The year God made me
This is the cover of my 1980 diary, from which we gather that the fourteen-to-fifteen year old me was into: the punk rock group 999, the Elephant Man, Marilyn Monroe (or at least the iconic image thereof), Gene Hackman, the Undertones and the NCFE Film Society. I reproduce it here simply because I am writing a diary again in 2006. It just happens not to have a collage on the cover. After a false start in 1972, I began writing diaries in earnest in 1973 and continued pretty much until 1993, which I wrote on my old Apple Mac Classic II and thus can no longer access, as I password-protected it and wrote it in WordPerfect. If nothing else, these diaries give a vivid picture of what I watched on television between the ages of seven and twenty seven.


To keep up the tradition: last night, I watched ER. I know I should just let it go, but I can't. They are so stuck for stories now they've put Abby and Luka back in bed together ("Do you still like ketchup on your eggs?") and crashed a plane on Chicago so that Neela could save a child from a burning building whilst on ambulance duty. We've been here before. However, they haven't lost the old magic completely. A patient whose heart had stopped was being kept alive by Pratt and Ray physically thumping his chest so that his family could be gathered around him to say their last goodbyes. I had something in my eye, I don't mind telling you.

Footballers Wives (which, according to the title cards, doesn't have an apostrophe, so it would be wrong of me to force one on it)


The new series began on ITV1 tonight with a 90-minute indulgo-special, and, even though it has the advantage of no Conrad (shot in the chest with a rifle at the end of the last run), it still has way too much of the hysterical Amber. It's a shadow of its former self, I'm afraid, and after an hour, we switched over. Another one bites the dust. It would be silly to say that Footballers Wives has jumped the shark, as it did this when Chardonnay's breast implants caught fire in something like episode two of the first series - that's not the point - but in constantly trying to out-do and out-camp itself, it has hit something of a rut. The Pride & Prejudice wedding vows sequence was a good attempt at topping previous excesses, and had one great line (a new, militant black player turned up dressed as a slave, saying, "It ain't about pride for us, it's about prejudice") but the rest was just a bit desperate. Not enough Gillian Taylforth or Nicholas Ball, the old timers. And if I hear one more character say something insulting, then apologise with, "I was out of order," I may have to, well, go back through my old EastEnders scripts to make sure I never wrote it. Which I daresay I did.

Anyway, nice to have one less long-running drama series to watch.

Haircut!
First full day out of the house with radical new haircut. I have allowed it to grow without interference for some months now, as ever enjoying the early thrill of seeing it appear behind my ears, then indulging in being able to run my hands through it at moments of concentration, and - finally - watching it "settle" at that precise moment when it moves from neglect to intent, and no longer just looks as if I need a haircut. First, it starts to curl at the sides and "flicks" follow me around for a few weeks so that I look like Madonna, then the flicks get too heavy and fall down of their own accord, only to - eek! - curl up again as they reach the second bend, as it were. It is at this point, when two palmfuls of shampoo is no longer enough to achieve full coverage and my The Word photo looks like it's of someone else, I start to luxuriate in what actually passes as long hair.

I've gone through this cycle approximately five times in my post-Goth adult life. In 1993, I grew it past bob length (sorry about the beard) . . .


. . . and it went past my shoulders in '94 . . .


. . . only to be shorn when I became the editor of Empire and felt the need to gain the respect and trust of my new colleagues. (I know.) My most recent adventure was in 2003, as seen in this 6 Music snap with Siouxsie and Budgie, who are literally giants of Goth rock.


The latest attempt was curtailed yesterday at Toni & Guy in Reigate.

It was Mel who had the honour of lopping it off. I asked for short at the back and sides, spiky on top and a fuller fringe. She said, without meaning to be judgemental, "Yeah, a lot of the indie bands have it like that." I didn't know what to say. She's right. They do. But I didn't want her to think that I was trying to look like an indie band, did I?

Actually, catching my new, 1940s House self in train window and lift mirror during the day, I thought I could probably pass myself off as one of The Rakes.


Whose new single, All Too Human, is, by the way, spectacularly good, as is the accompanying video, currently never off MTV2, which is based on Dogville and must be viewed to the very end, when the camera pans up. Their official site is here but don't expect a useful biog or lyrics.

