Back when I were a wage slave in London, the only thing that made the Monday morning commute bearable was listening to a mini disc of the previous night's Malcolm Laycock show, recorded off BBC Radio 2. Despite being in my mid-20s at the time, I enjoyed both halves of the show equally - the 30 minutes of British dance bands, then the 30 minutes of big bands. Well, I say 30 minutes of each. I remember my dear, much-missed friend Tony Moss, president of the Cinema Theatre Association, muttering to me on a visit to the Regal Sloughborough or somewhere that "Malcolm's been short-changing us. The dance band section is always under the half-hour nowadays". As a fan of both genres, I didn't mind quite so much as Tony the purist, and was simply grateful that someone, somewhere was broadcasting any amount of this stuff.

I can only begin to imagine how Tony would have reacted last December when Laycock was ordered by executives to drop the dance band half of the show. I know I could have expected at the very least a long telephone call of elegant, refined profanity. Informed profanity too, as Tony spent many years in the personnel department of the BBC and remained well versed in Corporation gossip. I was pretty angry myself, but knew that Laycock wasn't to blame. I've only met him once, in the bar at a Ted Heath band concert in Westcliff-on-Sea, but our brief conversation confirmed how much he cared (and cares) about the all aspects of the music in his show. In particular, his willingness to request obscure 78s from the BBC Gramophone Library, using the programme budget wisely to get them transferred, restored and shared with a devoted listenership, did him and producer Roy Oakeshott great credit. This was real public service broadcasting in action.

The alarm bells began ringing when Oakeshott left the show and was replaced by Bob McDowall, producer of Big Band Special. I believe Oakeshott retired from the Corporation staff, only to return as producer of Russell Davies' independently-made Song Show. Suddenly, every side played by Laycock came from a commercially-available disc. Then, there was no room for dance bands at all. Finally, Laycock disappeared on holiday for a few weeks - the first time I recall this happening in all of the time I'd been listening to the show - to be replaced by Clare Teal. Now, I like Clare Teal. I'm not a fan of the current crop of female jazz singers. In particular, Stacey Kent's reedy singing voice brings me out in a rash. I'm sure she's a lovely person and all that, but if offered a chance to hear her sing, I'll pass. Clare Teal's pretty good, though. I saw her at a jazz festival in Guernsey a few years ago and was impressed by what she did with the songs she sang, and her general witty on-stage manner. She is, however, flavour of the month at Radio 2, and her stand-in stint on the Laycock show seemed an obvious indication that Malcolm's tenure was coming to an end.

So it has proved. Last Sunday, without fuss or fanfare, Laycock signed off with an announcement that this show was to be his last. There were no DLT antics, but what he didn't say was very telling to those who've been following this particular saga. He thanked Oakeshott and current producer Caroline Snook, but there were no garlands for McDowall. The BBC Radio 2 website pushed out a statement that he was leaving for personal reasons. He's since dismissed this as untrue and made it clear that his departure was due to a disagreement on programme policy.

When McDowall kiboshed the dance band element of the Laycock show, the logic seemed to be that only coffin dodgers listened to that part of the show. Not so. I know of quite a few people my own age and younger who listened devotedly to that side of the proceedings. Given that much of the current popular song book dates from the dance band era, the original versions continue to be relevant to an audience of all ages. If any research was commissioned (and the BBC doesn't fart without focus group approval these days), chances are they deliberately canvassed the opinion of the worst kind of tinnitus-afflicted iPod abusers, who wouldn't know a tune if it came up and goosed them.

So, here's hoping that an enlightened station will snap Malcolm up and let him do a show like the one he used to do. It doesn't have to be a national network. If he's broadcasting somewhere, we'll find him online. In the interim, at least we still have The Late Paul Barnes on BBC Eastern Counties. Before some prannet like Mr G Reaper makes the connection, I will declare an interest here. Paul is a good friend of mine, and my visits to Norwich usually end with a trip to Barnes Towers for coffee and a natter. I was, however, listening to his simply spiffing show long before I knew him personally. So there.

Thanks to the bin lid stapled to the front of schloss Barfe, I've been watching the German TV repeats of 1970s editions of Top of the Pops. On the editions they've shown, 3 presenters have been in charge: Toe Knee Black Burn, Noel Edmonds and James Savile (then just an OBE - his KCSG had yet to materialise). Of these, I've met Blackburn and Edmonds. My encounter with Blackburn was brief (he'd just won Oldie of the Year, and I had sidled up to congratulate him), but , as you'd expect, very pleasant. Others who know him far better have supported my initial impression that he is exactly as he seems - a thoroughly nice bloke.

Then there's Noel. At one time, I thought he was great. I was always more a Tiswas fan than a Swap Shopper, but I caught enough of Noel, Maggie, Keith, etc in the ad breaks to be aware of his work. His Radio 1 weekend shows were the real source of delight to this smutty-minded pre-pubescent lad, especially the interventions from announcer Brian Perkins as Perkins the butler. I particularly recall the pair of them musing on the what each BBC radio network would call nasal mucus. Radio 1 was "snot", Radio 4 was "mucus", but Radio 2 was a more vexed issue. After much thought, Perkins replied "On balance, sir, I suspect that Radio 2 would be 'gribbly'.". Unfortunately, during the lost years when I thought all mainstream entertainment was shite, possibly evil, I came to regard Mr Tidybeard as something of a pariah. When Victor Lewis-Smith compiled the following 'Honest Obituary', I cheered:



When he retreated from television, I cheered again. Years later, though, as I began to research Turned Out Nice Again, I saw him being interviewed on a show called Who Killed Saturday Night TV, and felt very sorry for him, because he'd clearly been shafted by the production team, who had set out to present him as a risible, pathetic figure. They failed. Then, in the mass of excellent viewing material given to me by friends and associates for research purposes, I found a couple of editions of the Late, Late Breakfast Show. You know what? They were ace, largely because of the likeability and professionalism of the presenter. I bumped into him briefly at a book launch, explained what I was doing and begged for an interview. He said yes. Meeting him at his office, he was charm personified and also a crackingly good interviewee. Nothing was off limits - the Michael Lush business clearly still affected him deeply, but he talked very openly about the incident, and the difference between blame and responsibility.

Near the end of the interview, he said that he was delighted to be away from telly. Example: He'd been asked to appear on Five's reality show The Farm, the sole point of which was to show townie celebs floundering in a bucolic idyll. There was something they hadn't realised about Noel: "I own a fucking farm. What would I want to be on The Farm for? I’ve got a farm. I know what cowshit looks like". If it looks like he's angry and bitter there, I should point out that this section of the recording is covered in gales of laughter - his and mine. I have no doubt that his delight at being off telly was sincere at that point, but that Deal or No Deal was the ultimate offer he couldn't refuse. Quite right too. It's a compelling enough game in abstract, but without someone as good as Noel building the atmosphere perfectly, it's not an hour's worth of TV. So, Noel Edmonds - one of the good guys? Hell, yes.

Which leaves Sir James Savile, who has been the subject of much innuendo and rumour about his private life. Men in pubs, who claim to have friends of friends of friends who work on The Sun, wink and say, with confidence, that "it'll all come out when he's gone". Now, I've had a theory about Savile for years. I'm convinced that what will emerge when he's gone is that he has led a completely blameless life, but that he just never minded appearing a bit weird. It'll all come out that there was nothing to come out.

I'm not sure what's got into me of late, but my natural tendency towards procrastination has given way to a 'let's do the show right here' attitude. As a result, numerous tasks I've been putting off for years (no exaggeration) have been despatched with alarming speed. Best of all, it isn't displacement activity. I've been doing my proper authorial-type work too.

Example: In the autumn of 2006, a biblical downpour (on the day of Don Lusher's memorial service, as it happens - had I a canoe, I could have ridden the rapids down to the station that morning) exposed the shortcomings of our bathroom roof/ceiling. Removing a section of damp, crumbling plasterboard with alarming ease - it had the consistency of cheesecake - I was able to fix the holes in the felt with a can of Thompson's Instant Repair, and bung up a fresh bit of plasterboard across the gap. However, for the last 3 years, I've been looking at the gaps between the edge of the plasterboard and the wall and saying to myself "I must fill that in and paint over it". Reader, I filled it, shortly after repainting the front door, sorting out the bookshelves in my study and putting new hinges on the pull-down flap of the cupboard by the kitchen door so that it opens and closes properly for the first time in months. All were relatively tiny, easily-achievable things that had acquired a significance out of all proportion by being put off for so long. It's not all backlog, either. The decision that the larder door would benefit from a bolt, fitted well out of reach of small persons who had taken to using the kitchen as a potato bowling alley, was followed immediately by the fitting of said bolt. That the bolt in question had been bought to be fitted to a door in my previous house shows how far we've come. I never got around to fitting it, stuffed it in a drawer still in its shrink wrap and transported it over 100 miles when we moved here 7 years ago.

