John Hodgshon

Being a sucker for anything retro, this film had me hooked at the first glance. A large, shiny, alt-deco microphone which looked like something from an old Flash Gordon serial. A huge transmitting with banks of transistors and (yes!) a wood-panelled desk inlayed with hundreds of flickering gauges and metres.

So you want Balkan rhythms? Men in bowler hats playing accordions? How about melancholy music that makes you want to look wistfully off into the distance and murmur about “my lost homeland”?

Bruno Kreisky is widely lauded as the greatest chancellor Austria has ever had. Serving for an unrivaled 13 years, he had for many of them an absolute socialist majority in Parliament and enjoyed widespread popularity that bordered on obsession. However, like anyone, he wasn’t perfect and some of his false steps reveal much about the evolution of Austria in the post-war years, and help to explain the country it has become.

One of these cases was the ‘Wiesenthal affair’.

Although overshadowed by the Greek Debt Crisis and pressure on the Euro, the discussion of national smoking laws continues. However, the support for a possible intervention from Brussels has been dampened in Austria by falling restaurant profits as the financial crisis reaches consumers. As people start trimming their household budgets where ever they can, going out to eat becomes a kind of leading indicator of larger trends.

Hardly the best time to add another drag on the industry.

Dear Diary,

Anyone who has grown up with English war comics knows that all Germans speak in a harsh, barking accent, have a good grasp of English, but tend to pepper their speech with phrases like ‘Hände hoch!’, ‘In Ordnung!’ and of course ‘Englischer Schweinehund’. Ze also tend to pronounce zeir ‘th’s like zis, vitch makes zem sound most evil, ja? You also learn that Germans spend most of their time slapping English people across the face with leather gloves and making sinister threats.