Disaster Film Olympiad: Countdown To Looking Glass

Countdown To Looking Glass is an unlikely name for a film but it has a similarly unlikely premise: financial instability caused by a banking collapse suddenly intensifies the significance of a regional dispute in the Middle East, one that quickly descends into a proxy war between the Soviet Union and NATO forces which threatens to spill over into a global conflagration. None of this could ever happen.

As the new Soviet-backed, some say puppet, regime get down to business in Oman, the Western news media swing into action to help placate and inform the viewing trillions. The responsible souls of the major news outlets understand the significance of their role and would never dream of trying to spread panic or propaganda. They are our true heroes.

The disaster movie-as-faux-real-time-news-coverage is not an unusual concept, nor did it begin with Countdown To Looking Glass - 1983's Special Bulletin is a notable earlier example. However, Countdown has a few interesting twists and tweaks to the format designed to keep things fresh and interesting. Firstly, they engage the services of real life contributors: veteran American TV news stalwarts Eric Sevareid and Nancy Dickerson both appear as themselves as a senior analyst and senior reporter respectively. Additional opinion is provided by US Senator (and five-time former Presidential candidate) Eugene McCarthy, defence analyst Lincoln Bloomfield and Congressman (and all-round right wing diarrhoea cannon) Newt Gingrich. Although it is perhaps debatable as to the exact degree which each of the above understood what was actually going on, it nevertheless adds an interesting vérité to proceedings.

Don Tobin reports in Countdown To Looking Glass, shortly before kissing his ass goodbye

The second change to the format is that the real time news coverage is broken up by portions of melodrama, dealing with the real lives of both the lead anchor Don Tobin (played by Canadian news veteran Patrick Watson) and Washington reporter Dorian Waldorf (Helen Shaver). We watch on day by day as an increasingly anxious Tobin yaks on to his wife about the likely outcome of the unfolding crisis and, more significantly for the story, we see Waldorf's romantic relationship with a White House staffer lead to exclusives, high anxiety and heartbreak. Having gone to the trouble of getting real world contributors to weigh in on an entirely fictional story, these soap opera-style interludes could have been an eccentric move on the part of the producers. But oddly, it works: Shaver's story in particular has some very interesting and incisive points to make about the way that news events and the news media have become so interdependent as to have become self-sustaining; the exclusive story she uncovers from inside the Oval Office seems to have the potential to help defuse the spiralling situation only to be held back by the station's editorial policy.

It's all so grindingly predictable. This would ordinarily make for a damning condemnation of any film, but in this case it is not: the unfolding news coverage portions of the piece are done well enough that any despondency you feel tends to be despondency at the worst excesses of global politics and its vainglorious pride, its high ideals at the expense of the lives of its people. Sobering stuff, not least when - on the cusp of a nuclear exchange in the Strait of Hormuz - Newt Gingrich justifies the action as being crucial to the United States' vital stewardship of freedom and democracy around the world. Gallingly, this is something which required no acting talent at all on the Congressman's part because it also happens to be what Gingrich (in company with all of his contemporaries on the right of American politics) really thinks. Thanks, America.

Countdown To Looking Glass gets a spine tingling EIGHT out of ten Disaster Points.

Disaster Film Olympiad: Flight 90: Disaster on the Potomac

Strange though it may seem, real-life disaster tends not to be a particularly fertile ground for the creation of disaster movies. Reality tends to either be too tame for entertainment or too horrific for imagining, plus it has the unfortunate habit of continually confounding any conventional narrative structure, through its dedication to happenstance and dumb luck. It's more of a challenge to build a decent story arc when historical accuracy dictates that the character you have spent time establishing has a date with destiny at prescribed stage in events. Yet take too many liberties and your film isn't worth a brass farthing: a disaster film can either trade on its creativity or its adherence to reality, there's really no in-between.

Flight 90: Disaster On The Potomac's hands were tied from the beginning. The decision of whose stories to feature has already been taken by history, the ascription of the values that arose from them a done deal. The result is an odd mixture: the preamble is a bit boring, but only in the way that everyday life can be a bit boring. The drama is fraught and tense, but no more so than the historical event on which it is based. Essentially you are left with a compromise: either a news report with additional characterisation or a soap opera with limited dramatic license.

The event on which the film was based took place in Washington DC in January 1982. Air Florida's Flight 90 was scheduled to fly from the capital to Tampa, Florida. The weather was as wintry as a January day in Washington is wont to be, and take off was delayed by an hour and three-quarters due to snow and ice. This was not good news for the real people involved in this incident but its value to the screenwriter cannot be understated: a delay is prime territory for expositional dialogue. Lives are fleshed out and the stakes made abundantly clear. Were I a normal person, I would surely have started to relate to these people, their hopes and dreams.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, the pilots of Flight 90 were inexperienced at dealing with such arctic conditions and their failure to properly de-ice the wings prior to take-off led to the deaths of 74 of the 79 people on board. Their hobbled aeroplane failed to reach adequate speed on the runway, stalled and swiped into the 14th Street Bridge, killing an additional four people stuck on the ground in a snowbound Washington DC traffic jam. The Boeing 737 ended up in the frozen Potomac River below, as though it were nought but a common salmon. The stragglers bob to the surface and their battle for survival begins.

The film is fairly formulaic, cheap and cheesy stuff but it makes a number of key decisions which perhaps raise it above other examples of its type. Most notable amongst these is the fact that the crash itself is not graphically reconstructed: a neat reminder that this is a character piece rather than a Hollywood blockbuster, that each of the characters you are watching was a person you might have bumped into on the street not two years before had life taken a few different turns. The fact that five of the people involved in the accident still were people you could bump into on the street is the film's real point for celebration, rather than any florid displays of special effects mayhem. It's an admirable decision, one which arguably costs the film in terms of its overall effectiveness but saves its soul.

Alternatively you could forget everything I just said and look at the official movie poster. Cor lummy.

It is not, by any means, a great film. It is not really a good film or a bad film, either. As a faithful account of a traumatic day and as a memorial to the good in humanity that such days tend to reveal, it does pretty much everything that you would assume it should. Flight 90: Disaster On The Potomac gets FIVE out of ten disaster points.

The Joy of Doing Stuff

I've been watching a lot of woodworking videos on YouTube recently. No, wait, come back.

A while ago I found a rich seam of old motor racing documentaries on YouTube. They were mostly from the 1980s and almost always narrated by Martin Jarvis. In spite of the fact they were about racing cars, however, the thing which I enjoyed the most was watching a bunch of Midland craftsmen carving, from mahogany, a wooden former for the casting of a new engine block. The sight, sound and skill of it were mesmerising. Always a wise owl, I wondered if perhaps there might be some more examples of woodworking for me to watch on the site.

Of course, there were, as everything ever made is now on YouTube. It is by some margin the greatest site on the internet, ever. So, this is how I came to start watching a lot of YouTube videos about woodworking.

I can't particularly explain why I have been watching these videos. They are, for one thing, mostly tutorials and I have no particular interest in the practical side of woodwork. Make no mistake, if someone has a load of nice sharp tools and wood ready for me to have a wallop about with, I'd be in there like a shot. But to commit to making it happen for myself, the thought has never really crossed my mind. My last experience of woodwork came in Design & Technology class, which I stopped doing when I chose my subjects for GCSE in 1994. The ultimate result of this was a lot of unfinished crap and one tetanus shot.

And yet, I've been watching a lot of woodworking videos on YouTube recently. Hours and hours of them. I believe there is a basic desire in every human being to make things. To watch a craftsman produce a tangible object is extraordinarily, if often inexplicably, satisfying thing to do. But more than just satisfying. There is something profound in it. Something which is closer to the soul than our conscious brain can properly understand.

Paul Sellers demonstrates the advantages of his weapon of choice, the no. 4 smoothing plane

I quickly found a favourite producer of YouTube videos. It is Paul Sellers. Paul Sellers is a 60-year old British furniture maker and master craftsman with 45 years of experience and all the necessary tools to share and impart this knowledge. His videos are sometimes short affairs - mythbusting, tool maintenance or useful techniques - and sometimes hours and hours of masterclasses, where the viewer could, if they wanted to, make the piece along with him. The first video of his that I watched teaches how to carve a spoon using simple hand tools and I was absolutely hooked from the first axe cut.

