Encouragingly, Amazon's first order of Turned Out Nice Again has sold out, despite, or perhaps because of, my decision to add the "...this book is not worth reading" bit of Shabba Hanks' Independent write-up to the product description underneath all the nice review quotes. Don't panic, more copies are on order. I suspect the power of wireless helped enormously - many authors would sell a kidney to get two hours talking to East Anglia. Anyway, if you have bought it, thank you, and if you've received a freebie from the publisher, I hope you can get a good price for it. Moreover, if you haven't bought it, we know where you live. Your honest appraisals are always welcome. To use an old phrase beloved of the profession: if you liked the show, tell your friends; but if you didn't like it, tell us. Or, either way, you can write an Amazon review.

The broadcast with Paul Barnes was terrific fun. It's always good to talk to someone who knows what they're on about. He must have enjoyed the experience too, as he gave over two of his three precious hours to blethering with me about Duke Ellington, the Coventry Hippodrome and Liberace, and playing, to use his catchphrase, "some simply spiffing music" (not Liberace, obviously). Anyone daft enough not to stay in on a Saturday night listening to the wireless can catch up on the jollity here.

No sign of it online yet, but Roger Lewis has reviewed Turned Out Nice Again in today's Mail on Sunday. He makes the fair point that variety's such an amorphous mess, it's almost impossible to make any sort of sense of it. At times, writing the bloody thing did feel like plaiting sawdust, but I felt and still feel that it was worth trying. He concludes that it was worth trying too, and recommends it as background reading for media studies students. I'll take that as a compliment...

The estimable Paul Barnes has been kind enough to ask me on his Saturday evening Gold for Grown-Ups radio show across the BBC Eastern Counties stations tonight, to talk about light entertainment, jazz and other enriching matters. I've been a listener to his show since living in east London nearly a decade ago, when getting any sort of BBC Essex signal involved standing in a zinc bucket with the wireless strapped to my head. Now, of course, the show's available globally on the Internest at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/norfolk.shtml. He and I are both Oldie contributors, and we've been exchanging emails and telephone calls about our many shared enthusiasms and the state of the nation for a while now, but we've never actually met. I'll be around from 6.20pm onwards.

I've just received the following email:

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Dear Customer,

On Friday, 24th October, we formally completed the acquisition of Alliance & Leicester. It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to the Santander Group.

You are now part of one of the world's most successful banks. Santander is first bank in the Eurozone by market capitalization, and fifth in the world by profits, with over 70 million customers in 40 countries.

You are kindly advised to follow the instructions below to register your account to allow easy merger.

---------------

Now I've never had the Abbey habit or trusted any of my money to Sprocket & Sylvester, so this is obviously a phishing attempt. If I were to follow the instructions, the only easy merger that would occur is that of all my hard-earned money with that of the scammers. Does anyone ever fall for this sort of thing? And if they do, don't they deserve to be fleeced for being so bloody stupid?

I love this bit:

"By becoming part of the Santander Group, Alliance & Leicester has acquired strong backing, which is crucial in these difficult financial times."

Which translates roughly as "By clicking on the link in this email, these difficult financial times will get more difficult for you, sucker."

Robert Hanks has reviewed Turned Out Nice Again in the Independent. I'll sort the "numerous factual errors" out for the paperback - there tend to be numerous small factual errors in any first edition. No author or editor can catch every silly little slip, so reader feedback is invaluable, and if you find any howlers, please do let me know at ahoyhoy@louisbarfe.com. Every reviewer has highlighted omissions, which is fair enough. However, to say "it's perverse to devote pages to The Two Ronnies without mentioning Ronnie Barker's roles in Porridge and Open All Hours" misses the point of the book slightly. Quite apart from the fact that I am perverse, I make it fairly clear in the introduction that the book's about the nebulous concept of variety, rather than narrative comedy. A visit to any bookshop, good or bad, will show that comedy, particularly sitcom, is already super-served by nostalgia tomes. Porridge and Open All Hours are both sitcoms. I could have given them a passing mention, but would that have been anything other than a waste of word count that could have been better deployed elsewhere? Monty Python's Flying Circus didn't make the cut because it came out of the BBC's comedy department, A Bit of Fry and Laurie did because it was made by the variety department. Well, it makes sense to me. It's a shame he didn't like it, as it denies me the opportunity to nick the 'Thanks Hanks' joke from Look Around You.

