The other day, I did something I haven't done for ages. I read the Guardian. In it was a long article by a Guardian hack about how he had revolutionised his life and electricity bills by switching entirely to low-energy light bulbs over the last six months. Maybe I was in a bad mood when I read the article, but there seemed to be an overwhelming air of "aren't I great?" sanctimony about the whole affair, with this chap clearly regarding himself as some kind of frontiersman.

I am not a journalist for the nation's most environmentally minded newspaper, and yet Schloss Cheeseford has been equipped from basement to attic with low-energy bulbs for the last 13 years (with the last 1996 original only just having come out of service). Given that they cost over a tenner apiece when I began my own energy-saving crusade, I think I'd be able to write a better (and more sanctimonious) article about the wonder of CFLs than some Johnny-come-lately who waited until they were 50p a go, and who seems to have more light sources in his modest townhouse than Pinewood Studios. However, I know that if I'd pitched just such an article, I'd have been lucky to receive a polite rejection note. So, how do these people get these dull, obvious articles commissioned? Compromising negatives of the commissioning editor? Being able to call the commissioning editor Dad? What ever it is, I don't got it.

What I do got is a fractured distal humerus, my Grauniad reading having been something I did to pass the time in hospital. I go back in on Tuesday to have some fairly serious ironmongery inserted into my arm. Cruelly, it was my right arm, so typing is out of the question, and I find myself dictating this painfully slowly into a computer that throws up interesting alternatives for the words that I thought I said. Knowing my luck, I will now be deluged with commissions that I am unable to fulfil. I am now off to buy some incandescent bulbs which am going to leave on all of the time. So there.

Justin Lee Collins says that Brucie should step down from hosting Strictly Come Dancing. He's right.

There should always be a space for Brucie on British television, but it shouldn't necessarily be a weekly live show that usually runs for over an hour. When he was on the Gen Game, he was the best ringmaster TV's ever had - watch those old recordings and you'll see a man in complete control of his domain, making sure that hapless punters hit their marks and get the laughs. The Equity strike-bound Sunday Night at the London Palladium featuring just him and Norman Wisdom is a breathless masterclass in entertainment, and I speak as someone for whom a little Wisdom goes a very very long way. Unfortunately, I can't watch Strictly without thinking "Oh, Bruce, no" far too many times for my own good.

As in so many things, Wogan leads the way. He's going from the Radio 2 breakfast show on his own terms, with ratings higher than ever, and with the grace to wish his successor the very best. I think the experience of his BBC1 chat show still haunts him - he overstayed his welcome there and had to take a lot of flak from the press as a result. Live and learn. He also stepped down from the Eurovision Song Contest on an apparent point of principle, with honour intact. Despite being one of his greatest fans, I sensed him descending further into self-parody year by year, and am glad he got out when he did. The only downer there was that the commentary job didn't go to Paddy O'Connell, who gets Eurosong utterly and would have been great, but I have to admit that my dire predictions for Graham Norton's commentary didn't come to pass, and the whole experience began an unlikely rehabilitation of Norton, compounded by his pitch-perfect 'one foot in the grave' dig at Michael McIntyre on BAFTA night.

As I type, a solution has occurred to me. Make Forsyth one of the judges. He'd be there and he could bring his full experience to bear on the situation, but he wouldn't have to carry the whole show. Failing that, just shove him in TC1 with a piano, an orchestra, Tarby, Lynchy, some chairs, some tap shoes and an audience. Agreeing with Justin Lee Collins is slightly annoying, by the way. I hear from people in the industry that he's a sweetie, and that's nice to know, but it doesn't stop me thinking that he should step down from television.

On Facebook, a friend of mine was musing about the cost of certain items in certain high street stores. Knowing him to be a man of sense, I expressed amazement that he bothered with the high street for anything anymore. I bought both of my computers online - the desktop machine I'm typing this on now was two-thirds of the price of an identical unit in PC World, while the laptop came from PC World's website, and was an exclusive online offer. I get through a lot of blank DVDs, and am consistently astonished at the price high street stores expect me to pay. My DVD recorder came from Amazon.co.uk, and was half the price of the same unit anywhere else. A while back, I needed a replacement mini-jack for my headphones. Maplin wanted £2.99, for which price I could get 5 of the buggers from a chap on eBay. Finally, as one of the few people left still using a fountain pen (I think it's just me and my GP), I've been wondering why you can get green and purple Parker cartridges on the continent but not in Britain. Answer - you can get them here, if you go to the Battersea Pen Home. If you have a credit card, a computer and a willingness to wait a couple of days for the stuff to arrive, buying online is the way forward.

