Latest news with #PotBlack
Sydney Morning Herald
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
These hi-tech appliances lack fridge benefits
Sue Casiglia of North Ryde has noted a number of news stories on 'smart' fridges: 'They can do anything, it seems, including letting you know when you are low on a certain product. And all it takes is a knock on the glass front, and it magically illuminates the internal light so you can see what you've got in there. Beware of any future 'smart' additions that will warn you against eating something because of its calorie count. It ought to be 'smart' enough to know that we don't want to hear anything like that!' 'As a student who could only afford a black and white TV (C8), I nevertheless enjoyed watching those celebrated snooker geniuses on Pot Black (including Joe and Fred Davis),' recalls Ian Glendon of Ashmore (Qld). 'On one occasion, commentator 'Whispering' Ted Lowe, in typical hushed tones said, 'for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green'.' 'It was great to hear about DCE and SBW in the SMH today,' says Jim Pollitt (aka JBP) of Wahroonga. 'I was like LOL.' 'Radio XLFM in Cooma is advertising in the trade press for an announcer,' notes Peter Riley of Penrith. 'One of the requirements for the job is 'excitable' personality which Webster's D ictionary defines as 'volatile, anxious, unstable and hyperactive'. Rock on!' 'Lan-Choo tea rewards (C8) are not to be sniffed at,' declares Joy Everett of Valla Beach. 'I still use a box grater redeemed in 1979. Prestige brand, stainless steel, made in Belgium. Six types of grating in one. Fabulous quality, still sharp. But it took about 144 packet tops collected by my mother and me.' 'Plainly, the perps stealing 'Angus' street signs (C8) are fans of AC/DC,' asserts Dave Horsfall of North Gosford. Dorothy Gliksman of Cedar Brush Creek has more on the door-to-door sisterhood (C8): 'My mother must've been the first woman to go from door-to-door in what was the early 1950s, to sell frocks to women. The areas she covered were Botany, Mascot and nearby areas. She came from war-torn Europe, learned to drive, spoke a little English, and with those skills, plus a huge amount of self-confidence, managed to gain the trust of these women and over the years, built up her reputation to go on and open her own fashion boutique. Her ingenuity and hard work rubbed off on her children.'
The Age
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
These hi-tech appliances lack fridge benefits
Sue Casiglia of North Ryde has noted a number of news stories on 'smart' fridges: 'They can do anything, it seems, including letting you know when you are low on a certain product. And all it takes is a knock on the glass front, and it magically illuminates the internal light so you can see what you've got in there. Beware of any future 'smart' additions that will warn you against eating something because of its calorie count. It ought to be 'smart' enough to know that we don't want to hear anything like that!' 'As a student who could only afford a black and white TV (C8), I nevertheless enjoyed watching those celebrated snooker geniuses on Pot Black (including Joe and Fred Davis),' recalls Ian Glendon of Ashmore (Qld). 'On one occasion, commentator 'Whispering' Ted Lowe, in typical hushed tones said, 'for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green'.' 'It was great to hear about DCE and SBW in the SMH today,' says Jim Pollitt (aka JBP) of Wahroonga. 'I was like LOL.' 'Radio XLFM in Cooma is advertising in the trade press for an announcer,' notes Peter Riley of Penrith. 'One of the requirements for the job is 'excitable' personality which Webster's D ictionary defines as 'volatile, anxious, unstable and hyperactive'. Rock on!' 'Lan-Choo tea rewards (C8) are not to be sniffed at,' declares Joy Everett of Valla Beach. 'I still use a box grater redeemed in 1979. Prestige brand, stainless steel, made in Belgium. Six types of grating in one. Fabulous quality, still sharp. But it took about 144 packet tops collected by my mother and me.' 'Plainly, the perps stealing 'Angus' street signs (C8) are fans of AC/DC,' asserts Dave Horsfall of North Gosford. Dorothy Gliksman of Cedar Brush Creek has more on the door-to-door sisterhood (C8): 'My mother must've been the first woman to go from door-to-door in what was the early 1950s, to sell frocks to women. The areas she covered were Botany, Mascot and nearby areas. She came from war-torn Europe, learned to drive, spoke a little English, and with those skills, plus a huge amount of self-confidence, managed to gain the trust of these women and over the years, built up her reputation to go on and open her own fashion boutique. Her ingenuity and hard work rubbed off on her children.'