Another review, this time not for my book, but for Prime Minister, You Wanted to See Me: a history of Week Ending by Ian Greaves and Justin Lewis. Choice quotes from the Chortle critique include "the authors have employed the sensibilities of a trainspotter, and reduced 28 years of radio comedy to a catalogue of dry, passionless statistics", and "It must have taken hours upon hours of tedious research to compile this book, but you can’t help but feel it’s time wasted on something that cannot, surely, be of interest to anybody". Ouch.

The book in question is published by Kaleidoscope, the excellent organisation devoted to promoting interest in archive television and radio, and finding lost programmes. It would appear that the reviewer, Steve Bennett, hasn't seen a Kaleidoscope book before, because this is what they do - they cram as much information as they possibly can into their books, some of which are more directories than historical narratives. They're not meant to read like a John Grisham novel. They're research tools, and I'm immensely grateful that they exist. Bennett notes, quite rightly, that Week Ending's importance is less because of its inherent quality (in fact, the gags were often woefully poor) than the fact that it gave first breaks to pretty much everyone who came to prominence in comedy and satire between the 1970s and the 1990s. The exhaustive, painstaking show-by-show, sketch-by-sketch listing is, he says, tedious. No, no, no. I also fail to see how "Over 25 pages, there are no fewer than 106 footnotes" can be presented as a failing. Footnotes contain vital supplementary information that would otherwise hold up the main narrative. In compiling it and publishing this book, Greaves, Lewis and Kaleidoscope have done future comedy historians a great service. The authors have spent days sweating over P-as-Bs at Caversham so no-one else has to. This book will be of immense worth and interest to anyone attempting to research British comedy of the recent past.

My main problem with the review is that Bennett seems to have savaged it for not being something it was never intended to be. Anyone who says that my problem is also motivated by my friendship with Ian and Justin, and the fact that I owe Simon Coward from Kaleidoscope £50 for a part-share in an Oscar Peterson Jazz 625 telerecording, is bang off the mark and will be hearing from my lawyer forthwith.

"I bet those transvestites are sore at the end of the night" - Apres la Guerre, recalling the night he went on the lash with his mum in Amsterdam. It's a story he's told me before, but I'm very glad he's made it available for public consumption.

More reviews. One, largely glowing, in the Grauniad from Kit Hesketh-Harvey, whose work with the Widow I've always liked. Another, broadly favourable but concerned about areas I missed, in the Sunday Telegraph from Peter Bazalgette, about whose work I am divided. His part in bringing Big Brother to our screens makes me want to ask him outside for a frank exchange of views, but this transgression is almost counter-balanced by his involvement with the development of Deal or No Deal. Meanwhile, in the November Literary Review, Andrew Barrow calls me "scholarly", but wishes I'd been a bit nastier and says that there's too much Bill Cotton Junior in it. Barrow also asks (as does Kit H-H) who gives a toss about ATV, Associated-Rediffusion and the defunct dinosaurs of early ITV? Well, I do, hence their inclusion. The reviews prove that it's impossible to please everyone, and that, however you write, something that one reader loves, another reader will almost certainly hate. All you can do is write the sort of book you'd want to read yourself, and hope that some other bugger will too.

Of course, all of the nice reviews in the world are useless if the book can't be bought anywhere. At my hometown Waterstone's, Mrs Cheeseford tripped over ceiling-high piles of Why Do I Say These Things? by Jonathan Ross and At My Mother's Knee...and Other Low Joints by Paul O'Grady to discover that they have no intention of stocking Turned Out Shite Again, despite me being all over local radio like a cheap suit. On a flying business visit to London yesterday, I popped in to Waterstone's on Oxford Street. Nada. The gigantic Borders had one copy, which the very nice bookseller chap in films and media invited me to sign. I suspect that 90% of any sales I garner will take place through Amazon. Talking of which, one of their used and new affiliates was punting the work out for £6.99, which is about half of what my publisher would charge me, even with my author's discount. Over lunch, brer publisher mused that it was almost certainly a books desk junior staff member supplementing their meagre income. As indeed I did myself when on Publishing News. Good luck to 'em.

Incidentally, I haven't read the aforementioned O'Grady book, but intend to fully when I get a chance. I approve of it already for signalling a return to showbiz autobiographies with amusing titles. We've had too many years of Ronseal drabness like Dale: My Story and Bruce: the Autobiography. A showbiz memoir should have a funny title, preferably one that makes no sense until you've read the book, like Shake a Pagoda Tree by Mike and Bernie Winters or Michael Aspel's Polly Wants a Zebra. Any other good ones spring to mind?

