Judith Durham with Spectrum on the Wrokdown set

Mike's Pith & Wind - Forward
I’d gone into Target to get some new shorts to replace the ones I’d bought a couple of years ago, (which, despite all the time I took making sure they were the right fit literally fall off me if I don’t wear a belt), when Daddy Cool’s song Christmas Bug came on over the store system. It’s a chirpy enough song, but it put me in a bleak mood and I lost the shorts-buying vibe. As if we needed reminding that bloody Christmas is just around the corner! For an avid TV viewer though, the worst thing about the approach of the Christmas season is the number of TV programmes that are winding up. Last night Media Watch happily signed off for the year – who’s going to be watching the bastards now? (Actually, I don’t blame them. The TV diet gets decidedly dodgy from here on in). All I can say is, be prepared for some tetchy moments until the New Year kicks in and my favourite programmes return.
I keep a diary. Actually, that’s quite an interesting way of putting it, ‘keeping’ a diary. The Concise Oxford has it that ‘keep’ in this context means: ‘maintain (diary, accounts, books) by making requisite entries.’ By that definition I fail as a fastidious ‘keeper’ of diaries, as my entries tend to be haphazard, although I don’t usually miss out on more than two or three consecutive days. You might wonder that I keep a diary at all given that my every movement seems to be pretty well documented on this very website, but it’s surprising how many levels of my nuanced world remain unexpressed.
Anyway, the point is that at the back of.. read more

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Dick's Toolbox - Snow White
Mirror, mirror on the wall
Who’s the fairest of them all?
I had always classified Snow White as one of the seminal horror films of my life, along with The Wizard of Oz and Psycho, so buying the lovingly restored Walt Disney Classic version caused some trepidation. Not that I thought I would be frightened to go to sleep for a week as happened when I was four, but that the animation wouldn’t be as good as I remembered.
Made ten years before I was born it was the first Walt Disney full-length, full colour, animated feature. Given that Disney had largely been doing short black and white cartoons Snow White represented a major jump in style and technology. I’m pretty sure that it utilised Urb Irwek’s multi-plane camera that filmed several separate layers of cels giving the.. read more