Sellers is the teacher of your dreams in these videos. Calm, unambiguous, accomplished and authoritative without ever being steadfast, set in his ways or preachy. Plus, just the merest glance will tell you that he knows his stuff. What Mozart was to the pianoforte, Paul Sellers is to the Bailey-pattern number 4 bench plane. Coupled with the zen-like delivery - think Bob Ross, but with less happy clouds and more old-fashioned Salford common sense - I honestly think that anybody, of any walk of life and any set of interests, could happily lose themselves in his films.

I suppose that I am, too, a craftsman after a fashion. I, like Paul Sellers, have ploughed my own furrow in a world increasingly dominated by mechanical shortcuts and kept faith with traditional techniques. He does it with a lump of oak, I do it with bits of paper and pens. Although I may never necessarily do any woodwork, I have learned an awful lot from him. The importance of believing in your method. The fundamental seriousness of following your own vision. The simple joy of doing things rigorously, patiently and properly. These are basic lessons but also ones that strike at the very heart of learning about being human. I would like to thank him for that.

I recommend that you drop everything and indulge yourself in some Paul Sellers, right now: www.youtube.com/channel/UCc3EpWncNq5QL0QhwUNQb7w

My mates were on the telly

My mates were on the telly last night. This shouldn't be exciting any more. It's 2014, for a start. Nowadays, anyone can be famous if they want to be, and entirely on their own terms. Beauty and lifestyle vloggers from YouTube are now so pulsatingly popular that a public appearance has been known to bring Covent Garden to a standstill. Being on the telly shouldn't still be such a big deal.

My mates, who were on the telly last night

Another reason why my mates being on the telly shouldn't excite me any more is because it's 2014 and this means that I should be old enough to know better. The day before my mates were on the telly (which was last night) was my 34th birthday. I am old. And wizened. Bits of me hurt and other parts smell and I can never quite guarantee which bits are going to fall into which category. I am older now, in fact, than Pete was when I first met him. Pete is one of my mates (who were on the telly last night).

But guess what? Your mates being on the telly is still exciting. Thrillingly so.

We decamped to their local boozer in Hove for the hottest premiere that Sussex has seen since the Norman Invasion to watch. Any locals hoping to watch the Arsenal -West Ham Premier League match were squirrelled away in a room upstairs so as not to bother the people who were watching a televised gardening contest. But no matter, the atmosphere we all created was just as giddy as any communal pub football-watching experience of my life and far more good-natured. Opposing contestants were booed like pantomime villains, and when our heroes prevailed and won the preserves making test at the end, the roof came off. All told, having the gardening on instead of the football may appear to be a bold shift in conventional pub dynamics, but it was an unreservedly successful one. If nothing else, there was a buffet.

Next week my mates will be on the telly again. I'm not sure how I'll cope not watching it in a pub. For a start I won't know when to cheer. I'll probably have to make up all my own chants, too.

Your mates being on the telly is still exciting. However, it's not quite the same as it would have been in the past, because Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet and the internet has allowed the invention of Twitter. Twitter is an instant feedback sluice, a ceaselessly-flowing pipe of data and opinions, thoughts and feelings. Put another way, it's a shitfunnel, and this shitfunnel is going off in your face. Trepidatiously, I began to explore what other people were making of my mates being on the telly last night.

As I have mentioned before, I am now old. Old enough, at least, to not be surprised by people. And I've been on and around the internet for over a decade, so pretty much nothing shocks or offends me any more. So imagine my surprise when this was the very first tweet I saw on the subject:

hashtag: ponces

I wasn't surprised that people didn't like them per se, as we all know that not everyone is going to like you or like your friends. Also, television programmes are by their very nature never the whole picture. They are edited and re-ordered to fit a third party's view of what the narrative should be, with one eye always squarely on entertainment. Someone who doesn't like what they see of you on TV may be pleasantly surprised if they had to deal with you in real time.

I also wasn't surprised that someone who didn't like something had said so on Twitter. It is, after all, a shitfunnel and it's going off in your face. No, what surprised me is that I actually bristled. I bristled! How dare someone I don't know not like my mates (who were on the telly last night). He doesn't even know them! How can you dismiss someone without knowing all the facts?

Oh god, what was I doing?

Against my better judgement, I took another handful of blood pressure tablets and yomped in yet further. Predictably, there were just as many nice comments as nasty ones. Naturally, I found myself agreeing with these and growing increasingly convinced that the people tweeting them and I could grow to be firm friends.

This is, as far as I am concerned, the only rational response any human being could have had

Meanwhile, Lincoln WI approve. Summer Fetes in Spalding may have special guest jam judges this year

I think the positive comments very much outweighed the negatives in the end and so my researches were, on balance, a nice thing to do. My mates were on the telly last night but now they also represent many things to many people. They are everyman heroes, tweed-wearers of the year, nascent gay icons and the beards that just won't quit.

The only one of these things which started to niggle me, in fact, was the use of the word "hipster". "Hipster gardeners", "fashionably-bearded" and "hipster ponces" are all terms I have seen used. As I see it, "hipster" is just the fashionable term for people who try and be fashionable. Being fashionable is a reactive process, whereas Gary and Pete are proactive people. They don't look or dress like they do out of any notion of kowtowing to current trends. They are bringing sexy back on their own terms. Or, to put it another way, they're both too old to be hipsters. A hipster in their 40s would be a pathetic sight, and I think it's impossible to argue that either of our heroes is a pathetic individual. If nothing else, they kicked all your arses up and down that jam tent. Their bouquet was under-rated, too. Renaissance men. Upstanding men. Real men. There's no artifice or pretension there. So bloody shut up with the "hipster" thing, you idiots.

God.

I mean, I might be biased. Next week I will probably be watching the show on my own with Twitter open and I can't guarantee that I won't wade in to any number of futile internet arguments. If this experience has taught me anything, it's that I've learnt nothing and can't be trusted to be rational when there are Feelings floating about. Now, disclaimers out of the way, I'm off to find some more proper, constructive appraisals of last night's show.

It's possible, but they'd only be their own bits that they'd severed by mistake

This is the sort of unnerved feeling you get just before you realise it is, in fact, lust

If you would like to know or see more (and by the way, you definitely do and should) then you can follow my mates (who were on telly last night) on Twitter here: @vegetablismuk, like their Facebook page here: Vegetablism or read their website here: Vegetablism.co.uk. You can also watch them being on TV thanks to the wise owls at the BBC who invented the iPlayer: The Big Allotment Challenge episode 1

Compelling television

I've had an idea for a television series. I think it could prove to be one of the great spectacles of our time. It would be entertaining, provocative, must-see viewing for the general public as well as ticking all kinds of favourable boxes with television folk. Put simply, my idea is this: people with the same surnames as famous serial killers recreate their namesake's crimes.

It's easy to be dismissive of ideas as pungently brilliant as this one, but give it a little thought and the full spectacle of this programme should start to crystallise in your mind. This isn't just straightforward television designed to shock and appal, or to subtly reduce the number of immigrants and poor people in a way that would no doubt find favour within certain departments of our beloved government. This programme would instead run the full gamut of emotions and experiences craved by the increasingly sophisticated and choosy television viewer of the digital age.

Fred and Rose:
been there, done that

For a start, it would be a gritty psychological study. These people may not even want to do these crimes. They are only doing so because they are being filmed for television. The moral, emotional and psychological cost would be documented with video diaries and analysis by specialists.

Then, there's the educational aspect. Serial killers pock mark our history and any society's shared experience of life. We are fascinated by them and appalled by them in equal measure. They are us but different from us. Like gorillas. Each featured serial killer's story would be explained in both historical and sociological detail, to try and give the viewer a rounded view of the individual pathology as well as contextualising their actions within the time in which they lived.

