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Why are so many directors’ favorite projects failures as movies? “The failure of so many pet projects is more than fluky coincidence. Such films have their own set of problems. Over the years, endless script revisions can drain the life and energy from a movie, which then staggers into the world as if emerging from decades in a dark attic, as withered and creaky as Miss Havisham. And the filmmaker’s passion is often so blinding that he forgets to explain to the rest of us why Alexander was so great or Bobby Darin was such an idol in the Spacey household.”

“The jingle, as anyone with a television knows, is a vanishing art form. It is too quaint, too corny, too oldschool for our ironic times. Naming your product in a commercial for your product is just tacky, say advertising executives. Modern pitchmen prefer pop songs that create a mood or spark an emotional association or conjure up some sort of vague but potent lifestyle-oriented craving that, if all goes as planned, attaches to a product and translates to a sale. Which leaves the jingle writers scrambling to adapt to a world that has suddenly turned its back on their wares.”

A Christian group is charging the BBC with blasphemy after the broadcaster aired Jerry Springer, The Opera. Christian Voice national director Stephen Green said: “If Jerry Springer – The Opera isn’t blasphemous then nothing in Britain is sacred.” He said the show was “much worse” than he expected when he saw it and said it portrayed Jesus as a “coprophiliac sexual deviant”. A coprophiliac is someone sexually aroused by faeces.”