Number's Up!

My new game to stave off senile dementia is to find a number of the week. It's only being running for a few weeks and recent winners have included:

20: The percentage of Third World debt directly created by the arms industry selling weapons to impoverished African states.
2311: The number of indecent child porn images found on Gary Glitter's computer by the Vietnamese authorities.
58: The percentage of the London Underground that is not actually underground.

Today's winner, though, is 25. That is the amount in seconds I managed to stay upright on a surfbaord in a one-hour lesson. It was a glorious British sporting triumph. Well, for 25 seconds anyway...

Tis The Season To Be… Sunburnt?

‘Merry Christmas. I’m so glad we married as I’ve been the luckiest girl in the world to spend my life with a loving, generous and genuinely caring man like you…’

That, of course, was the greeting I was hoping for on Christmas morning as me and the missus woke up to a scorching Xmas day on the Gold Coast in Australia. Instead I got the following:

‘How come you found coathangers and I didn’t get any, you bastard?’

The missus was looking in the wardrobe at her relative’s house where we staying Down Under at the time and, after I told her I’d simply asked her 10-year-old nephew if I could nick some of his, her line of inquiry ended. Still the anticipated moment of festive romance was forever ruined…

Christmas is Oz is a strange affair. Our week in Sydney visiting friends had been fab and included a walk up (up and not over) the Sydney Harbour Bridge, then we flew up the coast to a place near Surfer’s Paradise for the remainder of our stay to bunk down with relatives. But walking around in swimming trunks and jumping in the pool or surf around Yule just doesn’t seem very familiar to one brought up on English Christmasses.

So I’ve decided to spend then rest of the stay walking around in several layers of clothes and complaining about the weather. It may seem crazy but it will be good practice for our eventual return home…

Christmas Down Under

Tomorrow myself, the girl and the boy are off in Oz for just over two weeks for our first proper holiday of the year. (OK… our first proper holiday of the year if you don’t count long weekends away in Austria, Hungary and Spain and I don’t.)

We’re now pretty much packed and we even have a house sitter to feed the cats so, touch wood, all should be OK on the home front in our absence.

But even though it’s a holiday – and I fully intend to rest up and recuperate properly from several recent martial arts injuries – I am taking my laptop as I want to get some writing done and a 24-hour flight seems like a good place to do it.

I am having another stab at writing some sketches, which may well turn out to be utter rubbish, and I also want to make some major headway with a new play about a disgraced faith healer, which could be very good.

I may, however, also decide ‘Bollocks to all that!’ and just chill out on the beaches of Sydney (first week) and Brisbane (second week) with the girl and the boy.

Anyway, merry Christmas and a happy new year to anyone who reads this blog… Please take this joke as my present to you:

A bloke with a thing for lions goes to the zoo. He pays his money and heads for the lion cage but it’s empty so he walks around to look at the other animals but every cage he approaches is empty. Feeling ripped off he heads towards the gate to complain but as he does so he sees a small cage with a tiny little dog in the back. It was a shih-tzu…

New Order!

The missus is convinced I have finally cracked. I am currently colonising an area of the back living room as a new office and she watched me move my bits in last night with my usual methodical precision: books in size order, everything on the desk at right angles, music to work to sorted in genre order, a Stalinist purge of everything in the area that is not mine so I can properly call the place home…

I call this orderly and organised, she calls it obsessive compulsive disorder and who’s to say who’s right. Well she seems to think it’s her normally… The missus does resist all my best attempts to bring order to the household by doing ‘helpful’ things, though, like putting all her CDs in alphabetical order and arranging her books into author order.

But some people are just never happy and, as I pointed out, the various families on Honey We’re Killing The Kids on BBC 1 would be only too glad of somebody like me to bring order into their lives. Sadly, though, the powers at the Beeb invited somebody else to do it…

The basic premise of Honey We’re Killing The Kids is that each week family ‘expert’ Kris Murrin and her team meet a troubled family and aim to improve and put some order into their lives in just three weeks.

Last week’s clan, the Jacksons, featured harangued mum Teresa, 11-year-old daughter Shannon and 10-year-old son Steffan, a five-a-day-cigarette man who started smoking when he was five. Yes. That’s right. Five! But as mum is a 60-a-day woman he’d still got quite a lot of catching up to do.

The best bit of the show is when the troubled parents (or parent in this case) face a computer-simulated image of their kids as they are now and their kids as they will be in 40 years time if things don’t change. And poor Teresa didn’t like what she saw one bit...

Her incredibly bright daughter had become a dumpier version of her mum with no hope in her eyes and the marks of an underachieving and hard life etched all over her face, while the boy looked like a walking cadever battery-fed on McDonalds for 30 years.

Fortunately it all worked out quite well in the end as the kids made an effort to change and so did the mum.

And the result… Well the freshly generated computer images of the kids growing up under their new regime made them resemble smugly contented members of the middle class rather than the grunts they’d previously looked like.

The show is without a doubt decent telly but it’s awfully voyeuristic in a car-crash sort of way and is a bit self-congratulatory. Fact: some parents can’t always indulge their kids with time and affection because they’re working long hours in low-paid jobs to put food on the table. But let’s not let reality intrude on reality telly.

And always remember if you need help: I’m cheaper than the BBC. Ask the missus…

Addicted to Love…

I am a sex addict. A moment hardly passes without some random sexually depraved thought entering my head. My condition can be triggered by a man or a woman and sometimes they don’t even have to be alive (like Carol Thatcher) to give me lewd thoughts. In fact it’s getting so bad that when either of the cats at home jump up on the bed when I’m dozing they are taking several of their nine lives in to their paws because they may get penetrated to death by my subconscious actions!

This, of course, is a lie (the cats move too quickly when I try to grab them) but sex addiction is apparently a proper disorder and people are treated for it. Honest! Of course it’s usually high-profile stars like Michael Douglas who get sex addiction treatment but now even the common folk are getting in on the act.

Last night’s The Dark Side Of Modern Love season on Channel 4 featured the documentary Sex Addict, which followed a married couple embarking on a quest to deal with hubby Mark’s all-consuming sexual compulsion.

Mark’s addiction had got so bad that he was spending thousands of dollars on phone sex chat lines, shagging several other women and even cranking his handle up to three times per day every day. And wife Connie was understandably quite (pardon the unfortunate choice of words) jacked off by all this. For a start it was costing her a fortune in tissues…

So our not-so-loving couple visited a sex therapist, himself a recovering addict of 18 years, where a mix of goofball psychology, religious instruction and hitting things with a cushion apparently helped him get better and her deal with her anger over his behaviour.

It was both bizarre and pitiful to watch and you’ve got to wonder:
a) Why she put up with it;
b) How he got away with it;
c) Why they agreed to make a TV show about it and expose their humiliation to the telly-watching world.

But I guess it takes all sorts. Just ask Mark – and our cats...

A Reader Writes…

Dear Sir

I have spent the past week watching soap operas on the TV set – and may I say there’s no wonder the country is going to rack and ruin if this is what passes for prime-time entertainment!

One show entitled Hollyoaks is currently running a hilariously acted comedy storyline about date rape and that particular topic is not at all funny if you ask me. On the plus side, though, it is addressing the very serious issue of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD!), a very hot potato in sixth form common rooms up and down the land, so it’s not all bad.

I also chanced upon EastEnders and saw the Sonia Jackson dumpling get a slice of girl-on-girl action. I was very upset at the preposterous nature of the storyline – and the appalling acting resembled no girly kissing scene featured in my extensive hobby cabinet.

Come on C4 and BBC. Pull your socks up!

Colonel Dwight Micklewight
Pall Mall Club

Culture Vulture

My long weekend with the missus didn’t get off to the best of starts. I wanted to go to Paris or Brussels and she wanted to go somewhere in the UK. Even worse she wouldn’t allow me to sulk in bed for not getting my own way on Friday morning. Some people! So we stayed in London and did stuff and it turned out pretty good…

First up was The Constant Gardener, which is an engaging film about a couple who get involved with exposing a medical company exploiting Third World citizens to test drugs. Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Wiesz are the marrieds caught up in this plot but it’s very much an ensemble piece, which even Bill Nighy camping it up as a high-profile politician can’t spoil. Brain food in movie form.

Next up was a trip to Soho Theatre (probably the most ambitious theatre in London in my humble opinion) to see a play by the ATC (Actors Touring Company) entitled A Brief History Of Helen Of Troy.

This was by an American writer called Mark Schultz and it was a rites-of-passage drama about a teenage girl coming to terms with the death of her mother, the grief of her father and her own changing world. Tightly written with razor sharp dialogue and not overly sentimental, it was the sort of play I imagine most writers would quite like to write (if they were honest). The ATC cast were also right on the money too.

Last up was a trip to see the ballet Edward Scissorhands at Sadlers Wells. Now ballet like opera hits all my inverted snobbery buttons as it's heavily subsidised and I always feel the money could be better spent on more deserving causes in the arts, but the Matthew Bourne production was stunning and won my prejudices over.

To be fair it was onto a winner from the start as I adore the Tim Burton movie and I love the gothic fairy-tale elements of the story but I wasn’t prepared for the sheer beauty and heart of it. It’s perfect first date material and I am toying with divorcing the missus just so I can start dating her again and take her to see it all over again.

But then I’m a new man – or maybe I’m just becoming a bit of an arts ponce…

Brought To Book…

I’m currently reading a scary book called Web Of Deceit by a journalist called Mark Curtis. It essentially charts the role of the UK government as the point man for US barbarity all over the globe. It’s the sort of book every voter in the UK should read to counter-act the endless lies and spin-doctoring that has become the main legacy of the Blair government.

Ahh Blair… I remember sitting knackered in a pub in 1997 after spending an enjoyable night watching the Tories get booted out of office and hoping it would get better. There was such optimism… But how wrong we were…

‘Education, education, education’ soon became an empty slogan and Blair’s major concern soon seemed to be making chums with big business after big business rather than helping out all the poor buggers who put their faith in him.