The crimes themselves would, of course, be the main feature. These would be re-enacted as faithfully to the original deeds as is possible. They would be shocking, enthralling television. A genuine event with cultural resonances to be felt like ripples by the generations to come. Like the Coronation, but with an increased chance that someone involved might have earned it.

These would then be accompanied by sequences explaining how the evidence was disposed of and how the perpetrators will try and evade justice in order to kill again.

Because the police will not be party to these goings on. While this does rather hinder the possibility of there being a second series, the advantage in terms of narrative tension far exceeds its pitfalls. A television crew would be placed at the appropriate police force's headquarters under the aegis of making a fly-on-the-wall documentary series. From here we will see the investigation from both sides. As viewers, we'd be both the pursuer and the pursued. It would be above and beyond every thrilling finale or cliffhanger ending ever seen on television before.

Samuel and Timothy: lives about
to become complicated?

Of course, the exciting part would be in the casting. Celebrities with the same surname as famous serial killers would of course be attractive: father and son actors Timothy and Samuel West could recreate the crimes of Fred and Rosemary West, or the Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion Caroline Lucas could live the life of the matricidal one-eyed drifter Henry Lee Lucas. Steve Wright could be Steve Wright. But there's just as much value in letting members of the public be the protagonist (or antagonist - the programme would never be predictable). Indeed, there's even the delicious possibility that, in the cases of serial killers with rare or unusual surnames, that members of their own family would have to step in and fill the breach.

Television as demanding, ambiguous and real as this programme - working title "Naughty Namesakes" - comes along perhaps once in a lifetime. Innovative, enervative television. It would make Breaking Bad look like King Rollo.

In order to decide the best one at something inexplicable to me

There have been 32 Super Bowls during my lifetime and I have watched none of them. The first one was on January 25th 1981 and was called Super Bowl XV. This made me feel old until I remembered that America is particularly historically deprived. It turns out that the first Super Bowl did not happen until 1967, which is almost 1968. Super Bowl XV was held five days after the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as the 40th President of the United States, an event so unlikely I still can't believe it happened. Five days, too, after the release of the American hostages in Iran. The patriotic fervour obviously had a positive effect on the Oakland Raiders, who beat the Philadelphia Eagles 27-10. Both teams celebrated by not getting to another Super Bowl until the mid-2000s. Neither have won it since. Losers.

This is an American Football. It is the wrong shape,
but not for playing American Football with

Today's Super Bowl is called Super Bowl XLVII, which is Super Bowl 47 in normal. It is between the Baltimore Ravens, who are from Baltimore and the San Francisco 49ers who are from San Francisco and are also a sexual position. Five days ago North Korea launched a rocket for no particularly good reason and Ronald Reagan continued to be deceased, as he has been every day consecutively since June 5th 2004.

The American hostages returning from Iran: that's doing it a bit brown

But the most seismic event about Super Bowl XLVII is that I am going to watch it and finally find out what all the fuss is about. I hope that Beyoncé doesn't mime the half-time show. Or else they'll set OJ Simpson on her. And so tonight on my blog you will be able to join me as I try and understand what the hell is going on. Will one of the teams do it? Or will there be a penalty shoot-out? This will also be my first ever game of American Football, so everything is up for grabs. Will American Football turn out to be better or worse than Rugby League? This is a rhetorical question. No sport is worse than Rugby League.

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23.17 I have just emerged from what can only be described as a tactical disco nap and now I am READY TO GO.

23.19 What the hell is going on?

23.20 Apropos of nothing, this is day three of my 28-day vegetarian food-only diet. The food is nice but I am farting like a horse. Like a HORSE.

23.23 Perhaps this is why soccer has taken such a long time to get a foothold in the United States: the FA Cup final doesn't feature enough emotionally exploitative jingoistic singalongs.

23.24 Presumably some sort of sporting event is going to break out at any moment.

23.26 There is a spirited discussion of the talents of Baltimore's Ray Lewis which represents perhaps the most glowing assessment of any sportsman's ability I have heard in cases where they could easily be replaced by a side of beef, or an oak dresser.

23.30 OK, consider this the one-off, catch-all post regarding the way American sport serves television, whereas European sport is served by television. There. I said it.

23.32 Heavens, someone just kicked a ball. Now they're going to start beating up on each other.

23.33 They're going to have to replay the first down because of an illegal formation. Apparently. This is going to be a long night.

23.35 San Francisco are the red ones, right? This is an important tactical choice.

23.38 DRAMA. The Baltimore quarterback (Bauterback) just chucked the ball miles up the field. This could prove significant.

23.40 Offside. Will we sports fans ever be free?

23.41 TOUCHDOWN! Oh my word. It's my first ever touchdown. What an event. As the US networks celebrate with a hearty 20-minute commercial break, I get to reflect on Baltimore's quarterback and dashing number 5 shirt Joe Flacco who is chucking the ball about with some gusto. This time a man who is the biggest man I have ever seen caught it on some grass which is for some reason blue. Then the kicking man converted it, just like in a good old-fashioned rugger. It is Baltimore 7-0 San Francisco.

23.44 I could really go for some football now. That touchdown has got the blood running to my shoulder. How ironic that it should also have triggered a full-on infomercial marathon. The trouble with watching the Super Bowl on the BBC is that you can't possibly expect to have the same experience as viewers in the US. Advertisers invest so heavily in their Super Bowl commercials that they are almost a part of the game.

23.47 Football has started again. San Francisco provide an immediate piece of excitement with one of their players getting hold of the ball and legging it a full nineteen yards before he is flattened by a defender the size of a tree.

23.49 This game is beginning to remind me a lot of proper football, in that there is clearly a level of tactical nous and refinement at work here, but it is taking place at a level that goes right over my head. What I'm seeing on the field is total chaos. It's almost reassuring.

23.51 One innovation I would like to see in European sport is the way there are two completely different teams for if you're attacking or if you're defending. But on the flip-side, it would be deeply amusing to me to see all of the reedy sophisticated Pythagorian ball-players to also have to do all the defending, or the colossal lunatic fatties have to try and extrapolate a 45-yard pass to a moving target.

23.54 Field goal! San Francisco bum up a chance for a touchdown when their big fat player drops it in the end zone, but make up for it thanks to the piston-like boot of Jimmy Kickpuncher. Now in commercials. I am rapidly discovering that for the true gridiron purist, the worst thing that could possibly happen is that either side score. Because it means no more football for 5-10 minutes. Ho-hum. Baltimore 7-3 San Francisco.

00.01 The most significant thing in the build up to this match is that the teams are coached by two brothers. If only their parents had taught them the importance of sharing, none of this would be happening.

00.04 The Baltimore number 82 has preposterous hair. He reminds me a little of The Predator, who would almost certainly be a good American Football player.

00.06 I keep thinking about Charlie Brown.

00.07 According to the BBC studio analyst, football often looks like a game of chess. Which poses a series of questions.

00.08 If he'd said Twister, I'd be more inclined to believe him.

00.09 We're back under way! The startling innovation here is that they take shorter commercial breaks for the end of a quarter than they do for either team scoring. The equivalent in football would be to take a 20 minute break every time a player scored a goal. Which is how Aston Villa defend. #satire

00.11 I've not heard anyone say "23! 48! 72! Hike! Hike! Hut Hut Hut!" yet. I feel television has misled me.

00.12 These gentlemen are enormous. San Francisco's number 23 just tried to skilfully feint to turn his man and get away up the wing. His reward was to be clattered by a defender the size of a bison and drop the ball. So possession reverts to the other team. I think Isambard Kingdom Brunel would have enjoyed American Football.

00.15 A series of slow-motion replays are celebrating this tackle with glowing praise. In any other sport he would be subject to the most harsh criticism. But which is the right reaction? I think all sports should adopt one player who is allowed to defend in the fashion of Baltimore's monolithic number 91 shirt. But having loads of them on either team does seem a bit like overkill.

00.18 It's still Baltimore 7-3 San Francisco, which is making advertisers nervous.

00.19 Quarterbacks must have arms like pistons. I've been trying to figure out how far I reckon I could throw an American Football. It is not far. And that's without 2500lbs of gristle running at me at 10 mph.

