For day 12, we return to the stage of the BBC Television Theatre at the height of Beatlemania (10 May 1964, to be precise). In charge, at centre stage, Billy Cotton. Enter stage left, Terence Alan Milligan with a jam jar of She Loves You and a deluxe Merseybeat wig. Comedy ensues, as does jazz, with Spike showing what a handy trumpeter he was, while making a prize nana out of poor old Bill Herbert on the banjo.

Meanwhile for day 11, it's the door to my study.



Separated by the Burston School Strike commemorative tea towel (my great-great aunt was one of the children who went on strike in that historic dispute) are two TV-related thingies. The '/B/B/C/ /tv/ colour' replica camera plate is obvious, the other less so. Let's take a closer look, shall we?



I know what it is and where it came from. Do you?

Playing catch-up again, here's day 10:

Day 9. This never gets old.

Day 8. A BBC2 junction from 1987. This is not as random as it might seem.

Day 7. Back when I was a student at Lancaster, a freak of geography meant that from the university campus, the Moel-y-Parc (BBC Wales/HTV/S4C) transmitter was line of sight while Winter Hill and its Lancaster relay (From the North - Granada, etc) were obscured by hills. So, if we wanted to watch TV illegally in our rooms, it was Welsh telly. In its earliest days, before the advent of TWW and Teledu Cymru, Granada made programmes for a Welsh language audience, reflecting the fact that most of north Wales is technically a Liverpool suburb. This is the ident they used.

The story of how a now-prominent sports lobbyist and I plotted to liberate the giant Granada G-arrow sign from outside the White Cross building will have to wait for another day...

More music for day 6, this time from a 1962 Ted Heath spectacular, featuring Ronnie Verrell (left of picture and left of sound field) and Kenny Clare (on the right) in a friendly sort of drum battle. Two drum heroes for the price of one. Can't be bad. The performance was mimed to the version used on the Decca Phase 4 Stereo album Big Band Percussion, so I've taken the liberty of replacing the lo-fi mono soundtrack from the telerecording with the audio from the original stereo LP. Also visible are numerous percussionists including Stan Barrett and Barry Morgan, not to mention bassist Johnny 'Salute to Thames' Hawksworth and guitarist Ike Isaacs. I can't place the ocarina player, though. Any guidance gratefully accepted. The spiffing arrangement is by Johnny Keating. I fear we might be peaking too soon, but what the hell...

A musical interlude for day 5, courtesy of the Dudley Moore Trio. This selection, called Song for Suzy, is in honour of Roman Empress who Twittered about how much she was enjoying this advent calendar, and the Baker/Worthington alternative.

For day 4, we cross the herring pond and commune with director Stan Freberg and actor Jesse White for an alternative to nicotine patches. I realise that I could, quite happily, fill the days before Christmas with strange little Freberg ads, but I'll try and keep things varied. Thanks to Posie Flump, whose tape this comes from, and to whom I really need to send the disc transfer I did for him, along with the bonus Time for Beany episodes I've put on it.

For day 3 of the advent calendar we return to state-of-the-art 1963 visual effects for the sight and sound of Millicent Martin duetting with herself on the final That Was the Week That Was. Anyone not cheered by the presence of Willie Rushton at the start of this clip is not human.

Playing catch-up, day 2 on the advent calendar brings a VT clock from a 1964 Big Night Out featuring Mike and Bernie Winters. Uncharitable souls have suggested that the VT clock was the most entertaining part of the show.

Despite not feeling particularly festive, a tradition's a tradition, so here's the first window on this years Cheeseford Virtual Archive TV Advent Calendar. For the last few years, Nigel Lythgoe - ex-Young Generation dancer, turned choreographer and producer - has been living and working in the US, most recently on a show called So You Think You Can Dance? He courted controversy when he expressed his reservations about seeing a pair of gents dancing with each other Fred and Ginger style. In certain quarters, this would have been bad enough, but he made matters worse by describing the all-male act as "Brokeback Ballroom" on his Twitter feed. The furore led to accusations of homophobia on Lythgoe's part. Tish and pish. This excerpt from a 1984 Central TV Christmas tape shows a young Lythgoe and what looks like Eurovision winner Johnny Logan camping it up something rotten. Obviously, neither gent is gay, but both are clearly happy to be identified as friends of the family.

