Back at schloss Cheeseford after nearly a week sampling the qualities and quantities of 'that London'. Reason 1 for the visit was the Lambeth Country Show in Brockwell Park, a gloriously incongruous combination of dub reggae, sheep-shearing and the Lambeth Horticultural Society's big annual show. To be frank, you can keep the dub reggae - the sub-bass emanating from some of the tents hurt my ears and loosened the soles on my walking boots - but the other stuff's really rather life-affirming, particularly because it happens where it does. LHS veterans have told me with pride of the year when a certain amount of unpleasantness down Brixton way threatened to spread as far as the Country Show, and they all prepared to see off the rioters and riot police with nothing more than firm, polite Englishness, and possibly their dibbers if it got a bit heated.

Reason 2 was a friend's birthday party, at which guests were encouraged to represent an elpee's worth of toons in some way. Full marks to the host for coming as Animals by Pink Floyd, having crafted a scale model of Battersea Power Station out of cardboard, and added a tiny pink pig on a wire. Honourable mentions also to the chap who came as Hex Enduction Hour by the Fall, a Mr & Mrs who came as BBC Transcription Discs and the other husband and wife team who came as Derek and Clive (Live) (him - white shirt with accurately-scrawled lettering on it) and Songs in the Key of Life (her - 7 quid's worth of orange cardboard and a pair of Sunnie Mann's old sunglasses). Me? Ever keen to pursue the easy life, and not overly fond of schlepping a hundred-weight of props on the Tube, I wore the bottle-green corduroy suit I got married in and claimed to be this. At least a certain amount of malice aforethought went into it. One friend only realised on the way to the pub that his choice of shirt and trousers had inadvertently allowed him to attend as Black and Blue by the Stones.

Reason 3 was to head to North Greenwich to see Return to Forever at the IndigO2. When most of my school contemporaries were listening to Jesus Jones and the Wonder Stuff, I was scouring second-hand record shops for anything involving Chick Corea or Stanley Clarke. This, along with my complete and utter lack of interest in competitive games and, well, most other aspects of my personality, marked me out as a bit of an oddball. My love of a decent bit of 'difficult jazz' (a fondly-remembered section heading from one of the aforementioned diskeries) has remained intact to this day, but I resisted the temptation to spring for tickets for a long time after the reunion tour was announced. There were a couple of motivating factors behind my lack of motivation. Firstly, in recent years, the price of concert tickets has outstripped inflation at a rate that suggests that someone, somewhere is taking the piss something rotten. Yeah, yeah, reduced record sales mean that the talent has to make up the shortfall somewhere, but when the cheap seats are £50 - before you've even allowed for transport, nosh and a couple of throat oils - it makes one powerfully selective about which shows to attend. I don't think it would be wildly inaccurate to suggest that Ticketmaster must shoulder some of the blame. Secondly, the thought that a certain proportion of my £50 (OK, it was really £49.50 - £45 plus £4.50 booking fee) would be heading straight for the coffers of the cult of Scientology (Chick's a long-time member, Stanley Clarke left years ago and became a 'suppressive person' - as critics of the cult are known - I bet they have a laugh in the dressing room) was enough to make me sit on my credit card for a bit. However, one night, in a moment of weakness after digging out Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy, I contacted a Corea-friendly mate and asked if he wanted in.

So, off we toddled, and were both amazed and relieved not to find Tom Cruise Fan Club recruitment leaflets on the T-shirt stand, or e-meter personality tests on offer by the bass bins. However, not all was apples. Stanley Clarke had obviously got the Brockwell Park massive to EQ the electric bass that he used in the first half. It was thuddy and muddy, making his intricate playing painful to listen to. Watching his fingers, it was clear that he was playing some awesome licks, but they sounded like Campbell's condensed cream of shit. Second observation: Why is it not standard practice to offset the rows of seating at venues, especially when - as in the case of the IndigO2 - they don't have a raked floor? Just place every other row a couple of inches to the left or right of the one in front, meaning that you don't spend the entire show looking at the back of someone's head. Job done. Failing that, Ticketmaster can use some of their ill-gotten billions to develop software that allocates seats by height and/or head size of purchaser. Third observation: Why pay a fucking fortune to go to a concert if you're going to watch it through your cameraphone, held up in front of your face and restricting the view of the poor schlub behind you? Save your money and wait until it all turns up on YouTube the next day - as ice-cool and very groovy drummer Lenny White acknowledged would be the case during his mini stand-up act between numbers. Fourth observation: the British like queuing for no apparent reason. Over half of the audience waited dutifully in line outside the venue for about an hour, while the other half stood outside the bar opposite, drinking and laughing at the silly sods who were queuing despite already having reserved seats. Fifth observation: The O2 is the restaurant at the end of the universe.

Thankfully, for the second half, Stan switched to double bass, and sounded proper lovely. Apart, that is, from when he slapped and punched the instrument. Unaccountably, these antics got huge cheers and 'wooohs' from some of the more cloth-eared members of the congregation. I love Stan the man, and think he's too good a musician to be cheered loudest of all for bringing a clenched fist down on his beloved and very expensive instrument. These reservations apart, by the time I returned to the Jubilee line, I felt I'd got my half a ton's worth. Despite his dubious beliefs, Chick Corea's still one of my favourite pianists, and hearing him flit between a real, live Fender Rhodes and a concert grand was a thrill. Al Di Meola - whose 54th birthday it was, marked by his re-appearance for the encore in an Arsenal shirt, bearing his name and the number 54 - sounded just grrrrrrreat, whether on electric guitar or acoustic, and Lenny White sounded as effortlessly wonderful as he does on all those albums I've hoarded for the last 20-odd years. I wasn't watching the clock, but I think 'Romantic Warrior' charged past the half-hour mark. Self-indulgent? Oh yes, but I wouldn't have missed it for anything.

Another sad demise, this time in the form of my old employer Publishing News, which closes in a fortnight - full story here. My 4 years there weren't a period of complete joy, due to personality clashes with a senior colleague and the fact that the chairman was one of the most unpleasant individuals it's been my misfortune to encounter. However, on balance, it was fantastic experience, and, without it, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now. Despite the chairman's iron whim, which resulted in some pretty rum editorial decisions and a few ulcers from the poor bloody infantry forced to put them into action, it was a good paper.

One story from the PN days. In the run-up to a London Book Fair (or was it Frankfurt?), when reams of picture captions and "At stand E984, the Badger Press will be gassing live badgers to illustrate their new range of Christmas books..." were needed, I felt the aforementioned chairman's breath on the back of my neck. "Kosovo" "Pardon, Fred?" "Kosovo" "Yeees, what about it?" "KOSOVO!" "Sorry, Fred, I have no idea what you're on about". At this he threw a paragraph of copy I'd written the previous week about a book on Kosovan refugees onto my desk, grunted "Picture'd be nice" and stalked off to make someone else's day a misery.

I spent most of Wednesday working on an article for the Independent. Normally, such a commission would be cause for jubilation, but not when the article is the obituary of someone I knew personally and liked immensely. I made initial contact with Hugh Mendl when I was working on my first book, Where Have All the Good Times Gone? Ray Horricks, producer of many fine jazz records and former colleague of Hugh's at Decca in the 1950s and 1960s, had given me his address with the instruction to go gently, as he was in his early 80s. As it transpired, Hugh outlived Ray by some margin. Hugh and I arranged to meet in Oxford, where he had studied before the Second World War, as he was up from Devon on a family visit. We talked, with a minidisc recorder running, about his 40 years as a record producer with Decca. Well, I say we talked. We talked, and talked, and talked. The transcript of the chat runs to 29 pages, and it's a fascinating document. In lieu of his professional diaries, discarded without his knowledge or consent when PolyGram took Decca over, it's probably the best front-row account of a remarkable company. When I get a chance, I'll post edited highlights. If he'd done nothing else, the fact that he produced Lonnie Donegan's 'Rock Island Line' would be enough to secure legendary status. However, he did a lot more. He also stepped aside from signing the Rolling Stones, allowing his colleague Dick Rowe to do so and rescue his reputation after carrying the can for Decca turning down the Beatles.

When I interview someone for my work, it's rare that a friendship ensues. This is not because I manage to offend or annoy my interviewees. I'm just grateful for any time that they can spare me, and, in most cases, that's the length of an interview. With Hugh and Ray, however, for some unknown reason, warm associations sprung up. Telephone conversations with Ray tended to be intense and serious, while calls to Hugh were marked by their hilarity. He was not merely a funny man, but also a very witty one, and his memory was pin-sharp to the end. A passing mention of the 1930s comedian Stanley Lupino, who recorded for Decca, caused Hugh to recall an old rhyme:

We know the Lupinos,
We go to their beanos.
We start off on cocktails,
And end up on Eno's.

About 25 years ago (well, just over 26 years ago - 23 May 1982 - if you insist on precision), I saw a TV Times billing for a Tales of the Unexpected in which Derek Jacobi played a Pied Piper figure. My 8-year-old self thought "that looks good" and then acknowledged that I'd never be allowed to stay up late enough. I wasn't, but the same episode turned up on ITV3 a few weeks back and, thankfully, I remembered to record it.


