Thursday, February 12, 2026

Meet the Blogroll: Books Music Films TV (Paul Rance)

BooksMusicFilmsTV.com is a British literary criticism site operated by Andrew Bruce and Paul Rance, the latter of whom I e-met at Associated Content. The site sells these products of creative talent and posts biographies, bibliographies, discographies, etc. 

Because it's been set up more as a commercial web site than as a blog, new posts often fail to show up properly in my blog feed.

Paul Rance is the author of several books published in the UK: Made in Luton, Being St Francis, From Ecocide to Eden and more. These books are of course featured at the site, along with a lively mix of obscure new books and classics--Richard Adams, Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Graham Greene, Edward Lear, C.S. Lewis, Wilfred Owen, Anna Sewell...Not all books featured at the site are by British authors but all are available in the UK. 

As a booksellers' site BooksMusicFilmsTV shows a more cautious approach than this web site's "Oh well I bought or inherited this book so let's post something about it and see who, if anyone, wants it." Books seem to have been selected for their enduring popularity. This makes a book site more profitable, and it's nice to observe that BooksMusicFilmsTV has enough traffic to attract nice arts-related ads rather than random, obnoxious Google, Wordpress, Taboola or similar selections of ads.

(This web site, too, could have nice tasteful links to pages that opened into big-picture ads for new books and records, if authors and musicians were paying for them. Just saying.) 

Music has also been carefully selected for popularity, though here the classics include the Beatles, David Bowie, Kate Bush, Coldplay, The Doors, Green Day, Pink Floyd, Queen, and 10cc. You can play an opening selection from Paul Rance's rock music quiz book. 

Featured film stars include Julie Andrews, Richard Attenborough, Brigitte Bardot, Halle Berry, Richard Burton, and on through Peter Ustinov and Reese Witherspoon. You might not like all of their favorites (I'm surprised that anyone still has the fortitude to claim Woody Allen as a favorite, though he was certainly funny) and might miss some of your own favorites, but there's sure to be some overlap. Or you could browse by film titles, which incline toward the family-friendly but range from Babe and Bambi to The Matrix and Moulin Rouge.

TV is probably the category in which US and UK lists diverge most but, if you enjoy television, this is a good site for brushing up knowledge of TV in the country where you don't live. 

In a brief review of "Frasier" Paul Rance writes that "Americans struggle to grasp...that there are more accents in England than posh and Cockney!" Most of us, I think, haven't listened attentively enough to notice that e.g. the Beatles' Liverpool accent was different from Cockney, while C.S. Lewis's accent, as recorded, was quite different from standard BBC (which I imagine must be what he's calling "posh") and surely more upscale (Lewis was a real English teacher, while the BBC is a commercial company). Then again I don't imagine that most British people have a clue how different the various "Southern" US accents sound from one another, to me...

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