Happy New Year...

It's getting towards the New Year so I'm already planning 2015 and reflecting on 2014.

Should anyone care, here are my highlights of the past 12 months:

TV: Emmerdale remains the best-written thing on UK TV. Yes. Emmerdale. That soap that used to be about farming. Set in Yorkshire. And, once upon a time, was only shown on Tuesday and Thursday dinner-times in the YTV area. But it is consistently brilliant. To retain that level of quality for six episodes every week over 52 weeks every year is an astonishing feat. Coronation Street is the second-best-written thing on British TV. It manages to maintain its quality, humour and drama for five 30-minute episodes over 52 weeks every year. It's an astonishing achievement to do that. Other good stuff I've seen this year has included series one and series two of Nordic Noir thriller The Bridge, and series one and two of The Vikings. There hasn't been an awful lot else to write home about. That, however, may change when I catch up with series two of Brit thriller The Fall. EastEnders wins the award for most consistently awful TV show of the year: bad scripts, poor plotting, terrible character development... It's a year to forget in Walford. Doctor Who also needs a kick up the arse. But, like Enders, that's also been on the slide for a few years now.

FILM: X-Men: Days of Future Past and Guardians of the Galaxy were bit hits at From Beer to Paternity Towers. Yes, the X-men movie wasn't as good as the original comic story it was loosely based on, but it sort of hung together, while Guardians of the Galaxy was just an utter blast from start to finish. I'm majorly excited about the new Avengers movie, Age of Ultron, which is out next year, too.

RADIO & PODCASTS: Fighting Talk, the Radio 5 Live sports comedy quiz, remains a must-listen, while the Richard Herring Leicester Square Theatre Comedy Podcast has been a source of utter joy this year. I will be paying to money to Richard Herring for this. It's wonderful. I'm amazed it's still free. Other shows I've enjoyed dipping into have included Private Passions, a sort of high-brow Desert Island Discs, on Radio 3, and I'm loving waking up to Breakfast on Radio 3 in a morning since buying a digital alarm clock radio. I don't know enough about classical music and this is a good way to learn more without making a massive effort. The Grapplearts podcasts have also been a good and interesting source of BJJ information this year.

MUSIC: The Kate Bush gig at Hammersmith was a thing of utter beauty and joy and was quite possibly my cultural highlight of the year. The Gaslight Anthem gig at Alexandra Palace and Arcade Fire at Olympia were also fabulous. Seeing The Buzzcocks at Guildfest was also very good. CDs I loved this year include Get Hurt by The Gaslight Anthem

THEATRE: The one thing that absolutely knocked me on my arse this year was Ballyturk by Enda Walsh at the National. Intriguing, bizarre, funny and moving. And I still haven't quite figured out exactly what it was that I saw either. The other thing that I found really moving was John & Jen. This musical two-hander was put on by a theatre company I'm involved in, but it was was really engaging and captivating and took me totally by surprise.

COMEDY: Stewart Lee was as excellent as ever. The comedy highlight of the year, though, was Sara Pascoe. Intelligent and funny. I just wish I'd seen the entire show.

BOOK & COMICS: American Vampire and Batman, both by Scott Snyder, have been brilliant this year. I've also been won over by the Warren Ellis run on Moonknight. The relaunch of Electra also looks promising. The book that's really stayed with me this year has been Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, a sort of pop science, history and sociology book about social trends as epidemics. It's an interesting read. I'll be dipping into more of his stuff.

PERSONAL HIGHLIGHTS: Visiting New York at the start of the year, visiting Cornwall at the end of the year, competing in my first grappling tournaments at the age of 45, having a successful readthrough of my most recent play, retaining my health and my sanity in an ever-more-demanding workplace. It's been OK as a year. 

For You, Buddy...

A good friend lost his ten-year-old boy to leukaemia earlier this year. 

Throughout the two-year battle with the disease, his son had shown immense courage and a refusal to let this horrible disease get the better of him. The friend and the friend's family had shown a similar courage throughout what must have been a horrendous ordeal.

Myself and the Missus attended the funeral. To be perfectly honest, it was a day I dreaded ever since hearing the news of the child's passing. At the same time, though, there was never any question that we weren't going to be there. 

Funerals are never good things at the best of times. But when it's a parent burying their child, the circumstances are about as bad as it can be. Of course, you're there to lament the loss and support the parents. But how do you offer words of comfort in those circumstances? What can you possibly say to offer salve to the wound of where a life used to be?

The service was incredibly moving and, from the church, we went back to a church hall for a get-together, where the father had done a slide show of pictures of his son, so those who didn't really know him could get a sense of him. And there were pictures of him with his family, pictures of him as a baby, pictures of him with various celebrities. The over-riding sense was here was somebody who was just up for life. 

