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

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

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

Being as poor as a church mouse, I've become rather good at making things for myself. I bake my own bread, I grow my own seasonal veg, I brew my own beer, and my kitchen is constructed entirely of bits that friends had going spare. In many ways, Mrs Cheeseford and I are, to all intents and purposes, Tom and Barbara Good. My proudest achievement so far has been installing a Belfast sink that had been rescued from a friend's garden and then creating a worktop and surround using surplus oak from another friend's very expensive installation.

The Belfast sink proved its worth today when I began the first batch of beer since it was put in place. It replaced a nasty brown plastic sink, the shallowness of which meant I couldn't top up the fermenting vessel directly from the tap. In contrast, the new sink took the vessel without a murmur, saving me the bother of relaying the water to the bucket using a large jug. Anyone wondering why I didn't use a hose will be unaware of the sterilisation that has to be performed on all brewing equipment - tedious, but necessary if you don't want your brew to taste and smell of old socks.

Anyway, in a week or so, this lot (36 pints' worth of Woodforde's excellent Nelson's Revenge, using a kit purchased from Mr Alexander Carr's rather wonderful Market Place Wine Shop in Halesworth - 01986872563) will be ready for bottling, and I'll report back on the ale's progress.

Being a freelance type, I know far too much about daytime television. I hate most of it and the personalities involved. If Lorne Spicer ever turned up on my doorstep asking to see what I've got in my attic, I'd show her the redundant and very heavy Sony Betamax machine that lives up there by dropping it on her head.

I thought Trisha Goddard was the worst person ever to appear on television, but then along comes Jeremy Kyle to set the bar so low that a rattlesnake couldn't limbo-dance under it. 'Jezza' is very fond of telling the malcontents and, let's not mince words, attention-seeking scum appearing on his show, that their behaviour would be unacceptable "where I come from". Wherever it is, I wish he'd fuck off back there. And don't get me started on the Cuprinol-dipped wide boy that is David 'the Dame' Dickinson.

Despite all of this, I find it impossible to dislike Bargain Hunt's bow-tied presenter Tim Wonnacott. I don't make an appointment to view the show, but equally, if it's on, I don't throw macaroons at the screen. My lack of distaste for Wonnacott - who is, after all, just Dickinson with A levels - baffled me utterly until the other morning when the penny dropped. He is Basil Brush. Mode of dress, gap in front teeth, Terry-Thomas voice, all present and correct. And, of course, almost everyone loves Basil Brush.

UPDATE - 24/4/2008: the Betamax machine mentioned in this posting has now been disposed of at the Lowestoft recycling centre. Dropping it, and the remains of my two previous PCs, from a height of 15 feet onto a concrete floor was immensely satisfying. No flowers.

I saw a poster for a Pink Floyd tribute band earlier today, which bore a hell of an endorsement. "Possibly the best concert experience you will ever have", it said. Who was responsible for this encomium? According to the poster, it was "The BBC". Did the Corporation have a representative poll of its staff from the DG downwards, or are the band's management parlaying up a doubtless heartfelt tribute from a Radio Shropshire work experience student? I think we should be told.

I'm busy. Isn't everyone?

There must be something in the air. Shortly after The Urban Woo's computer went sideways, my own 4 year-old laptop decided to switch itself off terminally. After establishing that the power supply was fine, I worked out it was a motherboard replacement job and decided that it'd be cheaper and easier in the long run to get a fully-guaranteed refurb machine. So I did, and although the product description said the lid was pink, the pictures online did not convey how neon pink it truly was. However, I am secure enough in my masculinity to use a pink laptop in public - yea, even in Humanities 2 at the British Library - my eyes daring anyone to laugh, especially when it was comfortably less than £300.

It came installed with Windows Vista, about which I've heard various nightmare stories, but I decided to test it out for myself before believing them. The actual experience of using the new OS was relatively painless, but it was practically impossible to make the new machine join my existing wireless network and talk to the desktop machine in my office. As the ability to write on one machine and save the document on the other is a massive boon, both in terms of backing stuff up and working on the sofa while watching telly, I decided that I'd set up a dual-boot Vista/XP system, allowing me to carry on as I had before without dismissing Vista entirely. Dual-boots hold no fear for me, as I've run XP and Ubuntu on my desktop machine for a while now, and am fairly good with backups, so if anything went wrong, it was a question of going back to the start and using the recovery disc.

