Anglophiling.

Friends, family, enemies, and lovers are quite aware of my love for British pop culture. Sherlock Holmes was probably the first fictional hero I ever had. The Beatles the first music I can remember falling in love with. (How much of this was due to them having a cartoon I saw every day after toiling in the first grade? I don't know. I just consider myself supremely fortunate that Neil Diamond didn't have a cartoon that I might've seen at that impressionable age.)

My obsession with James Bond (which flowered during the time every other boy in my generation had given himself over to Star Wars) and I suppose Doctor Who --came later. (I really do need to write about the Bond thing. Later.)

In the 1980's American comics experienced a sort of "British Invasion" as writers and artists from across the pond started writing and drawing for us. This exposed me to the writing of Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Peter Milligan, and Neil Gaiman. Holy Living Fuck were those the days. Well, for comics they were anyway.

All this has been a preamble to some links I'd like to point out:

The BBC is now airing The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: Tertiary Phase on Radio 4. You can listen to the current episode for a week here. The original series is easily amongst the most imaginative and hilarious radio I've ever had the pleasure to listen to. Don't know how the current batch will match up, but here's hoping.

The current series of six shows (and another six planned for next year) will adapt the remaining three novels in the "trilogy". Douglas Adams was doing some work on it when he passed away a few years ago. He did manage to actually voice one of the characters. Oh, and all the surviving cast members are back, which is very cool.

Some years ago, an English guy I worked with named Simon introduced me to the work of one Stephen Fry. Fry is an English actor, novelist, and director. He played Oscar Wilde in the film Wilde, Jeeves in the tv show based on P.G. Woodhouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories, and was featured prominently in my favorite tv sitcom ever Blackadder. He's also the reader of the Harry Potter audiobooks in England.

The man is witty, erudite, and hilarious. He also gives tremendously good interviews. In order of appearance: An interview from a couple years ago with Jonathan Ross from BBC Radio 2, a recent one on NPR, last week's conversation from The Onion and some further conversation from the same interview can be found here. Also very interesting is this blog entry where the interviewer writes of what it was like to interview Mr. Fry. Excellent.

I was lead to the two most recent interviews by links found on Neil Gaiman's blog. Something else really clever that began because of that blog is Johnny Theremin.

Made me laugh.