Kim Jong-Il and Gok Wan. You never see them together. Funny that.

The acknowledgments for a book are usually written in the last-minute rush to get the thing off to press. As such, important names are sometimes missed out. So it is with Turned Out Nice Again. For example, Simon McLean gave me a copy of the 1983 Late Late Breakfast Show where the car stunt went quite badly wrong, while Andy Henderson - former proprietor of the much-missed Lost British Television blog - gave me some invaluable Stanley Baxter and Chic Murray material. I forgot to thank both of them and am now mired in self-loathing. Similarly, I forgot to nod gratefully in the direction of John Williams - co-conspirator behind Tachyon TV and one of the funniest people in all archive TV fandom - and Dick Fiddy of the BFI, who introduced me to Bob Monkhouse's manager Peter Prichard. I am a clot. Sorry chaps. I'll sort it for the paperback.

John Peel was once asked what was the strangest place he'd had sex. He replied "Ipswich". After some of my experiences there today, I have a rough idea what he meant. I'd made the journey down on the East Suffolk line to be interviewed by Luke Deal on his BBC Radio Suffolk afternoon show. That bit was good fun, but train timetables meant that I'd arrived with an hour and a half to spare. So, I'd popped to a pub for some lunch. I stood at the bar, watching people come and go, turning up after me, but getting served ahead of me. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but I must have spent five full minutes being bypassed. When, eventually, nobody else was around and the barman deigned to serve me, I thought about it as a game of soldiers and just said "No thanks. I'm going to go somewhere else".

Looking for alternative sustenance, I passed a fish and chip shop on my bike, and decided that I suddenly fancied saveloy and chips. As I placed my order, the chief fryer gave me a quizzical look. "You want saveloys? You mean the red sausages?". As I was hungry, feeling unaccountably charitable and not reckoning much on a stranger's mucus as a condiment, I bit my tongue and nodded, but surely a saveloy is a saveloy and a sausage is a sausage?

As I sat on a nearby wall, eating my (very nice) red sausage, chips and mushy peas, I noticed a superb poster in a newsagent's window. This one, in fact.

In the shorthand of headline writing, putting something in quotes means that "we've heard this, and nobody will confirm it, but we're desperate so we're printing it anyway". Similarly, a question mark indicates that they're making it up as they go along. In this case, the Ipswich Evening Star was trying desperately to find a local angle on the big international story of the moment. Of course, the headline is designed to make the casual viewer think that the leader of the free world may be about to enjoy a break on the Norfolk Broads before taking office. On closer inspection, it turns out that Obama might land at Stansted on his first official visit to Britain, before being whisked to London as soon as humanly possible. Anyway, the poster made me laugh, and I hope it amuses you a bit too.

What happened next wasn't so jolly. Having taken the picture, I was approached by a chap in a hoodie, his eye movements indicating that his bloodstream contained something stronger than 2 jumbo saveloys, chips, peas and a can of ginger beer. "Are you taking my picture?" he asked in a threatening tone of voice. "No," I replied. "You were taking my picture," he continued. Taking great care to maintain a vice-like grip on the camera (street value: unknown), I showed him my picture on the preview screen, and reassured him that I had not and would never want to take his picture. By this time, he'd been joined by a motley crew of smackheads of both sexes, all bollocking on about how taking pictures of people in the street was against the law and an infringement of their civil liberties. I know, the irony wasn't lost on me, but I settled for staring at them quite hard (something were too whacked to achieve in return) before moving on. I was, however, boiling with rage.

I live in the same county, but Ipswich would appear to be a different world.

Another review, this time from Keith Watson in Metro. He has reservations about the book, but his last line pretty much gauges my attitude to the matter. I felt there were too many good stories to cram in about light entertainment itself to make any more space than I did for social context.

Inadvertently, I committed Internet suicide a fortnight ago. Concerned messages were left, enquiring after my well-being, after my bon mots stopped appearing on various forums. Over at Cook'd and Bomb'd, the absence of my usual Wednesday night pretend radio strangeness augured ill for those disturbed enough to tune in. I had even abandoned one thread in mid-argument, which was the surest sign that something sinister had occurred. The messages that I received were incredibly touching, but the simple truth was that I had a couple of piss-ups to attend in London, a research trip to the BBC Written Archive Centre at Caversham to do and some visiting of relatives to fit in, these being family members without broadband.