Of course, there are some things that money can't buy (mainly because they're crap), and in my journalistic career, I've amassed a fair few of them. Promotional mugs seem to proliferate - a recent purge of the cupboard brought forth a green one for 30 years of Picador books, a black 'Wake up and smell the coffee' one for Bloomsbury's Encarta dictionary, and a rather nice bone china one extolling the virtues of Sutton Publishing's historical titles. Having amassed enough pleasing non-promotional drinking vessels, including a repro White Star Line Titanic-era 3rd class mug and a superb 'Yorkshire Television Colour Production' mug hand made by my good friend Marcus Bernard of TV Ark, the publishing freebies are going to the charity shop, even 'Wake up and smell Nigel Newton's bank balance'. This has, however, set me to wondering what was the best freebie I've ever received? On balance, it's probably the Pure Evoke 1 digital radio in the kitchen, given to selected hacks in the glory days of Oneword, although the Weidenfeld and Nicolson 50th anniversary anthology that I got signed by both Lord Weidenfeld and Nigel Nicolson is a keeper, as is the t-shirt promoting my mate Andy Miller's book Tilting at Windmills (Slogan: "A hollow victory is still a victory"), even though it has never ever fit me. Does anyone else have good free stuff to declare?

This blog has a new crusade. It is to get every right-thinking person with an Internet connection to pass critical comment on the strange-looking, dull-sounding Chris de Burgh. This isn't unpleasantness for unpleasantness' sake. The idea is to get the multi-talentless cousin of Roly Mo writing so many letters and emails accusing people of being 'bitter and unfulfilled' that he never sings a single hemi-demi-semi-quaver again in his life. Go on, you know it makes sense.

Oi, Chris. Your music's shit and you look like the badger world's most notorious nonce.

How not to respond to a bad review: Writing a letter to the reviewer, calling them 'bitter and unfulfilled' and inventing childish names. Like Chris de Burgh just has. Hasn't the stumpy peddler of mediocrity got enough money not to give a tinker's cuss what anyone thinks of him? Also, does he not realise that this very act shows him to be 'bitter and unfulfilled' himself? Why else would a multi-million selling artist need the validation of a newspaper critic? Is it because he knows he's NBG? Finally, referring to the reviewer, Peter Crawley, as 'Creepy Crawley' is a bit rich coming from one of the most sinister-looking creatures in the pop business.

Normally I have no interest in the comings and goings of Jack Tweed, but I found myself reading The Snu the other day and puzzling over a detail of the report of his arrest. Tweed has been charged with rape, but his co-accused has not. The paper described the sexual activity involved as a "roasting". Now, I have no practical experience of said manoeuvre, but my understanding of it is that it involves two gentlemen partaking equally of a lady's pleasures, one at each end. Not being a lawyer, I don't know how this works, but if it was rape, shouldn't both men have been charged? Can anyone explain to me why Tweed has been and his mate hasn't?

For a couple of years or so, the bookshelf above my monitor has had an A5 envelope poked between the paperbacks, containing various items of correspondence. The content is nothing stunning or revelatory, but they're things I'd like to keep safe all the same. With this in mind, I've been eyeing them up for ages thinking "Must put that envelope away somewhere". So I did, and now I can't find it. It's not too much of a worry, as I know that the moment I stop looking for it, it'll turn up. That happened last week with a tape recorder manual. Shortly after locating a PDF on the Internet, I found my yellowing hard copy. If I weren't so dismissive of such things, I'd blame a playful spirit.

So farewell then, Keith Waterhouse. While I find his later novels near-unreadable, I've always had a soft spot for his earlier work, and he was one of the few good things in the Daily Mail. Apart from which, how could one not love a human being who so clearly set out to resemble a spaniel?