After reading various sets of instructions very carefully, I began the installation, partitioning the hard drive, etc. A few minutes into the installation, the machine rebooted, and hung on the Intel splash screen. I rebooted again. I tried it with the recovery disc I'd been instructed to make by the machine's manufacturers. Nothing happened. I turned to the desktop machine and searched for information on this make and model, finding that several attempting the same perfectly reasonable manoeuvre had been left with a machine that they couldn't restore to default settings, no matter how hard they tried.

At this point, I swallowed something hard and jagged, and rang PC World's 'TechGuys'. I knew this was a pointless exercise, because, while I'm not Sir Tim Berners-Lee, I have a certain amount of experience with computers, and usually find that I end up telling the helpdesk person what to do. No, not like that. Anyway, after telling me to turn it off and then on again (no, really), and then to try the same manoeuvre while holding in the F8 key, to no avail, they decided I needed the official recovery discs. I said I had one that I'd made on the machine when it worked. Ah no, I was informed, the official ones were better, somehow. However, as I'd tried to install a foreign OS, I would not be entitled to free recovery discs. I would have to ring an 0870 number and pay £55 for the official stuff. Very politely, I told TechGuy #1 that I had an allergy to premium rate phone lines, that I wasn't paying £55 for something that almost certainly wouldn't make a blind bit of difference, and that I would sail this ship alone, somehow. My suspicion that the 'official' recovery discs wouldn't be any better was confirmed when I loaded the home-brew recovery disc into my desktop machine and the boot process began without a hitch. It was the BIOS, the hard drive or the DVD drive.

The timing of the incident stank. There's a major project that I'm way behind with, but every time I tried to concentrate on that, the pink panther kept distracting me. There had to be a way through, past, round or over this problem without spending a relative fortune. Logic prevailed when I tried opening the BIOS on boot-up. It just hung after recognising the hard drive, so it was a recognition or driver issue, but as I had no way of getting past that point to reinstall drivers, I was stumped. A chink of light broke through on one of the support forums. A chap in the same position as me had reformatted the laptop hard drive in his desktop machine and installed XP from there before slotting it back into the laptop, with great success. Worth a punt, I thought, but, on opening the laptop, I saw that the hard drive was a SATA job, and I knew my desktop machine was IDE only. How about a USB/SATA interface? Fine, but all the ones I found at first were dangerously close in price to the dreaded recovery discs. As the whole point of recovery discs is to rescue your machine, no matter how fecked the hard drive is, I concluded that it was beyond reason to expect me to work around this issue, and I called the TechGuys again. TechGuy #2 went through the same script and tried to sell me 'official' recovery discs, but admitted defeat when I said that the disc I'd made worked in another machine. It sounded like a hardware problem, and an exchange was the best option. I rang customer services, who, slightly to my surprise, arranged to pick the machine up and give me a replacement. Peace of mind almost restored, I went back to work.

However, a nagging doubt remained. What if I could never install another OS on this machine? Wouldn't that be slightly limiting? In a fit of lateral thinking, I tried booting from the recovery disc with no hard drive present. I got past the splash screen to where I needed to be, but had no media in need of recovery. After another search on eBay, I found a SATA/IDE/OHMS/ATV/NTGB interface that practically allowed you to boil a kettle from a USB socket for under a tenner including post and packing. I ordered it, it arrived the next day, and enabled me to see that the laptop hard drive was functioning. I tried repartitioning and reformatting, but the laptop still couldn't see the drive, and was about to give up again when I discovered a crucial piece of information. SATA drives are hot-swappable - meaning that you can plug them into an already-running machine. So, I started the recovery disc with the hard drive out, and when the boot process was well underway inserted it. 25 minutes later, I had the machine back to how it was when it had arrived 4 days earlier. I rang PC World to tell them that they could cancel the courier. The pink panther was back. I now know that XP doesn't have any in-built support for SATA hard drives (hence the boot trouble), so I have to download some other McGuffin to make a successful installation possible. I don't have the stomach for that just yet, though. In the mean time, I'm learning to live with Vista's frankly shite networking, and have installed a dual boot of Ubuntu to show it who's boss.

