Never Knowingly Underwhelmed

I HAVE MOVED

2010-03-26T13:50:00.002Z

This blog has been reinstated at Wordpress. Please go here, and adjust bookmarks accordingly. I shall look into changes to feeds etc. when I have a minute. I have a lot of boxes to unpack and I haven't even found the kettle yet.

Thanks to all who, via Twitter, pointed me at Wordpress and recommended it highly. I would have stayed at Blogger if they'd made it easier for me to do so.

Riley culture

2010-03-23T16:21:00.003Z

Didn't your day just get better? It's Riley the smiling dog from San Jose, as picture in various places including the Telegraph. I'm not one for putting hats on pets. Or glasses. And I'm not sure if he's happy because he's got a birthday cake or because he's just thrown one up on the plate, but he does look happy.

Dozier, dozier and dozier

2010-03-22T23:56:00.007Z

According to a story put out by Press Association at the weekend, Craig David didn't know that Motown was a record label, saying he believed his latest album was based on the Motown "genre". Craig's record Signed, Sealed, Delivered (out March 29) contains 12 tracks, but only seven or eight are in fact Motown. He said: "[I] didn't actually know that Motown was a label ... I thought it was an era or genre, like New Jack Swing or something - I didn't know that if you weren't on Motown records, it wasn't Motown."

The innocent chap went on, "I wanted to make an album of me re-recording famous songs. There was no strong concept, but it ended up falling into a Motown thing, which really stemmed from Michael Jackson dying last year."

Craig David is 28 years old and has been recording music since 1999. Seriously, how do you get that far without finding out that Motown is a record label? This is not an obscure fact for trainspotters! It's to do with his line of work. I'd say that takes some doing. You have to hand it to him: that's real commitment to ignorance and not finding things out.

Here's what you could have won, EMI

2010-03-19T14:16:00.003Z

Very interesting piece in today's Guardian about OK Go, whose latest video, for new single This Too Shall Pass, has been watched over 8m times on YouTube, but has not sold them very many records. This, I guess, is an obvious downside to viral marketing and internet buzz and the world in which we live where The Kids don't expect to have to pay for anything. Anyway, it really does need seeing, if you are among the tiny handful who have not yet seen it. The key fact I learned from the piece was that EMI did not want YouTube viewers to be able to "embed" the video, as I have done, and thus share it around. So OK Go parted company with EMI. As the writer says, "It's clear EMI has no idea how to promote bands in the internet age, but also scary that bands like OK Go might be ill-equipped to survive in places that aren't the internet."

Pink ladies

2010-03-19T11:57:00.002Z

I have been a feminist for many years. I grew up, as all teenage boys do, as a qualified sexist, albeit one in thrall to the female gender. But as the 80s progressed, so did I, and I came out the other end a reasonably clear-thinking cheerleader for sexual equality. (In my weaker moments, I confess to being a self-hating man, but mainly when men seem to be at the root of so many of the world's problems, which they just are.) Anyway, I was introduced to feminist writing in the 80s - Marilyn French, Germaine Greer, the novel Praxis by Fay Weldon had quite an effect on me, as I remember - and have ever since dipped in and out of contemporary feminist theory: Susan Faludi, Susan Sontag, Naomi Wolf, Laura Mulvey and Natasha Walter. (I met Andrea Dworkin once, in a BBC radio green room back in the early 90s, and I was in awe of her in her big dungarees.)

Anyway, I've just finished Natasha Walter's new book Living Dolls: The Return Of Sexism, which makes a bonfire of her optimistic The New Feminism, published in 1998, during the first wave of Blairite hope - soon to be dashed. In Living Dolls, Walter, incidentally the mother of a young daughter, takes stock of where the new feminism is at. ("I am ready to admit," she writes in her introduction, "that I was entirely wrong." How's that for honesty?)

Casting an eye around the girls' section of Hamley's toy shop, she concludes, "Everything was pink, from the sugar-almond pink of Barbie, to the strawberry tint of Disney's Sleeping Beauty ... a pink nail bar ... a pink boutique stand ... pink 'manicure bedrooms' and pink 'salon spaces' ..." She also gasps with due horror at Nuts and Zoo, attending a last-days-of-Rome "Babes On The Bed" competition at Mayhem nightclub in Southend, sponsored by Nuts ("This Cara Brett," shouts the DJ, "She's on the cover of Nuts this week! So buy her, take her home and have a wank!") - from her account, the whole wretched circus is just as demeaning to the boys/men depicted as to the girls/women queuing up to stick their arses in the air in regulation "red hotpants and crop-top with Nuts logo". Nobody comes out of it too well. Walter takes a look at the booming sex industry and questions the "empowerment" myth of lap- and pole-dancing.

Then she moves in part two onto biological determinism, which is a much drier subject, but key, as Walter fears that "bad science" is leading us down a road where the inequality between men and women (in this country "childless women earn about 9% less than men, women with children earn about 22% less, even if they work full-time") is seemingly backed up by genetic orthodoxy based on often spurious studies at which bits of the brain are bigger in men and women. (She returns again and again with narrowed eyes to professor of developmental psychopathology Simon Baron-Cohen's book The Essential Difference, in which he confidently delineates between the "male brain" and the "female brain", and rewards owners of the latter with the following list of "suitable" careers: "counsellors, primary school teachers, nurses, carers, therapists, mediators or personnel staff", while men get to be "scientists, engineers, technicians, musicians, architects, taxonomists, bankers etc." - that's that sorted, then.) If we're not careful, she warns, the "domestic goddess" myth of cupcake-baking Nigella clones, coupled with "pink 'manicure bedroom'" conditioning, the glamourisation of prostitution in the media, and the Spearmint Rhino "bit of fun" defence might set the clock back on feminism a good 30 years, or more. (At best, she calls it "a stalled revolution.")

It's a complex picture she paints, but a recognisable one. I found the book thoroughly readable, and terrifying in places. I was lucky to come of age in the 1980s, when men were at least encouraged to examine their actions and their feelings towards women - the "New Man" might have been a myth, but you need ideals if you are to adjust your baser instincts. When I was a boy, porn was softer, and almost impossible to get your hands on, so I kept my innocence longer. Today, unreal images of sex bombard schoolchildren via mobiles, social networks and the internet, raising ludicrous expectations, sexualising kids way too early, and making life particularly tough for young girls, in my view. I don't know how modern parents deal with it all. Perhaps some of them don't.

If there is a flaw to Walter's book, it's the author's slightly woolly moments, where she is so afraid to be seen to criticise women who work in the sex industry, or dance for money, or spend too much time at work, or too much time at home, or bake cakes, she backs everything up with a caveat: "That's not to say that everyone who has chosen to go into glamour modelling is being exploited ... " that sort of thing. This is hardly the strident, fuck-you feminism of Germaine Greer in her pomp, but maybe it's a sign of the complicated times we now live in.

It reinforces my view that I am, at heart, a feminist. On part one of BBC4's Women documentary series last week, I think it was the imperious Marilyn French who defined a feminist as anyone who doesn't assume men to be superior to women. Reading about that Nuts night at Mayhem in Southend, I had a horrible feeling that we're all going to hell, male or female. ("One girl, who was a bit too fleshy around the middle and not fleshy enough around the chest, came in for boos rather than cheers. She looked tearful as she went back into the line.")

Oh, and yes I was a bit embarrassed to get the book out on the train because of that cover. I wanted to say, it's a book about sexism, it's not actually sexist!

A week in drama

2010-03-10T00:02:00.002Z

I watch all TV drama as a viewer and as a writer. I can't help it. Having written scripts for TV - soap and sitcom, thus far - I can't help but view what I consider to be superior homegrown drama with one eye on the skill of the writer and the mechanics of the writing. In the case of Five Days, which ran every night from Monday to Friday last week (and whose final episode didn't come out on my Sky+ due to the series link refreshing each day and a clash being missed, so I had to finish the run on iPlayer on this tiny screen - grrrrrrrrrr), the writer I found myself admiring was Gwyneth Hughes. She also wrote the previous Five Days in 2007, about a missing mum, which was packed with top-flight British TV acting talent and was based around police procedural. As I remember it, the final outcome didn't quite merit the five nights I'd invested in it, but it was clearly a quality piece of work.

This second helping - different setting, different characters, different cast, same reliance on policework - had a much more satisfying outcome. No need to go into plot, but it began with an apparent suicide off a railway bridge and an abandoned baby in a hospital toilet, developed into a full police search and drew much of its tension and intrigue from relations between the Muslim and non-Muslim communties in what must have been a Yorkshire town, as it was somewhere near Scarborough, which was named. Not being a Coronation Street viewer, I hadn't really come across Suranne Jones before, but she was very strong in the central role of a police officer, keeping her end up in an incident room largely staffed by blokes, and having to deal with the inevitability of Alzheimer's with her mum, Anne Reid (who seems to get all the old lady parts now). David Morrissey, who doesn't do substandard drama, gave depth and heart to a detective with family problems of his own, and the likes of Hugo Speer, Bernard Hill, Ashley Walters, Shaun Dooley, Shivani Ghai and Steve Evets added further ballast. I must admit, I enjoyed the direction, too, from Toby Haynes and Peter Hoar: stylish and artistic but never to the detriment of the story being told. No idea what he's done before, but the music, by Craig Pruess, was also outstanding. Although to be honest, I was concentrating hardest on the script, which had to deal with a wide range of characters, and did so with skill and good humour. Most threads were satisfactorily tied up, and I didn't second guess the action.

This is what British TV drama can do, and I for one am relieved to know that it can still do it, backed by a broadcaster bold enough to strip it across five days. I'd pay my licence fee for stuff like this.

Meanwhile, over on ITV1, I've been irritated and underwhelmed by new comedy drama Married Single Other, whose decent cast (including the ubiquitous Dooley) are battling against clunky exposition and a patina of arch wit that seems to make every character sound like every other character ie. arch and witty. That said, I haven't written a piece of drama that's actually been on telly since EastEnders and that's eight years ago now, so maybe I'm not in a position to nitpick.

Soft languge from the start

2010-03-05T08:28:00.004Z

Ah, the BBC, how carefully you tread. On Wednesday's Masterchef, we met Tim, 36, a very nice-seeming man and a very good cook, as it happened. He is, by trade, a Paediatrician. However, he was captioned as "Children's Doctor". This struck me as coy at the time, but the more I think about it and discuss it with other people, the more it becomes apparent that he was given this storybook epithet in order to avoid putting a word with "paed" onscreen. Children's Doctor is factually correct - he is a doctor who specialises in treating chidren - but this makes him a paediatrician, in the same way an animal doctor is a vet, and a foot doctor is a chiropodist, and a vagina doctor is a gynaecologist. Can it really be true that the News Of The World has won? That any word which might be misconstrued as "paedophile" is now too sensitive to put before this stupid nation? If the BBC had captioned Tim a "paediatrician", WHICH IS WHAT HE IS, would an angry stream of emails been sent at the very sight of the letters "p", "a", "e" and "d"?

Dear the BBC

I am writing to complain about the fact that a convicted child molester is currently making a raspberry jus on my screen. What kind of sick programme is this? I do not pay my licence fee so that murdering, pervert scum can learn how to cook a scallop on a bed of pea puree balanced on a slice of black pudding ... oh hang on, the next letters in the word are "i", "a", "t", "r" and "i" ... what does that spell?

I hope I'm wrong. Maybe Tim asked to be billed thus. Maybe it's not the BBC but the society we live in that's to blame. Neither is a good outcome.

Oh, and come on, Tim!

Happy birthday, Bobby Womack

2010-03-04T07:57:00.002Z

Today is Bobby Womack's birthday. I know this because it is also my birthday. I had a Radio 1 diary when I was about 14. This is how I first learned that I shared a birthday with Bobby Womack. I didn't really care about Bobby Womack at that stage. I care more now. I met and interviewed Bobby Womack when I was hosting the Teatime show on 6 Music in 2003, a network that should be saved, by the way. He was over to promote Lookin' For A Love: The Best Of Bobby Womack 1968-1976. It felt good to meet him at last, especially as I grew up to recognise that Across 110th Street is one of the greatest soul records of all time. (I asked him, by way of keeping the conversation going in the studio while the record was playing, what it was about. He smiled and told me to listen to the lyrics, which was the correct response. It's good when soul legends tell you what to do.) I was 38 when I met Bobby Womack. He was 59. Today, we both seven years older than that. Neither of us is likely to be sitting on a horse, smoking a pipe. But if one of us is more likely to be, it will be Bobby Womack.

Key marginal

2010-03-03T08:21:00.004Z

I don't go to many plays. I have seen plays, I'm not a total philistine, but I mainly like it when there's a big famous American film actor in them, and for the most part, I prefer musicals in the West End because you get more singing and dancing for your inflated ticket price. However, due to it having comedy connections and not being in a typical, velvety, warm-Becks-serving West End theatre, I went to see Party by Tom Basden last night at the Arts Theatre in London's Covent Garden (where I once saw Richard Herring do Christ On A Bike). I really enjoyed it, but I am going to try and explain why like a theatre critic would, even though I hardly ever go to the theatre to watch people sitting around a talking and not dancing or singing.

Party was the toast of Edinburgh, and I met and interviewed and was charmed by Tom and co-star Tim Key on 6 Music the week before last, so these elements led me to it. It also starred Jonny Sweet, Katy Wix (whom I sat next to at the Comedy Awards the year Not Going Out was nominated, and with whom I feel a kinship as I co-wrote the episode in Series 2 which introduced her character Daisy) and Anna Crilly. Katy and Anna have stormed Karaoke Circus on more than one occasion too. See why I was so drawn to it!

They play five young people in a shed/summerhouse forming a political party. There is one set, and the five of them are pretty much onstage, in the same crap chairs, for the duration, but the narrative is artfully constructed to create peaks and troughs out of their naive bickering without anyone being shot, having a nervous breakdown or being outed as a paedophile. There's a bit in it where they are all arguing and Tim Key's character, Duncan, sits in silence and just reacts, facially and bodily, and it's a moment of pure, beautiful theatre. It's full of funny lines - a credit to Mr Basden - and the satire is done by stealth, but it's often the performances, the nuances and the reactions, that make it special. (I am going to mention director Phillip Breen here, as directors never get mentioned, and he has blocked it and staged it brilliantly, and must be at least partly responsible for some of those skilled reactions from the actors.)

Party runs until March 13, and details are here. You can stay to see Tim Key's Slutcracker some nights, too, for a discounted ticket price, which I didn't, but should have.

Gurn, baby, gurn

2010-03-01T22:40:00.002Z

It's hard to dislike a Jean Pierre Jenunet film: he's so inventive and visual and economical (this is a director who can really tell a story), but you have to wade through so much self-indulgence and what can only be described as Cirque du Soleil-style gurning! Mimacs, his first for a long time - the last being a positively restrained A Very Long Engagement - is being heavily trailed and marketed. I'm sick to death of seeing its trailer at Curzon cinemas, although they do trail the narrow band of movies that the Curzon is showing, so the range is limited - that said, it is a very annoying trailer. In it, you quickly surmise that a man gets shot in the head by accident, finds his way into the bosom of a family of misfits who live underground and then takes revenge upon the armaments firm that made the bullet which remains lodged in his head. The only key piece of information missing from this hyperventilating trailer is that ... mmmm, the film is FOREIGN! An increasingly dishonest practice from the distributors of foreign-language films that make it to a wider release: mask any trace of a foreign tongue from the trailer. As I wrote in last week's Radio Times, this is like taking jokes out of a trailer for a comedy. Poor old Jeunet, it's always happening to his films, because he's - sacre bleu! - popular; Amelie and A Very Long Engagement were similarly mis-sold as films of non-specific origin, and the only word in the trailer for Micmacs is ... "Boo!"

Anyway, it's about as French as a film can be. Dany Boon, who plays the lead, actually seems to mutter away in a bizarre French dialect, which isn't even subtitled. Maybe it's a language he has invented. Anyway, I almost wished Micmacs was a silent movie. It's visually splendid, with loads of incredible imagery and tableaux and shorthand, but the script is really horrible. There are puns in it, even though it's French - one about Rimbaud and Rambo (yawn!), and, worse, one about "gaze" and "gays" - although I'm reluctant to criticise the finer points of a screenplay (co-written by Jeunet) that wasn't written in English! Perhaps it's more subtle and nuanced in the native French.

For all the gurning and screaming and bendiness, there is a very serious and very contemporary message within Micmacs about arms dealing and modern warfare and terrorism, but for the most part all this ballast is lost under that trademark Jeunet style: everything's composed and hyper-real, like a Coen Brothers movie without the restraint or nods to the real world. It wasn't as irritating as the trailer - in fact, it's far slower and more considered than I expected. But it's tiring to watch a movie where everybody is eccentric and nutty. I certainly preferred Amelie. And A Very Long Engagement. And Delicatessen. And City Of Lost Children. And ... oh, everything he's ever done except the rubbish Alien one. It's much better than that. I was hoping the allusions to Bogart and Bacall at the beginning would bear fruit (the credits sequence is beautifully realised in the style of a Hollywood film noir), but they are lost in the overall kinetic madness. Pity.

Soo-keh!

2010-03-01T15:32:00.002Z

True Blood, Season Two, then. Hey, I didn't want to crow in an unbecoming manner about the fact that I saw the first few episodes before they were aired on the mighty FX, so I kept quiet. Now the first one's gone out, I will crow. But NO SPOILERS BEYOND EPISODE ONE, don't worry. (If you haven't seen that one yet, look away nooooooow.)

This series has a lot riding on it - and I mean riding, tee hee! The first season was such a jolt in the ribs - sort of a bit like a few things, but utterly unlike them, and even from the charmed pen of Alan Ball it was a new kid in town. Sure, it chimes with the current zeitgeist-mania for vampires, but it's so not aimed at children, like all the other ones are. (And I speak as a grown-up who was fooled into going to see Twilight at the cinema. I should have stayed at home and watched Skins or In The Night Garden.) S2 begins literally seconds after the end of S1, with the identification of the corpse in the back of Andy's car, and we're off! As before the town is the skellington of the show, with Merlotte's its beating heart, the intersection where all human, and non-human, life passes. The two big shifts for S2 are Jason's conversion to happy-clappy right-wing Christianity, and Tara's willing submission into Maryanne's surreal, dead-eyed netherworld of sex and creepiness, a kind of masque of the red death. (Sam's flashbacks give hints of something way darker than turning into a doggy or sucking a bit of neck.) There's some shocking Saw-type action in a grotty cellar where Lafayette is having the joys of life sucked out of him, courtesy of Eric (who continues to be mah favourite character): how appalling to see abject fear in the eyes of Lafayette, a character where previously we only saw lust, wisdom and mischief. Sookie and Bill and vamp-gooseberry Jessica keeps the soap element going, especially when they get ... mercy me, if I go any further I will accidentally give away the other sights I have seen from the other side of Episode 5. All I will say is, these are sights to behold.

Popcorn double feature

2010-02-28T23:14:00.003Z

Two new films this weekend, both at lovely Curzons, one a triumph, the other a bore. Capitalism: A Love Story is the latest Michael Moore. I know Moore divides as well as conquers. I happen to be on his side, and have written before about the disgraceful body fascism employed by some of his critics (the venerable Philip French was moved to describe him in this way in his downbeat review of Capitalism in today's Observer: "Meanwhile he struts around, pot-bellied and badly shaven, in ill-fitting jeans and scuffed baseball cap ..." - what is this, a fashion parade for thin people?), but I do understand why he's not to all tastes. His scattergun approach to editing and presentation may not stand up under the microscope of close scrutiny, but his heart is in the right place, it's good that somebody is making films like this, and he reaches a wide audience. He is a polemicist, just one who happens to be entertaining with it. Some don't like him because he's left wing and successful/rich, which is apparently the highest form of hypocrisy. This doesn't bother me: he's making films that expose America's gun laws, foreign policy, healthcare system ... they may preach to the choir to an extent, but he remains a thorn in the side of corporate America and could easily have shut up and retired by now. He hasn't. He's still needling.

Those who find the sight of Michael Moore distasteful and would prefer it if he looked like Robert Pattinson or George Clooney, there's less of him in his more recent films, and less again in Capitalism. And there are fewer stunts. A bit of megaphone action and the now traditional dealings with security guards at revolving doors, but when you see Moore in this one, he's either interviewing someone or revisiting Flint, Michigan, and gazing thoughtfully at some rubble where an industry and a town used to be with his dad. In relating the recent bank bailout to Roger & Me, Moore provides a neat circularity (the simple message: every film he's made has been about capitalism); also, he depicts his childhood as happy and abundant, and no doubt does so through rose-tinted thesis-making spectacles, but at no point does he big himself up as a poor, working class hero; though his dad was an auto worker, they lived well, as many working families did in 1950s America. It's not the first time Moore has presented utopian images to help prove his gloomy point (remember the kite-flying Iraqi children in Fahrenheit 9/11?), but since these images are personal, it does what all great documentaries do, it focuses the bigger picture on individuals. It's not the first time he's shown evictions either, but these "foreclosures" have become more and more common, and it's the hard reality of being turfed out of your house that better illustrates the subprime crisis; we can sling mud at bankers all day, but that makes the issue more abstract. See a family set fire to the furniture they can't fit in the back of their truck as they load up and head off for ... where? ... is image enough.

I was moved by much of Capitalism. Unfortunately, the happy ending - Obama's election - although a hint of the people rising up, doesn't work, as Obama hasn't yet done very much. This is a shame, as the two upbeat stories Moore uses to shows us that all is not lost - both depicting people power (ie. unionisation, Moore's favourite drum to beat) - are far more effective. Frankly, I think you can guess by now whether you're going to enjoy this film. If you think you will, you probably will. If you think you won't, stay away.

By the way, you can, I'm delighted to say, still read the transcript of my interview with Moore at the NFT in 2002, when Bowling For Columbine was released. It was a real treat to do, and to go for a Chinese meal with him the night before.

Ah well. The Last Station had all the makings of a decent historical drama: fine cast, a nice bit of literary heft and an unploughed narrative furrow ie. the battle for Tolstoy's will between his idealistic disciples and his aggrieved and fruity wife, Unfortunately, it's dull. I actually found myself resting my head on my hand; never a good sign, and the cinema was packed with enthusiastic old people. James McAvoy, Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer gave real spark to the opening scenes, but the story itself turned the story into a to-ing and fro-ing game of blame tennis, and as Tolstoy's death approached, I found myself willing it on. Pity. This was a clever way of doing a literary biopic: avoiding showing its subject actually writing anything and focusing instead on his legacy, but the bedroom antics between Plummer and Mirren were excruciating, and you were left with a series of arguments in ornate rooms. By the way, it was set in Russia in 1910. Nobody smoked as much as half a roll up through the entire film. My question: is this historically accurate? My guess would be that pipes would be belching out smoke pretty much 24 hours a day. Was Tolstoy anti-smoking? Or was this some kind of health and safety version of pre-revolutionary Russia? I'd love to know.

For all London-based lovers of the Curzon: check out the Curzon Soho's Midnight Movies slate. Edgar Wright hosted one of Death Wish 3 the other week, and they have a disco-based Candy Darling one coming up on Friday March 19 for the Warholian among you, and a Barbarella cocktail evening on April 30. (Apologies to those not in London, but there are some benefits to living here, to counter the mess, the engineering work and extortionate house prices.)