And there were pictures of him with his father, both before he got ill and while he was ill. And you saw the love. It was an almost tangible thing. And you realise that is the thing that's left, it's the thing that remains. The love. And some people never have that or don't know how to give that. But here it was just such an evident thing. 

I remain genuinely devastated for the son's death and for my friend's loss. But I'm pleased that legacy of love remains. The older I get, I realise love is the only thing that really matters any more.

And I hope that love provides comfort at Christmas. Because I know that will be a hard time for him and his.

Thinking of you, buddy. And lots of your friends are, too. Even if they don't directly say it.

TV PItches: No.2...

I'm putting the finishing touches to a new TV project. 

It combines the nation's love of prime-time ballroom, tango, waltz and samba, and its current fascination with ridiculing and demonising the poor, the unfortunate and the unemployed. 

It has a competitive element and it's set on a poverty-stricken housing estate over-run with drug dealers and C4 documentary makers. 

It's call Strictly Scum Dancing. 

It's a sure-fire winner. 

Any TV execs out there? Let's talk...

Nightclubbing...

As a 45-year-old man, my days of going clubbing are a thing of the past. Unless I'm on a night out with my pool-playing friends. Then I am in real danger of forgetting this is the case and that it should probably always remain the case.

We generally end up in such places if we've been out and we fancy a late drink. And this was the case, recently, when several of us descended on a local nightclub in Guildford. It was an entertaining evening as we were out for our friend's 40th birthday. 

This was a genuine hoot, even when it got slightly messy, with him too drunk to stay in the club and a couple of other friends expressing their concern at this to the security staff, who were actually very lovely and professional.

The most disturbing aspect of the evening, though – apart from the other men around my age who seemed to be there to secure themselves a much younger lover – were several young boys who I found arguing in the toilets with the attendant. 

They were clearly educated and were dressed in what looked like fashionable and expensive clothes, and they were arguing with the toilet attendant about religion. They were also drunk but seemed to take great delight in mocking the poor man and bamboozling him with theories of narrative fiction and the idea of religion as a fictional construct. 

Then, on the way out, one of them said the following sentence to his friend. 
'Dude. I CAN'T believe you were arguing with the brush-down man! Duh! What were you thinking?!' 

It was at this point in the evening I should have grabbed the over-privileged little twat by the throat and told him to keep his patronising comments to himself, before asking him when the last time he worked for a minimum wage was. I was then going to ask him whether the privileged name for toilet attendant was 'brush-down man' because I had no idea what the proper title was. But he seemed to.

Sadly, I didn't do either. But I should have done. I did, however, enjoy the sight of him getting rejected by at least three young women over the following 45 minutes. They maybe found him equally repellent. 

And it meant I didn't have to follow him home, kidnap him and cut shit off him with gardening shears to teach him some manners.

Footballers...

Over the past few years, my viewpoint towards most Premier League footballers has become one of contempt and disgust. Their outrageous earning power, their seeming contempt for normal codes of behaviour, their seeming existence in a moral vacuum…

I obviously realise this is a hugely bigoted view, but I'd sort of fallen for the tabloid stories and exposes as the norm rather than the exception.

This year, however, I've seen two examples of things that have made me re-address this view.

The first was at the funeral of my friend's son. The child was a mad Chelsea fan and, while undergoing treatment, he had gone to Stamford Bridge and met the Chelsea players and had formed something of a bond with several of their stars. This is obviously something most clubs take part in, but the genuine concern and subsequent relationship built went above and beyond what you'd expect.

The other example was the commemoration of the Hillsborough disaster. This was a genuinely moving experience and you could see how involved all the fans and all the players were.

There are times that sport, and particularly professional football, can be a grubby business, where the high ideals expounded about sporting excellence promoted on the pitch aren't matched by behaviour away from it. But there are also times when sport and its sportsmen transcend that world and are capable of amazing acts of compassion and kindness.

It's good to be reminded of these things. It's just a shame it takes tragic events to begin this realisation. For both me and them...

Smug Bastard News...

I have tickets to see the Foo Fighters at Wembley next year. 

I am beyond ecstatic...

Fit...

I have a few days off work so I ventured to a dinner-time BJJ class. I've been away from any serious martial arts training for a while with an injury and I'm just starting to tentatively return again.

My instructor was pleased to see me, then pointed to my stomach and suggested I'd piled the weight on in my absence. 

The class was fab but I got ruined at sparring. It was good to be back. 

Even if I am fat...