I'll spare you the full Fear and Loathing travelogue, but a couple of highlights spring to mind. First was the Oldie Travel Awards at the East India Club. Now, despite being a mere stripling of 35, I've been an Oldie contributor for nearly a decade. I live in hope that the magazine will still exist when I'm a real oldie myself.

Second was the fulfilment of a long-deferred ambition, while visiting Mrs Cheeseford's parents in Bristol. In one of his 1960s documentaries on the west country, John Betjeman had featured a small escarpment in the Avon Gorge by Clifton Suspension Bridge, down which generations of Bristolian children had slid on their backsides, rendering the rock completely smooth. When I saw the programme, I thought 'I'm having some of that'. I ascertained that men in hard hats hadn't cordoned off the area for health and safety reasons, but somehow other commitments our our great western jaunts always got in the way. Until now:




Just one question arises. For the first, say, 100 years of the slide's existence, wouldn't it have been quite a rough ride? The darning needles of north-east Somerset must have been well-used.

Finally, there was the Blue Peter Goes Gold event run by the estimable Kaleidoscope at BAFTA. A day of laughter, hilarity, hard hats, vast quantities of beer and mock shock when we heard Biddy Baxter using the word 'cleavage'. After the 7 (count 'em) hours of clips and panels (something that might be perceived by some as an ordeal, only marginally preferable to spending the time with Peter Stringfellow in Basra, but they're wrong, it was great), we trooped upstairs to mark the publication of Ian Greaves and Justin Lewis' Prime Minister, You Wanted to See Me, and BAFTA: Behind the Mask by Reginald Collin. As well being a former director of the Academy, Collin is also a former director of top-rated drama series like Callan, and a fund of superb stories about the golden years of television. It was made apparent, at one time, that BAFTA could easily become RAFTA if it so desired. The desire, however, wasn't there. One reason was the potential for confusion with the Royal Academy over the road in Piccadilly, giving rise to the image of cab drivers asking fares if they wanted the one where the pictures moved, or the one where they stayed still.

As some of you might already be aware, I've got a new book out. One of the best stories in the whole volume is that of Sammy Davis Junior going AWOL on the day of a Simon Dee chat show, only to turn up in mid-transmission with a sheaf of band parts. The full, glorious tale is told in the book (pp210-212) by Roger Ordish, who was producing and directing the show, but here's the accompanying visual and aural magnificence. Sammy's original recording has Ray Brown on bass. This has Joe Mudele, taking the lead and sight-reading like mad. You know what? It leaves the studio version standing.



Despite this blog being the fount of all light entertainment knowledge, I shall avoid dwelling on the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand incident. Apart from to say that Andrew Sachs appears to be one of the most tolerant and decent men alive. If only those with a less direct connection to the furore could show such grace and restraint.

Roger Hutchinson in the Scotsman takes the honour of being the first person to review Turned Out Nice Again, and, frabjuous day, he liked it. I get to share the bill with Denis Norden too, which is no disgrace.

So, the last survivor of the Titanic disaster, Millvina Dean, has sold her mementoes for £30,000, to fund her twilight years in a care home. Doubtless the items have gone to people who will love and cherish them, but would it have been too much of a stretch for those who've done very nicely out of the whole Titanic thing, among them James Cameron, to see her right?

Congratulations to Atlantic on their Booker success with The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. As one of their non-Booker-winning authors, I do hope it doesn't make them all unbearable.

Back in my days on Publishing News, party small talk around this time of year always began with "What do you think of the Booker short-list?". This would then be followed by vague mumblings, designed to give the impression that the answerer had read even a paragraph of one of the novels. It was one of those situations where you really could have had your opinions handed to you on a crib sheet.

Unless, that is, you were me or a colleague. I was always scrupulously honest and admitted that I had no idea, not being much of a one for fiction. This was always sure to produce a Bateman cartoon response, even though the person asking me almost certainly had no more of a real clue than I did. Once, a publishing type pressed further and said "Come on, you must read some fiction", at which I confessed to a penchant for PG Wodehouse. "Oh," came the reply. "Old books. Don't you read anything new?". "Yes, AI (advance information) sheets mainly," feeling almost 99% sure that this person's opinion of modern writing came from the same source and reviews. M'colleague's response was far subtler, bordering on genius. He'd simply reply "Another good year for fiction". Then, in the pregnant moment while the questioner was trying to work out whether he was expressing surprise that so much fiction should make it through to the short list of a fiction prize, or whether he was saying that he liked all of the books on the list, m'colleague would change the subject.

