Robin Ince profile picture

Robin Ince

My Favourite Frilly shirt

About Me

I am a comedian and writer and that sort of thing. I hope one day to do a UK tour playing only libraries, these are my heady dreams. I am currently working on the E4 show Skins and writing a book about books, as well as touring the UK.

My Interests

I spend the time scouting for strange books, reading things that I hope will make me brainier and then promptly forgetting every detail. Watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos too often and listening to enough music to give me juke box tinnitus. I also waste the end of the day when I should be sleeping staying up to watch any true story telemovie, anything from court room dramas to crazed right to lifers going off the rails, preferably with Richard Thomas (once of The Waltons)

I'd like to meet:

Howard Zinn, James Randi, Christopher Hitchens, I wish i could have met Kurt Vonnegut and Carl Sagan

Music:

The Smiths, Nirvana, Mudhoney, any album where an entirely inappropriate band have been covered by a regional philharmonic, Jack, Hefner, Grandaddy, The Wedding Present, Giant Sand, soundtracks by Danny Elfman, John Barry or Michael Nyman, Nick Cave, Morrissey, Cyndi Lauper, The Fall, House of Love, Nick Cave, Yo La Tengo, the Kingsbury Manx, And You Shall Know Us By The Trail of the Dead, The Pixies, Billy Bragg, Mogwai (despite the fact they rudely heckled me once), Godspeed You Black Emperor, eels, Belle and Sebastian, Bright Eyes, Sufjan Stevens, The Shangra Las, The Ronettes, Love, The Kinks, Slade, REM, Elvis Presley, Cyndi Lauper, Kate Bush, The Delgados, laura Cantrell, Scout Niblett, Peter Gabriel, Lisa Germano, Neil Diamond, Ennio Morricone, you know, all that sort of thing, but having lost most of my albums to a deluge of sewage things are different now.

Movies:

The films of John Waters, David Cronenberg and George A Romero (particularly Martin), The Dead Zone is the most melancholy film to be lumped in the horror genre ever, Strictly Ballroom, The Wild Geese, Who Dares Wins, all 70s sitcoms made into movies (especially ones on the Costa Del Plonka), The Old Dark House, most things with Alastair Sim, Murder at the Gallop or any other Margaret Rutherford Marples, Edward Scissorhands, This Is England, Blade, Saturday Night Sunday Morning, Muriel's Wedding, If, Taste of Honey, Don't Look Now, Harold and Maude, Lair of the White Worm, Hal Hartley stuff, Static, Salvador, Hana Bi and most Beat Takeshi, nearly all films with Paddy Considine particularly Dead man's Shoes and Room for Romeo Brass, and the same goes for Jennifer Jason Leigh, with some clear exceptions, you can work them out if necessary

Television:

The Sopranos, Steptoe and Son, GBH, Curb your Enthusiasm, Dennis Potter, Twin Peaks, Ren and Stimpy, Cosmos, Ascent of Man, Fry and Laurie as Jeeves and Wooster or A Bit of, Millennium, Hammer House of Horror, Tales of the Unexpected, most things from the eighties with Rik Mayall, Brideshead Revisited, Arena, Sunset Beach, Columbo, The Avengers, The Prisoner

Books:

Graham Greene (particlularly End of the Affair), Daniel Clowes, Adrian Tomine, Myla Goldberg's Bee Season, Carl Sagan's Dragons of Eden, the novels of Martin Millar, Alan Moore, The Beast in Man by Emile Zola

Heroes:

John Peel, Carl Sagan, Kurt Vonnegut, journalists like Greg Palast, Thomas Huxley
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My Blog

Midges

Unsurprisingly, red wine bought from petrol stations is not very good. Since when did the Gallos control the wine shelves? I presume the buyer for the petrol station chains puts more effort into findi...
Posted by Robin Ince on Wed, 14 May 2008 04:53:00 PST

Not Exactly Jolly

I have just watched Shooting Dogs, a dramatic account of a few days in Rwanda during the genocide. It seems quite incredible that it took just 100 days for 800,000 people to be killed while the UN in ...
Posted by Robin Ince on Mon, 12 May 2008 11:00:00 PST

The man in the shiny hat and sandals bellowed

On returning home from my Saturday night gigs, I decided to watch Fahrenheit 911, oops. Whenever I see footage of the stolen election of 2000, my stomach cramps slightly, it's that mild stomach spasm ...
Posted by Robin Ince on Sun, 11 May 2008 12:10:00 PST

Itching in Monks Garb

I should really be wearing my hairshirt, but I don't have a hairshirt. Fortunately the cheap shirt I am wearing as an annoying small label in the collar that scrapes my neck. I was particularly lacklu...
Posted by Robin Ince on Sat, 10 May 2008 05:54:00 PST

A yorkshire pudding used in a particle accelerator

The BBC remains at the forefront of miniaturising food. Each time I go to a BBC do the food they bring round is smaller and smaller, but designed so it looks exactly as if it were the newborn sibling ...
Posted by Robin Ince on Wed, 07 May 2008 01:28:00 PST

It is late, this is brief

I have recently been enjoying the books of the late Neil Postman. Amusing Oursleves to Death is a fine title and a charmingly acerbic attack on our media mesmerized brains. It is good to discover that...
Posted by Robin Ince on Wed, 07 May 2008 05:56:00 PST

Benefit Warning

hello, just to warn you that on 13th July there will be a benefit for a fine children's cancer charity, William's Fund, at the Bloomsbury in London. So far it includes Steve Merchant, Jo Brand, Mark S...
Posted by Robin Ince on Wed, 07 May 2008 04:41:00 PST

sentences that are too long

How can you not love science news pages when they give us headlines such headlines as "Colossal Squid's Big Eye Revealed"? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7374297.stm There are many things that ...
Posted by Robin Ince on Mon, 05 May 2008 01:09:00 PST

Dick Burton?

I failed to mention how nice the audience at Barton on Humber was, especially as I felt tired and sick as I stood on the disused railroad track waiting to go on. A very ramshackle 80 minutes, but...
Posted by Robin Ince on Sat, 03 May 2008 01:35:00 PST

A hair bun misplaced

Dog bites man, that's not a story. 1.2 million Iraqi deaths since the invasion, that's not news (http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq/iraqdeaths.html) Man bites dog, or rather says he has bitten the ...
Posted by Robin Ince on Sat, 03 May 2008 01:25:00 PST