In Depth:  Eleanor Margesson

Until about a month ago, I hadn’t ever heard of Sir John Hegarty. He caught my attention recently in an interview on Radio 4’s Start the Week, talking about his career in advertising.

The first question that Andrew Marr put to him was: ‘What is the greatest brand in the world?’ His answer, which surprised me, was ‘The Church’. Although he was referring to the Catholic Church, he was keen to identify the cross of Christ as the most successful logo in history.

Jack Dee’s fourth and last series of Lead Balloon is currently being broadcast on BBC2.

In it, Dee plays the main character, Rick Spleen, who is an out-of-work comedian trying to make the big time.

Ex-President Mubarak is 84. He currently stands accused by opponents of ordering soldiers to fire on peacefully demonstrating protestors, 800 of whom died during the uprising earlier this year which ousted him from a leadership of almost 30 years.

If he is found guilty, he will face the death penalty. There is no question that Mubarak is experiencing ill health and that, one way or another, his end is near. As a Muslim, he will expect judgment to follow death and he will hope that, at that judgment, the good in his life will outweigh the bad.

Only a week or so to go now until the Royal Wedding and the planning is in overdrive.

The main type of celebration being organised seems to be the street party. As a local event, it ticks lots of boxes — it’s the perfect mixture of neighbourly camaraderie, national pride and British tradition, all rolled into one. My village is organising one, as is my son’s school for the day before. I’d better get a paper hat strong enough to last for a couple of days of partying!

It is a frequent complaint during the Easter season that no one really knows what Easter is about these days.

Children just think it’s about Easter eggs, chicks and bunnies. Adults think it’s about having a long weekend off work and very little else changes. This year, the late Easter is at risk of being subsumed completely in the run up to the Royal Wedding the following weekend.

The urban dictionary has defined Generation Wii as those aged between 12 and 18 in 2008.

These are the youngsters who see Atari’s early 80’s Pong game as the ancient relic of a bygone era. Video games have come a very long way since that hypnotic little square white dot zinging to and fro on a ten-inch, slightly greenish screen.

I’m looking forward to spending less time in the kitchen after reading Oliver’s new book Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals.

Here are some numbers that might impress us:

75,000 — the number of Jamie’s latest book sold in its first week.

Ian Hislop is a renowned satirist, most widely known for his appearances on the current affairs quiz programme Have I Got News For You and for editing Private Eye. He likes satire because he says that it is the ‘bringing to ridicule of vice, folly and humbug. All the negatives imply a set of positives’.

He was part of the Spitting Image team in the 1980s and went on as Private Eye editor to become the most sued man in English legal history because of the number of people (such as Robert Maxwell and Peter Sutcliffe) who took offence at the harsh comments published unashamedly in his magazine.

The media sensation of November 2010 is the ten-year-old Willow Smith.

She is the daughter of Will Smith (singer and actor) and Jada Pinkett Smith (famous to many as the voice of the hippo in Madagascar) and sister of 12-year-old Jaden Smith (Karate Kid 2010). Willow’s debut single is called ‘Whip my Hair’ and released in the UK to download on November 20 and buy in the shops November 21. She turned ten on October 31 and her worldwide impact is a little late in comparison to Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, who had both achieved worldwide fame by the time they were eight.

When Arthur Sullivan tried out Edison’s new invention of the phonograph cylinder in 1888, he commented that he was terrified by the prospect of recorded music. At the same time as considering the phonograph to be a wonderful invention, he objected prophetically to ‘so much hideous and bad music on record forever’.

If you’ve watched the X Factor lately, you may be inclined to agree with him. Alongside all of the wonderful recorded output that we can listen to whenever we like runs the musically awful and frankly superficial mush that seems to draw the most attention and gain the greatest sales.

There are many who might consider that there are fewer lovelier activities than granting a deserving four-year-old child the opportunity to meet Cinderella.

What could be more noble than to wait your turn in the heat of the midday sun for over two hours so that they might know five minutes of joy?

We often get passionate responses from readers who go to the cinema after reading EN’s film reviews. Some consider that these films contain themes, scenes and language that we should not be watching, let alone endorsing.

Should we be going to the cinema at all? Should we get rid of the TV, if we haven’t already? Should we ignore magazines, the radio, the internet? What does it mean to love the Lord with all our mind, heart, soul and strength when we are living in a world saturated by the media?

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to a Pampered Chef cooking show by one of the mums at my son’s school. I thought it would be an excellent chance to get to know some of the other mums, so off I went, determined to spend absolutely no more than a tenner.