I've always fancied the Whitbread myself. Apparently Abdul Abulbul-Amir presents the winner with a case of Best Bitter. The runner-up gets 4 cans of Trophy, "the pint that thinks it's a quart".

Following on from the previous post, about Peter Kay's laugh-an-hour 'satire' of talent shows, here's something that crams more actual jokes and proper digs at the whole genre into 10 minutes than he managed in 2 hours. And it was for charity, too, which means that it didn't actually need to be any good*. Oh, and it's 7 years old. Now, children, can you spell 'zeitgeist'?



* Joke

In the interests of remaining well-informed, I sat through the whole two hours of Peter Kay's Britain's Got the Pop Factor-wyllantisiliogogogoch. It looked perfect, but it didn't make me laugh once. As a satire (and some listings billed it as such), it was toothless, with Pete Waterman, Nicki Chapman and Dr Fox (who is, in the words of Lee and Herring, neither a real doctor nor an actual fox) all desperately trying to show how good they are at taking a joke and thus improving their own profiles in the process. As comedy, it was lazy. It seems that they'd spent so much time and effort getting the set right that they had no time to write any actual jokes. Still, we shouldn't be too surprised. Has Peter Kay been any good since he parted company with Dave Spikey and Neil Fitzmaurice?

Anyway, I can just about tolerate the existence of bad comedy, but on Monday, 'The Winner's Song' was released as a single. Extensive enquiries have brought forth no indication that the single is a charitable venture. So, it would appear that Channel 4 paid Peter Kay to make a two-hour promo for his own single, the profits from which will be going to buy his mum a bigger garden for her bungalow - I'm told she's got her eye on a little place called Lancashire. If so, am I being hopelessly old-fashioned to think that the whole setup stinks? Even the useless Ofcom must take a dim view of this sort of corruption.

For years now, I've been keeping informal tabs on who might possibly deserve the title of greatest living Englishman. Until now, Sir David Attenborough has been the clear leader, but, after last night's Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, he's got a challenger in the form of Sir Roger Moore. He was the sort of chat show guest you don't think they make anymore. Funny, twinkly, and with a neat line in Tony Curtis impersonations. Meanwhile, the genuine gleam in his eye when Wossy produced a gigantic pork pie (his favourite nosh) in lieu of a birthday cake was immensely endearing, as was saying "Is it Wall's?" in the manner of an Antiques Roadshow expert (Actually it was Fortnum and Mason's, and judging by the look on his face as he tucked in, they make an exceedingly good pie).

He gained points a while back, when it emerged that Sir Ben Kingsley was being a bit of a ninny and berating crew members who didn't genuflect in front of him and call him Sir Ben. I contrasted this with the story of a relatively junior crew member approaching Moore, asking how he preferred to be addressed and getting the reply "Call me Rog".

I think that Attenborough minor still just shades it, but the hat is doffed to Rog and his pork pies. Any other GLE nominations?

Going through the stats for this blog, I see quite a few people using Google Chrome. Nice, isn't it? However, I can't help wondering how long it will be before the first high-profile Google Chrome 'incognito window' divorce or sacking. They bill it as enabling undetected access for the purposes of present buying and surprise holiday planning. Yeah, right. It's like the cotton bud packets that tell you not to stick the contents in your ear, when that's their main purpose. The incognito window is for slacking and wanking.

The book reviews I've been doing lately and the impending publication of my new book Turned Out Nice Again: the story of British light entertainment have caused me to think far too deeply about approaches to reviewing. The one that annoys me most is the reviewer who tells you how they would have written the same book, and that the approach taken by the author is, as a result, worthless. As far as I'm concerned, a reviewer's job is to say whether the book works or not, and, if not, why not. There are many ways to reach the same conclusion, and to suggest that you have the one true path is appalling arrogance.

The other thing that annoys me is reviewers who think they're the main feature rather than a mildly illuminating sideshow. When my first book-shaped thing came out, one reviewer spent roughly half of the article talking about his own life and career before summarising the book dismissively in a couple of paragraphs at the end. Among his more perceptive comments, he said that the book was dense and confusing in places, which it was. It was a dense, confusing subject and, several years on, I'm happy to admit that I bit off a bit more than I could chew (I'm still enormously proud of the book, but I did feel the need to lob in the kitchen sink - I'd write it a bit differently now). However, as an example of density and confusion, he chose to quote a bit that I wrote in a quite deliberately dense and confusing manner (think Danny Kaye doing the vessel with the pestle) to show what a cat's cradle of guff the record industry had become.

Anyway, get yer lovely pre-orders in for the perfect stocking filler here.