Finally settling down to view it after quarter of a century, the first thing that struck me was that the setting was incredibly familiar, but somehow totally different. Soon, I realised that it was my local railway station, Lowestoft, in the days when it had a roof, full-on blue enamel British Railways signs, a news stall and a full complement of staff. Jacobi arrives in a slam-door DMU (after much Googling, I think it's a class 105 - correction or confirmation received with equal gratitude) , in gaily-coloured cloak and top hat. He does a bit of sleight of hand when showing his ticket to the collector, then shows the children at the news stand a little magic before leaving the station and heading into town.

First stop is a market right outside the station. A change of road layout in the intervening 26 years means that this shot would be difficult to recreate today with a full film crew. However, with a small digital camera, it's a piece of cake. The young girls depicted in the modern shot were quite clearly wondering what this old git on the bike was doing taking pictures of a semi-derelict railway station.


The roofline of the old Tuttle's furniture store building can be made out in both shots, but the arched window on the station has long since been boarded up. Wetherspoon's applied years ago for planning permission to turn this part of the station into a pub, but nothing came of the scheme, for saddening reasons that have now become quite apparent, more of which a little later.


For a final bit of magic, Pied Derek visits a flower stall, and kisses the hand of the flower seller in Lowestoft, before saying goodbye to her in Norwich. No, seriously. The first picture is recognisably the exterior of Lowestoft station.









Then, by the magic of television (and as this was Anglia Television, it was very special magic indeed, ho yus), the same woman, the same flowers and the same cart are whisked in a single film splice to the centre of Britain's driest city.


After that, he prances around Norwich, goes past the Hog in Armour and kills Clive Swift, but that's mere window dressing. Lowestoft station is the star of the show. Waveney District Council, who, if they owned a brewery, would use it for the manufacture of blancmange, is all for curtailing the tracks 400 metres away from town, putting up a bus shelter and calling it a station. This would then allow the rather nice 1855 building in Station Square - which still has its 1950s blue enamel British Railways sign on the front - to be demolished for flats, shops and other things the town doesn't really need more of. This isn't some sleepy halt, after Ipswich, it's the second busiest railway station in Suffolk. According to the bobbins local quango 1st East, the new position is "at the heart of the town, with shops, offices and restaurants around it set off by a waterfront people can get to and not cut off by the railway line". If my calculations are right, the new station would be right by Lidl, which while a good shop, is not at the "heart of town". The station is already at the heart of town. The people of Lowestoft are being hoodwinked. Everyone will have further to walk to get their trains, the centre of town will be cut off, and the only ones benefiting will be the property developers and the Waveney District Council numpties that they're courting. National Rail is against it, the local railway provider is against it, and so's anyone with any sense locally. We should be campaigning for a new roof on the existing station, and a full restoration, not the further emasculation of the old place.

This time last week, I was in Cornwall, with several quarts of St Austell brewery's very fine Proper Job lapping around my back teeth. The occasion was the wedding of some friends and it all went off beautifully, despite the heavens opening during the marquee-bound ceremony, rendering the registrar inaudible. I didn't even look at the television once during my stay, which would have been unthinkable even 6 years ago. One of the great excitements of my childhood holidays was to see a different TV region's output and bring home different editions of the Radio Times and TV Times. We never went to the west country, so I never saw anything of Gus Honeybun until adulthood, when I was given some recordings by a similarly-afflicted friend, including this Ed Welchfest, which is, I think, the one that Phil Norman's on about in the comments.



However, I had a pretty good working knowledge of Granada and Anglia from holidays in Blackpool and Great Yarmouth, while visits to relatives in Portsmouth scratched my Southern/TVS itch. On a school trip to Wales in 1985, I peered through people's windows to get a glimpse of S4C.

I haven't changed, but television has. For one thing, I can see all of the different regional variations from my Suffolk sofa, thanks to digital satellite. For another, the regional variations aren't terribly varied anymore. A couple of decades ago, it was impossible to look at TV listings without noticing something being shown in a far off land called Tyne Tees or Grampian that appealed more than whatever Thames or LWT were pumping out at that moment in time. Either that or you'd missed the start of something, which was being shown an later in the evening on Yorkshire. All of this is without getting started on the in-vision continuity announcers, the best of whom - Redvers Kyle, Philip Elsmore, John Benson, Arfon Haines Davies - became inextricably linked with the areas they spoke to. What I wouldn't have given for access to all of the regions and a pile of E180s back then. Sadly, it's going to get even less varied and interesting, if ITV is allowed to merge regions, as it currently wishes.

Visiting my mother on the way back from Cornwall, I glanced at her Daily Mirror. The front page story concerned the furore over ex-TVS autocutie Fern Britton's gastric band. The choicest quote from the story: "One fan said 'This is the most sickening act of deception I think I have come across'.". It's a doozie on so many levels. Firstly, isn't it a bit of an over-reaction to be "sickened" by a mild porkie told by someone you've only ever seen on telly? Secondly, if it's the "most sickening act of deception you think [not quite sure, though, eh?] you've ever heard", you must have led a hell of a sheltered life. Thirdly, is it a more sickening act of deception than that perpetrated by the journalist who so obviously made you up, you anonymous non-existent twat? Although she omitted one important, nay crucial, detail, Fern Britton was telling the truth when she said that diet and exercise were the cause of her impressive weight loss. A gastric band is a head start, not the Victor Ludorum trophy. I've known people who've undergone the procedure and remained fat bastards simply because they managed, by dint of applied noshing, to re-build their gut to its pre-op capacity.

Elsewhere in this sorry rag (What's that sound? Oh it's Hugh Cudlipp rotating in his grave at warp speed) is the tale of a mother who shopped her son to the police when she found a knife under his bed. Fair enough, tough love, he'll be grateful one day, etc. Until that is you see the picture. It's a perfectly normal round ended piece of cutlery. The poor lad was probably just buttering toast in bed. It seems that in the modern world, and especially in the tabloids, for every action, there is an unequal but opposite over-reaction.

Years ago, when I was trying to fill the shoes of Giles Gordon by writing the bulk of the book trade gossip for Private Eye's 'Books and Bookmen' column, I carried on one of GG's many worthy crusades: providing the oxygen of publicity for Andrew Malcolm's laudable one-man campaign to get the charitable status and consequent tax exemption of the Oxford University Press revoked. Eventually, Ian Hislop got bored with the story, clearly believing that I'd become as obsessed as Andrew had, and stopped printing most of what I wrote on the subject.

Andrew remains a friend, and we correspond about our common interests: most often OUP and jazz. A package arrived from him this morning, containing photocopies from the Oxford Times which detail a small academic Oxford publisher's pleas for a level playing field, and the residents of the OUP-owned houses who are being told that they have no right to buy their homes. In response to the small publisher, the OUP says that it is part of the University, and thus charitable. The journalist observes rather tellingly that this information came from an email with a .com suffix, not ac.uk. In response to the tenants, OUP is saying tough luck, that's what you get when you live in a house owned by a charity. However, when the houses were built in the 1950s and 1960s, the OUP wasn't a charity. It didn't gain that status and unfair fiscal advantage until 1978. The responses of the OUP bigwigs seem increasingly desperate and rattled. Meanwhile, many ex-OUP executives who now work for commercial publishers would love nothing better than to see the removal of the charity status they once defended. Personally, I'd love to see Lewis and Hathaway take a break from murder investigations to look at the OUP. Preferably with an Alan Plater script.

Why am I not still writing the Eye's book trade gossip? To be honest, I became bored with publishers' shenanigans, which showed through in my copy, and I found it harder to get stories in. After I took a break to finish my history of light entertainment (out in November), I found that I missed neither the bother, nor the money, and I just stopped sending things in. There was also the faint sense that whatever I did, I was sweeping up after the Lord Mayor's show. Giles is missed.

What the hell. I've got the laptop on, so let's blog live through Eurosong:

7.59pm - To get viewers in the mood for a night of Euro-frivolity, a self-flagellating BBC1 announcement about Eurovision: Making Your Mind Up phone voting. Does anyone really care?

8pm - Ah, the Wogan opens with an announcement in Serbian. In Lowestoft, a bottle of Lidl fizz is opened. The Baileys (well, the Lidl ersatz Baileys - or Queen Margot creme liqueur, to give its full, glorious name) must wait a little. Wogan describes last year's winner (and this year's opener) as "a bad-tempered Jeanette Krankie". I prefer to think of her as a bonsai Keith from 'The Office'.

8.07pm - The hosts are compared to Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald. One for the teenagers, there.

8.09pm - Romania, represented by "Vlad the Impaler" and a Vladette, get us underway with an unholy alliance of 'I Believe I Can Fly' and 'The Winner Takes It All'.

8.13pm - Andy Abraham takes the stage. There remains no chance he'll come anywhere near the top, but he gives it his all and projects nicely across the chilly wastes of the arena. Wogan must bear responsibility for his presence, as he was cast out of 'A Song for Europe' but saved by the Togmeister's casting vote. A shame that the Trojan horse potential of the Romanian girl was overlooked, but there you are. Seeing the mimed backing (with commendable equal opps in the form of a girl guitarist) does, however, make me long for the days of the resident orchestra and the national conductor. With Hazlehurst having reached his coda, who'd be our national conductor now? Laurie Holloway, I'd imagine. Is Noel Kelehan still with us? To say nothing of Johnny Arthey.

A technical point. When will set designers realise that shimmery backgrounds turn low-bitrate digital transmissions into a pixellated heap of shit? At one point, it looked like Andy A was exploding. No bad thing, you might say. Also, we're on early this year. I suspect that by the time the voting starts, AA and his band will be very nicely relaxed. If not off their faces.