00.21 TOUCHDOWN! The line of scrimmage was only two yards from the end zone, but the Ravens quarterback didn't let this fact dissuade him from making some plays and flinging the pigskin right into this shit. It was converted, too. Baltimore 14-3 San Francisco.

00.24 I wish I could see the commercials. I reckon I would enjoy the commercials more than a British Olympic rower explaining the completely inexplicable, i.e. why he supports the San Francisco 49ers. We're back under way, making everyone question why some gridiron players have a towel hanging out the back of their trousers like a tail. In a sport where the likelihood of a helmeted assailant grabbing hold of you is reasonably high.

00.30 This is where my total lack of understanding of the sport is a major handicap. A fight broke out, necessitating official intervention. But it looked so much like the regular gameplay I'm not sure how they called it.

00.33 Idea: combination All-American Aport. The meat of the game is like gridiron, but on either goalpost there is a basketball hoop for opportunistic 2- and 3-point shots. And one player at a time is allowed to wield a baseball bat.

00.35 Baltimoreterback Joe Flacco is so good at chucking the ball miles that he's gone all the way over the end zone several times. This time, The Predator was under it, legs going away like pistons, but to no avail. It's all Baltimore at the moment, as long as I have correctly assumed that they're the ones in white shirts.

00.37 Watching some replays of an interception. The slow-motion replay is very important here, as it shows off details that you might miss in real time. Notably, that once one player has grabbed hold of another to tackle them, everyone else just dives on, regardless of what team they play for. Or if they're even playing at all. There's an Irish grandmother, half-cut on Guinness, still perched atop the scrimmage hitting someone with her umbrella.

00.42 San Francisco have a Defensive Safety called Darcel McBath. And we can only thank god for that.

00.45 Two minutes to half time. Which means it will be half time in about 15 minutes.

00.48 Mother futchdown! Joe Flacco passes the ball about as far as you can get it without employing FedEx and an optimistic receiver called Jacoby Jones who is standing in Ecuador suddenly finds himself with a ball dropping out of the sky into his lap. He recovers from this shock, picks himself up off the floor and hares it over the line. It was very exciting stuff. Let's all chug a beer! Half time in an hour! Baltimore 21-3 San Francisco. It's difficult to see San Francisco coming back here, because they are dreadful.

00.55 Predictably, San Francisco have now moved into their most meaningful spell of attacking dominance of the match so far. I love quarterbacks. In fact, David Beckham used to play for England like a quarterback, delivering finely weighted long-distance passes whilst the rest of his gristle-headed teammates ran around aimlessly.

00.58 San Francisco kick their second field goal to go into half time trailing 6 to 21. It's go time for Beyoncé. What controversy will the half time show bring this year? Men everywhere hope it's in the Janet Jackson way.

01.01 Of course, the awesome organisation, integration and choreography of American sports makes things like the Super Bowl half time show possible. It's hard to imagine the kind of abject chaos that would reign if someone decided to try a similar thing during the FA Cup final. Electrocutions. Nail gun accidents. Trades Union outrages.

01.13 Woman wearing a bin bag dances to Beyoncé records. Wait a minute! It IS Beyoncé.

01.20 Do you reckon Jay-Z is a considerate lover?

01.22 Stars In Their Eyes having finished, we're just minutes away from some more I Can't Believe It's Not Rugger.

01.32 LUDICROUS TOUCHDOWN Well I never. San Francisco kick off the second half, it's caught by Baltimore's Jacoby Jones and he just runs the entire length of the field for a touchdown. This, it seems, is a fairly rare occurence. As one might imagine it to be, considering the amount of steaming huge psychos wearing armour between the two end zones. It's Baltimore 28-6 San Francisco, whose no doubt in-depth half time team talk obviously did the trick. Maybe their players were all busy dancing back-up for Beyoncé?

01.38 Half of the lights have just gone out in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. I'm not entirely sure whether or not this is supposed to have happened.

01.39 When they're not playing this Super Bowl, they are showing clips of old Super Bowls. It's like a Super Bowl assault on the senses. Meanwhile, it turns out that half the lights were not meant to go out. Candles are coming out.

01.42 I'm giving them until 2 to sort the lights out or else I'm going to bed. I was bewildered enough when everything was running smoothly.

01.44 What sports are there to play professionally for short-arsed scrawny Americans?

01.58 I'm tired.

02.01 The galling thing I have just realised is that there's not really much of a difference between a twenty-minute power outage and what happens when someone scores a touchdown, in terms of being a television viewer.

02.06 None of this would happen if they played this game outside and at a reasonable hour.

02.08 I am really questioning whether or not my going to bed now would represent a failure on my part or a failure on somebody else's. And, as it's past 2 a.m., whether or not I really care either way any more.

02.10 I think that, in situations like this, they should just resort to a 10 minute paintball contest.

02.12 This is still better than Rugby League.

02.15 Wacko Flacco *weeps*

02.21 Power failure.

08.01 Ah, that's better. Rumours of Far-Eastern betting syndicates be damned, as the power outage proved to be no help to the forlorn San Francisco 49ers were beaten 34-31 by the invincible (admittedly I have a very limited data set) Baltimore Ravens.

So, what do I think? Well, for a start, the need to sort their floodlights out. But beyond that, I find the stop-start nature took a little bit of getting used to. I would just start to get into the whole thing, feel a surge of excitement as one of the teams scored and think that this might well prove to be the sport for me. But then would come a break for commercials so drawn-out that by the time play restarted I would have forgotten the rules.

I didn't find the whole experience displeasing at all. In fact, I think that I could get into the whole idea. I reckon American Football viewed as a highlights package would prove to be a ceaseless thrill ride. Perhaps that's the best way for me to engage with it, though. I am a little old man and like to be in bed early, so the insurmountable obstacle in my watching future Super Bowls live will always be the time difference. Come the day I am in America on the big day, or they play the match in Swansea, I'll be straight there with a ten-quart skein of pilsner and a hat with clapping foam hands on.

Dude over there, got two heads

I've been watching a programme called Abby and Brittany recently. Abby and Brittany Hensel are 22-year old conjoined twins from Minnesota and are followed around by a documentary crew as they live their lives. The thrust of the programme is that these lives are fairly typical lives for that of 22-year old women. They went to university, now they have graduated and are looking for their first job. In the meantime, they are living it up with their college friends, travelling around the United States and visiting Europe before settling down to their career.

Being conjoined twins, then, presents them with no obstacles to living normal, humdrum, mundane lives. Their friends are interviewed at cattle prod-point throughout to tell us all how they admire the way they are able to live such normal lives.

But here's the thing: I think it's a bit condescending and offensive. In emphasising how normal their lives are and yet slavishly filming it the whole way, the programme is doing exactly what it is trying to avoid, raising the twins up and making everyone go OH NOW HOLD ON LOOK AT THAT. Abby and Brittany Hensel are fascinating people because they are conjoined. There's no point pretending otherwise. Because without that aspect, they'd just be two very normal 22-year old women doing brain-meltingly ordinary things.

It's a good reminder that it's always good to celebrate our differences. Pointing out that conjoined twins are conjoined is hardly offensive stuff, after all. For one thing, they already know. For a second, being a conjoined twin is not an offensive thing to be. Conjoined twins who are the subject of mockery and ridicule by idiots are equally able to mock the idiots back for not being conjoined. It's a plain of reference thing: for Abby and Brittany, they don't know what it's like to not be joined to one another any more than we one-heads know what it must be like to have your twin sharing your anus.

But the huge majority of people are not conjoined, and so have created almost indefinite amounts of documentation - art, literature and music to name just three - about that experience. Abby and Brittany will, I'm sure, be able to understand, and empathise with, my predicament more easily than I can understand their situation. This is why Abby and Brittany is such a missed opportunity. There's so much that we can all learn from each other if we embrace and celebrate what makes us different, rather than focus on the fact that we all like eating ice cream or looking at fountains.