SPOILER ALERT! [if you don't want to know who was fired on The Apprentice, read no further]

The Apprentice returns
I'm hardly out on a limb here finding The Apprentice compulsive viewing. The interesting thing is that I missed the first few episodes of the first series last year, and, after a confident recommendation from my producer Leona, I caught up with it at about the third "You're fired." I was hooked. So there's a lot riding on the second series, which started tonight on BBC2. First up, they haven't done anything rash like change it. Good. It's still Sir Alan, looking like he's been created by CGI and playing up to his image of irascible East End boy-done-good who does not suffer women gladly, flanked by Margaret and Nick, who've been by his side for 25 years, you know. Anyway: 14 business hopefuls who range from appalling to teeth-grindingly appalling. Jo, 35, made redundant from MG Rover, has already crowned herself the new Saira. She keeps whooping and punching the air as if to prove to herself that she's still "got it" and was the only one to burst into tears in the boardroom when accused of being a woman.

Tonight's boys-vs-girls task - buy fruit and veg, sell it, make profit - gave early clues as the most venal of the apprentices. (Actually, the pre-task task showed the boys up to be po-faced, by-the-manual, flipchart automatons as they brainstormed what to call the team, while the girls were soppy but at least decisive.) Syed, 31, would definitely sell his own grandmother to make it. I found myself laughing out loud at his pronouncements - how upset was he that nobody else liked his suggestion of being called the A-Team? Every time he suggested it (they eneded up being called fucking Invicta), I laughed. Then, while winding up Sir Alan in the death, he was challenged to say what he'd do for Amstrad, in the unlikely event that he win, and he said, with a straight face (his only face), "Add value."

Anyway, the girls managed to get a vanload of rotten fruit for free and sell it at a profit of something like £1,100. Sir Alan accused them of buying "toot" and using their womanly charms, as if this was against the rules. (Hey, he made it by being an ugly man, he doesn't see why non-ugly women she have any advantage over His Struggle.)However, they won, and the boys' team leader, Ben Stanberry, an IT consultant who'd apparently "beaten" cancer that was diagnosed in 2001, was rounded upon by his team and got fired. He deserved to be fired. He was weak and reasonable. He wouldn't last five minutes. Also, despite his heroic efforts, the chemotherapy seems to have left him tired. He should use this opportunity to go home and get some real rest.

Syed's card has been marked. He will be happier when a few more people have been fired and he can be an A-Team all on his own.

My favourite is the only one yet to annoy me: Paul, 25. He's not necessarily my tip, but he's my favourite. He auctioned off an apple for £5. That's business acumen. But he seems less of a self-aggrandising prick than the others.

Glad to have you back, Sir Alan. You help to confirm that I hate business people with a passion.

Old Seinfelds update
Got back into watching old Seinfelds on DVD: The Cafe and The Tape from Season 3. Just for the record. Preferred the former, in which George sits an IQ test for his girlfriend and Elaine does it for him - something that, guess what, actually happened to one of the writers who wrote it. This show is a documentary. Episode-stealing Kramer moment: when he is handed the hot towel in the cafe and reacts accordingly.

Feeder news
Readers of my old blog will know that I maintain a network of bird feeders in the back garden. I buy my seed, premium sunflower hearts, in bulk from these nice people (see how easily I fall into the trap of imagining that because a company sells good things they must be nice people! God bless me). Once a month I order four 10kg sacks of the stuff, with a stock-up of peanuts when needed. (I have two wire-mesh peanut feeders, which go down much less quickly than the four Conqueror seed feeders in die-cast powder-coated zinc and strong polycarbonate tubing: two medium, with 10 ports, and one large, with 12 ports.) Because the seed people deliver two working days after you order, I fucked up this time and ordered my usual 40kg on Friday. The shipment arrived too late yesterday for me to go out and replenish, so I did it this morning. In the interim, all three seed feeders had run down to the bottom. I felt bad, as all my lovely birds - blue tits, coal tits, great tits, greenfinches, goldfinches, chaffinches, nuthatches and robin - were coming down and finding the cupboards bare. It was cold and wet when I went out in my wellies to fill them up this morning, so that was my penance for letting the birds down.

All feeders are now filled to the brim and I promise I won't go on about this any more, but the reward always comes when I am mid-replenish. A blue tit will perch at the top of the apple tree with me working underneath and call out to the other birds. I imagine he is saying, "At last! The man is topping them up! Come on down!" The bravest ones don't even wait until I've finished before flying down and tucking in. This is my Francis of Assissi moment.