The first person to say 'Buy a Mac' wins a free kick in the front bottom.

I was determined to stay well out of the chain letter book meme thing currently infesting bloggery, but when a man as nice and good as Matthew Rudd asks one to step up to the plate, only a real churl could refuse. The idea is to turn to page 123 of the book you're currently reading, count down three sentences, then reproduce the next five sentences. Five-Centres has made the whole thing more interesting by making people guess the book, so I'll follow his template. Interestingly, I don't think I'd guess this book from the following lines, but there are other passages elsewhere that would identify the author and title straight away:

"Faithful Unto Death was in the assembly room, and I frequently had a chance to examine it. At nine on the dot, while we all stood in makeshift rows under the supervision of one of the mistresses, Miss Yates would make her entrance. 'Good morning, everybody,' she would say briskly, and we in our piping and ragged trebles, but with all the enthusiasm which children experience in fulfilling a ritual, would answer her in unison: 'Good morning, Miss Yates.' What then took place was some form of non-denominational prayers, for several of the pupils were Jewish or Catholic, followed by a hymn, usually 'All things Bright and Beautiful' accompanied by Miss Gibbons or Miss Edwards at the upright piano.

It was seldom however that this daily scenario went through without a hitch."

If you want clues, it's from one of the four massively entertaining volumes of autobiography written by a cultural all-rounder who died recently.

I now nominate James Masterton, Adam Macqueen and Richard Lewis.

I now own a David Hockney original. That's it on the left, embodying the great artist's current crusade against the absurdities of the nanny state. I can't resist a good badge, and when I saw others at the Oldie of the Year awards yesterday wearing theirs, I quite shamelessly bounded up to him and asked if he had any left. Thankfully he did, and I shall now wear it with great pride.

He was there to receive the Gasper of the Year award for his vocal opposition to the smoking ban. I was there on the strength of my occasional modest contributions to the Oldie's pages, and, as ever, I was profoundly glad that I had been invited. How else would a herbert down from Lowestoft on a £6 apex super advance ticket get to flirt outrageously with the utterly wonderful Moira Stuart, be reduced to tears of laughter by the equally fab Kate Adie or sit six feet away from Peter O'Toole as he held forth on rugby and the US election? Or to witness Stanley Baxter slaying the whole room with the best, funniest acceptance speech I've heard in 10 years of attending the do.

However, the great thrill of my day occurred in the pub before the do, when Barry Cryer - who, after 10 years of bumping into each other at Oldie functions and on licensed premises, I'm lucky enough to regard as a friend - introduced me to David Nobbs. Comedy writers have been my heroes ever since I first learned to read programme credits, and there aren't many who can match those two for quality and quantity of material. Baz doesn't keep a blog, but David Nobbs does, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

As Brian Matthew's Sounds of the Sixties is to my Saturday morning, so TV Burp is to Saturday teatime. It's the only way I am ever likely to have any contact with, or knowledge of, BBC3's Freaky Eaters, which has become one of Harry's favourite Aunt Sallies (When Harry Hill Met Aunt Sally? Is Eunice Tubbs available? Commission x 13). Last night's Burp featured a Freaky Eaters clip in which a woman who ate only bread, tinned spaghetti hoops and tomato soup threw her entire supply away, opening each tin and emptying it into the bin. Now, I know it wouldn't have made for 'great telly' (ahem), but how much less wasteful and offensive it would have been to give the bread to the ducks and take all the tins to a local homeless shelter, or just hide them in the loft until harvest festival. Silly cow and silly fucking 'documentary' makers.

Listening to 'your old mate' Brian Matthew's Sounds of the Sixties on the Light Programme, as is my Saturday morning wont, I realised that Heather Mills McCartney missed a trick in her abortive campaign to turn the world against her ex-husband. Now, I like Macca and find it extremely hard to believe that he ever showed Linda his hairy back hand. In this, I am far from alone, with the result that many now think of HMMcC as a lying psycho nutjob. If, however, she had said "Listen to 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer'. A person who concocts such a dark, depraved fantasy is capable of anything. I rest my case", it might well have worked. As Brian Matthew played it, I was reminded what a truly horrible little song it is, its twee bippety boppety nursery rhyme backing track masking the brutal toolkit homicide lyrics. Bugger 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' being all about acid, or Charlie Manson claiming that everything he did was motivated by 'Helter Skelter'. Did Peter Sutcliffe have a well-worn copy of Abbey Road?