But after two terms of disillusionment he soon found a way to top all of that – namely sending British soldiers to war to fight for US business concerns in Iraq.

What a first-class coward. Bottling out of his election promises when he had a huge mandate for change, bottling out of his supposed socialist principles and finally bottling out of his duty to only commit British soldiers to conflicts where Britain was under threat.

Anyway, Mark Curtis’ book charts this far better than I ever could and it’s definitely worth a punt. Probably won't be popular reading at No.10 though...

Giving Good Head…

There was a wonderful headline in The Guardian this week. Sunderland were apparently involved in a violent game of football at the Stadium of Light and the story was titled Malice In Sunderland.

This newcomer has now entered my list of top headlines but it has yet to beat the Mirror headline during the BSE crisis. A spread in that newspaper featured a massive picture of piles of burnt cow carcasses and the accompanying banner headline read Apocalypse Cow!

Sadly, both of these made me laugh more heartily than the new series of Little Britain. This started last Thursday and amid the usual characters was the addition of a freaky bachelor and his ugly Thai bride, plus an oh-so-polite woman who urinates everywhere while conducting everyday business such as chatting in supermarkets.

While there were a few funny moments in the opening episode, it did have a feeling of going over old ground. But like the other 9.5million people who tuned in to watch it, I’ll probably stay with it to see if it improves. It does make you respect Ricky Gervais more for not mining the seam of The Office to death with another series, though…

I may also give the new BBC sketch show Man Stroke Woman another go too. This is the new series from Ash Atalla, the producer of The Office. It’s pretty formulaic stuff but it had its moments, namely a scene with Daisy Haggard of Green Wing fame playing a woman who can’t play pool despite her boyfriend’s most encouraging efforts.

Most of the cast may currently be second-string comedy actors (that fat bloke from Sean Of The Dead, that bloke who was sometimes in Nathan Barley, a kooky Canadian bird, etc) but so were most of The Fast Show until that series really took hold.

This could be a slow burner. It could also be shit. The jury’s still out...

Reasons To Be Cheerful…

The problem with success, even modest degrees of success, is that you can take it for granted. It’s what I refer to as Leslie Grantham Syndrome.

One day you can be happy with the world and your part in it and the fact you’re back in the limelight with a few quid on the hip. But next thing you start to want a little more excitement as you think you’re on a roll. So you dress up as Captain Hook and start masturbating in front of a webcam– only to have your fun and games plastered all over a tabloid newspaper.

This, of course, has never happened to me (it was a Batman costume for a start) as I tend to value far too many people and interests in my life. But I had started to treat one of the great loves of my life, namely playing pool, as a mistress that I visited when I got a bit bored. So not surprisingly she started treating me like an unappreciative lover and rewarded her favours on people who treated her with far more respect.

Realising that this relationship was going to shit I started courting her again by putting serious time in on the practise table in an attempt to recapture that first flush of love and it’s currently working as I’m enjoying playing again and am now no longer playing like an idiot. Well not a total one at least…

I was reminded why I actually played the game again on Sunday when the county team I represent won its regional championship to go forward to the national finals next April.

The team needed to win by a big score and put in a huge performance to snatch the title away from the defending champions. There were several points in the afternoon where the match could have swung either way but the opposition missed a few shots and we just didn’t let them back in.

So with my enthusiasm totally restored it was a moment of serendipity when today I got a call to say that a new cue I had ordered some time ago was now ready for collection.

Even the writing is back on an even keel at present with my sitcom about a postman-turned-pornographer sent out to Channel 4, a few ideas in with the BBC and a stage play in with a new theatre company.

I am not, of course, going to be excited about all of this or take any of it for granted. But that’s only because I look shit dressed as Captain Hook...

Second Time Around…

Woody Allen once said that if reincarnation was real he wanted to come back as legendary Hollywood lothario Warren Beatty’s fingertips and, while I can see the plus points of this argument, there were always other contenders for me.

There was the pre-cancer Alex Higgins (breath-taking talent and real beauty while in his twenties), the pre-Aids John Holmes (lots of women and a cock THAT big – and paid to shag. Brilliant!) and Ross Kemp (but only so I could put on a tutu, pay somebody to tie me up and ram oranges in my mouth and up my arse then help me top myself and then give the pictures to every newspaper in town).

The newest contenders for this list, though, are Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, the writers behind Peep Show, and I would quite happily come back as both or either of them as they have created the funniest and most consistent comedy on TV at present.

The third series started on Friday and it remains a work of utter joy – from Jeremy trying to finish with his girlfriend only to end up having a threesome with her and a woman with a gammy foot, to mugging victim Mark explaining to his now girlfriend Sophie why carrying a large knife is actually a time-saving device and not a concealed weapon.

Peep Show inhabits the world of grating social faux pax and devastating social and personal embarrassment and its past triumphs are plenty. My favourite is probably the episode where Mark befriended a colleague at work and found himself going on a weekend dressed as a member of the Third Reich but there are countless others too.

I’m pleased to report that series three hit the ground running and it looks like there’s been no let-up in the quality of the scripts – or the acute pain experienced by its two central protagonists. Cue anguished internal monologue from Jeremy after he’s been shagged by his girlfriend wearing a strap-on ‘I suppose these are the indignities we accept to avoid being lonely…’

It’s worth spending Friday night at home for. And that’s pretty bloody good indeed…

Coffin Fit!

Our household is currently in a state of transition. Rooms are being changed, our decorator is in doing his thing and my pool room will soon be no more.

The eventual battleplan is for me and the missus to move back into the large bedroom (now the pool room), then we'll have a proper guest room (our current bedroom) and this obviously means goodbye pool table. Bizarrely it is a move that has my blessing as it means I'll have to go out to practice and play against proper opposition rather than just stay in and play with myself (insert rude joke here).

So it's all go on the domestic front and I've very much entered into the spirit of this (apart from having a major strop when I had to also sacrifice my office for three months for an unexpected houseguest) and the campaign of refreshed domesticity has seen me set out to finally finish clearing the two loft spaces in the house.

Our house was originally owned by a man who can only be described as a major lunatic headcase and it was only when he left that the missus discovered he'd filled the two loft spaces with all manner of utter shite.

So clearing them became my job and from one loft I have so far cleared out the following:
One car bumper
Three car seats
Various lengths of rotting wood
Coving
Copper piping
The wing of a Morris Minor
A car engine
A toilet bowl
A car's brake system
A broken bed
A suitcase with newspapers and dental magazines

So I didn't think anything else in the other loft space could surprise me when I climbed up to rescue a spare bed for our new house guest. But the sight of a coffin as my light flashed over the roof rafters made me realise how wrong I'd been...

On closer inspection, of course, it turned out not to be a real coffin but some MDF version of one that had been done for a school play of some description. But there was a split second where the missus saying 'I wouldn't be surprised to find a dead body up there...' came back to haunt me.

At one point I was genuinely contemplating climbing back down the ladder to grab my Bible and some garlic from the kitchen. Sadly we only had garlic paste and I wasn't sure that would have worked...

But, thankfully, there is no dead body. But then again I haven't cleared all the lofts out yet...

Ross Camp!

Not that I'm one to gloat but yesterday The Mirror reported that:

'EastEnders hardman Ross Kemp, who plays leather-jacketed Grant Mitchell, ended with a cut lip after being belted by his wife, Sun editor Rebekah Wade. He called police, who arrested Wade for alleged assault, and was later sent home from filming because he was so "distressed".'

So the telly thug is an utter girl and his wife's about to face the type of press witch hunt that she dished out to all and sundry while on The News Of The World and still does as editor of The Sun. You reap what you sow.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, etc...

The Empire Strikes Back!

A few things have annoyed me about the pre-amble puff for the BBC/HBO epic series Rome which started last night. So much so that I thought I may have to install my own vomitorium next to the telly when it began.

The first offenders have been the press/magazine industry who all seem to have thought it would be a jolly hoot to headline any feature on the series as No Place Like Rome. Geddit? Send for a medic to sew up my splitting sides… This proves one of my long-held theories that most journalists are utterly unimaginative and very lazy – or maybe just one dullard writes headlines for every paper and magazine on the planet. Could happen if Mr Murdoch gets his way…

It also shows how utterly they’ve missed the point of the show. The whole raison d’etre of Rome is that it’s a sex-obsessed culture of power and politics keen on foreign invasion which masks a world of squalor and sleaze – thus proving that there are several places like Rome (UK, US, etc) and how relevant the series supposedly is today.

The Beeb’s adverts for the show have also wound me up…

When the Beeb does something good it plugs it to death. Remember the clever ads for House Of Cards with Francis Urquhart talking direct to camera or the EastEnders ads surrounding the Steve Owen and Matthew Rose murder of Saskia Duncan? And they had a right to be smug because everybody was talking about it… But sometimes Auntie is so bloody smug showing off her latest baubles that you feel like mugging the old cow down a dark alley to bring her back to earth. And Auntie loves Rome and is shoving it under the nose of every viewer at every possible opportunity…

So how good is it? Well the answer is pretty good actually.

Kevin McKidd (Private Cooper in Dog Soldiers) plays a strait-laced soldier named Lucius, Kenneth Cranham looks every inch a sussed Roman politician in Pompey and James Purefoy looks to be having a hoot as the brash Mark Antony. The sets are stunning, the extras budget must have been huge and the script seems genuinely engaging. I even spotted Jez Quigley (actor Lee Boardman) from Corrie getting his leg over at one point as a horse salesman. It’s that bizarre but it also that good.

Probably...

Hard Sell!

I was introduced to pornography at the age of nine by an older cousin who’d located a secret stash of magazines in the garden shed of a relative. ‘Let’s go look at some nudey magazines,’ he’d suggested, reassuring me that if I kept guard I’d also be able to have a look.

Sadly I misheard and thought he’d said ‘Noddy’ magazines so I was somewhat confused as to (a) why he’d want to look at this sort of kids’ stuff and (b) why he thought I’d be in the slightest bit interested. I was nine after all and Enid Blyton was old hat!