Then there was the enormously satisfying business of downloading a bit of software that identifies duplicate files on your computer for safe deletion. I've cleared my hard drives of several gigabytes of superfluous old toot. If only one could download something like that for analogue life. Something that, Mary Poppins-style, sorts piles of papers when you whistle. "This is the manual for something you no longer own, but this is your birth certificate. This is a cherished letter from your deceased grandmother, this is a press release for something now obsolete that was utterly useless even when it was launched". That sort of thing.

I'm sure this burst of industry won't last, but I'm enjoying it while it does.

Phew, someone's posted a slightly-less-than-glowing Amazon review of Where Have All the Good Times Gone? I can't find fault with anything that the reviewer says. It was my first book and I tended to throw in everything bar the kitchen sink. Five years after it came out, even I find it a bit heavy-going. So yes, lots of trees, not enough wood (Hur hur). That said, the 'confusing rapidity' with which business names are introduced and dropped was semi-deliberate, reflecting the confusing rapidity with which it happened in the industry.

So, own up, is the reviewer a reader of this blog or the real Mr G Reaper? It's a bit too much of a coincidence for it to be a random punter.

Sheltering from a thunderstorm in Currys the other day, I found myself laughing heartily at the price of everything (£10 for a ruddy USB cable - if I weren't already tripping over spare leads that came free with USB devices, I'd be starting, and almost certainly ending, my search in Poundland) and trying to resist interrupting the clueless saleswoman who had just told a middle-aged couple that you had to buy a laptop with Vista Professional to get the software that played DVDs.

This led me to think about the vast number of people who shell out for software, despite there being legal free alternatives that are as good, if not better. I used to be one. I used Microsoft Office 2000, and dutifully paid an annual subscription for Norton Internet Security. For the last few years, however, I've been an OpenOffice kind of guy, with AVG Free, Malwarebytes and the firewall in my router taking care of the nasties that might infest my IT infrastructure given half a chance. If it weren't for a few work-related things that need to be done in a Microsoft operating system, I'd be using the Ubuntu side of my dual-boot installation for the majority of tasks.

Why do so many computer users ignore the wealth of good free software that's out there? Are they suspicious of its provenance? Does the act of paying for something give it some kind of imprimatur? Perhaps, but that's assuming that everybody's using commercial software that they did actually pay for, and not a cracked copy off a torrent site. If they realised that they could get stuff that did the same job for free without bootlegging it, would they?

Nice words about the paperback edition of Turned Out Nice Again from Nicholas Bagnall in last week's Sunday Telegraph and Victoria Segal in today's Guardian. In the interests of transparency, I should point out that I used to be married to Nicholas Bagnall and that I once offered Victoria Segal a crisp.

As you'll see if your eyes ever glance over to the right of this page, I have been known to do bits and pieces for Private Eye. Not as much as I used to, admittedly. Sometimes months go by without submitting anything. What did I do? Oh, shedloads of stuff for the Books and Bookmen column from 1999 until I decided that nearly all publishers were bastards and gave up for the sake of my sanity. For my sins, I was the one who named erstwhile Waterstone's boss David Kneale 'the Mekon'. Calling Alan Giles 'Weasel' wasn't mine. That was just a head office nickname for him that someone told me about.

An email arrived from the Eye yesterday, forwarded from a reader signing him or herself 'Mr G. Reaper'. It went as follows:

----

Glancing through Louis Barfe's website I saw claims that he contributes to Private Eye.

Glancing through Amazon's list of two books by Louis Barfe, I saw a small handful of distinctly suspicious reviews, indicative of someone or someone's close friends enthusiastically praising their own or Barfe's work. Indeed, certain praiseworthy quotations from Mr Barfe's website are repeated almost verbatim on one Amazon review.

Bearing in mind that Private Eye quite rightly exposes others for duplicitously puffing their own work or that of their cronies on Amazon, I wondered whether you would have the integrity to do so when it involves one of your own employees?

----

It's true that Bookworm has picked up on the odd bit of what appears to be Amazon review fraud over the years, but I always thought we were identifying the covert but painfully-obvious backscratching, the reviews that have blatantly been written by the author themselves and the suspiciously glowing notices for books that have been compared unfavourably to Andrex in all other quarters. Is that how this review and these reviews appear?

Yes, the Big George in question is the same one who wrote the Have I Got News For You theme tune. When Where Have All the Good Times Gone? came out, he interviewed me on the BBC eastern counties regional radio show that he then had (he's now on BBC London). Not because he knew me, because he didn't at that time (we email back and forth, but we've only actually met once), but because he loved the book, and he seems to love Turned Out Nice Again too. As he's someone with a lot of music industry and television entertainment experience, it meant a lot. Similarly, when Bernard Shaw raved about Turned Out Nice Again that meant a lot too, as I knew of Bernard by reputation as a musician who'd worked in many television orchestras and seen a lot of what I wrote about first-hand. Save for a few cordial encounters on a message board for drummers, including one where he declared himself ready to leap on any mistakes I might have made in the book, I never actually knew him or met him. I use the past tense because he died at the start of this year. So, two-thirds of my 'cronies' and 'close friends' are someone I never met and someone I've met once. It's hardly freemasonry, is it?

That leaves Miss T Jones, who is indeed a friend of mine - in fact, she says so at the start of the review. However, I know that she read it not because we're friends, but because of the subject matter, a shared interest in which is one of the main reasons why we're friends in the first place. She goes on to say that had my book not been any good, she'd have said so. I know this to be true.

As the vast majority of the press reviews for both books were favourable, the Andrex situation doesn't apply. Nor was there any systematic backscratching. I have been informed by several other authors and various people in publishing that it is now the norm for a writer to solicit Amazon reviews. It might be the norm, but it's not something I'd be happy with. I'll take what comes, rough or smooth.

Moreover, if I were hell-bent on puffing my work, would I have posted "...this book is not worth reading" from Robert Hanks' Independent review of Turned Out Nice Again on the book's Amazon page? On seeing that I had, my publisher questioned the wisdom of doing so, and flat out refused when I maintained that it would be a spiffing wheeze to put it on the paperback jacket.

So, there you go, Mr Reaper. No need for the Eye to expose me, as I'm perfectly happy to expose myself, mainly because I've no reason to be ashamed.

Am I the only person to greet the news that Coffee Republic has gone into administration with the response that at least some good has come out of the recesssion? I love coffee, but I hate paying through the nose for it. I can't recall the last time I bought one 'to go' from a high street coffee emporium. I think it was when I worked in London and hadn't yet worked out the art of avoiding needless expenditure. Work in an office? Buy a cafetiere for the same price as a double shot skinny Americano with blue jeans and chinos, or whatever the Cribbins they call it, and keep it in your desk drawer, along with a reclosable bag of ground coffee from the supermarket. Sorted. I'll only be truly happy when Starbucks does a Woolworths.

Are Michael Jackson fans the most unhinged followers of any pop culture icon? Yes, if some of the comments on YouTube concerning Jacko's run-in with the mighty Jarvis Cocker are anything to go by.

"Jarvis Cocker you are only a poor idiot.
it was better that you died.
M.J. THE KING"

Ah, but Jarvis Cocker hasn't died. Thus he wins.

"Jarvis Cocker youre a fucking twat. Don´t try to steal the KING Michael´s shine. Don´t need to know who he is, any money he has listened to Thriller one time or another and enjoyed it and that goes for anyone of you Michael Jackson haters. 110 million people can´t be wrong."

Ah, the 'if a lot of people agree on something it must be right' fallacy. Cobblers. Also, you can enjoy Thriller (although Off the Wall is a far superior album) and still think that the Brits performance of 'Earth Song' was an over-blown, self-aggrandising pile of cack.

"He told a story in that song a story that is in fact a reality of how fucked up the world actually is.

He at least tried to bring to the attention of us what was actually happening in the world.

On that note jarvis if you ever have the misfortune to meet me you will regret it. You jelous commercial fame seeking cunt.

Be warned the next time your in London keep your eyes open. "

Jarvis Cocker is well known for walking around central London with his eyes firmly closed, so the above advice will be a welcome wake-up call to the erstwhile Pulp frontman. Let's not dwell on the unpleasantness of the threat. It's easy to be a bullying fuckwit when you're sat at a keyboard, hiding behind a made-up username. The likelihood of this numpty ever getting to duke it out with Cocker is so small as to not even register.

The message, such as it is, of 'Earth Song' (and I think it's unbearably trite, twee and obvious, if well-meaning) is one thing. Appearing to think you're Jesus is another. Oh, and how can "commercial" be used as an insult when you're defending one of the most commercially successful and shrewd artists in the history of popular music? I can't believe either that Jacko's record sales didn't get a welcome boost from the coverage of this little fracas. The performance would have got a few headlines in its own right, because of the 'Jackson with ver kids' angle, but nowhere near as many as it got.

To close, my personal favourites:

"so, ho w is coocker?
ah the guy that invedes this performance...
oh great.

and who is michael jackson?

th king of pop...

poor coocker...."

and

"jarvis is a dick rider thats about the only talent he has as he even begged lil wayne and akon to ride there dicks.Thats why is last name is cocker lol.Jarvis is the king of dick riding and if u like him that means your a dick rider."

Well, that's him told...

