Everyone loves pictures of cats. Here’s David’s.
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Column by David in The Times.

The first thing to say about Horne and Corden’s new sketch show being rubbished by critics is that it does not mean it is rubbish. It means that critics don’t like it. Critics generally don’t like new comedy, especially the full-frontal attack of a show where the protagonists begin facing the camera: they are alienated, at some level, by the arrogance of the statement “laugh at us”. And comedy of this nature does take a while to bed in: the show that launched my TV career, The Mary Whitehouse Experience — which Matt Horne has been kind enough to cite as an influence, saying: “If you hadn’t watched it the night before, there was no point in coming to school” — was described after its first episode by the estimable Victor Lewis-Smith as “about as funny as being born dead with cancer”.

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Column by David in The Times.

Gordon Brown and Barack Obama may be flailing around to find answers to the global financial disaster presently threatening to collapse our civilisation back into the Dark Ages, but Hollywood, at least, seems to have come up with one: dog movies.

Clearly, over the past year, producers have been brainstorming it in the Fox and Warner lots and decided that nothing will snap us out of contemplating buying a sawn-off shotgun to protect our carefully hoarded cans of tuna more than a tail wagging happily to some perky incidental music while Owen Wilson does an “uh-oh!” face at some disgruntled pedigree cat-show judge. I’m guessing here – I haven’t seen Marley & Me – or indeed Bolt, or Hotel For Dogs, or Beverly Hills Chihuahua – but I’m assuming it includes that mandatory dog movie scene.

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