The evening was run by a very experienced ‘consultant’ who was able to multitask extremely efficiently as she showed us the products, gave us fireproof reasons for buying £40 knives and cooked up a clever-but-simple delicious chicken and broccoli ring. I developed a variety of skills while I was there. The skill of saying ‘I don’t need that’, the skill of saying ‘Well, maybe that would be quite useful’, and then the skill of handing over my card details at the end of the evening.

There is nothing that is more guaranteed to make a normal rational person feel stupid than hearing someone talk knowledgably about particle physics.

Since many physicists are actually very kind people, they often try really hard to find ways to communicate tricky science to the rest of us. Some of them are creative and artistic too, which is a real bonus, and so we get valuable avenues of understanding like Tom Stoppard’s plays and Douglas Adams’s novels. These have the useful function of making us laugh and feel thoroughly entertained while terribly difficult ideas about things like the space-time continuum creep into our consciousness via the back door.

When we took the glossy black lift up to the 124th floor, it felt as though we weren’t moving at all, even though we were rising at ten metres a second.

Our ears popped a few times while seagull music and images played from a dozen little plasma screens scattered around its walls. Then the doors opened and we walked out onto the observation deck. The view seemed very familiar. That confused me. Here I was, up on the tallest building in the world and I felt like I’d seen this sort of thing before. I was looking down past the tops of skyscrapers at snaking road and rail systems. Then I realised that I had indeed seen cities from this viewpoint many times before. From a plane.

This month, I really wanted to interview some members of the Paparazzi. I have passed them in abundance outside the home of Cheryl and Ashley Cole about four times a day every day for the last three months and have wondered about what they do and why they do it.

Some sit in their cars with their laptops, waiting. Some will be leaning on their motorcycles, long lenses slung around their shoulders. They drink coffee, they read newspapers, they presumably exchange bits of useful information and withhold other bits.

When I was about 12, my mother took us to see Snow White at the cinema and my younger sister, aged seven, was so scared by the evil stepmother that we had to leave.

I’ve not forgotten it. I didn’t blame my mother for taking us — it was my sister who shouldn’t have been so sensitive. The tables were turned at our half-term-trip-to-the-flicks the other week. When we returned to daylight, this time it was the mother and father who were a bit overwhelmed by the scary baddie.

Just telling the story?

Our understanding of the Haitian earthquake is enabled by today’s communication technology. As soon as the earthquake hit, everyone in the world could access information and pictures. As soon as the journalists got there, we had the reports, the maps, the statistics, the individual human stories of suffering and loss.

Yet, on arriving in Haiti, the journalists were faced with appalling choices when they got to areas of devastation before aid agencies and found injury, homelessness, the demolition of infrastructure, scarcity of medicine and electricity. What job were they there to do?

X Factor is over, Wogan is gone from our coffee and cornflakes, David Tennant has left Doctor Who and Stephen Fry has switched off his Twitter stream. Even Big Brother and Jonathan Ross have begun their goodbyes. You might be forgiven for concluding that books are all that is left.

TV is not going to give up that easily. 2009 was a bumper year for high ratings, particularly for ITV who had 19 million people watching the X Factor final. It is no surprise to see that ITV rode on the crest of this wave by advertising the 15th UK National Television Award Ceremony (held on January 20), which they sponsor.

If you’re not sure who Michael McIntyre is or what he does then you’re either abroad or refusing to switch on your TV.

He is a 33-year-old stand-up comedian who has experienced a meteoric rise to fame over the last couple of years. He’s come from literally nowhere, largely because of the decision by Prince Charles to put him into his own 60th birthday celebrations as well as a Royal Variety Performance in 2006.

It was announced on September 7: Terry Wogan is due to step down from presenting the long-running Wake up with Wogan breakfast show at the end of the year and Chris Evans will be moving to the slot from his present Drivetime show, also on Radio 2.

Both have big fan bases but Wogan’s is bigger. Chris has five million regular listeners and Wogan has eight million. The BBC presumably hope that Evans will bring his five million and gain some survivors from Wogan to maintain present listening figures, but not everybody thinks this will happen. ‘Evans is all very well in the afternoon when your brain is fried’, said one Drivetime listener, ‘but to have him first thing in the morning would be unbearable’.

The world of the Piplings is Nara, a wonderful, natural paradise where they explore the freedom of nature and help to preserve beauty and peace.