Dead air?

2010-02-26T08:41:00.005Z

Is 6 Music really on death row? Nobody actually knows for sure, and speculation and paranoid rumour have been rife for some time. But it's looking worse this morning than it did when I left the building at 10am on Wednesday. Well, the news broke last night, when the Times announced that 6 Music was to close and those that were still up went a bit nuts. The full story, by Patrick Foster, is here, but the thrust is this: the BBC will close two radio stations in an overhaul of services to be announced next month. The piece uses the word "will," not "might" or "may" or even "is expected to". Its unequivocal tone is what makes it so scary.

We all know that DG Mark Thompson is being forced to make cuts to appease readers of the Daily Mail and the Tory government-in-waiting, who think that the £3.6 billion annual licence fee is being wasted on some programmes and stations that they don't watch or listen to. The bashing of the BBC has long been a national sport among the media conglomerates who control the Rest Of The Media, corporations with fingers in multiple pies that chuck money at redesigns and failed ventures every day but are only accountable to their shareholders. Because of what used to be called "the unique way in which the BBC is funded", the private sector want the BBC to be cheaper and better and have the means to lobby for this outcome; the own all the newspapers. Any medium reliant on advertising income is suffering in the recession. They're bound to be pissed off that one of their major competitors doesn't have to rustle up ads. (Except the likes of Radio Times, for whom I also work, which is run out of the profit-making wing, BBC Worldwide, as a wholly commercial venture - more blurring of the public/private lines that started under the previous Tory government, who demanded the Corporation pay for itself. It's since come under fire to making too much money. A lose-lose situation. Close some things down, quickly!)

The Times piece says, "In a wide-ranging strategic review, [Thompson] will announce the closure of the digital radio stations 6 Music and Asian Network and introduce a cap on spending on broadcast rights for sports events of 8.5 per cent of the licence fee, or about £300 million. He will also pledge to close BBC Switch and Blast!, leaving the lucrative teenage market to ITV and Channel 4. But BBC3, which is aimed at 16 to 35-year-olds will not be touched."

The question is - and it really doesn't matter in the broader scheme of things - how come Patrick Foster has read this report, which is due to be made public next month? There are jobs at stake here. This is not about me - I just freelance for 6 Music, and have been thoroughly enjoying doing so since just before Christmas - most of the people who work at the network, day in, day out, doing a death-defying job with less resources and less warm bodies than any other comparable 24-hour music network while attracting some of the biggest names in music and receiving full support of the record industry, are on staff, or contracts. I worry for these people first, and for the loyal listeners second, with my own interests a long way down the list. I am like one of those media conglomerates - I have fingers in many pies; that's how the self-employed survive. To axe 6 Music and Asian Network - that's two entire radio stations, think about that for a minute, it would literally strip away two options on your DAB - seems sensational to me. I understand that cuts must be made, and that you can make an argument for or against any of the digital services ("Why don't they just shut BBC3?" say wags - but BBC3 is a fantastic training ground for new talent, whether you watch it or not - I don't listen to Radio 3, but I want it to exist), but my guess is that it's a lot less complicated to do the maths by chopping out entire organs than to put the body on a better diet.

The report has been drawn up by the BBC's director of policy and strategy, John Tate, who apparently co-wrote the 2005 Conservative manifesto with David Cameron. I present that simply as a fact. It seems - if the Times has actually read the report - that BBC2 gets a budget hike as long as everybody stops spending money on posh imports, like Mad Men. Frankly, as long as somebody shows Mad Men, I can live with this. (Most of my US imports are watched on FiveUSA and Hallmark anyway.) I'd rather not watch it with adverts, but I can always wait for the box set, or speed through them - oops, look at me contributing to the commercial sector's woes with the fast forward button Sky put on my remote control for me. It's so confusing!

I thought 6 Music's death had been greatly exaggerated, having emerged from the BBC Trust report with a clear brief: to ramp up the specialist music content. Brilliant. We can do that. (I speak as someone who co-hosts a Saturday morning show where the onus is very much on the other stuff.) It seems my optimism was misplaced.

Of course, we should all sit back and take a pinch of salt; the Times pieces is necessarily written and published from a stance of wishful thinking, and may not turn out to be gospel. Rupert Murdoch is easy to paint as the villain, as he's foreign and he broke the unions and gave us Page 3, but he also gives me House and Caitlin Moran, and as a media ogre he's no more against the BBC than whoever runs the Guardian Media Group, a media conglomerate to whom I happily give £1 every day, and more than that at weekends (I paid a pound!), and for whom, very occasionally, I work. I do the odd piece for the Times. I subscribe to Sky. It's complicated. But I love the BBC to the very marrow of my bones and always have done. Anything that chips away at its authority, its creativity, its inclusivity, its ability to inspire, its mission to serve and its dominance in the specialist fields of excellence and stimulation is, to my mind, bad. If they'd announced that they were closing 1Xtra and CBeebies I'd be just as pissed off, and they literally do not cross my radar. It's not just about my friends losing their jobs, it's about a prevailing storm.

Batten down the hatches, lovers of diversity and cleverness. As I always say, those who seek to give the BBC a good thrashing for being a Communist and having some croissants at its meetings and paying really good presenters some money for doing their job will be the first to write to the letters pages of the Times and the Mail and the Telegraph when the Today programme is sponsored by Immodium Plus.

Breakfast time

2010-02-23T07:53:00.002Z

Two days in for Shaun Keaveny at breakfast on 6 Music, 7-10am, which meant a 5am alarm, a 5.30am Prius, a 6am cup of instant coffee at the office, a 6.30am meeting with the team, and a 6.50am handover with Chris Hawkins [round of reciprocal applause]. It's an absolute killer on day one, when your clock's all out and your head's on upside down, but I must admit, going to bed at 8pm last night made day two so much easier to cope with. I truly take my hat off to Shaun and all the other breakfast DJs, who make a routine and a lifestyle of it. I only had to do it for two days and it damn near wasted me.

Of course, the early shift would have been a lot less painful had I not been committed to two full days of brainstorming a new sitcom straight after, both days, 10.30am-5pm, followed by my Radio Times stint at the end of this afternoon, on top, which took me up to 7pm. I was flagging a bit by the end of today. Hey, I don't need your sympathy - it's all work, and if I don't work, I don't eat, and I'd rather be eating than not eating. But once again, working at the heart of 6 Music, my view is galvanised: this is an inspirational little radio station, with cool and enthusiastic people - like the two breakfast teams - working at it, and I wonder if it might be in its prime right now? Certainly the access and the interaction and the sheer swagger of the operation, combined with a more varied spread of music, a higher class of listener, and the freedom to be as spontaneous and amateurish as me on a near-daily basis and power a show on pure adrenalin and fun, makes it a unique operation. Long may it continue.

Collins & Legge

2010-02-22T15:21:00.003Z

Not really. But Michael Legge and I are teaming up for a couple of Edinburgh work-in-progress shows at the Hen & Chickens in London's N1, on April 18 and 19 (starting 9.30), and May 31 (starting 7.30). As they are works in progress, the shows themselves could get better, or worse, so take your pick whether to go the earlier or later ones. Tickets go on sale TONIGHT at MIDNIGHT. We'd love to see you.

Pretty pictures

2010-02-22T09:17:00.004Z

Going to see lots of films at the moment, but too busy working to actually write about them. But hey, it's Oscars run-up, so let me take this opportunity to catch up with three that have awards-season form. A Single Man is one of my favourite films of 2010 so far, a singular piece of work, based on a 1964 novel, set in 1962 just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Christopher Isherwood, which, despite being a key piece of gay lib lit, nobody I know seems to have read. (Perhaps you had to be there.) It's an intrinsically gay film, in that it's about a gay man who loses his gay lover and risks a gay affair, and even his one meaningful friendship with a woman is affected by his gayness. And yet, it's not a gay film at all, it's a film about grief, loss, love and lust that just happens to be about same-sex grief, loss, love and lust. I'm not spoiling anything to say that it begins with the news of the loss - a scene in which, after all these years of mucking about and narrowing his eyes, Colin Firth gets to act. With his face. This is not stage acting, this is screen acting; it's all in the tiny nuances. These minutes are worth an Oscar - or a Bafta - on their own. The detail that makes the scene is that the family of Firth's lover, who he's been with for something like 14 years, don't want him at the funeral. This stings, and reminds us that the world was very different in 1962, even if you were on a trendy Los Angeles college campus. Tom Ford is a fashion designer. I know this, even though I care nothing about fashion and have only heard of fashion designers. (I have heard of Alexander McQueen, and accept that he was clearly good at his job, but I don't connect with him in the way that I might an actor or a writer.) I sort of don't care what Tom Ford was, or is - can he direct? Well, he has directed Colin Firth to his first acting awards, and teases honest and full-blooded performances from Nicholas Hoult and Julianne Moore, so he's doing something right. And A Single Man is an exquisite looking film, as you might expect. It is neat and tidy and tailored, but that's because the main character is neat and tidy and tailored, a neatness and tidiness and tailoredness that masks the fact that he's in bits. Some have accused the film of being cold and distant; I felt the opposite. It's Mad Men-on-sea.
Hey, I thought Eddie Murphy had finished wearing fat suits and caricaturing black people! Ha ha. That is my little joke. Precious has been around for a while now, and if you've seen the trailer, you've seen the film, and if the trailer puts you off seeing it, you're probably best off not seeing it - this is not for the socially squeamish. Based on another novel that nobody I know has read, it's an unshowy film that moves at the sluggish, incidental pace of real life, with occasional bursts of action which, sadly for Precious herself, are usually bursts of rage or cruelty or pain. Again, some have accused the film of indulging in social and racial tourism, in that unless you live below the poverty line in an ethnic ghetto where a foot hovers constantly over your chances you are necessarily going to be viewing another world. But isn't fiction all about taking us to other worlds? (The film is set in Harlem in 1987, although you'd hardly notice that it's a period piece beyond the lack of cellphones.) This is a soul movie. It works like all the best soul music: it's simple, it's emotionally charged and it comes from here. Gabourey Sidibe and Mo'nique deserve all the praise that's being heaped upon them - especially Mo'nique, as she has to play the monster without turning this into a horror movie - but all the girls in Precious's special education class are excellent, too. If it was all misery, it wouldn't work, but it's not. In the trailer, Paula Patton's angelic teacher says, tearfully, "Your baby loves ... I love you," to a sobbing Precious, and it's the Soul Moment - but you need to understand the context.

Well, I've never read The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, but I know people who have, mainly women, and they seem to greatly admire its tale of a 14-year-old girl raped and murdered in a small Pennsylvania town in 1973 who watches over her grieving family from a waystation between here and heaven. I am unmarried to the original text, so approached the film, directed by Peter Jackson, without prejudice. I thought it looked intriguing and would be a nice change from all his CGI stuff. Oh dear. He seems to have opted to fillet a rather bleak story and remodel it into a kids' fairy tale. It's a 12A, which is fine, so is A Single Man, and that's for grown-ups. Saoirse Ronan, aged 14 when she filmed it, is a luminous presence, and does a pretty good American accent too, but she is neither here nor there in a film where two films are poured into the same jug and just swirl around but do not mix. One film is a kitchen sink drama about a girl being murdered by the local weirdo (Stanley Tucci with a comb-over, identified as the killer from the beginning, thus making any tension about his capture flimsy and uninvolving); the other is a gloopy, Yellow Submarine-style fantasy about the gap between heaven and earth, which, instead of some kind of terrifying limbo as it initially appears, quickly flowers into a kind of paradise with trees and grass and beaches and sunshine, where huge symbols crash into view - ooh, look, the model ships-in-bottles that the girl's dad used to make as his hobby are now giant ships-in-giant bottles and they're in the sea and they're smashing against the rocks, subtly symbolising that all is not well in her father's world and the fact that, oh, he's smashing the bottles in real life. It's like Terry Gilliams sneaked into the editing suite and inserted bits of one of his films into an episode of Waking The Dead. It's surely significant of the film's cowardice that there is no mention, not even a hint, that the girl has been raped in the film. The nature of her murder is also skirted around, but that's not a problem, as she is dead. It's as if the awkward sexual assault aspect would spoil Jackson's film about the afterlife. Having her murdered is OK, but not raped as that's a bit icky. So we have a film about a serious subject - death - that's rendered ludicrous by wishful fantasy. Please tell me the book had a bit more heft and depth.

Now, back to work. Although I am on BBC News at 6.30 tonight, talking about the Baftas, so banging on about films and work collide.

Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice

2010-02-17T22:45:00.002Z

I'm on nights all week, sitting in for Gideon Coe, 9-midnight on 6 Music, and it's cosmic. We have the lights down low, nice hot cups of green tea, maybe a biscuit or a cheeky Double Decker, either me and Mark, or me and Justin, there's barely another soul in the building, you're entitled to a Prius home at the end, and it's just fabulous old concert recordings and session tracks and nuggets thrown in like a track from Ostrich Churchyard here and a Young Marble Giants track there, and I get to hear more recent stuff that actually merits an ear like Felix or Tune-Yards or the Dum Dum Girls, or something ridiculously obscure like the Liggers from a Manchester Musicians Collective compilation. If the BBC Trust want less celebs and more music, which apparently they do, then they should listen to Gid's show; it's the station remit in an approachable hat. It's been a pleasure playing with it, gentlemen. Oh, and look, Steve Lamacq popped in for a chat before his Radio 2 show tonight to tell us about Gyratory System, a nightmarish experimental jazz trio he saw by mistake. And then we played a Happy Mondays session, Public Enemy and Elvis live in Vegas, 1970. NEVER SHUT THIS NETWORK DOWN, YOU IDIOTS!

Scrumdog millionaire

2010-02-07T22:23:00.002Z

Saw the new Clint Eastwood movie Invictus on Friday. He directed and produced it, which is usually cause for celebration these days. It stars Matt Damon as actual South African rugby captain Francoise Pienaar and Morgan Freeman as actual South African president Nelson Mandela. Because I can't stand rugby - to me, it's a team sport seemingly entirely free of grace and mainly packed with big fellas running into one another - I had no idea South Africa won the rugby World Cup in 1995, but they did, and it was clearly a big deal on two levels: one, they were a bit shit, and two, they were mostly white, a fact that became conspicuous when Apartheid ended and Mandela launched his vision of a rainbow nation. Thanks to Invictus, I now know this. I also know that Pienaar is a man without a personality but with a wife, a mum and a dad, and that Mandela was a bit lonely and a workaholic and liked to have a bracing walk at 4am every day without fail. There's not a tremendous amount more to learn.

I thought Invictus was underwhelming and dramatically thin. It is handicapped by being a sports movie. Sport movies don't usually work - certainly not team sports anyway. Boxing has a cinematic quality, so does running, albeit only in slow motion. Football simply cannot be captured in drama, and nor, it seems, can rugby. (I love This Sporting Life, but then again, there's not that much rugby in it.) Beyond the sport, it's sort of about Nelson Mandela getting on with taking the reins of power, which involves making black and white security men work together, and attending some meetings, and making some speeches in his iconically slow, measured English. Freeman, who looks nothing like him, makes a decent stab of doing the voice. Damon, who looks nothing like Pienaar, does the same. It's not so much acting, as impressionism.

Anthony Peckham, the screenwriter, seems so enamoured and dazzled by the iconic celebrity of his two main characters, he doesn't bother to fill in any of the other ones, and yet, one of the characters speaks very slowly and the other one says nothing of any consequence on or off the field. In order to be swept up by the film's broad-brushstroke drama you have to be very easily pleased by the fact that post-Apartheid South Africa was nicer than Apartheid South Africa, which in a fundamental sense it was, but don't expect any subtlety or surprise. The initially awkward white rugby players sit young black kids from a township on their shoulders in a sequence that feels authentically like a bank advert. The white security guards learn to like the black security guards, united not by anything dramatic - as, sadly, nothing dramatic happened to Mandela in 1995, despite the fear of incident at his public appearances and a hokey low-flying aircraft that we know posed no threat - but by, well, getting on with their largely boring work in small offices. I think you are expected to admire and forgive Pienaar's white family when they take their black maid to the Cup Final, but this presupposes you see it as redemptive rather than patronising, which is how it comes across.

Clint Eastwood is a monumentally competent director and that's not faint praise. He is not showy or pretentious or tricksy, he does not grandstand, and he famously shoots as little film as he can, but you cannot argue with his best work. I thought Letters From Iwo Jima was brilliant, for instance, as was Unforgiven, obviously: two seriously good genre movies. Invictus proves that he is not scared of big stadium scenes. But he fails to make the rugby matches exciting, resorting to slow motion, naturally, when in a corner, and the obligatory scenes of people watching the telly. Too late he decides to show us the scrum from underneath and turns up the volume on the animalistic grunting, but this seems tokenistic, and what's he trying to say? That it's a brute, primal sport? Where has this observation been hiding? This Sporting Life begins under a scrum; its first thought is of the violence and the machismo of rugby. Invictus wants us to buy rugby not as a contact sport, but as a metaphor for community. See how the little black boy is eyed suspiciously by white security guards outside the stadium but ends up celebrating with them when the Springboks win the Cup - this is no more profound than when the grey ash descends across Los Angeles at the climax of Volcano, and, hey, black and white people are turned one colour.

This film's heart is in the right place, but it's deadly dull, its 12A certificate earned only because of strong but infrequent language. And, next to District 9, a science-fiction film made in South Africa by South Africans and starring South Africans, it has nothing to say about South Africa beyond facts, figures and cliche. And its two key South African roles are taken by North Americans. Meanwhile, both of these North Americans have been ludicrously Oscar nominated for their work. I admire them both, but this is not their best work, and nominations seem to be forthcoming because a) it's Clint Eastwood, and b) it's Nelson Mandela.

Everybody else seems to like it, however, so I must be missing something.

If al-Qaeda had dropped a bomb on the green room of the Bloomsbury Theatre ...

2010-02-02T16:06:00.005Z

... on the Friday night of December's Godless run, all of these talented comedians, musicians and curators would have been killed or injured, while I was hanging around with them. This fantastic, historic group shot, taken by Des Willie (left to right: Jim Bob, Jo Neary, Stewart Lee, Robin Ince, Richard Herring, Peter Buckley Hill, Waen Shepherd and me) is part of an official New Humanist set which can now be accessed on Flickr. This picture represents the culmination of all those years I've spent hanging around and ingratiating myself with talented comedians and musicians. Look how they let me be in their photographs and appear at their gigs! I am a monument to persistence.

I believe in America

2010-01-26T08:34:00.004Z

OK, it's time to round up the television that's currently not just occupying my evenings and weekends, but owning me. And when I say television, I mean drama, and when I say drama I mean American drama, as American drama is all that matters. (For balance, and to prove that I am not being racist, I watched a double-episode of Silent Witness last night, and it was excellent in every way, written by Andrew Holden and directed by Sue Tully, so let's bear that in mind.)

Sons Of Anarchy has just started on FiveUSA. (I sometimes wonder where I'd be without FiveUSA, FX, Sky1, More4, E4 and Hallmark. Oh, occasionally the BBC will buy something in, but they usually mistreat it, and us.) I had this recommended to me way in advance - it's two seasons in, on FX, over there, with a third already booked - and I must say it's filled the horrible vaccuum left by Breaking Bad: yet another British actor, this time Queer As Folk's Charlie Hunnam, essaying what sounds to my ears like an impeccable American accent as the heir apparent of a rough, tough Hell's Angels chapter operating out of the Californian town of Charming. The pilot episode pushed all the right buttons, setting up the Sopranos-like business, run by ailing old bear Ron Perlman. It's a soap opera that allows a peek in on another world, in this case, hairy bikers fighting internecine battles with other gangs, running guns, keeping meth off their patch (oh yes!) and being secretly sweet to their wives and in one case, being an Elvis impersonator. Created by Kurt Sutter, who did The Shield, it's hard as nails and yet its underbelly is soft. ("Soft", in fact, is what the gang think Hunnam's character, Jackson, is - and "soft" is what got his legendary dad killed.) So, just one episode in, and I'm in.

House continues to be my current favourite. Although we're up to date with Season Six on Sky1, FiveUSA have shown Season One and are now almost through Season Two, which is handy, as Season Three is on Hallmark (we're saving it up until Two is finished, for fear of losing the plot.) In many ways, I'm blessed to have discovered it so late, and to have so much back catalogue to enjoy. Yes, yes, every episode is the same, but only in the sense that House and his mutating team have to solve a medical mystery and along the way make it worse, then make it better, then make it even worse, then make it better, running up what must be an extortionate bill with all those tests and treatments that don't work, and yes they always discount lupus, but that's part of the fun. The hook is not the mystery, it's the relationships - between House and Wilson, House and Cuddy, House and Cameron, Chase and Cameron, Wilson and whoever his girlfriend/wife is, and so on. In the ep we watched last night, House vs. God, it was House and God. Brilliant stuff. Dazzling. One episode is never enough in one sitting. Always the mark of a truly magnificent drama (see: The Wire, The Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica, West Wing, Breaking Bad). I can't believe I watched the first episode when it first aired, years ago, and didn't like it. I didn't buy Hugh Laurie's accent. How ironic is that? Mind you, I didn't like Curb on first viewing either, so I can't be trusted. And let's face it, Laurie has improved so much with time. In the current run, he's skyscraping.

Is Nurse Jackie a drama or a comedy? It's half an hour long, which in network TV terms means it is a comedy, and yet there's no laughter. I say it's best viewed as a drama, just like Up In The Air, was was mis-sold as a comedy, I think. Jackie seems to be the first big commission for creators Liz Brixius, Linda Wallem and Evan Dunsky, which makes its ease and sass and grit even more astonishing. Edie Falco is, of course, strong in the title role, and the action revolves around her double life and nursey skills, but once again, and this is a recurring aspect of great US drama, the supporting characters obviously receive an equal amount of attention in the writing and the casting and the directing. (I saw some of a quite lame-looking, and very squealy, romantic comedy called Bride Wars yesterday and it was clear that once they'd case Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway, with a bit of Sex & The City cameo heft from Candice Bergen, they'd almost deliberately cast forgettable actors in the other parts, as if to highlight the talent of the two leads. You don't get that feeling from great TV drama.) I won't list the actors who bring so much to Jackie, but Merritt Weaver, who plays a flappy student, can steal a scene just by walking into a room and walking out again. Oh, and Eve Best, a British stage actress, actually plays a British doctor. That's a novelty. What a shame BBC2 felt so excited about their new acquisition they ran it every night for the first week, and are now running it every Monday night. Isn't that a form of sadistic cruelty?

And Glee, airing on E4 - even though it's created by Ryan Murphy, who gave the world the gloriously preposterous Nip/Tuck (currently showing on FX), I had my doubts that this would tickle me. I was wrong to have those doubts. It's arch and clever and camp and deeper than I expected, and manages to be sneery about the high school caste system while at the same time finding actual joy in the corridors. It's not the pisstake I mistakenly took it to be. And there's nothing ironic about the musical numbers - which are actually deftly staged - unless modern high school kids singing old songs that the grown-ups who write it remember from their childhoods is ironic. I sort of don't give a fuck that it's spawning hits in America - that's something for the Fox accountants to rub their hands together about. Thanks to Jane Lynch, who is fast becoming the most reliable actress in anything, I fell for this pretty quickly, and if it really did hate High School Musical, it probably wouldn't work. But it doesn't. And it does.

