41
Happy birthday, Bobby Womack, Patsy Kensit, Evan Dando, James Ellroy, Shakin' Stevens and Brooklyn Beckham, all of whom share a birthday with me (above). I'm old enough now to not make too much fuss on this special day, but I appreciated all the cards with cats and birds on them (especially the owl), and if I write out a list of my presents it will give this blog entry the feel of my 1976 diary:
A Seinfeld book
A book voucher
A Sideways DVD
A really nice black jumper (I am into jumpers, which proves how grown up I am)
Two tickets to see Arctic Monkeys in April in Bournemouth (a real surprise, as we already have tickets for Brixton, but this will be a nice opportunity to stay in a hotel, and it's seated, which will be an interesting new combination of factors at what will be our fifth Arctic Monkeys gig)
Two tickets to go and see Malcolm Gladwell live on the South Bank this month

For the record, in 1976, I got:
Two drawing books
A box of paper
A "brill" pack of felt tips
Some drawing inks and different nibs
A drawing book
The Goodies File
A Liverpool mug
Two Subbuteo goals

As a treat on my birthday (this one), I got up at 6am and wrote some of my book. I had a leisurely breakfast of raspberries and banana, followed by my favourite millet and spelt cereal combination with oat milk, sultanas and pecans, and some tinned sardines with sun-dried tomatoes, pine nuts and chilli. I went to work, it being a Saturday, but enjoyed the Chart, as ever, if not our fleeting number one, Corinne Bailey-Railey, whose debut album will debut on the Official UK Album Chart tomorrow and will thus be robbed from us. It's a deal. I met my wife in Wimbledon and we ate a splendid birthday dinner at a posh burger restaurant in the village, where I had calamari and a sweet chilli dipping sauce, the house salad, two organic burgers without the bun and without the Monterey Jack, but with egg, bacon, pineapple, beetroot, chips and mayonnaise. (Chips was my birthday indulgence. I ate them all, even though they give you too many. This proves I am a reckless fool, living on the edge.)

I had a really nice birthday. Thanks to a few days working from home this week and to three sessions in the gym that I was able to fit in because of it, I don't feel 41. I really don't get worked up about age. Certainly not about the numbers.

Of course, in 1976, it was not all over on March 4 - I had a modest party on March 6, and more presents were forthcoming from my friends Kim, Milner, Griffin, Angus, Lewis and Wilson, including: a torch, the Eighth Army soldiers and a 50p gift voucher. Also, with some of the money I received on my birthday I bought The Tower paperback by Richard Martin Stern (on which The Towering Inferno was partly based - I was mad on disaster movies at this age) and The Goodies' Book Of Criminal Records (I was also mad on the Goodies). I can honestly day I would rather be 41 than 11. I've still got the Goodies books, Bill Oddie is now one of my favourite TV presenters, and I now own four torches, which are placed at opportune places around the house ready for the next power cut.

I hope Bobby Womack had a splendid day too.

Police state latest
I called John Lewis, further to what they're all calling The Linen Basket Incident, and I spoke to an operator who assured me she could help when I asked to speak to customer services. She informed me that the reason I had to give my postcode to buy a basket was because they need it to "get into the system" (which is what the third man told me yesterday "in store"). This, however, only applies if you're picking something up from the collection point. You don't need to supply your details to buy something (as implied by the man yesterday), but you do need to if you're collecting it. This, she told me, is because if you left the goods there by mistake they could contact you and tell you. This is nuts. If I was stupid enough to leave something behind that's my lookout. And I could always contact the shop. It's clearly a system designed to keep tabs on what customers are buying.

The woman also tried to sell me a flimsy line about using a cheque: if I used a cheque (which I didn't), and it bounced, they would be able to contact me. What rot. Surely they would use the bank to get in touch if that was the case. So I asked her if this meant that if I wanted to pay for anything by cheque I would have to give my postcode and she said no. So it was a pointless thing to tell me.

I told her that the system was bad. She said nobody else seemed to mind (that's because they are idiots) and assured me my details would not be passed to any third parties and I would not be sent junk mail. I tried to tell her that in the current climate I'd rather keep my details to myself wherever possible. That's why I don't have a Nectar card or any loyalty cards. She offered to take my details off the computer system, which I said yes to, on principle. (From now on, I shall only buy things from John Lewis that are small enough to be on display. She seemed to think I was joking when I said this.)

I also told her John Lewis ought to train their staff better, so that it doesn't take three assistants to badly explain "the system". A letter to head office may be in order. Am I being paranoid? (The linen basket looks great, by the way, and I really enjoyed the phonecall. We must not let the big people get away with this type of thing at least without a difficult phonecall.)

Thanks to James for sending it my way.

