Entries by Michael

Awkward Questions

You may remember I used to blog as Putney Debater (which is now archived on this site). I gave it up when I retired and moved away. I’ve now migrated to Substack to ask Awkward Questions. Polemics about cultural politics and political culture. I invite you to subscribe (gratis). That’s MichaelChanan.substack.com

Omnishambles at the BBC

March 11th 2023 was Omnishambles Friday at the BBC, a day of multiple trouble. The redoubtable David Attenborough has a new series on British wildlife and there was consternation that the final episode, apparently dealing with its dramatic decline and what has caused it, is not being transmitted but will be seen only on iPlayer. […]

Artificial Writing: a first evaluation

LIKE every other domain of everyday life, education at all levels has been battered by digital technology even in places where it isn’t called for. Now the alarm has been raised about a new AI program, ChatGPT, which can be used, it is said, to write academic essays. A free trial version of the program […]

Funeral Music

Windsor 19/9/22 A Sideways Glance at The Funeral Monday morning. Impossible to escape the demise of the old lady who resided in the castle up the road from where I live. The Long Walk, which the cortège will pass along in a few hours, is just two minutes away, it’s where I take my daily […]

Ambrosio Fornet RIP

Ambrosio Fornet, who has died in Havana at the age of 90, was one of Cuba’s leading revolutionary intellectuals, a literary scholar, essayist and scriptwriter (his best known screenplay was Retrato de Teresa from 1979) who became a dear friend whom I never failed to visit every time I went to Havana, sometimes passing hours […]

Kiss Channel 4 Goodbye?

The prospective privatisation of Channel Four induces in me a state of cognitive dissonance. Part of me is appalled at this wanton repetition of what the patrician Harold Macmillan way back called ‘selling off the family silver’, and another part of me answers back, but what is there worth saving? I remember, you see, what […]

‘Corazon Azul’ by Miguel Coyula

It would be better to think of Corazon Azul (Blue Heart), the new film by Cuban independent Miguel Coyula, as a quirky political satire for the digital age rather than science fiction. As science fiction, the plot could take place anywhere. Genetic experiments have produced human mutants with strange powers who go rogue. But it […]