celebrity" recently seeming to challenge Lennon's pre-eminence on the biopic front is Mark Chapman, the Catcher in the Rye-obsessed psychopath who gunned Lennon down in December 1980 (both The Killing of John Lennon and Chapter 27 give Chapman the starring role). Oh, and Jesus Christ. Lennon once provocatively declared that the Beatles were bigger than Christianity, but Jesus is probably edging Lennon in the biopic count. But then wasn't Lennon a sort of atheist messiah, or John the Baptist? He certainly had the looks – and there was something divine about that white suit. Or can his seemingly endless fascination to film-makers be explained by something more earthbound – the way he gives such good backchat, especially when facing the press, such pithy, ready-made dialogue. Caustic, complex and compelling, Lennon still bewitches in a way that Paul, George and Ringo never will. But aren't other music legends being unfairly ignored? Bob Dylan is a more poetic singer-songwriter every bit as "important" as Lennon, and a cultural phenomenon whose story is just as entwined with those heady times. Of course Dylan is still alive, a drawback for dramatists with libel laws to consider, while a premature end is a short-cut to movie immortality – see Jim Morrison, Sid Vicious, Ian Curtis and Brian Jones. So what about Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin? Penelope Spheeris's Joplin biopic, The Gospel According to Janis, remains stuck in development hell – but the rock'n'roll hall of fame and infamy is full of terrific stories. Personally, I think there is a good film to be made about Led Zeppelin, or rather about their ruthless manager Peter Grant, who also looked after the Yardbirds. Which reminds me – what about Clapton? And there is comedy to be had, surely, with the Gallagher brothers, or a tragi-comedy with Keith Moon. As for Lennon, he's becoming almost too closely observed; it's beginning to feel uncomfortably fetishistic. That's not to say that Lennon Naked is a bad drama – it isn't – and Robert Jones's script is particularly good at illustrating the emptiness of the late Beatle's life. But isn't it time, to paraphrase the title of the band's final studio album, to let him be? 'Lennon Naked' screens on Wednesday 23 June at 9.30pm on BBC4.