In the latest episode I watched, Abby and Brittany went on holiday to Italy. They first went to Venice and then visited Rome. The public reaction to them was predictably understated. When someone sees conjoined twins, they don't scream, set fire to their children and then jump in the Po. Instead, the following happens:

BEPPE: Oh look, there's some conjoined twins.
MARCO: Where?
BEPPE: Over there, by the fountain. Dude with two heads.
MARCO: Oh yeah. I wonder how they shit?

These are the basic questions that I want answered! I don't care what Abby and Brittany are going to do with their lives. They are two otherwise unremarkable 22-year old women making their way in the world. I have no interest in what anyone I don't know personally is up to, unless it has some impact on me. What IS interesting, however, is the experience of being conjoined. I'd like to know how they sleep, how they poo, how they go about having a crafty wank, what they do if one is watching a TV show that makes the other one bored as shit but unable to wander off, what they do if one of them decides to join a gym. Basic, nuts and bolts of life stuff. You might argue it is prurient, but then so is filming the largely typical lives of two conjoined twins and then ignoring the real meat of the issue.

To that end, I have designed the twins AN INVENTION. It is called The Pillow Helmet. It is, as the name suggests, a helmet made from pillows. Essentially, it's a boxing helmet but with more goose down filling. The Pillow Helmet serves a double purpose: firstly, if either of the twins is someone who likes to sleep on their side, it allows them to do so without using their sibling's face as a support (which is just rude). Secondly, it acts as a buffer and a baffle so that neither girl need see the other's Doing A Poo face when they're sat on the toilet.

And the thing is, I reckon that the Hensels could find lots of other uses for it that I'd never have thought of. Because they have a lot they could teach we one-headed folk. We have a lot we could teach them. It's time the world as one realises that tolerance, acceptance and equality is not about pretending everyone is the same.

Telecom problems

As you probably already know by now, my hatreds are many, varied, almost always unjustified and barely thought-through. But I will tell you this, some fountains of bile never seem to run dry and besides, I have genuinely managed to convince myself that I am always right, so my more enduring pet peeves I consider to occupy the same status as a Papal edict.

So yeah, adverts that have ongoing storylines. What the shit?

We've had to endure these throughout my lifetime. The Bisto family brought pathos to powdered meat, as well as dodging a major bullet when they successfully sidestepped casting Jimmy Savile as the father. The Nescafé Gold Blend couple made us all sick before Anthony Head finally got up the courage to pump Sharon Maughan in their twelfth (TWELVE!) commercial together. I remember Nescafé taking out adverts in the press advertising their advert on the day the denouement to this particular series hit our screens.  I remember specifically tuning in to see it, too. In the days when there were only four television channels, this was event TV! The specific event that I was hoping to see was a asteroid striking their flat, or them getting the clap. Perhaps the failure for either of these to materialise is the root cause of my hardline aversion to commercial series? I think it's more likely to be the fact that they are fucking shit, but anything is possible.

The biggest repeat offender in this hideous sweating gonad are BT. Seemingly without any regard for my feelings, blood pressure or pursing anus, British Telecom have decided that the best way to sell their services is vignettes of family drama. We've had Beattie the meddling gossipy housewife. Beattie wasn't so bad. She was more a chance for Maureen Lipman to bring her almost inexplicable worship of Joyce Grenfell to bear. But it was a shot across the bows, a warning that should have been heeded.

Because now they're on a roll. Kris Marshall became the new young daddy to a hideous family in a seemingly unending series of adverts which successfully managed to become more mawkish, turgid and ghastly by the installment. Eventually, Marshall got himself in a pickle with a traffic violation in real life, which saw his character cast out into a gloomy, takeaway curry in a bedsit, grindingly Onanistic nightmare before the plug was finally pulled. The nation (i.e. me) rejoiced and wondered why Marshall had taken so long to make a social faux pas. I mean, I alone must have sent a hundred hookers to his house in the hope he'd get caught out.

But the horror was not over. Now BT's spokespeople are a hideous group of housemates. A snot-nosed studenty male and an avuncular landlord at least twice his age coexist in perfect harmony until the new girl, who the elder one wants to fuck, arrives. But these commercials are so half-arsed they can't really even be bothered to keep up any sort of narrative strand beyond the fact the people are the same in every new outing. Simon's need to get some filthy bingo begins as being sufficiently strong that he is willing to download the entire back catalogue of Duran Duran. But come the Olympics, he's perfectly happy to chase after a room full of Spaniards. Now, at Halloween, he's concerned only for the integrity of his carpet.

At least the Gold Blend couple had some semblance of dramatic tension. The new BT gang are completely lackadaisical. A series of seemingly unrelated events occur to them without ever really ruffling too many feathers. So dead inside are they, maybe Simon and Simon's Bit Of Fluff bump uglies every single day but they're both such profound psychopaths that it doesn't even register with them the following day?

I hate all these people. Which, sadly, must mean that I do care about them. And that is exactly what the advertisers want. The fact that the majority of my investment in their story is that I want to see them all dying of the shits is neither here nor there. At this present moment in time I rather fear that I would buy anything Simon suggested I should, and I would like to protest about this state of affairs. No-one that I actually know, whose ongoing story arc I am familiar with, could make me do anything at the drop of a hat in the same way.

Television advertising has rotted my mind in ways I had rather hoped would be reserved for the rotting of the BT housemates' private parts. When they all die, screaming, of Atomic Crabs.

Bloody bastarding hell.

My day in someone else's fake kitchen

I could literally watch the television channel Food Network UK all day. The reason I am able to make such a bold statement is that I have literally watched Food Network UK all day. It has crept onto the channels available on Freeview in the past year, first for only a few hours each evening and now, joyously, all day long. It is completely dominating my life and the people on it are filling my every thought.

As usual, I am probably reading too much into everything. There's certainly no need to try and impose some kind of narrative story onto these programmes, filled with hopes, dreams and broken promises. There's probably less CIA involvement than I am imagining. Far less lost love and bitterness. However, as the people who make cookery shows seem hell bent on turning them into aspirational vehicles to sell the virtues of the lifestyle of every new grub pedlar who appears on the TV, I think I'm probably justified in doing so nevertheless. Besides, who's to say that Nigella Lawson ISN'T building a jet camel?

As well as avidly watching some of the familiar names and faces who make daily appearances on the Food Network, I have also discovered three new TV cooks who have made me feel like a schmuck for missing out on their lives for so many years. Through gritted teeth, narrowed eyes and pursed anus, I watch them perform their culinary machinations and grow grimly, obsessively, fascinated by every part of their programmes and of their lives. By this stage, they can't even halve a lemon without me trying to figure out their voting intentions, judging by their words or mannerisms alone.

Guy Fieri is the smiley and ebullient face of the Food Network, albeit a face with an improbably distracting beard. He's a big name in US cookery shows, which makes it all the more unusual that he is so determined to pronounce it "Fietty" in spite of all evidence to the contrary. But for all his fame and success across the Atlantic, there's no ego here: Guy is perfectly happy to let his children, or his wife, or his parents, or his dogs join him on centre stage to make clams. This is unfortunate and one of those excellent, timely demonstrations of the importance of ego. Ego is unfairly maligned.

Guy Fieri: in Team Kale

Another thing that is unfairly maligned, in Guy's eyes at least, is kale. Does Guy ever love kale. Crispy kale. Boiled kale. Steamed kale. Baked kale. Sun-dried kale. Cannon-fired kale. I have never seen an episode of Guy's Big Bite or Guy's Big Bite: Backyard where his meal plan doesn't include at least one kale element. His devotion to kale is almost touching, until you remember that it's as likely as not the result of a deal with a major multinational kale concern. Kaleco Enterprises. A convoy of kale-packed 18-wheel lorries head towards his house every hour of the day or night containing all his gratis kale. His potassium levels must be such that his urine now reacts violently on contact with water. Kale, ladies and gentlemen.

