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?

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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.