8.20pm - Germany take the floor with Dortmund's answer to the Sugababes. Not up to much, but a couple of years ago, when the Teutonic fraternity fielded a little girlie in a gingham dress singing a rather nice Preston (as Country and Western is known to all Wogan devotees) song, I thought they'd ace it, and they did almost as badly as us. So this'll probably do well. Hang on, I've missed one, haven't I? I'm trying to do this and make dinner. What do you want? Blood?

8.24pm - Armenia's entry with "the Mongolian nose flute and three dancing eejits". Armenia's main contributions to music have been the Chipmunks and 'Come On-A My House'. This is neither. Oh, and the great jazz producer George Avakian. He's Armenian. And lovely.

8.29pm - Bosnia & Herzegovina: a strange one. Like a cross between Tatu and Hot Gossip, only done by the National Theatre of Brent. Four pregnant knitting brides backing Scary Spice and Super Hans from 'Peep Show'. Still, when you've suffered as much as the Bosnians, it's good to let off steam.

8.33pm - Israel with one that Wogan likes almost as much as Andy Abraham. Dana International wrote it, and the bloke singing it looks a bit like she must have done before she opted for reassignment work. This reminds me of the time a friend of mine was insulted grievously by an arch transsexual. Recounting the tale, he announced that he wanted to "kick her in the knobcunt".

8.36pm - Finland rocks out. Ah well, why fuck with the formula?

8.40pm - Pablo Picasso does a number in a hat stolen from George Melly. Full Slavic knees-up ending ensues.

8.44pm - Poland goes ballad-style with the picture in Cat Deeley's attic.

8.48pm - Banging choon from Iceland. Dr Alban considers suing.

8.52pm - Turkey goes admirably ahead of the curve with some Happy Shopper alt rock. The lead singer has a Kurt Cobain model Fender Jagstang. Shapes are thrown, and Germany will guarantee at least 8 points.

8.58pm - At the advice of a compadre in the Cook'd and Bomb'd chatroom, I've pressed the red button and am now watching Portugal's pie-enhanced answer to Edith Piaf with subtitles. No sign of Boogaloo Stu. I hope he's like Disco Stu from the Simpsons.

9.02pm - Boogaloo Stu shows his hand. Not that I'd wish to shake it, for fear of where it's been. He thinks he's Quentin Crisp, but he's really Graham Norton's less-talented cousin with the hair of Mollie Sugden. And here we go with Latvia, updating George Harrison's closing number from the 1975 'Rutland Weekend Television' Christmas special. Boogaloo Stu doesn't like the pirate act. Funny. I thought he'd like his screen covered in seamen.

9.07pm - Is Sweden meant to be that colour? Ah, it's a lighting effect. I was going to tell her to call NHS Direct pronto.

9.10pm - Denmark is in the area. I know why I like it now, as I sing "Wouldn't it be nice to get on wiv me neighbours?" over the intro. Mrs Cheeseford also spots the theme from 'Sesame Street'. By George, she's got it. Whoever it's stolen from, if that doesn't do well, the Eurovision is a busted flush.

9.14pm - Time for Georgia. The nation that gave us Katie Melua. They're not increasing the value of their shitty legacy with this.

9.18pm - Bonnie Anilorac gives us the Ukraine entry, with men in boxes. As a devotee of Sam Smith's pubs when I'm in London, 'man in the box' means Ayingerbrau lager, the pump for which used to be a perspex cube containing a jolly Tyrolean gent. Having now had the equivalent of several pints, I can see that this might do well. It's got a good beat, and she's a comely wench.

9.21pm - "I am not a professional host" says the host. Don't invite criticism, old badger. Wogan asks "Why do they do this?", referring to the long interludes where the hosts have to fill. The answer is that it allows commercial European TV networks to get their ads in, as any fule kno.

9.22pm - Sebastian Tellier for France. Bearded backing singers in black. Bearded lead singer in silver makes his entrance in a golf cart, holding a transparent globe. Air and Phoenix meet Jarvis Cocker = too good for Eurovision? Who cares? This is marvy.

9.27pm - Joe Absolom sings 'Confide in Me' by Kylie, with a pair of furry wings on his back and his nadgers in a vice. Meanwhile, Ramon Tikaram pours Double Diamond on a recumbent female. Azerbaijan thinks this is the way forward. Your mileage may vary. Mine does.

9.30pm - Greece gives us her Secret Combination. I didn't know they still made chastity belts. Not my favourite, but memorable and potentially a winner.

9.35pm - Why are Spain fielding Lee Cornes in one of Devo's cast-off plastic wigs speaking the Seville telephone directory to the beat of the Macarena? Because they can.

9.38pm - Serbia will get a standing ovation from the hometown crowd, but it's just the Asda Smart Price Enya really.

9.41pm - James Lance makes a surprise appearance for Russia. Not as surprising as Chris 'Hey Look That's Me!' Harris on backing vocals and dance moves. Meh.

9.45pm - The last entry. How time flies. Norway fields Janine Butcher singing Amy Winehouse. The middle female backing singer is not a woman. Actually, this works. I can go for this. That's the final nail in Norway's coffin, then.

The interval approacheth. In 1977, we offered Acker Bilk. In 1988, the Irish fielded the Hothouse Flowers, and made them in the process. What can Serbia give us? We wait and we wonder.

10.20pm - So we got the Serbian Temperance Seven. Bloody hell. Svante Stockselius - Eurovision mastermind - is the Swedish doppelganger of Jim Moir, the BBC's last great LE supremo and floor manager on the 1968 contest. We gave Greece 12 points? How? Why? What? When?

10.31pm - San Marino rescue the UK from 'nul pwan' hell, thus making up for pissing on us in international football once about 15 years ago. Cleavage alert: the Israeli presenter really should have pushed them together or worn a less revealing dress.

10.35pm - Wogan accuses the Moldovan vote presenter of being pissed. Which would be richly hypocritical if not for the fact that septuagenarian Irishmen can hold their Baileys.

10.40pm - Denmark gets a territorial 12 points from Norway, but that's fine by me. However, they gave their 10 to Bosnia, which brought a "you must be joking" from Wogan. I can only agree.

10.48pm - I know she was saying 'sorry', but for a minute then, the Czech presenter sounded like she was awarding 10 points to Surrey.

10.54pm - Malta having failed to give any points to the UK, Ireland make up for it with an 8. The 10 and 12 go to Poland and Latvia, both admirably obscure choices for such rich praise. Hurrah for the Irish.

11.07pm - James Lance wins. At least it wasn't Greece. Kevin Bishop is retiring. Is Wogan? He's dropping heavy hints that it might be his last time, and suggesting that the western Europeans needn't bother in future. With the result decided, he and Ken Bruce are off to get even more smashed. It's a tradition, and one I endorse fully.

11.16pm - BBC News. Is it Jane Hill? Must be. She's a known Eurovision fanatic and also rather lovely.

Despite being straight, I've loved the Eurovision Song Contest since childhood. Eurosong remains a highlight of my year, tiding me over amply between General Election nights with the Dimblebys - my other great long-haul broadcasting enthusiasm. Having watched both semi-finals, I was peeved but not surprised to see Dustin the Turkey get knocked out. The song (and I'm being uncommonly generous by classifying it such) was crap, but it would have been glorious to hear Sir Tel's reaction to the line about the authenticity of his tonsure.

Wogan's detractors, of whom I am not one, say that he just moans about every entry these days and is obviously pissed throughout. Well, yes. And that's the charm of the Wogan commentary. Incidentally, having pressed him on the matter at an Oldie function, I can confirm that he and Ken Bruce each take a bottle of Baileys into the commentary box with them. I will be joining them from the comfort of my sofa.

To the songs. Andy Abraham, despite coming from a fine musical dynasty (He is the Great Gonzo's son, isn't he?), hasn't got a cat in hell's chance. Political voting is partially responsible. We won in 1997, 2 days after the Labour government got in. I remain convinced that a large part of the success was Europe saying thank you for ditching the Eurosceptic Tories. We started doing very badly in 2003. Jemini's inability to carry a tune in a bucket must shoulder part of the blame, but our forced entry into the middle east can't have helped. As long as that continues, we're screwed. However, I digress. Captain Beaky's number would have been a minor dancefloor hit in the early 1990s among the dance round your handbag brigade, but it ain't Eurosong. Our only hopes in A Song for Europe (yes, I know it was called Eurovision: Your Decision this year, but it's A Song for Europe and always will be) were Michelle Gayle and the Romanian girl from How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria. Neither would have won in Belgrade, but Gayle's Woooooh! (sp) was suitably simple-minded, and the wannabe Julie Andrews would have picked up enough eastern bloc solidarity votes to keep us off the floor of the scoreboard. Instead, we're on for minimal points, but not nul. Abraham's selection is encouraging in one sense, though. We seem to have grasped that the other competing nations don't regard the whole affair as a big gay joke like what we do. Scooch were doomed to failure, as innuendoes about sucking a Fisherman's Friend and bags of salted nuts don't really translate that well.

I'm going to refrain from forecasting the winner, as I haven't seen all of the final entries yet, but if Denmark and France don't finish in respectable positions, I'll campaign for the EBU to be dismantled.