In one episode of the programme Waybuloo, Yok Tok is concerned with keeping his ‘happy plant’ cheerful, another features the Piplings keeping a bubble up in the air to preserve its beauty and serenity. It is an unreservedly contented and carefree atmosphere.

Having just moved to the country with the boxes barely unpacked, I’m confessing that I haven’t seen much media lately. So I’m sitting down to write the media column with not much inspiration.

The problem I’m finding is that unlike the zapsville of London Bridge where I used to live, there just isn’t so much in-your-face media here in rural Surrey, particularly in the realm of advertising. I sit in the garden and hear real, unmediated cows mooing in a nearby field. I drive around through tunnels of un-billboarded overgrowth. Horses trot by and the rain splashes down without a logo in sight. Not a snifter of persuasion from anywhere.

When it was announced that a series of 50 concerts was to be held at the O2, there was intense excitement. When they became available, all tickets sold in minutes. For tens of thousands of people, the opportunity to see and hear the legend was worth any amount of money.

The hysteria that accompanied the mere announcement of the tour was enough to confirm the popularity of the singer. His music brought intense nostalgia, his dance routines were hypnotising, the iconic moves and squeals were his alone.

My niece turned ten last month and my sister decided to take her for a surprise trip from Sheffield down to London to see Hairspray, the film of which she had seen the requisite 100s of times.

I was a little suspicious of the enterprise. I had done absolutely nil research and let my suppositions be ruled by the only thing I knew about it which was that one of the main characters was played by a male actor in drag.

On Facebook there is a wonderful group called the Vicar’s Wife Club. It is devoted (with tongue firmly in cheek) to the promotion of cooking buns, visiting Wesley Owen and hosting dinner parties.

Run by a host of single ladies dreaming of the day when they too will reach the lofty heights of vicar’s wife-dom, they consider important subjects with complex reference to Calvin and Luther, such as dancing in public and how to access good knitting patterns.

If you were as unhappy as I was about the end of the Larkrise to Candleford series, you will be very pleased at the new arrival of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency on BBC TV.

This is because the programmes have much in common, even though they are set on different continents and in different centuries. There is in each setting the strong single female, pillar of the community, with her careful use of words, her considerate adherence to etiquette and the desire to do what is right in every situation. Dorcas Lane and Mma Ramotswe would agree on many things, but, having said that, a small town probably wouldn’t be big enough for both of them.

If you watched the Oscars in February, you will not have seen a pro-religion film given any recognition. You have to go to the Faith and Value Awards ceremony for that.

The winner of the 2008 Most Inspiring Film award this year went to a Christian film called Fireproof. The tagline reads ‘Never leave your partner behind’ and the story concerns the marriage of a firefighter, Caleb, whose bravery and courage in his job doesn’t extend to extinguishing the disaster raging in his own home. Until, that is, his father challenges him to commit to ‘The Love Dare’, a 40-day plan designed to help struggling couples restore their relationships.

It doesn’t take usually take too much persuasion to get me to try a new box set of DVDs, but I have to say that I was a little sceptical when series one of Lark Rise to Candleford was proposed as Christmas viewing by well-meaning relatives. It looked very twee and slow moving compared to series seven of 24 and I wondered if I’d be able to stay awake with all the extra turkey.

However, after a few episodes, I was hooked. A month later, we are now halfway through the BBC’s showing of the second series which was launched by a feature length Christmas special on December 23. So, unless you are ready to work through the stacked episodes on BBC iplayer, you may need to do some catching up through DVDs yourself.

The Almost True Story of Ryan Fisher is a first-time novel from American screenwriter Rob Stennett. It has been welcomed as the sort of satire that evangelicals need, a kind that is written by a devoted believer who is keen to reveal the weaknesses of modern Christians.

You could even call it an updated version of The Screwtape Letters. You think you are reading about a deep threat that comes to Christians from their enemies but gradually realise that the Christians themselves may be the problem. The concept is instantly intriguing and full of comic potential. A non-churchgoer realises that Christians love buying houses from Christian estate agents and so puts a fish symbol on his adverts with fantastic results. Having realised that he is able to pull off this deception, he broadens his scope and convinces his wife to join him as he plants a church in small town Oklahoma. There he becomes Pastor Ryan, the church leader who promotes kindness and community. Will the congregation realise that he is not actually a Christian at all?

This month I wanted to write about four of the arty, media-cultural moments I’ve had since writing my last column.

They range from the sublime to the ridiculous; the Byzantium exhibition at the Royal Academy, music by Vaughan Williams at a church concert, High School Musical 3 and a derelict flat full of copper sulphate crystals. Three of them contained real little treasures and one was a real shocker.