I'm working from home today. This, though, is a photo of our sitcom-writing schedule (the different coloured highlighters represent the episodes we have to write). It's nice to write from home for a change (Lee's at the office) - it's an experiment to see if we get twice as much work done. We shall see. The only downside of working from home today is that it's a lovely sunny day and that means, in Reigate, that people burn garden rubbish. There are no bylaws to protect non-smoking households from other people's secondary bonfire smoke, and they are pyromaniacs round our way. The first sign of a fine day and they're out there setting fire to leaves and grass cuttings. A call to the council reaped no rewards - they do collect garden rubbish though, it's just that some people love to burn. They are obviously not asthmatics and they obviously get their laundry done by someone else and don't hang clothes out to dry on fine days. They are apparently also quite content to keep all windows and doors firmly closed. (Actually, we've done that too, but the smoke still gets in the house. And, like the song, in your eyes.) If it was up to me, the cigarette-smoking ban would also include bonfires. Unsociable, arrogant bastards.

Entertain, amuse and insulate
Went to see Good Night, And Good Luck (watch that comma!) and even though it was exactly as I expected it to be, I was not disappointed. George Clooney is clearly one of the most interesting and talented men in Hollywood right now, and powerful too. I hope "they" don't take him out. This, as I expect most people know, is the story of Edward R Murrow and the CBS News team's idealogical battle with "the junior Senator from Wisconsin", Joe McCarthy. It's in black and white, and, as one dimwitted and isolationist reviewer described it (and this was supposed to be a criticism), it's a load of men sitting around smoking and talking. (This same "critic" observed that Clooney is no great shakes as a director, when - hmmmm - the exact opposite is patently true.)

It's small and focussed and conversational, doing as Murrow did, which was not to take sides exactly, just encourage debate in a climate when that very thing was discouraged to the point of outlawed. I know that most of the great speeches are word for word what Murrow himself said on air - and at an industry dinner thrown in his honour in 1958 - so we must laud him for much of the movie's power ("We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home"). But David Strathairn gives the kind of honest, low-key performance that never feels like a performance. It's done with vivid period detail, and though the camera moves, fluidly, like a modern one, it works, as if we're eavesdropping on history.

It's not an Oscar-winner, as I've suggested before: too small, too quiet, lacking in sufficient emotion to win over the Academy, but we should be grateful that it's nominated, and that Clooney, as actor, director, producer and writer, operates in these troubled times.

By the way, Nick Cotton was in the cinema for the same showing, on his own. (Alright, the actor John Altman, if you must.) I never met him when I worked on EastEnders, but I did write words for him to say. He passed me twice in the corridor outside and looked at me both times, as if we knew each other. I wanted to say to him, "Hello, I killed your son," but that might have freaked him out without preamble.

The 1.35 matinee showing of a film about newsmen in shirtsleeves talking to archive footage of congressional hearings is not one where you're going to get pesky kids who came in by mistake. However, there were two blokes who insisted on eating the noisiest crisps all the way through it. How can people intelligent enough to want to see this film also be so thick? At one point, I thought Nick Cotton was going to tell them to pipe down. The look on their faces would have been worth the price of admission.


Police state latest
Went into John Lewis to buy a linen basket. Whilst paying for it with a credit card and getting the slip of paper needed to go and collect my goods from the customer service bay, the sales assistant asked for my surname and postcode. I gave him both, then did a double take.
"Why do you need my postcode?" I enquired.
"I don't know," he replied, pulling the sleeve of the next assistant along. "Why do I need his postcode?"
The second assistant, older than the first but clearly not in charge, asked the next bloke along: "Why do we need his postcode?"
The third assistant explained that it was required to get in to the system. "Even if we paid in cash?", we enquired. Apparently so. This seemed unlikely. "You have to do if for TVs and videos," he reminded us. (This is true, but that's because you have to have a TV licence to own a TV, and also, brown goods can be used to launder money. I was only buying a laundry basket. This struck me as amusing.) He explained further that "some techie" probably programmed it in. My wife asked what would happen if, hypothetically, we refused to give our postcode. He assured us that he couldn't sell us the goods.
The lady next to us at the counter said, "It's the Big Brother state."
We intend to find out if it is indeed John Lewis policy not to sell goods to anyone who refuses to give over their postcode. I wish now that I had not given it, to see what would have happened. Watch this space.

Apprentice latest

[SPOILER ALERT! If you have yet to see episode two of The Apprentice read no further as I will reveal who was fired.]

Yet again, I despair at the unholy combination of vacuity, ineptitude and self-belief exhibited by the contestants in this compelling series. They are even more fatuous and irritating and bullish than last year's 14. The boys ('Invicta') and the girls ('Velocity') remain pitched until the numbers come down, and that means neither gender feels the need to temper their traits: Invicta are aggressive and nasty, Velocity are emotional and airy-fairy. Having said that, while Jo continues to behave as if she is undiganosed bipolar (in which case, like the fired Ben, she deserves our sympathy and should get out of this stressful game), we had tears from two of the men when the going got tough. These people are living on the spare tank of adrenalin. Many of them are not up to the job of working with other people, let alone the job Sir Alan is offering one of them.

