Lauren Ward

The heads of Wall Street's biggest investment banks were summoned to an evening meeting by the US Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, to discuss the plight of another - Lehman Brothers. After six months' turmoil in the world's financial markets, Lehman Brothers was on life support and the government was about to pull the plug. Lehman CEO, Dick Fuld, recently sidelined in a boardroom coup, spends the weekend desperately trying to resuscitate his beloved company through a merger with Bank of America or UK-based Barclays. But without the financial support of Paulson and Lehman's fiercest competitors, Fuld's empire - and with it, the stability of the world economy - teeters on the verge of extinction.

Broken News is a comedy programme shown on BBC Two in autumn 2005 and in Australia on SBS-TV from the 17 July 2006. The show poked fun at the world of 24-hour rolling news channels. The title of the show is a play on the phrase "breaking news". The show jump cut between its various spoof TV channels, which covered both the central story and other stories that would be of interest to their audience. A large part of the comedy came from observations about the nature of news presentation rather than the stories themselves.

A reality TV program selects six contestants to participate in a free-for-all, no holds barred deathmatch, where they must skillfully outwit and kill each other in order to be the last person alive.

Around 1940, New Yorker staff writer Joe Mitchell meets Joe Gould, a Greenwich Village character who cadges meals, drinks, and contributions to the Joe Gould Fund and who is writing a voluminous Oral History of the World, a record of 20,000 conversations he's overheard. Mitchell is fascinated with this Harvard grad and writes a 1942 piece about him, "Professor Seagull," bringing Gould some celebrity and an invitation to join the Greenwich Village Ravens, a poetry club he's often crashed. Gould's touchy, querulous personality and his frequent dropping in on Mitchell for hours of chat lead to a breakup, but the two Joes stay in touch until Gould's death and Mitchell's unveiling of the secret.