Watching Blur closing the Glastonbury Festival on BBC2. Two things are obvious: 1) They've upped the tempo of each number, presumably to cram in as much as possible and 2) Alex James doesn't get anywhere near enough recognition as a bass player. Now excuse me while I kid myself that I'm a 20 year-old borderline alcoholic with quite a lot of hair again.

Merciful release. Nice day out, isn't it?

One of my worst fears is the loss of unique, irreplaceable material through technical failure. Seven years ago, I found with horror that an interview recording on minidisc had screwed up. Fortunately, the interviewee was someone I knew well enough to ask if we could start again. When a similar situation occurred yesterday, as part of the research for my forthcoming Les Dawson book, I had no such luxury. The interviewees had given me 40 minutes of their soundcheck time before a concert. As my wife drove me back home, I scribbled down as much as I could remember from the conversation, in case the recording proved beyond repair.

Had it been a cassette tape, there would have been no problem (apart from tape hiss and all the other reasons I moved to minidisc in the first place), but digital recording devices tend to use things called tables of contents that tell playback machines where the relevant bits are. If the table of contents isn't written properly, the audio is inaccessible. I knew it was there, as I'd listened to a little of it before turning the machine off, which is when the TOC gets written. I'd read online that it was possible to clone the TOC from a working disc to the failed recording, unlocking the material within, so I gave it a try. I felt like a cross between an expectant father and a bomb disposal expert as I waited to see if the technique would save my recording. I'm happy to report that it did. I'm hoping I won't have to resort to the bomb disposal method ever again, but if I do, it will be with a great deal less trepidation.

Now to transcribe the ruddy thing...

The coverage of the news that BBC Worldwide is to release the recovered soundtracks of several previously-missing editions of the Hancock's Half Hour TV series has been, at best, misleading. At worst, it's been utter bollocks. Take this line from The Times: "They are thought to be the earliest examples of a DIY audio recording made directly from a television broadcast". 'They are thought...' is a handy formulation. It enables a journalist to sound authoritative to the casual reader while admitting to those who know the way these things work that he/she hasn't got a bleeding clue. I can't be certain without making a few enquiries, but I'm sure I've heard of a number of DIY audio recordings from TV that predate these. There was a time when The Times didn't think. It simply reported, and was a better newspaper for it.

Meanwhile, Chortle, which should perhaps know better asserted that "The episodes were first aired 50 years ago, but thought lost forever when the BBC wiped the master copies so they could reuse the expensive tape and save on storage space". The shows in question never went near video tape. They were transmitted live, and telerecorded on 35mm film. These copies were repeated a few months after the first transmission and then junked. You don't 'wipe' film.

The coverage has also been full of the usual emotive nonsense that gets spouted about missing programmes. Back to the Times, this time from the paper's blog: "It's a scandal that the BBC let so much of its programming be wiped or destroyed in the past". Is it? At one time, the cost of repeating a show came close to the cost of putting on a new programme, and union regulations limited the number of screenings that a programme could have. Nobody foresaw sell-through video or multi-channel TV, and the renegotiation of the repeat agreements that eventually occurred. The pressure was on the BBC to use its funding as wisely as possible, and that involved making new shows, not recording and storing old ones that were, to all intents and purposes, unusable. It's sad that some programmes are missing, but it's not really a scandal. We should be glad when lost gems turn up, but retain a sense of perspective - in many ways, it's a miracle that we have as much archive material to enjoy as we do.

As I get older, I find myself less interested in my birthday. The last one I celebrated properly was my 30th, with a party in the back garden. For 32, I contented myself with shouting "Noooooooooooooooooooooo!" at the television as I watched Michael Jackson evade conviction on even the minor charges of giving alcohol to a minor, something he'd admitted to doing. Yesterday, when I turned 36, I ticked the no publicity box and celebrated with a swim in the sea, a takeaway curry and a dip into the bottle of single malt I received in the morning.

From now on, however, I have a real reason to celebrate on 13 June. In the Birthday Honours, an OBE was awarded to Brian Lomax, chairman of Supporters Direct and father of one of my dearest friends. Brian's a life force. He was instrumental in saving Northampton Town FC when the club hit the buffers in 1992, and, subsequently, has shown many football fans how grass-roots activity can see off inept and corrupt management of their beloved team. In the mid-1990s, he almost succeeded in getting me interested in football, after years of hating sport in any form. I liked the singalongs, the pies, the Bovril and Brian's excellent company in the nearest pub after the game, but I couldn't quite work up enough of an interest in the blokes doing things with the spherical doodah. After attending the play-offs at the old Wembley in 1997, and seeing the Cobblers despatch Swansea for a well-deserved promotion, I felt my work was done.

So, from this moment on, 13 June is Brian Lomax Day.

While it's nice to get away, especially if very dear friends are at the other end of the journey, I'm starting to find travel knackering to the point of incapacity. Via family in Surrey and Bristol, I popped over to the West Midlands last week to meet up with a pair of old friends, the recording engineer/archivist Martin Fenton (aka Posie Flump) and the composer/arranger/conductor Gavin 'Vaginal Thunders' Sutherland (no blog - too busy), and to attend, with them, the quarterly archive television treat put on by the nice people at Kaleidoscope in Stourbridge's thrusting, vibrant Town Hall. A wonderful time was had by all, but on returning home, I felt like death warmed up, and have taken two whole days, several hot baths and a lot of stretching/creaking to recover. It was the same when I came back from Glasgow last month, having gone up to blether about Stanley Baxter and Chic Murray to the Historical and Cultural Studies 2nd years at the School of Art. Why do I find travel so tiring? All I did was sit in trains and cars doing very little for quite a long time.

Incidentally, the Kaleidoscope beanos are put on in aid of the RNLI, and I encourage you to make a modest donation.

Last week's Independent on Sunday was uncommonly good.

Until the European election success of Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons, I hadn't heard the slogan "No platform for Nazis" for a good few years. The last time was at a meeting of the National Union of Journalists' London Magazine branch back in the early part of this decade when I was vice-chair(man). I'm not sure of the branch's political make-up now, but back then it was Socialist Worker-dominated. Nice people, but a bit obsessed.

'No platform' was, and I suspect still is, the Union's official policy. The matter came up, and all present agreed that it was a sensible policy, aimed at repelling evil. All but one. Although I knew that registering my concern would be like shaking the last drips of urine off in a force 9 gale, and that I would almost certainly be persona non grata for the rest of the meeting and possibly a fair bit longer, I felt it worth doing. My hand went up. Surely denying opponents the right to express their views and run for election, on the basis of their beliefs, were the sort of acts you'd expect from fascists? Wasn't it dangerous to do so? Would not the Socialist Workers be squealing like stuck pigs if the positions were reversed? Surely the proper way to repel the evil was to let it have its say, then refute every single point with sweet reason and humanity? My prognosis was correct. For the rest of the meeting, I was the man in the Bateman cartoon. I'm sure I heard one person tutting, completely unironically. Merely for daring to suggest that we should give fascists enough rope and then ensuring a satisfying outcome just by pointing out what poisonous bilge they had to offer, I was seen to be marching down Cable Street on the wrong side.

Until, that is, the meeting came to an end. We repaired to the pub and continued the debate. When it was thought that the chair(man) of the branch wasn't looking, one of his fellow travellers sidled up to me and said "You were right, of course, but I couldn't say so in the meeting. What are you having?". This clandestine dance was repeated a couple of times by other SWP members during the evening.

Free speech, free assembly and free elections are just that. Free. You can try to stop the electorate voting for fascists. That's fair game. However, if you believe that fascists do not deserve the same democratic rights as you, then aren't you a bit of a hypocrite?

So farewell then, Daniel Patrick Carroll, known professionally as Danny La Rue (French for 'the main drag', in the words of Ray Martine) . Apart from his own dazzling career, La Rue was responsible for helping to launch Barbara Windsor, Barry Cryer and Ronnie Corbett professionally when they worked at his West End cabaret club. Not a bad epitaph, but if you want more, have this false modesty-free self-assessment from his autobiography, From Drags to Riches:

"There will never be another Danny La Rue. There are very few one-offs in show business. I am unique...a complete one-off, and this is not conceit or big-headedness in any way, it is simply my professional side talking. There has never been anyone like me before...no one has made history like me in virtually every medium of the entertainment industry."

Many years ago, Richard Digance had a dream. With mainstream television on a drive to attract younger, more idiotic audiences, the journeymen and journeywomen of the entertainment world were no longer getting a fair crack of the whip. People like Digance, who can still fill clubs and theatres, weren't getting screen time anymore, and younger acts on the live circuit had no chance of getting on TV at all. Putting his head together with fellow comics Mike Osman and Jethro (real name: Geoff Rowe), with a bit of backing from Chris Tarrant, he decided to found his own channel. Initially billed as The Great British Television Channel, it finally launched, sharing airtime with the PIF-heavy satellite channel Information TV, on 26 February 2005 as Sound TV.