I like Guy Fieri. I like his recipes and his general no-nonsense, flavour-first approach to cooking. I'm far less sold on Kelsey Nixon, the host of Kelsey's Essentials. In every episode of Kelsey's Essentials, our titular star - one of those people who seems to be simultaneously 8 years old and sixty - tells us all about the ESSENTIAL ingredients, tools and techniques that she has laying about her pretend kitchen. Kelsey was a front runner in a Food Network competition to find a new TV chef and so there's every chance that this programme represents the culmination of all her wildest dreams. This alone could express the slightly frenzied look in her eyes. She doesn't so much look at you as see all the cuts of meat marked on your body. Kelsey is magnificently excited to be cooking on television. It troubles me.

Kelsey Nixon: planning what to cook next

But it is at least a straightforward cookery show. Kelsey cooks. Kelsey eats. Kelsey goes home again. Barefoot Contessa is more like a magazine programme for a life you will never, ever have. Barefoot Contessa is presented by Ina Garten, the absurdly wealthy middle-aged wife of an absurdly wealthy unspecified business scion called Jeffrey. Ina lives in The Hamptons surrounded by frighteningly wealthy friends, many of whom pop by during the day to try out a new recipe, perhaps inspired by Ina's recent trip to HyperParis: the Paris that only rich people know about. Then she'll tootle off to a florists to give you some flower arranging tips, apropos of nothing, nothing at all.

Before you know it Ina (she introduces herself on her most recent programme, Barefoot Contessa - Back To Basics, as "I'm the Barefoot Contessa", an act simply bound to earn a chorus of "no you're not" from my end) has been hanging around the kitchen of one of New York's most insanely exclusive restaurants shooting the shit with the head chef and is now back to finish the three course meal inspired by the time she went to space for Jeffrey's tea. Jeffrey looks like a man who'd be happy with sardines on toast and a wank, so a full banquet is always likely to go down well. Until, that is, he realises that all of this gourmet indulgence has come at the expense of that wank.

Ina Garten: considerably richer than you

The thing that really bothers me about Barefoot Contessa is the theme tune. Here is a show where wealthy people with dream lives cook delicious things for other wealthy people with dream lives. The music should just be the opening titles from Duck Tales with maniacal laughter and the unmistakable sounds of unfettered glee. Instead, it is an oddly-threatening electric piano doodle, replete with a building dramatic tension entirely absent from the programme, the food or Geoffrey's post-prandial shit, which comes out like a buttered adder.

I'm completely obsessed with Barefoot Contessa. For weeks I saw it coming up in the schedules and avoided it. More fool me. Ina Garten is a hero for our times.

Take you to liver school

Last year I first watched Man v. Food and frankly it changed the way that I thought about eating everything in the entire world. Back then it was still something of an underground hit. Now, everyone in Britain has seen MvF and it is changing the entire country's cholesterol level.

Not least because, off the back of it, I am starting to see pubs and restaurants instituting EATING CHALLENGES of their own. This is terribly exciting stuff. It's taken longer than most American cultural staples to make its journey across the Atlantic, possibly because we still had food rationing from the end of the second world war up until 1998. But now it is here, what will become of us? Best case scenario: we all get hugely fat and happy. Worst case scenario: we become laughing stocks.

Because, frankly, we're very much beginners at this sort of thing and I worry that our efforts will be quaint at best. American tourists will have to start ordering the eating challenges just to get a portion size akin to that of their ordinary breakfast. We'd be literally a side of coleslaw away from a pat on the head and a friendly-if-patronising chuck under the chin.

I find this prospect quite unappealing. After all, the British Empire is the Empire that taught the world all about excess and self-loathing, so our failing to out-eat the colonies would be a humiliating backslide. However, there is still one area in which us plucky Brits can still compete with the best in the world.

Step forward my new television programme idea: Man v. Booze.

Match of the Day problems

There's been far too many blogs and podcasts beating up on Match of the Day in the last few years that it feels like it would be wrong of me to join the chorus. However, I'm going to have to. It was a toss up between that and just going mad and ranting with a recursive impotence at the television every weekend. However, I am pretty good, so I have in fact managed to do both.

I'm not going to focus on some of the problems that other football correspondents and commentators have levelled at the BBC's venerable old football show. Yes, considering the advances in TV technology and social media, the football highlights show has started to feel a bit anachronistic, lumpen and omni-directional. But it does the job and it is, lest we forget, a television institution. We Brits like those. My problem is with the cast of characters.

Back in the day, all you needed to present a football show was a magnificently patterned terylene shirt, a desk with an oddly redundant telephone atop it. Brian Moore would tell us who was playing, then probably also be the commentator on the highlights before popping back to the studio and giving a succinct summary of events without editorialising. The reason that Match of the Day appears so dated is not that it fundamentally follows the same structure that football highlights programmes have always done, but that they felt the need to tart it up. Extra guests, prolonged tactical analysis and needless graphics packages when really all we need is the games and Jimmy Hill.

This blunderbuss of opinion and flapdoodle that BBC1 fires into my face every Saturday night and Sunday morning has left me resigned to the adoption of a number of coping mechanisms. Namely, I have turned it into a soap opera. Every single one of the regular cast are a character, all with their own problems, struggles and burdens. And like their EastEnders counterparts all cramming into the Queen Vic, they are not entirely always in control of whose company they will be in as their storylines develop. Sparks can and will fly.

Gary Lineker is the landlord. He's contractually obliged to be there every week, no matter how bad a seven days it has been or how odious that night's punters are. His strategy is to damn his enemies with faint praise and low-level jibes about their past, but mostly he just farts strangely odour-free platitudes and half-puns into the air where no-one in particular will hear them or care.

Alan Hansen is the most long-standing patron. His seniority means that few will cross him or even make a helpful suggestion about his skincare and moisturisation regime which would stop him from looking like a smoky bacon flavour tortoise. He remembers every single failure and mistake that all of his friends, colleagues and acquaintances have suffered (except for the number of times Alan Shearer kicked someone in the head, oddly) and this makes him a distinctly dangerous competitor.

Mark Lawrenson is the drunk old aunt propped up in the corner, leftover from a wake that took place some time around lunchtime. He's fed up with everything, wishing it could have been him that they had put in the ground but still happy enough to complain endlessly to anyone who will listen, until that great day finally comes. The fact that no-one is listening any more is of supreme disinterest to him as he just runs through his well worn sherry-scented monologue day in, day out.

New blood comes in the form of Lee Dixon and Alan Shearer. There's a little friction between them too, which is always exciting. Alan Shearer is basically Benny from Crossroads, a bungling but largely aimiable village idiot. It's impossible to get too upset by Alan Shearer unless you forget yourself and start to attach any credence to whatever he's spouting. But the sheer amount that he shovels out makes it more and more likely that this will happen, just due to the laws of probability. And this bothers Lee Dixon, who has probably the freshest ideas of the bunch but finds it hardest to get a word in edgewise. Force of personality, rather than intelligence of opinion, is what always prevails in this particular soap opera, which is what makes it so compelling.

That and the ever-present possibility that Alan Shearer might kick someone in the head.

Ah, young love

Over the last few months I will admit that I was starting to wonder if the world might not be such a bad place after all, but then last night I watched a programme called Toddlers & Tiaras and I'm right back on track. We are all doomed.

If you haven't seen it, then first of all you have to see it. It's a programme about those dreadful beauty pageants that they have for children in America. You know the ones: not the bouncing baby parades judged by disinterested vicars at church fetes on the village green, but the dress your child up as a hooker and make her strut to Lady Gaga records ones. The two episodes I watched were both set in southern States, so the possibility that any child not deemed beautiful enough would be fed to the alligators was ever present.

The alligators may have met their match with Laci, mind you. Tia is eight and has three ambitions in life: to be Miss America, to be Miss Universe and to shoot a deer. Shoot a deer right in the fucking face. To that end, she and her father went on a hunting trip. Two hours they spent with Laci cocking a rifle out of a hide window, but to no avail. "I'm disappointed I didn't shoot a deer", said Laci, gleefully ignoring the fact that there had neither been any deer nor had she fired a single shot, both of which are important parts of the deer hunting process. At one stage, Laci goes missing backstage just before her slot in the pageant. Her mother is beside herself with worry, because (I swear this is what she said) if you miss your slot you'll lose marks. Eventually she turned out to be out the back with her grandmother. Taking pot shots at elk.

