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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Admittedly, he came in at a perfect juncture, with commissioners actively seeking out the unfunny. Channel 4’s Eleven O’Clock Show was one of the worst comedy programmes ever made and Gervais was the best thing on it. Amid such rubbish, a mediocre comic could only shine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A light's gone out.

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

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

At last, a birth to document. A dear friend, who's interviewed more authors than I've had hot dinners as well as writing a couple of books himself, has started a blog about the life of a man of letters in cash-strapped London town. Visit my fellow flaneur at Libradoodle.

All things considered, it's been a bastard of a week: we've lost Stewart Morris, Angela Morley, Patrick McGoohan, Ricardo Montalban and now Sir John Mortimer. Has anyone unpleasant and/or useless died during the same period to help redress the balance?

I've just heard that Angela Morley has died. Another great gone.

More joyous Stewart Morris, this time from the 1979 BBC VT Christmas tape, Good King Memorex:

I'm no environmental activist. I do my bit with tin cans, yogurt pots and composting, I cycle everywhere and I have a beard, but that's about it. However, I'm outraged at the Government approving the expansion of Heathrow Airport. How, in the name of Cribbins, can they claim to be committed to a green agenda while permitting this sort of thing? Rhetorical question: it's because they're lying bastards.

UPDATE: Superb work, John McDonnell. Just a shame you didn't bop that prannet Hoon on the head with the Mace.

The sad news reaches me from Bernie Newnham, ex-BBC TV producer and now proprietor of the must-read Tech Ops broadcasting history site, of the death of Stewart Morris, last Saturday, at the age of 78. Stewart was one of the great showman-producers of BBC light entertainment's golden age, possibly even the greatest.

He was feared by his crews for his high-octane approach to production and his impatience with any minor cock-ups, but loved and respected by the same crews because he cared so much and produced such sparkling results. Probably the best-known example of his modus operandi is the illicit recording of his talkback from the 1977 Eurovision Song Contest, a night when tits up seemed to be the likely outcome on more than one occasion. He kept it on the rails, at the price of a few deafened and mildly offended colleagues.



He gave me a wonderful interview for Turned Out Nice Again and had, very generously, agreed to another interview for my next book. I was looking forward to visiting him at home in Chiswick, and trying not to let my laughter overwhelm the recording, but that's not to be. RIP Stewart.

Saturday morning found me in the British Library, looking up various details for my next book. Having left my laptop at home in the interests of productivity and my left shoulder, I found myself on a public terminal. The conditions for their use include not checking your emails, not visiting forums and certainly not seeing how your eBay auctions are doing. So, there I was, using the mouse wheel to scroll through a newspaper article database for transmission date details, when the chap next to me tapped me on the arm and said "Why don't you use the arrow keys?", the quiet prrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp of the mouse wheel having evidently distracted him. Through the narrowed eyes with which I regarded him, I realised that this was the chap from the front desk who'd checked my reader's pass and waved me through about 10 minutes before, and that he was bleeding well LOOKING AT USED CAR LISTINGS on the 'Bay. And that, dear reader, is why Britain is going to hell in a handcart.

Many moons ago, a friend gave me a box of 7" singles that I think he'd found in a house clearance. "You like records," he said, "see if any of these are up your street." They were - the box contained mostly Northern soul stuff, for which I am a bit of a sucker. Unfortunately, they were all in quite a bad state, and I wasn't going to risk a stylus on any of them in a hurry. Fast forward to early 2009, and, newly equipped with the aforementioned Disco Antistat, I decide to see if any of them come up playable. Some of them have come up fresh as a daisy, among them a UK Mojo label pressing of 'Girls Are Out To Get You/You'll Be Sorry' by the Fascinations. From the first bar of the A side, I realised that I was listening to an amazing record. Not surprising, considering it was written and produced by Curtis Mayfield. Having given it a few more listens, I think it might be one of the most perfect singles ever made, and wonder why I'd never heard it before. I was going to share a boring old needledrop (that's the way I'd go) with you, but then I found this on YouTube. Nice moves, sir, and the utter indifference of the passers-by only adds to the excellence of the whole thing. His name's dipsetmuthafucka, by the way, and he makes a habit of this sort of thing over on the 'Toob.

Did anyone get a reproduction Stylophone for Christmas this year or for Christmas 2007? Are you wondering why it didn't come with the 7" demonstration record, narrated by Rolf Harris? As a new year present, here's a lovely clean transfer of the aforementioned educational disc, cleaned to perfection using my top present of 2008, the Knosti Disco Antistat.