So I was quite stunned when I eventually saw what he was leafing through – and there wasn’t a picture of Big Ears or PC Plod in sight!

Now, though by no means an expert, I am more au fait with the world of ‘adult entertainment’ having lovingly crafted a bleak sitcom about a postman-turned-porn-star called Chunky Shaft (the Prince Regent of Adult Entertainment in the UK and owner of the Chunky’s Clean Sheets laundry chain).

I did, however, see something funnier than my mishearing story or even Chunky last week when I went to the Hustler sex shop in Brewer Street in London to make a purchase. I’d long admired the Hustler t-shirt line and decided it would be fun to own one as I am also a keen pool player so it would provide me with a clothing item possessed with double meaning. Brilliant!

So after choosing my t-shirt (Hustler: hardcore since 74) I went to pay and noticed the display of Hustler covers on the wall behind the till and one boasted a cover headline of ‘Good news for gonorrhea sufferers!’ Genius!

I only hope that in my life I will be able to write something that is brilliant as that…

Right To Reply

I’m getting pretty hacked off with halfwit advertisers adding comments on my blog about visiting their websites where they’ll sort out my penile/erection/debt problems.

But this, of course, is nothing new. I once had a similar problem at work where I used to get constant emails offering me cut-price Jacuzzis and doses of herbal Viagra.

I objected to the Jacuzzi because I thought it implied I was something of a soap-dodger but I appreciated the herbal element of the Viagra offer as it showed the person concerned had done some market research and realised I was probably a man of hippy-enough sensibilities to go down that route should I ever feel the need.

I was somewhat put off Viagra, however, when I went to a weekend pool tournament with a few of my friends and, in preparation for their usual night of pulling at the local nightclub, they dropped a few tablets of the stiffy drug. Sadly they got the dosage wrong and had to play pool at quite a formal event with whacking erections the following morning. Very funny…

Anyway I am now inviting readers of this blog to openly abuse anyone who posts adverts in the comments section. I’ve added a few replies of my own to get people started so please feel free to fire away! Nothing libelous though!

Return Of The Living Dead!

EastEnders used to be a place where even half-decent actors could make their reputations then move on to other things. Michelle Collins (Sinful Cindy), Nick Berry (Wicked Wicksy), David French (Even More Wicked Wicksy), Tamzin Outhwaite (Man-Hungry Mel), Martin Kemp (Slick Steve Owen) and Paul Nicholls (Nutty Joe) have all left the Square and done at least some decent stuff since leaving Walford.

But that trend is in danger of becoming reversed and it’s now a place where actors go to die. Leslie Grantham started the ball rolling when he returned as Dirty Den and his one-off-the-wrist shenanigans with a webcam virtually ended his career.

And I reckon it’s a plague waiting to happen. Consequently I fear for the pretty good and pretty saucy Tracy-Ann Oberman, soon departing as Chrissie, and the ever-beautiful David Essex, who is on his way to Walford next year. And the fact that Ray Brooks has decided to rip up the legacy of Big Deal and Mr Benn and be remembered as Pauline Fowler’s sex bitch reduces me to tears (although Fowler the Growler in a basque and suspenders bossing somebody around in a gimp mask is not without its merits).

Bizarrely, though, the actor who has probably done best of all post-Enders is Ross Kemp, who made his week-long return to the Square as Grant Mitchell last night and who will be back for a longer stint at the start of next year.

Kemp is an actor of breath-takingly limited ability and his dramatic range stretches from shouting and moving quickly, to shouting slightly less loudly and moving slightly less quickly, to whispering quietly and hardly moving at all... And that’s it.

As Grant Mitchell his previous tenure in the Square saw him walk around as if someone has stuck a pole up his arse that went right to the top of his skull and glued his butt cheeks together so that any form of complex body articulation was too problematic. Consequently on-screen he was a sort of supermarionation thug, whose best attempts at looking menacing were counter-acted by the fact that he minced along like a lifeguard from a gay Baywatch.

EastEnders is utter rubbish at the moment and, like a professional footballer who now owns a bar, the only thing it has to look forward to are memories of its glorious past. So not only have viewers had to put up with Dirty Den coming and going and Barbara Windsor tottering around the Square squawking variations of ‘I’m still a Mitchell!’ every five minutes but now the show has dragged back Ross Kemp as Grant Mitchell and Steve McFadden as Phil Mitchell.

McFadden is actually not a bad actor but Kemp is dreadful and all he had to do last night was get out of a car and say ‘Hello mum!’ He did and you already know it’s going to be spectacularly bad...

If the BBC had any shame it would write to every licence payer and apologise for pissing money away on this cock-rot. Even ITV would hang its head in shame…

Killing Time…

I often contemplate murder and it’s been a pretty annoying sort of week so the thought of releasing tension by butchering a few people is high on the agenda at present. But fear not! I obviously won’t just kill any Tom, Dick or Harry. No…

My A List would comprise obvious candidates like Robert Mugabe (brutal dictator), Margaret Thatcher (brutal dictator), George Bush (dangerous and ignorant idiot) and Ross Kemp (no-talent idiot who could be a win-double as I may also get his hate-mongering Sun editor wife too).

But once we’re through this list any other potential victims would have to undergo a thorough interview process and be carefully selected. And current candidates include:

Phil Collins
(plus points for Genesis but open noose for Another Day In Paradise)

Ben Elton
(plus points for The Young Ones but welcoming electric chair for novels and musicals)

Chris de Burgh
(plus points for a few good songs but major minus points for banging his nanny and penning and releasing Lady in Red)

Ross Kemp
(just because we may not kill him the first time)

And any half-witted businessman with a website who posts comments in my blog page to the effect of ‘Gee you have a great website here. But if you’re worried about impotence/penile growth/loans (delete as appropriate) click on my site to solve your problems.

You have been warned…

Hymn And Her...

The missus refused to go into the Christian book shop with me on Saturday. I think part of her probably feared she would be struck down by lightning or a bolt of thunder would smite her from above as she crossed the threshold, so she went to some chick clothes shop and I ventured in on my own…

The missus had expressed concern earlier in the week when I mentioned that I’d been looking at Christian websites and I think she’d have been a little happier if I used the internet for good old fashioned pornography like everybody else. But I explained it was for a new play I was writing about a disgraced evangelist and an atheist girl who has the power to heal so I needed to read up on stuff.

The soundtrack from The Omen started on my internal soundtrack as soon as I entered the place and it was a bit of an education. There were Catholic Bibles, Good News Bibles and even a Bible in cockney. There were books by Anglicans, Protestants, Catholics, Pentecostals… Religion is a confusing thing and this is only the Christian bit of it!

Anyway I got in and out in one piece and I purchased a New Testament (sadly not in cockney as I was looking forward to reading the parable about the loaves and the jellied eels) which I intend to start reading very shortly.

Working on a new play is always very exciting as a blank page is just so pregnant with possibilities. It’s even more exciting because I got positive responses from four theatres I really like to a play I sent out at the end of last year and I have another play nearly ready to send out and this one about to start. It’s good to be writing again.

Money Talks!

I very nearly didn’t become the aspiring playwright and disillusioned and cynical journalist and all-round word butcher that I am today. No sir-ree!

At one point in my life I was planning to be an accountant and after successfully negotiating my ‘O’ Level Accounts with a minimum of instruction I even had a job interview at a local firm of book-keepers. Sadly they rejected me in favour of someone who I later found out had a huge gambling addiction, which seemed to me at the time not a very good trait for somebody who needed to be good with money. So I concluded the only reason he got the job over me was that he had better hair and a better suit.

He was quite smug about this at the time but he got run over by a bus three years ago and I imagine that somewhat ruined his plush threads and also wiped the smile from his gloating face. It does however mean there’s something of an opening in the firm so I could try again… But why retread old ground? Unless the pay’s better…

I mention this because even before my potential life in debit and credit ledgers I understood a pretty basic rule of money and that was this: Don’t spend more than you have (or more than you can pay back!) because that way you end up in really serious debt. And it’s such a good lesson that Spendaholics got a second series out of it on BBC 3.

Sadly hairdresser Colin, the subject of last night’s show, had not only ignored this basic rule but pissed all over the stone tablet it was written on, smeared it with his own excrement, doused it in petrol, set it on fire and lobbed it through the window of Sensible Accounting Is Us.

Spendaholics is a great programme. It’s MVFS (Makes Viewers Feel Superior) TV and its basic premise is that the producers find somebody who treats money like confetti and films them blowing vast amounts of cash – then its presenters Jay Hunt and Benjamin Fry ride to the rescue to help them stave off the bailiffs and debtors prison.

Colin was last night’s subject and he was a hairdresser and he was gay and he was bullied as a child and our experts concluded that his flagrant use of money was an attempt to bolster his damaged sense of self-worth… That may well be the case but even to my now unfocused financial eye any idiot who routinely spends £45 on a pair of boxer shorts, doesn’t bother opening bills when they arrive and blows other vast amounts of moollah on luxury breaks and wild weekends is simply asking for trouble.

I like Spendaholics. It’s a smart BBC 3 show and the first series was pretty watchable but last night there were signs it’s starting to gimmick up. Colin couldn’t face his bills so our experts locked him in a cage with his bills stuck to the wall to make him face his bills (geddit?) and to show him where he could end up if he carried on his current road to fiscal suicide.

This is a shame because the show and its subjects are usually pretty engaging and the series doesn’t need it. You’d also have thought that a show that preaches frugality would itself be keen to keep its production budget to a minimum. But that’s a small criticism really. It all seemed to work for Colin as last night he went on a journey and managed to deal with his demons and also cut down on his ludicrous spending. So we should all feel loads better as there was a happy conclusion.

Well, for everyone but his underwear shop which may be closing down next week. Fortunately Colin will know just the people to help out if they run into financial trouble…

And The Winner Is...

A personality vacuum resembling a plank of wood in an expensive suit won series two of The Apprentice last night. The plank called Kelly beat a Barbie doll lookalike named Jennifer after both had completed an event organising task and the victorious former military man celebrated with a display of whooping that had all the grace of a cage-bound baboon lobbing its own shit at one of its neighbours.