The last time we won, the whole shebang was masterminded by Jonathan King, who's been ruffling feathers in recent weeks with Vile Pervert, the musical he's written and performed about his arrest, trial and conviction. My old mate James Masterton has already written most eloquently about VP, but I thought I'd add my support to the enterprise, for what it's worth. JK divides opinion violently. In the record industry, he's recognised as a very smart operator and one of the shrewdest judges of what makes a hit record. In the wider world, however, he was known primarily as a purveyor of dubious novelty songs. To many, this made his trial an open and shut case, with most punters seemingly unsure which is worse - Una Paloma Blanca or paedophilia.

He was convicted for having sex with 14 and 15 year-old boys. If he did that, his jail term was utterly deserved. However, he claims he didn't, and is taking his case to the European Court of Human Rights. Obviously, the Mandy Rice-Davies reflex is the natural response, but if you can spare 90 minutes, Vile Pervert casts enough doubt on the motives and methods of the prosecution in particular and the judiciary as a whole to be worthy of wider notice. It's also very funny, and most of the songs are superb. I'd argue that 'Wilde About Boys' isn't going to help his case as much as he might think, but the rest combine serious polemic with hooks you could hang a Crombie overcoat on.

Even if he was guilty of the crimes for which he was convicted, let's have a level playing field (possibly not the right term in the circumstances, but what the hell). Rock gods like Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page are documented as having had wildly inappropriate relations with girls of the same age as King's male accusers. The only difference is that the girls in question never pressed charges. However, the fact remains that they were as unable, in the eyes of the law, to give consent as King's accusers would have been at the time they claim he had sex with them. And yet, I didn't hear of any 'burn the paedo' protests at the O2 when Led Zep reconvened. Sex with minors is sex with minors, whether you're 'rock and fucking roll' or not.

If, after you've watched it, you still believe King to be as guilty as hell, fine. At least you've surveyed the evidence and reached your own conclusion. However, if you've ever made unshakeable pronouncements on the guilt or innocence of an individual, you owe it to yourself to watch it.

Sticking with election broadcasts, I was disappointed to see Dimbleby Major winding up last week's BBC1 coverage of the locals at 3.30-ish, a good 2.5 hours before he was scheduled to clock off. I don't pay my licence fee so that he can slack. I was good to go right up to Breakfast, so should he have been. Jeremy Vine had to stay up, providing increasingly demented illustrations of voting trends as the dawn broke, although as I turned in, he'd abandoned the Quick Draw McGraw 'howdy pardner' cobblers and was just rushing around a lot, enthusing wildly. Jeremy, old son, a word of advice. Never, ever attempt a cowboy accent again. Remember you're from Epsom, and we Epsom boys can't pull that sort of thing off convincingly. Darn Tooting.

Occasionally, I hear something on television or radio and wonder to myself "Did that person really say what I think they just said?". So it is with a clip from GMTV the morning after the 2005 general election. Like the proper anorak that I am, I recorded both the BBC1 and ITV coverage - 2 VCRs, 2 long play E240s, job done. While transferring all 16 hours of actuality to DVD the other day, I chanced upon John Stapleton calling Tony Blair "Mr Blower" and then tripping over the name of a gay Labour MP who had lost his seat (please, no, stop it). After 5 replays, I'm convinced that Stapleton really does say what I think he says. Watch the clip, wait until 1:40 and see what you think. Must have been a long night chez Stapleton.

There's not much else to say but 'Oh fuck'. RIP Humph.

My status as a serious researcher of weighty topics has just led me to look up the 1970s Yorkshire TV children's show Animal Kwackers on Wikipedia. What I found knocked me sideways. The original Bongo was, believe it or not, Geoff Nicholls, the lugubrious Northern drum tutor on Rockschool. Now, I watched the whole run of Rockschool on BBC2 back in the day, and my main memory is of lusting after Nicholls' rather lovely green Yamaha 9000 kit. At no point do I remember him explaining the whys and wherefores of providing a solid backbeat while wearing an outsize dog suit. Nor do I recall Deidre Cartwright explaining how to grip a tremolo arm firmly while wearing a nylon lion's paw, or Henry Thomas showing how to play slap bass without opposable thumbs. The producers missed a trick there, I reckon.

You can't keep a good title down, as I discovered when I chanced upon a March 1982 edition of the Radio Times (East region, 6-12 March 1982, to be precise - printed on that rarse clart that RT devotees of a certain age will remember only too well) during a recent stocktake at Schloss Cheeseford. Just over 26 years ago, BBC2 viewers were watching something called The Apprentice.

However, in place of ritual humiliation by misanthropes with a line in lo-fi hi-fi, those pre-Falklands War viewers were treated to a gentle explanation of what it meant to be a 16 year-old trainee undertaker. The trouble with leafing through old TV listings is that I now want, rather desperately, to see the programme. Of course, there's an outside chance it's in the clump of Betamax tapes I bought off eBay ages ago. I've already found an obscure and rather lovely Peter Greenaway documentary about lightning strike survivors, made for Thames in 1980. If nothing else, it illustrated how the broadcasting landscape has changed. Complete with Michael Nyman score and clever, clever captions and editing, it screams early Channel 4 or current BBC4, but it went out on ITV.

Being as poor as a church mouse, I've become rather good at making things for myself. I bake my own bread, I grow my own seasonal veg, I brew my own beer, and my kitchen is constructed entirely of bits that friends had going spare. In many ways, Mrs Cheeseford and I are, to all intents and purposes, Tom and Barbara Good. My proudest achievement so far has been installing a Belfast sink that had been rescued from a friend's garden and then creating a worktop and surround using surplus oak from another friend's very expensive installation.

The Belfast sink proved its worth today when I began the first batch of beer since it was put in place. It replaced a nasty brown plastic sink, the shallowness of which meant I couldn't top up the fermenting vessel directly from the tap. In contrast, the new sink took the vessel without a murmur, saving me the bother of relaying the water to the bucket using a large jug. Anyone wondering why I didn't use a hose will be unaware of the sterilisation that has to be performed on all brewing equipment - tedious, but necessary if you don't want your brew to taste and smell of old socks.

Anyway, in a week or so, this lot (36 pints' worth of Woodforde's excellent Nelson's Revenge, using a kit purchased from Mr Alexander Carr's rather wonderful Market Place Wine Shop in Halesworth - 01986872563) will be ready for bottling, and I'll report back on the ale's progress.

Being a freelance type, I know far too much about daytime television. I hate most of it and the personalities involved. If Lorne Spicer ever turned up on my doorstep asking to see what I've got in my attic, I'd show her the redundant and very heavy Sony Betamax machine that lives up there by dropping it on her head.

I thought Trisha Goddard was the worst person ever to appear on television, but then along comes Jeremy Kyle to set the bar so low that a rattlesnake couldn't limbo-dance under it. 'Jezza' is very fond of telling the malcontents and, let's not mince words, attention-seeking scum appearing on his show, that their behaviour would be unacceptable "where I come from". Wherever it is, I wish he'd fuck off back there. And don't get me started on the Cuprinol-dipped wide boy that is David 'the Dame' Dickinson.

Despite all of this, I find it impossible to dislike Bargain Hunt's bow-tied presenter Tim Wonnacott. I don't make an appointment to view the show, but equally, if it's on, I don't throw macaroons at the screen. My lack of distaste for Wonnacott - who is, after all, just Dickinson with A levels - baffled me utterly until the other morning when the penny dropped. He is Basil Brush. Mode of dress, gap in front teeth, Terry-Thomas voice, all present and correct. And, of course, almost everyone loves Basil Brush.

UPDATE - 24/4/2008: the Betamax machine mentioned in this posting has now been disposed of at the Lowestoft recycling centre. Dropping it, and the remains of my two previous PCs, from a height of 15 feet onto a concrete floor was immensely satisfying. No flowers.

I saw a poster for a Pink Floyd tribute band earlier today, which bore a hell of an endorsement. "Possibly the best concert experience you will ever have", it said. Who was responsible for this encomium? According to the poster, it was "The BBC". Did the Corporation have a representative poll of its staff from the DG downwards, or are the band's management parlaying up a doubtless heartfelt tribute from a Radio Shropshire work experience student? I think we should be told.

I'm busy. Isn't everyone?

There must be something in the air. Shortly after The Urban Woo's computer went sideways, my own 4 year-old laptop decided to switch itself off terminally. After establishing that the power supply was fine, I worked out it was a motherboard replacement job and decided that it'd be cheaper and easier in the long run to get a fully-guaranteed refurb machine. So I did, and although the product description said the lid was pink, the pictures online did not convey how neon pink it truly was. However, I am secure enough in my masculinity to use a pink laptop in public - yea, even in Humanities 2 at the British Library - my eyes daring anyone to laugh, especially when it was comfortably less than £300.

It came installed with Windows Vista, about which I've heard various nightmare stories, but I decided to test it out for myself before believing them. The actual experience of using the new OS was relatively painless, but it was practically impossible to make the new machine join my existing wireless network and talk to the desktop machine in my office. As the ability to write on one machine and save the document on the other is a massive boon, both in terms of backing stuff up and working on the sofa while watching telly, I decided that I'd set up a dual-boot Vista/XP system, allowing me to carry on as I had before without dismissing Vista entirely. Dual-boots hold no fear for me, as I've run XP and Ubuntu on my desktop machine for a while now, and am fairly good with backups, so if anything went wrong, it was a question of going back to the start and using the recovery disc.