As a fully paid-up geek, I love modern communications technology, but, like everything, it has a downside. Spam email is one of the less agreeable aspects of the whole shooting match, although filtering and a panoply of different email addresses for different purposes help keep its incursion into my busy, exciting life to a minimum. Sometimes, it can even be amusing, such as when some herbert claiming to be Peregrine Worsthorne tried to sell me penis extension surgery.

The other day, I started receiving spam that stood out from the herd of automated cock enhancers. For one thing, it arrived on an email address that I use exclusively for mailing lists, which never normally lets spam through. It also addressed me by name, which is something the auto-stuff never does. By an astonishing coincidence, the first message arrived less than 24 hours after a disagreement with an individual on a mailing list. Could this aggrieved person possibly have entered my name and email address into any number of bobbins self-help websites as revenge for our little set-to? As the person in question claims to be a mature professional with a young family (and a swift Google search supports the claims - the footprint many of us leave online scares me), I'd like to think they were above such antics, but the circumstantial evidence seems to point in that direction.

If so, what were they hoping to achieve? If it was to disrupt my life, they've failed. I have a couple more emails to divert to the trash folder each morning. Boo hoo. If it was to get back at me anonymously, they've failed, because they don't seem to have covered their tracks very well. The only way they'll have succeeded is if they wanted to leave me with the impression that they were a vindictive idiot, but I can't bring myself to believe that anyone would actually want to be thought of as such.

The stories of cruelty and abuse emerging from investigations at the former Haut de la Garenne children's home in Jersey are terrible and harrowing, so I feel dreadful pangs of guilt when I have to stifle a laugh every time a report is broadcast. What's so funny? Well, the police chief in charge of the excavations is called Lenny Harper. Every time his name is mentioned, I expect a pipe-cleaner thin Scottish woman with spiky hair to pop up and greet the newsreader back in the studio as 'Noel'.

Thursday was a bit crap, one way and another. I had a job interview in the morning, at which the panel spent far too long asking me about something I had pronounced myself largely ignorant of on the application form. When the expected 'No thanks' phone call came in the afternoon, explaining that my deficiencies in this particular area were what had cost me the plum role, I was momentarily too flabbergasted to do anything but say "Thanks for letting me know so quickly" and hang up. After a moment's consideration, I sent a moderately fuming e-mail to my interviewer explaining that these deficiencies were obvious from the application, and that they had wasted an hour of my time and their time bringing me in for an interview. I've been freelance for 6 years now, and this was only my second job interview in a decade, so maybe I'm just out of practice. Maybe it's simply down to making the right noises, and that's something I was never too keen on or good at. Or could it possibly be that some people in recruitment have trouble with reading comprehension? Who knows? Who cares?

Thank heavens, then, for Friday. Schloss Barfe is the home of redundant technology, and, alongside the impressive array of open-reel tape recorders, sits a Sanyo VTC5000 Betamax VCR. Well, I say Betamax. Being a Sanyo, it's more properly known as a Betacord machine. For a brief period in 1982, shortly before VHS was declared Victor Ludorum, it was the best-selling VCR in the British Isles. Rather perversely, it took until early 2005 for me to go Betamax, after I found some interesting tapes in a charity shop - we were a VHS family from the moment we entered the VCR market in 1984. I found a chap selling reconditioned machines on eBay, who, on closer inspection, turned out to live around the corner. I bought one, got it home, transferred my tapes and then bought a further job lot of tapes off eBay. I got part way into this hoard when the machine stopped working. I took it to my local TV repair shop, who claimed that it was caused by a part that was no longer made, and that they'd be happy to dispose of the machine for me. Being a hoarder and a naturally suspicious type, I put the machine in the loft and forgot about it. Just recently, however, I posted a message on a Beta enthusiasts' site, asking for any thoughts on what might be wrong with my machine. The chap who sold it to me got in contact, clearly regarding any non-functioning Sanyo machines as a challenge and a personal insult. Within a week, he had it working again. The obsolete part story was proved to be utter balls - it was no more or less than a screw-fixed catch in the loading mechanism that had worked loose. Being a perfectionist, he also checked that just about everything else was as it should be too, with the result that it's now running better than ever. To him, and enthusiasts like him who keep these machines running, the hat is well and truly doffed.