Thanks go out to Sparks for flagging this up. It's the once-underrated, now-feted (and deservedly so) Craig Ferguson saying roughly the same things I think about the current financial situation, only in a far more funny manner and in front of an audience of millions.

How's this for missing the point? The Phillipine Embassy is denouncing the BBC for a sketch in a recent Harry and Paul show, depicting a middle-class householder trying to mate his neighbour's Filipina maid with his own pet Geordie. This one, in fact, just after the opening titles (embedding's been disabled, so you'll have to click through). Meanwhile, an outfit calling itself the Philippine Foundation is describing the sketch as "tantamount to racism and [the] worst sexual abuse and exploitation of the hapless young Filipina domestic worker employee". Er, no. Context is everything. Regular viewers of this rather good series (streets ahead of last year's Ruddy Hell, It's Harry and Paul) will know that the middle-class white bloke and his neighbour are the figures of ridicule in this sketch. The sort of people who can afford domestic staff and who regard them as mere livestock (I should point out for benefit of the clueless that not everyone who employs domestic staff is like this). If the mob in the Philippine Embassy and their mates in the Foundation took a deep breath before flying off the handle, they might realise that Enfield and Whitehouse are actually on their side.

As the September Literary Review seems to be off the news stands, here's the aforementioned piece about Graham McCann's Bounder and Mark Simpson's Alastair Sim.

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JOLLY GOOD FUN

Bounder! The Biography of Terry-Thomas
By Graham McCann
(Aurum 291pp £16.99)

Alastair Sim: The Star of Scrooge and the Belles of St Trinian's
By Mark Simpson
(The History Press 256pp £18.99)

In the heyday of the British film industry, Terry-Thomas and Alastair Sim made respectable careers playing people who weren't respectable. They played characters who were ‘not quite gentlemen', but in different ways: Terry-Thomas was the embodiment of the player or bounder, while Sim depicted seedy, shabby, failed or faded gentility better than almost anyone else. The near-contemporaries coincided on screen on several occasions, so the appearance of this brace of biographies is serendipitous.

Sim was the elder of the two actors, born in Edinburgh in 1900, the son of a tailor. Terry-Thomas was born Thomas Terry Hoar Stevens eleven years later in Finchley and, despite being merely middle-class, affected a dandyish manner almost from the womb, as a way of blanking out his dreary suburban surroundings and his parents' unhappy union. Both actors achieved their greatest success playing amplified, exaggerated, grotesque versions of their real personalities, but both also had deceptively wide ranges. Sim began on stage as a straight actor before moving into film as a more manic, comic performer than he later became; while T-T was a skilled mimic, something he rarely got a chance to show.

Another thing that Alastair Sim and Terry-Thomas had in common was their work ethic. Sim, who began professional life as an elocution teacher in his native Edinburgh, was a fastidious director even when he wasn't meant to be directing, which caused no end of on-set tensions. T-T's apparent effortlessness and dilettantism masked massive ambition, drive and professionalism, the last of which he expected from his colleagues. Off-duty, however, both are shown by their biographers to have been amusing, charming men.

A populist former Cambridge academic, Graham McCann has spent the last decade or so producing books on film and comedy at a fearsome rate. In contrast, Mark Simpson is making his authorial debut, being a civil servant more used to writing government reports on private finance initiatives. Surprised to find that there had been no proper biography of such a major figure as Sim, Simpson spent the next decade finding out why, the guarded actor having left almost no trace of his seventy-five years apart from his work.

T-T's well-known film work is covered at length in Bounder, but McCann's conceit is to present his subject as the founding father of British television comedy. This is no hyperbole. Between 1949 and 1952, his series How Do You View? practically defined the medium's humorous trajectory. The BBC would have been happy with a simple act show. Instead, T-T, writers Sid Colin and Talbot Rothwell, and producer Bill Ward pushed at the limitations of the medium and paved the way for later shows like Hancock's Half-Hour. Sadly, because no recordings survive, the show’s legacy is all too often overlooked; but its contemporary effect was seismic.

McCann's other achievement is to convey what jolly company and rollicking good fun the real-life T-T must have been. Harry Secombe called him ‘the finest raconteur ever’, and that quality shines through here. No sad clown he. It's impossible not to adore a man who, upon meeting Pablo Picasso, asked the artist if anyone had ever requested ‘a word in your eye’. Unfortunately, the book suffers from a lack of original interview material with colleagues and contemporaries. McCann's excellent earlier books on Morecambe and Wise and Frankie Howerd were leavened liberally by such anecdotes. Apart from occasional observations from Sarah Miles, Jonathan Cecil, Barry Cryer and T-T's cousin Richard Briers, Bounder is mostly a survey – admittedly a very thorough one – of the paper trail left by T-T himself in articles, interviews and BBC contributor files.