Christopher Eccleston on playing John Lennon in new BBC4 biopic Lennon Naked Jun 16 2010 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post http://images.icnetwork.co.uk/upl/ldp2/jun2010/7/7/christopher-eccleston-300-131504723.jpg Playing John Lennon for BBC4’s new biopic brought Christopher Eccleston to tears, he tells Kate Whiting MOST actors would understandably be nervous about portraying one of their icons stark naked. Yet when Christopher Eccleston was approached about stripping off in a one-off TV drama about John Lennon, he had no such qualms. Instead, he dived right in, quite literally, as BBC Four’s Lennon Naked opens with a shot of a long-haired Eccleston swimming, albeit fully clothed, in Lennon’s indoor pool. “I think you have to just look at him as a human being, as a character and not worry too much about the fact that he’s a godhead,” says Eccleston matter-of-factly, about tackling the role. The 90-minute film covers a huge period of Lennon’s life, from the height of Beatlemania in the 1960s and meeting Yoko Ono, to the band’s break-up and John and Yoko finally leaving the UK for New York, in September, 1971. Much has been written about the anti-Yoko sentiment in the UK, and the fans who blamed her for breaking up the band, but the film looks sympathetically on her plight as a Japanese woman in post-war UK, and shows the natural love between her and Liverpool’s best-known musical son. It also recreates the naked photo shoot they did for the infamous Two Virgins picture which became the cover of their 1968 experimental album. While John and Yoko shot the pictures themselves in private, Eccleston and his co-star Naoko Mori had no such luxury, with a camera crew up close and extremely personal. The fact that the pair had worked together on an episode of Doctor Who, back when Eccleston was the Time Lord, must have eased the tension . . . “Yeah, it did . . . well, we weren’t naked in Doctor Who,” says the 46-year-old, grinning. “We are preparing a version for the late-night audience and I will be taking my sonic screwdriver,” he jokes. “No, we had a good rapport. When I met Robert (Jones, the writer) and the director Ed (Coulthard) and they asked me about Yoko, she was my first idea. They had other ideas for her, but I said Naoko. She’s pretty extraordinary. “With nudity, actors always watch each others’ backs . . . literally, so you’re not looking anywhere else,” he quips. “You always look after each other because it’s not a normal job.” As part of the BBC’s Fatherhood season, the film also lays bare the relationship Lennon had with his absentee father Alfred, who asked his son to choose between him and his mother, Julia, when Lennon was only five. Although he picked his father, Lennon ended up following his mother, who handed him over to her sister Mimi, living in Woolton, and he didn’t see his father again for another 17 years. In the drama, the scene where a young Lennon has to choose between his parents, on a day out in Blackpool, is shown as a flashback, and juxtaposed against his indifferent treatment of his own son, Julian, by his first wife, Cynthia. “Having to do the scene and to dwell on the fact of what happened to him as a five-year-old with his mother and father, when they said, ‘You choose’, I felt sympathetic for him,” says Eccleston. “That really hit home and it was an insight because I felt that that incident drove him on both in good ways and bad ways.” Although the film shows Lennon’s darker side – the drugs, erratic behaviour and choosing Yoko over Cynthia and Julian – Eccleston maintains he’s always stuck up for John and Yoko. “I remember having one family set-to, where I was confronting somebody about the fact that a lot of the vitriol towards Yoko was racially based, and as an 18-year-old I thought that was wrong. I had an instinctive empathy for her because she was an outsider and I did pick up that they loved each other. “I think what’s interesting is that John has been taken on as a lad icon and I think he probably struggled with that all his life. He was constrained by that macho culture and he was such a feminine man in the way he expressed himself and in his music.” He admits that filming the drama has confirmed what he felt was Lennon’s “contradictory nature”. “The first time I remember Lennon registering with me was the press conference that he gave in defence of saying, ‘We’re bigger than Jesus’. For a pop star to be talking about issues like that and not kow-towing to the press . . . He was offered endless opportunities to apologise and it wasn’t an apology. But at the time he was mortified that he’d spoilt it for the other three, one rumour is that he was in tears because he’d ruined it for them.” The actor, dressed today in a simple black jumper and jeans which reflect his down-to-earth personality, was keen to play Lennon, but only if the script was right. “Because I was interested in John, I certainly wasn’t going to do a drama that I thought didn’t do him credit or Yoko credit, or The Beatles. It would be such a mistake,” he says. “Any old poxy writer who wants to get some attention, will write something about John Lennon, so the important thing was the script. I thought it was very original the way Robert captured John’s voice. I think John would love it. There’s all these versions of him running around, he’d love it, it’s like performance art. ‘Oh there’s another me’,” he says, in Lennon’s nasal Liverpudlian twang. So how did Eccleston begin to play someone he admired so much? “At the beginning,” he jokes. “You’ve got all this resource of how he walked and talked and it’s mindless repetition in terms of watching video, listening to audio tape, reading books. And you begin by relying on Robert’s talent and imagination. In the end, it wasn’t those videos and audio tapes that got me through, they were a side issue to what he’d given me to say.” And then of course, there’s the accent. Eccleston was born in Salford, which may be close to Liverpool geographically, but certainly not vocally. “It starts with impersonation, then I worked with a dialect coach and they break it down a bit,” he explains. “They might tell you where the tongue is when they say a certain word and how much they open their mouth. “The voice is as important with John, you know there’s the accent and then there’s the voice, ‘the very thing, there’,” he says, sounding like Lennon again, “and of course his accent changed, because he was a shape-shifter, he had a number of personas. There was macho John, sensitive peacenik John and there was this nice complicated middle-class boy in there.” At the end of a hard day’s work pretending to be Lennon, Eccleston admits he found it difficult to leave him behind. “If you play a character like that and you’re dealing with very dark episodes of their life, which this script does, I think you carry a bit of it with you. Not intentionally. “The night before we shot the final day, I happened to read a fantastic interview with Paul McCartney where he talks about never intentionally sitting down to write a song about John’s death, and he said if a song came he would write it. “He mentioned this song, Here Today, and I was in the pub on my day off having something to eat, reading this article. I went home, downloaded Here Today and cried my eyes out. I think that was because I was finishing and I was not going to be able to be him any more.” LENNON Naked is on BBC Four, on Wednesday, June 23.