Sad news indeed about Simon Dee. I made contact with him when I was researching Turned Out Nice Again and I have a couple of very cordial letters from him. Sadly, I was already about a year late with the manuscript when I found him, and I never did make it to Winchester. Fortunately, I had plenty of background on his chat show years from producers and executives, and I tried to be as fair as I could. I had to note their comments that he was a bloody nightmare to work with, but I also had to make clear his importance in the history of the chat show - in UK terms, Dee and Eamonn Andrews laid the foundations - and also to give praise where it was due. On his day, he was a good interviewer - someone who listened and engaged his brain accordingly, but who also had the chutzpah to ask the apparently unaskable. Unfortunately, he seemed to believe his own publicity, and, I suspect, also suffered from bad management. As a result, he alienated the people he needed most, and in later life seemed more inclined to blame a nebulous conspiracy for his downfall, rather than his own hubris. As Bill Cotton said "There was a time when he was a very powerful force on British television and he could have gone anywhere. But he was just a bloody fool". Indeed, but his show was one where magic sometimes happened, and I make no apologies for reminding you all of this from the 21 September 1968 Dee Time:

All too often nowadays, I put down a newspaper having concluded that its writers know little and care even less about the subjects of their articles. I want authoritative voices, not some 'will this do?' chancer who's cribbed the lot off Wikipedia. I'm not entirely sure if it's them or me: was it always this way, and I only notice it now because I'm better informed?

One of my pitifully few must-reads is James May's column in the Daily Telegraph each Saturday. While Jeremy Clarkson's in the Sunday Times telling its readers how he'd run the world (and making many of them profoundly glad that he isn't) and the Hamster's set up his wheel in the Daily Mirror, May ploughs his own wildly meandering furrow in the Torygraph. Despite being in the Motoring section, May's rambles frequently have only the slenderest connection to cars. Very often, only the last paragraph even mentions motoring, in a manner that just about connects with the preceding few hundred words. And that, dear reader, is the joy of the exercise. Rather audaciously, May uses his platform to explore subjects that interest him, including trains, music and the contents of his kitchen cupboard. It's a weekly visit to the mind of an agreeably anoraky middle-aged chap who actually knows stuff and gives a toss about it, so, as an anorak nearing middle age, is it any wonder that I'm a fan?

When May appeared on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, the host, jokingly, said that he hoped never to be trapped in a lift with May. Given Ross' own well-documented geek credentials, I thought the remark, even in jest, was beneath him. I'd rather be trapped in a pub (as can happen at high tide in the White Cross in Richmond) with May, but if it came down to it, I suspect time stuck in a lift with him would pass most pleasantly. In this cynical, jaded age, May is an enthusiast, and a pretty good standard-bearer for enthusiasts of all kinds. My only hope is that nobody at the Telegraph ever sits him down and asks him to write more about cars.

Cemeteries are an endless source of fascination to me. In my local necropolis, there are two plots of note. One is over 100 years old, and is the family vault for James Maconochie, a pioneer of food canning and co-proprietor of Maconochie Brothers, whose first factory was located in my street. If you have relatives who served in World War 2, ask them about Maconochie stew. Another dates from a mere 20 years ago, and commemorates a man whose nickname, emblazoned on the headstone for all to see and scratch their heads over, was 'Pimp'. How did he get the name? Was he pimply? Was he Lowestoft's answer to Percy Blakeney? Or was he just a ponce?

It all reminds me slightly of the night when a friend admitted to having a relative with a shady past, whose tabloid nickname had been 'Harry the Ponce'. I'm guessing that Harry's gravestone doesn't bear this legend.

The news that the Government is considering various measures against file-sharers, including cutting off their Internet connections is more amusing than worrying, from where I'm sitting. After receiving David Geffen's hospitality, of course Mandy's got to make harrumphing 'something must be done' noises. Is it even remotely enforceable, though? Save for a few well-publicised legal actions brought by the RIAA in 2002 or thereabouts, the threatened wave of mass prosecutions has failed to materialise. A few people have received legal letters from computer game developers demanding compensation for alleged file-sharing naughtiness, but all can quite reasonably claim that it must have been someone leeching off their unsecured wireless broadband and tell the beaks to piss off. The Pirate Bay verdict has not resulted in the site's closure, and those responsible for running the site remain free men, despite ludicrous sentences being handed down. Even if it were possible to monitor every last bit of data sent or received, it would, effectively, criminalise the vast majority of computer users. If you've looked at even a single clip on YouTube, you've almost certainly been a party to 'copyright theft'. Most of those computer users will also be voters.

I share files. I've put things on YouTube to illustrate points I want to make here, I use Bit Torrent, and I download music and video from blogs and other sites. However, none of the stuff that I send or receive is available commercially. I encode and share records and archive TV programmes that haven't a cat in hell's chance of a DVD or CD release, but which a small number of people still want to see/hear. Some of the things I've hoovered off the Web have been vital for my researches into light entertainment. If I want something, and it's available to buy, I buy it. Legally, there's no distinction between sharing the contents of a commercial DVD and a forgotten comedy show retrieved from a Betamax tape, but, morally and ethically, I think there's a considerable gulf between the two acts. Just recently, I saw a newly-released DVD of a 1970s TV series turning up on Bit Torrent sites on the day of its official release. I'm afraid that's not cricket, chaps.