For the record, I'm also watching Season Two of Prison Break on box set and still enjoying that. It's not as if it's any more ridiculous than Season One. Looking forward to the return of Hung. Gave the new season of Heroes a go, on pretty much the sole proviso that T-Bag from Prison Break is now in it, but there simply aren't the hours in the day to get back into it, so that's been shelved after one episode. I fear I may have to give the final season of Lost a crack, too, even though, as I've stated, there aren't the hours in the day. Taped The Good Wife last night. High hopes for that. Uh-oh!

Oh, and I like Law & Order UK, unfashionably. And that's, like, British. Yuck!

Oh, and if you think I'm not supernaturally excited about True Blood, returning soon to the mighty FX, you'd be wrong. I have been sent the first two episodes of Season Two, but I don't want to watch them yet, for fear of being all frustrated at having to wait for the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. I may have to stop working and go bankrupt in order to fit all this in. Oh, and don't moan at me for prioritising US drama over British drama, especially when I work in British TV and have written British drama and would love to write some more: I know we get the cream of their telly, and it's not all The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, but enough of it is to make us feel ashamed of ourselves.

And I forgot to mention Mad Men in all the excitment, which has a lot to beat with Season Three this week on BBC4, as Season Two was sublime. *sighs*

New blog

2010-01-22T00:40:00.003Z

Today we officially launch the Collings & Herrin blog. Please bookmark it and sign up to the feed, as it will from now on become the indulgent home of all C&H news, and I can post up as many pics as I like without testing the patience of people who visit this blog but get fed up of all the C&H plugs and news. I may occasionally post things on both, but by and large, if you follow us, go here.

Radio Zelig

2010-01-19T12:51:00.004Z

It's been a fun run of 6 Music shows. I am back in the Nemone slot, 1-4pm, on Monday, after my three day Cardiff jaunt, and that will be my last week before she returns from maternity leave. (I have notched up something like 20 shows. It's been like having a job.)

Anyway, These are my holiday snaps so far. In the first, I am trying to look grumpy and misanthropic for Luke Haines, who wasn't grumpy or misanthropic at all, of course, even though his publisher had failed to get his book into the shops for Christmas. In the second, I am unable to be as grumpy-looking as Henry Rollins, so I have plumped for beaming happily (also, Fleet Foxes are playing, and Henry doesn't like the sound of them at all). And finally, Damo Suzuki from Can is putting an arm around me and making me super proud. Interestingly, both Rollins and Suzuki objected to me playing a vintage track of theirs while they were on - for Rollins, Rise Above from Black Flag's classic 1981 debut Damaged; for Suzuki, the unlikely hit Spoon from Can's 1971 album Ege Bamyasi - Rollins went into a rant about dismissing all the work he's ever done since 1981 by playing it and I let him get it out of his system before pressing the button; Suzuki was more languid but said that he only looks forward as the eyes are at the front of the head. He wasn't going to fight me over it. Neither had a new record to promote or play, incidentally; both were plugging gigs.

Most days we don't have famous guests in - it's just as much fun talking to Martin White or the Pajama Men or Dave Hill the comedian or Rhodri Marsden or Alex Heminsley. But it's cool to get some snaps for the family album.

Dead as a Dido

2010-01-16T00:41:00.003Z

So, Richard is back from Mauritius, jet-lagged, with a small put poignant avian gift for me (pictured) and the rich tan of a vain Giorgio Armani footballer. Having been apart for two weeks, during which Richard developed an unhealthy hatred for a nine-year-old girl in his hotel and saw four films on a plane, and I worked really hard, in our 98th podcast we have plenty to catch up on, including: the snow, Peter Kay's autobiography, Richard's autobiography and the Ronnie Corbett Scandal. We also find time to discuss what Beyonce will do for money, whether Wales counts as a proper country or not, the rubbish threats of Daffy from N-Dubz, the solecisms of poorly educated people and Lenny Henry's big hands.

Les nerks

2010-01-13T00:26:00.006Z

"Film of the year", says one newspaper's quote at the top of the praise-plastered posters for Un Prophete, or A Prophet. It's released next Friday, January 22. Can it be the film of the year yet? I suspect the critic was hailing the film as such after seeing it at a festival last year. Certainly, Sight & Sound's collected critics named Un Prophete as their film of 2009. For those of us who don't attend festivals, however, it's going to have to be film of 2010, and it has a long way to go. Mind you, I've seen it now, and it is astonishingly good. Film of the month, for sure.

It's the French prison movie. Directed by Jacques Audiard, who made The Beat That My Heart Skipped, it is not strictly a prison movie, rather a tale of manhood (or "self-education" to use Audiard's words), forced upon a young offender who spends six years in jail. It is also a film about ethnic tribalism, in this case, to reduce it down: Arabs versus Corsicans, the main groups in this French clink, with the Muslim contingent growing all the time. Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) hopes to keep himself to himself and his nose clean, but is sucked into the prison's subculture of racial violence in a truly shocking first-act incident that will cause even the most immunised to wince and instinctively cover their eyes when it happens. Needless to say, we see an immediate change in Malik and over the six years that unfold over the film's two and a half hours, it's not just facial hair that marks out the passage of time and the maturing of a young man. Audiard is fascinated by the rituals and routines of prison life, and the way that men are when left with other men; he's also adept at running a workable thriller element into a more meditative, even impressionistic whole - when Malik eventually earns 12-hour passes for good behaviour, you'll be amazed at what he gets up to!

All hail Niels Aristrup, who was in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, and plays the banged-up Corsican Godfather Cesar Luciani with the perfect blend of Genial Harry Grout and Frank Booth (although he looks disconcertingly like Anthony Worrall Thompson). The actual cons who take on roles as extras in the film - and the seemingly authentic setting - root the occasional esoteric touches and fantasy elements in cold, hard reality. There are rare moments of beauty in this prison, as there were in Steve McQueen's Maze in Hunger (both, interestingly, have snowflakes coming down outside a barred window). If you can handle the occasional bursts of unyielding violence and the inevitable atmosphere of threat and menace, Un Prophete is a film that's really worth seeing. You will learn certain techniques of defence and offence that you didn't know you'd ever need. Keep that [removed due to accidental spoiler].

Abdication crisis: latest

2010-01-07T23:58:00.004Z

The people have spoken: I should not take over from Jonathan Ross on Film 2010. Fair enough. (I understand the BBC will be basing their decision on the results of this mail-order DVD rental shop poll.)

Icon go for that

2010-01-06T10:50:00.001Z

Even though Rich is on holiday in Mauritius and I am hard at work on the radio, we present a special 97th Podcast Review Of The Decade. Using only the Guardian's Icons Of The Decade supplement as a guide, we look back over the last ten years and try to make sense of it all, by not making sense at all, which seems appropriate. There's talk of 9/11 conspiracy theories, David Beckham's vanity or lack thereof, and a bit about Tony Blairs. It's a bit like Newsnight, really. We hope to be back, in person, before the end of next week, when Richard gets back all tanned and tropical and full of insects.

New Old Faces 2010

2010-01-03T21:55:00.010Z

The following copy was commissioned by and submitted to the Times over Christmas, for a piece gathering together nominations for New Old Faces for 2010. I never saw the piece, but I know my contributions weren't in it, due to ... hey, people being on holiday and seasonal confusion. So I reprint them here, as I was rather pleased with them. Actually, I don't reprint them, I print them.*

JIM BOB
Born James Morrison in 1960 - which makes 2010 a self-evidently landmark year for him - the singer-songwriter I know and love as Jim Bob has never achieved the giddy iconic heights of his reckless Doors namesake, but neither has he overdosed in a Paris bathtub.

To ageing disciples of the early-90s indie boom and its accidental South London heroes Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine, purveyors of pun-filled social comment, exposed knees, punk rock electric guitar and the machine-gun rattle of a furious drum machine, Jim Bob and co-conspirator Fruitbat own a small piece of history. (Witness their now annual reunion gigs if you don’t believe me.) As an NME journalist I bonded with Carter in Brixton, Prague, New York and Philadelphia.

Since their amicable split in 1997, Jim has carved a quiet but prolific and sure-footed solo career out of the same urban angst and lyrical dexterity. He had a good 2009, releasing his fifth solo album Goffam and ending the year framed by a full orchestra, wearing a white suit, essaying 2004 anthem Angelstrike! onstage at London’s Hammersmith Odeon as part of comedian Robin Ince’s Lessons and Carols for Godless People variety bill. Thoughtful eccentrics Robyn Hitchcock and John Otway were on the same bill, and you could almost join the dots.

A have-guitar-will-travel cult troubadour and an accomplished author - following his 2004 account of the Carter years, Goodnight Jim Bob, his debut novel Storage Stories is published in May - Jim ought to be as beloved as a Costello or a Dury or a Davies, with slices of life as tuneful, arch, dramatic and unapologetic as Teenage Body Count, Cartoon Dad and The Golden Years Of Lonely Old Dears. I mean, who else is writing songs about the plight of forgotten pensioners?

LUKE HAINES
If ever a songwriter came with a reading list attached, it's 42-year-old professional misanthrope and self-anointed "Albert Speer of Britpop" Luke Haines. To appreciate his ever-expanding 18-year oeuvre - increased by two in 2009 with the impressive 21st Century Man and its evil twin Achtung Mutha - it's best to come armed with a working knowledge of 1970s British politics, Van Der Graaf Generator, serial killers, German cinema, the Mitfords, BritArt, Russian Futurism and the train from Woking to Waterloo. He's like Lloyd Cole's antisocial cousin.

Latterly dressed in white with a panama hat and the face fuzz of a member of ELO, he looks more like a novelist or the Man from Del Monte gone to seed; certainly nothing like an indie musician whose first brush with fame came during the pomp of Blur and Oasis. His age is key: born, one assumes grudgingly, in the year of the summer of love and raised amid power cuts in the 70s, the music he makes, whether operating at the megalomaniacal centre of The Auteurs or Black Box Recorder, under typically mordant alias Baader Meinhof, or as himself, is informed by the glam rock he grew up on, but conceals greater depth.

His voice is actually rather beautiful - plaintively sneery? - and his musical armoury considerable. Lucky he's so self-sufficient, as he never seemed happy in a beat combo. In his bilious Britpop gospel, Bad Vibes - one of my favourite books of 2009 - he refuses even to name one particular bandmember, such is his post-rationalised contempt. He plays to the gallery.

In a year of underwhelming albums, 21st Century Man was one of its few complete pleasures, and Haines deserves wider recognition. He's actually quite sweet when you meet him, although he wouldn't thank me for saying so.

PS: Would have been nice to read these two gentlemen hymned in the Times, but hey.
PPS: Jim Bob pic by Mitch Holloway, borrowed from Jim's website. (Hope that's OK.)
PPS: STOP PRESS! Even though I wasn't in the newspaper, they've kindly added the Jim Bob piece to the online version here.

Four

2010-01-03T21:55:00.006Z

... which is what Nine should really be called, as it's the film of the Broadway stage musical version of the theatre adaptation of Fellini's movie Eight and a Half, which was so called because it was, according to Fellini, his eighth-and-a-half film (it's complicated, but as well as a handful of features he'd made a couple of shorts and done a collaboration and he added the "halves" up), and this is the fourth feature film directed by Rob Marshall, after a TV movie of Annie, the Oscar-hoovering Chicago and Memoirs Of A Geisha. Phew. I must admit, I enjoyed Marshall's Chicago, I'm a fan of the great Hollywood musicals of the 40s and 50s, and if I go to the theatre it's usually to see a musical, as I find them tremendously good value. So it felt quite natural to go and see Nine at the cinema. It's already gathered quite a hand of Golden Globe nominations, and I daresay Oscar will come calling, but it's really handicapped by that title. It's rubbish. It says nothing. It's just a number. It even looks dull written down as a word. I wonder if the title will have actually prevented people from seeing it? After all, the poster image gives nothing away but the main cast, and the tagline, "Be Italian", is not helpful. Do we have to "be Italian" to enjoy it? Is it about people "being Italian"? Well, it is about Italians, so I suppose they have no choice.

If you like musicals, I say give it a whirl. You won't know any of the songs. I've seen it, and I can't whistle any of them. But it's well staged, the cast are pretty good, and if you like Italian cinema of the 50s and 60s, there is plenty to enjoy, as Daniel Day-Lewis takes on the Fellini/Mastroianni role, a middle-aged director unable to make a film due to a midlife crisis of confidence and, frankly, a complicated love life imploding around him in Rome, and the musical numbers sort of spring up around him. If you like Rome, you'll enjoy the sightseeing, and the direct references to La Dolce Vita, Anita Ekberg, the prototype paparazzi and various other period signifiers. The girls - that is, Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard, Fergie (ha ha, not the Duchess one), Kate Hudson, Judi Dench and Sophia Loren (who doesn't have to move much) - are superb, and I speak as someone who can't usually bear to be in the same cinema as Nicole Kidman. Luckily, she only has a marginal part; she swans in, and after one number, swans out again. The bulk of the responsibility falls at the capable feet of Cotillard - how nice to see her with something to do after the false start of her first Hollywood movie, the useless Public Enemies. If anyone steals the film from this formidable chorus, it's Judi Dench, actually, although you have to admire the way Day-Lewis inhabits a part, carrying himself in such a convincing way, even in silhouette.

So, after the disappointment of Sherlock Holmes, it was good to see something that held my attention and did not insult me. It's not a classic, but it's full of artistic merit. And I saw it in a small cinema, the HMV Curzon, where people seem happy to pay their money, turn their phones off and watch the film. Radical.

Sherlock. Home

2010-01-03T11:02:00.003Z

I don't walk out of films much. In fact, hardly ever. I can count them on one hand. I gave up with Showgirls. I walked out of Duplicity. I voted with my feet when the lady's breasts got shot in Crank 2*. And now, I have done the same with Sherlock Holmes. This was at the Empire in Leicester Square, a really excellent screen (albeit a cinema whose foyer seems designed after a cattle market), and surely the perfect setting for the post-Christmas blockbuster romp. It was full, which means, by the law of averages, there were people talking and texting either side of us, but frankly, I didn't blame them. What a terrible film. Unengaging, overly fond of itself, miscast, and actually rather dull - and this is a Sherlock Holmes film! We lasted about 45 minutes, at which point the escape was coordinated and executed. (Sorry for treading on the toes of the young man to our left who had actually taken a call on his mobile during the film, without even leaving his seat!)

I won't pick it to pieces. I take no pleasure in that - nor do I take pleasure in paying for a film and not seeing it through to the end. Indeed, I remain a huge admirer of Guy Ritchie's early work - ie. Lock, Stock and Snatch - but as time marches on, it seems he had his creative moment and that creative moment has now passed. I seriously wondered why Warner Bros let him spend all this money on a supposedly iconoclastic "reimagining" of the famous detective (cor, he's a bare knuckle fighter!) - but hey, they were right to take that punt, as it's taken almost $150m in the States, where only Avatar kept it off the number one box office slot in Christmas week. But I just didn't buy into it. Robert Downey Jr, whose comeback fills me with cheer (and who hugged me at the Baftas last year), seems to have opted to keep him mouth shut as he talks, in order to preserve his English accent; as a result, you really can't quite hear what he's saying. Jude Law is just Jude Law with a moustache - I guess you either love him or you don't - and Rachel McAdams doesn't convince at all. I don't need the question "Why is the female lead an American?" answering, as I realise her character Irene Adler did actually appear in one Holmes story (A Scandal In Bohemia: I've seen the excellent Jeremy Brett adaptation), but this isn't that story. So why is she?

I feel locked out of the love-in, here, as many have enjoyed the film and word-of-mouth has kept it afloat at the box office. But I went along in good faith, hoping to enjoy it, so the fact that I didn't seems to be largely rooted in what I thought of the film. Ah well, at least I got an hour and a quarter of my life back.

*I forgot about Crank 2 and added this in after the first draft of this blog entry, hence the comments below reminding me. Well reminded!

Bromine Barium

2010-01-02T00:24:00.003Z

On the first day of 2010, I watched the final episode of the second season of Breaking Bad, which I now declare to be the finest new TV series of 2009. (It began on AMC in the States and here on FX in 2008, but I picked up on it in 2009.) It was so good and so satisfying, this final episode, I was moved to immediately begin to watch season one again from the start. It is the mark of a truly great TV show that you can watch it again, without a cooling-off period. Breaking Bad, created by Vince Gilligan, is one such show.

I wasn't sufficiently drawn in by the trailers to catch it when it premiered on FX at the end of last year; maybe the timing was wrong, or maybe it just seemed too fond of itself in those trailers. When it was snapped up and re-aired by FiveUSA, I actually missed the opening episode, by mistake, and was forced to come in at episode two, by which time Walt White (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) had already embarked upon their get-rich-quick scheme in the New Mexico desert. In fact, Ep2 of S1 begins with its own flashback, further tantalising us about what actually occured in Ep1. To be honest, the trailers, and a couple of rave reviews, filled in the basic narrative gap: that chemistry teacher Walt has been diagnosed with lung cancer and opts to pay for the treatment and look after his family by cooking up crystal meth with an ex-pupil dealer.

It's a dark piece of work, cleverly set in Albuquerque where they have bright sunshine 300 days a year, thus always hammering home its bleak message under blue skies. It's not the first time the suburbs have revealed dark secrets, but this is no American Beauty. The White family are not well off. They can't afford health insurance. Their boiler doesn't work. Their pool is not an indicator of wealth or comfort. Indeed, the pool itself will come to contain its own grim portents as S2 unfolds, and an emptied pool at another location will bring death. The trailers presented a sort of self-consciously wacky comedy, but Breaking Bad is anything but - there is humour in the writing, certainly, but it comes from the juxtaposition of dialogue, the clash between a 50-year-old man and an ill-educated, jive-talking twentysomething hip hop kid: in Ep1 Jesse tells Walt in the desert that he can see "a cow house"; when Walt tries to dictate to him what to do, he comes out with, "Heil Hitler, bitch!"; and when Walt educates him in how to fashion a makeshift car battery and, like his teacher again, tries to get him to name the element copper, Jesse triumphantly calls out, "Wire!" If Aaron Paul's characterisation of Jesse seems one-note and comedic from my summary, you ain't seen nothing yet, beeyach.

Walt is a clever, learned, philosophical man who missed his chance to make money and cannot connect with his students, despite being a very good, and very illuminating, teacher. He loves his wife, and his wife loves him, and there's a baby on the way, but the sense of having missed the boat is etched into Walt's brow. He does not "deserve" inoperable lung cancer on his 50th birthday ("Why me?"), and yet, absurdly, it is the making of him. It changes his life. Certain death releases the inner Walt, which is generally bad news for everyone else.

The only real lightness comes from Walt's son, Walt Jr, who has mild cerebral palsy and yet provides the story with its heart: brilliantly played by RJ Mitte, who also has palsy, he is anything but defined by his condition, and usually cuts through the breakfast table tension between his parents with the honest, unsugared view of a teenage boy who's finding his own personality (he starts demanding to be called "Flynn", without much explanation, because his friends do, thus hacking at the family ties of his unimaginative and narcissistic given name). Here is a character who's living with a debilitating physical condition, hopping around on crutches, unable to use the pedals of a car effectively, but he deals with it stoically and bravely, and does not demand praise or special privileges for doing so. I've no idea why Gilligan gave the son palsy, but it was a genius move. (If a kid appeared on crutches in a British drama, you'd immediately think, "box-ticking." But then, as Breaking Bad confirms, we may as well stop making TV drama in this country and just let the Americans do it.)

Skyler (Anna Gunn, previously seen in The Practice and Deadwood) is the long-suffering wife, but no need to reach for the cliche-scanner - she's long-suffering in the sense that she effectively has two male children to cope with, and seems to have subjugated her instinct to write to the needs of being a homemaker (we occasionally hear of her short stories, but they remain mostly buried). Like Walt, she has sacrificed something at the altar of family, and look what her reward is: a lying husband. Because Sky is visibly pregnant from the start of Ep1, the bulky belly and the bad back define her to us - she is carrying the future around inside her. Meanwhile, inside her husband, the breadmaker, is an inoperable tumour, something far less hopeful. I won't ruin it for anyone, but in S2, Skyler sheds her innocence and loses the trust that kept her going - although even as far back as Ep2 in S1, she played detective and confronted Jesse in his own front yard, so she was never a victim.

The character who surprised me the most over the course of the two seasons was Hank (Dean Norris), Walt's brother-in-law and seeming polar oppostite, the hardass, ball-busting, pistol-packing, bulletproof DEA supervisor, buoyed by the innate bigotry and smart mouth that get him through his day job, but much more complex once you get to know him. Again, I won't go into any story detail, but even Hank is not a God; he, too, can be reduced to a mere mortal by events. The skill of Breaking Bad is to drip-feed details about the supporting characters gradually over the course of the two series, with even Marie (Betsy Brandt), Sky's sister and Hank's wife, fleshed out beyond early tics. (What's fascinating to me is how different the second viewing is - I watched Ep2 and Ep3 from S1 again last night, and Marie is a great example of a character who feels more real now; the scene in the shoe shop seemed almost random on first viewing; now it is loaded with portent. Can you imagine the guts it takes to make a drama so rich and so subtle that stuff is almost designed to bypass the first-time viewer? TV drama writing is all about immediate impact, usually. Not here.)

A word about the direction. You watch a great film, you can credit the writer and the director. With an ongoing TV series, you must credit a team of writers, and a string of different directors. And yet, Breaking Bad, like all the very best TV dramas, has an overarching visual feel. I guess the real skill of the TV director is to bring personal touch and individual vision without unbalancing the whole. In many ways, the landscape and the New Mexico climate give Breaking Bad its "look." Of the individual directors across the two seasons, I think I have counted 16 - including, incidentally, Bryan Cranston, John Dahl, Charles Haid and Peter Medak, who once worked here and directed The Krays and Let Him Have It - but their skill is to create something cumulative. There are some amazing early stylistic touches, such as the way the first episode begins with a pair of trousers noiselessly floating to the ground (that was Gilligan), or the way Ep3 (Gilligan again) opens looking up through the acid-dismembered goo of a copse in a bathtub as Walt and Jesse mop it up. And the recurring flashforward in S2 with the pink teddy bear in the pool is not just a stylistic flourish, but a narrative one, too - not that I'll be giving any clues about that. (Hey, apparently there are clues in the episode titles of S2, but unless you want to ruin the ending, don't look for them. I was happier not knowing.)

I never watched Malcolm In The Middle, so I'm only aware theoretically that Bryan Cranston is making a bonfire of his most famous screen characterisation here. I envy those who know and love him as Hal, the Dad in that popular show; it must make Walt and Breaking Bad seem all the more revolutionary. All I know is, Cranston deserved his Emmy for this - it's a tightly-wound, small-brushstrokes performance that defies the precepts of so much returning-series TV in the sense that Walt changes throughout. The lead character's job is usually to provide a constant, a pivot around which the action revolves. Sure, a character can get married, have a baby, move house, change job, but his or her personality must remain steady. Not here. Which is why Breaking Bad is more like a film.