Side 1: http://www.sendspace.com/file/gsptid
Side 2: http://www.sendspace.com/file/pj4hpk

If that's not up your street, try this. If you're going to be a 2-hit wonder, make one of them as good as:

The New Year's Honours List makes me wonder, as all honours list announcements do, about the relative values at work behind it. Is a lifetime of literary excellence worth the same as a few years of cycling quite fast? Even if you think Chris Hoy deserves his gong, why's he getting it at 32, when Terry Pratchett had to wait until he was 60? And would Pratchett have had a sniff without the announcement that he's battling Alzheimer's? When she notched up her swimming double gold, I predicted that it'd be Dame Rebecca Adlington come December. Fortunately, a 19 year-old DBE was too much even for the honours selectors this time, so she gets the OBE - which is just about right, I'd say, but if she manages another gold in 2012, she's a shoo-in, isn't she? If forced to write about Kelly Holmes or Tanni Grey-Thompson, I would have to refer to 'Dame' Kelly and 'Dame' Tanni - so risible do I find their titles. So, the question is: Why do sports men and women get instant high-level gratification from the gong squad? It's a recent thing. After Moscow 1980, Steve Ovett got an OBE, Sebastian Coe got an MBE. Coe's later elevation was the result of his political career (political honours are a whole other can of worms, which, given time, we might well open). Does this indicate the devaluation of honours? Or am I guilty of doing a Rhodes Boyson?

There are other, subtler distinctions at play in the whole sideshow. Why is it Sir Mick Jagger, but only Robert Plant CBE? Sir Percy's got a ring to it, no? Why is it Sir Tom Jones, but only Bruce Forsyth CBE or Ronnie Corbett OBE? Why do I care so much about this largely meaningless display of patronage? Stan Tracey had it right when he received the OBE (since upgraded to a C, but if anyone deserves an hereditary peerage for services to jazz, it's Stan). Someone said to him that he must feel very honoured. He replied "Does it get me a discount in Sainsbury's?".

I've been watching and reading the numerous reports on the poverty-stricken abandoning their dogs with a mixture of distress and anger. It's costing too much to feed the dogs, they claim. Bollocks. Utter bollocks. Good, healthy dry dog food - complete, not mixer - can be bought loose in pet shops for about a pound a kilo. A kilo lasts for about a fortnight in the case of my own, admittedly small, canine associate, supplemented, of course, by whatever she can get off my plate. That's a pound for two weeks of uncritical adoration, and the distinct sense that not everything's completely buggered. Dogs are life-enhancers, but it's not one-way traffic. People who claim poverty need to look long and hard at their spending habits before abandoning the dog. How many of them spend a tenner a day on fags? How many complain about the price of their own food, but persist in buying pre-packaged crap and ready meals rather than buying ingredients and making it themselves?

Christmas is off to a flying start here, thanks to Gary Rodger, who alerted me to the following lines in Robin Askwith's Wikipedia entry:

"Recently several internet sites - including the IMDB - claimed Askwith had played the lead in Oh No, Its Derek Anus, a 1972 LWT sitcom. However it has since emerged that this was an internet prank/hoax and no such TV show exists, the IMDB no longer carries a listing for Derek Anus."

The trouble is that I now want this show to be real. It couldn't be worse than Bottle Boys.

And so we reach the final window of the Cheeseford Virtual TV Nostalgia Advent Calendar, prising the flap open gingerly and wondering what in the name of Jesus H Cribbins we can expect to see. Oh, it's a VT clock blackboard. How exciting. However, before you all demand refunds, let me tell you that this is the VT clock from studio A at Broadcasting House, Whiteladies Road, Bristol, now enjoying a very happy retirement. As a result, if any of you have timecoded Windmill Road windfalls of things like Vision On, Animal Magic, Jigsaw, Think of a Number, Leap in the Dark, Scoop, Take Hart, etc, this is the actual bit of blackboard that you see at the start. Not Rutland Weekend Television series 2, unfortunately, as though the shows were made in studio A at Whiteladies Road, they were given new, different clocks by the VT editors. Unfortunately, the accompanying Smiths clock became detached when studio A was taken out of commission, and is probably now in landfill somewhere under the M4.

As a special Christmas bonus, I have been alerted to the return of the ads for Mike's Carpets to Yorkshire Television. These cheaply-made efforts, featuring a man in a roomful of synthetic rugs with something similar perched on his bonce are the kind of commercials that come to the fore in times of recession. During boom times, ITV lives high off the hog, and has no need of Mike's advertising pound. However, when the chips are down and the Woolworths account has gone down the gurgler, the rate card goes out of the window and all money is good money, especially if it prevents ad breaks from consisting entirely of trailers for things starring Robson Green. Here's some vintage Mike. I'm just off to record a couple of hours of YTV in the hope of catching one of the new ads. Merry Christmas to one and all.