In contrast, the privacy-obsessed, interview-shy Sim left no such trail (whatever the question, his standard reply to journalists was ‘I don't know’), so Simpson is to be commended on having found as much material as he has, particularly with regard to the actor's early years. Similarly, Sim's long and fruitful association with the now unfashionable Scots dramatist James Bridie is chronicled well. Simpson has spoken to many who worked with Sim, and their reminiscences help build up a picture of a stubborn, difficult, exacting, but ultimately kind and lovable man. This picture is obscured very occasionally by sloppy editing: cinematographer Otto Heller becomes 'Otto Helier', for example.

Sim's kindness towards young actors and actresses, such as George Cole, has been well documented. Simpson acknowledges the ‘murkiness of innuendo’, wondering whether Sim's privacy obsession did not mask darker impulses. After all, when Sim met his wife Naomi, he was twenty-six, and she was twelve – but the friendship was purely platonic for many years. Although Simpson, unintentionally, makes the waters even murkier in the way he broaches the subject, the answer is ultimately supplied by friends like the child actor-turned-BBC executive John Howard Davies, who testify to Sim's honourable intent.

As you'd expect from a seasoned biographer like Graham McCann, Bounder is pacy. Conversely, Mark Simpson's book can be a little dry in places, which might be the influence of the day job. Alternatively, it might be the subjects themselves imposing their considerable personalities on these welcome books.

So, Mandelson. I'm not an expert on card games, but I thought a flush could only bust once? And the US bailout has gone through. It was Hobson's choice, really, but I think they made the wrong decision. At the other end of this, the bankers, financiers and politicians who got the world into this shite in the first place will still be claiming that they know best. They, like the arseholes who demanded compensation when their Railtrack shares tanked, need to be shown that there's no such thing as a risk-free punt. Even with a shedload of taxpayers' money propping the whole corrupt, ineptly-run system up, a lot of people are going to lose jobs, businesses and homes. Refusing the aid package would have punished those who truly deserve to suffer.

Having waited 20 years for any meaningful movement on Crossrail, I'm currently filing this one under 'believe when see', but, horribly, it appears to be a Tory policy announcement that I support fully. Obviously, the fact that these are the people who turned a flawed, but functional nationalised industry into the worst advert for capitalism ever must not be forgotten, but I fail to see how any government can be committed to environmental responsibility and airport expansion at the same time. And the risible Ruth Kelly calling it "economically illiterate" is, perversely, the biggest endorsement I can think of. I'd still never vote for the Conservatives as long as there's breath in my body, though.

You can't buck the market, oh no. You've got to let the market decide. For the last 30 years, this has been the mantra, first of Thatcher and her cronies and then of the bleeding Labour party. The City boys knew best - intervention would be foolish. And now all of these supposedly-unbuckable financial institutions are needing to be baled out by government money, both here and in the US. This whole situation is coming as cold comfort to those of us who maintained all along that the market couldn't be trusted to run a whelk stall, and that a balanced economy requires intervention and heavy regulation, but, hey, it's something to cling to. With any luck, it'll be the start of a new age of scepticism and questioning in politics, but chances are the big public will remain just as bovine as it ever has. I despair.

I post the following as catharsis for anyone who has ever been let down by technology:

I instruct all of you to go and buy the September issue of the Literary Review. Already the finest periodical for bibliomanes everywhere, it has, this month, chosen to improve its standing yet further by printing my review of Graham McCann's new Terry-Thomas biography Bounder and Mark Simpson's book about Alastair Sim.

I'm having to choose my words very carefully here, but in the cases of the two seaside piers that have 'gone on fire' in the last few weeks, is the fact that they both changed hands recently significant in any way?

Speeding along Lowestoft's busy London Road South on my bicycle earlier today, a teenager in a hooded top shouted something to me as I passed. I couldn't quite make out what he'd said, and assumed it had been something insulting. I was just about to slam on the anchors and give hoodie boy a piece of my mind about cheeking your elders when I realised that he'd merely said "Oi, your back wheel's following you". Perfectly innocent, not at all insulting, agreeably absurd but logical and clearly designed to make me think "What the f....oh, I see". Judge not...

