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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A light's gone out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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