West Australian
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- West Australian
Ocean with David Attenborough: Conservationist calls on countries to protect our waters to save our world
Sir David Attenborough turned 99 on Thursday, was feted by King Charles and presided over the London premiere of a stunning new movie that he hopes will force the United Nations to save Earth's oceans. Not a bad day for the world's most famous biologist. For someone who has spent his career describing the lifecycles of all creatures great and small, Attenborough is acutely aware of his own mortality. It's an immutable fact he leans into in his movie, Ocean with David Attenborough, to add even more weight to its urgent message. 'When I first saw the sea as a young boy, it was thought of as a vast wilderness to be tamed and mastered for the benefit of humanity,' he says in the film in that unmistakable voice. 'Now, as I approach the end of my life, we know the opposite is true. 'After living for nearly a hundred years on this planet, I now understand that the most important place on Earth is not on land, but at sea.' It's his sincere hope, and that of everyone attached to the film — produced with funding assistance from WA's Minderoo Pictures — that Ocean generates a veritable tsunami of support that flows into the United Nations Ocean Conference in June. It's there the nations of the world have what could be the last chance to vote on dramatic increases in marine conversation, before entire underwater ecosystems suffer catastrophic failure. 'This could be the moment of change,' Attenborough says in the film. 'Nearly every country on Earth has just agreed, on paper, to achieve this bare minimum and protect a third of the ocean. Together, we now face the challenge of making it happen.' Should it happen, it will further burnish the legacy of a man who has effectively become the human face of the natural world, tirelessly communicating wonders, fears and struggles on its behalf. And to think his first job application to the BBC in 1950, for a gig as a radio producer, was rejected. The consolation prize, however, was a job with the national broadcaster's nascent television department, where he found himself hosting the first series of Zoo Quest four years later. That show ran for a decade, and led to Attenborough's promotion into an administrative role at the BBC, where he spent a decade signing off on expenditure and commissioning shows by other people. He is erroneously credited with commissioning Monty Python's Flying Circus during that period – the honour goes to then-BBC1 controller Paul Fox – but Attenborough did greenlight Pot Black, a snooker show, when BBC2 transitioned to colour. But the inexorable pull of the natural world eventually convinced him to resign from his post, even as he was being touted as a future head of the BBC, and he eagerly dived back into wildlife filmmaking. And the planet is lucky he did. From the early 1970s to today, if it crawls, bites or flies, Attenborough has caught it on camera and beamed it into our loungerooms. It was the seminal 1979 series, Life on Earth, that really put him on the map. At the time, it was the most ambitious natural history series ever filmed, taking in more than 100 locations around the world and enlisting the expertise of 500 scientists over its three-year production. To this day, it remains one of the most influential works to documentarians and established a benchmark for all subsequent wildlife filmmaking. The boy who grew up collecting fossils and natural specimens was suddenly one of the BBC's most valuable international commodities. In the years that followed he gave us a seemingly endless array of flora and fauna. Blue Planet. Planet Earth. Frozen Planet. Life. Mega-budget shows that wowed adults and children alike with never-before-seen moments of magic. But what once seemed endless now has a very permanent end in sight, and Attenborough is determined to go out with a bang. Ocean was shot over two years and contains many firsts for wildlife filmmaking, including capturing the first vision of industrial bottom trawling, the biggest mass coral bleaching event and the largest school of yellowfin tuna ever caught on camera. Australian underwater cinematographer Tom Park contributed incredible footage of coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef and said the emotion of being part of Attenborough's final film was hard to put into words. 'He's been an icon of mine for as long as I can remember, I grew up watching his films, and he's really a figurehead of the natural world,' Park told The Sunday Times. 'He's inspired generations of wildlife filmmakers, so to actually be able to have filmed part of his new film is the privilege of my professional career.' Park's portion of the film chronicles the devastating impact of last year's mass coral bleaching event, which is becoming increasingly common as ocean temperatures rise. It's part of a larger section of the movie that focuses on humanity's destruction of the marine world and is considerably more grim than Attenborough's usual style. The vision of bottom trawling, a commercial fishing method that sees a weighted net destroy the seabed, is hard to watch, even for someone as experienced as Park. 'We've never seen anything like it on the big screen before,' the cinematographer admitted. 'Everyone knows bottom trawling is bad, we've seen the stats, but when you actually put vision to this idea of bottom trawling, and it's showcased how they do it in the film, it's remarkably shocking.' Of course, the point is to shock. To make the audience question why bulldozing the Amazon rainforest is an unthinkable horror, but doing the same to the ocean doesn't move the needle for most people. 'Unfortunately, the ocean is out of sight and out of mind for a lot of us,' Park said. 'For the everyday public, for the policymakers, the ocean is this hidden, underwater world. 'But if people understand, and they see the beauty and the fragility, hopefully this will create empathy, and that will lead to action.' That action better come fast, because a certain 99-year-old doesn't have time to wait. Ocean with David Attenborough is in cinemas now.