Season Three airs in the States in March. Let's hope Five have bought it. Breaking Bad has been a revelation: simple concept, brilliant execution, subtle depths. Life, death, birth, sun, sky: it is, to risk a pun based on Walt's beloved Periodic Table, elemental. And, as I say, it merits an immediate second viewing, upon which it reveals further genius. If you haven't seen it yet - and S1 is on DVD - you're going to have to get over the fact that the main protagonist coughs, violently and painfully, all the time; that death stalks the show constantly; that by the end of Ep3, two bodies will have been clumsily and graphically disposed of; and that even if you think you're immunised to insanely violent drug dealers thanks to their ubiquity since Quentin Tarantino changed the face of crime movies, there's an even more insanely violent one, called Tuco, you have yet to meet, and he will scare the living daylights out of you.

I did. And I'm glad. Vince Gilligan is two years younger than me.

End

2009-12-31T15:03:00.004Z

Spent an enjoyable day at work (sorry, nurses and emergency service people, but it's all I'm qualified to do), helping to fill three hours of 6 Music's New Year's Eve schedule playing loads of tunes from 2009, including my three favourites from the year, none of which get airings that often on the radio - Cellz by Doom, Rave On by M Ward and Rumpus by Karen O and the Kids from the Where The Wild Things Are soundtrack. I was going to risk bringing the station crashing to its knees and losing its licence by playing the pop song The Promise by pop group Girls Aloud, which has been one of my favourite songs of the year but turned out to have been released at the very end of 2008 and thus did not qualify (glad I checked, although I suspect nobody would have noticed). Anyway, it was nice to contribute to the gaiety of nations, and then go home in time for a long evening of catching up with the cream of US TV: Breaking Bad, Prison Break and House.

Frankly, if you'd told me at the beginning of 2009 that I'd be ending it on 6 Music, even in a maternity-leave cover capacity, I'd have been surprised. I thought I was off the subs' bench, and it seems I am very much not. That's been one of the happier surprises of the year, professionally. All the other stuff, well ... my first priority of 2010, professionally, is to complete the second draft of my sitcom pilot script, which is in development with BWark, the eminently aproachable production company who make The Inbetweeners (which I belatedly discovered this year, thanks to Richard's recommendation, and his DVDs) and The Persuasionists, the BBC2 sitcom starring Adam Buxton I've script edited this year which is due on TV in January, I think. My first script editing gig, and a positive experience, although I did galvanise my desire to write my own and have someone else edit it. Also in the immediate New Year, I'll be writing on 7 Day Sunday, the Chris Addison discussion show for 5 Live which we've been piloting, and having those early meetings about Season Four of Not Going Out. I currently have a number of other sitcom projects at various stages of pitching and development, and I'll reveal all when any of them hit a more tangible milestone. Don't wish to jinx.I fully intend to carry on with the Collings & Herrin podcast, for as long as we both enjoy it, and with two gigs already in the diary, let's hope there are more. I'm considering taking my own show up to Edinburgh, but there are financial considerations, and we're not out of the recessionary woods yet. Still, who knows what might be around the corner?

Rave on, then.

Who's in here? Oh, it's a lovely cat

2009-12-30T09:57:00.004Z

Before I recycle my reliable Cats Protection advent calendar 2009, I thought I'd scan it for posterity. Cats Protection have had a tough year, coping with the £11.2 million they lost at the end of 2008 when the Icelandic banks went belly-up (that's about a third of their annual donations) and having to put building work on new adoption centres on ice (ha ha, not funny). I think they deserve a thought at a time of year when even more people are getting rid of unwanted kittens. Maybe give them a donation. (Enjoy, in particular, Lucky, Smithy, Dandy and Marcos.)

Don't speak!

2009-12-29T15:01:00.003Z

You don't deserve us. Or maybe we don't deserve you. One or the other. Richard is going on holiday to Mauritius to find a Dodo tomorrow and I am working right through to the end of January, yet still we manage to find time to record Podcast 96. Because I lost my voice on Sunday and am still awaiting its full return, I'm mainlining honey and lemon and cherry Strepsils; this still gives Rich the chance to dominate proceedings, as we discuss the Nigerian Pants Bomber, Hannah Waterman's amazing weight loss, Paul Hogan's amazing age gain, and the surprise fate of the Harry Potter movie franchise.

Happy new year!

2009-12-27T22:39:00.004Z

Cheer up, The Road, it might never happen. Oh yes, it did. That's the whole point. One of the most depressing books I've ever read, it was bound to be a fairly bleak film. To be fair, if it wasn't, then something would have gone horribly wrong on the road from page to screen. If you haven't read Cormac McCarthy's novel - and I'm no expert, it's the only one of his I've read - I wholeheartedly recommend it, unless you're in a fragile state: it's a relentless tale of basic human survival told as a Sisyphean ordeal in which, in some unspecified post-apocalyptic future, a father and son pick their way to the imagined sanctity of the coast, day by day, scavenging for scraps of food and doing their best to avoid other, possibly cannibalistic scavengers. It is a book - and now a film - about fatherhood, or parenthood, and the lengths we will go to to protect our offspring, even when the odds are so overwhelmingly stacked against us, they block out the sky. As I say, not a cheery story.

All credit, then, to director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall, for finding a workable film within McCarthy's deliberately dead-eyed prose, without sacrificing the nihilistic mood or the paucity of relief available to our two protagonists, played by Viggo Mortenson and 12-year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee, who dominate the Picaresque action, while other characters are reduced to cameos (Rober Duvall as an old man, Michael K Williams - aka The Wire's Omar! - as a thief, even Charlize Theron, who only appears in pre-event flashback). Hillcoat and his amazing Spanish cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe work with a palette of muddy browns and greys that couldn't even be described as slate - the skies are overcast in this ruined world and the animals are essentially all dead; there are only two kinds of film to be made out of these scraps: a sci-fi action thriller, and an existential meditation. Hillcoat just about steers his through both, although the cleverly edited trailer - surprise, surprise! - suggests the former, by cutting together pre- and post-apocalypse to suggest we might be getting something a bit like 2012. Some hope.

In fact, one day, someone will compare the two films, in detail, and read into the similarities and differences something profound about the damaged American state of mind in the early 21st century. Me? I'm too depressed to do anything. I have seen The Road. I had to go and see something light and frothy and pureed afterwards, to decompress, and cheer up - specifically Nowhere Boy. ("John, meet George, he should be in your band!" - no, really.)

I would heartily recommend The Road (it's released on January 8), but only with a mental health warning attached. Let's all have a fantastic New Year. It could be a lot, lot worse.

Actually driving home for Christmas

2009-12-22T07:22:00.004Z

Phew. Nearly became a BBC news story last night, driving home for Christmas after a trip up to see the family in Northampton. Left there at 16:18, arrived back in London, after what is usually a two-hour journey, at 20:42, having spent about two of those four and a half hours moving about two miles on a snowbound M40. It really was surreal to be out in the kind of weather that makes the news. What amazed me was how quickly it turned. The M40 is one of those major motorways in this country that doesn't have lights for long stretches, which always strikes me as phenomenally dangerous on a normal night, after dark, but when the climate changes, as it did yesterday afternoon and Chris Evans on Radio 2 starts to bang inappropriately on about how "magical" the weather is, it's actually quite terrifying.

Anyway, Chris soon changed his tune, when the traffic reports lengthened and became grave in tone. Now, I know that we're only talking a little bit of snow and temperatures as low as, ooh, minus one, and the big joke is how quickly this country grinds to a pathetic, oh-woe-is-me halt, but to be in the middle of it, with the motorway reduced from three lanes to two in a matter of about 30 minutes, it's less amusing. I read this morning that some motorists outside Basingstoke were out all night. There was certainly a point, some 30 miles outside London, where I wondered if the same might happen to us. All I had was two bottles of wine Mum and Dad had given us for Christmas. I wished at one point that they'd given us chocolates. Or perhaps Kendal Mint Cake.

I pity anybody turning off for the A404, as the tailbacks on the sliproad were, as Chris Rea sings, top to toe. Not that that makes any sense. Anyway, God bless Chris Evans for keeping us entertained, and then, when things started to speed up south of the M25 (which had actually been described earlier by the traffic lady as "a car park"), Smooth Radio's 70s hour at 7pm - hearing Harry Chapin's Cat's In The Cradle was a symbolically uplifting moment.

Weather report over.

Driving home for Christmas

2009-12-21T12:00:00.002Z

In a craven attempt to recapture the ghost of Christmas past, we reunite with the mighty Phill and Phil aka Messrs Jupitus and Wilding in their fancy Central London studio to record another festive four-way pod-off, entitled The Perfect Twelve, in which we ponder a dozen listener-supplied Christmas Questions and, in one case, nurse a post-Hairspray Christmas party hangover. The professional, mixed, balanced, equalised, topped, tailed and Andre-Vincent-jingle-festooned version is available from The Perfect Ten on iTunes - but if you prefer the longer (1hr 6m 35s), lo-fi, jingle-free, Collings & Herrin version, this is it. With extras. (Thanks to Jeanette for the tinsel-bedecked photo of us, taken in Brighton. We forgot to take a special one with P&P, due to intake of evil Vitamin Water.) God bless us every one.

There'll be one more C&H podcast, available on December 31, that's New Year's Eve, and then we're taking a break for two weeks, while Richard is on holiday. I, meanwhile, will be on 6 Music, working through the festive period like a nurse or taxi driver:

Tues-Weds, December 22-23, Steve Lamacq slot, 4-7pm
Mon-Thurs, December 28-31, Cerys/Nemone slot, 1-4pm
Mon-Fri, January 4-8, Cerys/Nemone slot, 1-4pm
Mon-Fri, January 11-15, Cerys/Nemone slot, 1-4pm

Tune in.

Wow

2009-12-21T07:59:00.003Z

Avatar. It's big. It's clever. It has fashionable things to say about indigenous populations and the exploitation thereof. It cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make and took ages. The 3D is state of the art; when the little bits of ash rain down after a fire some of them feel as if they are in the cinema with you. It lasts for two hours and 42 minutes. It has almost nobody famous in it and some of it is real, the rest is a cartoon. I watched it. I was impressed by it. But it left me cold.

The Final Fives

2009-12-20T13:28:00.002Z

OK, let's review this sucker. 2009 is drawing to a close, we've almost reached the big 25th rehomed cat in the Cats Protection advent calendar and the remainder of the year is dominated by 6 Music stints and the occasional pear cider. I shall call 2009 The Year Of Secret Dancing, Cylons and Pear Cider, and in order to make nominal sense of it, I present my Final Fives in a number of categories, plus an additional Significant Seven, where relevant, in no quantitative order, for each. (And if you don't get the Final Five and Significant Seven reference, you won't have watched number one in my Final Five: TV Programmes.)

The Final Five: Films

1 Moon (Duncan Jones)
2 Das weisse Band/The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
3 Up (Pete Docter)
4 Pranzo di Ferrogosto/Mid-August Lunch (Gianni di Gregorio)
5 Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold)

The Significant Seven:
Antichrist (Lars von Trier)
2012 (Roland Emmerich)
Bright Star (Jane Campion)
The Wrestler (Darren Aronovsky)
In The Loop (Armando Ianucci)
Star Trek (JJ Abrams)
The Hurt Locker (Katherine Bigelow)

The Final Five: TV Programmes

1 Battlestar Galactica, Seasons 1-4, DVD box set
2 House, Seasons 1, 5 and 6, Sky1; Hallmark; FiveUSA
3 Red Riding, C4
4 30 Rock, Seasons 1, 2 and 3, DVD box set; Five; Comedy Central
5 Modern Family, Season 1, Sky1

The Significant Seven:
True Blood (FX, Season 1)
Celebrity Masterchef (BBC1)
Garrow's Law (BBC1)
Prison Break (Fiver, Season 1)
The Thick Of It (BBC2)
Mad Men (BBC4, Season 2)
Arrested Development (DVD box set)

The Final Five: Songs

1 Cellz by Doom (Born Like This)
2 The Promise by Girls Aloud (Out Of Control) - BOO! Just found out this came out at the very end of 2008 but I'm leaving it in, because I got into it late, this year
3. Sticks'n'Stones by Jamie T (Kings & Queens)
4 Rave On by M Ward Ft. Zooey Deschanel (Hold Time)
5 Reflection Of The Television by The Twilight Sad (Forget The Night Ahead)

The Significant Seven:
Vlad The Impaler by Kasabian (West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum)
Heads Will Roll by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (It's Blitz)
I Felt Stupid by The Drums (Summertime!)
Teenage Body Count by Jim Bob (Goffam)
Daylight by Matt & Kim (Grand)
Just Like You by Ian Brown (My Way)
Mirror's Image by The Horrors (Primary Colours)

The Final Five: Albums*

1 Where The Wild Things Are by Karen O and the Kids
2 Born Like This by Doom
3. My Way by Ian Brown
4 Goffam by Jim Bob
5 Forget The Night Ahead by The Twilight Sad

Significant Other:
A late entry - I've been listening to Luke Haines' 21st Century Man all day, and it's a triumph!

The Final Five: Live events

1 Blur, Glastonbury Festival, June
2 Swamp/Come, Been & Gone by Michael Clark, the Barbican, London, November
3 Daniel Kitson, The Stand, Edinburgh, August
4 Hairspray, Shaftesbury Theatre, London
5 Hitler Moustache, Underbelly, Edinburgh, August

The Significant Seven:
The Specials, Glastonbury Festival, June
Karaoke Circus at the 100 Club, London, July, and the Pleasance Ace Dome, Edinburgh, August
Edwyn Collins, Assembly Hall, Edinburgh, August
Sarah Millican, Pleasance, Edinburgh, August
Robin Ince, Glastonbury Festival, June
John Otway, Glastonbury Festival, June
Alan Moore, Bloomsbury Theatre, London, December

The Final Five: Books

1 The Red Riding Quartet, 1974, David Peace (1999)
2 The Red Riding Quartet, 1977, David Peace (2000)
3 The Great Crash 1929, J.K. Galbraith (1954)
4 Bad Vibes, Luke Haines (2009)
5 The Red Riding Quartet, 1983, David Peace (2002)

The Significant Other**:
The Red Riding Quartet, 1980, David Peace (2001)

The Final Five: Heroes

1 Bonnie Greer, for dealing with Nick Griffin in a way that no other Question Time panelist could have done: calm, reasoned, intelligent, cool, patient and armed with the secret weapon of historical fact
2 The Green Party, for keeping me interested in politics and the environment when I might just as easily have given up on both
3 Alan Moore, for being a true original and uniting all who saw and met him at the Bloomsbury Theatre in December in the conclusion that sometimes you should meet your heroes and they won't let you down; also, for speaking in the Northampton accent of my grandparents and making me homesick by pronouncing "Einstein" correctly as "Oinstoin"
4 Robin Ince, for his tireless work in bringing together comedians and non-comedians, scientists and non-scientists in the name of genuinely stimulating entertainment for non-idiots
5 Seymour Hersch, Hendrik Hertzberg, Steve Coll and the "far flung correspondents" of the New Yorker, for showing me that there is more to American politics than posturing and disappointment

The Final Five: Places to be

1 HMVCurzon Wimbledon; Curzon Soho; Curzon Mayfair - these three buildings have made cinemagoing enjoyable again
2 RSPB Titchwell reserve, Norfolk
3 Richard Herring's attic, Shepherd's Bush, London
4 Duke Of York's Picturehouse, Brighton
5 Downstairs bar, Oriel, Sloane Square, London

The Final Five: Proudest moments

1 Secret Dancing in front of live audiences at the Duke Of York's, Camden Roundhouse, the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, the Phoenix Bar and the Bloomsbury Theatre - quite a "journey", as they'd say on The X Factor, while fanning their faces
2 Being given a glug of champagne by Mickey Rourke, and being hugged by Robert Downey Jr at the Baftas, February
3 Recording the audiobook of Where Did It All Go Right? in Cardiff with Chris and Gerald, February, blocked in by the snow - and seeing it onsale and being bought by nice people: an indie victory!
4 Being asked by the Times to speed-read Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, overnight, a rare moment of Fleet Street journalism
5 Episode 2, Series 3, Not Going Out, Winner, BBC1, broadcast February

The Significant Seven:
Being on More4 News
Returning to 6 Music on a "holiday cover" basis
Being a small part of Mark Watson's 24-hour gig in Edinburgh
Being interviewed by Germaine Greer for The One Show
Hosting Q&As with Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton at the Edinburgh TV festival, the creators of Lost at the Curzon Mayfair, the makers of Bunny & The Bull at the Curzon Soho, and Shane Meadows at the Curzon Wimbledon
Being in the Top 10 Comedy Podcasts in the Guardian's otherwise rubbish Comedy Special
Thanks to Robin Ince and Martin White, sharing comedy/variety bills with Stewart Lee, Josie Long, Alexei Sayle, Waen Shepherd, John Otway, Ben Miller, Chris Addison, Barry Cryer, Jim Bob, Robyn Hitchcock, Simon Amstell and many, many more

The Final Five: Exhibitions

1 Rothko, Tate Modern
2 Anish Kapoor, Royal Academy
3 Futurism, Tate Modern
4 Wild Thing, Royal Academy
5 Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism, Tate Modern

The Final Five: New Things

1 Twitter
2 Pear cider
3 20-minute workout at new gym (thanks, Dom)
4 Oyster card - damn you!
5 Working with Iain Morris and Damon Beesley at BWark - the future of my sitcom career?

* Quite the worst year for albums in living memory; nothing outside of this Final Five (and one Significant Other) really merited being in my list - I'm sure you'll have loads of personal suggestions, but I fear the album is becoming a lost art and it pains me that so many promising artists fail to fill a whole two sides and keep my attention; still, it makes this six all the more precious, I think
** Didn't read enough books this year

Not Staying Off

2009-12-17T16:04:00.004Z

It must be true as I've read it on some websites. Not Going Out, the audience sitcom that used to get as many as 3.9 million viewers at 9.30 on a Friday night on BBC1 when it should have been tipping the 4 million mark, has been reprieved. We learned in March this year that it had been cancelled by the BBC - I announced it here - and I must admit we were all very surprised, and very sorry, as we'd come through the potential minefield of a principal castmember leaving after Series 1 and, we felt, re-established it as a potential returning series in 2 and 3. It seems, then, that we are producing six new episodes for next autumn, which will air in a later slot, midweek, on BBC1, thus taking the pressure off us a bit - and raising the pressure a bit at the same time ie. we'd better make it work!

I personally can't wait to work with Lee and the rest of the gang again. This is some good news for 2010. And can I just offer a vote of thanks to all those who left messages of condolence and support, or signed petitions, or just came up to me and said how much they liked Not Going Out, whether from within the industry, or without. The people have spoken. I love the BBC.

Oh, and the spare Christmas episode from Series 3 - guest star: Bobby Ball - goes out on Wednesday, BBC1 at 10.45, to see how that later, midweek slot feels. What could have been a rather sad swansong has turned into a swan. Or something shit like that.

In the navel

2009-12-16T18:06:00.003Z

Back to the attic - in a brief but festive West London snowstorm! - for our 95th podcast, with a 25-minute section on bad breath, and most of the rest taken up with dissection of what Peter Kay's acceptance speech meant at the Comedy Awards and who is the most against sweatshops and torture out of Rage Against The Machine and X Factor's Joe McElderberry. There's a bit on Twiggy's eye bags and Tiger Woods' inappropriate violence against a man who hasn't got enough blades in his razor. Unfortunately for the latest one-star ingrate on iTunes, we don't have time to inspect the fluff from our navels and sod off the radio!

As it recurs to me

2009-12-15T12:02:00.007Z

Thanks, as ever, to Andy McH, for this exclusive footage from last night's triumphant, end-of-run As It Occurs To Me at the Leicester Square Theatre, in front of a packed house of around 400 nerds.

For context: throughout the run, Richard Herring, to whom the sketch-based events have always occurred, has turned me - or a cartoon version of me - into a recurring character, along with Richard Whiteley, the "simples" Meerkat, Susan Boyle and the man in the queue behind Richard in Waitrose. (It really is a modern-day Fist Of Fun, without the being-on-television part.) I have secretly enjoyed the inaccurate impression of me by Dan Tetsell (based note for note on Ken Worthington rather than, say, me) and my fictional need to appear on the show reached a dramatic peak in show nine.

So I paid ten pounds for a ticket to the last show, and sat in the audience, as an audience member, with my friends Michael and James, and a pear cider in my hand, ready to be entertained. But ... I had secretly been down to the theatre in the afternoon to rehearse the climax of Richard's very well written Christmas Carol remake in which he visits the grave of Tiny Andrew Collings in a ghostly vision of the future and sees the error of his grumpy ways. Having been mocked by the Ken Worthington-voiced Dan Tetsell throughout the show, I was finally called up on stage. It was a bit like Al Pacino finally meeting Robert De Niro in Heat. Because I am a professional, and not just mucking about for Haribo sweets like Richard and Dan and Emma, I had learned my lines, thus giving the final denouement a patina of authentic spontaneity. I might win an Evening Standard Theatre Award to add to all my other awards.

Of course, I thoroughly enjoyed my brief moment in the spotlight, even though, ironically, every word I said had been written for me by Richard Herring.

... And here's a pic taken by James from Bath (who came all the way to Brighton from Bath last week, and all the way to London from Bath last night):

Brilliant at drawing

2009-12-09T01:23:00.005Z

Well, we came - again - to Brighton, we saw - again - but did we conquer? Only you can decide, after listening to Collings & Herrin Live Podcast 94, recorded in front of a near-sellout crowd amid tinsel, prizes and Up-style balloons at the tremendous Duke Of York's Picturehouse, scene of our triumphant first full show in May, a triumph we foolishly hoped to replicate tonight. I'll be honest, it was an odd crowd. Many seemed on the verge of hysteria. There was, shall we say, an interactive vibe in the air. When Richard did a rendition of a special song, composed at the age of 10, very much pre-enlightenment, the audience went along with it (and indeed cheered to demonstrate their eagerness to hear it) until halfway through the second verse, which, to be honest, was no more shocking than the first verse. There is further juvenilia, including my own primitive, acoustic Profanity App, made in about 1973 and the public debut of Richard's story The Dectives. Perhaps these tested the patience of the audience and sent them over the edge. Maybe. But that's the fun of doing these live gigs. I hope the at-home version conveys some of the bizarre atmosphere.

Thanks to Jon and John at the Duke Of York's, for dressing the stage ("Who designed the stage set?" asked one man, loudly, during the ill-fated Q&A), packing them in, manning the controls and allowing us to run way past midnight, including a signing session at the end for the most devoted participants, many in appropriate t-shirts, and none of whom tried to punch or kill us. Below are some pics taken backstage during the interval, one posted up by Holly aka Project Lumino at our shop (she's the one in the Mitfords t-shirt), and a really bad one of the audience. A memorable evening, if a decidedly strange one. Thanks again, Brighton, you beguiling and up-for-it boho town.

Plus: here's one taken by MrJohnRain of my Secret Dancing demonstration from the first half, complete with five, that's five volunteers, all brilliant. I wish I could have seen it! (I can't remember all the dancers' name, so please come forward and claim your glory.)

