Brian Viner

Recently by Brian Viner

Brian Viner: Salinger understood what made us love Henman – he wasn't quite good enough

Saturday, 29 January 2011

The Last Word

Brian Viner: A ringside seat at the birth of 24-hour news

Friday, 28 January 2011

On a chilly January morning 25 years ago today, I drove my beaten-up Chevrolet from my digs at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, to the downtown offices of Cable News Network. I had been a student intern at CNN for less than two months, and the assignment handed to me by my boss, a Fawllty Towers-loving Anglophile called Gary Rowe, was to liaise with schools across America concerning the impending journey into space by Christa McAuliffe, a 37-year-old teacher from New Hampshire.

Brian Viner: Never mind the lure of the lira. Lofthouse was happy, if poorer, as a one-club man

Saturday, 22 January 2011

The Last Word

Brian Viner: I've spent too long talking to TalkTalk

Friday, 21 January 2011

One of the small ironies of our peculiar age is that telephone companies are less communicative than just about any other kind of enterprise. Phone them up and it feels like a minor miracle when eventually you find yourself in dialogue with a human being after all the automated nonsense of pressing 1 if you want this, or 2 if you want that. If only the next option was, press 3 if you'd like to interact with somebody real, but it never is.

Brian Viner: Ashes to Ashes – it's a year to celebrate Botham's miracle and Strauss's majesty

Saturday, 15 January 2011

The Last Word

Brian Viner: The real drama in Ambridge is online

Friday, 14 January 2011

All human life is there. Love, hate, bigotry, tolerance, spite, kindness, pedantry, brevity and above all, the conviction that Ambridge is the centre of the known universe. I refer not to The Archers but to The Archers website. I have never listened to more than two consecutive minutes of The Archers, but for entertainment value, not to mention shock, hilarity and a vivid insight into the human condition, I can't believe that it holds a candle in a hayloft (if not a past storyline, then surely a future one) to the extraordinary online rants of its devotees.

Brian Viner: This is the year to toast the memories of Blanchflower, Fangio and Shergar

Saturday, 8 January 2011

The Last Word

Brian Viner: I spent €250 and things started looking up

Friday, 7 January 2011

Last Sunday's opening instalment of BBC1's adaptation of Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen books, about an incorruptible detective in Rome – perhaps the incorruptible detective in Rome – got careful scrutiny in our house, because we'd only just come back from three days in the Eternal City. "That's where we had the ice creams," went up the cry, causing far more excitement than Zen (Rufus Sewell) being followed by a sinister fellow on a motorbike.

Christmas Quiz: A second chance to win a beer for a year

Monday, 27 December 2010

Due to a production error, one of the questions printed in the ever-popular yet ever-fiendish annual Christmas Quiz from The Last Word would have had you scratching your head for far longer than necessary – it was printed wrongly. Apologies. So here it is again in full. As ever, I am hugely grateful to master brewers Shepherd Neame, who have once again agreed to supply a fantastic prize, namely 365 bottles of Spitfire Ale, one for every day of 2011.

Brian Viner: I'm a Christmas card failure. Apologies

Friday, 24 December 2010

Every year it happens, with the utter predictability of my children saying no to the Christmas Day sprouts, and my father-in-law to the parsnips. Somewhere around 25 November my mind turns to Christmas cards, and in particular those destined for friends and relatives in the United States and Australia. This year, I assure myself, will be different. The cards travelling to distant lands, with a bespoke accompanying letter and perhaps a clutch of photographs, will be in the post by the beginning of December. And with that done, I will sit down with the dozens of cards meant for friends in the UK, and actually enjoy writing them, without the pressure of Royal Mail deadlines.

Brian Viner: Fancy a beer (or 365)? If so, get your sporting brain in gear for our tricky Christmas quiz

Saturday, 18 December 2010

The Last Word

Brian Viner: Coco thinks it's grim up north London

Friday, 17 December 2010

Rehab clinics probably don't have guest books – "lovely stay, can really recommend the cold turkey" – but if they did, the children of the rich and famous would loom large. It's no easy matter being born into the limelight, growing up with one or both parents appearing to belong as much to their fans as to you, and in some sad cases even more so.