Times
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Why we're hypnotised by snooker on TV
Ask people to name a groundbreaking example of man making contact with a chalky white sphere in July 1969 and they are likely to say Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11 moon landing. A snooker fan, however, will recall Ray Reardon's masterly control of the cue ball in the inaugural episode of BBC2's Pot Black. Half a century later, snooker remains synonymous with the medium of television. This, in many ways, should be unsurprising. Today and tomorrow, the most prestigious match in the snooker calendar, the final of the World Snooker Championship, will be watched by a smaller crowd than Weston-super-Mare AFC in the sixth tier of English football. The Crucible theatre, home to the championships since 1977, holds just 980 people. A game played on a 12x6ft table is not a natural mass spectator sport. So, the love affair between snooker and television is perfectly logical. But what great love affair was ever founded on logic alone? There is something more subtle, more primal going on. There is chemistry. In a recent essay for The New Yorker, the author Sally Rooney described a frame of snooker as 'an apparently chaotic jumble [that] slowly reveals its hidden form'. In his book Deep Pockets: Snooker and the Meaning of Life, Brendan Cooper says the game is like 'a kind of hearth, a breathing fire in the living rooms of the world'. The commentators certainly sound as though they could be sitting on the sofa beside you: Dennis Taylor working his way through a packet of Rich Tea, Steve Davis with the family dog asleep at his feet. With its brushed carpet surface, polished metal highlights and sturdy wooden frame, even the snooker table suggests a kind of domesticity, with much in common with the typical British living room. From the inception of snooker on TV, the footage has largely been captured from a single, recurring angle, the one you are likely to be picturing in your head as you read. The camera hovers overhead at the foot of the table, altering its rectangular shape into a kind of foreshortened parallelogram. Just as the action fits on to the table, so the table fits on to the screen. 'It's not exactly a bird's-eye view,' says Petra Szemán, a visual artist and lecturer at Newcastle University. 'If it was a fully top-down view, you'd really feel that it had nothing to do with your body — that the human is not in the equation.' Instead, we see the match both through the eyes of the player and as an observer. 'You're right in the middle of everything,' says Taylor, who is in his fifth decade of commentating for the BBC. 'You could be standing at the table yourself.' Each frame begins with an ordered image — the triangle of red balls, the pattern of other colours in their starting positions — which is immediately broken into chaos before sequentially being returned to another, emptier kind of order as the balls are potted and disappear. On the simplest of levels, this process is rewarding to watch. There is an inherent satisfaction to the image of a table being gradually cleared — one that, broadcast into our living rooms, could be seen as tidying up. Andrew Klevan, a professor of film aesthetics at Oxford University, draws a contrast with football, where aesthetic beauty is achieved by finding a rare moment of coherence — scoring a goal — amid 90 minutes of chaos and disorder. 'Snooker is about clearing up mess. There's something very satisfying in that.' For Alan Male, the head of illustration at Falmouth University, it's the appearance of the balls, which 'totally conflict with our psychological perceptions of colour'. The black, with its connotations of 'coldness, death [and] nothingness' is worth the most points; while the red ball — signalling 'passion, danger, aggression, energy [and] vigour' — is worth the least. It is no coincidence that snooker's popularity took off with the introduction of colour television, with Pot Black specifically commissioned by a young David Attenborough to showcase the BBC's colour service. Overnight the game turned from a working man's pastime into a national obsession. 'Once they started watching,' Taylor remembers, 'people got hooked.' • Read our coverage of the World Snooker Championship Snooker's audience is notably mixed. 'The way the game was played fascinated everybody,' says Taylor, who says just as many women watch the sport as men. Taylor partially attributes this to the players' smart waistcoats. The game's popularity may have dipped since its 1980s heyday, but for devotees it remains more than a sport. Both snooker and its TV coverage are throwbacks. They are reassuring. Like the smell of home-cooked food wafting in from the kitchen or the crackle of a stylus nestled into a well-worn groove. Snooker doesn't happen in 60-second bursts. Even its surprises seem to happen in slow motion. The balls sound just as you would hope they would sound, just as you would imagine if you had been watching on mute. They are potted. And then they are respotted by the spectral presence of a white-gloved referee to sit obediently atop their marker until the laws of physics crash into them and send them rolling towards their destiny once again. The sport itself can be beautiful. The broadcast's greatest virtue is knowing not to get in the way. It is, says the 2005 world champion, Shaun Murphy, 'a safe space. It feels like the TV's giving you a cuddle.' The final of the 2025 World Snooker Championship is live from the Crucible on BBC2 and iPlayer, today and on Monday
Daily Mirror
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Ken Doherty speaks out about Alex Higgins as he reveals snooker icon's 'special code'
Former world champion Ken Doherty recalls his relationship with snooker hellraiser Alex Higgins, which began when he served drinks to the 'Hurricane' at a tournament in his youth Snooker hellraiser Alex Higgins once revealed his secret booze code to a future world champion. The Hurricane captivated sports fans with his brilliance at the table and chaotic lifestyle, which featured a string of bust-ups and controversies. Ken Doherty idolised Higgins in his youth after first watching him on TV in the legendary Pot Black tournament. Unlike many of his contemporaries, the 1997 world champion, always managed to stay on the right side of the Belfast-born maverick, who died in 2010 aged 61. Doherty said last year: "I was one of the guys he actually liked! "I never had one run-in with him. I was one of those guys he seemed to like and we got on pretty well. He was my hero. He was the one who made me want to play snooker. "When I first saw him play on Pot Black as an eight-year-old, I wanted a snooker table and I got one from Santa. I was hooked." Their positive rapport began when a young Doherty, fresh off winning the Irish under-16 championship, served as an usher at the Irish Open held at the legendary Goffs venue. Doherty recalled: "I was 14 and had just won the Irish under-16 championship. I got a week off school and got a job there, taking tickets off people, showing them their seats. I could just sit on the middle of the steps and watch the snooker. "I got a tap on the shoulder one Wednesday afternoon while a match was going on and got brought up to the office. I thought I was in trouble but, lo and behold, there was Alex Higgins. I couldn't believe it! "I was as nervous as a kitten. He said, 'Congratulations babes [on the winning the junior championship], hopefully one day I'll be playing you here at Goffs'. "He then said, 'By the way, when I'm playing tonight, when I ask you for an orange juice, that means a vodka and orange juice'. I said, 'while you're playing, Mr Higgins?' And he said, 'Yes kid, and if I ask you for a vodka and orange juice, that means a double'. "About 10 years later, I'm playing him there. I played him twice there and it was just incredible. That was like a dream come true and we became quite friendly over the years." In a touching twist of fate, Doherty was the last World Championship opponent of Higgins in 1994. Despite Doherty's victory, it was the Hurricane who stole the show. "He had a stand-up argument with the referee, John Williams," added Doherty." He signalled to John to stand on his left and John said, 'no Alex, I've been standing here all day, I'm not in your line of sight'. Higgins retorted, 'you're not in my line sight, John, you're in my line of thought'. It was so funny."