But the real highlight of the finale of The Apprentice last night was the way the usual intimate boardroom end-of-show format turned into an episode of The Jerry Springer Show as screens were pulled back and the boardroom suddenly appeared on the stage of a huge theatre filled with several hundred people.

The astoundingly haired Donald Trump sat in the middle of a big desk on this stage and he was flanked by his colleague George, one of the few genuinely entertaining and smart men on the programme, and his colleague Carolyn, the no-nonsense ice queen who’s become a prominent feature of some of my darkest sexual fantasies. Even better she’d had her hair done specially in sort of flicked bouffant affair. She obviously has her eyes on the Trump role come the next series.

The unsuccessful candidates who’d previously been fired came out and said their pieces about the two remaining wannabe squillionaires and took seats on stage like in This Is Your Life, then advice from various business dignitaries (all white and all male) in the audience was sought. We then had a few audience soundbites and some footage from more colleagues (Yawn!) then Don invited the two remaining candidates out for a grilling.

Jennifer was razor-sharp and intelligent throughout this but the man who could ‘give and follow orders’ won the day. And there’s an important lesson to be learnt here... the dim American white man always wins. But with a Texan Forrest Gump as US President I guess that comes as no surprise.

God bless America!

American Apartheid?

When series two of The Apprentice first started I was convinced it would be a case of the WASPs (white anglo-saxon protestants) who would inherit the earth. Or at least the large part of it that came from working for Donald Trump.

And so it came to pass as Kevin, an impressively educated black guy who was by far the smartest and the most centred would-be business guru of those who made it through to the TV stages, got the bullet last night, leaving two blonde Barbie doll lookalikes and former military man Kelly as the final three.

I’m not saying that Donald Trump is a racist (libel lawyers take note) because nobody with that hair could EVER realistically criticise anyone else on the grounds of appearance. And he is particularly fond of helping Eastern Europeans, especially if they’re young, female models with long legs all the way up to their arses. But it was interesting that a white man and four of his white business chums all picked two pretty white women and a half-witted white guy with a military background over someone who had consistently proven himself on task after task over the series.

After the eviction of Kevin one of the dim blondes went and now my only interest in the series is seeing if Trump realises that his business empire is named after a noun that in England means foul-smelling gas escaping from the bottom.

I am also hoping that they reshow the section of Donald Trump carrying an Olympic torch and jogging along the street as part of the New York bid that featured on last night’s show. ‘To be a winner you have to think like a winner!’ boasted the amusingly coiffured one’s voice-over while he jogged along, a vision in shell suit and mad hair.

News flash on this one Donald. You bloody well lost! From little victories...

The Sound Of Music...

Generally I hate musicals. Just the opening strains of most trite West End vehicles can give me a sudden urge to find and skull-fuck the creative teams responsible. And don’t even get me started on any musical penned by Ben Elton... The best case scenario here is that he’s a snuff movie waiting to happen.

Sometimes, though, an odd musical will get under the wire. Cabaret remains fabulous because of its mix of political comment and sleazy decadence and West Wide Story is very classy and makes me halt all my critical faculties. But the rest of them. No thanks...

So seeing two musicals in just over a week to celebrate the birthday of the missus could have been a bit of a test but it was not a wholly horrible experience.

Sadly Guys And Dolls was pretty rubbish. It’s currently playing in the Piccadilly Theatre after a transfer from the Donmar Warehouse. It stars Ewan McGregor and he’s sort of OK in very little charisma sort of way. The two lead girls (Jane Krakowski and Jenna Russell) are excellent and a few of the musical numbers (Luck Be A Lady Tonight and Rockin’ The Boat) are pretty good but that’s sort of it.

You can pretty much see how a show which had been ripped out of an intimate stage at the Donmar and probably worked really well there just hadn’t been significantly changed enough when it was slung into a huge aircraft hangar of a West End theatre. It just didn’t fill the space. It was a bit pedestrian pace-wise, too, and not the most energetic show I’ve ever seen. It was also bloody expensive and I frankly expect a bit more for my cash. But I guess hiring Jedis doesn't come cheap.

The Big Life, however, was utterly fabulous. This new ska musical was real high energy and featured a cast who actually seemed really pleased to be there. The show is a love story about four couples from the first wave of West Indian immigrants who came over on the Windrush and it happily mixes slapstick, rollicking musical numbers and a bit of social commentary. This was transfered from the Theatre Royal Stratford and it’s a great example of a community show that was created for the area’s largely black population and has a life outside its original genesis.

If Guys And Dolls had half of the energy of The Big Life then it may well have been a very different experience. Sadly it didn’t and it was pretty poor because of it.

Stratford East 1 Big Name West End Tourist Tat 0...

Swear On It!

Apparently I have a foul mouth. All I have to do is open my lips to say something simple like ‘Good Morning!’ and a string of expletives that would shame a gin-sodden dockside whore spews forth.

I am currently putting this down to working long hours on a special project but maybe I just have a foul mouth – or even some mild form of Tourette’s. Maybe things will get so bad that I’ll have to have my mouth sewn shut by surgeons (or sturgeons even) and have to relate to people through the medium of mime. After all I’ve recently discovered I quite like Marilyn Manson and, as all those gun-toting and God-loving Americans tell us, it’s only a short step from Mechanical Animals to self-mutilation and behaving like a social deviant!

Fortunately I have a garden and, as I was sans boy and sans wife, I spent the best part of Saturday sorting this out. Down came all the starting-to-go tomato and French bean plants and in went the bulbs for next year. I also discovered a great smelling herb called lemon verbena at the local garden centre. It was good Tourette’s therapy (although I was tempted to spell out the word ‘cock’ in daffodils at one point) and coupled with an hour kicking and hitting my punchbag I felt very chilled.

I feared a run of expletives would return when myself and the missus sat down to watch the latest ITV drama on Saturday night, though. This was called Afterlife and starred Lesley Sharp as a reluctant spiritualist who sees and chats to dead folk, with Andrew Lincoln as the cynical college professor who’s out to investigate and expose her.

Sharp is always good value and her acting credits include From Hell, Vera Drake and Clocking Off. Andrew Lincoln, though, did a decent job as the cynical bloke in Teachers and was quite good in the stage play Blue/Orange at the National but I’ve yet to be totally convinced by him. And as for the whole genre of ITV drama... Cue profanity attack!

Rather amazingly, though, this mish-mash of talents produced something that was eminently watchable and I may even make a point of catching part two of the six-episode run next Saturday.

An ITV drama that’s actually pretty good. Now that is bastarding amazing!

In Da Club!

ITV recently screened a programme counting down it’s top 50 TV shows to celebrate 50 years of broadcasting and the good people who voted for this quite rightly put Coronation Street, 45 this year and still going strong, at the top of the pile. Sadly they also put Ant And Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway at number two and Footballers’ Wives at number five. This means that two sometimes funny Geordies and a soul-less glam-fest masquerading as drama are considered ‘better’ than such ground-breaking shows as World In Action, Rising Damp, First Tuesday, Whicker’s World and The Sweeney. God help us...

But even the dullards who decided to rate schlock over quality on ITV would find Five’s latest offering, Trust Me – I’m A Holiday Rep, too much to bear.

The basic premise of Trust Me – I’m A Holiday Rep is that six celebs get jobs as holiday reps in Cypriot party capital Ayia Napa. Then they go about their jobs as they struggle to toe the holiday company line and entertain the punters – with hilarious results!

Sadly Quentin Tarantino (‘Drink that sambuca or I’ll pop a cap in your ass!’) and Michael Jackson (who would have been great running the kids’ club) were unavailable so Five plumped for another six members of the great and good to take part. And what a six...

Step forward glamour model and breast exhibitionist Jodie Marsh, former New Kids On The Block singer Jordan Knight, Make Me A Supermodel reality show ‘star’ Jasmine Lennard, comedian Syd Little, broadcaster Nina Myskow and Coronation Street actor (well, for about six months three years ago) Scott Wright. And if that wasn’t enough quality the presenting duo is Nancy Sorrell (Mrs Vic Reeves) and Toby Anstis (the memorable host of TV Scrabble).

Words nearly fail me here and nothing you imagine can prepare you for the utter banality of this show. Its undoubted star is Jasmine Lennard, who bizarrely ‘shot to fame’ on another reality show about trying to find a supermodel. She’s worth a look if only to witness a woman whose sense-of-humour bypass operation was so successful that it also removed any sense of irony too. She’s a micro-celeb who IS stupid enough to think that she’s a real TV player and she can’t understand why nobody thinks she’s as important as she clearly does.

With this sort of celebrity competition cheery Syd Little is the show’s only saving grace – and those are words I never thought would pass my lips. Ever... It’s so bad it even makes an ITV drama starring Ross Kemp a preferable choice for an hour’s viewing!

Don’t say you weren’t warned...

Out Of The Closet...

Myself and the boy went comic shopping on Saturday and came home to find the missus sorting out her wardrobes (note the plural). Tops, trousers, T-shirts and shoes filled three recycling bags and she’d even systematically sorted out her cupboards with those hanging down linen shelve things.

I considered this a moral victory because one of my major influences in our home has been my need for organisation and cleanliness. The boy affectionately refers to this as my obsessive compulsive disorder (unless I’m buying him comics when he says it’s an important influence on the smooth running of the household) but he has unwittingly followed my lead and keeps his comics and DVDs in order. Of course it’s not the alphabetical system I use for such things but I do smile and nod approvingly when I see him label magazine boxes and ensure his DVDs are neatly stacked. For some parents it’s sport but I feel great pride when I see a nicely labelled filing system and possessions in a familiar and easy-to-understand order.

The wife, of course, had previously resisted my civilising influence and continued to ignore basic suggestions to aid domestic organisation. Her bag tree (a hat stand brimming with bags of every shape and colour) remains an utter shambles and the less said about her CD collection before I got my hands on it the better!

So I gave myself a slap on the back when I arrived home to her newly organised wardrobes and the full recycling bags. Then the following day she went out and started buying more clothes. She’s got room in her wardrobes now you see...