Brian Viner: Snow gets the better of O'Sullevan but nothing must block AP's path to BBC glory

Saturday, 11 December 2010

The Last Word

Brian Viner: The rise and rise of pismronunciation

Friday, 10 December 2010

Not since my schooldays, when a boy in my year called Ian Hunt was cruelly nicknamed Isaac, even by some of the teachers, has the surname of the current Culture Secretary struck me as potentially comical. So three cheers for Jim Naughtie, whose now-celebrated clanger on Monday's Today programme unwittingly kindled the schoolboy humour that brought some warmth to a freezing winter's day.

Brian Viner: The best hotel in the world? Probably

Friday, 3 December 2010

Notebook

Brian Viner: Lord Darnley unveils real contents of his family urn which keeps us up at nights

Saturday, 27 November 2010

The Last Word

Brian Viner: Nostalgia plays tricks with the mind

Friday, 26 November 2010

Sky Sports are advertising their exhaustive coverage of the Ashes by reproducing in all national newspapers a sweet painting of their main cricket presenters – if the image of an unshaven Sir Ian Botham can ever be called sweet – with ties askew and bleary-eyed, the message being that the poor loves have had to stay up all night. This, of course, is misleading. They are all fully adjusted to the 10-hour time difference, while we're the ones meandering zombie-like through the day after staying up until the wee small hours to watch the action from Brisbane.

Brian Viner: If even Monty is giving fielding masterclasses, have England simply peaked too soon?

Saturday, 20 November 2010

The Last Word

Brian Viner: What Kate could learn from Dame Barbara

Friday, 19 November 2010

Almost certainly with a great big rustle of chiffon, the romantic novelist Dame Barbara Cartland has surely been turning in her grave this week at the news that the future Queen of England is descended from labourers and miners, not to mention British Airways air crew. Romance is all very well, but it would have upset her idea of the natural order of things, as so exquisitely set out in her 1962 Etiquette Handbook: A Guide To Good Behaviour From the Boudoir to the Boardroom. Moreover, the old girl felt somewhat proprietorial about Prince William, whose step-great-grandmother she so proudly was.

Brian Viner: Wales prepare a party in Cardiff but no Springboks will ask for a 99

Saturday, 13 November 2010

The Last Word

Brian Viner: The message-board clique is not for me

Friday, 12 November 2010

One shouldn't name-drop, I know, but as the Duke of Edinburgh said to me just eight months ago, the secret of a happy marriage is not to have the same interests. "It's one thing not to argue about," said Prince Philip, after I had asked him whether he shares the Queen's love of horse-racing, and he had answered, rather bluntly, in the negative.

Brian Viner: Redknapp escaping punishment was just – not least because his witticisms are a must

Saturday, 6 November 2010

The Last Word

Brian Viner: Why Scousers are in the ascendant

Thursday, 4 November 2010

This has been a great week for the frequently-maligned scouse accent. On Tuesday, BBC Breakfast constructed a jolly item out of a study – a study! – that revealed Liverpudlian to be the accent most appreciated by the nation's plantlife. Apparently, a lily talked to soothingly by a scouser grew 10.2 inches in the same time that one addressed in cockney grew only 6.7 inches. Loving encouragement in Geordie yielded only 5.5 inches of growth, and the lily practically recoiled from a Birmingham accent, growing a mere two inches. I hope that Prince Charles, our most celebrated talker to plants, takes note. If he dispenses with the Queen's English and takes up Queen's Drive English, Queen's Drive being Liverpool's residential ring-road, his garden will flourish.

Brian Viner: Even at 70 Pele, the perfect 10, is still the undisputed king of Planet Football

Saturday, 23 October 2010

The Last Word

Brian Viner: This throne is the greatest leveller

Thursday, 21 October 2010

On Monday it will be 250 years since King George II died on the toilet. It is not what he would have wished to be remembered for a quarter of a millennium after his death, for he also spoke six languages, and was the last British monarch to lead his troops into battle. That was during the War of the Austrian Succession, at Dettingen in Bavaria in 1743, an eventful year for the king. A few months earlier he had been present at the inaugural London performance of Handel's Messiah.

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