It all started with two well-known and highly-paid presenters behaving very badly on Russell Brand’s Radio 2 show. You can have a look at the podcast on YouTube if you want the exact details but you probably know the gist of them anyway.

I wonder what you have been most concerned about as the story unfolded. It might have been concern for the victim, the elderly actor Andrew Sachs, whose mobile answerphone received four messages from comedians Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross regarding Brand’s relationship with his granddaughter. Sachs would be quite entitled to get extremely angry and litigious over the whole affair, not only as the victim of a criminal offence, but also because his wishes that the show should not be aired were ignored by the show’s producer. Yet he made the gentlemanly decision not to press for police action or even for apologies, even though this incident will probably feature in all of his obituaries.

Channel 4’s Property Ladder is compulsive watching because of its ever-present promise of lots of cash for the most hapless of property developers.

The format on the programme has remained the same throughout all six series aired since 2001.

The scene is set inside an Auschwitz bunkroom in which several prisoners are knowingly spending their final hours.

Out of the tension of their situation comes the decision to carry out a trial in which God is charged with breach of contract. Since God made a covenant with his people, they argue, and since that covenant included many promises that, as his chosen nation, Israel would survive under his protection, why then is the history of the Jewish people marked with destruction and suffering? Surely their slavery, their exile and the six million dead of the Final Solution all prove that God is guilty of going back on his word.

On the shelves of your newsagent or supermarket are plenty of pink magazine front covers aiming to catch the eye of young girls.

They are mostly covered with brand names such as Disney, Barbie and Bratz and littered with the names of celebrity teens. There is free plastic jewellery, sparkly purses and eye shadow attached to their front covers beneath glamorous looking girls with swooshy hairstyles and shimmery blusher. Barbie and Go Girl! magazines are both aimed at girls as young as seven, yet they claim to offer ‘fashion and beauty tips’ as a key part of their content.

Do hard things: a teenage rebellion against low expectations

Eleanor Margesson looks at the Rebelution blog (http://www.therebelution.com) started by Alex and Brett Harris that is encouraging Christian teenagers all over the world.

In 1963, an unknown schoolteacher with a strong Christian faith began campaigning for higher moral standards from the broadcasting services.

Her ‘Clean up TV’ campaigns gathered huge support from like-minded viewers and listeners who were appalled by the unedifying content that was often channelled into living rooms during the earlier part of the evening when families were having tea. 500,000 signed her petition to the Queen, a record number at the time, all of whom believed in a Christian way of life, wanting to protect their children from the ‘disbelief, doubt and dirt that is poured into our homes by TV’.

BBC2’s The Apprentice is now in the middle of its fourth series and the ratings keep on climbing. 7.4 million watched episode five in which the contestants competed to win orders for strange new flavours of ice cream. The show soars over the success of personality driven vehicles such as Big Brother because of the need for contestants to demonstrate skills in the real world.

Having said that, there are still plenty of personalities at work. At the heart of the programme lies the ruthless character of Sir Alan Sugar. The 61-year-old offers young wannabe tycoons the enticing prize of working with him and over 20,000 applied to take part in the show. His hardnosed business approach has made him the 92nd richest person in the UK with a personal fortune of £830m. Most young people today want that. Yet many GCSE Business Studies teachers are using clips from the series to show classes how not to do business in the real world.

TV hospital drama Scrubs tells young men that it’s OK to lean on other people for support.

Everyone feels overwhelmed every now and then. Whether it’s the rigours of the job, the family or just the daily business of living, everyone recognises that life is not always easy. So we need other people to help get us through it. This is the premise of Scrubs, a hospital drama from the States, that has been running since October 2001 and which is now gaining in popularity this side of the Atlantic, particularly among young men.

Is her controversial book How to Cheat at Cooking professional suicide? Or does Delia know more about our cooking habits than we are ready to confess? Eleanor wonders if she’ll need to bother putting her apron on.

For those like me learning to cook in the 1980s and 90s, Delia was our guiding light. Moving us on from Mrs. Beeton, her Complete Cookery Course could be used to look up any dish and follow simple instructions to obtain a decent result.

The journalist A.J. Jacobs, an agnostic New Yorker, sets out to ‘live the ultimate biblical life’ by following the Bible as literally as possible.

Soon to become a film, this comic and gently cynical approach may lead to far more misunderstandings about how God works than Dawkins ever could. A recent article in The Guardian’s Saturday magazine summarises its message.