All the rage

2009-12-07T12:57:00.005Z

I don't relish being the one to point out that the Emperor's bollocks are on show, but the FaceBook/Twitter "campaign" to artificially get Killing In The Name, a 17-year-old Rage Against The Machine single, to number one for Christmas, is at best "a bit of fun" (the defence many have made on Twitter) and at worst a deluded act of musical snobbery.

The theory goes: evil Simon Cowell has the singles chart sewn up and can claim the Christmas number one as his own no matter who wins The X Factor, which is cleverly timed to climax just before Christmas; ergo, if we (whoever "we" are) get together and all buy the Rage Against The Machine single in the key week beginning December 13, we can bring down his hegemony and put a record with the word "fuck" in it at the top spot, rather like last year, when "we" failed to get the Jeff Buckley Halleluyah to number one instead of Alexandra Burke's cover of his cover. Yay! #ratm4xmas!

I understand the NME and various other media outlets are supporting the "campaign." Why not? It's just a bit of fun. Maybe. The pair who started the campaign on FaceBook say: "None of the admins have anything to do with Sony music or Rage Against The Machine themselves. We're just 2 music fans who want to bring back the Christmas No.1 excitement to the UK
(plus we'd love to see a Christmas No.1 containing the word 'fuck.')"

1. They've dealt with this on the FaceBook page (they don't care!), but I'll restate it for those that don't know: Rage Against The Machine are - or were - signed to Epic, part of Sony Records. Simon Cowell's Syco Records is licensed through Sony BMG. Whether it's #ratm4xmas or #whoeverwinsxfactor4xmas, one of the largest music and entertainment conglomerates in the world pockets the lion's share of the cash. Actually, this is not important, as most music is released through a tiny handful of such media conglomerates, and it would be sweet if Rage got a few dollars, but it is ironic. If someone at Sony had started the #ratm4xmas campaign, they would have deserved the afternoon off. (By the way, I don't happen to think Rage Against The Machine's admirable and selfless political campaigns - they truly rage against sweat shops, torture, war criminals, Fox News, poverty, repression of Tibet etc. - are in any way diluted by the fact that they are - or were - signed to a major record company. There is something to be said from subverting from within.)

2. Some on Twitter seem to think that buying one single and not another one will topple "capitalist consumerism." Nothing needs to be added to that.

3. Others on Twitter seem to think that Simon Cowell's "empire" needs "toppling." Why not Google's empire? Or Amazon's empire? Or Microsoft's empire? Maybe they think those empires need toppling too. I suspect not. Because those empires provide things that people on the left approve of, whereas manufactured pop music - eek! - is for idiots and plebs, who are too stupid to know how bad the music they like is, and the choices they make on iTunes or in HMV are in some way inferior to the choices made by Rage Against The Machine fans. (By the way, the #ratm4xmas campaign seems to have little to do with Rage Against The Machine, and plenty to do with the fact that the song has "fuck" in it, which isn't magically going to be played on Radio 1 or the Christmas Top Of The Pops anyway.)

4. Since when did Zach de la Rocha and Tom Morello start worrying about who was number one at Christmas? In Britain? It's nice that the FaceBook "admins" want to get back the "excitement" of the Christmas number one, but wouldn't it be better if the "excitement" was based on who bought which single? There's no suggestion that Cowell is cheating his records into the charts, so surely the X Factor single has as much right to go to number one as a record being orchestrated into the chart by a FaceBook group. (About 230,000 have signed up to the group, so they must be counting on 230,000 sales - unless members are going to buy more than one, which really does make a mockery of the "excitement." A fixed chart is no longer a chart, surely?)

5. There is no harm in orchestrated block-voting, but organised direct action is far more powerful when it's to do with things like elections or civil rights or referendums, as opposed to the number of singles being sold in a week.

I do not watch The X Factor, nor am I likely to buy one of its singles, but it's not because I am boycotting either, or because I think I am better than the people who do like it. I don't like The X Factor and I know I don't like it because I have watched it in the past; my dislike is not based on reflex snobbery. I don't like it because it manipulates the contestants who apply to be on it and exploits their desperation and sometimes their mental instability for entertainment. It also devalues crying, as everybody on it cries all the time - what will these people do if, say, a family member dies? Where will the extra tears come from? How much harder can they fan their faces? I object to the editing. And I object to the fact that it obviates the need for record companies to seek out talent and nurture it. It's a smash and grab on the charts, and if the hapless, stage-managed, madeover artist survives the year, that's a bonus.

It seems to me that Simon Cowell is a very, very astute record company executive and A&R man; he also just happens to be one whose giant ego allows him to play a pantomime version of himself in a talent show that's as tightly scripted and plotted as a soap. Fine. Let him have his fun. More people bought Susan Boyle's album in its first week than bought the Arctic Monkeys' debut album in its first week - so why are the people that bought the Arctic Monkeys album in some way more discerning than those who bought the Susan Boyle album? It's a lot of people in both cases, just from different demographic sectors. I scent snobbery here, and I don't like it. The X Factor is light entertainment. When I was little, summer-season artists like Bobby Crush and Lena Zavaroni got in the charts after being on Opportunity Knocks. The only thing that's changed is the sheer scale of the thing.

If the success of The X Factor drives more musicians underground to make their own angry response and put it out without Sony, then good. But herd-buying a song from 1992 to stop a song from 2009? Fuck you, I won't buy what you tell me.

Language that may offend

2009-12-04T23:56:00.003Z

Well, my three-week George Lamb/Cerys Matthews run on 6 Music ended with a bang today - well, with a fuck. Sylvain Sylvain, legendary, dapper, surprisingly well preserved guitarist with the New York Dolls and one of only two surviving members from the classic 70s lineup, came in for an interview which went really well - we even played in a clip of Morrissey introducing a Dolls track from Desert Island Discs. However, due to my innate ability to make interviewees relax, in the second part the good-natured, throaty and utterly professional Sylvain forgot himself and said "fuck" while telling an anecdote about driving with Malcolm McLaren from Florida to New York. If you want to hear the "fuck" it's around 1:21 on the iPlayer (apparently the current policy is not to edit the swears out, but warn of "language which may offend", which they have done).

In a way, it was the perfect end to a great week in the Cerys seat - live and dangerous! I apologised immediately, which is all a BBC presenter can do on live radio. Funnily enough, a week ago, in the Lamb slot, Paul King, director of Bunny & The Bull and The Mighty Boosh, said "pissed off" and I had to apologise for that too. I am Bill Grundy.

I've had a fantastic three weeks back at the old ranch. Today was Steve Lamacq's second annual Wear Your Old Band T-Shirt To Work Day, so I even got to be in a staff photo with all the people half my age who now work there. You may or may not be able to see that I am wearing a UB40 World Tour 1986-87 t-shirt. This is not mine. I borrowed it. Because I do not own a single band t-shirt.

And here's me in Sylvain's hat.

I'll be back on 6 Music, this time filling in for Steve, on December 22 and 23, then in the Cerys slot after Christmas before it reverts back to being the Nemone slot midway through January 2010. Thanks for all the supportive comments I've received by email, text and Tweet throughout the run. It makes all the difference.

Who is Hot Dog?

2009-12-02T20:06:00.004Z

WARNING! NOT AS GOOD AS LAST WEEK'S! In our 93rd podcast, we drift back into mediocrity after last week's unexpected peak of hilarity based upon the writings of a nine-year-old boy. This week, dozy on pear cider - and in Richard's case, "a couple" beforehand, like Christmas has come early or something - we go old school and sift through pages and pages of news, important and unimportant, like the sailors who accidentally sailed into Iran, the golfer who accidentally sailed into a cocktail waitress and the lookalike of Simon Cowell who accidentally sailed onto the front cover of the tear-powered Daily Mail. [Oh, and we forgot to take our photo afterwards, which is why Richard only appears in puppet form in this one. He's probably sleeping it off somewhere on a bed of five-star reviews.]

19 men were killed

2009-11-26T16:08:00.004Z

In a special Antiques Roadshow edition of the Collings & Herrin podcast, Richard sorts through a load of his old shit from the past, including coins, posters, Youth Hosteling badges, railcards, a Post Office Savings book and - at last! something interesting! - an early book of stories, mostly about Tarzan, ghosts and specific numbers of policemen and other men being killed. There is barely time to consider the papers, but we do offer a cursory glance at the world of Jordan, the fruity Australian couple having it off in a bell tower in Sydney in the afternoon [pictured], those worms that swim up your wee into the urethra like tiny salmon leaping upstream, and the idea of sipping cava through some cured meat. We might just carry on doing this.

I love you

2009-11-26T10:19:00.003Z

Surely this needs no explanation. I've been playing clips from it all week on 6 Music and I need to get it out of my system.

I love 1913

2009-11-22T16:37:00.003Z

An amazing exhibition at the Royal Academy in London: Wild Thing. This collates the work of three sculptors working in London at the beginning of the 20th century: Englishman Eric Gill, Frenchman Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and American Jacob Epstein, whose striking, prescient bust Rock Drill had piqued our interest at Tate Modern's recent Futurism show. The original, full-length version of Rock Drill is the defining image of Wild Thing, or at least a 1970s reconstruction of the 1915 original, a nightmarish, baboon-like robot who seems to be a part of the actual quarry drill he mounts - and of course predates the design of various robots in 20th and 21st century sci-fi, including the Battlestar Galactica Centurian. This apparition dominates the third room of the exhibition - each artists gets a room - but there is much stimulus to be had from the smaller pieces. (I must admit, I usually gravitate towards 2D art exhibitions, but seeing one that was all 3D was superb.) I've long admired the work of Gill, thanks to his carvings that adorn Broadcasting House, but it was good to see Ecstasy, finished in 1910 and carved out of his favourite Portland Stone, and the entirely charming Golden Calf. Of the three, Gaudier-Brzeska was the least known to me, but what striking abstracts he produced from animal and bird forms - Birds Erect, 1914, is a fantastic extrapolation in limestone. His Red Stone Dancer, carved from Red Mansfield stone but looking almost wooden, is a key work in the middle room, only 60cm high but with boldly abstacted breasts (one circular, one oblong) and a triangle for a face. You have to admire his huge portrait of Ezra Pound, too (Pound called Gaudier-Brzeska a "wild thing"), and Bird Swallowing A Fish, whose titanic struggle is said to have presaged the mechanised stalemate of World War One, in whose trenches the artist perished, aged just 23. Epstein was no critics' darling before the war; indeed, they called Rock Drill "indescribably revolting", and his frank nudes with their dangling bits shocked polite society, most notably by the two English ladies who used umbrellas to knock the cock off the angel on The Tomb Of Oscar Wilde (a monument I am happy to say I have seen in situ in Pere Lachaise - see: below - where is it smothered in lipstick kisses - a footnote you hope Epstein would have enjoyed). The big, ahead-of-its-time Centurion overshadows the whole room, but you'd be mad to overlook the series of gorgeous, plump copulating doves, even though whoever decided to make the exhibition's postcards did. Incidentally, they were also selling a reprint of the Vorticist manifesto, BLAST, in the shop (as featured in the Futurism exhibition). I succumbed. I love going round art exhibitions, but it would seem wrong to come away without stuff. (By the way, I haven't seen the Anish Kapoor at the Royal Academy yet, but it was intriguing to hear his paint-cannon going off somewhere else in the building. It's calling me, I tell you.)

Crunch

2009-11-19T13:55:00.006Z

Hey, nerds! Forget the arcane, impenetrable, new-subscription-skewed iTunes charts. Check out these recent stats. They reveal how many people download all the BBC podcasts, accurate as of September 2009 - that is, those podcasts comprising mostly bits of existing radio shows on the BBC, advertised by the BBC, and with the backing of the mighty international BBC brand. Not indie ones like ours made up of original material every week even when Richard is in a bad mood. Still, numbers like Adam and Joe's monthly figure of 275,401 rather put into the shade the 23,000 who we have this week discovered regularly download the Collings & Herrin Podcast - which, of course, would make 92,000 a month. Still, we love every single one of those 23,000 people, and don't mind competing on the mezzanine floor of popularity with R1's Mini-Mix and R4's Excess Baggage.

More C&H stats courtesy of Orange Mark:

Around 19,500 very keen listeners download a new podcast in the first couple of days. Considering it's nominally "topical", we enjoy quite a "long tail" ... for example, Podcast 10, recorded way back in April 2008, has been downloaded 513 times this month! Podcast 74, the pre-Edinburgh one, is the most downloaded to date, with nearly 30,000 listeners. Podcast 69, the Virgillio Anderson one, is close behind with 28,000. Meanwhile, 21,000 idiots ignored the warning and listened to the post-Edinburgh one in the hotel room.

In total, our podcasts combined together have been downloaded over 2 million times. So fuck you, Mini-Mix!

Noise gate function

2009-11-18T16:25:00.004Z

Sorry about the further self-promotion (and our failure to disable the "noise gate function"), but in what could be our last ever podcast, depending on whether or not Richard's ravaged, overworked, overfed, overwhelmed, overoccurred body holds out for another week after what transpires, according to Orange Mark's stats, to be a cumulative four solid days of podcasting or 5,881 minutes since February 2008, we consider the impact of Calvin Harris's "protest" against Jed and Ward on The X Factor, discuss whether Bill Clinton or David Milliband would make a better lover, give Ben Elton the benefit of the doubt over his Frankie Boyle-style remarks about the Royal Family and - +++++SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! NOT THAT RICHARD CARES!+++++ - review the new disaster movie 2012 in way too much detail, and reveal the ending of a film about the end of the world. No, it's not actually 1992, despite the misleading Sun cover and I am no longer in the Labour party either.

The gathering storm

2009-11-17T23:42:00.003Z

The White Ribbon, or Das weisse band, is a quite remarkable film. (What's also remarkable is that, without any planning or foreknowledge, I arrived at the Curzon Mayfair and bought a single ticket to the 1.3o showing, and who should appear behind me, but my old showbiz friend The Fast Show's Simon Day, also about to purchase a single ticket for The White Ribbon. So we sat together. At one stage, I saved his seat for him, which means that if anybody had sat down next to me, I could have said, "There's someone sitting there, mate.") If anything, The White Ribbon could be retitled The Slow Show. Set in a Bavarian village in 1913, it is like a severe, black-and-white Heimat, except it takes place across just the one year rather than 81, and plays out in two hours rather than 53. Two is long enough.

Directed with incredible control and poise by Michael Haneke, whose interest seems to be in the repressive, prurient nature of a tight-knit community, especially one governed by feudal hierarchy and fear of God and the flesh, it is still something of a departure from the contemporary settings of his best known work, Hidden, Funny Games and The Piano Teacher. But such is the sense of isolation in this tiny, rural barony, it might almost be said to be timeless were it not for the narrator's references to the gathering storm clouds of war and the eventual flashpoint of Archduke Ferdinand's assassination. I guess it's about old certainties being eroded by outside events, or, in the case of the seemingly unexplained bursts of violence and sadism in this village of the damned, inside events. It begins with the death of a horse and ends with the death of an Archduke, which will, in turn, lead to millions more dead, including horses. You can't help but see the innocence and peace of this pre-war era in the silent fields of wheat and other crops, the very fields that will soon be torn up in France. When one character takes his revenge on the baron by destroying a field of cabbages, portent is in every swipe of the scythe. (Good lord, he's even using death's own gardening implement.)

The crisp monochrome makes it look like a 1950s European film (I was reminded of Ingmar Bergman's Summer With Monkia and Smiles Of A Summer Night, which I love), and it's only halfway through that you start to notice the lack of music. The titles are silent, which is unnerving enough, but the lack of a score isn't immediately apparent - well, it wasn't to me. How strange to see a film where the only sound comes from what's on the screen. After Hidden, which was quite a perplexing puzzle with a fairly open ending, White Ribbon is far more linear, with clear narration to move the action along with the perspective of time having passed, and a mystery that actually gets solved.

This doesn't mean it's an easy film. It's not. It's stiff and awkward and evasive and its true horror is concealed beneath propriety and tradition and routine, reflecting the airs and graces of the world it portrays; all the more thrilling, then, when the truth comes out, as when the doctor reveals his true, world-weary, patriarchal feelings to his lover, which are not nice feelings at all. Such cruelty merely serves to underscore the emotional purity of the relationship between the starchy pastor and his youngest son, embodied by the injured bird he nurses back to health. (Warning, there are two incidents of animal cruelty, one of them already mentioned, but neither is graphic or dwelt upon. The thought is enough.)

I am still thinking about this film, days later. That is the mark of a great film for me. By comparison, I really enjoyed An Education a couple of weeks ago - well-acted, well-scripted - but I barely thought about it again, beyond pondering how they could let a character in 1962 drop two individual teabags into two mugs. The White Ribbon needs to be seen. Just don't go in with the fidgets.

England and Wales

2009-11-16T19:45:00.004Z

Set the controls for the heart of Torchwood! Tickets are now available for the first ever Collings & Herring Live Podcast in Wales: Cardiff St David's Hall, January 21, 2010. It's a full evening of adult entertainment, with podcast, stand-up, Q&A etc.

The other two key dates for your diary:

TUESDAY December 8, 2009
Duke Of York's Picturehouse, Brighton
The Collings & Herrin Christmas Podcast Party: an evening of stand-up, interaction, prizes, secret dancing, an exclusive Q&A, the chance to pick up a perfect Christmas gift and, of course, the one hour, 6 minute and 35 second podcast itself. After May's near sell-out, we hope to repeat the feat, and celebrate the birth of the baby Jesus a couple of weeks early. With you. Tickets available here.

MONDAY February 1, 2010
Leicester Square Theatre, London
The 100th Collings & Herrin Podcast: the 100th C&H podcast, seasonally adjusted, recorded in front of a baying audience of nerds, 7.00-8.30 then you can buy us a drink somewhere quiet. Tickets already available here.

Slim to none

2009-11-12T17:24:00.005Z

In our 90th podcast, we spend the £45 million we didn't win on the Euromillions lottery, in detail, and devise a variation on the two-minute silence if Richard was in charge. We also prune my wallet, defend Gordon Brown after his bad-eyed felt tip spelling mistakes, uncover how the printing presses are powered on the Mail, Sun and Mirror, compare the potential for jungle romance of all the I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here contestants (Lucy Benjamin, married to an oil businessman with one child: "Slim to none"), and, oh yes, plug our various gigs, at length, one by one, and brainstorm a couple of controversial ideas for the Brighton one on 8 December at the Duke Of York's, which may have health and safety implications. There is also a joke about dolphins that I borrowed from the leftovers of a radio pilot I have been working on - so listen out for that.

Radio times

2009-11-08T22:45:00.003Z

So, they allowed Collings and Herrin back onto the actual radio on Saturday morning, filling in for the hallowed Adam and Joe show, 9am-midday, albeit not trying to be them - that would be a fool's errand and we are too similar in height anyway. Earwax, Johnny Ball, trumpet cleaning, Gene Hackman, Noah - it's like a podcast, except with music and no swearing - and it has been calculated that we actually spoke for about one hour and six minutes in total. How about that? I liked it when someone on Twitter suggested we sounded like an old married couple arguing. Maybe we did. It's on iPlayer here. I hope you find it as much fun to listen to as we were obviously having in the grabs shown here. (I like the pic in the middle where Richard is very busy checking his iPhone.) And, on a related note, you can listen to me doing the Entertainment Guide on Dame Michael Ball's Sunday Brunch on Radio 2 from this morning. It begins at approximately 0.50 and ends with me reviewing How David Hasselhoff Brought Down The Berlin Wall, a documentary written and presented by ... Richard Herring (which is itself on Radio 2 on Tuesday, 10.30 and I describe, dispassionately, as "a great hour of radio").

Kelly Brook's buns

2009-11-05T17:53:00.004Z

As Richard stares unemployment in the face and I realise that it was my broken earphones that led to a fleeting, erroneous feeling of punk rock cool on a train this morning, our 89th podcast soldiers on, featuring a whole load of genuine laughter at the twin Daily Mail "imagined nostalgia" attack of

a) AN Wilson for the time "a few years" ago when there was no Halloween and no 200 yard queue outside his local joke-cum-fancy-dress emporium, and
b) Quentin Letts for the time, before 1970, when urchins would demand a penny for the guy

Plus: the varying levels of pictorial hypocrisy over the iconic photo of weeing student Phil Laing [see: self-defeating Guardian crop above]; the inappropriate casting of Kelly Brook in the West End Calendar Girls, which will only lead to confusion at the box office; and the over-35 joy, for Richard, of meeting Johnny Ball and Maggie Philbin. For the record: we do not repeat the Rebecca Adlington joke like all the newspapers who claim to be offended by it.

By the way, we are number two in this discerning Dave channel comedy podcast chart. Only Adam and Joe are better than that

Dancevision

2009-11-04T11:11:00.005Z

To the Barbican in the City of London last night for an extraordinary evening of modern ballet, courtesy of the Michael Clark Company. An ugly building that houses such beauty! This was my first time through the Barbican's doors. Once past the brutalist concrete pillars and almost sadistic lack of decent seating in the bar areas (three quid for a bottle of beer, par for the course in such establishments), the Theatre itself was a revelation: wide, comfy seats that don't flip up, a clear view of the huge, widescreen stage, dazzlingly simple access to each row by way of individual entry points through doors that automatically close when the houselights dim, a superb sound system - it put the South Bank into the shade; if only they could excavate it from the Barbican, lift it up and put it, well, at the South Bank!

Having begun to enjoy mostly traditional ballet these past couple of years, and having been wowed by Matthew Bourne's Nutcracker at Sadler's Wells, I felt ready to appreciate what Clark has clearly done for the form, and his New Work 2009 - that is, Swamp and the two-part Come, Been and Gone - seemed a perfect place to hop aboard, based as it is on the work of Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and David Bowie (and Wire, as it transpired). Premiered at Edinburgh, it now comes home to the Barbican, where Clark is an Artistic Associate. Among the arts-based celebs we spotted in the audience were Mark Moore, formerly of S'Express, and Sam Taylor-Wood with her boyish new boyfriend, the actor Aaron Johnson (they snogged during the interval, which was a bit much, but that's young love, I guess). The sell-out audience seemed to be of "a certain age", that is, Clark's age, Taylor-Wood's age and pretty much my age: the very people to be excited by hearing White Light/White Heat and Jean Genie through a big sound system and being interpreted through dance. I'm afraid I went in with this preconception: I'm going to bloody love this.

And I bloody loved it. The first section, Swamp, based on Feeling Called Love by Wire, followed by two, lengthy ambient pieces by Wire's Bruce Gilbert from his album This Way, involved eight dancers - three men, five women - bending their lithe bodies in simple leotards on an empty stage against a floor-to-rafters white screen which a single strip of white light occasionally traversed, as if it were a long, thin, moving doorway, or the vertical band on an old-fashioned radio dial. When you haven't been to live dance for a while, you forget just how insanely athletic and poised great dancers are, and these were no exception: hair simply tied or greased back, with black strips across the eyes, the Clark style has them almost never in complete synchronisaton - rather, they do their own thing, sometimes in pairs, forever dancing off into the wings and reappearing, sometimes on the opposite side, as if the stage frames our view of a much larger dance and we are looking through a cinemascopic viewfinder. The sheer simplicity and strength of these tactile routines, based on slow-marching, foot-dragging, puffed-out chests and surgically controlled slow movement, is mesmerising.