U2

Beware My Love

87 and cry Underground v When The Wind Blows

Because they had to travel to America, they were trying to sleep during the Day so that their body clocks were properly prepared. What was the name of the Jewel in the movie "Help!"?

Breakdown of previous two tournaments with 32 teams (8 groups) between 1st, 2nd & 3rd set of 16 matches & lastly the 16 knockout matches. 2006 - 39 - 36 - 42 - 30 2002 - 46 - 35 - 49 - 31 Funny how they both have the same pattern, showing that historically it is the second set of group matches which are the relatively cagey affairs, before the Knock Out stages see less goals than any of the group set of matches.

Yes, but I think you fail to realise that Diego Maradona used the South American qualifying as an opportunity to experiment and play several different players. From the outset Diego stated that his plan was for Argentina to qualify for the World Cup, and that looking at as many different players and options was a priority over topping the qualification table. A total of 51 Argentina's played in these qualification matches. Therefore, don't go thinking for one minute that Chile & Paraguay are better sides than Argentina just because they finished ahead of Argentina in South American qualifying.

Well at last the tournament has come alive in the last 24 Hours. :cheer:

Exactly...... and Obama will look good to the USA electorate whilst supporting one of their biggest fund raisers (Exxon) a good ole' US of A oil company to pick up the share of the spoils after doing his best to destroy BP. ... and isn't it funny that Obama did not do too much vocally until after Cameron (The ConDem coalition) told him we would not put more troops into the Helmand provence in Afghanistan as Obama requested. It must be odd for the President of the USA to have a UK leader saying no to the President of America. :lol:

I don't understand how anyone can possibly make my entry favourite to win compared to some far more obvious candidates. :o I mean she has not even got a page on Wikipedia yet. :lol:

After his speech overnight, I would say your about your leader have shown up that he is nothing more than a "false godhead". Obama has singularly failed, as a statesman, to address the oil spillage catastrophy in the Gulf of Mexico. I would have expected a President in his position to have adopted a more statesman-like role, encouraging 'across-industry' cooperation to address the problem and bring this gusher under control, but no, all we get is more finger pointing, hysterical rhetoric and blatant threats. Setting aside the fact that the American culpability in this disaster is being totally ignored by Obama, BP (or "British Petroleum" as he deliberately and knowingly incorrectly calls them), since the two companies which were actually involved in the drilling (on BP's behalf) were the SWISS company Transocean and the AMERICAN company Halliburton. But have you heard him criticise them? I haven't. It would fit in with his anti-British agenda. BP have grudgingly from the outset accepted their responsibilities and obligations with regard to the compensation issues and clean-up etc, yet still we get negative pressure and threats from the White House, when true leadership would be much more appropriate and helpful in finding a solution to this awesome technical problem. It is ironic that the very person that Obama dislikes so much, Winston Churchill (he had previously suspected that the British Army of Churchill's time was involved in the torture of his father during the Mau Mau rebellion; Hence on Day 1 on taking office he discarded the bust of Winston Churchill that was in the Oval Office), would have by now pulled together a panel of 'oil-industry and environmental' experts tasked with solving this problem and formulating measures that would regulate exploration and extraction methods, preventing further incidents occurring in the future - I wonder if Obama will get the message - or will it just be yet more threats and pressure. Sorry, but this smacks of lets drive BP to go bust, so good old US owned Exxon can benefit (whom as I posted earlier gave the Democrats a significant amount towards their Election kitty). Hence his speech last night mentioned absolutely zero about amending all Oil producer's procedures & policies in the Seas around the USA as it was all about knocking BP. Obama's rheoteric of "Seizing the moment," invoking World War II vets and the moon landing and stating that this disaster is the environmental 9/11, when 4 times as much is polluted from the Gulf of Niger by US Oil companies is breathtakingly insular. But then again I guess he ignores that, as his predecessors ignored (& supported US companies) over Bhophal is to be expected as the Rwandan genocide never happened did it in America's eyes. As Morrissey once put it America Is Not The World & the Manic Street Preachers once put it If White America Told The Truth For One Day Its World Would Fall Apart. In short Money talks & Bull$h!t walks. Whilst the UK is now getting a timely reminder in understanding why America is hated for its sheer arrogance in significant potions of the world. Sad times, as I really thought Obama had more class than this, but I was wrong.

Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:29 UK BBC NEWS BP 'to fund $20bn spill payouts' Breaking news Under-fire oil firm BP is to place $20bn (£13.5bn) in a special fund to deal with compensation payouts after the Gulf oil spill, US media report. BP executives were said to be finalising a deal at White House talks with President Obama and aides. The meeting was held the morning after Mr Obama made his first Oval Office TV address over the oil spill. Oil has been leaking into the Gulf since a drilling rig leased by BP blew up on 20 April, killing 11 workers.

OK then (after first set of group fixtures with 8 groups & 32 teams): 2010 - 16 - 24 - 1.50 2006 - 16 - 39 - 2.44 2002 - 16 - 46 - 2.88 1998 - 16 - 37 - 2.31 Personally I think the majority of the players complaining about the new FIFA Jabulani ball where they now seem incapable of taking free-kicks, and strikers are struggling to control their shots & headers, and where a quarter of the goals have come from goalkeeping errors because the movement of the ball is difficult to predict for all concerned; and the noise from all the vuvuzelas means the players are having trouble communicating with each other on the pitch resulting in several tepid poor quality matches is the real factor for this low scoring tournament to date, especially when you consider in major European, South American & International football the goals per game averages are higher than they were 10 & 20 years ago. Well done Sepp Blatter & FIFA. :arrr:

I cheered more when North Korea scored than when Stevie G scored on Saturday evening. Here is some food for thought: FIFA WORLD CUP GOALS 1930 - 18 games - 70 goals - 3.8 average number of goals per game 1934 - 17 - 70 - 4.1 1938 - 18 - 84 - 4.7 1950 - 22 - 88 - 4.0 1954 - 26 - 140 - 5.4 1958 - 35 - 126 - 3.6 1962 - 32 - 89 - 2.8 1966 - 32 - 89 - 2.8 1970 - 32 - 95 - 3.0 1974 - 38 - 97 - 2.6 1978 - 38 - 102 - 2.7 1982 - 52 - 146 - 2.8 1986 - 52 - 132 - 2.5 1990 - 52 - 115 - 2.2 1994 - 52 - 141 - 2.7 1998 - 64 - 171 - 2.7 2002 - 64 - 161 - 2.5 2006 - 64 - 147 - 2.3 2010* - 14 - 22 - 1.6 :manson: *Up to and including Tuesday, June 15th.

I'll do my first listens to all 49 songs over the weekend. But I'm off Wed 23rd for the remainder of the week, so I should have no worries getting a proper listen to all these songs.

When in Rome, etc..... Personally, I can't stand them ..... and they would fail UK health & safety criteria to be admitted into grounds on account of their loudness. But each to there own.