It didn't last. Plans to fly the Information TV nest and gain its own position on the Sky EPG came to naught. Within six months, the dream was dead. In many ways, it's sad that it didn't last because far more pointless satellite channels continue to broadcast, but the first 38 minutes show quite clearly the seeds of the channel's failure. The opening attraction to the channel that says it's going to revitalise British variety is not a fast moving slice of top-flight entertainment, but three bored-looking old pros sitting at a table in a Southampton restaurant putting the world to rights for half an hour. Good video editing software is in the grasp of just about everybody, and you can get professional results cheaply. This just looks cheap. The logo looks like it was designed by Helen Keller.

As a child weaned on Tiswas, Tarrant's place in my affections is secured, and nothing he does can change that, not even Man O Man. I also have quite a lot of residual fondness for Digance, based on his 1980s LWT shows like Abracadigance. That whole raft of comics who came up through the folk scene, who were too edgy to be old-school but who were never seen as truly alternative, interest me greatly. Influenced by Jake Thackray, people like Jasper Carrott, Billy Connolly and Mike Harding blazed a trail (Harding's early 1980s Friday night BBC2 show was a must-watch, and, on the basis of clips I've seen recently, still stands up - no pun intended), with Digance and others following in their wake. I like Osman - who was heard to best effect on Capital Gold back in the 1990s - too. I've never seen Jethro's act, but his reputation as an entertainer is pretty strong, so I'll take it on trust. As a result of this, I had a lot of goodwill towards the venture. These men knew their stuff, so I tuned in wanting it to be great. It wasn't. By the end of the opening show, I knew the whole thing was doomed. Don't let that prejudice you, though. Here, in the interests of historical research, is the first 38 minutes of Sound TV.

The German digital channel EinsFestival is currently showing a rake of early 1970s Top of the Pops in the dark watches of the night, in the original English (or whatever language it is that DJs speak) unsubbed and undubbed. Having missed out on the UK Gold run of later shows in the mid-1990s, I'm atoning for my sins by hoovering these off the satellite onto shiny discs.

Last week's edition dated from 15 November 1973. Now, one of the guarantees of TOTP was that you heard (and usually saw) that week's chart-topping act. On this show, however, it jumped straight from Tip for the Top - Kiki Dee's 'Amoreuse' - to the fragrant Pan's People hoofing through the end credits to Barry Blue's 'Do You Wanna Dance?'. Where is number 1 band? A glance at the Murphy's Book of British Hit Singles (cheaper than Guinness) explained all. That week's toppermost of the poppermost was the erstwhile Paul Gadd, teetering on spangly platforms, as he belted out 'I Love You Love Me Love'.

Now, whatever your opinion of Gary Glitter, I have a problem with him being unpersoned in this way. Whatever he did, he was number 1 in this particular week, and without the number 1, Top of the Pops is, literally, not top of the pops. You don't want to give residuals to a convicted sex offender? Fine, pick another edition off the shelf. It's unclear as to whether the cut was made by the BBC, the German TV people or whether Glitter himself refused to allow clearance. The fact that Jonathan King was left in the repeat of the 29 January 1970 edition makes things even less clear.

If the motivation came from either the BBC or EinsFestival, double standards are at work. However abhorrent his crime, Glitter's served his sentence. Leslie Grantham murdered a taxi driver, but the BBC has never had any problems with employing him. Meanwhile, EinsFestival preceded one of the recent Top of the Pops repeats with a half-hour long profile of...wait for it...Bill Wyman.

There's not an awful lot I miss about being a full-time wage slave, but I do have occasional yearnings for the banter and in-jokes that occur between colleagues on the same wavelength. When I worked on the now defunct trade paper Publishing News a decade or so ago, sharing space and humour with people like Rodney Burbeck, Roger Tagholm and Ralph Baxter (not to mention ad boss Matt Levy, who started the Crisp Olympics via internal email to decide on which variety of fried potato snackwas best, and designer Jon Bidston, who put subliminal items into the backgrounds of photos and created a treasured spoof place setting for the office Christmas lunch that still lives on my mantelpiece) made some of the other aspects of the job far more bearable.

Tagholm, in his dry Croydonian way, is one of the funniest people I've ever encountered. He's also an unbearable human being*, but you can't have everything. He once rendered me and Ralph (with whom I already had several years' worth of in-jokes stored up, the pair of us having been friends at university) speechless with admiration using nothing more than a slightly adapted section of Wichita Lineman. The paper was owned and run by a terrible old misanthrope called Fred Newman, whom I think I've mentioned before. He was known to the irreverent in the PN office as Kunta Kinte, just because it sounded a bit like what we thought he was. I think Tagholm might have been behind the rechristening. When we moved from Museum Street to Store Street, Rog found that his desk was directly under a skylight, and that, when the sun came out to play, his monitor was afflicted with terrible glare. Grudgingly, Fred arranged for a blind to be installed. One day, pulling the blind across with the stick he kept by his desk for the purpose, Rog sang to himself, quietly, "I am a blindsman for the Kinte". On hearing this, I think Ralph and I just stood up, clapped and nodded approvingly. What we really needed were those score cards that you used to see on the TV coverage of ice-skating. This would have been worth a clean sweep of 6.0s.

At PN, as at many workplaces, the office noticeboard was a strange mixture of serious information about the work on one hand, and surrealism and quiet subversion on the other. We had 'Up the Arse Corner' before Viz ever latched onto the idea. Also pinned there was a yellowing letter sent some years before in response to an article by columnist Ian Norrie, which we all suspected to be the single greatest item of reader correspondence ever sent to a periodical. When I handed in my notice to become an airy-fairy author ponce in 2002, I took a photocopy, which turned up the other day during a bit of light re-shelving, and I reproduce it for you here. I have reason to believe that its author is the same Simon Strong who wrote the cult novel A259 Multiplex Bomb Outrage. If it's half as good as this, I must find a copy.

*Actually, I love him, but I didn't want to look too crawly.

Be warned, this isn't remotely safe for work, but it is incredibly funny.

What an age we live in. I write this on an East Coast main line train to Glasgow Central, using the free wi-fi provided by National Express. Observation: download speeds were non-existent until York, when dial-up speeds were achieved. Obviously, if there were no-one else on the train, I'd get full-speed. Selfish bastards.

How clueless are the bookers at Nottingham's Royal Concert Hall? They've cancelled Ken Dodd's booking for a show in December 2009, after "a significant number of audience members left before the end" of his show there last December. This, apparently, raised "concerns to our manager on the night as to the quality of some of the performances within the show". Quality? The only problem with a Doddy show is quantity. When I went to see him in Lowestoft, I enjoyed the full 5 hours, secure in the knowledge that I was a 5-minute walk from my bed. Others will have had further to travel and might reluctantly have made an exit before the finale. I'd be very surprised if the people who left the Nottingham show thought that they'd got anything less than excellent value for money, and would have booked up for December 2009 and left early again. I think we're dealing with weasel speak. When anyone says guff like "the management team therefore took the difficult decision to give this long-running and much-loved show a break during 2009" you know they're hiding something. "We can't afford to pay overtime to the usherettes" is probably closer to the truth.

If a chap can't be a shameless self-publicist on his blog, where the hell can he? Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, I sat in a windowless room in Norwich talking to actor/comedian Miles Jupp* down the line in London. The reason for this disembodied conversation was that I was contributing to his BBC Radio 4 documentary By Jove, Carruthers, in which he explores the tendency of the name Carruthers in fiction to embody a certain type of character, with the help of people like me. It was all jolly good fun and the finished article is on tomorrow (Tuesday) in the 11.30am slot long reserved for splendid quirky features like this one.

*Best known to parents of toddlers as Archie the inventor in Balamory, but last seen on non-children's TV playing an estate agent selling a lengthy lease on his anus to a couple in need of a home.

Half-watching Friday Night with Jonathan Ross earlier while trying to get on with something else, I sat up and paid attention after Tom Hanks had been on for about a minute. Film-wise, I can take or leave pretty much everything he's done since Dragnet, but, holy cow, he's a great chat show guest. A proper, bona fide Hollywood star, but with a quick wit and a willingness to talk about something other than the product, just like Jimmy Stewart and all the greats who twinkled so merrily on Parkinson back in the 1970s. The bit about supporting Aston Villa was a particular delight, with Hanks explaining that he was stuck in a hotel room with the scores coming up one day and just decided that he liked the name, then going on to make up a splendidly-daft fake opponent for the Villa, the name of which escapes me. Get thee to iPlayer or catch the repeat tomorrow and see for yourself. He's great.

This week, I have been mostly reviewing my relationship with Facebook. First things first, I've found the whole shebang faintly sinister since I read a Daily Telegraph magazine feature about the founding of the site. I sat, riveted to the bog, by the details of how a high-achieving Billy No-Mates code monkey stole a couple of fellow students' idea for helping people at their institution keep track of each other socially, and turned it into a global business. It struck me as one of those horror B-movie plots - "Muhahaha. Nobody wants to be my friend, but I now OWN THE CONCEPT OF FRIENDSHIP. I have codified social interaction, and in so doing become the king of the friendship hobby. Next stop, the world...". After wiping my arse and shuddering a bit at what I'd just read, I decided that I didn't trust Mark Zuckerberg to run a whelk stall, let alone look after private messages between me and my (real) friends. Consequently, unless it's been impossible for whatever reason, I've tried to steer conversations onto nice, old-fashioned email, which, once my ISP's handed it on to me, lives on my hard drive and is backed up daily.