After reading various sets of instructions very carefully, I began the installation, partitioning the hard drive, etc. A few minutes into the installation, the machine rebooted, and hung on the Intel splash screen. I rebooted again. I tried it with the recovery disc I'd been instructed to make by the machine's manufacturers. Nothing happened. I turned to the desktop machine and searched for information on this make and model, finding that several attempting the same perfectly reasonable manoeuvre had been left with a machine that they couldn't restore to default settings, no matter how hard they tried.

At this point, I swallowed something hard and jagged, and rang PC World's 'TechGuys'. I knew this was a pointless exercise, because, while I'm not Sir Tim Berners-Lee, I have a certain amount of experience with computers, and usually find that I end up telling the helpdesk person what to do. No, not like that. Anyway, after telling me to turn it off and then on again (no, really), and then to try the same manoeuvre while holding in the F8 key, to no avail, they decided I needed the official recovery discs. I said I had one that I'd made on the machine when it worked. Ah no, I was informed, the official ones were better, somehow. However, as I'd tried to install a foreign OS, I would not be entitled to free recovery discs. I would have to ring an 0870 number and pay £55 for the official stuff. Very politely, I told TechGuy #1 that I had an allergy to premium rate phone lines, that I wasn't paying £55 for something that almost certainly wouldn't make a blind bit of difference, and that I would sail this ship alone, somehow. My suspicion that the 'official' recovery discs wouldn't be any better was confirmed when I loaded the home-brew recovery disc into my desktop machine and the boot process began without a hitch. It was the BIOS, the hard drive or the DVD drive.

The timing of the incident stank. There's a major project that I'm way behind with, but every time I tried to concentrate on that, the pink panther kept distracting me. There had to be a way through, past, round or over this problem without spending a relative fortune. Logic prevailed when I tried opening the BIOS on boot-up. It just hung after recognising the hard drive, so it was a recognition or driver issue, but as I had no way of getting past that point to reinstall drivers, I was stumped. A chink of light broke through on one of the support forums. A chap in the same position as me had reformatted the laptop hard drive in his desktop machine and installed XP from there before slotting it back into the laptop, with great success. Worth a punt, I thought, but, on opening the laptop, I saw that the hard drive was a SATA job, and I knew my desktop machine was IDE only. How about a USB/SATA interface? Fine, but all the ones I found at first were dangerously close in price to the dreaded recovery discs. As the whole point of recovery discs is to rescue your machine, no matter how fecked the hard drive is, I concluded that it was beyond reason to expect me to work around this issue, and I called the TechGuys again. TechGuy #2 went through the same script and tried to sell me 'official' recovery discs, but admitted defeat when I said that the disc I'd made worked in another machine. It sounded like a hardware problem, and an exchange was the best option. I rang customer services, who, slightly to my surprise, arranged to pick the machine up and give me a replacement. Peace of mind almost restored, I went back to work.

However, a nagging doubt remained. What if I could never install another OS on this machine? Wouldn't that be slightly limiting? In a fit of lateral thinking, I tried booting from the recovery disc with no hard drive present. I got past the splash screen to where I needed to be, but had no media in need of recovery. After another search on eBay, I found a SATA/IDE/OHMS/ATV/NTGB interface that practically allowed you to boil a kettle from a USB socket for under a tenner including post and packing. I ordered it, it arrived the next day, and enabled me to see that the laptop hard drive was functioning. I tried repartitioning and reformatting, but the laptop still couldn't see the drive, and was about to give up again when I discovered a crucial piece of information. SATA drives are hot-swappable - meaning that you can plug them into an already-running machine. So, I started the recovery disc with the hard drive out, and when the boot process was well underway inserted it. 25 minutes later, I had the machine back to how it was when it had arrived 4 days earlier. I rang PC World to tell them that they could cancel the courier. The pink panther was back. I now know that XP doesn't have any in-built support for SATA hard drives (hence the boot trouble), so I have to download some other McGuffin to make a successful installation possible. I don't have the stomach for that just yet, though. In the mean time, I'm learning to live with Vista's frankly shite networking, and have installed a dual boot of Ubuntu to show it who's boss.

The first person to say 'Buy a Mac' wins a free kick in the front bottom.

I was determined to stay well out of the chain letter book meme thing currently infesting bloggery, but when a man as nice and good as Matthew Rudd asks one to step up to the plate, only a real churl could refuse. The idea is to turn to page 123 of the book you're currently reading, count down three sentences, then reproduce the next five sentences. Five-Centres has made the whole thing more interesting by making people guess the book, so I'll follow his template. Interestingly, I don't think I'd guess this book from the following lines, but there are other passages elsewhere that would identify the author and title straight away:

"Faithful Unto Death was in the assembly room, and I frequently had a chance to examine it. At nine on the dot, while we all stood in makeshift rows under the supervision of one of the mistresses, Miss Yates would make her entrance. 'Good morning, everybody,' she would say briskly, and we in our piping and ragged trebles, but with all the enthusiasm which children experience in fulfilling a ritual, would answer her in unison: 'Good morning, Miss Yates.' What then took place was some form of non-denominational prayers, for several of the pupils were Jewish or Catholic, followed by a hymn, usually 'All things Bright and Beautiful' accompanied by Miss Gibbons or Miss Edwards at the upright piano.

It was seldom however that this daily scenario went through without a hitch."

If you want clues, it's from one of the four massively entertaining volumes of autobiography written by a cultural all-rounder who died recently.

I now nominate James Masterton, Adam Macqueen and Richard Lewis.

I now own a David Hockney original. That's it on the left, embodying the great artist's current crusade against the absurdities of the nanny state. I can't resist a good badge, and when I saw others at the Oldie of the Year awards yesterday wearing theirs, I quite shamelessly bounded up to him and asked if he had any left. Thankfully he did, and I shall now wear it with great pride.

He was there to receive the Gasper of the Year award for his vocal opposition to the smoking ban. I was there on the strength of my occasional modest contributions to the Oldie's pages, and, as ever, I was profoundly glad that I had been invited. How else would a herbert down from Lowestoft on a £6 apex super advance ticket get to flirt outrageously with the utterly wonderful Moira Stuart, be reduced to tears of laughter by the equally fab Kate Adie or sit six feet away from Peter O'Toole as he held forth on rugby and the US election? Or to witness Stanley Baxter slaying the whole room with the best, funniest acceptance speech I've heard in 10 years of attending the do.

However, the great thrill of my day occurred in the pub before the do, when Barry Cryer - who, after 10 years of bumping into each other at Oldie functions and on licensed premises, I'm lucky enough to regard as a friend - introduced me to David Nobbs. Comedy writers have been my heroes ever since I first learned to read programme credits, and there aren't many who can match those two for quality and quantity of material. Baz doesn't keep a blog, but David Nobbs does, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

As Brian Matthew's Sounds of the Sixties is to my Saturday morning, so TV Burp is to Saturday teatime. It's the only way I am ever likely to have any contact with, or knowledge of, BBC3's Freaky Eaters, which has become one of Harry's favourite Aunt Sallies (When Harry Hill Met Aunt Sally? Is Eunice Tubbs available? Commission x 13). Last night's Burp featured a Freaky Eaters clip in which a woman who ate only bread, tinned spaghetti hoops and tomato soup threw her entire supply away, opening each tin and emptying it into the bin. Now, I know it wouldn't have made for 'great telly' (ahem), but how much less wasteful and offensive it would have been to give the bread to the ducks and take all the tins to a local homeless shelter, or just hide them in the loft until harvest festival. Silly cow and silly fucking 'documentary' makers.

Listening to 'your old mate' Brian Matthew's Sounds of the Sixties on the Light Programme, as is my Saturday morning wont, I realised that Heather Mills McCartney missed a trick in her abortive campaign to turn the world against her ex-husband. Now, I like Macca and find it extremely hard to believe that he ever showed Linda his hairy back hand. In this, I am far from alone, with the result that many now think of HMMcC as a lying psycho nutjob. If, however, she had said "Listen to 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer'. A person who concocts such a dark, depraved fantasy is capable of anything. I rest my case", it might well have worked. As Brian Matthew played it, I was reminded what a truly horrible little song it is, its twee bippety boppety nursery rhyme backing track masking the brutal toolkit homicide lyrics. Bugger 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' being all about acid, or Charlie Manson claiming that everything he did was motivated by 'Helter Skelter'. Did Peter Sutcliffe have a well-worn copy of Abbey Road?

As a fully paid-up geek, I love modern communications technology, but, like everything, it has a downside. Spam email is one of the less agreeable aspects of the whole shooting match, although filtering and a panoply of different email addresses for different purposes help keep its incursion into my busy, exciting life to a minimum. Sometimes, it can even be amusing, such as when some herbert claiming to be Peregrine Worsthorne tried to sell me penis extension surgery.

The other day, I started receiving spam that stood out from the herd of automated cock enhancers. For one thing, it arrived on an email address that I use exclusively for mailing lists, which never normally lets spam through. It also addressed me by name, which is something the auto-stuff never does. By an astonishing coincidence, the first message arrived less than 24 hours after a disagreement with an individual on a mailing list. Could this aggrieved person possibly have entered my name and email address into any number of bobbins self-help websites as revenge for our little set-to? As the person in question claims to be a mature professional with a young family (and a swift Google search supports the claims - the footprint many of us leave online scares me), I'd like to think they were above such antics, but the circumstantial evidence seems to point in that direction.

