Channel 4’s Countdown is one of the longest running TV gameshows in the world and by any measure the raw ‘statistics’ are pretty impressive. In the UK it’s been running for almost thirty years and has racked up – to date – sixty-five series and more than five […]

The starting point for much of what I write here at the Ministry tends to be the kind of stuff that bugs me because, when I think about it in detail, it doesn’t quite make sense. Take, for example, the very recent rape conviction of a Sheffield United […]

If you’ve ever read Richard Dawkins’ book ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ or seen his Channel 4 series ‘The Genius of Darwin’ then you may readily recall the rather surreal interview that Dawkins conducted with an American creationist named Wendy Wright. If you’ve not seen the series or […]

As regular visitors to the Ministry will appreciate, I’ve got a bit of unfinished business with Chris McGrath, the idiot who unsuccessfully tried to sue Amazon, Richard Dawkins, the Richard Dawkins Foundation and a blogger named Vaughan Jones over comments made in a review thread on the Amazon […]

I have nothing but admiration for the good folks at Full Fact and the time and effort they put into monitoring the accuracy of factual claims as they appear in the media, but even they sometimes miss a trick or two and their analysis of the media coverage […]

My previous dealings with Chris McGrath, who unsuccessfully tried to sue Amazon, Richard Dawkins, the Richard Dawkins Foundation and Vaughan Jones over a book review, and subsequent flame war, are detailed in the following posts: Shades of Kaschke: Christopher McGrath aka Scrooby In which I get a nastygram […]

No, I’m not going to add any more fuel to an unnecessary fire, my question here is actually very simple… Why has no one bothered to do the most basic background research on this whole non-story? The name ‘Samantha Brick’ is unusual enough that simple News Archive search […]