My disenchantment with the whole Facebook experience has been enhanced by the recent remodelling of the site, taking on some of the dubious innovations of Twitter. I can't see the point of Twitter at all. It seems to consist of drab people writing haikus about their wretched lives in the mistaken impression that they're remotely interesting, and celebrities giving a false impression of intimacy to their fans in the hope that it'll shift more product. In the case of Adam Woodyatt, it somehow manages both. Facebook users now post status updates, whereas once they might have had conversations using the site's Wall feature. For a while, I quite enjoyed coming up with what I thought were amusing status updates, but I suddenly realised that it was just a way of showing off, a nasty habit I've spent most of my adult life trying to break. We seem to be saying more, but communicating less than before, and that's sad.

I don't know what other people's policy for accepting friend requests is, but mine's always been that I have to know and like the person in question. Having been on or around forums and mailing lists since the Internet was just fields, I have quite a few close, valued associates I've never actually met, but I believe that qualifies as knowing someone. Conversely, there are people I've known personally for years, and I've suddenly realised that I have nothing in common with them other than the fact that I've known them for years. I don't actually like the buggers, and I know the feeling to be completely mutual, so why do they try to add me? Then there are the "Friends all over the world! All over the world! None in this country..." operatives who seem to be just hellbent on racking up a high score as if the whole thing's a gigantic pinball machine. An American writer I'd never encountered in any way, shape or form added me, and got ferociously humpty when I rejected her very politely explaining that I didn't know her from Adam. I was missing the whole point of networking, she blustered, and in so doing, did nothing to persuade me that I hadn't been very wise in not accepting her invitation.

So, what's a lad to do? Deactivate my Facebook profile? I tried that once before, for 24 hours or so, and many friends were so concerned that they practically asked me to surrender my tie and shoelaces. If HM Bateman were alive today, 'The Man Who Took His Facebook Profile Down' would be one of his best-loved works. On Wednesday, I finally hit on the compromise. Post a status update saying that all was well, and that if anyone needed me, I could be reached via email. Since then, I've dipped into Facebook for five minutes here and five minutes there, and I feel strangely liberated. The site has its uses (marking birthdays, anniversaries, etc.), but it's my bitch, not vice versa.

Isn't it a bit hypocritical for me to be blogging about the whole matter? Isn't this showing off too? Maybe. I keep this blog as a jotter for random thoughts about subjects that interest me: entertainment, broadcasting, technology, etc, to which like-minded individuals (recent surveys suggest that I have enjoyed at least a pint with 99% of the people who leave comments on this blog) add their valued opinions. As such, I prefer to think of this posting as a starting point for a discussion among friends about how much information we give away about ourselves, the nature of modern friendship, the point of social networking, why withdrawing from Facebook isn't tantamount to topping yourself and why Twitter's for cunts.

Ever since I first discovered YouTube, it's been a source of astonishment and relief that the death of Tommy Cooper on live national television has not been uploaded. My astonishment and relief have come to an end, and it doesn't make for comfortable viewing. I won't supply a link, as I suspect it'll be taken down pretty soon, only to be re-uploaded almost instantly. The really interesting thing is the way that the camera stays firmly on the slumped Cooper, as if expecting him to leap to his feet and make a joke of it. The director will have known this wasn't how it went at rehearsal. So why did they stay on the star? An explanation comes from Harold Fisher, who was drumming in Alyn Ainsworth's orchestra that night.

"The horrible thing was that the balancer who was outside in the scanner thought that it was part of the act. He sort of sank to his knees and you know, what you were hearing was this death rattle, the poor sod. So he turned it up. His doctor was there, apparently. He told him not to do the show. His son was there and his doctor. Obviously he wasn’t feeling very well. What a way to go. It was amazing how it panned out. He did most of his act, as I remember and then he sank to his knees. They cued the band and the adverts came on. It was unbelievable."

I can remember watching it with my great-grandmother. Aged 10, I thought it was part of the act. She could see that something was wrong. When the news came on after the show, her suspicions were proved right.

When I was a member of my university's Labour Club, a few other members of that august institution tried to pass a motion of censure on me, for being close friends, nay housemates, with a known Tory. Even then, in the first flush of idealism, it seemed absurd to let political allegiance decide friendships, especially as my political allies were such a dull bunch socially. Now it seems even more mad, but still it goes on. "How can you talk to him? He's a Conservative." Because he's fun and interesting, now piss off.

In the fun and interesting camp is a chap called Iain Dale, whom I came to know when he was running a bookshop in London called Politico's. We disagreed pretty vehemently on just about every single thing politically, but we both had a thing for the Eurovision Song Contest and he was/is the owner of a very smart little dog, which beat politics in a game of scissors/paper/stone any day of the week. I visit his blog, still disagreeing with him pretty vehemently on any subject other than the Herreys and aniseed treats, but doing so from a position of warmth and respect.

Iain's been onto the Damian McBride thing for a while now. Indeed, he was on the 'to be smeared' list himself. With Dolly Draper denying the existence of the incriminating emails, Iain was going to file a Freedom of Information request. With the whole story now public and Iain proved right, the FoI request turned out to be unnecessary, and Iain's been making the most of his vindication, writing articles here, there and everywhere (I would say left, right and centre, but...) and appearing on almost every channel and managing to stay just this side of a gloat.

Now, following some more digging into the way LabourList - the 'e-network' run by Dolly - is funded (or not, as the case may be), Iain's had to contend with 40 calls on his private phone, some of them threatening, and emails like this, apparently promising to blow Dale's blog off the face of the Internet with denial of service attacks. The way Dale has been treated for getting too close to some uncomfortable truths is nothing short of a disgrace. If Iain's blog is DOS-ed offline, however temporarily, this will be why.

EDIT - 27/5/2010 - A follow-up post to this one appears here.

Many thanks to all of those who contacted me with notes and queries about Turned Out Nice Again to be borne in mind for the paperback edition. The corrections were finally, belatedly sent off this morning. The delay came partly from the fact that I was waiting on educated responses from a couple of respected individuals, and partly from the fact that there is precious little more boring than reading your own words for the fourth or fifth time. When I read a book by someone else, I might read it through twice, and then keep it for reference/dipping. When you're checking something for corrections, however, dipping and skimming aren't options. Comparing notes with a fellow author and close friend, he admitted to glazing over on the first read-through, but I think he was being self-deprecating. Don't get me wrong, I'm immensely proud of the book and the re-reading merely fortified that pride. However, I know the ending already.

Ah, endings. Had the timorous BBC not forced the last two editions of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle to swap places, the show originally scheduled for Easter Monday being about religion, the show would have had the best closer of any TV show for some years in the form of the riotous apple shop sketch, which culminated in the superb Paul Putner - representing the holy trinity of Ronnie Barker, Harry Worth and Cyril Fletcher in one body - trashing the set, pursued by Kevin Eldon in a brown overall and a lady trombonist. As it is, they'll have to settle for best finish of a run's penultimate show, but I reserve the right to restore the original order when I put the series on disc.

Talking of endings, I suspect that those who predict the imminent end of days may have a point. I'm not talking about New Labour's Nixonian smear shite. I'm not talking about natural disasters all over the shop. I'm not even talking about the return of Britain's Got Talent. I'm talking about the fact that, earlier today, I bought a JVC hi-fi stereo VHS recorder in good condition for £4.99. I remember when tapes cost more than that.

The front page of today's Sun says "It's time to let Jade rest in peace". This, unfortunately, is not a statement of Snu policy, but a quote from Jack Tweed. As such, you can guarantee that News International has no intention of letting the poor dead sod rest at all. What an age we live in. Still, it's not all bad. That bald head is just made to have 'TURMOIL' written on it.

Elsewhere, an LWT technician has explained that the company adapted a BBC microcomputer to aid with vision mixing. This set me wondering what the LWT micro would have been like. It would definitely have had a set of stairs on the top of the case, with chaser lights built in. And when you turned it on, you would have been greeted by the reassuring sound of Trish Bertram telling you what you'd done and A Well-Swung Fanfare. Having invented the ruddy thing, I now want one.

The Doddy experience reminded me of an LP that I had and played to death as a child, on my mum's old Dansette. Music for Pleasure MFP1368 - Ken Dodd and the Diddymen - provided many happy hours of amusement in my formative years, not least the 'Nikky-Nokky-Noo Song' and the historical epic 'Where's Me Shirt?'. I'm not sure where it went. I think I might have worn it through. However, thanks to the Bay of E and the Royal Mail, I now have another copy. Expect no further bulletins from me for quite some time. I'm away with my Diddy mates: Dickie Mint, Mick the Marmaliser, Wee Hamish, Sid Short, Little Evan and Old Doddy Doddy and all. Now, wheeeeere's me shairt?