In the penultimate window of the CVTNAC, we have a spread from a 1957 book on TV (I have no idea what it's called, because it lost the covers and title page long before I got hold of it) about the building of the BBC Television Centre.

Having spent the majority of the weekend either recovering from a monumental hangover or trying not to emulate Rod Hull's dying moments while attempting to capture two different satellites on the same dish (I gave up on Hotbird 13E, as there's nothing of interest on it save for the odd Arabic test card and the surreal experience that is Tele Padre Pio - finally I managed to get the whole thing into a position where both Astra satellites came in loud and clear), we're now playing catch-up.

So, for what would have been Saturday's offering, have another end credit, this time from Morecambe & Wise's 1976 Christmas show. This is, apparently, the only picture in existence of the boys with producer Ernest Maxin (the frantic pace of rehearsal and production left nary enough time for even a snapshot), and even then, Maxin is obscured. Perhaps they thought he was too handsome to share the limelight with them. Bunging this fine picture on here gives me a chance to alert your attention to the latest issue of the very fine Kettering which contains a piece by me on how video tape rescued the Christmas TV schedules, and a splendid dissertation on Sunday night ITV comedies by that nice Mr Norman, among other treats.

In Sunday's window, we find one of the obscurer idents from the 2002-2006 BBC1 'Rhythm and Movement' package, while for Monday, we return to 1993 for an edition of The Late Show about the new ITV contractors. The production credit for the programme was in the style of the idents used at the time by Carlton in London.

For today's Advent calendar entry, we see what happens when you play the wrong take of a current affairs show.

The 18th window of the CVTNAC springs open to reveal this floor plan of studio G at Lime Grove, the compact complex occupied by BBC Television from 1950 to 1991. Over the years, G was home to shows like Dee Time and Top of the Pops, but its rectangular shape made it less ideal for situation comedies. The first Hancock's Half Hour TV series was made here, but the various sets had to be placed in a line along one wall, with the audience a few seats deep along the other, with a majority of audience members unable to see what was going on at any given time. It was never converted to colour and closed in the very early 1970s.

A Pye mark 4 advert for the 17th day of Advent.

Tuesday's Advent calendar window pops open to reveal a coaster advertising HTV's studio and post-production facilities. The north Wales facility was reputedly very little used as news editors hated stories that were covered in Mold. Ay theng yew.

A double bill for today, as I was unable to get to a computer on Sunday. First off, the electronic test card known to its friends and associates as PM5544. Check your gratings. Go on. Fiddle with your colour, brightness and contrast until everything looks just right. It's all good, and it's all for you.

Secondly, the final credit from the BBC's 1972 adaptation of Hedda Gabler, complete with copyright date added as an afterthought, as this was the transitional era between shows ending with a simple BBC tv (up to late 1971, if memory serves), BBC Colour (late 1971-early 1972) and displaying a date. Roman numerals were adopted from 1977 onwards, apparently to disguise the age of some of the repeats.

The LWT graphics department was always one of the best in the business, as day 13's offering goes some small way to prove. It's a still from the ident that heralded London Weekend's late night programming in the mid-1980s. The neon effect of the lettering is clearly being used to indicate glamour, glitz, excitement and possibly even naughtiness. The purpose of the graphic is to persuade insomniacs and sociopaths that sitting up into the dark watches of the night watching cheaply bought-in programmes was somehow comparable to hitting the town and having a good time. This comes from a tape of an edition of The Monte Carlo Show, featuring Anthony Newley. It was recorded (on Friday 21 June 1985, I am informed by the Times Digital Archive) for the benefit of my grandmother, who thought the sun shone out of Newley's backside, and for 'Strawberry Fair' alone, I'll concede that she may well have had a point. It was recorded on a timer as, on the night of transmission, my grandparents were actually out having a good time, probably at the bingo in Kingston. Unfortunately, an earlier programme had over-run (most likely the Athletics from Birmingham) and as this was very early in the Cheeseford family's adoption of wondrous VHS technology, padding the recording time was unheard of. So, we ended up with the last 10 minutes of a dubbed foreign film called There Once Was a Cop, and poor old Tony Newley being truncated in the middle of a disco version of 'Who Can I Turn To?'. The dubbed foreign film contains a child actor who would have been supremely slappable even if he hadn't robbed my dear old Nan of the finale of The Monte Carlo Show.