Their task: to produce and flog a calendar for Gt Ormond Street. Though Invicta took longer to get theirs off the flipchart, neither team did a good job. The Invicta calendar (babies dressed as grown-ups - always a winner with those who miss the Mini-Pops) was ugly and cheap-looking, the Velocity one (kittens in a "contemporary" style) was illogical and unusable as a calendar. Neither sold well, but the boys' seemed to impress one calendar company and they won some caviar, champagne and hubris. Nargis, the Velocity team leader, a pharmacist, gave the worst presentations I've ever seen, even on training courses ("I haven't finished speaking, sorry"), and yet - guess what? - she seemed oblivious to her own shortcomings. She pulled the irritating Jo into the boardroom to detract from her own uselessness, but the coup failed, and she was fired. Good. The most ineffectual of an ineffectual bunch got the taxi of doom back to Civvy Street. The sight of a triumphant Jo punching the air again almost had my dinner up.

This is top quality telly. If you like watching maladjusted twerps humilating themselves for £3,000 each (which is apparently what they get as an appearance fee). For me, Invicta won tonight's show for the sheer number of boardroom cliches they managed to employ: thinking inside the box, singing from the same hymnsheet, coming from leftfield, putting things on the table, moving forward - the entire handbook was there. I'd prefer the programme if the loser was actually fired from a cannon into the sea. (I can't believe I am watching a series where Sir Alan Sugar speaks for me.)

German cat dies
I hate it when animals or birds die. (And humans too, obviously, I wouldn't want you to think that I care more about animals than humans.) Last night we passed a dead fox on the southbound A217. I swerved to miss it as it was curled up on the road as if perhaps sleeping. It must have been hit moments before. I didn't want to be the first to desecrate its still-warm body, but I expect, with that much traffic, it will have been paste within the hour. I always keep an eye out for foxes on the roads in semi-rural Surrey. You mostly see them at night, sneaking across roads, and I would be inconsolable if I ever hit one. A cat has died on the Baltic island of Rugen (I don't know how to do umlauts on this keyboard - there's one over the "u") of the H5N1 strain of avian flu. They suspect it ate a heavily infected bird, as it was found near to where most of Germany's 121 cases of the virus have been found. Poor cat. Poor birds. It is clear that the non-human form of this virus will at some point hit Britain. Even the most hysterical newspapers have stopped making it front page news, presumably because they realise that a pandemic that will kill us all is a very remote possibility. The drugs companies have already had their way, selling tons of Tamiflu, which is not a vaccine, nor is it proven to prevent or cure bird flu. But governments have bought the lot, just in case.

Whenever there's a health scare, you can be sure that one of the all-powerful pharmaceutical companies will be behind it. They invented erectile disfunction and sold us Viagra, which was formulated for something else but didn't work, so they had to foist it on us pampered Westerners somehow. But the drugs companies are running out of illnesses to invent and pills to invent to combat those illnesses. They're doing well with statins. And they've done well with bird flu. (The same companies make veterinary medicines, so they're laughing if farmers have to vaccinate flocks and it never reaches humans in Europe anyway.) I feel sorry for the farmers, and that's something I don't usually say. Having said that, avian flu has only flourished because conventional, factory farming uses so many antibiotics and crams its livestock into appalling close quarters, making the spread of disease a piece of cake. Anyway, I feel sorry for the German owners of that cat. They must be sad today.


On a more upbeat avian note: yesterday, I was thrilled to see a family of seven siskins feeding at my feeder. First time we've had siskins in the garden, but what an entrance. At first glance I thought they were greenfinches but the black cap and the rich yellow gave them away. What a glorious, life-affirming sight.

Linda Smith
This is terrible. I just went on to the Comedy Forum and saw the thread "Linda Smith dies." I followed the link to the BBC news page and there it was. Linda Smith has died, of ovarian cancer, aged just 48. Obviously her close friends will have known she was ill, but I didn't know her that well. This didn't stop a cold chill entering my bones when I read the news story. Poor Linda. I worked with her a few times on the radio, and bumped into her on many an occasion once we'd been introduced (I think by my agent Kate). When 6 Music was starting up, my producer Frank and I had hoped to enlist Linda as a regular guest on my Teatime show. She was really keen, and came in to pilot a session. In the end, she was too busy to commit. And no wonder, the amount of stuff she did. Prior to that, I'd interviewed her for a pilot version of what became My Life In CD on 6 Music (eventually under the aegis of Tracey MacLeod). It was Desert Island Discs, basically, and Linda and I spent a happy hour or so chatting through her life and favourite records. The thing that makes it doubly memorable is that I know the exact date: September 11, 2001. Once we'd finished, in a pokey studio in Western House, we were told that a plane had crashed into a building in New York. We went into a nearby office and watched the second plane crash into the second of the Twin Towers. A day etched on everybody's memory, and now one that I can't help but recall (not the last time I saw her, but the longest amount of quality time I spent with her). I wish to remember Linda as she was: full of life, a really warm and witty person to be around, even on days of international incident. I'm sad that she is gone. Those who knew her better than I did will be even sadder. And anyone who saw her on TV or heard her on the radio will be sad in a different way.