For years, I've wanted to catch one of Ken Dodd's marathon performances, but, when he comes to the Marina in Lowestoft, he always sells out before a single poster can be put up to publicise the show. Thanks to a friend who's on the theatre's mailing list, I got in this time, and am unbelievably glad that I did. Much is made of the length of his shows: well, it ran for 5 hours, but felt like a very well-paced 2. I've known some comics who can make a 7-minute spot seem like weeks.

Some say he's the last of a rare breed, but, even in the glory days of variety, there was only ever one Ken Dodd. I'm not going to paraphrase any of the jokes. Only he can do them justice (some of the material has whiskers, but his delivery rejuvenates even the oldest, corniest gags). All I'll say is that if you have even the merest hint of a sense of humour, you must go and see him. I was lucky enough to go back after the show and say hello, having helped Roy Waller interview him on BBC Radio Norfolk last week. I gave him a copy of Turned Out Nice Again, he gave me a tickling stick. I'll be sure to treasure it.

Bonanza night on BBC4 - Dave Brubeck Quartet in Jazz 625 at 7.30pm, Dizzy Gillespie in Jazz 625 at 11pm, with 1959: the Year that Changed Jazz at 10pm. Caveat 1: these are the completely pointless early 1990s BBC2 re-edits of Jazz 625 with celebrity introductions (EDIT: I've never been happier to be wrong. Despite the billing indicating that the Slim Gaillard-introduced re-edit would be used, Brubeck was the 1964 original with Steve Race all present and correct. I'll forgive the periodically-wowing audio track and the couple of seconds missing at the start of 'Sounds of the Loop'. EDIT 2: Gillespie is the Humph-fronted original, not the Neneh Cherry-led repackaging I've endured for 20 years. I am wanking as I write this.). Caveat 2: I'm not sure that an equally cogent case couldn't be made for just about any year between 1935 and 1965. However, glass half-full and all that. Here's a bit from the Brubeck show - the awesome power of Joe Morello much to the fore:

Hey kids. Come and join me on Twitter. I am chronicling each of my bowel movements in as much detail as I can in 140 characters. I can't help but feel that this is what all communications technology has been working towards since the invention of the telegraph.

Glad tidings for missing episode hunters. News reaches us from Vienna of a 2-inch quad tape of Josef Fritzl's appearance on the Austrian version of Ask the Family being found, misfiled, in the ORF archives. Meanwhile, there are unconfirmed reports from the BBC archives at Windmill Road, Brentford, that a reel of 16mm mute Ektachrome featuring Jade Goody being chased by a gigantic Dougal has been found propping up a coffee machine in the Film Exam department.

An interesting line appears in Anthony Quinn's Independent review of Lesbian Vampire Killers (I do love a good rom-com), starring Mathew Horne and James Corden. Says Quinn: "A loveable pair of mates in Gavin and Stacey, here they have flagrantly overstretched their appeal, and now look in danger of becoming the Hale and Pace de nos jours".

I'm afraid that Horne and Corden can only dream of being the new Hale and Pace. I've caught a few editions of Hale and Pace on Men & Motors recently, and they're actually half-decent sketch shows. Proper jokes, good solid comic performances and all the stuff that seems to be an optional extra in a lot of TV comedy now. The lows are pretty low, but the highs consist of good material, put over with gusto. I remember being underwhelmed at the time, but they stand up surprisingly well, especially in comparison to most of what we've been getting in recent years.

Talking of what passes for comic genius now, I've just stumbled across this unpublished article, written for the Oldie's Rant column. The editor decided, probably quite reasonably, that attacks on individuals weren't the sort of thing he wanted to include, and so persuaded me to write about people who take up the bike space on trains with their luggage instead, Anyway, here it is:

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Like God and poverty, Ricky Gervais is everywhere. Otherwise sane and rational adults rave about Extras, while believing The Office to be neither as clever nor funny as its creators thought is pure H.M. Bateman material. Sadly, I can’t see or hear him without wanting to put an anvil through my television. Not being a blacksmith and knowing how to switch off, order is maintained, but I still wonder how such a mugging ninny became the saviour of television comedy.

Admittedly, he came in at a perfect juncture, with commissioners actively seeking out the unfunny. 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.

His stand-up act relies heavily on jokes about race and disability. I can’t work out what winds me up more: being told that something is never a suitable subject for humour or a middle-class white man doing darkie and spaz jokes behind a slender and not entirely convincing veil of irony. He’s just Bernard Manning with a better tailor and worse timing.

His supporters say he does comedy of embarrassment. It seems more to me like the comedy of inflating his ego. When David Bowie appeared in Extras and sang an insulting song about Gervais’ character, it seemed self-deprecating, but the subtext seemed more like “I’m a major celebrity, these are my major celebrity friends who want to be in my hit show. I own entertainment”.

Why do I know so much about his work? I’m a big comedy fan, and I want to enjoy new things. Maybe it’s me? Maybe I’m missing something? So I watch him, hoping to be dazzled, and each time conclude that everyone else is mad, misguided and stupid. Time to visit Anvils R Us.

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Nearly 3 years after I wrote that, people whose opinions I otherwise respect still can't see Gervais for the chancer he is, a man who's made a very meagre endowment of talent go an unfeasibly long way. Am I missing something or is everyone else wrong?

Tom Driberg has long been a figure of fascination to me. He was a life-long friend of Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman, a man of the left, a rapacious homosexual, a disciple of both Lord Beaverbrook and Aleister Crowley and an alleged double agent. About 20 years ago (tempus fugit, etc), Francis Wheen wrote an excellent biography of Driberg, and, last night on BBC4, William G Stewart added to the sum of Dribergian knowledge with an excellent documentary on his friend and former employer.

Yes, the same William G Stewart that presented Fifteen to One and produced The Price is Right. Although he's probably best known for his game show work, Stewart's one of the cleverest and most versatile operators in television. Among his other achievements, he produced Bless This House and directed David Frost's demolition of insurance fraudster Emil Savundra. When I interviewed him in 2005 for my book Turned Out Nice Again, he explained that Frost could go from interviewing heads of state to presenting Through the Keyhole because, whatever the vehicle, the important thing was communication. Watching this informal but very informative documentary, I realised the same could be said about Stewart, a fundamentally serious-minded man and one of LE's genuine intellectuals. Had it not been for Grace Wyndham-Goldie's snobbish inability to countenance employing a man who hadn't been to university, he might well have made his name in current affairs instead. Certainly, the contacts he made in his time as Driberg's assistant would have come in very useful.

This is as good a place as any to note something that I didn't have space for in the book. He rescued Don't Forget Your Toothbrush after an utterly disastrous pilot. Not being an insecure sort, Stewart downplays his contribution, saying that Chris Evans, John Revell et al were very nearly there, and just needed someone with a bit more experience to tell them what worked and what didn't before they found out the hard way. Evans and Revell tell a different story, and say that without Stewart there would have been no show worthy of transmission.

The paperback edition of Turned Out Nice Again is out in the summer, and the nice people at Atlantic want me to send them any corrections and amendments arising from the hardback by the end of the month. If you read the hardback and anything struck you as erroneous or suspect, I'd love to hear from you as soon as possible on le@louisbarfe.com. Thanks in advance. No, really.

Being an adult and moderately shameless, I haven't felt embarrassed in a shop for years. I could quite merrily barge into a particularly eclectic retail emporium and request sex toys, hardcore pornography and a Richard Clayderman LP without a second's hesitation. Yesterday, however, I came as close to being abashed as I've ever been.

The record-cleaning fluid that came with my Knosti Disco-Antistat (see Cheeseford passim) is getting a bit dirty, as you might expect. However, I resent paying £15 for a bottle of isopropyl alcohol, de-ionised water and washing-up liquid. So, I did the rounds of Lowestoft's pharmacies, asking whether they sold isopropyl alcohol. A couple said they could order it, but one responded to my query with a very firm "no". Unless I'm very much mistaken, from the steely look in her eye, the woman behind the counter wanted to add "I know your type and it disgusts me". I did think of adding cheerfully that it was for cleaning records and tape heads, but I thought that would only make matters worse.

I slunk off and thought I'd try Superdrug before I gave up. There the pharmacist was unable to oblige with the goods, but incredibly helpful. He asked if it was for record cleaning, and explained that if he stocked it, he'd have to have flame-retardent cabinets all over the place. He also seemed to recall that he'd seen it in B&Q once. No joy there, either, so I ended up ordering it on eBay. Make mine a large one.

I knew Kecske Bak was a man of taste and distinction, and his response to yesterday's Nick Lowe posting merely underlines the fact. I responded by citing 'All Men Are Liars' from 1990's Party of One album as an example of Basher's greatness, and, in a spirit of show, don't tell, here it is. There's also a full band version on the 'Tube with Paul Carrack, Bobby Irwin and (I think) Steve Donnelly, but I find this unplugged version oxymoronically electrifying. I now have a sudden urge to dig out Jesus of Cool, if only to hear 'Nutted by Reality'. "Well I heard they castrated Castro, they cut off everything he had..." is one of the great opening lines of the last 50 years. Incidentally, the guitar in the clip is a Gibson J180 Everly Brothers model. When I bought my acoustic in 1994, I went for the cheaper Epiphone version, purely because Lowe and Costello had the Gibson. That's the power of Lowe.