Maybe I'm just post-rationalising my own transgressions, but I can't see a problem with sharing commercially-unavailable material. For one thing, doing so drives a coach and horses through the distasteful practice of bootlegging for profit. For another, sharing an obscurity can help create awareness and interest for an eventual commercial release. The DVD of the Armando Iannucci Shows, an excellent series overlooked at the time of transmission in autumn 2001 because of various world events, came about largely because comedy fans had been sharing the shows online in the years since, bringing them to a new audience who'd missed them when they went out. The fans then began lobbying for a proper release. Hell, I've even seen things that I've encoded turning up as the source of clips in TV programmes - in which case, the broadcasters are the ones doing the illegal downloading. How do you like them apples?

If Geffen gets his way, will I be left without an Internet connection? Believe when see. In the meantime, the 'creative industries' should stop insulting their customers and potential customers, cease bellyaching about file-sharing and simply try to work out ways of making it generate revenue for them. Home taping didn't kill music.

Keeping with the theme of digital radio instant nostalgia, was the Digital 1 multiplex so named because it had only one station worth listening to? The demise of Oneword was a sad day for UK radio. On a budget that wouldn't cover Mark Damazer's annual expenditure on coffee and Danish pastries, it provided a good, intelligent, broad-based speech radio service, with nary a phone-in to be heard. Maybe I'm biased, having had several mates who worked there, and having nearly bagged a show of my own just before it went tits up (the first time, that is), but it was a good, talented little outfit, producing splendid stuff. If the backers had held their nerve a little longer, who's to say it wouldn't have turned the corner?

Regular visitors to this corner of the WWW will know already that schloss Cheeseford is home to all manner of strange, wonderful technology. My family of open-reel tape recorders rule the roost, but there's room for more recent obsolescence such as the object on the left. That's what affordable digital radios looked like in 2000. Well, I say affordable. When launched, the Psion Wavefinder was £299, and you needed a PC with USB ports for it to be any use at all. I sprung for mine when they came down to £99 a year later. At the time, I was reviewing radio for the New Statesman and I felt I needed to keep up with all of this digital lark. That and the fact that, despite putting my life in peril by hanging out of my 2nd floor flat window with an electrically-unsafe drill to install a suitable antenna on the side wall, my VHF reception was still far from perfect. Unfortunately, I chose to opt in at the moment that the BBC dropped the bitrates of all their stations (save for Radio 3), so I was merely swapping one set of sonic compromises for another, but with timer recording and other rather neat features, it was a worthwhile bit of kit. When it worked.

I've lost count of the number of times I reinstalled the drivers and the front-end software. I unplugged it, plugged it back in again, found a piece of third-party software that disabled the resource-hogging lights (I should take some video of the lights in action. They're oddly calming. When they work.), and I tried it with slimline salad dressing. Unfortunately, every which way I turned, it was a buggy piece of crap. I kept it for dire emergencies, but came to rely on satellite and Freeview for my radio reception, as well as an improved VHF aerial installation when I moved to my present house. Finally, when Windows XP Service Pack 2 came out, it was bye bye Wavefinder, as Microsoft had done something under XP's bonnet to make the Wavefinder even more of a dud than it had been before. I hung it on the far wall of my office as a lesson to myself never again to be an early adopter.

Then, last week, I read on Mike Brown's excellent TX list that the ruddy things work again in XP SP3. I went through the rigmarole of reinstalling it, and yes, it works. Sometimes. I had hoped that having a computer several times more powerful than the one I had in 2000 might have helped the Wavefinder realise its full potential, but no. It's still a buggy piece of crap. And yet I can't bring myself to get rid of it.

To my great surprise, I've just had a phone call from Bob McDowall. To my even greater surprise, it was a long, constructive conversation about the show, the issues and Radio 2 in general. He said a lot of things that I suspect would be heard sympathetically by a lot of his harshest critics, and he said that he'd love to say them in public, but that he was unable to make any definitive statements until he's talked to Bob Shennan (currently on holiday) about the situation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Mail story is not quite how he remembers what happened, and I know the problems involved in relying on a single source, so a contrary view is always instructive. What he did say, though, was that he genuinely didn't want Malcolm to leave and that he was and is looking for ways to incorporate relevant dance band music into the programme. He also corrected some of my assertions about gram library usage, which I'm happy to take on board - the process of transferring rare material for use in programmes is ongoing, and his view is that he's happy to spend whatever it costs to do the programme right. The information that he's an ex-BBC Scottish Radio Orchestra musician goes some way to scotching (no pun, etc) the idea that he's a faceless bureaucrat, meddling in perfectly good programmes.