25 Baddiel, Skinner & The Lightning Seeds - Three Lions 07 Eminem - Not Afraid 02 Example - Kickstarts 38 Glee Cast - Anyway You Want It/Lovin' Touchin' Squeezin' 26 Glee Cast - Over The Rainbow 24 Kele - Tenderoni 21 Kelly Rowland ft David Guetta - Commander 04 Kylie Minogue - All For Lovers 13 Lady GaGa - Alejandro 42 McLean - Finally In Love 07 Robyn - Dancing On My Own 46 Shakira ft Freshlyground - Waka Waka (This Time For Africa) 41 Terry Venables - If I Can Dream 69 Tiffany Page - On Your Head Bonus #1: YES Bonus #2: YES Bonus #3: NO

01. Dizzee Rascal feat James Cordon - Shout 02. Example - Kickstarts 03. K'naan - Wavin' Flag 04. Kylie Minogue - All The Lovers 05. Tinie Tempah - Frisky 06. Robyn - Dancing On My Own 07. Eminem - Not Afraid 08. David Guetta feat Chris Willis, Fergie & LMFAO - Gettin' Over You 09. Jason Derulo - Ridin' Solo 10. Usher ft Will.I.Am - OMG Bonus questions: 1. (for 5 pts) Which song will be # 40 next week? (Artist name and song title needed!) Terry Venables - If I Can Dream 2. (for 3 pts) How many new/re/chart entries will be altogether in the top 40 next week? 8 3. (for 2 pts) Which album will be higher next week: Chemical Brothers – Further or We Are Scientists – Barbara? Chemical Brothers - Further

I think (yet again) you are showing a failure to grasp rudimentary Economics. In very simplistic terms South Africa's Economy was getting better and stronger after the end of Apartheid (1994) & the rise of the ANC, until 2000, when South Africa (clearly inspired by Zimbabwe) introduced in 2000 (against the advice of Nelson Mandela who left office in 1999) Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) program launched by the South African government to redress the inequalities of Apartheid by giving previously disadvantaged groups (black Africans, Coloureds, Indians and Chinese). In 2008 The Economist said "BEE has created a brain drain, where the qualified white expertise is leaving (left the country) for areas where they would not be discriminated against. Since BEE discriminates based on race, it is inherently a racist policy. Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi is a strong critic of BEE and supports this view. He has stated that "the government's reckless implementation of the affirmative action policy is forcing many white people to leave the country, creating a skills shortage crisis". Archbishop Desmond Tutu has warned that South Africa is sitting on a "powder keg" because millions are living in "dehumanising poverty" stating that Black Economic Empowerment only serves an elite few. According to the Economic Indices South Africa ranked 48th in 2008 ......... falling from 25th in 2000. It ranked 43rd in 1994...

Well Rachel has been busy: AlPZjWLLcYQ Lea Michele & Matthew Morrison performing at the 2010 Tony Awards (13th July 2010)

Yes, but what do you expect. The World Cup should NEVER have been given to South Africa. But money talks, and bull$h!t walks (especially when it comes to FIFA); just as it will with 2018 when Russia get hosting rights for that World Cup. South Africa has gone rapidly backwards since Mandela relinguished power, not helped by a President with anti Western World views. The irony being I recall arguing this very point with Scott. But I guess Scott wants its both ways instead of blaming the fukking corrupt bully boy Jacob Zuma because he is a self proclaimed socialist (he was the former leader of the ANC Communist Party Youth League) who thinks homosexuals should be imprisoned saying that same-sex marriage was "a disgrace to the nation and to God": "When I was growing up, an ungqingili (a homosexual) would not have stood in front of me. I would knock him out.", and believes that Aids is God's punishment. He was charged with rape in 2005, but was acquitted. In addition, he fought a long legal battle over allegations of racketeering and corruption, resulting from his financial advisor Schabir Shaik's conviction for corruption and fraud. On 6 April 2009, the National Prosecuting Authority decided to drop the charges citing political interference from the USA & the UK.

Hilariously I picked them out in BOTH my work's & pub's sweepstakes. :lol: What a header!

World Cup Winners Betfair.com - Win only odds (10th June) Spain 4/1 (4/1) Brazil 9/2 (5/1) Argentina 7/1 (6/1) England 9/1 (7/1) Netherlands 9/1 (9/1) Germany 21/2 (14/1) Italy 16/1 (16/1) France 28/1 (28/1) Portugal 33/1 (33/1) 66/1 Bar

Maybe not the Netherlands v Denmark match; but the Japan - Nigeria match was.