When routine bites hard
Now that I go to the office every day, my mornings have atrophied into exactly the kind of routine I went freelance to avoid. How ironic. It's only temporary, while Lee and I finish the sitcom, but it's potentially depressing. Unless, that is, you allow the odd little marker flags of routine to stimulate your imagination.

I leave the house, Reggie Perrin style, at 8.40am, walk up let's-call-it Coleridge Close, turn right into Tennyson Avenue and then across the common onto Wordsworth Drive, at which point, if it's really cold, as it is at present, I start to warm up - is that something to do with "the burn" that people who run get? Anyway, the first reassuring marker is the slightly odd-looking schoolgirl whom I pass walking in the other direction (presumably, to school) at the dip of Tennyson Avenue. It's initially quite alarming to pass the same person at the same point at the same time, but it certainly saves wondering what time it is. Then, as I proceed in an easterly direction down let's-call-it Wordsworth Drive in the direction of Redhill, I pass a young mum with a toddler in a pushchair at precisely the same point. What slaves we all are to routine. From men to women to schoolchildren. You have to assume that both of these otherwise random residents of Reigate and Redhill, the girl and the mum, recognise that they pass the same man in a long coat with a hat on listening to a portable music player every day and at the same point. Perhaps this gives them pause about the routine nature of their own lives. Do they perhaps wonder who I am and where I'm going? Actually, it's an easy guess that I'm walking towards Redhill to catch a train, but do they fill in other details using their imagination? Do they think I'm a kind-looking man, or treat me, like all unattended men of a certain age (and certainly those in long coats cutting across commons) as a potential child-killer?

On my way down the hill, I pass a residential street along which, my powers of deduction tell me, a junior school is situated. Young mums pour out of there at about 8.50, some on foot, most in road-hogging cars. As I cross this road, I am always struck (although not actually struck) by how reckless and in a hurry these mums in cars are, once they've dropped off the kids at school. Or perhaps they are just distracted by the million and one things they have left to do. Either way, it sometimes feel as if they are trying to run me down.

My next routine marker now comes as I approach Redhill Station just before 9.10am, as passengers from a very busy train trickle into Redhill itself across the pelican crossing. It is here that I have started to notice a rotund man, who may only be in his late 20s or early 30s, and he's always smiling to himself. The first time I saw him I thought perhaps he had just thought of something funny. The second time it struck me as a not unpleasant trait (after all, what is there to smile about if you are commuting into and not out of Redhill?) - some may find it creepy or odd that he is always so amused, but not me. I like it. He has a Hawaiian look about him. Is that why he is so preternaturally happy? Because he comes from the land of hula skirts and Elvis Presley? It's good that this happy-go-lucky nature travels so well.

I am one of those people who catches the same train and thus stands at the exact same spot on Platform 2 so that I can get on the foremost carriage at the same place and hopefully get one of the non-table seats facing backwards, platform-side. If it's a window seat, as it must be, I get a hook to hang my overcoat on. On the platform I always see the same man on his way to work (slightly later than the commuter herd, like me), also in an overcoat but never in a hat, despite his bald head. He looks quite hard but quite smart. He reminds me of the fairly obscure American screen actor Elias Koteas. Anyway he gets on at the first set of doors, not the second, so I never see him in transit. But I have seen him in London, on the platform of the Underground, Victoria Line, heading North, like me. We have so much in common, and yet, so little.

Incidentally, on Friday, when approaching Victoria Station on my usual train in my usual seat, as I was putting on my overcoat, I accidentally brushed the head of the man sitting in front of me with my sleeve. He was quite old and had a bald head with some wispy hair on it, which he immediately brushed flat, as if perhaps he thought a ghost had ruffled his hair. I don't think he realised I had done it, so no apology was necessary. I just sat down and hoped he wasn't too spooked.

Well, I saw that very same man today, on the same train, in the same seat. He's as bad as the rest of us with his routine. I almost felt like brushing his wispy head again with my sleeve but held back. You shouldn't mess with people's heads, but one morning last week, I had forgotten my Travelcard and when I was just about to pass the schoolgirl in the dip of let's-call-it Tennyson Avenue, I remembered and turned round and went back in the other direction. That must have freaked her out. She was probably put off thinking about her homework for a second there.