If so, what were they hoping to achieve? If it was to disrupt my life, they've failed. I have a couple more emails to divert to the trash folder each morning. Boo hoo. If it was to get back at me anonymously, they've failed, because they don't seem to have covered their tracks very well. The only way they'll have succeeded is if they wanted to leave me with the impression that they were a vindictive idiot, but I can't bring myself to believe that anyone would actually want to be thought of as such.

The stories of cruelty and abuse emerging from investigations at the former Haut de la Garenne children's home in Jersey are terrible and harrowing, so I feel dreadful pangs of guilt when I have to stifle a laugh every time a report is broadcast. What's so funny? Well, the police chief in charge of the excavations is called Lenny Harper. Every time his name is mentioned, I expect a pipe-cleaner thin Scottish woman with spiky hair to pop up and greet the newsreader back in the studio as 'Noel'.

Thursday was a bit crap, one way and another. I had a job interview in the morning, at which the panel spent far too long asking me about something I had pronounced myself largely ignorant of on the application form. When the expected 'No thanks' phone call came in the afternoon, explaining that my deficiencies in this particular area were what had cost me the plum role, I was momentarily too flabbergasted to do anything but say "Thanks for letting me know so quickly" and hang up. After a moment's consideration, I sent a moderately fuming e-mail to my interviewer explaining that these deficiencies were obvious from the application, and that they had wasted an hour of my time and their time bringing me in for an interview. I've been freelance for 6 years now, and this was only my second job interview in a decade, so maybe I'm just out of practice. Maybe it's simply down to making the right noises, and that's something I was never too keen on or good at. Or could it possibly be that some people in recruitment have trouble with reading comprehension? Who knows? Who cares?

Thank heavens, then, for Friday. Schloss Barfe is the home of redundant technology, and, alongside the impressive array of open-reel tape recorders, sits a Sanyo VTC5000 Betamax VCR. Well, I say Betamax. Being a Sanyo, it's more properly known as a Betacord machine. For a brief period in 1982, shortly before VHS was declared Victor Ludorum, it was the best-selling VCR in the British Isles. Rather perversely, it took until early 2005 for me to go Betamax, after I found some interesting tapes in a charity shop - we were a VHS family from the moment we entered the VCR market in 1984. I found a chap selling reconditioned machines on eBay, who, on closer inspection, turned out to live around the corner. I bought one, got it home, transferred my tapes and then bought a further job lot of tapes off eBay. I got part way into this hoard when the machine stopped working. I took it to my local TV repair shop, who claimed that it was caused by a part that was no longer made, and that they'd be happy to dispose of the machine for me. Being a hoarder and a naturally suspicious type, I put the machine in the loft and forgot about it. Just recently, however, I posted a message on a Beta enthusiasts' site, asking for any thoughts on what might be wrong with my machine. The chap who sold it to me got in contact, clearly regarding any non-functioning Sanyo machines as a challenge and a personal insult. Within a week, he had it working again. The obsolete part story was proved to be utter balls - it was no more or less than a screw-fixed catch in the loading mechanism that had worked loose. Being a perfectionist, he also checked that just about everything else was as it should be too, with the result that it's now running better than ever. To him, and enthusiasts like him who keep these machines running, the hat is well and truly doffed.

Now, throughout the years, I had heard the Betamax faithful saying that the picture quality knocked VHS into a cocked hat. Natural suspicion came into play again. Having seen quite a few Betamax tapes, I'd thought the picture quality to be about the same as VHS. However, I'd never seen a fresh recording on a new, clean tape. When I came into possession of some factory-fresh Scotch L750s, through the kindness of a Mausoleum Club member who wanted to reclaim some space at his house, I thought I'd make a test recording. The results were astonishing. When I still used VHS as a recording medium, I always thought my Sharp VCR lived up to its name in terms of picture quality. Despite being 20 years older and having spent nearly a year in a loft, the Sanyo - without the advantage of any of the picture processing circuitry present in the Sharp - matched it. The better system lost the format war, and the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD stand-off suggests that the lessons of the VHS/Betamax pagga haven't been learned properly.

Anyway, on Friday, as an accompaniment to work, I thought I'd dip into the Betamax box and see what I could find. Most of the tapes were, very helpfully, labelled, and most have off-air recordings of feature films that you can now find just about anywhere on DVD. However, a couple of tapes were unmarked. Here a 1992 edition of Horizon, there a 1988 Tom Bower documentary on the US bombing of Libya, everywhere some nice BBC1 globes and things from the early days of UK satellite TV, including a 1994 edition of Trivial Pursuit with Tony Slattery taped off the Family Channel. All fairly interesting, particularly the Slattery game show, in which he is quite clearly on the verge of the breakdown that took him off telly for far too long, making jokes that probably weren't actually jokes about presenting the show under the influence of horse tranquilisers. Meeting the contestants and confronting them with interesting facts about their lives, he reveals that one chap had a dog who jumped off Beachy Head. Where exactly does one go from there in a light daytime quiz show? It's like (the unassailably wonderful) William G Stewart introducing a 'Fifteen to One' punter with the line "So tell us about the time you murdered a nun".

As interesting as my finds were, I was disappointed to find no proper old-fashioned light entertainment shows. In went another unlabelled tape. "Here we go. It'll be a 1987 Panorama on Northern Ireland or a copy of The Music Man that cuts off 5 minutes from the end," I thought. Suddenly, I was greeted with music that said 'This is a variety show' and the face of Roy Hudd. I tempered my hilarity with a modicum of reserve. Years of playing back old, unlabelled tapes has taught me that the moment you find something you actually want to watch, it will cut off after 5 minutes in favour of 3 hours of snooker 'highlights' from the Reading Hexagon, with David Vine. Fortunately, Barfe's 2nd Law of Archival Playback (and for that matter, the 1st, which states that anything you really want to see will have become mildewed and may bugger up your heads) was not in operation on this occasion. I found that I had four complete editions of a 1984 series called Halls of Fame, in which the great Hudd visited a different variety theatre each week, talked about the venue's history and introduced a rip-snorting bill of entertainment excellence. From the Victoria Palace, we had June Whitfield singing Marie Lloyd (Very well too - is there no end to her versatility?), Chas and Dave singing Harry Champion and Max Bygraves giving of himself. Bristol Hippodrome brought forth Acker Bilk and Dame Anna Neagle. Sunderland Empire gave us Alan Price and 'the little waster', Bobby Thompson. This hoard of jollity arrived just in time to warrant a mention in my history of light entertainment, which is currently going through the corrective process.

The best was saved until last, though. In the final show on the tape, from His Majesty's in Aberdeen, there was a whole glorious spot from Chic Murray, Billy Connolly's mentor and the greatest 'droll' comedian who ever walked the earth. I had left the tape transferring, with the plan of watching it later, but at the mention of Murray's name, I just sat down with a cup of tea, and tried to avoid dampening the sofa. In a spirit of show, don't tell, here's what I found:



So, thank you to Betamax, Barry Bevins of BBC Manchester - who produced the series, Roy Hudd and Chic Murray for rescuing me from the doldrums.

Just when I was about to post about the social menace of the MP3 phone, the Urban Woo beats me to it. They are truly horrible things. I fear I'm part of the last generation to place a premium on high-fidelity audio. Moving from vinyl (yes, I know the arguments about audiophile vinyl, but how many teenagers can afford a Bang and Olufsen rig?) and cassette to CD was a moment of glorious liberation, but the yoof of today seem happy with over-compressed MP3s played through tiny, tinny speakers that make Radio Luxembourg on medium wave sound like a wideband Decca blue-back stereo pressing. This is just one of many ways in which they are being palmed off with fool's gold, IMHO. The Mighty Boosh, anyone?

Anyway, yesterday, I got on the Lowestoft train at Norwich, and saw a young chap trying to make an ill-fitting window stop clattering in sympathetic resonance with the engine. Helpfully, I stepped forward and wedged a redundant ticket in between the window and the frame, rendering it silent. The young chap then thanked me by playing tuneless R&B on his phone nearly all the way home. If I'd been on my own, I'd have challenged him, but I had a small, defenceless and rather beautiful dog with me, so, for her safety, I said nothing. Eventually, somewhere around Reedham swing bridge, the ticket worked loose, and the window started banging away again. Pitted against the MP3 phone, it truly was the lesser of two evils, despite being considerably louder. The noise made matey boy turn his crap music off, mercifully. The truly galling thing is that I had with me several hours of Steely Dan and Donald Fagen, plus a pair of decent headphones, which let very little external noise in, and even less of my music out into the general atmos. If only the batteries hadn't given out on the London-Norwich portion of the journey. I shall be operating the patented Masterton sing-along method in future.

On another occasion, I did say something. Heading to London, a man old enough to know far better got on at Ipswich and proceeded to watch DVDs without headphones. I stepped forward and asked him if he minded using headphones. His reply was stunning in its lack of logic: "It's not a Walkman". My reply was stern: "I don't care what it is. Use headphones or turn it off". He came back with "Am I allowed to talk?", to which I answered "You got on the train on your own. Nobody in this carriage wants to talk to you. If you want to talk to yourself, and you look like the sort of person who might, I can't stop you". As he got off the train at Colchester, he gave me a defiant 'You're a very lucky man' look. As he was about 8 stone soaking wet and a good 5 inches shorter than me, all I could do was laugh. Once he was off the train, another passenger thanked me for intervening, but it's come to a pretty pass where decent people doing nothing is the default position.

