The Electric Pitchfork

The Dirty Truth When film-maker David Barrie decided to make a documentary about the sitcom Steptoe and Son, he had no idea it would uncover the story of one of the strangest and most tortured double acts in TV history. When Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H Corbett, stars of the hit BBC sitcom Steptoe and Son, first met each other in 1962, it marked the beginning of one of the most successful double acts in the history of British television. By the time Corbett died in 1982, the two wished that they had never set eyes on one another. But the extraordinary story behind their bizarre relationship has never, until now, been fully told. I was brought up watching Steptoe and Son and, ever since, I've wondered what the magic ingredient was that made the show so hugely successful. Finally I decided to make a film about it. And the truth was stranger than I could have imagined. At its peak, the programme commanded an audience of 28 million viewers. Brambell played dirty old rag-and-bo...

Why one of the first super-bloggers wants us to switch off Powering down: Andrew Sullivan Andrew Sullivan was a pioneer of the wired world, plugged in 24/7. He began to fear that this new way of living was actually a way of not-living. Then he got seriously ill ... He went on the ultimate digital detox. To save our souls, he thinks we should all do the same I was sitting in a large meditation hall when I reached into my pocket for my iPhone. A woman at the front of the room gamely held a basket in front of her, beaming beneficently, like a priest with a collection plate. I duly surrendered my little device, only to feel a sudden pang of panic on my way back to my seat. If it hadn’t been for everyone staring at me, I might have turned around immediately and asked for it back. But I didn’t. I knew why I’d come here. A year before, like many addicts, I had sensed a personal crash coming. For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a ...

Scourge of the West dies at 90 The death of Fidel Castro, the 90-year-old Cuban revolutionary who once brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, plunged his country into mourning yesterday and reignited global divisions over the communist ideology he espoused. As Cuba embarked on a nine-day period of national homage to a shaggy ex-guerrilla who turned into a cultural icon, battalions of his critics and admirers fought over his legacy. For an older generation of radicals raised on inspirational images of cigar-chomping Cubans in combat fatigues, Castro was, as the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn hailed him, “a massive figure in the history of the whole planet”. For Donald Trump, a different kind of politician suddenly facing his first serious foreign policy challenge, Castro was “a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades”. The US president-elect first noted Castro’s death with a four-word message on his Twitter account — “Fidel Castro i...