The second section and first act of Come, Been and Gone (there were two intervals, of which the second seemed unnecessary and broke the mood), featured four Velvet Underground songs - Venus In Furs, the aforementioned, Heroin and Ocean - each with its own visual theme and formation, such as a solo performance for Heroin in a bodysuit with syringes sticking out of it, while the others involved a full company of six (two men, four women) plus Clark himself, usually in humorous cameos. This followed through to the climax, beginning with Iggy's Bowie-like Mass Production, then into a Bowie suite: the doomily ambient Sense Of Doubt, "Heroes" (during which the screen bore giant footage from the video and Bowie seemed to join the company, all wearing that boxy jacket he wore), After All (a great, quirky little song from Man Who Sold The World), Future Legend and Chant of The Ever Circling Skeletal Family from Diamond Dogs, Aladdin Sane (during which one of the male dancers responded to every plink of Mike Garson's insane piano solo - genius!), and Jean Genie, an upbeat finale, with more jackets adapted from the Bowie original. These songs, recorded almost 40 years ago, sounded big, full and contemporary coming out of those speakers. Modern music really should be ashamed of itself.

Clark's reputation as an iconoclastic genius is already written. I'm fully aware that I'm coming pretty late to the party - how I wish I'd seen I Am Curious Orange with the Fall in '88, from which I saw intriguing clips on a South Bank Show, I think - but I can concur: he is an amazing, singular choreographer. His young company are like putty in his hands - it's like watching gymnasts without the accent on points, glory and competition (they dance most of the show barefoot). When watching dance you find yourself fixating on certain individuals - one of the female dancers was noticeably taller and less skinny than the others and so stood out, and she moved with such incredible precision; all three of the men/boys were also captivating, not built up like bodybuilders or Hollywood actors but taut and graceful. You begin to take their skills for granted, but my God, they move their entire bodies around while standing on one foot and it's as if they are on a rotating turntable.

Clark, although too old for all this apparently, was also impressive when he appeared, and utterly self-effacing: at one point he emerged from the wings holding a cricket bat and immediately departed again; at another, in a Victorian bathing suit, he spurted water out of his mouth like a bendy whale. (During Aladdin Sane, three of the dancers appeared nude, facing the back, and bumped bare arses in time to the music - such comedy was refreshing.)

A memorable night. I feel ill-equipped to describe dance, having seen so little of it, relatively speaking, but I hope I have conveyed my delight and awe.

Flag day

2009-11-04T08:38:00.006Z

First of all, here is a link to the Royal British Legion website, where you can donate money to their cause, which is to support the families of British service men and women injured or killed in armed conflict around the world. These are the stated values of the British Legion:

Reflection - through Remembrance of past sacrifice in the cause of freedom
Hope - by remembering the past, a younger generation has the chance of a better future
Comradeship - through shared experience and mutual support
Selflessness - by putting others first
Service - to those in need and in support of the whole community

Now, forgive me if I spell this one out, but in foolishly attempting to state my case on Twitter yesterday, I have caused a minority to call me names, and I wish to clear the air in more than 140 characters: one way of showing your support to the work of the British Legion, and to publicly remember those British service personnel who have been killed since the First World War, is to wear a red poppy. Should you wish to donate money to the British Legion, either in person or via their website, and not wear a poppy, is up to you; it's your choice. Is it, some might say, the very freedom of choice that servicemen and women fought for in the Second World War. (It is also your choice whether or not to donate, but that is a different matter.)

As I stated on Twitter, my views on war and servicemen and women are too complex to reduce to the wearing or not wearing of a paper flower, so I choose not to. This is not a stance, or a boycott, if anything it is an absence - the absence of a need to display my feelings in the street. The only reason I mentioned this on Twitter in the first place is that I am already feeling peer pressure and emotional pressure to wear one. Fortunately, I have not been on television during the run-up to Remembrance Sunday, so have not been in a position where it has been broadcaster policy and thus been coerced into doing so. (NB: See Chris Treece's comment about BBC poppy policy below.)

The poppy is good. Its original meaning is sound: poppies grew in Flanders fields (as captured in John McCrae's poem In Flanders Fields) and elsewhere after the First World War and so represents rebirth and positivity, and - for me, anyway - something natural and not man-made reclaiming the earth after the earth has been scorched and muddied and associated with death by something unnatural and very man-made ie. war. The poppy, introduced here in 1921, is worn for essentially good reasons: to remember the dead. I have no problem with it, or anybody who wears one. The outward display of a personal belief - that the dead should be remembered - is not a bad thing. It is just not for me. I would hope that anyone who knows me knows that I have a great deal of compassion for people and animals, and this is borne out in my worldview - and in the charities I support. For those who don't know me, why should I worry about what they think? If they pass me in the street, see my lack of poppy (which, by the way, is not that uncommon - I must have passed 150 people between Tube station and the BBC yesterday and I counted four, two of which were worn by security staff; and only one today between Tube and library) do they come to conclusion, "Oh, he must be glad that men and women have died in wars"? I sincerely hope not.

I don't wear badges or wristbands or ribbons or flags that denote which charities and causes I support, because I am happy just supporting them. I am at peace with myself, and with those that wear such things. I do not judge others for wearing a wristband or a ribbon. I might assume that they support a particular charity or cause, but that is their choice. I don't think they are more compassionate than me because they tell me that they are in a coded way, but I assume that they are compassionate. But I assume people are compassionate unless given evidence to the contrary. I certainly don't assume that anyone not wearing a Lance Armstrong wristband is pleased that people have died of cancer. So why should anyone seeing my lapel think anything negative about me?

Feelings clearly run high on this issue. Someone called Lisa posted a message here on the end of an unrelated entry calling me "a disgrace," and effectively ordering me to wear one. (Someone on Twitter who felt passionately about the subject suggested I wear one and "do the decent thing.") I really do object to being ordered to do something - this is one step away from bullying. It's emotionally charged and unnecessary. Call me names for bad things I have done, not for supposedly virtuous things I have not done. I accept that, on a very modest scale, I am a public figure. Anyone who writes books and appears on radio or telly is. But that does not mean I have to set an example. I would rather influence people by airing my views on serious matters when the time is right and when the forum allows me to explain myself. I am usually caricatured as a woolly liberal, and to be honest, I am happy enough with that. It doesn't cover all my views, or reflect all my opinions, but it's a start. Certainly, I don't feel like "a disgrace." (I am hoping Lisa will engage in a debate under this entry, but I also hope she will withdraw her accusation of me being a "disgrace". I save that word up for people who have done something to harm others.)

Please donate to the British Legion if you believe they are worthy of support, and please do not feel any self-consciousness about wearing or not wearing a poppy. Do what you please. I read an interesting blog yesterday from an ex-serviceman who said he chose not to wear a poppy because he couldn't bear the hypocrisy of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown wearing one when they actually sent soldiers to their deaths under false pretenses. That's a fairly extreme view, but one that he is entitled to. (Certainly, for politicians, it is an opportunity for them to appear to commune with the nation on an issue they consider beyond party politics, even though war is completely political, especially the wars we are currently engaged in.)

My brother was in the British Army for 15 years and put his life at risk, like many soldiers do. I admit, this colours my otherwise woolly liberal views, as do the numerous books I have read about the hard realities of war, from Waterloo to Iraq. I have not, nor will I ever, put myself willingly in an armed conflict, because I am a coward. That, thus far, has been my choice. Many who were conscripted from 1914 onwards in this country were probably also cowards, but stepped up when the situation required it. I respect them as much as I respect anyone who volunteers. Why? Because they are human beings. I happen not to believe in killing other human beings, which is why my stance on the military is complicated. I do not believe in the death penalty. Others do. I do not think they are a "disgrace" for believing in it. I just disagree with them.

In many ways, yesterday's debate on Twitter was stimulating, but it was also, for me, infuriating, as I kept having to reiterate the same arguments, in 140 characters. I would much rather debate it here. Equally, I hope I have made my case clear enough, so that there is nothing else to debate, although I am happy to publish any views that do not cross the line of decency, and are posted under a name, even if it's a made up one.

Please do not judge anyone by their poppy or their lack of poppy. We live in a free country, where feelings about war are complicated and full of grey areas, and where our service men and women are currently being killed and injured on a daily basis. It is possible to support them, and the families they leave behind, without supporting the wars they are fighting. It is also possible to support them without telling everybody.

We've got our eye on you

2009-10-29T14:42:00.004Z

As it occurs to us, in the 88th Collings & Herrin podcast, we present an exclusive tribute to Peggy Mitchell, who is to leave EastEnders after 15 years, consider Malcolm MacDonald's nightmare vision of St James' Park stadium in a commercial world, stir the latest political correctness storm in the Daily Mail's teacup, apply for a job on Wight FM, ponder the newspaper grammar of Kelvin MacKenzie's column in The Sun, review the extras that come with the new Terry Gilliam film, and give an update on the not-for-sale rhino and its matted-hair horn. Don't forget to book tickets for our live podcast gigs in December (Christmas Podcast Party, Brighton Duke Of York's) and February (100th podcast, Leicester Square Theatre)

Actually for sale

2009-10-28T17:54:00.003Z

The rhino may not be, but our asses are. If you'd like to be a part of the Collings & Herrin podcast, and you're in the right half of the country, two dates for your diary:

TUESDAY December 8, 2009
Duke Of York's Picturehouse, Brighton
The Collings & Herring Christmas Podcast Party: an evening of stand-up, interaction, prizes, secret dancing, an exclusive Q&A, the chance to pick up a perfect Christmas gift and, of course, the one hour, 6 minute and 35 second podcast itself. After May's near sell-out, we hope to repeat the feat, and celebrate the birth of the baby Jesus a couple of weeks early. With you. Tickets available here.

MONDAY February 1, 2010
Leicester Square Theatre, London
The 100th Collings & Herrin Podcast: the 100th C&H podcast, seasonally adjusted, recorded in front of a baying audience of nerds, 7.00-8.30 then you can buy us a drink somewhere quiet. Tickets already available here.

If we can sell these out, we promise to look into some more gigs outside of London and Brighton in the new year. Maybe even one in the north of England. Or the West.

You couldn't make it up

2009-10-27T23:57:00.003Z

And I didn't. For anyone who doesn't listen to podcast: I have become fascinated by a not-for-sale rhino that sits atop a shelf at a key-cutting/watch repair concession at Vauxhall overground station in South London. It made me laugh that the rhino was seemingly put there for decoration but had to have the handwritten RHINO NOT FOR SALE sign put in front of it, thus ruining the decorative look of the statue. I cling to the idea that so many people must have gone in there to have a key cut or a watch battery fitted and asked how much the rhino was, the poor harassed owner had to make and erect the sign. The RHINO NOT FOR SALE sign disappeared for a while, which made me wonder if the owner felt the signage had done its job and risked taking it down, or else the rhino had actually suddenly gone on sale. However, the recent return of the RHINO NOT FOR SALE sign - a slightly smaller, less obtrusive one, actually - suggests customers have started asking about it again. Ah, the gentle, large-mammal-based soap opera of real life. Thanks so much to Andy McH for hearing my plea on the podcast and going out on South London safari to bag a snapshot. If AA Gill had done it, he would no doubt have shot the rhino, to see what if felt like.

Of course, Richard thinks people should go in the shop and ask how much the RHINO NOT FOR SALE sign costs, so that the owner will have to make a RHINO NOT FOR SALE SIGN NOT FOR SALE. He is a professional comedian.

PS: Update. Our nerds are dangerous people. What would happen if they used their powers for evil?

Twit

2009-10-24T13:43:00.003+01:00

Rather than comment myself on the weighty issues of the Nick Griffin Question Time, I'll hand you over to the reliably childish Cassetteboy.

Yeah-eaargh-eee-arrghh!

2009-10-22T21:45:00.009+01:00

I will add more pics as they come in, but hats off to Andy McH for taking this evocative rock shot - and posting it on Twitter within seconds - at tonight's absolutely brilliiiiiiiiaaaaaaaaaaaant Karaoke Circus extravaganza, back in its spiritual and literal home the Albany Downstairs in Central London, where, dwarfed by the comedic talent either side of me on this illustrious bill, I belted out Lithium by Nirvana. My rendition looks, if I may be so bold, better than it sounded. Certainly from where I was standing. We were also treated to an emotional Nothing Compares 2 U from Josie Long, which was almost impossible to follow, but I chivalrously held her new coat while she sang it, which I hope was a contributing factor to her greatness. (I am nothing if not the man who holds the coats for comedians.) Also, a song from Bugsy Malone by Anna Crilly and Katy Wix; an ironically stopped Don't Stop Me Now from the super-patient Margaret Cabourn-Smith (who subtly referenced the C&H podcast in her patter, which we appreciated); a remarkably tuneful rendition of the punk rock classic Orgasm Addict from Mr Richard Herring, dedicated to his current comedy partner; Song 2 by the cycling-fit Dave Gorman ... and then I snuck off home to watch Question Time because an ugly man was going to be on it. I was torn. Apologies to those performers whose work I missed and whose coats I could not hold, including genial, snake-hipped Chris Addison with an apparently show-stopping, ovation-deserving Common People, Robin Ince, Jeremy Hardy (aka. Robin Ince in the future if he calms down a bit) and special secret guest Jessica Hynes, who, as Richard commented, cheated "by using talent", and also earned an ovation. Below are a selection of photographs from various sources. First past the post were these evocatively blurry ones by Andy McH, which were also instantaneously Tweeted, and would have definitely been printed in the NME in 1991:

And now some slightly clearer ones from Linzy aka AngryFeet:

And finally, from unofficial Karaoke Circus photographer Paul Bailey, are some highlights from his full set, which can be viewed here.

So, a big hand to packed-lunch addict Martin White [above], who pulls this whole thing together every time; to Danielle, Foz, David and the rest of the musicians; and to Dan and the Baron, the Yin and Yang of critique. Another subterranean have-a-go triumph over technical adversity in the key of fun.

We are the news

2009-10-22T17:38:00.004+01:00

In the 87th Collings & Herrin podcast we are the news but don't even know it, as helicopters buzz over Shepherd's Bush to monitor the protests against Nick Griffin on the night of his historic Question Time appearance. (We mistakenly imagine them to be piloted by Michael Legge and James Hingley, aka Bollings & Nerrin, our podcast stalkers. We are idiots.) However, we still discuss the issues of the day: Nick Griffin, again, pictured in frankly unrealistic Sun cartoon form, whose own wife Jackie calls an "oddball" and seems confused about how precisely the sun might rise and set inside his fat Nazi arse, the shame of the as-yet-unnamed binge-drinking Cardiff girl and her skateboard knickers, Mitch Winehouse's approval of his troubled daughter's new breasts, the demanding nature of As It Occurs To Me listeners and the latest update on the Vauxhall Station rhino. There are no sketches. Thank God.

I declare South London open

2009-10-22T08:46:00.004+01:00

It was truly an honour last night to have been asked to host the grand opening of a new cinema, the HMV Curzon in Wimbledon, guest of honour: Shane Meadows. The cinema itself actually sits above the existing HMV on the high street and may well point the way forward in these uncertain times: a large record chain expands its old-fashioned business to include music venues and now, cinemas. Wimbledon has a massive Odeon - indeed, the new Curzon is virtually next door, in an almost sneery gesture - but this is increasingly a place where the movie-lover takes his or her life into their own hands, not really knowing whether the viewing of a film will be actually possible, what with all the young people talking and texting all the way through it.

The Curzon is essentially an arthouse cinema, which means it may charge a few extra quid (tickets at Wimbledon will be capped at £10), but that, combined with its more esoteric programming choices, means that it's less attractive to the talking and texting teenagers. Anyone living South West of the river should be as cheered by its arrival as I am. I frequently trek into London's busy West End to visit either the Curzon Soho or Curzon Mayfair for a respectful, eyes-front, mobiles-off evening of cinemagoing - recent happy occasions include Moon and Antichrist (well, maybe happy isn't the correct word for Antichrist). Let's hope the Curzon Wimbledon will develop into a profitable venture. It has three modest-sized screens; the biggest, the Red Screen, seats just 103 patrons, but in comfort and with all digital mod cons. (I'm told the entire cinema can be operated from a laptop in space, or something.)

Anyway, to the glamorous gala night: our guest of honour was Shane Meadows, whose ace new film - shot in five days for £28,000 - Le Donk and Scor-Zay-Zee, was the inaugural screening, and he was a terrific sport, wielding the giant golden scissors and being photographed in a sea of HMV logos and with Nipper the HMV dog (seen above with Karolina Kus, the Curzon Wimbledon's manager). Having posed with the giant scissors, he was then given a normal-sized pair to actually cut the ribbon! I have known Shane, on and off, in a professional capacity, for many years, and he remains unnecessarily gracious about the fact that his first ever award was presented to him for his no-budget debut feature Small Time by Collins & Maconie's Movie Club on ITV in 1996. (We sprayed a Fisher-Price farmyard gold and called it the Barn D'Or.) He was happy to do an informal, sit-down chat before the screening - after Simon Fox, Chief Exec of HMV Group, had presented him with a complete Seinfeld box set, which he had cheekily mentioned he was after in a short promotional film for the cinema's opening. Shane really is one of the good guys, unspoiled by success, just as cheery and sociable and amenable as he was when I first met him, and just as fired up by getting out there and making films. Le Donk is hilarious and moving, and you should see it. At one candid point in our Q&A, Shane admitted that he considers Once Upon A Time In The Midlands "a piece of shit" but that its commercial failure, despite big names and a massive marketing push, actually helped relaunch him as a guerrilla filmmaker. (It isn't a piece of shit, but it lacks the personal beating heart of his other work, and if it led to the rich seam of work beginning with Dead Man's Shoes - which Paddy Considine did as a favour for his old pal - then it was worth doing.)

So, a successful launch. The cinema itself opens tomorrow (Friday). It's rare that a new boutique cinema opens, and it was thrilling to be there, and to have lured so many people south of the river to see it. (Nipper the dog is a bitch. No, really.)

Thanks to Hugh Thompson for the official photos. And thanks to Debbie, Nadia, Karolina and all at HMV and Curzon for giving me the chance to host the evening. Also to Gennaro, a whirlwind presence at HMV since I used to work at Q, who reminded me to mention this charitable venture:

The HMV My Inspirations 18-month calendar is based on the ads with nice black and white photos of famous musicians you've probably seen. Proceeds go to children-and-young-adults cancer care charity CLIC Sargent.

Attack of the clown

2009-10-21T16:33:00.002+01:00

Two things I thought I'd bring up about the Star Wars Episode I review I wrote for this week's Radio Times, a publication I won't assume you buy, even though a million people do, God bless them every one. (Why was I reviewing Star Wars Episode I? Because ITV1 are showing the whole hexalogy from this Saturday, in episodic order - or "the wrong order" as it's known to purists.)

1. Spot my schoolboy error in the review:

The answer to "life, universe and everything", according to The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, is 42. But what about the really important question? In which order should you watch the six Star Wars films? This week, ITV1 posits an answer: you start with Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and conclude, in six Saturdays' time, with Episode VI: Return Of The Jedi. Sounds perfectly reasonable to the non-obsessive, but is it? I would argue that the hexalogy (as nobody calls it) should be viewed in release-date order, beginning with the original Star Wars - since reconfigured as Episode IV: A New Hope - at which point we had no idea about the extent of the "issues" between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.

Released in 1977 into an entertainment industry that considered sci-fi a moribund genre, George Lucas's long-held space opera dream changed everything. Star Wars busted unexpected blocks and provided a young generation - mine - with what we would always regard as "our film". Having grown up with Star Trek re-runs, it fed the same stargazing wonder and love of rubber-suited monsters.

Star Wars has almost amounted to George Lucas's life's work - production of all six installments occupied him from 1973 to 2005, when the final film was released. During the gap in the middle, CGI technology developed enough to lure him back into the galactic game. The release in 1999 of the first of the second trilogy, The Phantom Menace, had grown-up Star Wars fans salivating. What a shame it failed to live up to the hype.

Despite seamless digital effects, intriguing narrative "seeds" (such as our first sighting of nine-year-old Anakin Skywalker, whom we'd already seen grow up), the return of such key creatives as composer John Williams and Frank Oz as the voice of Yoda, and the casting of red hot Ewan McGregor as the young Alex Guinness - sorry, Obi Wan Kenobi - Menace felt scrappily scripted and, ironically, episodic. It was also hobbled by the idiotic, Goofy-like sidekick Jar Jar Binks.

Things would pick up for Episode III: Attack Of The Clones, showing for the first time on terrestrial TV in five Saturdays' time, at which the trilogies merged, but "our film" had been sullied forever.

I apologise for my lacklustre performance, but in mitigation it was rewritten in haste. Some eagle-eyed folk have already picked me up on my schoolboy error on Twitter, confounding my theory that, hey, sci-fans aren't the sort to notice this sort of thing and bang on about it. (By the way, I have also been picked up on my use of the phrase "sci-fi fan", as Star Wars isn't sci-fi, apparently. Oh, shut up. What is it? Period drama? Oh.)

2. Enjoy the discursive and self-indulgent intro I wrote for the piece that was quite rightly cut for reasons of "space" (that's "space" as in room on the page, not "space" as in the final frontier):

It is the greatest sci-fi saga ever told. An ambitious, mythic, densely-plotted odyssey set in a parallel galaxy wrought by civil war. The definitive space opera, it unfolds across multiple episodes aboard enormous space cruisers and upon alien worlds, using familial strife and old-fashioned romance to give it a human heart. It is Battlestar Galactica, the "reimagined" TV series that drew to a conclusion after four seasons etc. etc.

You try your best. You really do.

Fragmented

2009-10-21T12:05:00.005+01:00

And on the third day of In The City, Manchester's legendary music industry jolly, I travelled due North-west to take part in a panel about ... well, it was never really made totally explicit what it was about, either in the publicity or by fragmented punk-rock moderator John Robb, but it was something to do with writing books and rock music. This explained why I found myself squashed into a leather sofa alongside John Niven, A&R-turned-gamekeeper and author of scurrilous biz novel Kill Your Friends, Mark Hodkinson, genial boss of indie publisher Pomona and author of affectionate post-punk novel The Last Mad Surge Of Youth, Pete Frame, all-round beardy legend and architect of the mighty Rock's Family Trees, and Peter Hook, musician, bon viveur and now author of just-published hardback memoir How Not To Run A Club. (John Robb is no literary slouch either, having collected his fragmented thoughts in many a bound volume, most recently Death To Trad Rock.) The suite at the Midland Hotel where the panel took place was well attended by biz types, and at least one spunky young band called My Name Is Animal - I think - and if anything there were too many good talkers onstage for the allotted hour. (I could have listened to Pete Frame for an hour - that man has lived a life.) But it was a lively one, and although we started by talking about whether the myth of rock music can be conveyed on the printed page, we soon got off the subject of books and onto the subject of the reduced influence and literary content of the music press in a digitally fragmented world. (John claimed, at 48, to be well up for this fragmented world, as it was the democracy that he sought during punk, but most of us disagreed, most eloquently Mark, who worried that a world where everybody is chattering about music on a democratically equal plane is too diffuse to nurture movements, such as those we have experienced in the past - I hope I haven't paraphrased too much.)