A Reader Writes...

Dear sir

I am just writing to express my admiration for the fine example set by the England Cricket Team after their recent triumph in the Ashes.

For more years than I care to remember our cricket chaps have played second fiddle (and indeed even third trombone) to pots and pans countries such as Australia.

But now our brave boys have shown that they too can get as shit-faced and behave as disgracefully as both the chaps from Down Under (who coming from criminal stock have a head start in the bad behaviour stakes) and even the intellectually challenged gentlemen of the Association Football game.

Good on them I say! Rule Britannia! Britannia rules the bar!

Colonel Dwight Michelwight
The Pall Mall Club
London

What’s Up Doc?

I went to see the doctor to have my injured arm double-checked today. After waiting for what seemed like an eternity I finally got in and saw it was a locum doctor rather than my usual thorough-as-a-bloodhound-on-a-scent medic. The meeting went like this.

Doctor: What seems to be the problem?
Me: As my notes show I seriously injured my arm a few weeks ago and it’s still quite swollen and pretty painful so I just wanted to know if it’s still OK.
Doctor: (The doctor prods around for five seconds) It’s fine. Goodbye.

NHS! Best health service in the world... Unless my arm suddenly falls off and I go on to discover the so-called locum doctor was actually the cleaner who found a white coat and fancied living out some medical fantasy. Thank god I didn’t have a prostrate problem...

House Of Pain...

This week I have been off work following an elbow injury at hapkido and typing left-handed is a real pain in the arse. Hence the up-until-now non-updated blog as left-handed keyboard work is a very, very, very slow process.

Normally any time off work would be a cause of major celebration and banners and bunting would be dripping from the house and filled champagne flutes and croissants made from unicorn tears would be given to guests. But with no right hand any major writing, playing pool and martial arts classes in my unexpected free time are total non-starters so it’s been radio, TV and DVDs to while away my recovery time. And this has been a real mixed bag…

On the plus side BBC radio is consistently good. The Bearded Ladies’ sketch show on Radio 4 is a quite smart affair and The Flight Of The Conchords, a sitcom on Radio 2 about a New Zealand folk outfit, is both kooky and funny. New sitcom Weak At The Top on Radio 4 is pretty funny too. On the DVD front I have also indulged myself with all three and a bit hours of Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai. Bliss…

But this attempt at filling my healing time with quality entertainment has also had its bleaker and less worthy moments…

Car Booty at dinner-time on BBC 1 remains relatively painless and is clearly a cheap schedule filler. The show involves members of the public trying to earn a few quid from flogging their unwanted tat on the premise of needing to raise cash for some noble cause or other – visiting long-lost relatives overseas, taking a carer out to a health spa, spending a weekend in a Thai brothel snorting cocaine… OK. I made the last one up but if you can ignore the inanely scripted banter such as ‘Can I have a rummage around in your downstairs? F’nar, f’nar…’ the show is relatively painless and an improvement on the Test Card. If only just…

But some shows are not so innocuous and the lowlight of my TV week remains The Jerry Springer Show on ITV. I thought Springer had gone from our schedules but this was the UK version of his US show and it was brilliant. Well I say brilliant but excruciatingly desperate would probably be nearer the mark and I was quite close to taking my entire week’s prescription of pain-killers when the remote control went missing half-way through.

The episode I saw was subtitled ‘Who’s lying? My husband or his pregnant mistress?’ and it featured a former married couple from Dorset named Melvin and Shirley and the with-child other woman called Catherine. Was Melvin a love rat? Would Shirley leave him? Was Catherine’s child his?

These questions could have been answered in two minutes but that wouldn’t make it very interesting telly so we had a procession of rows, name-calling, stopped-in-the-nick-of-time fights, people walking off stage… Imagine a colony of squabbling penguins squawking at each other in West Country accents at 4am in the morning when you’ve just got in from a heavy night out and you need sleep. This was worse and it was just relentlessly painful.

As was series two of Nighty Night which returned to the ever-excellent BBC 3 with Julia Davis as West Country beautician-cum-serial-killer Jill. It’s bleak stuff and the show continues to take black comedy into previously unchartered waters. The opening episode had an OAP having her pubic hair shaved, attempted bestiality and oral sex with a glass partition in-between. There was a murder too. It may sound sick but it was pretty funny. Relentlessly so in fact. Think Last Of The Summer Wine scripted by the Marquis De Sade and you're there.

If only Melvin and Shirley and Catherine came with jokes too…

What’s In A Name?

I’ve recently signed up to AOL so I now have internet access in my office at home and don’t have to keep heading downstairs to use the boy’s computer whenever I want to go online. But this turned out to be a real baptism of fire when I tried to create a user name using my own name only to discover that my name and several other variations of it were already in use.

This was quite depressing because it made me realise that I am not the only version of me. I then followed this idea to its logical conclusion and did a quick Google search on my name to discover that there are not only many more versions of me but many of them are much more successful. Bastards…

To bypass this problem I then started inventing names surrounding some of my interests such as writing, pool, comics and hapkido that I thought were quite sweet. But these also failed as they were already in use so I started using ones which were less sweet…

By doing this I discovered that fellow AOL members have already signed up to the service as Adolf Hitler and several other members of the Third Reich and most serial killers including Fred and Rose West and Peter Sutcliffe.

This would not have greatly bothered me until I hit on the name that I eventually chose (Gooleboy).

This means that people would rather be known as either members of the Nazi Party or infamous murderers rather than be named after a small town in East Yorkshire. The world’s an odd place…

Fashion…

Regular readers of this blog (if such wonderful people indeed exist) will already know that the entire concept of men’s fashion is something that escapes me and has done for most of my life.

I try to keep abreast of female fashion (the ‘gypsy’ look, the shrug, the wrap-around dress, the chicken brick, etc) so I don’t feel entirely lost when the missus goes clothes shopping, but all things related to male attire remain a foreign country. In fact they remain another planet that will stay unexplored and unchartered. For ever.

This idea of male fashion as a personal no-go area was reinforced by a trip into Kensington today where I stood and stared at a pair of trousers for several minutes in a high-street shop. Passers-by thought I was a piece of performance art until the missus arrived to move me along.

The trousers were actually a normal enough pair of jeans but they had what I can only describe as tan leather chaps sewn into the inner-thigh area, prompting me to assume that the rodeo look is obviously the next big thing.

So if that does happen you read it here first. And I obviously want a prize of some description…

Money, Money, Money…

Want money? And I don’t mean a few quid here and there. I am talking major bucks. The sort of dignity-stripping amount of money that would make a basque-clad Donald Trump bugger livestock to death in front of an arena of snapping paparazzi. Yes. That much…

Then look no further because I am now seeking fellow investors for a sure-fire money-making venture. The plan is to launch a new TV channel called TNT (Thick Northerner Television) and populate the screen with programmes full of idiotic northerners who are either grotesquely fat, laughably unfashionable, living in pigsty-style homes or badly in debt. Then we simply have a bunch of lifestyle gurus (obviously non-northern but southern and Celtic is OK) come in and sort them out.

The less media-savvy among you may think this is a non-starter but take a look through the TV schedules and you’ll see it’s already happening in shows like How Clean Is Your House, You Are What You Eat and 10 Years Younger. So the great beauty of TNT is that it’s cashing in on something that’s already with us so there’s no development money needed.

All myself and the other shareholders do is make TV shows like these and at the same time create a talent agency and sign up all the stupid, fat, untidy, unfashionable and lazy northerners everywhere and, bingo, TNT suddenly has a monopoly on both the shows and their subjects.

Then if the TV companies want to play ball they’ll have to submit to our demands. These will obviously include cake and cocaine besides cold, hard cash but then, and this is the real beauty of it, we’ll have a whole new raft of shows for TNT like When Northern TV Moguls Go Bad And Get Addicted To Cocaine And Cake.

It’s genius and one of the first shows on the TNT hit-list is undoubtedly Moneyspinners on BBC 1. As I’m now on holiday I am enjoying the delights of daytime TV and this, or possibly the utterly dreadful chat show Loose Women (or Out-of-work Actresses Talk Shit For 60 Minutes as the missus calls it) on ITV 1, is my highlight so far.

Moneyspinners really is in a class of its own. Today’s show featured a family from Newcastle who had financial problems as they were basically spending more money than was coming in to the household. So enter presenter Lorne Spicer who gave them astounding advice along the lines of ‘Spend less money and keep the bit you don’t spend so you have savings…’ And that was basically it – stretched over a whole painful hour…

So really, how hard can making a telly programme be? Considering Lorne Spicer’s got a TV show out of a premise this simple I reckon TNT is a sure-fire winner.

So any takers?

Holiday!

Me and the boy have had a few days together and we’ve done the usual comic-shopping and movie-going ritual and during this we both decided Batman Begins was quite cool and a distinct improvement on the shite-awful but camp-tastic Batman And Robin.

But a new family ritual has also entered the bonding fray over the past year and this involves me, the missus and the not-so-little fella going to stand-up comedy gigs, which are probably better for his general well-being than the CGI-fests me and him now enjoy.

The three of us have so far seen the brilliant Bill Bailey, the fabulous Omad Dahjili and most recently this week we saw Andy Kindler. He’s an American comedian and comedy actor and he arrived on a wave of astoundingly good previews and publicity. Sadly Soho Theatre was only half-full and his routine was very hit and miss as he dabbled with new material of varied quality. The audience generally couldn’t quite decide if the poor sod was just dying on his arse or if he wasn’t all that bothered which was a shame as some of his material was quite good. He’s obviously quite a funny man but he just wasn’t on that night…

Thankfully I’d already got my comedy quota for the day by tuning into Radio 4 to listen to The Bearded Ladies for the first time. A friend of mine is one quarter of this four-woman comedy troupe who were a big hit at the Edinburgh Festival a few years ago but this was the first time I’d actually listened to the show, now in its second series, and it was pretty good.