Anyway, I'll be continuing to lobby for BBC Radio 2 to reinstate its commitment to dance band music, but I'll be easing off on Bob McDowall, in hopes that, when he and his programme team have had time to regroup, they'll confound all of the critics.

Two reviews for the papperbok edition of Turned Out Nice Again this weekend. In the Sindie, Brandon Robshaw says " I thought I was going to love it at first – there are fascinating accounts of the early variety acts...The evolution...is entertainingly told...But there is too much emphasis on the behind-the-scenes stuff, the hierarchies, management structures, procedures, and budgets." Agree to disagree. I've always found what goes on backstage as fascinating as what happens out front, and have also always believed that the writers, producers, session musicians and crew members are the most reliable sources of information. Also, in this case, hierarchies and budgets play a large part in shaping what ends up on our screens. Still, Mr Robshaw thought it worthy of 3 stars out of 5, and expressed his reservations in a polite, constructive manner. Can't say fairer than that. Just one thing, the Parkinson show he cites was 1982, Richard Burton wasn't involved and if he still wants to see it, the section I write about is on YouTube. Meanwhile, in the Mail on Sunday (4-star review not yet online), Simon Shaw says that I'm "an excellent companion to have on this visit down memory lane". That's very kind.

Also in the MoS was this piece about Malcolm Laycock's exit from Radio 2's Sunday night schedules. The Mail stable's anti-BBC agenda is well-documented, but as this story seems to come from a reliable source - Mr Laycock himself - we can, if we can bring ourselves to dismiss the Mail's motive, trust it. So, it appears that the dance band element of the programme was canned simply because executive producer Bob McDowall didn't like it. In which case, was there nobody around who would have happily taken over the dance band side of the show, so that McDowall didn't have to sully his lugholes with Jack Hylton, Jack Payne, Jack Hylton again and the band at the Brixton Astoria? The show still has a constituency, and it's one that has every right to be served.

The decision to get drop the dance bands was symbolic of a problem with the BBC that needs to be flagged up a lot more than it currently is. While the Corporation is impeccably, and quite rightly, anti-racist (The BBC's 'urban music' digital station 1Xtra has a weekly reach of 491,000, while the Asian Network has a reach of 473,000. So, their pulling power is only about 30% more than Laycock's listenership, but would anyone even dare suggest replacing either station with something else entirely? Feel free to take your time in answering that one.), anti-sexist and anti-most other isms you'd care to name, it is deeply ageist. This would be offensive enough if it weren't also a complete and utter fallacy that you have to be old to appreciate dance band music. I'm 36, and I'm far from alone. The BBC's entertainment programming was built on live relays from the major London hotels, and that precious weekly half-hour of music was a direct link to the Corporation's origins. It should be viewed in a similar light to the Tower of London's ravens. I'd be interested to know whether that figure of 360,000 listeners is from before or after the decision to narrow the programme's focus, and how many have deserted the show since?

Below the Mail story, there's a host of comments including one from 'Deanna of London': "Awwww poor diddums, a measly 24 thousand pounds for 52 hours work? I expect the people who work in a supermarket who take home around 300 measly single pound notes for 52 hours work, will be sobbing for the injustice to this poor man!!". You're missing the point, Deanna. Laycock's saying that the 52 hours of radio involve far more than 52 hours of work, indeed that it's a full-time job - scripting, checking discographies, timings, creating running orders, etc. Given some of the other salaries given to Radio 2 presenters, the asked-for £38,000 for a year of impeccably-researched, meticulously-prepared programming that credits the listener with intelligence looks like a bargain.