Heaven is six and lives in Georgia. Her father is called Benny but it is pronounced "Beany". Heaven is something of a trooper, taking it with admirable calm when Beany forgets he's an integral part of her Pinocchio dance routine and leaves her up on stage folded in half for minutes on end. Heaven also has a serious chewing gum habit. Quite how her prospects in the facial beauty round will fare when her jaw muscles develop and make her look like David Coulthard, only time will tell.

But the undeniable star of the show is Alana. Alana is also six. She is sure that she will win beauty pageants left, right and centre because her face will win her da mon-neh. The potential adorability of her gormless catchphrase "Honey Boo-Boo" (which has since made her sufficiently famous to get her her own series) is undermined by the fact that she has a head that looks like a pork pie with a mouth. Luckily, her vile mother is on hand to brainwash her past this notable shortcoming and into doing her bidding. To this end, she helps lubricate the strings with Go-Go Juice. This is her own concoction, although from the effects it has it's fairly easy to guess at the ingredients, presumably Mountain Dew, Lucozade, Red Bull and a bag of sherbert. She was far from the only one filling their child with sugar backstage though. Virtually all the competitors are shovelling sweets and energy drinks down their gaping maws whilst their mother gives them a vajazzle. The elder children were all doing coke in the lavs.

It is difficult to know quite who the villain of this particular piece is when such bewildering acts of supervillany are coming from all directions. In the end I plumped for the organisers, but really I could just have stuck a pin in the screen. However, I don't buy into the complaints of people who say the worst thing about these pageants is that they sexualise children. Their argument seems to be predicated on the thought that everyone in the world is basically a dormant paedophile who just hasn't met the right child yet. Anyone who isn't wanking themselves a blue streak can tell how dazzlingly unpleasant this all is at a single glance. The outfits and the make-up and the dancing just serve to enhance the horror, rather than to lure you in.

Still, in many ways I'd rather have these preposterous melées of bouffant hair and bump 'n' grind dancing for the under-fives, than what is happening on television in a broader sense. Advertisers are particularly to blame for this, peddling the belief that everyone, everywhere must have a boyfriend or a girlfriend regardless of age, background, circumstances or species.

It's possible that I am just a deeply repressed bumpkin from Woodingdean (I am) and that my experience of growing up was atypical, but when I was of primary school age, boys and girls came from different worlds. We didn't have anything to do with one another and we didn't want to. I think it's possible that I didn't talk to a female human being my own age until I was about 9 years old. Nowadays that would get you a one-way trip to the Palookaville Autism Clinic, but at the time I don't think my experience was so rare.

Nowadays, everyone is pairing off. My niece, who is 6 in a fortnight, recently moved to a new town and started a new school. She already has a "new boyfriend". She works fast. I can only hope they use protection.

I don't want to turn into one of those people who spends their life moaning about the venality of the modern world and patiently (but furiously) explain how things were so much better in the olden days to anyone who will even pretend to be listening. But this is going to require some co-operation on the world's part, too. Namely, it has to stop being so shit.

It's...

... a page from the Monty Python's Flying Circus sticker album. Which does not in fact exist, shut up. (Click the picture for bigger)

Wimblemund 2012: day 12

Ladies' Singles Final Day

SUE BARKER: Hello and welcome to Wimbledon, where tomorrow Britain's Andy Murray will bid to become Britain's first Grand Slam-winning male tennis player since Virginia Wade in 1977. I'm joined by Lindsay Davenport and Tracey Austin. Lindsay and Tracey, it's Ladies' Final day, so the question on everyone's lips is: can Andy do it?

LINDSAY DAVENPORT: Almost certainly not.

TRACEY AUSTIN: He'll be lucky.

SUE BARKER: Well, it's not just Andy Murray's final tomorrow today, it's also the British Grand Prix at Silverstone which you can see live on the BBC. Our man Jake Humphrey is at Silverstone for qualifying, and Jake, what we all want to know is: can Andy Murray do it tomorrow in the British Grand Primbledon?

JAKE HUMPHREY: Hello Sue from a wet Silverstone, I wish that we had a roof over the circuit here like you do over at Centre Court where tomorrow Andy Murray bids to win everything.

SUE BARKER: Of course, today's final tomorrow is all part of a great summer of sport on the BBC - the Olympics starts at the end of this month and we've also enjoyed Euro 2012. Gary Lineker is our man in the Match of the Day Studio... Gary, with the whole world wondering if Andy can do it, how are England getting on in the European Championships?

GARY LINEKER: They're still out, Sue.

SUE BARKER: Well, 3 hours talking about Andy Murray is plenty of build-up for today's Ladies' Final, so let's go to our commentary team for today: David Mercer, Virginia Wade and Sam Smith.

DAVID MERCER: Thank you, Sue. Here come the players now, and you can see that Agnieszka Radwanska is deep in thought - probably wondering whether or not Andy can do it tomorrow.

SAM SMITH: Almost certainly, David, yes. But can he do it? That's what everyone who is here wants to know.

SUE BARKER: Well, that was quite some final, wasn't it? Let's not forget that tomorrow on the BBC you can find out live if Andy Murray will win the title, but let's just get the trophy ceremony out of the way. Here's our losing finalist. How do you think Andy will do tomorrow?

LOSING FINALIST: *Wracking sobs*

SUE BARKER: I know how you feel, it's been an emotional rollercoaster ever since Andy beat Nikolay Davydenko twelve days ago. A word now from the winning finalist. You've won today, do you think Andy Murray can win tomorrow?

WINNING FINALIST: It's pretty difficult to see how he can.

SUE BARKER: Well, thanks for that. I'll be back tomorrow at 6 a.m. to start the build-up for Andy Murray's first Wimbledon final. Now over to TV centre for the news, with Maxine Mawhinny.

MAXINE MAWHINNY: Thank you Sue. The headlines: [BUNF BUNF] Andy Murray will play in tomorrow's Wimbledon Men's Singles Final... [BUNF BUNF] Can he do it? We ask Ban Ki-Moon... [BUNF BUNF]...

Serena Williams won by the way. 6-1, 5-7, 6-2.

Wimblemund 2012: day 4

Anyone who has been watching the European Championship football this summer will be aware that the TV coverage of the game in Britain is increasingly blighted by its presenters and commentators. You can read a pretty succinct summary of the key issues here.

So Wimbledon running concurrently is a good time to celebrate the quality of the commentary teams on televised tennis in the UK.

The 'lead' commentators are yet to succumb to the dread of silence (or letting the action do the talking) that seems to afflict their football covering contemporaries, let alone the HORROR of thinking they've become personality in their own right. Meanwhile, the 'colour' commentators, the ex-professional players, are unobtrusive and analytical, offering technical insight and analysis.

Obviously, there are exceptions. A number of the American broadcasters are considerably more notable for being walls of sound, particularly John McEnroe, who treats the microphone like a particularly talkative churchwarden doing the public address at the village fete. Boris Becker can sometimes give enough information as to other sporting events that have been or will be on the BBC as to make the continuity announcers redundant. And Andrew Castle's forays as a GMTV presenter give his commentaries the terrifying feeling that he may be about to throw to an outside broadcast with Cheggers at any moment - although this is hardly his fault.

On the whole, though, tennis fans are particularly lucky. Voices such as David Mercer, Andrew Cotter, Mark Petchey, Sam Smith, Jo Durie, Tim Henman, Greg Rusedski, Peter Fleming and the great Barry Davies are all consistently authoritative and informative without ever being obtrusive or at odds with the viewer's enjoyment of the game itself. And in John Inverdale, the BBC can boast perhaps the finest sports television anchorman in Britain today.

It's all a far cry from my dream last night, where Andrew Castle accidentally says "bollocks" during coverage of today's second round match between Andy Murray and Ivo Karlovic. Castle apologised immediately, as one would expect from a professional broadcaster. However, Tim Henman was rather more reluctant to do so a few minutes later when he referred to the Scot as a "shithead".