It’s basically a sketch show and it’s more quirky and gentle than biting and vicious humour but it’s well worth a listen if you’re kicking your heels on Tuesday at 6.30pm. I particularly liked the short sketch about the wife text messaging the drunken husband and the woman on the sinking boat refusing the lifejacket on the grounds that it wasn’t fashionable.

Alan Partridge, Goodness Gracious Me, The League Of Gentlemen, Dead Ringers and the wonderful Mighty Boosh all started off in similar slots on Radio 4 so see it as a chance to grab an earful of something that could well be on your telly screens quite soon.

One bit of advice, though… Do be careful what you search for if you look up The Bearded Ladies on the internet. I typed in beardedladies.com instead of their actual address of beardedladies.co.uk and it definitely was not my friend in the pictures…

Baby Blues...

I am a little stunned after this weekend. In fact scrub that. I am downright bloody annoyed. There I was clutching my copy of The Independent On Saturday as me and the missus returned from our big shop at the supermarket and I opened up the page where the Prize Super Soduko was located and was my name among the winners? Was it buggery.

I fully appreciated that the Saturday Indy has a readership that is comprised of more than just me but I could not believe that more than ten of them would be as sad as me and actually complete the bloody thing and then go to the trouble of sending it in to win one of the ten prizes on offer. But there’s an important lesson to be learnt there. Never underestimate the amount of sad buggers like yourself who do these things as the world’s obviously full of ‘em!

The boy returned from three weeks at his dad’s on Sunday and he has grown yet again so he is practically the same size as me. He’s nearly 15 and he’s now 6ft. This may be a useful tactic, though, as we now have a week together while we’re both on holiday and one of the films he wants to see has an 18 rating. Dare I risk the potential embarrassment of us going to the pictures and hoodied-up him getting in and baby-faced and clean-shaven me getting thrown out? Could happen…

Me and the missus did actually venture to the cinema a few times while the not-to-little fella was away. We saw Crash last week which was a pretty good. It’s basically several inter-connected stories about race in the US and Don Cheadle is rather excellent as a cop with a wise-cracking robber brother and a crack addict mum. It’s a bit self-righteous but that’s no bad thing and its heart and intentions are certainly in the right place.

The real highlight for me, though, was Me And You And Everyone We Know. This is an uplifting indie film about a shoe salesman and an artist finding love. It’s a perfect date movie so get a date before you go and see it. Or start an affair. Or have a row with your partner and then let it melt you back into lurve... It is that funny quirky and sweet.

Which is more than can be said for the BBC’s new Saturday night flagship show He’s Having A Baby. The premise here is that the cameras follow several dads-to-be and their expectant partners. The ubiquitous Davina MacCall hosts and it sounded quite sweet and promising – but then there came Danny Wallace, a man I’ve previously liked as Dave Gorman’s speccy mate, and it all started to fall to bits...

You see Wallace’s job was to provide the dads-to-be with ‘challenges’ to make the show more entertaining. And, oh, how we laughed as some of them held babies for the first time and swore. Then one went off to learn how to be a stand-up comic for toddlers. Hilarious…

It’s quite sad that the Beeb obviously felt what could have been an interesting and fascinating show about real people and real emotions (as opposed to the manufactured rucks and rows on Big Brother and its ilk) needed gimmicking up. It didn’t but now it has expect all the babies to get mixed up at the end of the show and laugh as the parents scream when they fail to recognise their own kids and head off home with somebody else’s child.

Unless they’re 6ft it’s a mistake I won’t be making…

The Fall Guy!

Some people say that ‘What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger!’ But these people have obviously never taken a fall at a martial arts school where a lack of concentration on the part of the idiot faller (guess who?) means he ends up slamming into the mat on his shoulder. Remarkably I was relatively unscathed by this but I would change the old adage to something along the lines of ‘What doesn’t kill you can still hurt loads and make you want to swear quite a lot!’

My bruised shoulder aside my martial arts training has been pretty fabulous of late as the London school I attend has had an instructor from the main school in Chicago visiting for a week. This was great because it meant there were two instructors instead of one so everyone was under a bit more scrutiny than normal.

Our usual instructor is a woman and she’s a truly superb teacher but the guest was also a woman who was equally impressive. She even told me I was quite good at one point – then proceeded to correct faults in my stance and kicking and several other areas for the duration of the lesson. Bugger...

But one of the things I genuinely like about the martial art I do, namely hapkido, is that it relies on technique rather than brute force so correct technique is very important and that is one of several areas that both instructors are razor sharp on. I also adore the school because we rarely attract the type of macho lunatics I have encountered at other martial arts schools – and this is a major boon as a lot of the stuff we learn can be quite dangerous if applied correctly.

The final thing that was very refreshing on a personal note about our guest from the US was that she was articulate, thoughtful and considerate – and in these anti-American times it’s sometimes good to be reminded of the basic fact that George Bush and his gun-toting, world-domination-obsessed, greed-is-good, right-wing chums don’t represent everyone in the US. Thank God...

And that’s quite a timely reminder for me because, as an obsessed fan of The Apprentice US, I was in danger of losing sight of this obvious fact.

The latest outing for the remaining bunch of wannabe squillionaires on this highly watchable bit of car-crash telly saw the two teams, mainly comprised of utterly hateful American business types, have to renovate a house with a $20,000 budget to see who could add the most value to the property.

One side did a really good job and made a bundle of dosh while the side lead by Raj (a remarkably accurate name considering he acts and dresses like an anachronism from the days of English rule in India) were so hopeless that it was a major feat the house was still left standing after his hilarious attempts at ‘home improvement’. Official programme sacker Donald Trump (think Don King colliding with a truck of Brylcreem to get the full horror of the hair) eventually decided that the foppish Raj was next for the chop and booted him out. This was sad as professional gentleman and full-time buffoon Raj was always good value.

But there are still plenty more despicable people left in to enjoy loathing in the show... Misanthropy rules!

Pillow Talk...

‘That woman has big cat eyes. She looks like the bride of Wildenstein – or one of those vampires from Salem’s Lot.’
‘Honey, I’m watching the telly...’
‘But she look like a vampire. Is it a horror show about vampires?’
‘It’s a documentary about humanism.’
‘And not vampres?’
‘Please shut up...’
‘But she look like a vampire. Are you sure it’s not a programme about humanist vampires?’
‘Shut up – now...’

I’d been out all day and arrived home quite late to find the missus in bed watching the telly. My eyes – or several pints of bitter – may well have been playing tricks on me and I have since looked through the TV listings magazine to confirm it was indeed a show about humanism with not a mention of the undead in sight.

But I am offering a prize to anyone who saw this show at midnight on Sunday and can confirm that it had a woman who looked like a cat-cum-vampire in it.

Lost !

The survivors in C4’s new glossy and imported US uber-drama Lost can’t really be all that bright. They’re all wandering around a desert island desperate to find a means of contact with the outside world and they all consistently ignore the film crew chronicling their every move right under their nose. Must be post-traumatic stress disorder – or they’re just idiots...

The much-hyped Lost is basically a load of old hokum about a bunch of air crash survivors trying to cope with life on a mysterious desert island. The plot revolves around the group working out how to survive both the island and each other while the viewer is fed titbits of information about their lives pre-crash each week. In terms of giving Lost a multi-layered narrative this works OK but unless more starts happening I’ll be rooting for the giant polar bears that seem to inhabit the island eating all the survivors and curtailing the show so Channel 4 can put something more interesting on.

But bearing in mind Channel 4’s idea of interesting is the piss-poor Big Brother and several other equally woeful reality TV shows then sticking with Lost may be no bad thing.

The only thing potentially more scary than the giant polar bears or the prospect of another series of Big Brother is Donald Trump’s hair. The astoundingly coifffured one was back in The Apprentice US last night as both teams of wannabe business moguls had to present an advertising campaign designed to recruit cadets to the New York Police Department. An utter halfwit named Elizabeth was fired at the end of last night’s show after deciding potential police officers would be impressed if they were portrayed as the guardians of a police state. But have no fear as there are still of plenty of dopes to choose from and buffoons to despise.

The appeal of the show, though, is becoming more about Carolyn Kepcher for me. Carolyn is the tiny-mouthed acid queen who works alongside Trump and helps judge the contestants. She’s the sort of woman who could impersonate an iceberg and she has a stare that could petrify (as in turn to stone rather than just scare a bit) the combined might of the Green Berets and the SAS. Whenever she opens her mouth to pass judgement I can feel the temperature in our living room drop several degrees. She’s truly wonderful to behold.

If I wasn’t already married (and if I had a huge streak of sado-masochism) this could be love...

The End... Not!

The best words any would-be literary genius can write are ‘The end’. Although that is probably an exaggeration because writing the words ‘Pay self’ on a cheque for several zillion squid are also very good words to write too. But ‘The end’ comes quite close.

So it was with a real sense of satisfaction that I added my favourite two words to the finale of my latest play, Trust, yesterday evening. As soon as I’d typed these words down a little party began in my head where I was quaffing champagne (which I don’t like) and disco dancing with the missus on a Caribbean beach while Kid Creole and the Coconuts played some happening tune. In my head I was even high-fiving my stepson (and I generally consider people who do high fives only fit for chemical castration).

Sadly this image only lasted for about two minutes because I then started thinking about ways to improve the play and working out which bits needed cutting. I then realised that adding my favourite two words actually meant the job was only half-done because I’ll now spend the next four weeks redrafting it and adding bits to it and making sure the narrative makes sense and the characters are fully developed.

Then when I think it’s done I’ll give it to my two unofficial script editors (wife and wife’s writer father) to rip to bits and I’ll probably wish I hadn’t while secretly being quite glad I had because they are usually right about these things. Then I’ll do some more rewrites and send it off to my hit list of theatres and wait...

Anyway, to cut a long story short I thought I’d finished my play but I probably haven’t...

Here’s Johnny!

The boy is with his dad for three weeks so me and the missus are doing a passable impression of being young and fancy-free. This involves us not having to get up at 7.30am to ensure the not-so-little fella gets up for school and it means we don’t have to head back home at a reasonable hour post-work to ensure he doesn’t starve to death.