Here's the deal. I'll write about something other than death when my heroes stop dying. Sir Bill Cotton was, by common consent, the best head of light entertainment that BBC television ever had. He was also, in his retirement, unfailingly kind and generous to herberts like me who rang him up and asked him questions about his dad, the Generation Game and the Albanian delegation at the 1968 Eurovision Song Contest. Although he made a rather fine knight, those who worked with him longest always called him 'young Bill', rather like the various Mr Graces in Are You Being Served?, a hit show introduced on his watch.

He was the second person I interviewed for my forthcoming book Turned Out Nice Again. Noel Edmonds was the first, in the morning, at his office in Hammersmith, and when I said who I was seeing in the afternoon, Noel told me to pass on his very best wishes to a gent whom he regarded as "the ultimate showman". Noel was right in his assessment of Sir Bill's showmanship, but he was much more than that. Clever without ever being pretentious, he was the only light entertainment executive in the BBC's history to reach the board of management, where as managing director of the television service, he oversaw the full run of programming. Jim Moir, one of his proteges and a close contender for the best head of LE title, described him as "a very shrewd man, who knew the place and the worth of entertainment in the BBC's hierarchy. He saw the BBC not only as informer and educator, not only in terms of gravitas and journalism, but as an entertainer. He knew its power. I'm not saying the others didn't, but Bill was certainly among the first to articulate the need for it successfully".

Sir Bill was always diplomatically careful to avoid saying that modern TV was ghastly: "What I say can be construed as a bloke who thinks that he’s absolutely marvellous, and nobody knows how to do it now, and all that. You just get yourself kicked to death. Oh, that old fart walking around saying all these things. But the fact is, not only in television, but in so many things in modern life, where there was fun to be had in work, there’s not the same type of fun now. Things are too serious, or are made out to be too serious."

The "hysterical" programme review board meetings were a perfect example of the old sort of fun. The earnest journalists, the power-seeking missiles from Lime Grove would be right at the front of the table, as close to the chairman - the controller of programmes - as possible ("All auditioning," as Bill put it). The LE delegation would be as far from the seat of power as possible, making witty comments and starting paper fights. Meanwhile, head of outside broadcasts Peter Dimmock, shoes off, "used to sit behind, on a couch, doing his in-tray". When he became controller of programmes, Huw Wheldon rearranged the seating: "I want light entertainment sitting here, and outside broadcasts sitting here, then we’ll have one meeting".

The aforementioned Albanian delegation is another example of Sir Bill's idea of behind-the-scenes merriment. In short, over lunch with a few young LE producers, it was decided to wind up Tom Sloan by turning up at the Royal Albert Hall claiming to be a nation who wished to enter the Eurovision Song Contest. With the full might of the BBC wardrobe and make-up departments at their disposal, the trio - Terry Henebery, Roger Ordish and Brian Whitehouse - managed to fool Sloan for a gratifyingly long time. The full, glorious story (and pictorial evidence) is in the book.

The fun had its place, but when it came to making the programmes, he was deadly serious. "Good entertainment is a highly professional business, it requires a lot of experience, a lot of care. You don’t take short cuts." RIP Young Bill.

A message arrived just now from my mate Alex asking if I'd heard that Johnny Griffin had died. I hadn't. Back when I was assistant editor of Crescendo and Jazz Music, one of my most pleasurable assignments was an annual trip to the Wigan Jazz Festival. One of the magazine's other writers did the bulk of the reviewing, so I was left to prop up the hotel bar with the musicians and generally have a nice time. When the Little Giant (as Griff was known) was in town, I had a blinder of a night just listening to him hold forth, as he laid waste to the bar's supply of Bushmills. I think I might have helped a bit. There was a hairy moment when his female German manager - a delightful lady until crossed - passed the table and rumbled the contents of his tumbler. He was, she made quite clear, under doctor's orders to avoid spirits. Johnny smiled sweetly and explained that one of the nice people at the table had bought it for him, and he'd felt it would be rude to refuse. I'm lucky that my work's brought me into the presence of greatness on several occasions. That night was one such occasion. Remember him this way:

My Independent obituary of Hugh Mendl appears in today's paper. The Times - Hugh's own newspaper of choice - devoted its lead obit page to him a couple of weeks back (quite right too), and Music Week's Ben Cardew wrote a very nice piece in which people as elevated as Seymour Stein stressed Hugh's importance and influence. Hopefully, the existence of these tributes will ensure that he's remembered as the major figure he was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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


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









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


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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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