A Frankly Terrible Man Obsessed With Lenny Henry

Today is the fiftieth birthday of a truly towering presence in popular culture and social history – Lenny Henry. To mark this momentous occasion, Talk About The Passion proudly presents an overview of the very best of Lenworth on record, on video, in print and in, erm, crisps. Hope you enjoy it as much as [...]

And It Feels Like The Words To A Song…?

One of the most popular posts on the original Out On Blue Six, and quite unexpectedly so, was made up of little more than a bemused rumination about a little-heard song lyric. Head Music, the not unfairly maligned fourth album by the badly floundering ‘The London’ Suede, contained approximately two and two thirds good songs; one [...]

“Every Minute Of Every Hour, I Love A Sunflower…”

…and now we’re fast-forwarding a couple of years, leaving the days of Phil Cool impersonating The Housemartins hitting Colin Baker with a cricket bat conceptually, if not chronologically, far behind. For it was during the closing months of 1989 that Tears For Fears chose to unleash Sowing The Seeds Of Love, the flagship single from [...]

Pick Of The Lazy YouTube Embedded Pops: Red Box ‘For America’

You remember it, don’t you? That sarcastic rejoinder to inherent reverence of all things American that hit the top ten during the closing months of the epochal time for pop music that was 1986? No? Oh alright then, have a watch of the video:

OK, so it’s hardly the epochal appearance on [...]

An Open Letter To Doctor Who Fans

Doctor Who Fans! Tired of hearing yourself complain about Russell T. Davies’ All Singing All Dancing ‘Gay’ Agenda-ed New Aventures Of Doctor Who And His Amazing Friends and the sheer nerve of it daring to be ’successful’, and how you don’t like it as much as you did when a coked-up lead actor was phoning in a performance to [...]

Wake Up, It’s A Beautiful Morph-ning

When The Amazing Adventures Of Morph was first shown by the BBC, it didn’t have that familiar rasping/melting Korg-heavy synth theme to accompany his Tony-Hart-paintbox-thrapping dog-transmogrifying paint-throwing opening title shenanigans (and let’s not even get started on the oft-forgotten third theme – a sort of nasty tuneless antiseptic squiggle – that was bolted on for [...]

“We Could Sing American Pie…?” – “Go On, I Deserve It”

Don’t you just hate American Pie?
No, not those sub-Porky’s teen comedy film things (though they’re pretty hateful too, now that you come to mention it), but the perpetually busker-endorsed song by Don McLean. Far from being the poignant portrait of post-adolescent disillusionment that it’s so often portrayed as, it’s actually more like intolerable whingeing from [...]

Silence In The Library

It’s taken longer than any sane person should realistically think reasonable, but at long long last, the epic-length quest to re-read all of the original Doctor Who tie-in novels in story order plus assorted spinoffs that were adjudged to belong on the list is finished. That’s all of them, from Doctor Who And An Unearthly Child [...]

Pick Of The Lazy YouTube Embedded Pops – France Gall ‘Toi Que Je Veux’

When France Gall wasn’t collaborating with Serge Gainsbourg on songs about the vacuousness of the pop industry, hallucinating attacks by gryphons and ‘doing things’ with her mouth, she had a neat sideline in charming ditties about entirely innocent subjects like blue eyes, maths lessons and, erm, ‘Made In England’ labels. Taken from [...]

Fourteen Seconds Of Energetic Sweeping Overloaded Orchestral Bliss

One of the most popular running features of the original Out On Blue Six, if the search stats were anything to go by, was Eve Myles Tits a quest to locate a copy of the original theme music from top BBC2 eating-into-timeslot-of-Alexei-Sayle’s-Stuff-by-five-minutes horticultural show Gardener’s World. No, not the current one that seems to be [...]