Nearly 15 years of bafflement and anxiety have just come to an end. That's the length of time I've been familiar with 'Love Gets Strange' by Nick Lowe on his 1988 album Pinker and Prouder than Previous, and the length of time I've been trying to work out the chords on guitar. I assumed that it was beyond my meagre skills, but as most of Basher's excellent back catalogue can be expressed in four chords at most, I thought it unlikely. I worked out a set of chords that sort of got me through the song unaccompanied (G E Am D on the verses, G F C and one I couldn't quite get on the chorus), but were at noticeable variance with the pitch of the record. The one thing that never occurred to me until just now was that they might have speeded up the master tape. So, I twiddled the pitch control on the turntable until my chords fitted, and once the spot had been found, guess what, Basher's voice sounded more natural and, well, Nick Lowe-ish. It's a subtle difference, but it's been like taking off a pair of tight shoes. And, as the icing on the cake, I've just located the long-lost jewel case for Two Against Nature for Steely Dan, which had fallen down behind a bookshelf. Call it low-effort spring cleaning.

My Saturday mornings usually consist of dozing lightly with Brian Matthew on in the background, but yesterday, I was out of the house at 8.35am with a purposeful stride. Unfortunately, my purpose was to reach Lowestoft station by 8.42am, a journey I know to take 10 minutes. The plan was to catch the train to London, spend the afternoon researching at Colindale, then head off to see a much-loved band of my formative years in concert. Amazingly, with a bit of light running, I made it to the station just in time to see my train pull out. As it was an advance ticket, tied to the service I'd missed, there was no point in hanging around and catching a later train. My emotions were mixed. I was moderately annoyed to be missing the show, although I have seen the band in question enough times not to mope about not making it. I was fairly annoyed to have spent £30 on a concert ticket for no good reason. Most of all, though, I was cheesed off at the waste of £32 on the rail fare. However, as sticking to the plan would have involved even more expenditure - another bloody ticket to Colchester at the very least, plus a Travelcard at the other end, not to mention nosh and drinks - I decided that cutting my losses and going back home was the best option.

As the day wore on, I occasionally thought about where I'd have been at that given moment, had I caught the train. Oddly, instead of gnashing my teeth and cursing my tardiness, I started to feel relieved that I hadn't gone anywhere. Instead of sitting in a venue I know to be horrible simply to hear music that I know backwards forwards and sideways, paying through the nose for beer I wouldn't touch under any other circumstances, and then struggling to get back to my mother's house for a few hours' kip, I was at home, listening to Paul Barnes on the wireless, making a curry and sharing a bottle of Albanian burgundy with the GLW. I started to feel that, had the concert ticket and travel been free, I'd have paid £62 willingly not to have to go anywhere. I'm getting old. And, you know what? I love it. I'll just have to wait for the tour DVD.

My word, has it really been three weeks since I last wrote anything here? Seems that way. Maybe I'm a right old grumpydrawers, but I take a very dim view of bloggers and, worse, paid journalists who write about having nothing to say. It might have been funny and novel once upon a long ago (when children searched for treasure, but found only puppy dogs' tails in the House of Lords, donchaknow), but no more. I've always been of the 'if in doubt, say nowt' school. (UPDATE: I've just been to Matthew Rudd's blog and seen that he's said almost exactly the same thing. Great minds, etc...).

That doesn't, however, account for my recent slackness. Instead, too much has been going on. Work on my third book has been gathering momentum after a very slow start. No, not the biography of Jon 'Gaunty' Gaunt, to be published by a "small left-wing press". There never was going to be such a book, at least not written by me. The mention of it here was an elephant trap that I laid after hearing from various sources that Mr 'Gaunty' was notoriously touchy and litigious. Indeed, one acquaintance of mine had received various cease and desist notices after posting on his blog some mild criticisms of TalkSPORT's erstwhile idiot magnet. So, I thought that it might be fun to test the water. If Mr 'Gaunty' or his lawyers responded heavy-handedly, I was going to string them along for a bit before pulling faces and running away. If an answer came there none, it would be evidence that Mr 'Gaunty' wasn't quite as much of a humourless blowhard as he sometimes seemed. The latter would appear to be the case, so well done to the Coventry massive for not taking the bait. There's almost certainly material there for a nicely critical book, but I doubt I could research something or someone I didn't care about or respect.

Which brings me, neatly enough, to the real subject of book three. When, as a stroppy little leftie teenager, I declared all mainstream entertainers to be agents of Thatcherite evil, there was one old-school comedian for whom I retained a vast amount of affection and admiration. I remember the day that Les Dawson died very clearly indeed. It was 10 June 1993, three days before my 20th birthday, so I was still a teenager and still quite stroppy. However, extended exposure to truly right-on people during my first academic (ha) year at Lancaster University had taught me how boring they were and how entertaining and amusing it was to wind them up. It didn't take much. Just "That Andrea Dworkin - you wouldn't, would you?" was enough.

As was my wont, on that particular Thursday afternoon, I was hanging around at the studios of University Radio Bailrigg. In walked James Masterton (for it was he), who yelled across what we laughingly called the office, "Hey, Lou, have you heard the sad news? Les Dawson's dead" (I should add that Masterton is, for reasons that aren't quite clear even to me, the only person on Earth who can get away with calling me 'Lou'. If anyone else tries it, a gentle but firm correction is forthcoming. I'm Louis or, having attended a single-sex school - albeit a comprehensive, Barfe). I was gutted. Dawson was an overweight northern comedian who'd made it on television after an apprenticeship in the clubs. Bernard Manning ticked all of the same boxes, but after that the similarity ended. Manning was a gag machine - many of them in deeply dubious taste; Dawson was an artist and a wordsmith, and, what's more, every last word he uttered was fit for the ears of families of all races and creeds. Manning sometimes left audiences wondering about his motivation. Dawson never did. His was the comedy of humanity, and a basic kindness underpinned everything he said in pursuit of a laugh. Even his famous mother-in-law jokes can't be taken seriously as examples of misogyny. They're cartoonish, absurd and glorious, and the one who loved them best was his own mother-in-law. For me, Les Dawson has always been in a class of his own.

Fast forward 15 years or so. Having realised what a posturing little tit I'd been to dismiss all old-school entertainers as hideous old farts (some were, obviously), I had made up for my apostasy by writing a celebration of the greats of light entertainment. On handing in Turned Out Nice Again for marking, my publisher, Toby Mundy at Atlantic Books, told me that my next book should be a serious, weighty biography. Obviously, given my enthusiasm for the genre, an entertainer would make sense. Who did I want to do? I suggested Dawson, and, to my delight, he agreed. So, for the last couple of months since the contract was signed, I've been inhaling editions of Sez Les, Jokers Wild, The Loner, Dawson's Weekly, The Dawson Watch, The Les Dawson Show and Listen to Les, in preparation for the serious business of interviewing the people who knew and worked with the great man.

Finally, last week, I hauled myself out of my east Anglian retreat to begin the process, firstly in London, then in Manchester. The Manchester jaunt also enabled me to catch up with old friends and to help save the life of a dog impaled on a spiked gate, which made the travel and effort all the more worthwhile. I won't go into details here, because there'll be no point writing the book if I do and I would be guilty of the most dreadful name-dropping, but all of my interviewees were wonderfully illuminating and have convinced me that this is going to be a wonderful experience. Best of all, they remembered Dawson with great affection and warmth, which is good from my point of view, as I'd get thoroughly depressed spending a year of my life with a wrong'un. By all accounts, he was a lovable, delightful, funny man. What of his supposed dark side? Well, it might just turn out that there wasn't one. We shall see. He had his serious-minded moments, certainly, but does that equate to darkness? I have a very low tolerance of the 'sad clown' cliché and its frequent misapplication.

Before heading to Manchester, I'd had the good fortune to attend the Oldie of the Year once again (I think this was my 11th time). At the risk of sounding like a terrible crawler, The Oldie is a wonderful, idiosyncratic magazine that lets good people (and Wilfred De'Ath) get on with writing. If you've never read it and assume it's a sequence of moans and groans, try and pick a copy up. It's actually a very enthusiastic magazine, in which contributors are encouraged to write about the things they actually really like. The Oldie paid me to write about test cards, and didn't poke fun at me for doing so. The Oldie of the Year ceremony is always a namedropper's paradise, so I shall just give thanks that I was allowed to sit in the corner and gawp once again, and report that toastmaster/TOGmeister Sir Terry Wogan referred to Barry Cryer as Barry Took. This places him in excellent company. Princess Anne once did it, prompting Cryer to reply "No ma'am, I'm the other one".

