- published: 10 May 2012
- views: 5946
Bad news may refer to:
Tokyo (東京, Tōkyō?, "Eastern Capital") [toːkʲoː], English /ˈtoʊki.oʊ/; officially Tokyo Metropolis (東京都, Tōkyō-to?), is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of the world. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family. Tokyo is in the Kantō region on the southeastern side of the main island Honshu and includes the Izu Islands and Ogasawara Islands. Tokyo Metropolis was formed in 1943 from the merger of the former Tokyo Prefecture (東京府, Tōkyō-fu?) and the city of Tokyo (東京市, Tōkyō-shi?).
The Tokyo Metropolitan government administers the 23 special wards of Tokyo (each governed as a city), which cover the area that was the city of Tokyo, as well as 39 municipalities in the western part of the prefecture and the two outlying island chains. The population of the special wards is over 8 million people, with the total population of the prefecture exceeding 13 million. The prefecture is part of the world's most populous metropolitan area with upwards of 35 million people and the world's largest urban agglomeration economy with a GDP of US$1.479 trillion at purchasing power parity in 2008, ahead of New York City metropolitan area, which ranks second on the list. The city hosts 47 of the Fortune Global 500 companies, the highest amount of any city.
Bad News were a spoof rock band, created for the Channel 4 television series The Comic Strip Presents.... Its members were Vim Fuego (aka Alan Metcalfe), vocals and lead guitar (played by Adrian Edmondson); Den Dennis, rhythm guitar (Nigel Planer); Colin Grigson, bass (Rik Mayall); and Spider Webb, drums (Peter Richardson).
Bad News made their television debut during 1983, in the first series of The Comic Strip Presents... (written by Edmondson, and produced by Michael White/Comic Strip Productions). The episode, "Bad News Tour", took the form of a satirical fly-on-the-wall rockumentary, in which the incompetent band is followed travelling to a gig in Grantham by an almost equally inept documentary film crew: It seemed to take much inspiration from Mark Kidel's 1976 BBC documentary So You Wanna Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star? that followed the Kursaal Flyers around Scotland and northeast England. The episode was also coincidentally in production at the same time as This Is Spinal Tap, which was released the following year to a much wider audience and subsequently greater acclaim.