The film adaptation of Philip Pullman’s novel Northern Lights has brought the Dark Materials trilogy to a wider audience and so has enlivened debate over its writer’s agenda.

Ever since Pullman declared his intention to do for atheism what Lewis did for Christianity, Christians have reacted strongly to the messages in his books and so are naturally wondering what the film will do to promote his materialist views among the young, views that have made some Christians so concerned that they are boycotting the film and refusing to let their children read the books.

Imagination rules over reason in the BBC’s bedtime CBeebies hit In the Night Garden.

A large blue teddy-like creature throws himself on his back and squeaks. A colourful, rambling, trundley train with house-shaped carriages drives up and down a tree trunk. Ten peg-doll characters jump in and out of a teeny-tiny hole. These are the seemingly random events that connect with little narrative to create the dreamy, imaginative woodland world of In the Night Garden, voiced almost entirely by Derek Jacobi.

I’ve often thought of reading women’s magazines as a bit of fun indulgence, something that would cheer me up in a doctor’s waiting room or calm me down on a long journey.

But I usually end up getting more frustration than pleasure out of them. It occurred to me that it would be fun to challenge Cosmopolitan to a contest with the Bible. Which is more of a joy and relief for the modern woman, in her busy, stressed, ageing world, to read today?

Can the popular social networking website really help you to be a better friend?

You may not have a Facebook webpage but you will almost certainly know someone who does. Facebook is the number one website in the new internet revolution, that is ‘Me Media’ webpages where you generate the content. Facebook and similar sites, such as MySpace, hi5, Bebo and Flickr, are all networks which encourage users to interact with one another, but Facebook is different because of the social community atmosphere that it promotes. Unlike MySpace, no one else can view your page unless you have acknowledged them as your ‘friend’ and so users are protected from wider viewing. You are notified of any activity between your network of friends and given ‘mini news feeds’ about their lives as they update their pages.

Heroes is the new series from the US that the BBC has bought for a controversial £400,000 an episode. Now I have a weakness for Mars Bar ice creams, and I often consume them while watching TV. But having finished one, I soon need another.

Heroes is a bit like getting hold of another Mars Bar ice cream. It’s the same sort of drama series that is great fun while the concept lasts but when it’s been played out as far as it can go, we just want another one. Having seen the many seasons of Spooks, CSI, West Wing and 24 and so on, there is definitely a market for more of the same. Heroes is like watching a film with loads of half famous actors where you spend your time wondering where you’ve seen all the bits before. It’s not hard to identify the components. Coming on the back of the Marvel Comic resurgence of the last decade, Heroes seems to be a kind of X-Men fantasy tale topped with a huge dollop of the type of sinister fate and destiny type stuff that J.J. Abrams (creator of Lost and Alias) is so enamoured by. It’s not new either; think John Wyndham’s Chrysalids and mix it together with Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge to get an equally strong ‘fate and spooky talents’ fusion!

I’ve got to confess that I’m a bit behind the times. The Secret Millionaire series was first shown at the beginning of the year but I have only just caught it in repeats on More4.

But I’ve found it so compelling that I have to talk about it. The series is produced by RDF media, the company who brought us Wife Swap, a programme which specialises in putting people into an alien situation in an alien culture and getting them riled up in the pressure cooker environment of an often quite bizarre family. Great TV, but not very subtle. Mercifully, The Secret Millionaire is free from the emotional firestorms that are born from big characters having to justify their lifestyles to people they don’t like. Instead, it is about people making quite a big effort to help others at quite a cost to themselves.

'We all dream a lot, some are lucky, some are not'

Oscar Hammerstein once said, ‘If you don’t have a dream, how are you going to make your dream come true?’

Shock and awe at Tate Modern

When I was 16 and just getting to grips with my History of Art ‘A’ level, we had a class trip to the 1987 Gilbert and George exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.

I remember the repetitive presence of two odd-looking men in suits set in brightly coloured stained-glass windows amongst representations of crosses, young men and plenty of vulgarity. All great fun for a group of sixth formers, but as a Christian I felt angry and sad because I thought that their representations of crucifixes and other religious symbols were treated with the same level of importance as swear words and images of human excrement.

In case you hadn’t realised, the end of March saw the official anniversary of the passing of the Act of Parliament that ended the slave trade in Britain. The release in the UK of the film Amazing Grace that tells the story of William Wilberforce has by now been widely reviewed and commented on, particularly in the Christian press. So isn’t it a little past the event to be still talking about it?

