The 2016 British Soap Awards: Part II...

The first thing to report about the 2016 British Soap Awards was how slick Philip Schofield was as the host. If you've ever seen anything filmed before, you know that it can often go on a bit. But Schofield was amazingly slick and polished and the filming of the awards ceremony itself, which was held at Hackney Empire in London, was pretty much done and dusted in about two hours.

Two of the biggest winners of the evening were Lacey Turner, who plays Stacey Fower in EastEnders, and Danny Miller, who plays Aaron Dingle in Emmerdale. 

Lacey's a very good actress and one of the most recognisable faces on British TV and she's been good in Enders this year, with a sometimes bizarre but emotionally high-voltage story about her character suffering post-partum psychosis. She picked up two awards for Best Actress and Best Dramatic Performance Female and her mental health story also won the Best Storyline gong.

Danny Miller is a real fan favourite and his character's harrowing story about childhood abuse saw Miller pick up the Best Dramatic Performance Male and Best Actor gongs. 

Their awards were probably deserved and the fact that the panel votes were echoed in the public votes probably means there's some sort of across-the-board consensus. I think Jeremy Sheffield, who was excellent as Motor Neurone Disease sufferer Patrick Blake in Hollyoaks, and Rhakee Thakrar, who played Shabnam Masood in EastEnders, would also have been incredibly worthy winners, too.


Two awards that I was delighted by were the victories for Doctors for the Best Single Episode for their 3000th episode, The Heart of England, which saw the conclusion of their Treehouse storyline. This was quietly brilliant and managed to combine child abuse, a shooting and police corruption on a small-budget daytime soap. An amazing feat.

Ruby O'Donell also won Best Young Actor for her role as dilemma-struck teen mum Peri Lomax in Hollyoaks. I'm watching a lot more Hollyoaks at the moment and it's generally pretty good and can sometimes be excellent. My favourite character in it, however, is Nico Blake, the deranged and damaged daughter of Sienna Blake. She's quite compelling and there's something of the night about her character.

The award that cheered me the most, however, was the gong for best soap. This went to Emmerdale and it was thoroughly deserved. The show has consistently been one of the best things on British TV in the last 18 months and it was a worthy victor. 

Its executive producer, Kate Oates, has now moved across the Pennines to run Coronation Street and I expect Corrie, whose excellent live episode went criminally unrewarded, will be back gunning for the big one next year. I hope so. I genuinely love Corrie.

The 2016 British Soap Awards: Part I...

I'm not very good at doing events. I sometimes struggle with small talk, I sometimes don't play well with others and I don't really have the hustling gene necessary to get the most out of such things. I also don't do clothes. The whole dressing-up thing escapes me. 

However, I was invited to be a judge at the 2016 British Soap Awards earlier this year, and I thoroughly enjoyed assessing the entrants, then taking part in the panel day and discussing and debating, then voting for the high points of the last soap year. 

Then, this weekend, it was time for myself and the Missus to don posh clothes and head to the glitzy event itself. 

First up was a haircut, so it straight to the barber's shop for a No.1 all over. Coupled with massive Seth Armstrong sideburns, it was job pretty much done. I had a bit of a shoe disaster so had to improvise, then found I'd lost so much weight that my suits didn't fit properly. 

On the plus side, the lady hairdresser said I had lovely, strong hair and a beautifully defined hairline. I wasn't wearing my specs so I couldn't see if I could repay the compliment by pointing out that she had, too. 

On getting to the event, I met a few people I sort of knew and discovered the following: 
i) Telling the story about my injured penis and how it was held by a man who ended up on the Sex Offenders Register is still quite funny. 
ii) My fellow soap magazine editors are facing the same declining market problems and large corporate insanity that I am.
iii) My plumbing joke is still funny. This goes: 'I'm thinking of a career in plumbing when the world of journalism finally implodes. But that's because I've watched an unhealthy amount of 1970s pornography and it seems to offer a lot of fringe benefits...'

Preacher...

Cards on the table: I am a huge fan of Preacher, the irreverent, violent, macabre, brutal and blackly funny Vertigo comic book series by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. So it was with trepidation that I prepared to watch the opening episode of the new series on Amazon Prime. 

But the show opener is shit-bricking brilliant and I have high hopes for the rest of it. 

It was obviously never going to faithfully follow the comic series panel-for-panel, but it's already introduced the key players: disillusioned Preacher Jesse Custer, who suddenly develops an extraordinary celestial power; his love interest and one-woman arse-kicking army, Tulip; and fruit-loop Irish vampire Cassidy. 

There are a few nods to other characters in the comic that will probably develop more fully as the series and its narrative progresses, but the thing I'm most excited about is how they've absolutely nailed the tone of the comic and managed to translate it to TV.

This could good. It could get a five-Herr-Starr review. 

That last thing was a reference to another character in the series. I used that one because working in a reference to the Saint of Killers was far too complicated.

Cue Wank...

I recently needed to get my cue re-tipped and I was also having problems with my ferrule, so I made the trip to Forest Hill in London to see John Parris. 

For those involved in any cue sports, John Parris is well-known. For those not involved in cue sports, John Parris is the world's leading cue maker and he makes snooker cues for Ronnie O'Sullivan, Stephen Hendry, John Higgins and a host of other top players. And me.

For a cue geek like me, visiting John's shop remains a bit of a treat. It's quite a small shop with racks of cues lining the walls, and it has a workshop out the back at the side of the shop. It's an unassuming oasis of absolute craftsmanship in a quiet London suburb. I can spend a decent amount of time in there just looking at the cues he has for sale and admiring how excellent they are.

My cue re-tipped and my ferrule checked out, I returned home and was having a polish of my cue in my office. I also have a few collectible cues, so I was having a bit of a cue polish and sort-out in general. I'm always worried that my tip will fly off is the cue has been re-tipped, so I was working out which other cue to take to my match the following night just in case this happened. Just to put this madness into perspective, a re-tipped cue losing its tip has happened once in my life. But the memory and the fear remains.

The Missus entered my office, looked at what I was doing, asked me if I was a 'cue wank', then left. 

She was right. I probably was.

Strategy...

The Missus is in a playful but combatative mood when I come home from work, and the second sentence out of her mouth is as follows:
'Why do you talk such fucking cunting shit?'

I hadn't even done anything stupid. Or said anything stupid either. 

So I don't answer. This is probably a wise strategy...

Edinburgh: Part II...

First up on the Things to Do in Edinburgh List was a trip to the Beltane Fire Festival. This is  'a dynamic reinterpretation and modernisation of an ancient Iron Age Celtic ritual of a pagan festival to welcome summer', according to the website.

This saw me, the Missus, the Other Woman and the Other Woman's Long-suffering Fella, plus several thousand other folk, gather on Calton Hill in the middle of the city to watch some pagan re-enactors crown the May Queen and set fire to stuff before processing around the hill.

It was quite a fascinating event, mainly because the PA system was awful so you has to fight your way close to the action to have any clue about what was going on. The lighting of the fire from the temple (pictured badly above) was quite impressive, but it also happened an hour later than advertised.

Pagans and pagan re-enactors are clearly no the most punctual of people. There were other events going on but it was a slapdash on the organisation front and information was quite hard to come by, despite the fact there was a printed leaflet.

So we stuck it out for a bit, then left and went to the pub. 

'We'll talk about this for minutes to come,' commented the Other Woman's Long-suffering Fella. I think even he realised he was being optimistic about this prediction.

 The following day we went to Edinburgh Castle, which was a much more organised and enjoyable experience. The Missus tried to attack a cannon and won, and we also had a poke about in the jail cells, which were very good.

In the evening, we ventured out to the Pleasance, which was one of the venues hosting TradFest. This is a lowish-key festival celebrating traditional art and music, and we saw a folk-meets-bluegrass out called Blue Flint. Fronted by two banjo-playing women, they were excellent, and I bought their most recent CDs, Stories From Home. This has been getting a lot of air play at home and I'll be investing in their other two CDs.

Injury News: Part II...

I was looking forward to competing in my first BJJ tournament of the year. I'd made weight and I had some decent training behind me... then my hamstring went doing kicking drills at Hapkido three days before the event. Bugger!

Last year, I missed two of the three events I entered through injury and the pattern has started again this year. I'm not doing stupid things or taking unnecessary risks. I'm just being unlucky. 

So, apart from being a bit grumpy because I don't like not training, I just need to be sensible. My time to compete this year will come. And, while I'm healing up, I have a play to rewrite. 

Every cloud and all that...

Five-word Reviews: Flowers...

Brilliant, original, darkly absurdist comedy. 
or 
Deserves to win a Bafta. 
or
Stonkingly fabulous original comedy series.

Injury News: Part I...

I always felt that the back injury I acquired while hanging a pair of boxer shorts on a washing line was the most ridiculous injury I'd ever had. But there's a new contender. 

We're currently having work done at Brooks Towers and a floorboard was left up to connect some water pipes. The cat, Buffy, took this as an invitation to explore and jumped down five feet and decided to go hunting in the foundations of the house. She couldn't, however, get back up. 

Cue myself and the Missus pulling a up a few additional floorboards and me lowering myself into the bowels of the house to get her out. The gap, however, meant I needed to do some twisting and turning to get the cat, then get back back out. It was a like a shit version of subterranean horror, The Descent. 

On the way out, a few things went click in my back as I dragged myself up. This hurt. The next time, the fucking cat can stay down there.

Edinburgh: Part I...

The Missus bought me a surprise trip for my birthday. She didn't, however, tell me where we were going until two weeks after I turned 47, and we arrived at King's Cross Station in London to embark on our adventure. This drove me slightly insane and she milked it for all it was worth. It's fair to say that she squeezed the teat of secrecy bone dry on this occasion...

The bad news was the leaving point meant the suspected trip to the World Snooker Championships was off. The good news, though, was that it meant something else was happening, and I didn't have to wait long to find out. About five minutes later, the Other Woman and the Other Woman's Long-suffering Fella mysteriously appeared and everything fell into place: a Bank Holiday weekend in Edinburgh. 

Getting to Edinburgh, however, entailed a five-hour train journey with the Missus and the Other Woman, who veered between congratulating themselves on their cunning planning... and ripping the piss out of me. This was made even worse because I felt like somebody who'd been on the end of a Jeremy Beadle prank, but who couldn't repeatedly punch those responsible because it was a beautiful and thoughtful kindness. I fear I am not good at not knowing things.

We did some cool stuff and a long weekend with three people I love very much was ace.