So, Ian Hart remonstrating with a 'disruptive' audience member was understandable, was it? I prefer Sir John Gielgud's approach, which was to rise above it and press on. At one point in the 1950s, the great actor found himself working with a young man heavily in the thrall of Pinter. It might even have been Pinter himself, I'm not entirely sure. After an epic pause, the kindly Gielgud asked the young thesp a question: "Dear boy, why are you leaving these enormous pauses?". The young chap replied that it was all the rage at RADA now. Gielgud's reply was majestic. "It's nothing new, dear boy. I went through a similar phase myself until one night when, in the middle of a lengthy, dramatic pause, I heard from the stalls a cry of 'You horrible beast, you've just come all over my umbrella'." I wonder how Ian Hart would have dealt with that one?

RIP Malcolm Laycock. The best.

Sitting in Humanities 2 at the British Library, wrestling with a pile of Radiotimes bound volumes in the interests of research, a programme billing from April 1979 leapt out at me. "8.10pm - Accident. A drama series in eight episodes. In the confusion of a road accident ten lives are mixed in a jig-saw of past and present." If you ever wondered what Anthony Horowitz was watching on Wednesday nights 30 years ago, now you know.

I've just taken a momentous decision. When my current stock of blank minidiscs is exhausted, I'm going to buy one of those new flash drive-based digital audio recorders - a Zoom or a Tascam of some description. There are 18 shrink-wrapped discs on the shelf in front of me, and a couple of part-used discs with over an hour of recording time in mono mode left, should I need them. I reckon those 18 discs should allow me to do all the interviews I need for the book I'm currently working on (very slowly, but I've just started to regain a tiny bit of momentum after the events of what Americans would call 9/24, thanks for asking). I have three working portable minidisc machines (one of which has power issues when using the internal battery, which means I've got to search for the nasty, plasticky screw-on gewgaw that enables the user to shove in a bog-standard AA - I could be gone some time. It's a Sony, whereas the brace of Sharps have a built in AA compartment, just one of many reasons why the Sharp portables were so much better than the Sonys), and a small family of stereo condenser microphones, and I'm hoping they'll see me through this project as well. I reached the conclusion when I was thinking "Have I got enough blanks left?" earlier. I was on the verge of buying another 10 from an Amazon Marketplace seller for just under a tenner, when I thought "I'm going to have to move on sooner or later, and this tenner is 1/15 of the cost of a spanking new machine that will allow me to transfer the audio to my computer losslessly and not in real time. What a world that would be. Best hold fire, then". Memories of clearing out my local Aldi's stock of bargain BASF 8mm video cassettes immediately before my 8mm camcorder breathed its last also popped into my mind. Why not get a super zippy modern doodah now? Until I finish this book, any money coming into schloss Cheeseford is earmarked for luxuries like bread and shoes. That's a good gag. I wonder who came up with it?

Memo to BBC News and other media outlets: Celebrity has very mild disagreement with mildly critical fan is not a major story. However, a few people have said to me "Come now, it's not Stephen Fry's fault that the BBC has over-reacted in this way". It is, though. Fry has made such a big deal of Twitter, to the point that I would describe him as a shill if I didn't love him and his work so much. He's created the interest. A (hopefully temporarily) depressed Fry reacted badly to an observation that seems to me to be on the mild side of fair comment. However, the trouble is that a man of his intelligence can't not have known that his loyal followers would react in the way that they did, which reflects badly on him. He would also have had a fairly shrewd idea that it would be picked up by the media, if not of the undue prominence they gave it. To be fair, though, depression is the enemy of rational thought.

Still, it's all been dealt with now, with Fry admitting to feeling foolish. Well, yes. Come here you big lummox and have a cuddle. If there is a story left to report, it's the unpleasant reaction of Alan Davies. One Twitterer sent a message to Fry saying "@stephenfry Please don't be a grumpytrousers. You're much-loved - go get yourself a non-cyber hug immediately". Davies reacted to the whole business with "Anyone who thinks that @stephenfry could even fabricate a toss about anything @brumplum or any such moron says ought to stop worrying". The 'grumpytrousers' poster tackled Davies (hopefully while wearing ear protection) with "There's no need to be offensive. @brumplum said he adored @stephenfry but his tweets could be a bit dull. That's not moronic". Davies hit back with "yes it is moronic, you should know , being a moron yourself". From there, it escalated, with Davies calling everyone who dared to pass comment a 'moron', 'tosser', 'halfwit', 'dickhead', 'idiotic' or a 'prat', clearly unaware that he was confirming his own idiotic comic persona by doing so. Finally, Davies concluded that "Anyone has a pop at your mates you stick up for them.Twittr needs to be more like Essex.If you wouldn't say it to their face then do shut up". Which bit of Essex, Alan? Dedham Vale on a tranquil Sunday or Basildon on a Saturday night? Fry has apologised to brumplum for all of the abuse he's received. He should now have a quiet, schoolmasterly word with Davies, who has been one of the principal abusers.