Now, throughout the years, I had heard the Betamax faithful saying that the picture quality knocked VHS into a cocked hat. Natural suspicion came into play again. Having seen quite a few Betamax tapes, I'd thought the picture quality to be about the same as VHS. However, I'd never seen a fresh recording on a new, clean tape. When I came into possession of some factory-fresh Scotch L750s, through the kindness of a Mausoleum Club member who wanted to reclaim some space at his house, I thought I'd make a test recording. The results were astonishing. When I still used VHS as a recording medium, I always thought my Sharp VCR lived up to its name in terms of picture quality. Despite being 20 years older and having spent nearly a year in a loft, the Sanyo - without the advantage of any of the picture processing circuitry present in the Sharp - matched it. The better system lost the format war, and the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD stand-off suggests that the lessons of the VHS/Betamax pagga haven't been learned properly.

Anyway, on Friday, as an accompaniment to work, I thought I'd dip into the Betamax box and see what I could find. Most of the tapes were, very helpfully, labelled, and most have off-air recordings of feature films that you can now find just about anywhere on DVD. However, a couple of tapes were unmarked. Here a 1992 edition of Horizon, there a 1988 Tom Bower documentary on the US bombing of Libya, everywhere some nice BBC1 globes and things from the early days of UK satellite TV, including a 1994 edition of Trivial Pursuit with Tony Slattery taped off the Family Channel. All fairly interesting, particularly the Slattery game show, in which he is quite clearly on the verge of the breakdown that took him off telly for far too long, making jokes that probably weren't actually jokes about presenting the show under the influence of horse tranquilisers. Meeting the contestants and confronting them with interesting facts about their lives, he reveals that one chap had a dog who jumped off Beachy Head. Where exactly does one go from there in a light daytime quiz show? It's like (the unassailably wonderful) William G Stewart introducing a 'Fifteen to One' punter with the line "So tell us about the time you murdered a nun".

As interesting as my finds were, I was disappointed to find no proper old-fashioned light entertainment shows. In went another unlabelled tape. "Here we go. It'll be a 1987 Panorama on Northern Ireland or a copy of The Music Man that cuts off 5 minutes from the end," I thought. Suddenly, I was greeted with music that said 'This is a variety show' and the face of Roy Hudd. I tempered my hilarity with a modicum of reserve. Years of playing back old, unlabelled tapes has taught me that the moment you find something you actually want to watch, it will cut off after 5 minutes in favour of 3 hours of snooker 'highlights' from the Reading Hexagon, with David Vine. Fortunately, Barfe's 2nd Law of Archival Playback (and for that matter, the 1st, which states that anything you really want to see will have become mildewed and may bugger up your heads) was not in operation on this occasion. I found that I had four complete editions of a 1984 series called Halls of Fame, in which the great Hudd visited a different variety theatre each week, talked about the venue's history and introduced a rip-snorting bill of entertainment excellence. From the Victoria Palace, we had June Whitfield singing Marie Lloyd (Very well too - is there no end to her versatility?), Chas and Dave singing Harry Champion and Max Bygraves giving of himself. Bristol Hippodrome brought forth Acker Bilk and Dame Anna Neagle. Sunderland Empire gave us Alan Price and 'the little waster', Bobby Thompson. This hoard of jollity arrived just in time to warrant a mention in my history of light entertainment, which is currently going through the corrective process.

The best was saved until last, though. In the final show on the tape, from His Majesty's in Aberdeen, there was a whole glorious spot from Chic Murray, Billy Connolly's mentor and the greatest 'droll' comedian who ever walked the earth. I had left the tape transferring, with the plan of watching it later, but at the mention of Murray's name, I just sat down with a cup of tea, and tried to avoid dampening the sofa. In a spirit of show, don't tell, here's what I found:



So, thank you to Betamax, Barry Bevins of BBC Manchester - who produced the series, Roy Hudd and Chic Murray for rescuing me from the doldrums.