Anyway, even though I was in Manchester for just four hours, I enjoyed returning to the scene of so many past music biz crimes. I attended In The City on an annual basis during my years in magazine publishing, and did as the Mancunians do whilst in Manchester. (It was, I always thought, healthy that the London-based media had to spend so much time in another city around the turn of the decade when Madchester was the centre of the universe.) This time, I drank two cups of peppermint tea and one glass of carbonated water. I ate a healthy packed lunch on the train. But hey, just wandering into the lobby of the Midland, going downstairs to pick up my delegate pass and goody bag, and feeling the industry vibe took me right back to the 90s, to the deregulated days of pluggers and BBC press officers and Select and the Hit Parade and taxis and Mark Lamarr and Mark Goodier and Indian food and lager and Tiny Monroe and their manager. God bless Manchester for continuing to generate its own electricity and sense of occasion. The old place doesn't seem to have changed that much, and just hearing Hooky sparring with John Robb reassured me that the years may pass, but the song remains the same. Top one, nice one, get sorted etc.

The lead photo above was taken by Hobbsy. These were posted on Flickr by Martin at VisitManchester.

Fight 'em until we can't

2009-10-19T00:19:00.007+01:00

They're falling like dominoes now. As I review Season Two of Battlestar Galactica, I am already well into Season Three. And regardless of word-of-mouth hype, it really is getting better and better. ++++++++SPOILERS! SPOILERS!++++++++++ At the end of Season One, we left our "rag-tag" exiles in stasis, with Adama's blood all over the octagonal/hexagonal CIC lightbox, Starbuck back on Caprica clutching the Arrow of Apollo, Roslin in the brig after a military coup, and the whiteboard bearing the population tally 47,887. Thus Season Two begins with Adama in a hospital bed, with stitches down his chest, Tigh in charge and feeling the pressure (clear liquids in a jam jar all round! oops, I have declared martial law!), Roslin going cold turkey without her chamalla, and a motley crew, including the drastically unsuited Baltar, stuck on Kobol hoping not to experience their last gleaming. (One of them does.)

Father-son relations are strained between Adama - who's up and at 'em and regaining the con by Episode 5 - and Lee, who took Madam President's side and helped her hightail it to Cloud 9, where "convicted terrorist" Richard Hatch becomes an ally. Things take a turn for the unpleasant on Caprica when Starbuck wakes up in an all-too-quiet hospital that turns out to be a human ovary farm - scars are left. Both kinds. She has to leave her new boyf, former basketball/snooker-hybrid star Anders, behind, but vows to come back and save him, Hollywood style. Xena Warrior Princess turns up - she's now an Australian reporter making a documentary about Galactica. Actually, she's a Cylon. (It's a clever disguise - who can resist having a documentary made about them?) An obsessed and grief-struck Chief builds his own plane, Roy Neary style. Sharon plugs the ship's computer into her wrist.

The Pegasus turns up, captained by Admiral Cain, who's Adama's boss, and a bitch, and doesn't last long. Baltar effectively cures Roslin's cancer using half-Cylon blood out of Sharon's doomed foetus. With rebirth, comes death. There's a lot of heavy emotional stuff in Season Two, and more schisms than you could shake an arrow at. Scar becomes the embodiment of the evil Cylon threat in one of a number of stand-alone episodes, Scar. This also bonds Starbuck to Cat, tenuously - they remain at each other's throats. We also meet a new Cylon, the priest (Dean Stockwell), who's quite chirpy, but ruthless. And in the Lay Down Your Burdens two-parter, an election takes place. You won't be surprised to learn that voting cards have the corners cut off. But when Roslin attempts to cut the corners off democracy, further difficult questions have to be answered, and, with the now-constantly blubbing Baltar (and his special, imaginary adviser in the red dress) in charge, the pivotal events that kick off Season Three are in place.

I'd been warned that BSG takes you places you didn't foresee, and it does. But I wasn't prepared for the massive narrative shifts, even after the cliffhanger assassination attempt that ended Season One: the near-death of Roslin and the way that was averted; the arrival of the Pegasus and the short life of Cain (whom I understand to be the flashback pivot of The Razor); the rise to power of Baltar and the permanent shift from white coat to presidential blazer; the bit where Chief beats the hell out of future wife Cally; but most importantly, the development of Starbuck as a rounded human being, with an actual past, and an actual heart. (She gets her boyf back in the end, which causes Lee to ripple his bag-of-walnut muscles* in jealousy.)

When I started watching Two, weeks ago now, I could never have imagined that it would end with the survivors colonising a shitty, grey planet christened "New Caprica" as if they have come to Glastonbury in winter by mistake, then surrendering to the Cylons, under wet-eyed President Baltar! I love that a whole bunch of American writers thought of this and I didn't. So say we all, surely?

Now, Season Three, must get on.

* Yes, I have borrowed this fantastic image from Clive James, who once described the overdeveloped Arnold Schwarzenegger as "a condom filled with walnuts."

ORGIES

2009-10-16T21:06:00.006+01:00

There, that got your attention. In the 86th Collings & Herrin Podcast, recorded at the Three and Ten pub in Brighton before a packed audience of around 50 people, many of who probably wished they had sat further back. Despite the Brighton Fringe using a photo of Richard Herring on his own to illustrate the gig [see: incriminating pic], this was a two-man show, albeit only one of us actually felt inspired to mime what it must be like at an orgy. This was sparked by a story in the Sun about the MoD and a Travelodge, in which the word "ORGIES" was helpfully picked out in caps; we also cover the Jan Moir Daily Mail gay-bashing outrage ("Are you thinking what she's thinking?" er, no), the Leona Lewis head-punching outrage (and yes, I realise I said Robert Plant when I meant Jimmy Page), and the Cardiff students war memorial-weeing-on outrage. All the outrage that's fit to print. Fortunately, things pick up at the end when I reveal the mystery of the Colgate Plax mouthwash bottle*.

Thanks to all who came out and paid money to see our unscripted, non-Radio 4 antics. Especially the incredible burping man in the second row. (Damian Harris, the boss of Skint Records was there, too. Cool.) And to the venue staff, who provided me with Magners Pear cider. But not to the bar staff downstairs, who told me off for "bringing my own drink into the pub"! I didn't! (Richard had already gone off, in his Hitler costume, to do a proper theatre gig of his own. I wonder if the picture advertising it had me in it?)

*You'll have to listen to find out what this refers to.

Taxing

2009-10-14T10:34:00.002+01:00

It can't be just me who keeps getting the same piece of spam - the Notice Of Underreported Income - its arrival seems to be expanding exponentially, as if perhaps the more times an obviously fake email arrives from HM Customs & Excise requiring to me to click on a link the more likely I am to cave in and click on it like a prize twat. Hey, I understand spam, and have written at length about it before, but this one is curious. I've had it 125 times since October 7, that's 37 times yesterday, and 22 times today since midnight (compared with nine times on October 7, before they really worked out the strategy of overegging the unscrupulous-bastard pudding). It's interesting that the same email started out being addressed from the Internal Revenue Service, then, two days ago, it switched the more UK-friendly HM Customs & Excise. I find spam and the logic behind it fascinating. The stuff that comes through in Chinese or pidgin English is easy enough to dismiss, as are the Nigerian scams, the knock-off designer watches, the lottery-win notifications and the ones promising that if I "enlarge" my "device" women will "jump in my bed." But these punts disguised as official notification from banks and building societies are more carefully built - and in this case, apparently adjusted to suit the nationality of the recipient. (Did someone pass on the information to the evil nerds in a pizza-box-strewn shed in Iowa who send this shit out that it's not the Internal Revenue in the UK? And if so, why doesn't this person work for Dan Brown and help him out with his poor grasp of British culture?) I particularly like the fact that it has extrapolated what it thinks is my name (the prefix "happy" from this website's email address, the one that attracts all the spam and has no filter) and added that word to the fake "Taxpayer ID". It would be nice if such codes in real life had the word "happy" in them.

Sorry not to blog about anything more interesting, but I am going through one of those fraught periods where I have panicked and taken on way too much work which simply cannot be squeezed into the waking days I have available to me. Better get back to it. If only, I don't know, some of my income had been underreported by the Internal Revenue. I can but dream.

Precious Little

2009-10-09T19:58:00.003+01:00

In the 85th Collings & Herrin podcast, we tread a fine line between undermining Richard's new, breakaway, sketch-based podcast, As It Occurs To Me, by accidentally previewing material about Berlin that might turn up in it, in advance, and undermining our own, already-less-popular podcast, by going on about As It Occurs To Me all the way through it. However, despite tiredness and the lateness of hour, it's a great week for racism-based news, and we cover all the racists: Anton de Beke, Bruce Forsyth and Jackson Jive, who won an Australian talent contest in 1989 and have come back to redress the balance of 20 years of enlightenment. There's also a tiny hedgehog, Carol Vorderman's bum and a rhino. What more do you want? Michael Legge and James Hingley?

Warm up the computers!

2009-10-06T15:25:00.003+01:00

I have now polished off the establishing miniseries and Season One of Battlestar Galactica, which is officially my latest box-set obsession. There's something especially pleasing about starting a box set which has a finite ending, so you can go at your own pace (unlike The Wire, whose first three seasons I caught up with on DVD, binge-style, then had to trudge through the last two, one episode a week, on FX). BSG, as I'm now comfortable calling it, concluded at the end of Season Four earlier this year on Sky 1 (and on Sci Fi in the US). The definitive Region 2 box set contains 25 discs: that's 75 episodes, plus the "back-door pilot" miniseries. (The Razor, also included in the box, is widely accepted to form the first two episodes in Season Four, even though it's presented as a separate entity.)

BSG is already mah favourite sci-fi TV series. Hey, I grew up on Star Trek, especially the original series and the movies, but have fallen in and out of love with the subsequent spin-offs; The X-Files was good, too, although the final season went off the boil; meanwhile, Lost has pulled it back from the brink. Entire sci-fi universes have passed me by, such as Buffy and Firefly. (Yes, yes, one day I will watch Firefly, I do have a job as well, you know.) But BSG has a story arc that I know for a fact concludes at the end of Season Four, even though I have no idea how, and that is why I felt compelled to dive in.

+++++++++++++++++++SPOILER ALERT+++++++++++++++++++++
There's no way I can review each season as I complete it without giving certain plot points away as I go. If you have yet to embark upon this epic quest from Caprica to the fabled planet called Earth, please stop reading. I have managed to avoid learning too much about later seasons by averting my eyes when I refer to episode guides on Wikipedia or other sites (I have also stopped using IMdb for cast information, as in brackets after each actor it says how many episodes in total they appeared in, potentially giving away the lifespan of the character).

So then, Season One ...

The miniseries, aired in 2003 in the States, was our first glimpse of Ronald D. Moore and David Eick's "reimagining" of Glen A. Larson's 1978-79 series of the same name (I remember excitedly seeing the movie - at the cinema - in 1978, in the hope that it would be like Star Wars, but it wasn't really, beyond a few similarities in design). Building on essentially the same story, it reboots, as they say, and sets everything up again: a distant human civilisation, the Twelve Colonies, see their home planet comprehensively nuked by Cylons, cybernetic robots designed by humans, leaving only those currently off-planet, around 47,000, alive. What is always referred to as a "ragtag" fleet of survivors gathers around a worn-out old Battlestar, Galactica, captained by equally weathered old warhorse Adama (Edward James Olmos, whose problem skin as a teenager has, many years later, made him a formidable-looking middle-aged actor, who might have been hewn from rock).

The only reason Galactica has escaped Cylon intervention is that its computers aren't even networked! I love this about BSG - it's not exactly lo-fi, in that its spacecraft are able to "jump" to other co-ordinates in the nick of time, but its comms devices are attached by curly telephone cables, its attack ships come into land like ducks on a lake, and the cry of "Warm up the computers!" is actually heard in the heat of battle in the miniseries. (In Season Two, when Gaeta networks the computers up in an emergency and has to un-network them to avoid a virus getting through his firewalls, he literally pulls the cable out of the side of his computer!)

It's certainly militarily-themed, with Viper space-pilots the gym-toned hunks and honeys of the series, and many a pivotal scene on the bridge, with Adama and Michael Hogan's pisshead second-in-command Tigh hunched over the octagonal lightbox, but there's so much more to it than Cylon attacks, exchanged gunfire with funky noises and fire in the hold. First of all, there's the political layer: Laura Roslyn (Mary McDonell) is sworn in as ad hoc President after the attack, despite being a lowly education secretary ("the schoolteacher" they call her, disparagingly) and must instantly face sacrifice and thorny decisions. We see the withholding of key information from the public - via a familiar-looking press corps - and a blind eye turned to rendition in the name of winning what is very nearly a War on Terror, with the Cylons not only "walking among us" but having a go at suicide bombing too. Next, there's the religious layer, which really gets going in Season Two, which I'm quite some way into now. But in Season One, we learn about the scriptures, and the schism between the atheists and the polytheists - led by Roslyn, who, dying from breast cancer, identifies herself as a kind of saint, put here to lead the humans to safety on the fabled planet Earth. We also meet Zarek (played with a bold flourish by Richard Hatch, who was Apollo in 1978), a terrorist leader/freedom fighter, with whom Roslyn is forced to deal.

But most importantly, there's the personal layer - you get Oedipal father-son stuff, between Adama and Lee "Apollo" (our own Jamie Bamber, of course doing a spotless American accent - you may remember him from Hornblower); you get unrequited - thus far - love between the all-too-gym-toned Apollo and Kara "Starbuck" Thrace (played by Katee Sackhoff), a seeming tomboy pilot whose more emotional side is gradually drip-fed to us, to the point where she takes on a messianic hue and starts crying all the time, but in a hard, I-can-fly-anything kind of way; the growing romance between apple-cheeked political aide Billy (Paul Campbell) and "D" Dualla (Kandyse McClure - now there's somebody who had to re-spell her name for the Actors' Guild handbook) with the hypnotic blue-green eyes; there's doomed inter-racial romance between a number of Sharons (all played by Grace Park) - ie. Cylons who are convinced they can feel love and get pregnant but might assassinate at any moment - and, respectively, Helo (Tahmoh Penikett - how quickly you become accustomed to these unfamiliar names as they go past on the credits, and how pathetically I always shout out "Hello!" when he come onscreen) and Tyrol, "the Chief" (Aaron Douglas), who doesn't know whether he's coming or going. On top of all that, Roslyn and Adama are like the platonic, surrogate mum and dad of the show - he says he "loves everybody on the ship", and still grieves the loss of his other son Zack, whom Starbuck feels she sent to his death - and both Vice President Gaius (James Callis, another Brit, but playing a Brit) and Col Tigh (Michael Hogan) are being manipulated by their own Lady Macbeths, respectively Number Six, the forces' sweetheart-shaped Cylon in permanent evening wear, and the apparently humanoid Mrs Tigh (Kate Vernon), who sits around in a slip all day and makes Tigh do things he doesn't want to do, between drinks.

I'm not sure who I'm writing this for, except myself, but it's good to get it down, having been entirely sucked into the parallel BSG universe, with its colonies and its Gods and its own swear word ("Frak!" "Frak you!" "Frak me!" "Warm up the frakkin' computers!" "What the frak?!" "Motherfrakker!" - it's the malleable, all-occasions equivalent of "naff" on Porridge). I love the way the population number changes for each episode, I love the gay vests, and I love Bear McCreary's stunning score, which I'm told grows with the saga - certainly that haunting piano sonata is under my skin. If only they didn't feel the need to do a rapid-cut montage of what's "coming up" before each episode. Stop teasing me.

Now, on with Season Two, and no more Mr Nice Gaius.

Collings & Armstrong & Miller

2009-10-05T14:04:00.004+01:00

The holiday cover they ask for by name! Filled in for George Lamb on 6 Music this morning, 10am-1pm (on iPlayer for seven days). Didn't attempt to match his energy levels or use any of his catchphrase, just played some records, spoke in between them, and enjoyed the guests that had been lined up for me: the engaging Tom Wrigglesworth, whose Edinburgh-anointed Open Return Letter to Richard Branson show is now touring and whose part in BBC4's Electric Dreams experiment is getting him recognised by people who want him to take the back off their telly; and Armstrong & Miller [pictured], of whom I've only met Ben Miller, at Karaoke Circus, so it was good to complete the set and make the more casually attired Xander Armstrong sit directly underneath an unforgiving spotlight. (They get a high class of guest on the new 6 Music - Shaun Keaveny had Dara O'Briain in at breakfast, and George has Terry Gilliam in on Wednesday. We used to be more than happy with the drummer from Razorlight and the man who'd written a book about Eminem in my day.) Is it wrong of me to get this comfortable behind the desk there? Is it? I can't help it. I woke up this morning feeling under the weather due to the change in seasons, and the sheer adrenalin of live radio, pressing the buttons, riding the fader, trundling around on my swivel chair, reading out texts and backtiming Down In The Tube Station At Midnight up to the news literally cured me of my ills.

Yellowbellies

2009-10-03T00:47:00.005+01:00

The 84th Collings & Herrin Podcast, recorded in front of a broadminded audience old enough to remember Panini sticker albums in the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre (or LPAC), in Lincoln, in Lincolnshire, is now available to everyone who didn't have the commitment to travel to Lincoln to hear it being recorded. And to the patient people of Lincoln - and Ipswich and Preston - who did. After warming the crowd up with my version of stand-up and actual stand-up, and a 20-minute interval, we came back on with the laptop, sat down and did what we are now increasingly doing across the country: make things up for an hour, 6 minutes and 35 seconds and expect people to pay for it. In the podcast, during which you can either imagine the two of us [above] wearing our new official merchandise (Richard in a limited edition t-shirt design that has been mysteriously discontinued), or imagine looking into the faces of these people [below], we discuss the death of New Labour (now available as a wallchart courtesy of the Sun), the hairy ape lady, Richard Littlejohn and the "Bin Police", Michael Jackson's autopsy and make the audience feel special by constantly referring to aspects of Lincoln's history and what it is the capital city of.

We did a Q&A after the podcast which may be made available in the future but for now remains only in the collective memory of Lincoln.

We would like to thank the people of Lincoln, especially the staff at LPAC and Shaun from the Lincoln Comedy Festival, which continues until the 6th with the likes of Josie Long, Stewart Lee, Gary Delaney and Pappy's Fun Club. A smart venue, big dressing room, clean toilets, excellent tech support, good publicity, nice bag of wine gums, three bottles of organic cider and a fine parade of people, many of them in what looked like monogamous relationships, at the merchandise stall afterwards, where Rich sold a ton of stuff and poured white wine on the money he made, and I wished I hadn't forgotten my box of audiobooks like an idiot as I gaily posed for photos with my comedy mentor and signed some tickets. A terrific night, topped off with a drink in the Holiday Inn Express bar like two middle-aged travelling salesmen.

What a Carve-Up!

2009-09-29T07:54:00.004+01:00

The great man of American letters and "blue-collar laureate" Raymond Carver is one of my favourite writers. The fact that a new book of his is - posthumously of course - being published in two weeks' time, grabs my attention. It's called Beginners and is in fact the original draft of what became his 1981 short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - the scoop being, his editor Gordon Lish cut and changed the work so much, the substantial edit itself has become a chattering point. This story ran exclusively in the New Yorker two years ago, with the original and the published versions of his stories going public for the first time*. Now it's a book you can buy. Anyway, Carver was covered twice, at great length, in two broadsheets this weekend.

In the Times on Saturday, Toby Litt began his piece:

"On July 8, 1980, at 8am, Raymond Carver began a letter to Gordon Lish, his editor. Carver, at that moment, was far from the revered literary figure that he would be at the time of his death, eight years later. He had published several books of poetry and one of short stories. At best, he was a respected figure within limited circles ..."

In the Observer on Sunday, Gaby Wood began her piece:

"At 8am on 8 July 1980, Raymond Carver sat down to write a letter to his editor, Gordon Lish. He'd been up all night worrying about the book they were working on together, and by the time Carver had finished writing there were more words in the letter than there were in many of the short stories for which he was known. 'Dearest Gordon,' it began ... "

I find it fascinating that in both, lengthy pieces (both excellent, by the way - go for Litt's if you want closer analysis of the "saintly" Carver from an academic perspective - he teaches at Birkbeck - and Wood's if you want an interview with Carver's widow Tess Gallagher) the writers began with exactly the same conceit, and exactly the same sentence. I wonder, if you'd sat me down with the same material in isolation, I'd have done the same. Actually, no, I would have started with, "Raymond Carver is one of the only authors I can quote, from memory ... blah, blah, blah, me, me, me ... "

*Incidentally, the New Yorker piece, from 2007, began:

"On the morning of July 8, 1980, Raymond Carver wrote an impassioned letter to Gordon Lish, his friend and editor at Alfred A. Knopf, begging his forgiveness but insisting that Lish 'stop production' of Carver's forthcoming collection of stories ... "

Maybe sometimes, there really is only one way to start a story. Although I suspect Gordon Lish would have had a few suggestions.

Shirt hits the fans

2009-09-23T10:30:00.006+01:00

Thanks to Steve Brown and Steve Newman, the men who created our iTunes ident (Steve Brown takes the photos, Steve Newman does the designs), we are now able to offer a whole stupid range of Collings & Herrin t-shirts, via this fantastic site MySoti, who basically print them to order using DTG - Direct To Garment - printing, so no overheads, and no warehouses full of unsold t-shirts with NYUM NYUM NYUM on them. Other slogans include ANDREW COLLINGS IS A FUCKING IDIOT, RICHARD HERRING IS A FUCKING IDIOT, ASK ME ABOUT THE MITFORD SISTERS, MAH FAVOURITE T-SHIRT and I'M SECRET DANCING RIGHT NOW, but keep refreshing the special "shopfront" page for collingsherrin designs. I think Richard and I stand to make pence from this venture, but since it's no-risk, what the hell?

Personally, I wouldn't be seen dead in a t-shirt with either my face or Richard Herring's face on it, but if you are mentally ill, knock yourself out.

Battlestar Galactica = Art

2009-09-22T23:52:00.005+01:00

Ever since Friday, when I saw the fascinating Futurism exhibition at the Tate Modern (now finished, sadly), I've been meaning to do this: above, The Rock Drill, a Vorticist sculpture by Jacob Epstein, created in 1914; below, a Cylon, from the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, created in 2003 and designed I believe by Pierre Drolet. (I'm currenly working my way through BSG, as the kids call it, and I think it's possibly one of the greatest US TV series ever made.) Anybody else see any similarities in these two striking images, taken from the best part of a century apart?

On the road

2009-09-22T10:29:00.004+01:00

You too can be as happy as these people. There are now three, non-Scottish live C&H podcast dates to put in your diary, albeit two in the same town, which is greedy of Brighton, but hey, it's a great comedy town and it's where all our gay fans live.

Tickets for our full variety spectacular (podcast, Q&A, plus solo stand-up, inc. Secret Dancing, merchandise buying/signing love-in) at the Lincoln Comedy Festival on Friday October 2 are selling fast, but go here if you wish to join in. (This will, in fact, be Podcast 84 - sorry about the longish gap between today's and the next one, but Richard is taking a well-earned holiday between then and now, and I'm not.)