Perhaps not when the crusade behind the film is to engrain our memories with a story that we should never forget. The story of the end of institutionally led exploitation and the perseverance of individuals who had the vision and opportunity to do something about it. It is also the story of the Christian faith echoed by John Newton, who in his old age remembered only two things; ‘That I am a great sinner and that Christ is a great saviour’.

I recently heard a sermon on Luke 13 and the parable of the diminutive-but-soon-to-be-huge mustard seed. One of the upshots of Jesus telling us that the Kingdom of God is steadily growing is that we need to get a right understanding about what is really important and cultivate a ‘healthy disrespect for the rich and powerful’.

I assume that an unhealthy disrespect for the rich and powerful might be some sort of shallow critical attitude that licences feelings of prejudice and moral superiority. A healthy disrespect, meanwhile, recognises that although some people have the privilege of great wealth and power, it is not an enviable privilege. The mustard seed teaches that, eventually, having material riches and power will count for nothing if they are not invested in the growth of the Kingdom of God.

I know it was a month or so ago, but Jade Goody was back on Big Brother, this time as a celebrity. A few words later and we all knew about it.

When James wrote those famous words about the effect that a little tiny tongue might have, could he ever have envisaged a world in which a few insulting little words could be broadcast around the world and commented on instantly and publicly by politicians, journalists, not to mention many ordinary people. When Channel 4 broadcast the moment that Jade Goody called Shilpa Shetty, her fellow Celebrity Big Brother housemate, ‘Shilpa Poppadom’, it seemed as though everybody knew something about it, particularly if they hadn’t seen it on TV. In fact, those who had seen it on TV were the ones who found it difficult to separate out the acceptable shocking behaviour from the unacceptable and were consequently a bit flummoxed as to what they were meant to be appalled by. It was a ‘media event’, at which everybody wished to be present. The little tiny tongue had indeed worked its evil and created a massive forest fire of controversy.

Keeping Mum is a gentle but dark film in the tradition of the Ealing comedies, set in beautiful coastal locations in Cornwall and the Isle of Man, with much Laura Ashley and bits of Country Living magazine also in evidence.

The characters are recognisable from the Working Title / Merchant Ivory genres and the cast is studded with British stars such as Dame Maggie Smith, Kristin Scott Thomas and Rowan Atkinson. Yet it is the presuppositions and conclusions held by the film’s moral framework that makes it more interesting on a spiritual level.

‘I lift my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come?’ The answer to this question for Connie Fisher was probably, ‘The great British public‚ when they texted and phoned their votes to the TV show How do you solve a Problem like Maria?’ this autumn.

Andrew Lloyd Webber, bringing the musical version of The Sound of Music to the West End, came up with his characteristic and unnervingly brilliant understanding of the public spirit when he decided to choose his leading lady through popular TV vote rather than traditional auditions. A.A. Gill commented rather witheringly in his review that ‘the vast majority of [the public] will never have set foot in a theatre — to pick your star in this way is not just risky, it’s delusional’. Yet the canny, if delusional, Lloyd Webber has nevertheless found his way through our hearts to our all-important purse strings, breaking records at the box office.

At the National Television Awards shown at the end of October, Nikki from this year’s Big Brother was voted ‘best TV contender’.

Known for her tantrums and dislike of air-con, Nikki was the popular favourite over others including Carol Thatcher (for her part in I’m a Celebrity Get me out of Here!). Her ‘favourite books’ list includes The Sport, The Sun, The Star and The Complete Guide to Finding Mr. Right. Having being voted out of Big Brother by the public, put back in (also voted for by the public), she eventually came fifth as a result of votes cast by the public.

Monday nights have just got more thrilling. Eleanor Margesson watches as the fifth series of Spooks unfolds on BBC1.

Imagine you are a spy. Your mission: to bug the house of a terror suspect in order to gain intelligence about their imminent bombing campaign. As you enter the empty house on a rainy night, a cat escapes past you into the dark. What do you do?

Do you know the names of the red one, the green ones and the blue ones? If you could also identify the two black ones and some 20 others, then chances are that you exist in close proximity to a Thomas the Tank Engine fan.

Class system

The creator of the fussy little engine was a clergyman who began telling stories about trains to his three-year-old son, Christopher, in 1943. The original series by the Rev W. Awdry introduced the engines through stories explaining how they came to work on the Line. In them, details are carefully given about the functions of the engines and events are often drawn from real-life railway news, as if from one train enthusiast to another.