Just when I was about to post about the social menace of the MP3 phone, the Urban Woo beats me to it. They are truly horrible things. I fear I'm part of the last generation to place a premium on high-fidelity audio. Moving from vinyl (yes, I know the arguments about audiophile vinyl, but how many teenagers can afford a Bang and Olufsen rig?) and cassette to CD was a moment of glorious liberation, but the yoof of today seem happy with over-compressed MP3s played through tiny, tinny speakers that make Radio Luxembourg on medium wave sound like a wideband Decca blue-back stereo pressing. This is just one of many ways in which they are being palmed off with fool's gold, IMHO. The Mighty Boosh, anyone?

Anyway, yesterday, I got on the Lowestoft train at Norwich, and saw a young chap trying to make an ill-fitting window stop clattering in sympathetic resonance with the engine. Helpfully, I stepped forward and wedged a redundant ticket in between the window and the frame, rendering it silent. The young chap then thanked me by playing tuneless R&B on his phone nearly all the way home. If I'd been on my own, I'd have challenged him, but I had a small, defenceless and rather beautiful dog with me, so, for her safety, I said nothing. Eventually, somewhere around Reedham swing bridge, the ticket worked loose, and the window started banging away again. Pitted against the MP3 phone, it truly was the lesser of two evils, despite being considerably louder. The noise made matey boy turn his crap music off, mercifully. The truly galling thing is that I had with me several hours of Steely Dan and Donald Fagen, plus a pair of decent headphones, which let very little external noise in, and even less of my music out into the general atmos. If only the batteries hadn't given out on the London-Norwich portion of the journey. I shall be operating the patented Masterton sing-along method in future.

On another occasion, I did say something. Heading to London, a man old enough to know far better got on at Ipswich and proceeded to watch DVDs without headphones. I stepped forward and asked him if he minded using headphones. His reply was stunning in its lack of logic: "It's not a Walkman". My reply was stern: "I don't care what it is. Use headphones or turn it off". He came back with "Am I allowed to talk?", to which I answered "You got on the train on your own. Nobody in this carriage wants to talk to you. If you want to talk to yourself, and you look like the sort of person who might, I can't stop you". As he got off the train at Colchester, he gave me a defiant 'You're a very lucky man' look. As he was about 8 stone soaking wet and a good 5 inches shorter than me, all I could do was laugh. Once he was off the train, another passenger thanked me for intervening, but it's come to a pretty pass where decent people doing nothing is the default position.

I've paid farewell to the London Library. My membership lapses at the end of the month and I've returned all of the books I had on loan. The parting is not without sadness. I've spent a fair bit of time there over the last 5 years, working first on my history of the record industry, then on my soon-come history of light entertainment. Their collection is unrivalled, except by the British Library, but the London Library lets you take the books home, sometimes for years on end. The atmosphere is wonderful if you like to be surrounded by dark wood, leather-bound books and snoring gentlemen with hairy ears. It's not just a haven for bookish buffers, though. There's free wi-fi access for members too. So, why am I giving up on such riches? As you may be aware, the subscription has gone up 80% from £210 a year to £375, to pay for an extension to the building. It sounds a lot, but it's still cheap for a base in the centre of London with hot and cold running wi-fi, a lot of wonderful books, and an iron-floored shelving stack that sounds like the gantries of HMP Slade when you walk through it. I'm just spending less and less time in London these days, and I don't have £375 to spare at the moment. Even before the rise, I was umming and ahhing about whether I could justify the outlay. The rise made my mind up for me, accompanied by an astonishingly puffed-up circular from Sir Tom Stoppard justifying the rise and suggesting that anyone who disagreed was a twat. I'm hoping that my exile is a temporary one, as I can't think of a better waste of £375, but until I have that much to pee up the wall, Sir Tom will have to do without me.

Like many television enthusiasts (all male, obviously), I have a tendency to record programmes that I never get around to watching. In my case, it's simple forgetfulness and lack of time. One close relative, however, uses 3 VCRs to record a vast amount of material, almost all of which is then labelled and filed, unviewed. Only when others ask him 'did you see...?' or a laudatory review appears does he dig the tape out and watch the programme. If the programme passes without comment from trusted advisors, the tape is re-used and so the cycle begins again. It's a quite brilliant system in a way, almost like an Ofcom logging operation, and in the days before BitTorrent, he was a reliable source of programmes we'd missed. I'm in the process of educating him on the subject of hard drive-based PVRs, which I suspect he'll adopt with gusto once the initial learning curve is negotiated.

