The original Twitterer  Bill Nighy interview for The Boat That Rocked He's a maniacal texter who doesn't own a computer and has a profound fear of daylight and shorts. Is Bill Nighy, star of Richard Curtis's The Boat That Rocked, just another oddball actor, or one of the last great British eccentrics? Judge for yourself.   By Nigel Farndale
Last Updated: 4:58PM GMT 25 Mar 2009 He's one distracted man, Bill Nighy. 'Just… need… to… finish… 'The sentence trails off as his crooked fingers move over the buttons on his phone. Texting is an obsession of his, he says (distractedly), because he doesn't use email, having… no… um… computer. Friends and colleagues of his receive dozens a day, apparently – pithy observations, apercus, updates about his daily goings-on. He invented the concept of twitter long before it had an official name. Another of his obsessions is going on in his head, and in mine – Bob Dylan. Though we are upstairs in the green room of someone else's photography studio, it is his music we are listening to. He always has his own with him and it is nearly always Dylan. The actor listens to the singer every day.   Related Articles Pop music, actually Dylan, indeed, is the soundtrack to his life and has been since he first heard him in the early Sixties. This either shows a wilful lack of imagination, or an impressive streak of loyalty, I can't decide which. What I do know is that when I correctly identify the album, a fairly obscure one from the late Seventies called Slow Train Coming, my stock rises instantly. 'Oh,' he says, looking up from his text. 'You know your Dylan.' Bill Nighy is a tall and spidery 59-year-old in thick-rimmed, Eric…

  Has Obama's charisma deserted him? By Alex Spillius World Last updated: November 26th, 200941 Comments Comment on this article In my interview with Obama’s 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe, he draws comparisons between the down days of Obama’s bid in mid 2007 and controversies such as Rev Wright and the difficulties of his first year. The lesson, he says, is that stay true to the message and the strategy and you shall prevail. A campaign is very different from running the country however as it has one goal. Mr Obama has several, even if they share common themes.     His performance of the last few months has however reminded me of the campaign in another way than Plouffe meant. Like the first six months of 2007, as Plouffe’s book The Audacity to Win acknowledges, the candidate was flat, uninspired and too professorial.The same is true now. The president is not connecting with voters on the economy and doesn’t speak about the mission in Afghanistan with the required conviction. His advisers, unlike the campaign, aren’t full of smart ideas. Maureen Dowd says he is like a cold shower compared to the warm bath of Bill Clinton. Politico’s Arena asks where his charisma has gone.Perhaps this is no more than too much too soon, and perhaps the sparkle will return. For America’s sake, it needs to.   

 Is President Obama's Carter moment nearing?
By David S. Broder
Thursday, June 3, 2010"This is the worst," a Democratic friend exclaimed over the phone on Tuesday, the first day back at work after the Memorial Day weekend. I knew without asking what he meant -- the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico that dominated television coverage and was into its second month with no quick solution in sight. No, I told him. It's not yet the worst. They haven't built a popular new television program around it -- yet. No one has created a new media franchise for himself out of it. There isn't a name for it that has become part of popular culture. I was thinking back to when another Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, found himself stymied in another seemingly endless ordeal. Iranian militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 officials and workers hostage for 444 days, while the United States was helpless to free them. Many of us recall the event by the name that became attached to it: "America Held Hostage." That was the title ABC News slapped on its half-hour news update that aired each night, with Ted Koppel as anchor. The show later became the long-running program "Nightline." This is when you know you are truly harpooned, when your problem has become someone else's meal ticket. As sinister as the jet stream of escaping oil and gas looks via the underwater camera in the gulf, Barack Obama has not yet moved into the category of the late-night patsy that Jimmy Carter became. The Iranians were more clever, or diabolical, in exploiting their hostages than the restrained BP executives or their enviro foes are in this situation. Obama keeps popping up in new settings, sounding as…