It was a classic piece of commentary, but more importantly a timely reminder that - at the moment at least - disastrous, annoying or ghastly tennis commentaries luckily still only exist in theory, or in the imagination of idiots. Hello.

Prolonged absences

I've been terribly lax updating this blog recently. Unfortunately, actual life has been getting in the way, which has significantly impacted on my ability to imagine a whole different life and then fill the internet with a series of lies about it. So this morning I thought I should quickly explain that, and apologise. But then I thought, why should I? Honestly.

I love posts like these, but at the same time I have to admit that they are never anything beyond pointless, self-indulgent and self-important drivel. I'm afraid that people who have blogs, especially blogs that people actually start to read, just unavoidably find themselves cast in the role of a celebrity guest in the episode of Going Live! that is taking place in all of our heads.

I guess that this makes you readers the TV viewers or perhaps even the little kids who made up the studio audience. People who comment are the kids who called in to actually speak to the guests!

Kid 1 Hello Chris who does your hair?
(sound of a baby sibling wailing and screaming in the background)
Chris Isaak Hey kid, I do ma own hair
Kid 2 How do you get the ideas for your song?
Chris Isaak Hey kid, I needed money

So, just to be clear, you are my fans and hanging on my every word, I am famous, what I have to say is important, I am Chris Isaak.

Let's laugh at other people

First they came for the Gypsy weddings, but I did nothing for I am not a Gypsy who is getting married...

Actually, no, that's not true. But I was able to do what any reasonable person would do when faced with a great theatre of finger-pointing, snuckering, prejudicial, sub-school playground bollocks on television and paid it no mind, least alone actually watch it. Perhaps it was just an aberration? Perhaps some prankster slipped PCP into the complimentary muffin basket before the schedulers' meeting?

But no. Because next they came for the Jewish mothers. This time, I am doing something, even though I am neither Jewish nor a mother. So, this is going to be an ongoing series of programmes based on crass, lazy, racist stereotypes, is it? On British national television. In 2012. On Channel 4.

Channel 4, I expected better of you. I don't know why, after you brought us My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding but I don't know, perhaps I had some residual good feeling towards you? And perhaps I will retain a little residue of that residue after My Really Really Jewish Jewish Mother, right in time for Britain's Most Curry-Smelling Pakistani Household or whatever masterstroke you come up with to follow this? Although this time, I suspect not. Once was very, very definitely enough.

I am trying to imagine the full horror of this programme. The makers say they're after the "ultimate Jewish mother". I see absolutely no way around that not being a completely overt admission of racist intent. For me, a human being, I would imagine the thing which really makes anyone stand out as a Jewish mother would be: one, Judaism; two, being a woman and three, having a child. Anything beyond that is just going to be straight out of the sketchbook of Josef Goebbels. Perhaps the winner will have a big nose and circumcise their children with their gold teeth, whilst making matzah balls? Who knows? It's bound to be compelling television.

My friend Lolly, who you probably remember from these pages, comes from a Jewish family - a fact that I am sure a number of elements behind the scenes at Channel 4 may find completely unbelievable to note that I don't hold against her - and was saying on Twitter this morning that she was trying to express exactly what it was about this programme she found so loathsome but couldn't find the right words. I suggested that "lazy, stereotypical, exploitative racist garbage" might be a good starting point. "BUT you see," she replied, "there will be a MASSIVE proportion of the community who will relish it and love it."

This is the sad truth. The majority of people in this country are bloody idiots, I'm afraid, and will lap this up. To be fair to most of them, I reckon at least 90% are too stupid to even realise that there is a whole questionable element of racial sensitivity and would be terribly upset if anyone considered them to be racists, because they are not. But all you need are 10% of people to be truly malign, eh? It is the result, as Lolly pointed out, of fishing in a very small gene pool - which with the ultimate irony is precisely what the rogue 10% accuse the Jewish, or Asian, or whoever else, community of Great Britain of engaging in. Indeed, it is a way of thinking that is the motivating factor behind this whole initiative, whether people like to admit it or not.

I personally would rather have a gene pool limited by race; containing dimwits and geniuses, binmen, park keepers, scientists, newsagents, chefs, musicians, businessmen, politicians... than a gene pool where the sole characteristic required for inclusion is nothing but blinkered stupidity, fear and hate. But perhaps that's just me, who knows?

I think everyone should be ashamed and angry that this programme could even be mooted, in our time and in our society, let alone made. I know I am.

The Digital Switchover Blues (or: Sally Taylor, A Lament)

Yesterday was phase one of the Digital Switchover here in Sussex, or at least the bit of Sussex in which I live. All TV signals in the United Kingdom will soon be digital only because we live in the future and are cutting edge and think nothing of bewildered old dears wondering where Coronation Street has gone. This whole thing has sort of passed me by to be honest. I've had digital television for years so I've largely put it to the back of my mind as an irrelevance.

Oh what a fool I was. Come the time I did what every obedient digital television consumer had to do and re-scan their box or television, the horrific reality of the matter was revealed. People served by the Whitehawk Hill transmitter are now considered to be in the BBC South East region rather than in BBC South. Woe is me.

I used to complain bitterly about BBC South. I felt that, due to the unique way the BBC is funded, every time they ran out of money because Jonathan Ross said something to an elderly man or suchlike, BBC South bore the brunt. BBC South sprawled out to eventually encompass places as demonstrably not south as Oxford and Swindon. It was exquisite madness. But it was OUR exquisite madness, you know?

BBC South East smells. It covers East Sussex, a little bit of West Sussex, Kent, Surrey and Essex. To be honest, I live much closer to Surrey and Kent and Essex than I do to Oxford or Rhyl or Dublin. BBC South East will probably prove to be more relevant local news to me, if I'm completely honest. But I don't like it. BBC South Today used to provide you with a delightful numbing cushion of distance. "A MURDERER HAS ESCAPED," the bulletin would roar. "HE IS ANGRY AND FRANKLY WANTS TO KILL YOU warn Oxfordshire police". Phew! Oxfordshire!

It just doesn't feel right. I was used to the local news that was happening miles away which I didn't care about being in Winchester or Banbury. Now I have to adapt to it being in Rochester or Canvey Island. To give BBC South East their due, yesterday's brave new world bulletin did throw Brighton a bone by featuring them as their second story. But it was about how far above the national average we are for teenage pregnancy rates. Tomorrow: do men in Uckfield have smellier balls than chimps? It was a bone, but it was a pretty manky bone with a maggot on it. And a pube.

But as well has having to recalibrate my moping rants about "local" news covering things which are actually halfway to Saturn in a south-easterly direction (I'm sure I'll cope), there is the more troubling issue. No more Sally Taylor.

One day this woman will be on the stamps

Sally Taylor is local news royalty to people from the south coast of England. She is the reassuring presence who has been with me pretty much my whole life, telling me about a beer festival on the Isle of Wight or a particularly rude-looking tree in Bournemouth. Sally Taylor has been reading the local news for the south for so long that she actually appears in the Bayeux Tapestry, reporting on William of Normandy's landing at Pevensey.

Brighton has expanded in recent years. All sorts of new people have arrived, attracted by its proximity to London, it's trendy image and the fact that it is the best place on earth. Moreso even than accents or "I *heart* Cambridge" sweatshirts, asking people their opinion of Sally Taylor was the most surefire way of gauging where in Britain people have come from and when. If they said anything critical in the slightest - "I don't like her shirt", or something - we would know that they were a newcomer. Proper southern people hold Sally Taylor in the highest regard. For Brighton folk, she would be one chair at our dream dinner party.

At mine she's sat next to Hitler.

But alas. My bitter rivals in Portsmouth will still get their daily local news from Sally Taylor on South Today, the programme she first presented when the dinosaurs ruled the earth. People in and around Brighton will have to make do with Hugh Opinions or Muriel Spank or whoever the hell it is. I feel deeply disenfranchised.

It's almost enough to make me want to move to Southbourne (as close to Hampshire as I am willing to get) just so I can get back to shouting at Sally about how Abingdon isn't in the bloody south. Oh Sally.

It's been real.