Proof that the seed people are nice: I keep the bulk seed in 10kg plastic tubs in my delapidated shed, and the delivery man doesn't even bother ringing the doorbell when he comes now - he just puts the seed straight in the shed for me. It's like he's the seed fairy.

Oh, by the way, I'm having a day off work today. My first since February 9. Who would begrudge me that?

Syriana
A rare treat: we attended an advance film screening this evening. Happens much less than you might think for the Film Editor of the Radio Times, mainly because film screenings happen in London and I don't live in London. However, at the moment, I do work in London, seven days a week, so I exploited that fact and did what I used to do all the time when I lived in the capital. It was at the headquarters of Warner Bros, which means a very nice screening room indeed, with lovely seats, luxurious legroom (you can actually move along the rows without anyone getting up or treading on their toes) and, I can only imagine, state-of-the-art projection and sound. I bumped into the comedian Lucy Porter in the bar, who was reviewing it for Giles Coren's new film programme on Five. She said she didn't know anything about films. I reminded her that most newspaper film critics don't know anything about films either. She also said she fancies George Clooney. I told her that in a funny sort of way, so do I.

The film, written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, and very much in the multi-stranded style of Traffic, which he also wrote, is to oil and the Middle East what Crash was to race and Los Angeles. If I am the gallery, Syriana is playing to me. If I am the choir, it is preaching to me. It presents Texan oilmen and a venal US government as the baddies. Centred around an unnamed, oil-rich Middle Eastern country whose Emir is on his way out and succession could send relations with the US either way, Clooney plays a wild card CIA rebel with a beard and a belly and a beige suit, but his is just one of the strands; we also get Jeffrey Wright's dogged and seemingly principled lawyer investigating an oil merger; Matt Damon's eight-year-old energy trader working in Geneva; Chris Cooper's oilman who appears to have zebras on his Texas ranch for the armchair big-game hunting thereof; and Shahid Ahmed's young, disillusioned Pakistani immigrant who loses his job after a Chinese takeover and finds solace at the local madrassa, and we all know what happens to disillusioned young men who find solace at the local madrassa in this kind of story. You will see the ending coming. Maybe that's the point. As Matt Damon says, "It's running out. This is a fight to the death."

It's a terrific, intelligent, demanding, provocative film. Great credit to all concerned for getting this uncomfortable story funded and backed and told. Neocons will view it as join-the-dots liberal porn. That's my favourite kind. It reminded me, in style and scope, of the great political films of the 70s, Parallax View, All The President's Men etc. And there's a really gruesome torture scene. Look away now.

And all that legroom. Syriana is released on March 3.

As for Clooney's spare tyre, well, he does have to appear stripped to the waist in the torture scene, and the gaffer tape make him look even bulgier, but he didn't have to pile on the pounds. He could have worn an Eddie Murphy-style fatsuit. But I admire him, as a hunk, for doing it. His character has, after all, gone to seed a bit.

Bafta 2006: The winners
For a full list of winners from the rain-lashed Odeon Leicester Square go here. But the big ones were:

Best film
Brokeback Mountain
Had to be. There is such a momentum behind this film now. I sometimes find myself taking it for granted, having got used to it being around, but try to remember what cinema was like before it came along. It's not that long ago.

Best British film
Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were Rabbit
A real surprise - and we must cherish those on a night like this. Up against The Constant Gardener and Pride & Prejudice, Nick Park and co can hardly have written a speech. All hail the unfashionable choice.

Best actor in a leading role
Philip Seymour Hoffman - Capote
Haven't seen it, like 99.9% of the British public, thus making the usual mockery of the Baftas. I can't wait to do so, and Hoffman looks like the man to beat at the Oscars, but why must we include so many American films that aren't yet on release in the UK, just to make us look good? It's such a transparent con.

Best actress in a leading role
Reese Witherspoon - Walk The Line
Well deserved. And at least it's out at the pictures.

Best actor in a supporting role
Jake Gyllenhaal - Brokeback Mountain
Why this is a supporting role and Heath Ledger's is not is beyond me. Surely this film is a two-hander. Pah! We quibble over technicalities! A good show by someone who was unknown just a couple of years ago.