Davies, in his ham-fisted and oafish* way, does make an interesting point. I've never said anything online I wouldn't say to someone's face, but some find it easy to hide behind a persona and be the fearless fighter that they wouldn't dare be in real life. Tools like Twitter create an artificial intimacy between fans and celebrities, and when you are intimate with someone, you feel able to say whatever you like to them. This started mildly, and ended in the same way. The next time a fan criticises their hero on a social networking site, it might not be so seemly. A celebrity might 'follow' you and might reply to your messages occasionally. However, you do not know them. They do not know you. Proceed accordingly. Celebrities too have a responsibility to make the ground rules clear.

I'm trying to think of an historical equivalent, but I can't. It's a product of the technology. In 1978, Stan Boardman didn't ring everyone up to call them a cunt when Tom O'Connor went ex-directory. Welcome to the modern world.

* EDIT - 21/2/2010 - I've substituted 'oafish' for the original, stronger description of Davies' manner, as Davies is now Twittering about "libellous blogging". The original term was, I believe, defensible as fair comment, but defending it on those grounds would take more time and effort than I'm prepared to put in. I've also removed a couple of comments, which, while true, also come under the heading of "can I really be arsed?".

I'm all in favour of collective bargaining, and can understand the principles behind the Royal Mail dispute. However, isn't striking at the height of a recession to maintain existing working terms, when countless thousands of jobless would happily accept the inferior terms on offer, bordering on the suicidal?

When so many high-profile child abuse cases are in the news, it's sometimes hard for one to stand out, but this one manages it. Being so used to reading and hearing of terrible acts of inhumanity, I find my visceral reactions to situations like these increasingly rare. Rationally and logically, I abhor and condemn the acts, but it takes a lot to make me feel physically sick, as I did reading that report.

And yet in that terrible catalogue of events, there is a glimmer of hope, decency and humanity. The mother of one of the victims is quoted as saying: "[F]or those involved in paedophile behaviour to identify it in themselves and know where to seek help, society must be prepared to discuss this issue. We need to allow an openness within society of where to seek help, just as alcoholics go to AA and gamblers go to GA. Clearly the protection of children must take precedence, but if individuals could have been stopped or deterred, we as a family may not have found ourselves in this situation."

I think this might be the bravest thing that anyone in the public eye has said for quite some time. Prevention is always better than cure, and prevention need not mean the extermination of all paedophiles or bricks through windows. Unfortunately, we won't know what it does mean until we have the openness that this mother requests, and are able to find out exactly what compels paedophiles. Only then can the problem be managed effectively. If this were being said by a social worker or someone else with a need to maintain professional detachment, it would be easy for the 'condemn first, don't bother to ask questions later' lobby to dismiss. However, it's coming from a woman whose child was subjected to vile, awful acts of abuse by men she trusted to care for her child. Everybody should be listening to her right now.

Just seen some rough clips on BBC News. Dimbleby on stunning form. First question about the BNP's adoption of Churchill. Griffin concludes his case for Churchill's natural home being in the BNP with a snide dig at Jack Straw, talking about his own father's WW2 service versus Straw's father being a conchie. Dimbleby - nobody's idea of a Trot - straight in: "What relevance does that have on the question?" (doubtless thinking "If you want to play that game, matey, my father was one of the first Allied personnel into Belsen after the liberation"). Griffin restates the slur. Dimbleby restates the question. Clip cuts off. Later, Griffin responds to suggestions that he said "Thank you, Auntie" with a statement that he doesn't regard the BBC as Auntie, but instead as part of "nasty, ultra-leftist establishment" that is the enemy of Englishness. The response is pure tumbleweed. If the clips are representative, Griffin gets hung out to dry in the fairest possible manner. The British way, if you like.