Well it’s true. On Valentine’s Day I went to see Munich, which is hardly the most romantic film in the world and probably not the thing to take your girlfriend too. It’s the story of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 by Palestinian terrorists and the subsequent vengeance killings organised by Golda Meir and Israel’s government. Essentially the message was the futility of such a plan because for every person you assassinate there will be plenty more to take his or her place, all you’ve accomplished is more death, more bloodshed and more bitter revenge. Both sides believe they’re fighting for the right to call a land their home, a feeling you can deeply appreciate if not truly understand.

I also discovered during the film that I can blame my mum for my dark sense of humour. There’s a scene where two men are attempting to assassinate a wealthy Arab and are hiding in his garden ready to take aim. My mum sees the swimming pool and leans over to me whispering “It’s Michael Barrymore’s party!” Soon enough, the pool did end up containing a dead body

Right, on Wednesday it was great to meet up with some friends from school again. We planned to go bowling but finding it fully booked ended up watching Fun with Dick and Jane – the new comedy starring Jim Carrey. It’s… an odd little film. I definitely enjoyed watching it but that’s not to say it was actually a good movie, in fact, I wouldn’t have said they were even trying particularly hard to make a coherent film in the first place. Until five seconds ago when I looked it up on IMDB I didn’t know it was a remake which may go some way to explain this. I think this would have actually been the perfect Valentine’s Day film simply because couples could spend half the time snogging at the back, then watch a few scenes and not feel like you’ve missed much. (Dominic’s Valentine’s Day tips will not be a regular feature of this blog.)

Basically – if you want to go and see a good film, see Munich. If you need something to pass the time and don’t mind a rather cartoony plot, Dick and Jane might be more your thing. If you think combining these two films into some kind of slapstick massacre film would be interesting, you’ve officially sunk to my depths. Well, Fabio and I. Oh it was good to go into full force religious mocking again without fear of a fatwa, but I did get a very odd look from a woman pushing a buggy on the way back home when I joked that we were glorifying terrorism (we weren’t, don’t worry) rather too loudly. She just turned round and gave me that “I’m reporting you to the Daily Mail” stare that shut me right up.

Still reading? Congrats, only one more event to describe. This was the recording of The Late Edition that I attended in the evening, again with mother darling. We were very lucky actually, cause we were a bit late and got given the 20th and 21st ‘standby’ tickets. Eventually they let in the standby people up to number 23. Phew!

Anyway, The Late Edition is hosted by Marcus Brigstocke and broadcast on BBC FOUR. (Make sure you watch it tonight!) This week features interviews with Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, who made a rather better impression on me than I was expecting. She explicitly said that she did not believe we were living in a ‘police state’ and while I disagree with her on ID cards it wasn’t a hysterical position by any means. The other guest was rather bizarre and faced a bit of a mauling from Brigstocke- a guy from pro-smoking group FOREST which is 96% funded by tobacco companies. At one point he even indicated that smoking while pregnant couldn’t be that bad, “cause lots of people did it in the 1950s and there was a baby boom!” Ur.. right. There is an ideological argument that people have the right to smoke if they choose to which I agree with, but that doesn’t give them the rights to damage my lungs by smoking in public places and that debate has now been comprehensively won.

Ooh and after my purchase of a copy of Broadcast I went one further and snagged an edition of Ariel -the BBC’s famous in-house magazine. Hooray for one brave broadcast journalist from Manchester who nominated ‘vox pops’ as something had joined Smash Hitsmagazine as being past its sell-by date. Oh, and why did a ‘Breaking News’ caption obscure Hardtalk on News 24 last week? Because a cleaner accidentally knocked the option on the caption generator. So now you know.

Ooh that was a rather long and many congratulations (again) to anyone who got through it all. I’m off to Cambridge tomorrow so you won’t have to hear from me now until Saturday. Bye!

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