Natalie Vincent

Emotive and manipulative film-making masquerades as factual documentary  Last night I decided to watch BBC3 for a change instead of Panorama. It was about tax havens. Too heavy for a Monday, I thought, so scrolled through and caught the end of Junior Doctors.   Apparently BBC3 is running a season of Body Beautiful programmes, targeted for its 13-25 demographic, in light of the pressure on young people to look perfect.     The show on this evening was “ Dying for Clear Skin ”; having suffered from horrendous acne as a teen and early twenties (with the occasional monthly breakout now), I suspected that it would be touching upon the drug Roaccutane, which I had been treated with twice -   at 17 and 20.  Boy, did I underestimate that. What followed was an hour-long, scaremongering propaganda film about the dangers of Roaccutane, interwoven with highly emotive stories about young people who had apparently taken their own lives during or follow...

If you look at the poster, they have added a caveat! In the past year, I have found that communicating directly with directors of huge companies more helpful than going through switchboards and customer services. Why? Because if you use enough initiative and guesswork, you can sidestep the gatekeepers and get direct responses and solutions, from someone who is often full of commonsense, rather than the pencil pushers lower down. This worked with a telecomms company I was having trouble with, and my problem was solved within one week. This time, I was annoyed to find out that the uncut version of The Hunger Games was only being released in the UK on Blu-Ray format. Not a problem, a lot of you may say, but when you are not in possession of a Blu-ray player but  a perfectly functioning DVD player, the decision seems rather cynical. I mean, it's ony seven seconds of extra footage, but I just wanted to see what they decided to cut  to get a 12a rating. So I decided to write...

Depressed that the Olympics are over? Don't be - it doesn't end for our athletes, nor does it have to for you There's about 61 million people suffering from acute sports withdrawal symptoms - but sporting events happen all year round. The last fortnight has shown how truly Great our British athletes are. A plethora of gold, silver and bronze-winning antics has seen 65 medals, 29 of which are gold, across sports as diverse as dressage, heptathlon, rowing, sailing, boxing and long-distance running. So much so in fact, that once our collective jaw stopped dropping each time Team GB achieved a  gold, the whole country was bathed in a happy, exuberant pride, and we started walking around with smiles on our faces and dancing with policeman. Now that the Olympics are over, we are looking forward to the Paralympics , where the GB medal haul is expected to be at least double of what they accumulated in the past two weeks. But after that, what is in store for the country, save ...