Yesterday afternoon, I was sitting on a bench near Lowestoft station, sharing my cod and chips with the youngest member of the Swiss Family Cheeseford. The sun was out, the nosh was lovely, my ankle is on the mend, and I thought that things couldn't get much better. And then, I looked towards Lowestoft station and noticed a set of carriages unlike those that haul the normal services in and out of town. A mixture of mark 2 and mark 1 stock, I deduced, leading to the logical conclusion that there would be a locomotive of some note at the front. So there was - BR Britannia class 70013 Oliver Cromwell was paying a visit with a steam enthusiasts' excursion from Liverpool Street to Norwich, then to Lowestoft, then back down the East Suffolk line to Stratford. Cheeseford Junior showed enormous interest in the big, noisy machine, and having established that it would be in town for a couple of hours, I resolved to go home, grab my camcorder and capture its departure, which I share with you now. Like James May in yesterday's Telegraph, I'll admit to a preference for early diesel locomotives. Faced with a choice of a famous steam loco pulling modern carriages and a modern locomotive pulling vintage carriages, the smell of warm leather and moquette always beats any amount of atmospheric smoke. However, I did feel a pang of jealousy that I wasn't on the Easterling as it chuffed away back to the capital.

I've just heard about the death of Les Paul. I really, honestly, thought he was good for the ton and then a few more. His mother achieved a great age, and, when I saw him live at Iridium in New York in 2002, he looked indestructible - even if a stroke had robbed him of some of his dexterity. However, I don't think anyone can call 94 a bad innings, and he packed a hell of a lot in to his time on Earth. Pioneering and popularising, if not actually inventing, the solid-body electric guitar. Creating 78rpm soundscapes that still sound futuristic as all get out. Inspiring Ampex to make the first practical multi-track tape recorder. I grew up with his music, and I still revisit those amazing, astonishing Capitol sides regularly. When he struck up 'Brazil' on that night in New York 7 years ago, I found myself crying a little. I'd played the record to death, and now I was no more than 20 feet away from the man who'd made it, hearing him play it live. After the show, he sat at a table and signed stuff for anyone who wanted it, which was just about everyone in the audience. I waited my turn, shook his hand and we had a brief chat. I tried not to gush. I didn't need to. Without being arrogant, he knew precisely how great and important he was. RIP Red Hot Red.

Maybe Bob McDowall has voodoo powers. Or maybe I was pissed. We shall never know. Both are possible explanations for how I passed out on Sunday morning, sending my full 14 stone 13 pounds crashing down on my right ankle and resulting in the accompanying picture, taken at Stroud railway station. It happened while spending a weekend visiting relatives in Gloucestershire, and such a lovely time was being had that not even the injury and the fact that Mrs Cheeseford's beloved Nissan Sunny had been declared DOA (hence the need to return by rail) could put a crimp in the festivities. I'm currently finding PRICE easy to comply with, and doing OK at avoiding H, R and M of HARM, but I reserve the right to ignore the advice on the A.

Crossing London as a temporary cripple was an interesting experience, second-guessing rude bastards with their tinny little iPod headphones blocking out the outside world, allowing them to rush about like headless chickens, oblivious to the fact that they've just nearly knocked over someone whose stopping and turning abilities are considerably less than theirs. In one case, I found myself shouting something obscene at the person who'd almost sent me flying. Oddly enough, the name I called him got through his aural insulation, and he turned round and asked if I was talking to him, in a manner that he obviously thought menacing, bless him. I said that I was and that I was glad I'd got his attention, as it might in future make him more aware of his surroundings when walking around like he owned the pavement. His response: "You can talk about walking". Choosing not to debate the meaninglessness of the utterance, I replied: "Yes, I can. And if you'd like to carry on being able to walk, I'd advise that you go on your way right now". Which he did. I'm not a violent sort, and as can be seen from the picture, I was dressed like Alec Guinness at the end of The Lavender Hill Mob. I can only put it down to the fact that I had a walking stick, and the expression of a man who knew how to shove it up someone's arse.

Apologies to the fellow blogger who added a comment about BBC producer Bob McDowall from the vantage point of having worked with him. Very illuminating, and the poster in question knows I trust his judgment, but in this instance defending it would take more time and effort than I'm prepared to expend. Since the Laycock cancellation, he has developed a reputation for stalking himself on the Internet and requesting that critical comments about his abilities be removed. That he shouldn't do things that make people want to call him what the deleted comment called him seems not to have crossed his mind. Similarly, the idea of tackling his critics head on and winning the argument with sweet reason seems not to have crossed his mind either. Maybe that's because he knows he's ballsed this one up royally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

----

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

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

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

----

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To close, my personal favourites:

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

and who is michael jackson?

th king of pop...

poor coocker...."

and

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

Well, that's him told...

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

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

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

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

Now to transcribe the ruddy thing...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last week's Independent on Sunday was uncommonly good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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