I've paid farewell to the London Library. My membership lapses at the end of the month and I've returned all of the books I had on loan. The parting is not without sadness. I've spent a fair bit of time there over the last 5 years, working first on my history of the record industry, then on my soon-come history of light entertainment. Their collection is unrivalled, except by the British Library, but the London Library lets you take the books home, sometimes for years on end. The atmosphere is wonderful if you like to be surrounded by dark wood, leather-bound books and snoring gentlemen with hairy ears. It's not just a haven for bookish buffers, though. There's free wi-fi access for members too. So, why am I giving up on such riches? As you may be aware, the subscription has gone up 80% from £210 a year to £375, to pay for an extension to the building. It sounds a lot, but it's still cheap for a base in the centre of London with hot and cold running wi-fi, a lot of wonderful books, and an iron-floored shelving stack that sounds like the gantries of HMP Slade when you walk through it. I'm just spending less and less time in London these days, and I don't have £375 to spare at the moment. Even before the rise, I was umming and ahhing about whether I could justify the outlay. The rise made my mind up for me, accompanied by an astonishingly puffed-up circular from Sir Tom Stoppard justifying the rise and suggesting that anyone who disagreed was a twat. I'm hoping that my exile is a temporary one, as I can't think of a better waste of £375, but until I have that much to pee up the wall, Sir Tom will have to do without me.

Like many television enthusiasts (all male, obviously), I have a tendency to record programmes that I never get around to watching. In my case, it's simple forgetfulness and lack of time. One close relative, however, uses 3 VCRs to record a vast amount of material, almost all of which is then labelled and filed, unviewed. Only when others ask him 'did you see...?' or a laudatory review appears does he dig the tape out and watch the programme. If the programme passes without comment from trusted advisors, the tape is re-used and so the cycle begins again. It's a quite brilliant system in a way, almost like an Ofcom logging operation, and in the days before BitTorrent, he was a reliable source of programmes we'd missed. I'm in the process of educating him on the subject of hard drive-based PVRs, which I suspect he'll adopt with gusto once the initial learning curve is negotiated.

For my own part, last week, I had a sudden urge to watch the 1964 'Wednesday Play' production of Jean-Paul Sartre's 'Huis Clos', translated as 'In Camera'. This play is best known for being the origin of the phrase "Hell is other people". I found it on a disc with a 1963 BBC West regional documentary about Swindon Town FC, directed by John Boorman. Both were recorded during BBC4's 'Summer in the 60s' season in June 2004, so it's only taken me 3 and a half years to get around to watching them. Back then, I didn't even have a DVD recorder, so they've been transferred from VHS, still unwatched, at some point since then. Strange how the archival mentality works.

Anyway, as my expertise is comedy not drama, I'll spare you a review of the play. Suffice it to say that I was gripped, that Harold Pinter - in a rare acting role - was superbly sinister, and that I'm slightly in love with Catherine Woodville, the future Mrs Patrick Macnee, who played a flakey socialite with a dark past. The one thing that I feel does need a special mention, however, is, rather aptly, considering the title of the production, the camera work. As with most drama of its era, it's a multi-camera studio production. Moreover, it's from the days before lightweight shoulder-mounted cameras. Every camera used will have been a cumbersome valve-filled box from the factory of EMI or Marconi (probably the latter, for reasons explained by Martin Kempton just below here), on a gas-operated Vinten pedestal with the footprint of a woolly mammoth. And yet, everything moves in a fluid, graceful manner, while one shot would appear to be impossible. At one point, Woodville walks around and around in a circle followed by a camera. A revolution or so would have been easy enough, but sooner or later, the camera cable would have got caught up and forced a jerking halt. There's evidence of this on a 1970s edition of 'Magpie' where a similar shot is attempted with the lovely Susan Stranks. Very soon, the cameraman is forced to admit that this is as far as he can go. In this play, however, the camera goes way past that point. How the hell was it done? Well, according to Bernie Newnham, ex-BBC cameraman and producer, this shot became a legend in Corporation circles, and was the work of his mentor, Jim Atkinson. The camera was hung from above, with the cable also hanging from above, thus not trailing on the floor and getting wound around the pedestal. Another of Jim Atkinson's trainees has since offered an alternative technique: the shot was done using a standard floor pedestal, with the cable arranged around it so that it unwound rather than tightened. Either way, I'm not surprised it became a legend. It's still a jaw-dropping piece of craftsmanship, however it was done. UPDATE: 18/2/2008 - Bernie has located someone who worked on the play, and the definitive answer is that the camera was on a conventional pedestal, but the cable was suspended from the lighting grid.

Bernie's excellent Tech Ops site (broadcasting history as written by the infantry rather than the generals, which is always worth hearing) has a page on Jim Atkinson, and I present the clip in question here.

It pains me to admit this, but I've become jaded, musically speaking. This chap, who once pored over release schedules and went to the record shop most Mondays to pick up something farm-fresh, hasn't bought anything new for ages. Don't get me wrong. I still love a nice tune, but there's just nothing being made today that makes me go 'bloody hell, who's that?'. The next CD I buy (do you want woofers and tweeters with it, grandad?) will be something from the Sensational Alex Harvey Band catalogue, to follow up on my recent purchase of a 'best of' compilation (although how it can claim to be a 'best of' without including 'Boston Tea Party' is beyond my comprehension), but I'm currently undecided which one to go for.

The first problem is that when I hear something 'new', I can usually pick it apart and identify all of the influences. In particular, it rankles that so many bands have done well by sounding like a pale imitation of XTC or Squeeze, while either band has yet to receive even 1/10 of the kudos and royalties they deserve. I admit that it's always been the case. My mum would come into my bedroom (never bloody well knocking, until a traumatic incident made her very punctilious in this regard) asking "Is this Three Dog Night?" when I was listening to something I thought was wonderfully original. I've just crossed over to the other side of the fence.

Secondly, there seem to be a lot of artists who have become successful not by exciting anyone's passions, but by being acceptable to a large enough number. I'm sure it's always been the case, but it just seems more obvious now. Even the wock and woll webels are crushingly ordinary. The Kaiser Chiefs seem to be about the best we can manage, but the strongest reaction they provoke in me is 'meh'. Does anyone really get passionate about them, or have they become big because nobody really minds them? Meanwhile, who let that mumbling bore Jack Johnson - for people who find John Mayer a bit too edgy - become famous?

I'm not asking for uneasy listening. As I get older, I find myself unapologetically reaching for my Dean Friedman (Maturity = realising what a bloody clever song 'Lucky Stars' truly is, wisdom = realising that he did loads of other songs that were even better on that album alone, including 'The Deli Song (Corned Beef on Wry)' and 'Rocking Chair'), Andrew Gold ('Hope You Feel Good' from 'What's Wrong With This Picture?' being a real stand-out) and Rupert Holmes (I'll see your 'Pina Colada Song' and raise you the sublime, cynical 'Him' - complete with 'my Mini-Moog's broken' comb and paper solo) records. Even Peter Skellern. Stuff like 'You're a Lady', 'Hold On To Love' and 'Our Jackie's Getting Married' is quirky pop of the highest order. I can take or leave the faux-1930s stuff he did later - it's nice, but it comes across as a good musician relieved to find a lucrative niche after years of struggling with his own original material. I just find their modern equivalents paralysingly dull.

Or maybe it's just me.

I'm just working my way through Q6, Q7 and Q8, Spike Milligan's BBC2 shows from the second half of the 1970s. A gangling presence in many of them is Chris Langham. His recent conviction makes no difference to my ability to enjoy his work as a comic performer. Judge the work, not the man - if the reverse were applied consistently, the world's art galleries would be empty.

Langham's encounter with Dr Pamela Connolly on More4's 'Shrink Wrap' made infinitely more uncomfortable viewing than any of Langham's comedy. Whatever the erstwhile Ms Stephenson's qualifications, the whole programme seemed a nasty, cynical exercise - tabloid prurience hiding behind a skimpy veil of serious, scientific enquiry. Nonetheless, I'm glad that Langham was allowed to discuss his situation at length. On many Internet forums, the prevailing view seemed to be 'no platform for nonces', with anyone arguing otherwise being painted as either an apologist for child abuse or a potential abuser themselves.

My problem with the knee-jerk reaction is two-fold. Firstly, we stand even less chance of understanding and preventing child abuse if we don't listen to its practitioners, however distasteful we find what they say. Secondly, I don't think that Langham is a paedophile. While there is obviously considerable room to doubt his 'research' mitigation, gratification is not the sole motivation for looking at any unpleasant images. I looked at the Ken Bigley beheading video when it was on Ogrish. Does that make me a terrorist or a decapitation fanatic? Or just someone trying to understand the unpleasant world he lives in a little bit more?

There is no doubt that Langham was wrong to access the material that he saw. There is also no doubt that a legal redress of some kind was appropriate, although I believe that an especially heavy sentence was doled out, as this was a high-profile case and a perfect opportunity to present a deterrent example to others. However, to state unequivocally that Langham has to be a paedophile is not something that any of us outside the psychiatric team that evaluated him, post-trial, is in a position to do. I can only speak in terms of my perceptions, thoughts and beliefs with regard to the matter, and I am careful to do so. The most I can do to support my view is to suggest that Langham being allowed to return to his wife and young family - one of 11, one of 13 - indicates that the assessors concluded that while he is undoubtedly many things, he is not a risk to children.