Jack Vettriano is one of those artists whose work you instantly recognise. He produces paintings that seem to have been around forever. Yet he has only been painting for just under 20 years.

His work is recognisable for many reasons. He has tapped into the mass-marketing money-spinning poster trade, making £15 million a year from sales of reproductions. So it is more than likely that you have seen his work on a wall or a biscuit tin somewhere.

When Crash won its surprise Oscar for best film instead of Brokeback Mountain, the critics’ reaction was generally that Hollywood was chickening out by preferring to air the age-old race debate rather than confronting the more now gay debate.

Seeing as spring is more or less here, I decided to have a bit of a clear out of my film magazines.

Five years of back copies has taken up valuable space that is now needed for toys and baby clothes. As I flicked through the front covers, I was struck by the range of themes that the mainstream Hollywood films use to woo us into the cinemas: Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and The Matrix may all use special effects and multi-release strategies to keep us interested but they also run with themes and ideas that transcend space or Middle Earth and connect with human everyday experience. Love, grief, self-doubt, heroism are all present in many blockbusters and often linking them all together is the theme of forgiveness. In order for relationships to continue in the midst of the immense stresses of the plotlines, forgiveness needs to be alive and well. Frodo and Sam need to forgive each other throughout their journey with the tricksy Gollum, Ron has to forgive Harry for his failures in friendship and so on.

When I was last teaching, I saw celebrities all the time: Elton John, Will Smith and Beyonce to name but a few.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t because the rich and famous had enrolled their children at my school. It was because with the revamping of the BBC in Langham Place, Radio 1 was moved to a location directly opposite the building that I was teaching in. The main entrance was now in full view of all of the windows of the school, allowing both students and staff unprecedented visual access to the morning show’s guests.

By January, you should feel well and truly Narnia-ed. This is because the spirit of Christmas 2005 is being brought to you unmissably via shopping centres, Nestle cereal packets and McDonalds Happy Meals through multiple illustrations of frosty images of the White Witch and the warm magical profile of Aslan the Lion.

If you’ve gone anywhere near the children’s books during your lifetime, you will probably have a strong opinion about the fact that Disney have got hold of the series of films that will be made over the coming years. Perhaps you have misgivings, strongly influenced by the adaptations of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Will they mess up the imaginations of future readers? Will they trash our own mental picture of Narnia? Are they going to alter the strong gospel allegory in favour of a Hollywoodian secular message of goo?

How much do you know about the computer games that teenage boys will be asking for this Christmas?

If you were lucky enough to own a ZX80 games console in the late 70s then you were probably the envy of all your friends. Oh the excitement of the downhill skiing game! The joy of avoiding huge white square pixels with your cursor as they hurtled towards you at increasing speeds! Perhaps you even had a brilliant top score in the game of ‘pong’, the table tennis game with the rewarding ‘beep’ as the ball was successfully batted back over the electronic net. What satisfaction on a rainy afternoon!

I’ve got about an hour before my husband returns from work and we can watch the next episode in the fourth series of the hit serial ‘24’.

The first three episodes have set in place a nail-biting hostage scenario that only the mighty Jack Bauer of the Los Angeles Counter Terrorist Unit could cope with, and I’m desperate to know how it all plays out.

When English teachers are wondering what speaking and listening task to set their GCSE classes, one popular solution is the ‘plinth debate’.

This gets students discussing who or what should be displayed on the empty fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square in central London. Among the claims that David Beckham or the Queen Mother should be the worthy winners, I doubt that any 15-year-old ever suggested that a naked, pregnant, disabled woman should be displayed.

Channel 4 churns out yet another season of Big Brother for those bothering to watch.

I was relieved to discover that since the target audience for Big Brother is 18-34 year olds, I will be safely out of their clutches this time next year as a 35 year-old. So I decided to see what it was that I would be missing in 2006 and started watching.

Shopping is no longer escapism. Gone are the therapy days. The recent ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign is just one of many ways in which the issue of Fair Trade has been highlighted to us as consumers.

Going to the supermarket or browsing along the high street with these issues ringing in our ears makes the experience very different. We are told in the Bible that ‘blessed is he who is generous to the poor’ (Proverbs 14.21) yet inadvertently many of us have probably bought goods that have been produced by people who are exploited and abused. Being interested in the equal treatment of all mankind means that the shopper needs to make ethical decisions as they make their purchases.

When the BBC commissioned the independent Tiger Aspect production company to make a three-part series about life in a monastery, they took the concept of reality TV to a new level.

