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No, he went home yesterdie. (Works for me, I'm a Brummie)

Will the cardinals be welcomed to the conclave by somebody standing up and saying "Greetings, Pope Pickers" Yeah that's my coat

...all the usual suspects! Unusually, he wasn't mentioned on DL at all last year. I guess everybody hoped no one else had noticed he was dying. I was sure that I mentioned him in the forums! After one of my many Google searches for "gravely ill". I remember you doing so as well, and here's the post.

actually I'm rather surprised that he has resigned just before Easter which I had always thought was the most important time in a Catholic priests calender..next to junior school fresher week that is.

Wow that must be one big bed!

Wasnt he from your neck of the woods Mary? Im just thinking that you may have to get the black suit and tie out and go into a week of "official mourning" or summat. If you want to get the campaign running to get a statue of the great man ( well he did produce and star in that gargantuan of televisual brilliance, Mr and Mrs) put up outside Border TV studios then you best start now while his passing is still fresh in the minds. Just an idea, like. Obviously, it'd be fitting if Mrs Batey followed him soon!

But the crux of it, is that Richard Briers was giving interviews only last month, making light of the fact that he was having a job climbing stairs, when I've got 30 candidates who are way past half dead, who carry on taking years to die, and he goes and kicks the bucket in double quick fashion. Zilch opportunity to draught on to next years team now Richard... Ali, Mandela, Mubarak... Bet your bottom dollar, if I take anyone off the team to bring in someone like Bonnie Franklin then the removed person will last less than a month... galling...

The couldnt carry a tune in a bucket, they couldnt write songs, they were mega shit live, they influenced nobody and more than one generation didnt give a shit. Bubblegum pop....

I think you are getting the 1960s mixed up with the 1990s, which is an understandable mistake seeing as it was a replay of it in many respects. It's that bit I don't get. I could be wrong, but I get the funny feeling you are under 30 years old. Who were these "traditionally appealing" bands in 1963/4? Trad jazz? Skiffle? Balladeers like Sinatra? Elvis? The Beatles were no doubt overrated but their impact on music for good or ill was pervasive. To dismiss that is to cut off your nose to spite your face. The Beatles were an influence on Glam Rock for instance (listen to Roxy Music's opener from their debut album and it's a rip off of 'Daytripper' from 1965. Bowie pretty much stole McCartney's DESH style music on stuff like "Changes") who were in turn an influence on Nick Cave. The very notion of a band or artist using the album format, complete with "concept" (such as cover art, themes and contemporary reference) was one the Beatles were at the forefront of in the 1960s, with albums such as 'Revolver' and 'Sgt. Pepper'. Don't sound much like 1 Direction to me. They were indeed the "boyband" of their day, but that was then, a very different pop landscape. This argument smacks of the kind of naive, elitist tight-arseness I long abandoned as I've got older...

Like with many bands that have made it big, they were in the right place at the right time. There are several bands out there that can fill stadiums and I think to myself "How the hell does this crap sell"? For the first possibly 4-5 years, The Beatles were what you could call bubble-gum pop.band but then they managed to break away from that and write more imaginative songs. maybe the drugs helped form that, but that's what they did. I like Nick Cave too. I enjoy his lyrics and his style and I believe I'm missing just one or two of his albums to complete my collection. I've even gone to a couple of his concerts and one at the Royal Festival Hall is on my top 20 concerts that I've been to. Partly because it was a good concert and also that he managed to get Kylie Minouge up on stage to sing Murder Ballads and then afterwards had her recite the lyrics to Better The Devil You Know. This debate about who is good and who isn't reminds me of a conversation Leonard Cohen had with his manager as he was being driven to his first performance. Cohen said to his manager "I don't know what I'm doing here, I can't even sing". His manager turned to him and said "None of you guys can sing. If I want to hear a singer, I go to the opera".

Can we please forget about that. That was about the Nadir of Doctor Who. (Exempting David Tennant and the TV Movie) By all means. I thought McCoy wasn't bad - a return of the eccentricity missing from Colin Baker's stint. The casting of Bonnie Langford (in anything) though, is unforgivable.

Depends on what you mean by good? It's pretty dated now (as is any television from the 1970s) both in look and feel (all this dystopian worldview is very much of it's time). However, I've got the first series on DVD and I enjoyed it (I'm only old enough to remember when it had Avon as the leader not Blake and subsequently being confused by the title!) and I hope to get the second series in the not too distant future... I'll give it a go then. Also, I think you'll find that the first series is up on youtube. I started watching it last Sunday and now I'm up to Series 1 Episode 7. I think it's brilliant. I love the downbeat tetchiness and the strong characterisation. I agree that the special-effects are very, very dated but if you can get past that there is a lot there.The politics are quite complicated too. The only small problem I've got is that I already know what happens at the very end from having seen it on lots of clip shows.But even that is not a problem because the characters are so interesting that you want to see how they get there and what happens along the way. I highly recommend it and I'm usually only a mild sci-fi fan.