Yesterday, I had a very illuminating conversation with Harry King of BBC Radio Cumbria. On Monday evenings, he presents a weekly delve into entertainment nostalgia, and wants to feature Turned Out Nice Again on his show. Which is nice.

However, in a former life, Harry was a Border Television man, producing and directing programmes like Mr & Mrs and Look Who's Talking for the ITV network. As ITV stands now, it's astonishing to think that two popular network shows could come from one of the smallest regional companies. Having visited Border in the early 1990s when a friend worked there and seen the size of the studio they used for quiz shows and chat shows with a live audience, it's even more astonishing. I've just hoiked Television and Radio 1984 off the shelf, and it says that Border's biggest studio was 94 square metres. At BBC Television Centre, the old N1 news studio (now TC10, used for very small, simple productions) was 111 square metres. Sadly, the Durranhill studios are not long for this world, with the Border region set to be rationalised out of existence in the digital switchover.

They were good shows too, not parochial. Look Who's Talking regularly got top entertainment names up to Carlisle for a chat with Derek Batey. Border also made some big shows for Channel 4, not least The Groovy Fellers with Jools Holland and Rowland Rivron - which was a truly great example of what can happen when funny people are sent off to apparently random places with a camera crew in tow. Streets ahead of Paul India in Merton, certainly.

Now, just about everything studio-based ITV show is made in London, Manchester or, to a lesser degree, Leeds. Gone is Anglia's fine tradition of drama programming and Sale of the Century. No more children's programmes from Southern/TVS. No more That's My Dog from Plymouth. With the BBC determined to evict as much programming as possible from Wood Lane, London, W12 8QT, it seems odd that ITV is consolidating like mad and concentrating production in a handful of expensive bits of city centre real estate, rather than building on its regional expertise.

Last night was the Literary Review Bad Sex in Literary Fiction award, so this morning is the Literary Review Bad Sex in Literary Fiction award hangover. Over the last couple of years, the party's been supported by Hendrick's gin, and I've felt the need to support them in return. Ouch.

Rachel Johnson - sister of Boris - won the prize, and John Updike - who's been nominated for the award four times, got a lifetime achievement award in absentia, to mark his 'always the bridesmaid' status.

Highlights:

• Alexander Waugh's always-superb speech - definitely his father's son in the best possible way
• Nancy dell'Olio reading Updike's acceptance speech
• Meeting Georgina Baillie in the cloakroom queue and drunkenly asking her what it's like to have such a gracious, cool, unflappable grandad and instructing her to give him a hug from me. I think she thought I was a tabloid scumbucket trying to catch her out, because she clammed up completely. You can supply your own punchline. I'm far too gentlemanly.
  

Today, I had my first eye test in five years. After the compressed air in the eyeball and the 'clearer/more blurred' thing with the different lenses, brer optician told me that my eyesight hadn't changed at all since my last test, and that I needed new glasses only if I fancied a change or the old ones were falling apart.

As it happens, I do fancy a change, as, like just about every other four-eyed git in Britain, I have little oblong specs, because they seem to be the only ones you can get. I don't like them, though. I'd quite like something that improves my peripheral vision as well as the main focus. Little oblong jobs don't do that. I have it on good authority that Hank Marvin wears big glasses partly because they're his trademark, but also because with little frames, he wouldn't be able to see his guitar properly when he glances down.

When I was at university, I affected a pair of round tortoiseshell specs that can only be described as Richard Wattis-chic. They came from Specsavers - bliss it was in that dawn to be alive. No chance that they'd carry similar styles now, the swines. Fortunately, Opera Opera in London have very similar frames in stock. They know how to charge, but as they have them custom-made in Britain, rather than stamped out in an oriental sweat shop, that's understandable. They also offer them in clear plastic, which would be wonderful as long as I don't wear them with a dark suit. I admire Jonathan Meades too much to invite even superficial comparisons.

Back to the high street: in one shop, I asked why all of the glasses on display were little, oblong jobs. The assistant replied "There's no call for any other kind, sir". I replied that I was calling for them, couldn't find any anywhere and that maybe, just maybe, there would be some other calls for them if they had any in stock. "We tried, sir, but no-one wanted them". Having a suspicion that I was well over halfway round a circular argument, I gave up. I also suspected that the alternative styles they'd tried had come from the Dennis Nilsen Serial-Killer-About-Muswell-Hill range. So, what's the story there? Does an optometric insider have the skinny on skinny glasses? What, to be frank, are they trying to pull?

STOP PRESS: I've gone for these in tortoiseshell. Named after the Two Ronnies and only £34. It had to be done.

In his Sunday Telegraph review of Turned Out Nice Again, Peter Bazalgette thought I hadn't concentrated enough on the independent production sector. As it turns out, it's a good job I didn't write any more than I did, because former National Museum of Photography, Film & Television curator and good chap Ian Potter has done a whole book on the subject. My copy's on order, and I'll report back further when I've read it, but I suspect it'll be essential reading for anyone interested in recent TV history.

I've expressed my alarm at the acres of coverage being given to John Sergeant's exit from Strictly Come Dancing by adding to the acres of coverage with a piece in today's Sunday Telegraph. With any luck, I'll be forgiven any hypocrisy and opportunism for the fact that I seized the opportunity to suggest a robust British alternative to the awful Americanism 'water cooler TV'. Long live the 'tea-urn moment'.

Two reviews in today's blatts. In the Times, Brian Schofield is unimpressed, but says so in such a reasonable and constructive manner that I can't complain. In the Telegraph (not yet online), Sinclair McKay is full of enthusiasm, for which I thank him profusely.

In other news, I can report with great pleasure that I have accepted a modest advance from a small left-wing press to pen an unauthorised biography of Jon Gaunt.

Danny Baker's back on Saturday morning national radio, and it's fab. It's 1994 again, but in a good way. Zoe Ball's not disgracing the set up, either. He's currently reeling in the Radio 2 massive with all the greatest hits. A mate's sent me a message to ask how long before he's calling the register, and I reckon we'll be on 'How nuts is your mum?' before too long. He's not played this yet, but give it time.

I've noticed that most of the comments on this blog come from people I know and with whom I have drunk, often heavily. If anybody else is chancing upon these ramblings, don't be a stranger. Come say hello.

So, John Sergeant has pulled out of Strictly Come Dancing. It was a lose-lose situation. His ongoing presence made a mockery of the dance competition, but his absence now makes a mockery of the voters' wishes. Still, let's keep a sense of proportion. It shouldn't be the lead story on every bulletin, but it will be.

If his exit is the result of a decent man deciding his own fate, fair enough, but if it was another case of the BBC shitting itself in the face of adverse newspaper coverage, the fact will emerge eventually and make matters far far worse for Auntie.

Meanwhile, TalkSport's long-overdue sacking of Jon Gaunt, the Poundland Don Imus, means that he now has more time to spend with his gorgeous wife Lisa and his beautiful daughters Rosie and Bethany. Lucky them. I well remember peeing myself laughing when I read this and present it again for your amusement.

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

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

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

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

I've just received the following email:

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Dear Customer,

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

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

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

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

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

I love this bit:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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