For my own part, last week, I had a sudden urge to watch the 1964 'Wednesday Play' production of Jean-Paul Sartre's 'Huis Clos', translated as 'In Camera'. This play is best known for being the origin of the phrase "Hell is other people". I found it on a disc with a 1963 BBC West regional documentary about Swindon Town FC, directed by John Boorman. Both were recorded during BBC4's 'Summer in the 60s' season in June 2004, so it's only taken me 3 and a half years to get around to watching them. Back then, I didn't even have a DVD recorder, so they've been transferred from VHS, still unwatched, at some point since then. Strange how the archival mentality works.

Anyway, as my expertise is comedy not drama, I'll spare you a review of the play. Suffice it to say that I was gripped, that Harold Pinter - in a rare acting role - was superbly sinister, and that I'm slightly in love with Catherine Woodville, the future Mrs Patrick Macnee, who played a flakey socialite with a dark past. The one thing that I feel does need a special mention, however, is, rather aptly, considering the title of the production, the camera work. As with most drama of its era, it's a multi-camera studio production. Moreover, it's from the days before lightweight shoulder-mounted cameras. Every camera used will have been a cumbersome valve-filled box from the factory of EMI or Marconi (probably the latter, for reasons explained by Martin Kempton just below here), on a gas-operated Vinten pedestal with the footprint of a woolly mammoth. And yet, everything moves in a fluid, graceful manner, while one shot would appear to be impossible. At one point, Woodville walks around and around in a circle followed by a camera. A revolution or so would have been easy enough, but sooner or later, the camera cable would have got caught up and forced a jerking halt. There's evidence of this on a 1970s edition of 'Magpie' where a similar shot is attempted with the lovely Susan Stranks. Very soon, the cameraman is forced to admit that this is as far as he can go. In this play, however, the camera goes way past that point. How the hell was it done? Well, according to Bernie Newnham, ex-BBC cameraman and producer, this shot became a legend in Corporation circles, and was the work of his mentor, Jim Atkinson. The camera was hung from above, with the cable also hanging from above, thus not trailing on the floor and getting wound around the pedestal. Another of Jim Atkinson's trainees has since offered an alternative technique: the shot was done using a standard floor pedestal, with the cable arranged around it so that it unwound rather than tightened. Either way, I'm not surprised it became a legend. It's still a jaw-dropping piece of craftsmanship, however it was done. UPDATE: 18/2/2008 - Bernie has located someone who worked on the play, and the definitive answer is that the camera was on a conventional pedestal, but the cable was suspended from the lighting grid.

Bernie's excellent Tech Ops site (broadcasting history as written by the infantry rather than the generals, which is always worth hearing) has a page on Jim Atkinson, and I present the clip in question here.

It pains me to admit this, but I've become jaded, musically speaking. This chap, who once pored over release schedules and went to the record shop most Mondays to pick up something farm-fresh, hasn't bought anything new for ages. Don't get me wrong. I still love a nice tune, but there's just nothing being made today that makes me go 'bloody hell, who's that?'. The next CD I buy (do you want woofers and tweeters with it, grandad?) will be something from the Sensational Alex Harvey Band catalogue, to follow up on my recent purchase of a 'best of' compilation (although how it can claim to be a 'best of' without including 'Boston Tea Party' is beyond my comprehension), but I'm currently undecided which one to go for.

The first problem is that when I hear something 'new', I can usually pick it apart and identify all of the influences. In particular, it rankles that so many bands have done well by sounding like a pale imitation of XTC or Squeeze, while either band has yet to receive even 1/10 of the kudos and royalties they deserve. I admit that it's always been the case. My mum would come into my bedroom (never bloody well knocking, until a traumatic incident made her very punctilious in this regard) asking "Is this Three Dog Night?" when I was listening to something I thought was wonderfully original. I've just crossed over to the other side of the fence.

Secondly, there seem to be a lot of artists who have become successful not by exciting anyone's passions, but by being acceptable to a large enough number. I'm sure it's always been the case, but it just seems more obvious now. Even the wock and woll webels are crushingly ordinary. The Kaiser Chiefs seem to be about the best we can manage, but the strongest reaction they provoke in me is 'meh'. Does anyone really get passionate about them, or have they become big because nobody really minds them? Meanwhile, who let that mumbling bore Jack Johnson - for people who find John Mayer a bit too edgy - become famous?