In fact it means we can do pretty much what we want without having to worry about the welfare of our favourite teenager. We can eat food he doesn’t like, watch telly he doesn’t like and dance around the living room without snorts of derision coming from under the hoody on the sofa. I can even crawl around the house naked pretending to be a dog bothering the cats should I wish. I don’t, of course, but I could.

Typically, of course, as soon as he’s away it turns out he’s needed as on Sunday I took the missus to see Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. As I’ve expressed in previous blog entries the boy is very useful when there’s a kids’ picture me and the missus both fancy seeing as we can persuade (bribe) him to go see it and we don’t look like the oddest people in the cinema.

But my wife’s craving to see Johnny Depp in action over-rode our usual need for subterfuge and we arrived at Kensington Odeon on Sunday without the aforementioned boy. Fortunately the place was pretty empty although I did pretend the supplies I bought at the kiosk were for my kids (I decided to invent a few) when the guy asked me if the huge tub of popcorn and the sweets I was cradling were all for me.

Surprisingly the film itself is fabulous but Tim Burton and Depp always do good work so this should come as no surprise. Depp, though, should get the Oscar he was robbed of for his role in Pirates Of The Caribbean. His Willy Wonka is a cross between Michael Jackson (minus the kiddy-fiddling rumours) and Marilyn Manson and is very funny. I can nearly see why the wife likes him so much. I’d shag him and I don’t even do fellas.

We also got out to the National Theatre on Saturday to see a play by Simon Stephens called On The Shores Of The Big Wide World. I bought the tickets for this in a hurry on Friday night and didn’t notice until we about to take our seats that the tickets were for a performance in two weeks time. Oops… Fortunately they exchanged the tickets and we went in to see the play. This was fortunate as the consequences of dragging the missus all the way to the National Theatre only to discover we were two weeks early were simply to horrible to ponder…

I’d never seen Stephens’ work before but the play was an engaging story about three generations of a Stockport family who have to come to terms with a tragedy, and with each other, in a six-month period. There was a real spark and tenderness about the writing and, going against the trend of a lot of modern theatre, the ending was quite upbeat and optimistic. It’s always good to find new writers you like – even if you realise it means you have to up your game at the same time...

The other highlight of the weekend was my second attempt at The Independent On Saturday’s Super Soduko Puzzle. God help me but I fear this may be a new addiction. I’ve even started coveting the BlackBerry 7100 I could win and imagining how much it could improve my life. Bizarrely I don’t know what a Blackberry 7100 does but I do know that I now want to win one. I can feel my hands stroking its plastic keys now. This could be serious…

Family Values...

My little brother, our Nobby, visited this week. I call him little brother but he’s actually not very little any more. In fact he’s quite big and it would be fair to say that he’s ‘filled out a bit’ as people more polite than myself would say.

He’s now aged 30 and is the father of two kids and he got the ‘Nobby’ nickname when he was seven after he visited the birthday party of a girl up the street who had the unfortunate surname of Nobbs. In northern parlance this is the same as being called Fuchs or Bangs (insert christian name for full effect of joke) and it greatly amused me for many years. In fact it still does... Anyway little brother came back late from the party and myself and my older brother ribbed him mercilessly about this until the ‘Nobby’ nickname evolved.

Sadly for our kid this nickname stuck and his closest friends still use it some 23 years later. Even more amusing I have heard past girlfriends and his wife use it when they’re annoyed with him.

Nicknames, of course, are horrible things and I’ve had several stinkers throughout my life but my favourite of these was ‘Ghandi’ which I was christened because I had similar glasses to the famed man of peace. One cousin was also nicknamed ‘Mamba’ because of the length of one part of his anatomy. I often thought ‘Mamba’ was a better nickname than ‘Ghandi’ when I was a teen hoping to impress women but ‘Mamba’ was also quite jealous of my nickname as he was interested in peace studies and wanted to bring about reform by non-violent means then be shot and martyred. That last bit may be a lie...

Nobby was down to play in a big-money poker tournament. He’d won a seat at this prestigious event by winning several internet events and the two grand expenses he’s pocketed to go along with his entrance money seemed like a decent prize should he get hammered by all the big guns present at the main event. In the end he did OK and finished a creditable fourth on a table with two professional players. Who knows, it could even be a new career! Good luck to him.

Sadly he’s got to lose a few pounds before we can call him Amarillo Slim...

Hyde And Seek...

I’ve been doing martial arts for a while now and as part of my studies I do a bit of ki meditation. This involves me adopting the lotus position and focusing on my breathing until I clear my head and zone out.

It’s good stuff and, even though various visiting family and friends have found this hilarious when they’ve chanced on me meditating in the garden, it is something that is good for my equilibrium as it makes me want to assault people less than I once used to. The flip side of this, though, is that if I drop out of the ki habit I can turn from Jekyll to Hyde in a matter of weeks...

This transformation is currently under way and the first signs manifested themselves at the weekend at a pool tournament. The ongoing decline of my once-aggressive eightball game has been a matter of concern for some time but it hit rock bottom on Saturday with a performance so abject that Stevie Wonder would have beaten me on the baize. It was then the twitch started...

The twitch occurs when I’m really hacked off and it feels as if all the muscles in my neck are trying to slant and turn my head 180 degrees to the right. My eyes also start to go dead and my mouth starts to snarl. Imagine Jim Bowen having a stroke and you’re about there.

I managed to control the twitch by the time I got home on Saturday but I have chanced upon Big Brother twice over the past few days and it sent the twitch into spasm mode. I also saw adverts for Rock Around The Block on ITV1 and this triggered the twitch too.

I was getting worried about this until I saw the potential for life as a telly critic on GMTV (twitch, twitch, twitch...) where I’d sit on the sofa next to Kate Garraway and John Stapleton (twitch, twitch, twitch, neck spasm, neck spasm...) and they’d show me various shows and gauge their popularity from my body language.

So the currently excellent Corrie would get no response and be deemed a hit while EastEnders with its Supermarionation-style actor Nigel Harman would send me into total body spasm mode.

It make sound a tad distasteful but it’s no sicker than the House Of Obsessive Compulsives (twitch, twitch, twitch, neck spasm, neck spasm...) on Channel 4. I’d actually like to review this on the GMTV sofa while sat next to simpering telly hack Richard Arnold and start with a few twitches then have my head explode all over his suit. I'd like to see him quip his way out of that.

Time for some meditation methinks...

A Reader Writes...

Dear sir/madam

I’m a huge admirer of the brave boys (and lovely girls) in blue and, give or take the odd wrongly imprisoned Irishman here and there, I think they do a jolly decent job.

I would suggest, however, that if they wish to catch these new terrorist chappies they should spend more time looking around the area and watching the travelling public and less time congregating in groups and staring at young ladies in short skirts. Just a thought...

Many thanks

Colonel Dwight Micklewight
The Pall Mall Club
Londonium

Staring At Goats...

Jon Ronson is a very funny journalist, writer and documentary-maker and I read his book Them: Adventures With Extremists earlier this year. This chronicles Ronson meeting various fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists around the world and it’s both funny and frightening as he travels around the world poking the underbelly of various right-wing loonies and other nutjobs.

I’ve recently just finished reading his other book, The Men Who Stare At Goats, and this is also pretty fabulous. It chronicles the US military’s attempts to harness psychic powers and other types of extra-sensory capabilities to compliment its arsenal of more traditional weapons. It also ends with a lot of these people who were first brought into the US military in the 1970s and 1980s being reactivated for use in the War on Terror.

The obvious weapon the US military have failed to utilise so far, though, is Donald Trump’s hair. This must surely count as a paranormal phenomena and could probably hypnotise and stun a cell of terrorists by its appearance alone.

The Trumpster’s hair was back on telly last night in The Apprentice US and the fellas team actually lost to the bicker-tastic backbiting women and dim John was booted out.

The blokes were, of course, onto a loser as soon as the task was announced as it focused on launching a new line in women’s clothes and they clearly had no idea what they were looking for or at half of the time. Well, apart from the models who they invited down to measure their vital statistics when they should have been concentrating on the job in hand. Blokes. Love ’em...

I also must correct an earlier blog entry, too. In my diatribe against Rock Around the Block I stated that it was a Sunday morning show on ITV 1. But I have since learnt it is actually a prime-time show on Saturday evening which is repeated on Sunday. As far as I’m concerned this makes the imminent demise of ITV in an even more advanced state than I feared. Expect Massacre! A Musical About Somalia or Famine: The Game Show very soon...

Reasons To Be Cheerful...

I took the boy to see The Fantastic Four movie on Saturday. It’s now a major point of bonding between us that we go see CGI-laden comic-book-based movies together without the missus. This means we can pig out on popcorn, sweets and nachos without having to face my good lady wife’s chilling line in disapproving looks and sighs when the crunch factor gets too loud.

Sadly it does rob us of the potential for sarcastic question and answer sessions:
Missus: ‘Are you really going to eat all that popcorn?’
Me: ‘No I’m going to save some of it to fashion a length of popcorn rope that I intend to secrete about my person and escape from the bedroom when you’re not looking later tonight.’
Missus: ‘Well make sure it doesn’t snap or you’ll get injured which means I’ll have to nurse you back to health. And that’s quite dull...’
Me: ‘Sod it. I’ll fashion a noose instead...’

But the upside of me and the boy heading off on our own is that I get to watch as many superhero pictures as I want without sitting in the cinema on my own looking like a kiddy-fiddler on reconnaissance.

Good as The Fantastic Four was, though, it provided nowhere near the amount of entertainment that BBC3 offered last night with the return of two of my favourite comedy series.

The first of these was The Smoking Room. This, as its title suggests, is set in the smoking room of a company where various members of staff come to bitch, gossip, moan and generally waste time in pointless chatter rather than go back to work. It’s a one-set sitcom and it uses the same eight or nine characters with odd guests dropping in from time to time so it could easily become quite staid. But the writing by Brian Dooley is razor-sharp and the mundane dialogue and offbeat gags are bang on the button. It’s good to see a standard of writing that you can aspire on telly every now and then.