I respect the right of others to doubt Langham's sincerity, but I condemn their tendency to present their own ill-informed surmises as unassailable fact.

There are times when I'm ashamed to be a journalist. This is one of them. How is '75 year-old man goes shopping' a news story? I bet the photographer has a whole memory card full of pictures where Mr Bough's looking perfectly happy with his lot, but "Oooh, look. There's one where he's looking a bit pissed off because they're out of sun-dried tomatoes/his pound jammed in the trolley. Let's call it the tragic life of a forgotten broadcaster". I'm guessing that this sort of crap is exactly why he avoids the limelight. Sure, he did some foolish things back in the day, but his worst crime was getting caught. I'm sure that no Daily Mail journalists or executives have ever taken cocaine or paid for sex. Take no notice, Mr Bough. He was a consummate professional on Nationwide and Grandstand, and quite frankly no scandals can take that away from him. I hope that he and Nesta are having a lovely retirement.

Ricky Gervais needs to make up his bleeding mind. Is he the 'aw shucks' regular guy that declares "I’m more famous than I should be", or is he the hideously arrogant knob-end who states that he's too good for British television? No, really. The exact words being “You know when you play tennis with someone who’s nowhere near as good as you, and you have to say, ‘Okay, you can play in the doubles area and I’ll only use one arm’? That’s what me and Steve feel like when we’re doing comedy in England".

I suspect that the former is closer to Gervais' real attitude, and that the latter is merely the sort of thing said by a man who's been watching too many Muhammad Ali interviews. Maybe he knows precisely how limited he is and how incredibly lucky he has been. Lucky not only to parlay up a successful career out of such a meagre act, but also to convince apparently intentional, rational people that the meagre act is a performance of depth, range and integrity. Keep saying you're the best and some people will begin to believe it, however overwhelming the evidence to the contrary.

Gervais is right to say that the British comedy scene isn't in the rudest of health, but throughout his career, he has relied on the deficiencies of others to make his own mediocrity look like spun gold. Channel 4’s Eleven O’Clock Show was one of the worst comedy programmes ever made and Gervais was the best thing on it. Amid such rubbish, a mediocre comic could only shine. He must also share some of the blame for the current malaise. There were some nice moments in The Office, but it wasn't the greatest sitcom ever made, as many seem to claim. It wasn't even as good, funny, clever or innovative as the now-largely-forgotten People Like Us, which beat it to the mock-docusoap format by a good few years. However, it has come to be regarded as the gold standard for modern TV comedy, and with the bar set so low, the state of the rest of the industry is a natural consequence.

Festive lethargy led me to watch the Extras Christmas special from beginning to end, where I've only managed to stomach one episode from each series of the normal run. It reinforced my conviction that Andy Millman = David Brent = a slightly amplified version of Gervais himself. It also reinforced my view that Stephen Merchant is the brains of the outfit, both as a writer and performer. The joyous sight of him, Shaun Williamson and Dean Gaffney dancing to ringtones like a Care in the Community version of Wilson, Keppel and Betty bought the whole show a hell of a lot of goodwill on my sofa. Goodwill that was, sadly, pissed away when Gervais/Millman went into his rant on the nature of modern celebrity while in the Big Brother house. When Merchant and Gervais gave Brent his moment of redemption at the end of The Office - standing up to the odious Finchy, and possibly on the verge of real love - it was worthy of respect. It was an about-turn in the character's development, but it didn't jar. In contrast, Millman's apparent redemption was over-blown, cloying and seemingly calculated to show what a serious artist Gervais is.

Or believes himself to be. While obviously not a stupid man or completely without humour, I don't believe that Ricky Gervais is either as clever or as funny as he thinks he is. Witness his tendency to bring race and disability into his comedy at the drop of a hat, while hiding behind the slenderest 'comedy of embarrassment/confronting attitudes' defence. A spaz joke's a spaz joke, and there are some good ones in existence - just be honest about your motivations.The hype machine has meant that expressing this view in public has been the modern equivalent of an HM Bateman cartoon. However, it seems that the backlash is getting underway. If his next big project is about a slightly different tubby man with a Reading accent, maybe the scales will fall from the eyes of even his doughtiest defenders. The conclusion of the interview in which he claimed to be bigger than British TV comedy is very very interesting.

“When I first came into this, I was scared of the press. Now, I’m not scared of them. How can they hurt me? Them saying I’m rubbish can’t hurt me. Them not liking me can’t hurt me. Them saying I’m fat and stupid and not funny can’t hurt me....Only I can ruin my career. Only I’ve got that power. Only I can ruin this. Only I can ruin it.”

He's wrong, of course. Many comedians have seen their finest work decisively ignored by the public. He seems rattled. Maybe it will spur him on to create something that finally convinces people like me that there's more to him than has been previously displayed. Maybe he'll realise the game's up, and he'll just sit back and count the money. We shall see.

I'm deeply saddened by the news of Kevin Greening's premature demise. When he turned up on Radio 1 in the early 1990s, his bone-dry wit was a welcome counterpoint to the wacky but ultimately humourless cack that had gone before (Gary Davies' Sloppy Bit, Willy on the Plonker, etc). I was a student at the time, and it took a lot to wake me before midday (no change there, then), but I regularly made the effort to catch at least the last half-hour of his weekend breakfast show, as a prelude to Danny Baker.
He wasn't just a funny man, though. Years later, I found myself sitting in a cubicle at BBC Norwich, being interviewed down the line by Greening for a World Service programme on the state of the record industry. He had either read my book thoroughly or been provided with an excellent precis, and the ensuing interview was one of the best and most perceptive I've ever been involved with. Before the recording started, I took the liberty to thank him for all the great radio he'd funnelled my way. All the Raymond Sinclair stuff, etc. I felt a bit of a gushing pillock at the time, but I'm glad I did it now. He'll be missed.

When it comes to the German people, one of the most enduring stereotypes is that they have no sense of humour. This is unfair and untrue. If nothing else, they are connoisseurs of slapstick, which explains the enduring popularity of Dinner for One, an old British music-hall sketch that the German television networks show every New Year's Eve.

The setting for the piece is the 90th birthday party of an aristocratic female called Miss Sophie. Her table is set for a group of friends, all of whom have predeceased her. Not daunted, it falls to her butler, James, to pour the guests' drinks. As he does so, he asks Miss Sophie if she wants him to follow "the same procedure as last year", to which she replies "the same procedure as every year". The same procedure being that he has to drink the drinks himself, supplying a brief impersonation of each guest. Unsurprisingly, with a different booze being specified for each course, he becomes thoroughly Rowley Birkin-ed, and a rich vein of comedy ensues as he tries to dish up the dinner while utterly paralytic. His attempts to negotiate a path round, over or past a tigerskin rug are particularly joyous. In short, it's a masterclass in physical comedy. Finally, Miss Sophie declares that she is ready to retire to bed. "Same procedure as last year?" asks James. "Same procedure as every year," replies Miss Sophie, and they disappear upstairs together.

The piece, which is believed to have been written in the 1920s, was the star turn of the comedian Freddie Frinton. Despite being the star of the BBC sitcom Meet the Wife (very few episodes of which survive, despite being enough of a smash hit to be namechecked in a Beatles song), it appears that Frinton never performed his most famous sketch on British television. Certainly, if he did, no recording has survived. The German recording resulted from a visit to Blackpool in 1962 by German entertainer Peter Frankenfeld and his producer Heinz Dunkhase. Frankenfeld persuaded Frinton to come to Germany and perform it in his live show, and at one performance in March 1963, an outside broadcast unit from the Norddeutscher Rundfunk network captured it. Frinton had served in World War II and had the hatred of Germans that many of his generation and experience shared, but he overcame that to accept the offer. That Frinton's greatest fame should be in a country he disliked so intensely is as noteworthy as the fact that, despite being a superb comedy drunk, he was, like Jimmy James, a teetotaller. The broadcast went down well, but it wasn't until it was shown on New Year's Eve in 1972 that it began to acquire its ritualistic status. Since then, it's been shown every year, at various times of the day by the regional German broadcasting networks. The German recording has never been shown on British television, but it's been part of my own New Year's Eve ritual - along with Rikki Fulton, Still Game, the Edinburgh Castle gun, a bottle of single malt and not even thinking about leaving the house - ever since my friend Gavin Sutherland gave me a tape years ago. We can rest assured that if the BBC had ever screened it, the tape would now be wiped or misfiled. Or, even worse, only ever dragged out for clip shows where a nanosecond would be shown as a prelude to five minutes of Barry Shitpeas passing a judgment along the lines of "Yeah, right, and they're going to have sex. They're really old. Gross. What's all that about? Can I have my money now, please?" despite not being able to display one iota of Frinton's comic craftsmanship in his own work.

Frinton died in 1968, just before he was due to return to Germany to remake the sketch in colour. In recent years, the original tape has been colourised fairly sympathetically, and this is the version I present here for download. It's a 200MB AVI file, suitable for viewing on Xvid/Divx-compatible DVD players. May it bring as much joy to your Hogmanay celebrations as it does to mine.