Best actress in a supporting role
Thandie Newton - Crash
Well, at least this gave us a weeping winner, and every internationally syndicated awards show needs one. Clearly not a bad performance in a film that's chockful of them, but the very best of a category that included Brenda Blethyn, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener and Frances McDormand? I suspect she got it because her character is sexually assaulted and that makes the male members of the Academy feel guilty by gender association (I expect some of them are male), and thus extra sympathetic for Newton. We're a funny bunch, aren't we? And it must be noted, with some alarm, that Thandie Newton is getting thinner and thinner. She was thin enough when she was in ER as John's whiny girlfriend, but that was obviously before she went on the diet.

Original screenplay
Crash - Paul Haggis/Bobby Moresco
Correct. A brilliantly drawn piece, with many different stories to tie up. This is the very essence of a great original screenplay. It never once felt like a book or a play that had been squeezed into film shape.

Adapted screenplay
Brokeback Mountain - Larry McMurtry/Diana Ossana
Get all that out of a short story; win an award.

The David Lean Award for achievement in direction
Ang Lee - Brokeback Mountain
A shame George Clooney wasn't honoured, but I have come to the conclusion that Good Night, And Good Luck (I love a film with punctuation!) is going to be one of those nominated films. It's appreciated, but not loved.

The Carl Foreman Award for special achievement by a British Director/Producer or Writer in their first feature film
Joe Wright (Director) - Pride & Prejudice
Excellent choice. You'd never know it was his first film. And he's a very scruffy man, which is good.

Sound
Walk the Line
Of the "technical awards" this is worth noting - I thought the sound in Walk The Line was superb. The opening shot where we approach Folsom Prison and the sound of the Tennesse Three playing to a hallful of cheering, stamping prisoners gradually reveals itself as such from a dull thudding dirge is a defintive modern movie sound moment.

Academy Fellowship
David Puttnam
Hard to believe he isn't a Fellow already, so not much a surprise, but Best Speech of the night, by a long chalk. Puttnam managed to provide all the expected genuflection and luvvyism whilst making his citation utterly personal with a tale of his deceased father and the final scene from The Sixth Sense. Honestly, I know actors will go moist-eyed at anything when a camera's nearby (and Duncan Kenworthy was crying for most of the evening), but the shots around the auditorium during the climax of this speech revealed what I suspect was a real emotional reaction. Statuettes all round!

I am no expert on the UK Grime scene. All I know is that over the past year I have found myself enjoying more and more of it, finding its beats and frenetic rapping an invigorating change from white, angular rock bands. Roll Deep, Lethal B and now Sway, whose first official album This Is My Demo has gone to number one on the 6 Music Chart. His real name is Derek, a fact he acknowledges and makes fun of on tracks like Little Derek ("Little Derek's doing OK/Little Derek's doing fine/Little Derek's doing cool etc."). I am particularly partial to the track Download, on which he bemoans the fact that although he's tipped for the top he doesn't sell any records, as everybody's downloading the tunes. This seems to be borne out by the fact that he is number one in our chart, and not the Official UK Chart (where his album went in at 45 and dropped this week to something like 72). And after the reams of broadsheet and specialist press coverage he's enjoyed, usually wearing a bandana over his face to increase da mystique, you might think mainstream success would be his. But no.

Sway should be glad. Look at how unhappy and shifty success has made my favourite band Arctic Monkeys. (I am not selling the album pictured above, by the way, even though it has a price tag on it.)

I don't know if Plan B is Grime. I like him very much as well.

Some of the corpsing is amusing
Each Sunday, Richard Herring comes in to my radio show and we talk about what's in the Sunday papers. If it goes well, we laugh a lot. Today, we laughed too much. It is known in the trade as "corpsing" - that is, being unable to speak due to laughter. It is not rare than one of us laughs a lot; it is rare that neither of us is able to speak. We had attempted to cover the story in the News Of The World about some rugby players filming themselves "roasting" a young lady in a kitchen. It's not important what we actually said, only that it was Richard's fault that we both descended into tearful, choking laughter - which I can only hope was a joyful sound on the radio. I had to play the next record early to restore normal service. The moral of this tale is: you can make light of serial killers and bird flu and the news in the Mail On Sunday that all cabinet ministers are to be given Jaguar cars (all tax issues at the end of the day), but there is no way, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon on a Sunday to satisfactorily interrogate the concept of "roasting", despite it being featured often in newspapers that are available to buy by small children, without conjuring images that you don't wish to have in your mind.

Is there a worst surprise than a bad nut? I was happily scoffing some organic, roasted hazelnuts this afternnon and I had a bad one. The only thing to do is keep eating to get the taste out.