Here was an opportunity to see if spirituality could be seen and experienced by ‘normal’ people from the outside world. Would the monks’ way of life and belief system affect those who took part in the project? Or would they confirm to a mass audience that religion is antiquated and irrelevant for a modern world? Put simply, could these monks prove to the five non-Catholics who came to live with them that their God was real enough to have faith in?

Eleanor Margesson breaches social etiquette by suggesting that we should front up to the makers of adverts and programmes that frustrate Christians.

Is there anything in the media that makes you really angry? Have you seen a film recently, or perhaps an advert or even a newspaper article that set your teeth on edge? If so, what have you done about it? Did you complain? If so, who to?

Eleanor Margesson gives the new series of Dr. Who a quick healthcheck.

A memo written in 1962 is posted on the BBC website. It is written by three scriptwriters putting forward a proposal for a new Saturday afternoon programme.

20 years ago I was 14 and an addict. I couldn’t get enough of Just Seventeen magazine. Every week it would arrive with the newspaper through our letterbox and I couldn’t do anything else until I’d read it all. When I went to camp one summer, I even insisted to my parents that they had to send it to me through the post and by the time my obsession was at an end, I had amassed hundreds of copies in my chest of drawers.

What is the attraction of the girlie magazine? Every month a new collection of glossy magazines hits the shelves of your local newsagent, aimed squarely at teenagers between the ages of 12-16. This month I bought the pink and yellow Bliss magazine, which was offering me three free nail polishes, a nail file and a set of false stick-on nails to use it all on. All of which would suggest that this is a magazine aimed at young girls wanting a fun activity for their next sleepover. However, the front cover follows design conventions that are used for fashion magazines aimed at older female readers, such as Red and Instyle. There is a glamorous cover girl, in this case Britney Spears, pictured behind provocative and sensational cover lines. ‘I went to the loo and had a baby!’, ‘Six steps to a thong-tastic bum!’, ‘My classmates don’t know I’m a prostitute!’. Tantalising stuff, particularly when the largest cover line on the page screams ‘Get Sexy Now!’. All of which begs the question, what are these magazines coming to?

When news headlines flash across our papers and TV screens, they are generally dominated by political activity and human tragedy.

Representations of countries as political hot-spots or needy victims can shape our assumptions about them to the extent that we forget about the cultural and artistic expressions of the people who live there.

El;eanor Margesson reviews the Unilever Series exhibit 'Raw Materials' by Bruce Nauman, showing in the Turbine Hall of London's Tate Modern until March 28 2005.

If you walk into the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall between now and March 28, you could easily confuse it with entering the London Dungeon. Howls of ghoulish screams and echoing growls bounce off the walls of the massive space, while piercing shrieks mix with calmer, more insistent tones. Meanwhile, the hum of the vast generators, which originally powered the building, drone on in the background.

The name 'Disney' works like an undisputed seal of approval. It is recognised the world over as a guarantee of a wholesome, exciting and magical experiences. Most of us remember a trip to the cinema to see a Disney classic, perhaps even a trip 'to see the mouse' in Florida or Paris and many will no doubt give or receive Disney merchandise this Christmas.

This Christmas, the big Disney release, in partnership with the computer animation giant Pixar, is The Incredibles, an interesting departure from the normal Disney cartoon. It is directed by Brad Bird, a writer from the explosive satire of another highly successful cartoon franchise, The Simpsons. The result is a more laidback appeal to a mature audience without the cute and cuddly approach of Monsters Inc and Toy Story, with fast action and pyrotechnics that result in several dead baddies along the way.

Advent is upon us once again. This month EN looks at three successful works - two films and a novel - which ask the same question as that raised by this particular Christian festival: 'Will the ending come as a surprise?'

There is no doubt that fictional stories set around actual historical disasters are hugely popular with audiences. When James Cameron made Titanic in 1997, it attracted millions of viewers worldwide, with a final gross of £1 billion. When Gus van Sant (director of Good Will Hunting) made the smaller, independent film Elephant about the 1999 Columbine High School shootings, he won the coveted Palme D'Or award at the 2003 Cannes film festival. This year, the novel Pompeii has taken its writer, Robert Harris, to the top of the bestseller lists once again with his fact-based version of the events leading up to the eruption of Vesuvius.

Talking about reality TV comes a close second to talking about the weather.

Everyone has an opinion about it. This seems to be particularly true in evangelical circles, where there is almost an unspoken understanding that if you watch Reality TV then you can't possibly be a keen Christian.

EDWARD HOPPER

Tate Modern, London