What possesses a right-minded comedian to quit the day job for life as a breakfast radio DJ?The opening DJ on the Beeb’s new alternative radio channel, 6Music, Phill Jupitus was a maverick on the flat landscape of inane commercial breakfast radio. Disregarding the prescriptive chart-led schedule and showing no fear in the face of BBC management, this ex-performance poet’s personal crusade against the bland, the predictable and the smug self-satisfaction ensured that he never had any trouble...
Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, and the Modern Revolution, explores the myriad ways in which social media has influenced, created, and exposed some of the 21st century's most pivotal moments. From the early days of social networking to the Arab Spring and its winter, the idea of the technoself and the ways that technology has helped both individuals and groups shape their own identities to the issues of privacy and permanency in a digital world, Social Media evaluates everything from...
First published in 1933, “Acting: The First Six Lessons” is the classic work on what would later become known as Method acting by Richard Boleslavsky. Born in Russia in 1889, Boleslavsky began his acting career by studying under Konstantin Stanislavski at the Moscow Art Theatre where he learned about the “system”. After World War I, Boleslavsky both directed and acted in films in Poland and Germany before settling in New York, where he founded the American Laboratory Theatre in 1923. There he...
Written in 1948, “The Royal Road to Card Magic” by Jean Hugard and Frederick Braué, is an important and classic beginner’s guide to over 100 different card tricks. Jean Hugard, born John Gerard Rodney Boyce in Queensland, Australia in 1872, began his professional career as a magician in 1896, eventually moving to America in 1915, where he worked in vaudeville and as a stage magician. He retired from performing professionally around 1930 and began a prolific and successful career writing books on...
First published in 1953, “To the Actor: On the Technique of Acting” is the famous and influential guide to acting by Russian-American actor, director, and teacher Michael Chekhov. Born in Saint Petersburg in 1891 and the nephew of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Michael Chekhov studied acting from the famed theater director Konstantin Stanislavski at the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre and was considered by Stanislavski to be his most brilliant student. While Chekhov was at first a...
The best jokes, gags and scenes from a true British comedy classic.‘They don't like it up 'em!’'People shout the «Don't tell him, Pike!» line at me regularly – and I didn't even say it!’ Philip Madoc.In the annals of British television, no finer example of classic comedy exists than in the shape of Dad's Army, the Home Guard-based sitcom written by veteran writers Jimmy Perry and David Croft. Although they penned many other sterling programmes, including Hi-De-Hi! and the underrated You Rang,...