Your next chance to come and be part of the magic and maybe appear in a blurry photo taken on my Mac is in Brighton, part of the excellent Brighton Comedy Fringe (a kind of modest but worth-supporting alternative to the Brighton Comedy Festival, with which it crosses paths): it's Friday October 16, at 7pm, and will be just the hour-long podcast show. It's Upstairs at the Three and Ten, 10 Steine Street, Brighton BN2 1TE (box office: 07800 983 290, or book online here). Smaller venue, so book early.

Our next concrete date is also in Brighton (although not yet booking, but go there to see a film in the meantime anyway) is at the magnificent Duke Of York's Picturehouse. We return to the scene of May's triumphant first ever full show (with podcast, Q&A, plus stand-up, Secret Dancing, full English), for more of the same on Tuesday December 8.

We'll try to book some more dates in other towns and cities over the next few months, as they are fun for us to do, and it seems that those not in attendance are happy to download them. If you run a venue, can attract enough people who might get what the podcast is all about and would like to book us, get in touch.

Diversion

2009-09-21T13:58:00.006+01:00

In a first for Collings & Herrin - if not a first for Robert Llewellyn, but we're not in competition with him - we present our first ever on-the-road podcast, recorded in Richard's car on the M4 yesterday morning, heading West to his parents' house in Cheddar. We've not established whether this is illegal or ever dangerous, but it does mean that we don't specifically refer to anything in the newspapers, as Richard is driving a car on a motorway, and I can't read in a car without feeling travel sick. This is among the points of discussion, as well as 21-year-old Alesha Dixon versus 102-year-old Arlene Philips, the shocking amount of Cheddar cheese we import from other EU countries, Battlestar Galactica (the 1978 one) and the "Suicide Bummer" (as seen in the Sun, and headlined as such). You will also hear points of interest noted along our journey, such as certain junctions, a sign saying "LOG HOTLINE", something on fire just outside Reading, and a Herman Miller office furniture lorry. Don't want to give too much away!

The Three Show

2009-09-18T08:34:00.002+01:00

Alright, my theory is shot to hell. I was seriously thinking about writing a book called The One Show, in which my pathetic TV career stretches to appearing as a guest on every programme on television but only once - Newsnight Review, The Wright Stuff, Richard & Judy, What The Dickens on Sky Arts 2 - but BBC1's dastardly The One Show have ruined everything. I have only ever been asked to present an item once, but now I have contributed to two further items, the latest being one on Dan Brown, which aired yesterday. This was a lot of fun, despite me not feeling very well (the adrenalin of TV usually perks me up when I'm required to shine - I'm sure this is not good for long-term recovery, but it's a medical reality), and Gyles Brandreth and I mucked about a bit in Waterstone's on Piccadilly, with one bit of business about the Masonic handshake actually being left in the edit. Anyway, it's just a few moments in the limelight in a too-low chair, but it's traditional now for me to present a few screengrabs, and it will annoy Richard Herring, so here goes.

The Da Versity Code

2009-09-17T17:14:00.003+01:00

Our 82nd podcast comes in the form of a Dan Brown-style mystery - we call it The Da Versity Code. What governmental/church conspiracy is afoot? At around 52 minutes into the podcast, a perfectly harmless section about Britain's Got Talent-winning dance troupe Diversity visiting Gordon Brown at number 10, Downing Street causes the laptop to stop recording - thus, all trace of this two or three-minute routine is lost forever. Still, the rest of it will compensate. This podcast is not sponsored the Beatles Rock Band video game, as Richard paid the full price for his. We just happen to be playing on it before and after the recording, and in the accompanying photograph, with the combined age of 86. Elsewhere, it's the mystery rapist, the thrill of Great Yarmouth, the death of Keith Allen, Andrew's asthma, a mistaken "nyum nyum" signal from Guardian TV writer Sarah Dempster and some plugs for the Lyric gig at Hammersmith, still some tickets left.

Race against time

2009-09-15T14:15:00.003+01:00

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown was released to the media at midnight, ready to be snapped up by the book-buying public from whatever time the shops opened this morning. A hardback copy was dispatched from the publisher Transworld (where, it is said, only four people had read it) by motorcycle courier, to my house. I signed for it at approximately 1.15am, having already been asleep, in preparation. I started reading what is a 510-page novel at approximately 1.18am. I reached about a third of the way through before requiring a nap. I had a nap. I woke up and carried on reading, aware that the Times required a 600-word review by "as soon as I could do it" today - chiefly because they wanted to beat their competitors to a full review on their website. I took the book on public transport as I travelled in to the Robert Langdon-style British Library to write my 600 words. I speed-read bits of it, in order to reach the end before making my judgement. I delivered my review, at just over 600 words (unprofessional, but it will be edited for the page; this was for the website), at just before midday. I had completed my quest in under 11 hours. The review is now online - although a frustrating 90 minutes passed between delivery and publication, during which some rapid-fire sub-editing made a nonsense of two sentences, but most of what I wrote survived intact. I am very proud to have written the review of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol for the Times. I'm not quite sure how it happened, and I only found out I was doing it at 5pm yesterday in Caffe Nero. If it doesn't make me a proper journalist, I think it makes me a proper book reviewer. You can read my review if you want to know what I thought of The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, but in precis: it's not as good as The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, even though it follows an identical pattern. I am a bit tired.

Giving

2009-09-12T15:08:00.003+01:00

So, two charity books I have selflessly and magnanimously contributed to are just about to be published with an eye on the Christmas gift market, and the least I can do is point you in their direction. Both launched in London on Thursday - although I only managed to attend one of the launches, because it was at Number 10, Downing Street and I am shallow like that.

One of the nice things about being a published author is that you are often asked to write things for no money. You are flattered to be asked; the shrill inner voice of egotism and the baritone of realism combine to convince you that seeing your words printed in someone else's book is suddenly far likelier than seeing them printed in your own, and that seeing your words printed anywhere is a pleasant, if fleeting thrill. Which is why I agreed to contribute to Modern Delight, published exclusively through Waterstone's (Faber, £9.99), and with all proceeds going to Dyslexia Action, and the London Library; and Grandparents (Ebury, £9.99), the third book, followings Mums and Dads, compiled by and intended to make money for Piggy Bank Kids, Sarah Brown's charity.

The former is a modern update of Delight by JB Priestley, published in 1949, which sought out 114 instances of simple pleasure (the Marx Brothers; a walk in the woods) at a time when Britain was beset by bombed, postwar gloom and the author was having some teeth out. The Waterstone's edition collects mini-essays on the same from writers as various and crowd-pleasing as Stephen Fry, Nick Hornby, India Knight, Jeremy Paxman and Clive James. I wrote 400 words on the Pied Wagtail, which begins, "They say that the Devil is in the details. If so, then surely God is in the wagtails." (Beat that for a forced pun, Clive James!)

The latter is a far cosier anthology of pieces about, yes, one's grandparents, penned for no money by a broad sweep of contributors, from Martha Kearney, Alan Titchmarsh and the Archbishop of Canterbury to Jimmy Carr, Lorraine Kelly and Paul Dacre. Bill Bryson's in there too, but it's an appropriate extract from his memoir, not a newly-written piece. Still, kudos to him for turning up - and adding considerable literary weight and star power - to the launch.

You may recall that, by contributing to Piggy Bank Kids' previous book, Dads, I was invited to its launch, last Valentine's Day, at Sarah Brown's house: Number 10, Downing Street. This was an evening affair, and star-studded (click here for a full guest list) - all party politics aside, a memorable event with champagne flowing and Joanna Lumley. My second visit was to be an afternoon-tea kind of affair, so less glamorous and boozy, although I had rather hoped for a better celebrity turnout, if only for the sake of my Dad. You might say I should have taken my Dad to the Dads launch, but he was there in spirit - in my essay for the book - and anyway, I had no idea that a nonchalant walk up Downing Street would become an annual occasion. (Charlie Higson took his dad to the Dads launch, by the way, but most took their spouses and partners, as did I.) No matter! It was great to be able to spread the Downing Street love around this year, and my Dad came down to London especially. Even though I was an old hand at walking up Downing Street, it was exciting again to push past the stupid public and be allowed through the big gates to wander up the most famous non-fictional street in Britain, having put our bags through the police X-ray machine.

No mobile phones or cameras were allowed inside Number 10, so I was unable to Tweet or surreptitiously snap the inside of the Downing Street toilets, and since no press photographers were granted access either, it actually felt, once again, like a private do. Sarah Brown spoke eloquently about the charity, we all stood around and held cups and saucers in the rooms where so many world statesmen have also stood around holding cups and saucers, and everybody craned their necks to subtly check out who else was there. I was disappointed that so many of the book's bigger names didn't bother to turn up (Kelly, Titchmarsh, Alex Ferguson, Fiona Bruce, Annie Lennox, Rowan Williams) - perhaps some of them are blase about going up the famous stairs and looking at all the former Prime Ministers? Perhaps they had better things to do on a Thursday afternoon? I certainly didn't, and nor did my Dad. It was surreal to be in that famous house, nibbling tiny meringues and wondering who the very elderly lady in the wheelchair was. (We have since decided it must have been Denis Healey's wife Edna.)

Of course, last time, it being an evening do, Gordon Brown turned up, without fanfare, and had an after-work beer among us. I expect he was working on Thursday afternoon, trying to think up ways of taxing the middle classes and allowing the bankers to give themselves obscene bonuses. Dad and I had a pleasant two hours at Number 10, chatting with my actor friends Michael Simkins and his wife Julia Deakin (yes, Marsha off of Spaced!), and regaling them with what Jimmy Carr had said to us when we first walked in. Ever the comedy imp, he shook my Dad's hand and said, "Have you got the drugs? Because Andrew says you're usually holding." My Dad took this in good spirit and I enjoyed the risque nature of Jimmy's opening gambit.

Just as we were leaving, we bumped into the genius British filmmaker Paul Greengrass, he of the best two Bourne films and instantly recognisable long hair. Dad and I had been enthusing about United 93 in Costa beforehand, which we had both watched on TV, so I introduced us to Paul Greengrass and we were able to enthuse about it to his face. He seemed grateful for our praise at the top of the stairs. I certainly liked the idea that my Dad could come down to London from Northampton for the afternoon and wind up shaking hands with the man who had written and directed the very film he had seen on TV two nights before. Dreams can come true, as long as they are sensible and achievable dreams based on being introduced to a man most people wouldn't even recognise in the street.

Modern Delight was being launched at the London Library directly after our Downing Street experience, but Dad is not a serial ligger - and nor, frankly, am I any more - so we had some Italian food and he took the train home.

As I said, there is no photographic evidence that the Downing Street event ever took place (they didn't even send out posh invites this year - credit crunch). I could be making the whole thing up, like Derren Brown Mind Control, but I am not. Jimmy Carr really did accuse my Dad of carrying cocaine and I really did see Trevor Beattie, Patti Boulaye, Bill Bryson, Emma Freud and Kathy Lette in the same room.

Get Lost

2009-09-11T11:13:00.004+01:00

At last, the 15-minute film I made for Bafta about Lost when its creators Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse and Jack Bender were in town in July is online (along with six other clips from the Bafta masterclass; they're all on YouTube too). It's nice to see the finished little film and to pretend to be a TV presenter again, for a bit. If you don't have the time to watch it, here are the presenting highlights: me standing outside a cinema; me standing on a roof; me standing on a roof, but shot from the ground; me leaning over the back of a cinema seat to interview a man; me pulling a funny face and walking into a cinema. What a pro.

Mind Control

2009-09-09T17:02:00.002+01:00

In this, the 81st Collings & Herrin podcast, we attempt the impossible: to make it even better than last week's absolute classic. Along the way, we discuss popular boys' names from Jack to Mohammed; the etiquette of going along to see Calendar Girls onstage in the West End; the etiquette of half falling asleep during a massage; the dangers of being the Radio Times Film Editor; and the likelihood of Derren Brown Mind Control picking the winning Lottery numbers TONIGHT without first buying all the Lottery tickets. We also manfully resist the urge to pack the podcast in early and go and play with Richard's Beatles Rock Band game, just to see if John Lennon would really like it were it explained to him on the steps of the Dakota Building in 1980. We also suggest a potentially funny scene that any future filmmaker dramatising the life of Josef Fritzl can use if they want to. Alright, I do. I am a div.

Plugs: Al Murray, Al McGowan, Wilson Dixon, Naz Osmanoglu and Richard Herring at the Lyric, Hammersmith, September 20: book here. Collings & Herrin Live Podcast at the Lincoln Comedy Festival, October 2: book here. Collings & Herrin Live Podcast at the Duke Of York's cinema, Brighton. December 8: tickets don't appear to be available yet. Richard Herring's As It Occurs To Me traitor podcast shows, Leicester Square Theatre, every Monday from October 12: book here if you want the Collings & Herrin Podcast to end

There is an answer in the sky

2009-09-07T13:38:00.002+01:00

Deck the halls with boughs of atheism. The ironically godlike Robin Ince is once again curating a run of gigs at London's splendid Bloomsbury Theatre in December: The Return of Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People. Except this year, it runs for five nights: 15-19 December. Tickets are now on sale, even though the bill is not finalised. Buy them anyway. It's like Glastonbury: the bill is of secondary importance. Robin will definitely be on. Last year, I was honoured to be placed on the bill alongside ... that's physically alongside if not comedically or musically or professionally ... the likes of Tim Minchin, Stewart Lee, Josie Long, Phill Jupitus, Ricky Gervais, Luke Haines, Robyn Hitchcock and many, many more (and Richard Herring), and enjoyed every greasepaint-smelling minute of both nights, onstage and off. I took it on the chin that I was not chosen to play the added date at what I still call the Hammersmith Odeon - I think it would have been a bit surreal anyway, and I may have suffered from the live performance bends: too much, too fast, too soon. (Although I had played the Bloomsbury before, when David Quantick, Stuart Maconie and I supported Lloyd Cole in 2003: a surreal moment in all our lives, and one which laid to rest the preposterous notion that Lloyd has no sense of humour.)

Robin is still in the process of putting the bill together, and put the call out on 6 Music yesterday for suggestions for musical guests, but he has confirmed that I will be appearing on Thursday December 17, and possibly other nights, too, if they don't get too crowded. But these bills are not about individuals - even last year's surprise star guest, Ricky Gervais - they are about the cumulative effect of atheistic joy and song. You don't have to be one of them there militant atheists to get in, either. I'm certainly not one. And proceeds go to the Rationalist Association, who put out New Humanist magazine, which, unlike many militant atheists, has a sense of humour. And a sense of human.

WTF?

2009-09-05T16:31:00.003+01:00

Thanks to Sophie and to Andrew Browne (who made the grab) for drawing my attention to this strange caption, which appeared on BBC1 on Friday night. First of all, can't BBC caption writers place apostrophes? And second, what is Andrew Collin's Film Of The Week? It appears to be coming up after Pulp Fiction, which, oddly, I did make Film Of The Week in that week's Radio Times. Can the two be connected? And if so, why is my Film Of The Week coming up "later"? Or, is there a man called Andrew Collin, and does he have a Film Of The Week slot on BBC1? If anyone can explain, I'd be enormously grateful

Giant Robot Versus No-Legged Puppy

2009-09-03T16:07:00.004+01:00

After Saturday's "dummy" podcast (and we must have been dummies to actually release it), today's can rejoin the numbering system and call itself Collings & Herrin Podcast 80. We haven't split up, Oasis style, and we're back in West London, under the Velux window in Richard's attic, firing on a number of cylinders. Actually, it's just alright, but you will get to hear Richard having a go at many comedians and writers more famous than himself - and at one stage wishing four of them dead, Stewart Lee/Richard Hammond style! - and the unveiling of a new, defining metaphor for our comedic podcast relationship, but I won't spoil it. Among the big news stories: Kelvin McKenzie's sick, Libyan bomber-based bet at William Hill, the fate of the mysterious "Chloe", the tiny roll of flab that's taking over the world, and Jamie Oliver's accidental Mexican drug rampage. We're really sorry for last week.

Result

2009-09-01T14:05:00.003+01:00

I received a certain amount of stick on the live podcasts for drawing attention to the fact that, according to the media, only pretty girls got their A-level results two weeks ago. It's a little bit after the event, but I've only just found this - so thanks to the Guardian for pictorially collating the newspaper coverage, proving without a doubt that I was correct. Mostly blonde girls, too.

Outranked

2009-08-30T17:10:00.004+01:00

This is the reason I was back in Edinburgh for 24 hours: to chair a session at the Media Guardian Edinburgh Television Festival at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre - my first time at this annual event. I arrived and picked up my delegate's pass at 11.3o this morning, and was out of there by 2.3o, sort of wishing I'd spent more time there, gassing with TV types. The event went off smoothly: a 30-year career retrospective with Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin, currently riding high at the BBC with Outnumbered, but still best remembered for Drop The Dead Donkey, and before that, Who Dares Wins - which I used to love, although a rights issues means it has never been repeated or released on DVD. I'd met them for a preliminary meeting in London, so I was very comfortable around them - plus, they are very nice men, with many fine cautionary stories to tell. There's a short clip of the session here. Andy does most of the talking. (I liked it when he said they'd never written or pitched anything with a specific audience in mind. Why? "We outrank them.") I like chairing events like this with people I admire. It's easy - that's probably why I agreed to do it for nothing but a free First Class rail ticket and a night in a presentable hotel with a moody bathroom. Although I failed to give them the cue to tell the Les Dawson anecdote, which I've actually forgotten now, but I can assure you was very funny.

I did bump into a few TV types in the Loft Bar of the Gilded Balloon last night, where I was out drinking with Iain Morris, co-creator of The Inbetweeners, and Simon Wilson, of BBC Comedy. I met Adrian Chiles and told him I admired his work, because I do (and I wasn't drunk), but he was itching to gey away from me. Fair enough. I also met Jimmy Carr, although not for the first time (he and Iain go way back, and the first I heard of Iain was as Jimmy's sidekick on XFM) - we first met at the Fringe in 2001, and he sweetly remembered this. (I say sweetly because he is very famous, and the very famous can be very different from the not-famous you met eight years ago. He had nothing to gain from being nice to me other than the satisfaction of being nice.) Michael McIntyre was also in the bar, but we were not introduced. That's enough namedropping anyway. More importantly, I saw two further Fringe shows, which were an added incentive to coming back to this fine city on Media Guardian's shilling:

Pappy's Fun Club at the Pleasance One, a sizeable venue, which they have been selling out, suggesting they are on the verge of something. But I'm not sure how easy it would be to bottle and package the joyous DIY energy of their show. That's what's so appealing about it: you have to be there. It manages to combine the surreal silliness of Vic and Bob with the bouncing-up-and-down spirit of a Footlights-style revue, all the while revelling in its own threadbare amateurism, and yet capable at any moment of going off on one. It's a tremendous hour of fun, which isn't as anarchic and plotless as it as first seems. (And if you've seen it, you'll know why the mention of Dean is funny.) Then we saw Justin Moorhouse at the Pleasance Dome, the closest I've come this Fringe to an old school northern club comic. Justin is best known outside the circuit for Phoenix Nights and Looking For Eric, but he comes into his own in front of a mic, mixing unreconstructed gags about regional differences and dwarves with more thoughtful stuff based on the seven plots in a book about storytelling that he hasn't read. But at heart he's there to make audiences laugh at jokes. Which he does. I bust a gut at some of his stuff. He's a natural.

So, that's Edinburgh 2009. I failed to see the Angel Of The North from the train home for the fourth time in seven days, despite actually sitting on the correct side of the train. Here are my photos of me not seeing it. Proof that it does not exist.

Can you see the disappointment in my little face? I thought it existed. I believed the hype.

Spot the deliberate mistake

2009-08-29T17:56:00.004+01:00

WARNING: may cause drowsiness. In this special, uncalled-for, extra, bonus, rubbish stopgap podcast, nominally called Number 79.5 and recorded in my Edinburgh Television Festival-paid-for hotel room against our better judgement, we allow tiredness and Fringe-fatigue and sudden lack of audience energy to undermine our razor-sharp topical observations and Maurice Gran-standard one-liners. We just about manage to comment upon the bad man in California, Anne Robinson's new smile, Ronnie Biggs and the Monopoly connection, the end of the NHS "flasher" gown and Amanda Platell (not the end of, but she has a column in the Saturday Mail, which we don't usually cover). It sounds like we have jetlag, and there's a weird gap at around 45 minutes. If you've never listened to our podcast, PLEASE DO NOT START HERE! If you have, and loyally sit through it, it almost picks up in the last ten minutes. Almost. We promise a return to form next week.

(Incidentally, it was only after we'd finished that we realised what went wrong: we sat the wrong way round. See: picture. What were we thinking!?)

The death of everything

2009-08-28T10:33:00.002+01:00

I had the misfortune to read the diary of Pixie Lott in today's Guardian. I was drawn to reading it by the fact that they splashed big on this "exclusive" in their usually trustworthy Film & Music supplement with a huge picture of this young lady, and I took this to mean that she mattered in some way. Also, and I'm not playing dumb here, I had no idea who she was, or that she'd had a number one hit. (I didn't even know she was a singer when I first saw her name, although the name itself had crossed my radar somehow. I certainly didn't know she was British.)

So, I read her diary - and you may do the same here - which appears to cover two and a half months, from June to August, during which the Essex princess plays an industry showcase, goes to LA for an awards ceremony, makes a video, answers some stupid questions from "European journalists", has her photo taken, goes abroad again, Tweets Little Boots, gets bronchitis and plays the V Festival: "Last year I camped there and I loved the whole experience, although it rained in the morning so I rang home because I only live 15 minutes away and I was like, 'Dad, can you come and pick me up?'"

Except it's not a diary at all, it's an interview conducted by Paul Lester dishonestly presented as a diary, as if perhaps Pixie Lott wrote it or something. Anyway, it's not Pixie Lott who offends me, yeah? (I've since listened to her number one hit and it could have been made by anybody - this is hardly front-page news in R&B-based pop music.) I'm offended by the fact that the Guardian thinks I should be interested in this bubbly, 18-year-old stage-school brat. If ever an artist needed some context, it's Pixie Lott, who instead appears fully-formed in my newspaper, as if I should already know about her and care. Unless the whole thing's an elaborate pisstake? I mean, listen to this:

"I'd love to move to London, somewhere central, near the action, where it's busy and buzzy. I'm looking a bit 1960s today. Sometimes I dress more indie, or I might be hippieish, or classic and designery, or vintage - it depends how I feel. Nothing fazes me. That's just my personality."

Pixie Lott is 18. God help us if there's a war.

Senator Kennedy dies

2009-08-26T11:20:00.002+01:00

Before Senator Edward Kennedy selfishly died, aged 77, Richard Herring's big Hitlery face dominated the main BBC website homepage. (As Jim Bob commented on Twitter: "Could it be any bigger?") I took a grab of it, and I'm glad I did now, as Hitler is history. (You can read the story here - which, incidentally, has some very reasonable, positive, urbane comments at the end, a credit to either the moderators, or to the class of person who reads the BBC website.)