I'm not asking for uneasy listening. As I get older, I find myself unapologetically reaching for my Dean Friedman (Maturity = realising what a bloody clever song 'Lucky Stars' truly is, wisdom = realising that he did loads of other songs that were even better on that album alone, including 'The Deli Song (Corned Beef on Wry)' and 'Rocking Chair'), Andrew Gold ('Hope You Feel Good' from 'What's Wrong With This Picture?' being a real stand-out) and Rupert Holmes (I'll see your 'Pina Colada Song' and raise you the sublime, cynical 'Him' - complete with 'my Mini-Moog's broken' comb and paper solo) records. Even Peter Skellern. Stuff like 'You're a Lady', 'Hold On To Love' and 'Our Jackie's Getting Married' is quirky pop of the highest order. I can take or leave the faux-1930s stuff he did later - it's nice, but it comes across as a good musician relieved to find a lucrative niche after years of struggling with his own original material. I just find their modern equivalents paralysingly dull.

Or maybe it's just me.

I'm just working my way through Q6, Q7 and Q8, Spike Milligan's BBC2 shows from the second half of the 1970s. A gangling presence in many of them is Chris Langham. His recent conviction makes no difference to my ability to enjoy his work as a comic performer. Judge the work, not the man - if the reverse were applied consistently, the world's art galleries would be empty.

Langham's encounter with Dr Pamela Connolly on More4's 'Shrink Wrap' made infinitely more uncomfortable viewing than any of Langham's comedy. Whatever the erstwhile Ms Stephenson's qualifications, the whole programme seemed a nasty, cynical exercise - tabloid prurience hiding behind a skimpy veil of serious, scientific enquiry. Nonetheless, I'm glad that Langham was allowed to discuss his situation at length. On many Internet forums, the prevailing view seemed to be 'no platform for nonces', with anyone arguing otherwise being painted as either an apologist for child abuse or a potential abuser themselves.

My problem with the knee-jerk reaction is two-fold. Firstly, we stand even less chance of understanding and preventing child abuse if we don't listen to its practitioners, however distasteful we find what they say. Secondly, I don't think that Langham is a paedophile. While there is obviously considerable room to doubt his 'research' mitigation, gratification is not the sole motivation for looking at any unpleasant images. I looked at the Ken Bigley beheading video when it was on Ogrish. Does that make me a terrorist or a decapitation fanatic? Or just someone trying to understand the unpleasant world he lives in a little bit more?

There is no doubt that Langham was wrong to access the material that he saw. There is also no doubt that a legal redress of some kind was appropriate, although I believe that an especially heavy sentence was doled out, as this was a high-profile case and a perfect opportunity to present a deterrent example to others. However, to state unequivocally that Langham has to be a paedophile is not something that any of us outside the psychiatric team that evaluated him, post-trial, is in a position to do. I can only speak in terms of my perceptions, thoughts and beliefs with regard to the matter, and I am careful to do so. The most I can do to support my view is to suggest that Langham being allowed to return to his wife and young family - one of 11, one of 13 - indicates that the assessors concluded that while he is undoubtedly many things, he is not a risk to children.

I respect the right of others to doubt Langham's sincerity, but I condemn their tendency to present their own ill-informed surmises as unassailable fact.

There are times when I'm ashamed to be a journalist. This is one of them. How is '75 year-old man goes shopping' a news story? I bet the photographer has a whole memory card full of pictures where Mr Bough's looking perfectly happy with his lot, but "Oooh, look. There's one where he's looking a bit pissed off because they're out of sun-dried tomatoes/his pound jammed in the trolley. Let's call it the tragic life of a forgotten broadcaster". I'm guessing that this sort of crap is exactly why he avoids the limelight. Sure, he did some foolish things back in the day, but his worst crime was getting caught. I'm sure that no Daily Mail journalists or executives have ever taken cocaine or paid for sex. Take no notice, Mr Bough. He was a consummate professional on Nationwide and Grandstand, and quite frankly no scandals can take that away from him. I hope that he and Nesta are having a lovely retirement.