There was also the far-from-solemn business of Sir Bill Cotton's memorial service at St Martin in the Fields on Thursday. I met Sir Bill a few times - the first being at the launch of his own memoirs in 2000, the second being when I interviewed him at length for Turned Out Nice Again in 2004, the rest being at Oldie functions - and held him in very high regard, as just about everyone who knew him did. Apart from Michael Grade breaking down in very understandable tears, the mood was light-hearted. Sir David Attenborough told the Albanian Eurovision delegation story, while Ronnie Corbett (still, unaccountably, just an OBE) spoke admiringly of Sir Bill's membership of several of the country's most exclusive golf clubs. "Not cheap. Like lunch with Ken Dodd", he observed, memorably. 'Sir' Ron had the awkward job of following the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, who had played the Billy Cotton Band's version of 'The Dambusters March' and a Russian folk song-style rendition of 'Leaning on a Lamp Post'. Almost all of the speakers, including Sir Bill's protege Jim Moir and his friend, the Rev Dr Colin Morris, referred to Sir Bill's love of Chinese food and HP sauce (separately, thank the Lord). I'll be smearing my dinner in sauce brune tonight in his honour. RIP Sir Bill.

When I hear stories of students living at home and still graduating up to their foreheads in debt, I get angry. For me, university was 3 years of being given money (not very much admittedly) to avoid my mother. I spent that time in a provincial northern town, drinking far too much beer, having far too much fun and doing far too little study to justify the investment involved at the point of sale, but have I not more than made good that outlay in tax and sundries? My university years were a glorious interlude. Isn't it the basic right of any Britisher to have a glorious interlude at some point in their lives? The introduction of tuition fees was the issue over which I cancelled my direct debit to Walworth Road (as it was then). Since then, that same political organisation has done sweet Felicity Arkwright to ensure anything more than a grudging X at election time, where it once had my whole-hearted support.

Has the pace of technological development slowed down or have I just become easier to please? Normally, every 4-5 years or so, I get an itch to buy a new computer, but the itch is completely absent. My current machine does everything I need from a computer at decent speed.

Some historical background. I bought my first home PC in the summer of 1997. It had a 200MHz processor (an AMD, I seem to recall, having taken advice from mates in the IT department at work, one of whom even drove me to collect the machine and helped me set it up at home), a 2.5GB hard drive - big and bold at a time when 1GB was the norm, and 32MB of RAM (for added performance). With a 15" monitor, it cost £1,100. It served me very well for a time, but by summer 2000, it was starting to creak. I wanted to add a CD writer for the purposes of transferring some of my analogue audio stockpile, and I thought that it might be just as well to get a newer, faster machine. So, I bought an HP with a 500MHz Celeron processor, an 8.4GB hard drive and 128MB of RAM, for a mere £500. I added a second hard drive - a 40GB - for all the audio I was processing, but I kept the 15" monitor from my original machine until a year later when it went up in a puff of blue smoke one Sunday morning, resulting in a hurried trip to the Mile End Road PC World on the number 25 bus to pick up the Philips 17" monitor I'm squinting at now. That old heap served me well too, until I decided that I needed a DVD writer.

So, in 2004, I bought an external USB model, but soon I realised that I'd put go-faster stripes on a horse and cart, and decided a new machine was in order. Early in 2005, I looked on eBay and bought a refurbished, fully guaranteed Packard Bell with a 2.67Ghz Celeron, an 80GB hard drive, 512MB of RAM and a DVD rewriter for a piddling £180. Apart from the addition of a 250GB hard drive, another gig of RAM and a second rewriter bunged in the case, not to mention the 2.8GHz Pentium 4 that I put in when I replaced the old, fried motherboard, that's my current machine. When I replaced the motherboard, I was told, almost universally, that I'd be as well starting from scratch. I ignored everyone and got the machine going again for £30.

It's not just a glorified typewriter. I do some fairly intensive audio and video work on this machine, and it just keeps going. I suppose my attitude might be different if I were a gamer, but would I gain anything by buying a state-of-the-art machine? I suspect not.

Where's my credit card? I have a sudden urge to buy a golliwog. Anyone who takes offence clearly has too much time on their hands.

Doing the authorial self-absorption thing on Amazon, I noticed that one bookseller had a 'collectible' copy of my first book for sale. Curious to see what made it so, I clicked on the link and found the following:

"Signed by the author with a dedication; 'To Elkan with thanks for his help on the follow-up. Regards, Louis Barfe.' (written in attractive hand-writing). Excellent book in very clean solid order. Dispatched immediately."

The Elkan in question is Elkan Allan, former head of entertainment at Rediffusion and creator of Ready Steady Go, whom I interviewed for Turned Out Nice Again. He died a couple of years ago, and his family are obviously selling his library, with which I wish them the very best of luck. So, if anyone has a signed copy of a book what I wrote, note that it is, officially, collectible, and that the author has attractive hand-writing.

The BBC is by no means perfect, but it's the best we've got in terms of broadcasting. Radios 2-4 and BBC4 justify the licence fee, IMHO, and anyone who argues otherwise obviously wants to spend the rest of their lives eating dinner with a vast number of plastic coffee stirrers. This Gaza appeal business highlights the problem the BBC currently faces, which is, to put it bluntly, damned if it does, damned if it doesn't. In the past, the BBC has been criticised for showing a modicum of support for appeals that have gained air time, appeals that have been recognised generally to be A GOOD THING. Faced with the inevitable glee that would emanate from numerous stinking hypocrites elsewhere in the media, the BBC decided to sit the politically-charged Gaza appeal out. Now, the same stinking hypocrites are giving it the old "heartless BBC - do you pay your licence fee for them not to caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaare?" horseshit, and the DG's bothering to dignify it with a response. In such situations, I think Hugh Greene's attitude to Mary Whitehouse is the correct one. Don't even acknowledge the existence of such people.

In the course of researching my two books, I've recorded a large number of interviews. Each recording is an irreplaceable document of a fascinating and illuminating conversation. Mercifully, the overwhelming majority of those interviewed are still with us and still readily contactable, but the passings of Angela Morley and Stewart Morris, as well as those of Hugh Mendl and Sir Bill Cotton last year, have prompted me to listen to a few of the recordings again, and to make sure that each is backed up.

I'm not entirely sure what my fellow researchers use for these recordings, but I've used mini-disc exclusively for the last decade or so, the results of which I'm now backing up onto DVD-Rs in FLAC lossless format. Doubtless the time will come when I should consider a solid-state digital recorder like a Zoom H2, but as long as my trusty Sharp keeps going, and as long as spare machines can be found on eBay for not much more than a tenner a throw, I'll stick with MD. Indeed, I underlined my commitment to the ageing format recently when I bought 20 blank discs, marked discontinued, at a heavily-reduced price from my local Tesco.

My introduction to the format came in 1993, when my university radio station needed to replace its ancient cart machines. Reading a hi-fi magazine on Christmas Day, I rang the station director there and then to suggest he look at the new format. He bought them, took the credit and is now head of something very important at the BBC. We're still friends, but that's why he's there and I'm here. It was a revolution. It provided the editability of open-reel tape with the portability of cassette, and the sound seemed out of this world. Now I can hear the lossy compression far more readily, but for speech it's fine and dandy, and it's enabled me to record some music that would otherwise have floated off into the ether, and it doesn't get much more lossy than that. It was a few years before I could justify the cost of my own personal machine, but, paired with a Sony condenser microphone, it's allowed me to assemble a very acceptable-sounding library of oral history.

The Angela Morley interview was unusual. Normally, I meet the interviewee at their home or a mutually-convenient venue, and let the machine capture whatever is said. After establishing initial contact with Angela at a meeting of the Coda Club on one of her annual visits back home, her schedule meant that there was no time for a sit-down chat, so she suggested that I email a list of questions, and that she would send me her replies. I assumed that she'd email back, but, instead, a mini-disc arrived in the post. At the time, I groaned a little, as I had a lot of material to assimilate and I was anxious to avoid unnecessary transcription duties. Now, however, I'm thrilled to have the recording, with Angela saying "Hello, Louis..." at the start, rather than a dull old Word document. I thought I'd share a little bit with you, along with a bit of the music she describes, in this case, her gorgeous arrangement of 'A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square', with sumptuous trombone solo by Laddie Busby. It's from the 1958 Philips album London Pride, now, more than ever, overdue for a CD reissue. It comes from a stereo pressing, but Blogger's summed the channels into mono, as Philips did with the initial copies 51 years ago.

Reasons to mourn Sir John Mortimer, number 984: "For Rumpole, I thought of Alastair Sim, but he was dead and couldn't take it on."
Reasons to mourn Sir John Mortimer, number 985: "Sport brings me out in a rash."

Also, a nice line (paraphrased) from Neil Kinnock: some criticised him for not knowing right from wrong, but he knew justice from injustice.

A light's gone out.

Right, let's be proactive and halt the trend of excellent people popping their clogs. Between us, I'm guessing that myself and the readers of this blog must have the home numbers and email addresses of quite a few elderly celebrities. So, let's all make the effort and get in contact to make sure they've all got their heating on and a tartan blanket over their legs.

Tony Hart's gone. God's turban and tutu, how many more? In tribute, here's Lucas and Walliams' finest moment, with sterling support from Paul Putner: