Latest news with #Viz
Cambrian News
02-05-2025
- Automotive
- Cambrian News
A feast of rugby at the popular Aber7s rugby festival
There will be a parking charge for all vehicles; (£4 per day) or £6 for both days online. This will need to be obtained by an AberSU staff member (in Hi Viz) who will be at the parking site OR can be pre-paid online.
Telegraph
13-04-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Workplace etiquette has gone to the dogs – these rules can bring it back
Ruthless, he must be, I thought: some kind of Ivan the Terrible of the office. A man without fear, a dictator, a veritable piste basher flattening all the snowflakes. For surely, these days, a boss can't address his company and dish out admonishments? One word of criticism and there'd be a stampede to the psychiatrist's couch. The website Glassdoor, on which employees share horror stories ('My boyfriend had dumped me and my beast of a manager made me come in to work…'), might crash under the weight of anonymous postings about bullying and harassment. So, how refreshing this week to read of a missive from Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, in which, in no uncertain terms, he dished it out to his employees. 'I see people in meetings all the time who are getting notifications and personal texts or who are reading emails. This has to stop. It's disrespectful. It wastes time,' he raged. Perhaps, at that very moment, shivering underlings reached for their phones, seeking out the crying emoji, #traumadump. Might there now be rumblings of discontent that spill over into HR, and then ensuing investigations, official warnings, a suspension pending further enquiries? Well, given that 69-year-old Dimon has run America's biggest bank since 2006 and is known as 'the $25 billion man', in reference to how much the stock would drop if he left tomorrow, this is unlikely. Having woken at 5am, read all the papers, exercised and travelled to his office in midtown Manhattan, where he runs a bank that operates in 100 countries and employs 250,000 people, when he says: 'Stop looking at your phone', you stop looking at your phone and you don't complain about it. And Dimon does the whole world a favour as he lays the laws of some much-needed office etiquette. 'Talk like you speak; get rid of the jargon,' he also wrote in his letter to shareholders. He also warned people against virtue signalling and said, 'More and more people are being disrespectful, condescending and unwilling to listen to one another.' Dimon reminds me of a great boss I once had, one John Brown. Each month, he would gather all staff into the office café and address us. First he'd soften us up with readings from the latest issue of his beloved Viz, the magazine he proudly, and very successfully, published. Having read out some choice snippets from Roger's Profanisaurus, as the laughing faded he'd dish out some truths. 'Work starts at 9.30am' he might say. 'That's 9.30am. That doesn't mean you get to the office at 9.30am, have some breakfast, get some coffee, chat with your buddies and then think about walking to your desk. It means starting work at 9.30am.' He also had a firm company rule that no meeting should last longer than an hour. To which I would add the following 10 rules: Do not bring your laptop to a meeting. You might say it's there for writing notes, but we all know you're watching Netflix, albeit muted with subtitles on. And don't claim you need it in case a client emails. It can wait. It is only your demented fetish that makes you think anyone needs a reply within 30 seconds of receipt. Place your phone face down during meetings. Even if it so much as shimmers, do not look at or touch it. And don't think we don't know you're cheating by glimpsing at your Apple Watch. If you're chatting to a colleague in the office, do not look at your phone until the conversation is over. Do not walk through the office looking at your phone. You're not that important. No one is. And if they are, they don't look at their phones – they have people to do that for them. If you're out to lunch with colleagues, friends, even Grandma, do not place your phone by your side as if to say: 'Whatever is on my phone is more important than you, so when it buzzes, I'll be looking at it.' (I once had lunch with a self-important chum who brandished two phones. 'The second one is in case I'm on the first and someone needs to tell me something important.' Needless to say, over two hours, neither even buzzed.) Do not consistently work late. It does not impress anyone; it merely suggests you can't control your own workflow or delegate efficiently. Never eat at your desk. It's unhygienic (if your desk is dirty), antisocial (if we don't like the smell of it) and selfish (if we do). Do not type loudly (and if you do, like me, stay away from the office – see rule 10) or discuss football. Do not take off your shoes, nor wear shorts (men). Do not go to the office and don't attend meetings. This is one rule by which I abide, thus avoiding any of the above dangers.
The Independent
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Like it or not, Kevin & Perry Go Large was proud British cinema – now it's all but gone
The laws of physics are challenged early in Kevin & Perry Go Large, when Harry Enfield's sullen, spotty teenager foils a bank robbery with his erection. Later on in the film – one of the most successful British movies in UK box office history – the camera is splattered by the gloop from an infected belly-button piercing, Kathy Burke cops off in a sand dune while dressed in full Gallagher-brother drag, and a third-act cameo is provided by EastEnders ' Phil Mitchell. Kevin & Perry Go Large, about a pair of sex-starved mates attempting to lose their virginity in Ibiza, is absolute tosh. But it's our tosh: the product of a nation that invented Viz, Lucozade, and Denise van Outen. And 25 years ago this month, it was the sort of slapdash, locally made and proudly creaky tosh that British audiences regularly flocked to see. Today, though, things are different. And it begs a simple question: did the movies change, or did we? The year 2000 is often considered a nadir in the story of the British film industry, with too many nascent production companies – each flush with National Lottery funding – trying to make their own Guy Ritchie movies, or their own spins on Richard Curtis, or films designed to capitalise on the (questionable) allure of the Primrose Hill set. Numerous releases became punchlines in their own right: the office romcom Janice Beard 45 WPM with Patsy Kensit and Rhys Ifans; the grotty gangland turkey Rancid Aluminium with Sadie Frost and Rhys Ifans; the... err... equally grotty gangland turkey Love, Honour and Obey with Sadie Frost and Rhys Ifans. Others have been largely forgotten: Kelly Macdonald's bingo hall comedy House!; the clubland murder mystery Sorted; the unholy union of disco music, psychic powers and a naked Stephen Fry titled Whatever Happened to Harold Smith? I will not lie and declare these films any good, likewise many of the Britflicks that came and went through cinemas soon after the millennium. Even if you wear the thickest of nostalgia goggles, you won't find a secret cult classic in Honest, Dave Stewart's infamous Swinging Sixties crime thriller in which three members of the pop group All Saints dropped acid and took their tops off. But to watch any of these films again is to be immersed in work that could only ever be made in Britain. And – with that in mind – it's staggering just how expansive the term 'British film' used to be. At the other end of the quality spectrum, homegrown cinema meant that year's Purely Belter, an endearingly chintzy Geordie comedy about teenage Newcastle United supporters. It also meant Wonderland, Michael Winterbottom's tender ensemble drama about lonely, alienated Londoners. We had range. Upon its release, Kevin & Perry Go Large was often contrasted with the previous year's American Pie, another sex comedy about prurient teens, albeit one with a far less grubby bent. It was 'more sophisticated fare', as Empire magazine put it at the time – some claim for a film built around a scene in which Jason Biggs has sex with a dessert. But I suppose it's accurate: whereas American Pie cast nebbishly handsome men and some of the most beautiful women of 1999 to play its horny yet earnest adolescents, Kevin & Perry is almost overwhelmingly ghoulish-looking. Enfield and Burke, who originated the characters on the Nineties sketch show Harry Enfield & Chums, transform themselves into greasy-haired monsters; tantrum-throwing grotesques with craven libidos and a wardrobe of sagging shell suits. American Pie boasted Barenaked Ladies, Third Eye Blind and Norah Jones on its soundtrack. Kevin & Perry Go Large is built around a novelty dance track in which the pair repeatedly chant: 'All I wanna do is do it – big girl, big girl'. It went to No 16 in the UK Top 40. A Variety article in 2000 reported that Paramount Pictures did pick up Kevin & Perry for US distribution – with plans to position it as a British spin on Beavis and Butt-Head, apparently – but an actual release didn't seem to materialise. It's largely unthinkable for America to ever have 'got' the film, though, with its 'top shelf of a newsagent magazine rack' set pieces and laddish frivolity. Its entire creative approach is as British as bangers and mash, its aspirations admirably local. Over time, British films like Kevin & Perry – meaning ones devoid of obvious global appeal – have become increasingly unusual, and rarely trouble the box office like they once did. Think Mike Leigh's mesmeric Hard Truths, Molly Manning Walker's holiday-from-hell drama How to Have Sex, or the little-seen 2024 comedy Seize Them! with Aimee Lou Wood. Think queer dramas Layla and Unicorns, or the Christmas movie Boxing Day, or recent film versions of TV series including Bad Education, The Inbetweeners and People Just Do Nothing. All worthy slices of thoroughgoing Britainalia, and satisfying to varying taste levels, yet few of them found a deserving audience. The possible reasons for this are tenfold. The internet age is one defined by homogenisation and an Americanisation of creativity, while the genres that for years British film seemed to champion (comedy, romances, gritty character studies, even costume dramas) have largely migrated to television. Cinema tickets are expensive, and audiences are conditioned only to want to pay for blockbuster spectacle – something that is rarely financially viable for the UK film industry, and that, arguably, we've never been particularly good at making anyway. Still, it is concerning for the future of British cultural identity as a whole. Numerous industry power players have spoken in recent years of the crisis in UK film funding, and the increasing threat to specifically British storytelling. Statistics last year from the BFI were a sobering read: the overwhelming majority of film production spend in 2024 (87 per cent of it, in fact) was on 'inward' productions such as Edgar Wright's The Running Man, the live-action version of How to Train Your Dragon, and the next Knives Out sequel – films with largely American casts, American backers and global reach. 'Domestic' productions – meaning films with a more overtly British bent and British backers – made up just nine per cent of spend. Is it any wonder, then, that Britain is in such a cultural drought when so many of the films we make might just as well have been made anywhere? And that while movies including Barbie and Wicked – which were shot at Warner Bros Studios in Hertfordshire – helped inject millions into the UK economy, they barely spoke to British culture or British society, or reflected anything about our everyday existence. For all the criticism levelled 25 years ago at British cinema's Class of 2000, it's impossible to deny that films like Kevin & Perry, Purely Belter and Rancid Aluminium were ours. It was easy to see our humour in them. Our lives and foibles. Our teeth. Someone get Rhys Ifans's agent on the phone and tell them we need him pronto.
The Guardian
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
There's No Time Like the Present by Paul B Rainey review – a funny, unpredictable and wild comic
People who enjoy science fiction love to imagine the future: time travel, spaceships, something wobbly with a green face. But what if those fans really had access to it – the future, I mean – courtesy of something very similar to the internet? This is the possibility Paul B Rainey floats in There's No Time Like the Present, in which a crowd of misfits from Milton Keynes (once the future itself) are able, if not to visit Mars, then at least to watch episodes of Doctor Who that have not yet been screened. Mordant and misanthropic in almost equal measure, Rainey's book has three central characters, each one somewhat stuck, unable fully to escape their childhood. Barry, an obnoxious lazybones, still lives at home with his parents; he makes his living selling bootleg recordings of TV shows he has lifted from the 'ultranet', which provides entry to the future. Cliff, Barry's friend, and a yoghurt-addicted woman called Kelly live together in her new house, but they're not a couple; while he secretly pines for her, he's only her tenant. In the evenings, they watch, with varying degrees of guilt, future episodes of their favourite series (Doctor Who in his case, Emmerdale in hers): tapes pressed on them by the grisly Barry. All of the pleasure of this book lies in Rainey's close attention to the quotidian. If a strange figure from the future does at one point visit present-day Milton Keynes, we're very far indeed from Star Wars here. Kelly only books a session on the office ultranet in desperation, after a particularly depressing work appraisal, and even then all she wants to know is how much longer she'll be stuck with her awful boss. When Rainey plays with time himself, it's often in the same way as any traditional novelist would. Time passes. The narrative leaps on. If Kelly ends up having some full-on sci-fi adventures courtesy of the strange and charismatic Ogmyre – he's the one with the horn – we also get to see a much older Barry at a drop-in centre for pensioners (alas, he's no more sympathetic). There's No Time Like the Present isn't a new book; it came out originally in 2015. But Rainey's career has taken an extraordinary turn. In 2020, he won the Observer/Faber graphic short story prize, after many decades of making comics (he's a regular contributor to Viz, the influence of which is sometimes detectable in his work). In 2023, Drawn & Quarterly published his graphic novel Why Don't You Love Me?, and soon afterwards it was announced that Jennifer Lawrence was to develop it as a feature film. Now D&Q has stepped in with this beautiful new edition of an old book – which is neat in the context of its subject. For me, it's marred slightly by the attitude of some of its male characters towards women; I understand their inadequacy and loneliness, but the misogyny that rises from its early pages is horrible, nevertheless. But it's worth pressing on. This is a funny, unpredictable, rather wild comic: the unlikely product of a singular imagination. There's No Time Like the Present by Paul B Rainey is published by Drawn & Quarterly (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
