Ten things that have arrived on my tits

• Anybody who eats anything in any cinema screening I attend (I'm not a maniac. I have no problem with the other 99.999% of screenings)
• Putting soap in the softener drawer (Clown!) 
• Chicken-flavoured crisps - hardly a sapictive phenomenon - they are the the waste of a taste bud, readied and primed for an experience.
• The response of the 999 operator when you tell them you have put soap in the softener drawer.
• People who say Happy Monday to you (or any other day of the week. This isn't 1984. I'm okay with any festival-related greeting though. I'm not a maniac)
• Lyme disease
• How irons are filled.
• Re-released albums (Pleeease! This isn't 1983)
• American Mother's Day (that's caused me more than it's fair share of confusion and guilt)
• People who don't take the door from you when you hold it open for them (usually pregnant women or utter bastards)

Changing Fashions

Look like I'm behind the times again... time to update my knicker drawer.

A4 Gone - Conclusion

Come on now...

I know you've raced to the sliding trapdoor.

You might even have reached for the mains source.

You might have pressed the red button or Cancel or anything for three seconds or more....

But...

Has anybody ever successfully cancelled a printing job...ever?

We should be told.

Advice

I am just writing my appraisal submission..

I am currently backing up the section on 'Communication, partnership and teamwork' with that highest level of evidence...the personal self-interested assertion.

You do lose your perspective after a while writing all this guff so just to check...there's nothing wrong with this sentence is there?

"I treat all patients as equals, even the women".

After a while you just not sure if your 'eye' is still in, if you are still riding the crest of that guff-writing flow state.

Now I see it written down it looks fine. 

I'm not going to even bother mentioning the Mexicans.

Wog on the Prog

The fashion for limited "event" series in the wake of our successes.. so here we are for a limited run.

For many of us, there wasn't a time when Terry Wogan wasn't a part of our lives.

An original who appeared to do things his own way retaining an edginess with a mattress of double entendre.

As useless on a TV chat show as he was brilliant on the radio, I spent time part of my childhood laughing in hysterics at the comic antics on Blankety Blank.

We are living in a time where the changing of the guard is more palpable every day.

I'm worried that the new uniforms don't fit the new incumbents particularly well. The material isn't quite made of the same quality and the texture is cheap.

A world which waits for tributes from Scott Mills and Nick 'Grimmy' Grimshaw is a sad, pathetic and desperate one.

Terry's Old Geezers represented the mature bunch who hadn't lost their sense of humour, who could still laugh at life while enjoying all of its rich tapestry and idiocy, keeping their brains alive with a generosity of spirit, a glass of port and strong core values, even as their body fails.

The simple overriding fact is a cliche.

We won't see their like again.

It's not that they got it all right.

I went to see Doug Richard in a theatre a couple of years ago talking about start-ups and business. He was a Dragon from California in the first two series of Dragon's Den.

I don't think he has even been required to sign up to the sex offender's list for having sex with a 13-year-old girl who weighed less than six stone, despite giving her money for it (not payment of course, a gift to reflect the good times they shared).

This is a legal loophole for sex with children known as "reasonable belief" [that she was 16, and therefore an ideal partner for 57-year-old "family" man]. 

Laws made by lawyers. Idiots running the asylum.

Don't you think he knew his defence before it was required?

Legal sexual abuse of children on our high street paid for my millionaire TV celebrities. And not just once in his case but hundreds of times.

There is no prison sentence for this. Not even a slap on the wrist.

He could still run for President.

But don't be alarmed. He's getting therapy to treat his addiction. 

Praise the Lord.

The guard is changing. Richard must've been flustered to see that his birthright to buy and sell children had been challenged. After all he had plenty of money. What could possibly be the problem?

Ethics and decency are squeezed every day by people who prize instant gratification above all things.

But at least once upon a time, there was Radio 2.

And we still have Ken.

The Last Post

And that last post seems like a pretty good place to wrap it up, even if I'm now making it a penultimate post.

One hundred and fifty pointless posts this year - it's been a banner year, so an early retirement has been well earned. Seven years and 784 something-and-nothings makes enough.

Thanks to the person in the US who stumbled across me and bizarrely, the two thousand page views from the Ukraine. OK, 2042 page views in seven years is nothing to write home about but nevertheless Дякую to you both.

I'd like to finish with a song....

But then...we all do in the end.

  

A Goal or a Gaol

Try Fry Fly

What if you started collecting something again?

Something specific, something simple and for the first time.

Something that wouldn't perhaps overtake or possess you but something fun and colourful and artistic which would force you to play and stare a little harder at a certain aspect of world - an aspect that by definition you already have some connection with.

What would that thing be?

I've always had a fascination with "promise", specifically that promise given to you by a snippet of entertainment. Notably the movie trailer… [insert booming voice] "In a time when aliens…" etc .

We used to call that promise "advertising". Nowadays it seems to be called marketing. The promotion of promise. But when that marketing becomes a product in itself, it takes on a kind of meta-interest.

I saw this week on television and advert advertising a further advert that would be coming up during the following program.. that that would indeed be a trailer for a movie that is about to come out.

A trailer for a trailer. An ad for an ad. It doesn't get much more meta than that.

The appeal of the distillation of course is in punchy conciseness. A little thimble punching well above its weight. A taste of nouvelle cuisine, but with the promise of an appetite satiated.

Hope.

Potential.

(prior to Delivery and perhaps Disappointment, but we will stop way before then).

Perhaps such a collection would also be an inexpensive hobby.

Ask anybody with a set of watercolours how expensive a hobby should be.

Collect Ferraris, and you are a spectacular tool and unlikely to know it.

The nerd-do-well develops fascinations.

The particular promotion I'm alluding to might be something like a beer mat but in fact I'm thinking of the theatre flyer. Specifically the A5 variety. (Don't you dare give me DL size. That's 1/3 A4, to the novice).

The A5 flyer has has a pleasing dimension and enough space for a graphic designer to go to town with a haunting image or boastful claim. They may speak of terror and mystery and primally connect with any schoolboy who ever walked into a theatre. They place their production at a venue that usually comes with hundreds of years of history, and they date and timestamp it as a transient moment in the ephemera of the shared human condition.

I quite like them.

Pen & paper

"There are no would-be writers. Only writers". 

Mark Gatiss

You've Been Maimed

Although the initial results claimed that nobody was actually harmed in the making of the video clips on You've Been Framed, we now know these assertions were based on short-term anecdotal studies alone. 

It has been revealed that despite the number of repeats and 'Best Ofs' transmitted TV researchers did not follow up on interim or long-term results.

An independent data trawl has produced a new meta-analysis released today with definitive results. This is the broadest survey of its type to date on the subject.

We now know that 36.4% of the people in You've Been Framed clips developed persistent complications (those that do not disappear within 6 months) or permanent injury requiring long-term medication or surgery. 

The cohort has a higher positive predictive value for attendance at Pain Clinics but a worrying 17% have criminal convictions for opiate or pregabalin abuse. 

ITV and Dr Harry Hill has refused to comment.

But I like it when they fall over.