Talking of slappable, I was almost roused to violence at the cashpoint earlier. Now, I try wherever possible to avoid the Daily Mail 'hell in a handcart/isn't everything ghastly?' view of modern life. This isn't because I think everything's just dandy. It's because I believe fervently that man's default position is rudeness and self-interest, and that we've always been closer to hell than we care to acknowledge. However, the arsehole who pushed in front of me as I tried to pay a cheque in must be closer than most. There I was, standing well back from the person ahead of me in the queue, doing that ostentatious 'I can't see your PIN. Ooooh look at the watch straps in Timpsons' window' thing. I turned back to notice a chap had taken up a position at my side, a little in front of me. It came to what I knew to be my turn, and this bloke stepped forward with me, and stood at my side, looking at the keypad. Momentarily discombobulated by the brass neck of the man, I turned to him and said "If you're that desperate, you'd better go in front", rather than telling him to get behind me and wait his fucking turn. He said "Thanks", barged in and inserted his card. To the back of his head, I said "Actually, I was being a little sarcastic back then. I've got better things to do than stand around by cashpoints on freezing cold nights, giving way to pisstakers". He got his money out. He went back to his car, where his fugly wife/sister/both was waiting. I put my card in, and the screen changed to read 'Temporarily out of service'. At this point, had I been in need of cash rather than depositing, I wouldn't have liked to be this twunt. I would have thrown my bike squarely at his windscreen and taken the consequences fully. How do people like that go through life without ending up perpetually in traction?

Today's Advent calendar window pops open to reveal a set of colour bars displayed before the launch of BBC Arabic earlier this year, on its allocated channel on the Astra 19.2E satellite cluster. It's 720x576, so can be re-used to add jollity to your home movies and DVD compilations.

STOP PRESS: I have had an offer of a diary.

For day 11, here's something I found in the bottom of a drawer in my desk.

The 10th window on the CVTNAC takes us back to the mid-1980s and the Jazz 625 reruns on BBC2. Meanwhile, as a bonus, I thought I'd share some goodness that's been filling my ears of late. It's Stan Kenton's version of Hank Levy's 'Chiapas', recorded for BBC TV in 1972, and a finer bit of big band 5/4 you're unlikely to hear in a month of Sundays. Gary Husband's Force Majeure did a pretty super version of this tune a few years back too.

Day 9 of the advent calendar shenanigans, and it's back to the mid-1980s for a graphic used by Thames when announcing a choice of viewing on ITV and Channel 4. Imagine Philip Elsmore or Peter Marshall doing the announcement, and you're there.

Day 8. Even I, a hater of Big Brother and all it represents, can't help but hear those 2 words in a Marcus Bentley voice. To mark this milestone, we head back to the National Museum of Film, Photography and Television (as it was in 2004) and the hands-on studio exhibit. Like the tube simulators at the London Transport Museum, this was always crawling with children until slightly menacing-looking 30-something men in corduroy jackets suggested that they might like to go and amuse themselves in the museum shop for a bit. With the anklebiters despatched, the adults could give it some crab, had not the dolly been fixed to the floor. The camera casing is that of an ex-YTV Link 130, the development of which was so problematic and expensive that it brought TV camera production in the UK to an inglorious end. More sweepings from the studio linoleum tomorrow.

And now an appeal on behalf of Cheeseford. The other day, I found myself in a well-known chain of stationers, perusing the pocket diaries. Then I thought that there must still be companies or organisations out there flush enough to have their own diaries made for their staff and to give away to valued clients, etc. So, before I shell out for a standard Letts job with integral pencil, is there anyone reading this with access to complimentary diaries, and, if so, can I please have one? The more outlandish or notorious the firm, the better. If South African Nazi Tobacco are kind enough to give me the means to organise my 2009, then I owe it to them to carry their week-to-view masterpiece with pride. And if I get more than one offer, I will find homes for the surplus in a spirit of mutual goodwill, back-slapping and cross-fertilisation.

I note with sadness the recent announcement that all future ITV1 regional programming for the east of England will be presented from a shed at Postwick Park & Ride by BC, the Birthday Club tigerbear thing. Clare Weller's out of a job and John Francis is jiggered, while Stephen Lee's already made arrangements for himself and his increasingly surreal hair to emigrate to Australia. I shouldn't sound so flippant. The erosion of the ITV network and the role played by the regional companies angers me hugely. Anglia, while no longer a producer of network drama or entertainment, is still a good outfit.

So, for day 7 of the CVTNAC, I present a 2005 leaflet sent to satellite-equipped houses in the east of the Anglia region, announcing that they no longer had to watch the Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire variant of Anglia Tonight, as ITV had shelled out to send both Anglia sub-regions into outer space. Comely weather person Wendy Hurrell must have sensed the way things were going, as she's now with BBC London. Incidentally, if the winner of the "meal at one of East Anglia's most prestigious restaurants" is reading this, please get in touch. It was saveloy and chips from the stall in Norwich market, wasn't it?