The highlight of the night, though, was the return of The Mighty Boosh. This is a totally surreal comedy about two zookeepers and their off-the-wall adventures. Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt are the double-act behind this unmitigated piece of genius and last night’s adventure saw the duo and their shaman chum Naboo and his gorilla familiar Bolo go to a shack in the woods and escape a gang of sex-mad Yetis. Think Morecambe and Wise doing Ernie’s ‘plays wot he wrote’ on crack and you’ll get the idea. It’s the most inventive comedy on TV at present and if it doesn’t win a major award soon the world’s gone seriously wrong.

Brit TV drama may be pretty rubbish at present but the comedy’s coming thick and fast. Hurrah!

Opera-tunity Knocks!

When I was writing my since-aborted Ph’d on community theatre in the late 1990s I researched facts and figures about opera and it pretty much confirmed my already jaundiced view that it was a very heavily subsidised art form in the UK that took up a disproportionate amount of public money and offered little in return apart from piece-meal cut-price tickets and a bit of community outreach work. Then, as if by magic, one of the major London opera houses got a whacking multi-million pound Lottery grant for major refurbishment work – and two days later announced it was cancelling its theatre-in-education service.

I took this as a sign that my prejudices and research were bang on the money as I also worked out that the Lottery grant the opera house got would have funded something like 100 theatre-in-education companies for four years reaching more than 10million schoolkids in total. That’s a lot of art for a lot of people who may not otherwise have access to it, people whose money is now ensuring London opera lovers have convivial surroundings and comfy seats. Arts subsidy. Great, eh?

So it was with some trepidation that I plonked my arse in the posh rows at the Bregenz Opera Festival, a massive event where the stage floats on Lake Constance with the seats tiered up the river bank to form probably the most beautiful open-air auditorium in the world.

Unlikely opera-lover me had, of course, got on this trip because the missus had been invited to Austria on a press beano. Partners were also invited and, once several other people had turned her down, she decided to ask me if I wanted to go. I accepted and on Thursday morning off we went...

We landed in Zurich airport and, before the bus ride to Austria, I needed the loo. On shutting the door I was greeted with a hard-core porn magazine on the cubicle floor. I was impressed with this but my trips to further loos proved that this was a one-off and not part of some sort of continental service.

The missus did have to work on the trip so I also trolled around a few factories discovering things about kitchens that I never knew and we were also taken to several fabulous restaurants. It made me realise that I’m obviously in the wrong job as the only press trips I’ve ever had while writing about telly have been to Liverpool and Birmingham. And they’re not glamorous. At all.

The opera, though, was the highlight and it was truly spectacular and epic and, although it hasn’t changed any of my preconceptions about the accessibility and validity of the art form, I can now see the appeal and accept that it can be a very seductive and amazing thing to see.

Sadly a compartive event in the UK (as I don’t know about Bregenz arts funding) still doesn’t outweigh 10million UK schoolchildren getting the chance to see live theatre. But Austria was bloody lovely.

Living In A Box!

Poor Nick! There he was doing his job and before he could say ‘I haven’t checked the blood splatter patterns yet...’ he found himself interred in a perspex box with only a limited amount of time before his air ran out and his buddies could save him.

I am latecomer to Five’s US crime drama series CSI and, ironically, I also only caught the second half of last night’s double-bill directed by Quentin Tarantino. The missus and the boy have been long-time fans but I’ve only really started getting to grips with it in the last few months and it’s bloody good stuff.

Five, of course, used to be the channel of the three ‘f’s (football, films and fucking) but it’s had a major rebranding over the past three years and it now has three of the best shows on TV in CSI and its various offshoots in Miami and New York, The Shield (which returns on Saturday) and Law And Order.

There was a time, of course, when Channel 4 would have immediately snapped up quality shows like these to add to The Sopranos and Desperate Housewives but these days they’re too busy providing wall-to-wall coverage of Big Brother to bother about anything so trite as gripping drama. So it’s left to Five to carry the flag and thank god it does.

Nick made it in the end thanks to Grisham and an ant thus foiling the revenge of a loony former gardener whose dad was none too happy that his daughter was jailed on dodgy evidence. But you have to wonder what British drama series would make a big name like Tarantino want to direct or write a few episodes. Midsomer Murders, Frost, Murder In Suburbia, Casualty, Holby?

Dr Who was great and Shameless pretty entertaining but it’s pretty bleak in tellyland at the moment really. And you have have to wonder where the next big homegrown drama series is coming from and where, if your name is not Paul Abbott or Russell T Davies (both fine writers I hasten to add), it will actually get shown in a sea of reality TV and makeover shows.

As a jobbing journalist and writer I learnt early on that the amount of titles who will quite happily buy the same-old lowest-common-denominator shit from you are many while the ones who want to print interesting and well thought-through features are few. I think TV is pretty much the same and I worry about these things because it’s an industry I have ambitions to work in but so much of it is utter shite too...

So thank god The Mighty Boosh is back next week on BBC3. It will hopefully give me something to laugh about and I’ll forget my fears that like Nick we’re all trapped in a doomed box with no hope of escape.

On a separate note me and the missus are heading to Austria on a three-day press beano tomorrow. If anyone cares I’ll report back next week...

Sight Seer

Pocket-sized pop god Prince said ‘I’ve seen the future and it will be. I’ve seen the future and it works!’ Well I’ve seen the future and it bloody well doesn’t...

My moment of prescience came on Sunday morning when I was in bed with the missus. We had a weekend sans boy so we were enjoying a lazy morning lounging around and one of us flicked the TV on.

On Saturday mornings this can be quite entertaining as it can throw up various kids shows on BBC1 or ITV1 with some C List celeb getting gunked or we can even catch the cookery strand with Anthony Worrall-Thompson on BBC2.

The latter is a particular joy if you’re feeling tired or hungover as it’s a real pick-me-up to see someone that ugly on TV and you suddenly feel much better about yourself. I also read an erotic but very sad story once about a red-headed and well-hung bearded dwarf who travelled to rich-but-sexually-unfulfilled ladies in 19th-century Eastern Europe and sated their needs, and it was a squashed-up version of Thompson I always pictured in this role so he also acts as something of an aphrodisiac as far as I’m concerned too. Only on Saturdays, though...

But Sunday morning TV has none of these pleasures and you really are taking you life in your hands if you have a dabble. There are trendied-up religious shows and the talent-free zone that is Hollyoaks. But my latest discovery made even the Chester-set soap look like one of Chekhov’s finest moments...

The ITV website tells us the basic premise of Rock Around The Block is that ‘two families are transformed into pop heroes in just 48 hours by a team of experts from the world of hip-hop, dance and fashion. The kids are left cringing as parents practice their moves in a bid to win the £5,000 cash prize.’ But even the best wordsmiths at ITV really can’t do it justice...

Yesterday’s show saw one family learn the words and dance routine to the B-52s’ Love Shack while another boogied along to the sounds of Sir Mix-a-Lot, who is a rapper of some description. The show lasted for an hour. I lasted five minutes before running from the bedroom screaming, although I did return 20 minutes later to make sure I really did see it and it wasn’t part of some bad dream or waking nightmare.

But it wasn’t. Instead it was a part of the ITV1 Sunday schedule. I thought this channel had hit rock bottom with Celebrity Love Island and Celebrity Wrestling but this show is a new low. If all the TV executives in the world pooled their worst-ever ideas (Dachau: The Musical, Tsunami: The Sitcom, etc) and moulded them together it would not be anywhere near as bad as this.

ITV celebrates 50 years of broadcasting this year and you’d have thought someone somewhere would have the sense to can certain bottom-of-the-barrel ideas like this. Even if only for a year...

But the channel that brought us World In Action, First Tuesday, Corrie and Prime Suspect is heading downhill so fast that stopping the decline seems unavoidable, and when it crashes and burns as it obviously must wreck investigators will find a schedule full of shows with ‘ordinary folk’ living their dreams and getting their 15 minutes of fame.

I’ve seen the future and it will be. God help us...

Sister Act!

It was the early morning shows that got me. I don’t watch any of the wall-to-wall live coverage on E4 and I am sometimes out or watching something else when the evening shows are on. But the morning shows caught me off-guard and half-asleep when it was my turn to get the boy up for school and that’s how it started.

So now I know that Science is a wannabe rapper from the hood in Leeds who can’t string two words together, there’s some skeletal Irish bird who looks like she could do with a month’s worth of good meals and there’s a black gay Tory who lets his chums call him ‘Golly’. How the winter evenings must simply fly by at Tory HQ... Then there’s a sexually confused fella, a Geordie hairdresser, a geek and several others.

The Big Brother lot are all equally hateful and making distinctions between them is a bit like deciding which form of terminal illness you want to be riddled with – the details are unimportant as it’s still painful and it’s still gonna get you...

There perhaps are not enough bullets in the world for these people but sadly my guns are still trained across the pond as The Apprentice lost another member of its would-be team of wannabe squillionaires last night. And there are only so many people you can hate at one time...

Last night’s task on The Apprentice saw the two teams have to launch competing restaurants in New York with task winners judged on decor, service and food by the customers. Mosaic, the fellas and one girl team, went about this in their usual methodical and relaxed way while Apex, the girl group, continued to bitch, fight and generally be as unpleasant as possible to each other.

Apex obviously lost and the night leading up to the boardroom meeting saw all the girls at their cattiest. Having last week decided to victimise and expel Stacie J (the only black member of the group and, rather hilariously, bearing in mind this week’s task a restaurateur) the WASP coven went for another minority in the shape of a vertically challenged Jew called Stacey.

But Stacey proved to be a tough little cookie and she was not having any of it and in the end it was the half-witted project leader Jennifer C, a woman who can’t stop talking with the added bonus that nothing she says makes any sense, who was fired.

The girls may now see the light and actually end up working together if they have any hope of winning the job with Trump that’s on offer to the series winner when this show ends, although part of me hopes they don’t as watching them squabble is great fun. Sisterhood, eh?