Eek!
I've been inadvertantly sucked into a reality show. Channel Five's Make Me A Supermodel is currently running far too many times a week, and with Sky+ it's all too easy to keep up. This is the second series, and it is what it sounds like: 12 lithe, self-absorbed individuals battling it out to be the best at walking in some clothes. It's amazing how quickly you get dragged down to its level: "Look! He's really good at putting one foot in front of the other! She's really goot at wearing trousers!" There's nothing profound about it. Funny-lookin' Rachel Hunter leads a panel of harsh judges that includes a bossy woman from a model agency, ker-azy photographer Perou (whom I once went to LA with to interview and photograph Marilyn Manson - a gentle chap, but he looks frightening in all those Gothic rings and his wraparounds and he was wearing two-foot rubber platform brothel-creepers and I was glad I wasn't sitting next to him on the plane) and dapper editor of GQ, Dylan Jones (how he finds the time to put his magazine together I do not know). Plus, an assortment of ugly-looking, style-free fashion and style professionals whose main advice to the hapless future clothes-rails is, "Work it!" (One of them actually said, "Work that hat!") I'm not promoting this show as a must-see - they're four evictions through it already, with only eight to go - but it's morbidly fascinating. And nobody's watching it. It's definitely not water cooler television. Tuesday's episode fell from 700,000 viewers last week to 484,000 this week, a 2.1% share for the sixth of 24 episodes. Its viewing figures are positively anorexic.

Marvel at Albert's dead eyes! Guess how long before Kerrie starts crying again! Guess how long before James refers to being gay and "separate from the other guys"! Shiver at the frigid, ruthless sight of Swedish Marianne! Place bets on how long before Jen hits somebody for looking at her thighs! Wonder if Waz will say anything that sounds like a statement rather than a question?! (Yes, there is someone called Waz on it.)

I hereby put figurative money on Luke winning. Like anybody cares. Work that remote.

To the Riverbank Park Plaza on London's Albert Embankment (short walk from Vauxhall Station) for the MDAs and the MJAs, that's the Magazine Design Awards and the Magazine Journalism Awards, combined for the first time to create a fairly typical industry bash with 22 perspex logos handed out after a perfunctory mass-catering dinner at which the vinegary wine runs out before the hard bread rolls have been eaten. I'll be honest, this was a nice break from book-writing exile. I went out for breakfast with Phill Jupitus in Old Compton Street at 10.30 at a lovely upmarket cafe called Balans (three-egg omelette with ham, mushrooms and mozzerella), which was an entirely pleasant occasion. I also had a meeting this afternoon with my friends at TCM, Tuner Classic Movies, for whom I am hosting the Classic Shorts Awards again, next week at the NFT, just to run through order of events, so I was up and down, in and out all day. It was nice to do a bit of walking. All too sedentary, the author's life.

Anyway, I was invited to the MDA/MJAs, thrown by trade magazine Press Gazette, by my benefactors Radio Times, who had entered me, without my knowledge, for Reviewer Of The Year. I had been shortlisted. I didn't expect for a moment to win, and this was not false modesty, but it would have been rude not to get the suit dry-cleaned and show my face. Half of the awards were for design, half for journalism. My category looked like this:

Andrew Billen, New Statesman
Andrew Collins, Radio Times
Boris Johnson, GQ
Kieran Long, Icon
Matt Master, BBC Top Gear Magazine
Ben Walters, Time Out London

Now, in my opinion, Andrew's Billen's TV reviews in the NS are in a category of their own: possibly the only really essential TV writing outside of Mark Lawson in the UK media. Not since Clive James in the Observer or Paul Morley in Arena has television been so lovingly, intelligently and incisively covered in print. I look forward to his column every week. I confess I have never read Boris's car reviews in GQ (my new friends at Top Gear who shared Table 16 with the RT overspill, tell me that Boris often returns his cars with dents in), nor any of the other nominees. I met Matt Master, as he was sitting opposite me, and we agreed to root for each other, since we are both owned by BBC Worldwide. In the event, the best man won: Andrew Billen. It was, in fact, a memorable night for the newly-revamped, modest-circulation NS, as they almost swept the board, winning just about every design award going, plus Exclusive Of The Year for their political editor Martin Bright, and a commendation in Columnist Of The Year for Peter Wilby. Only Grazia equalled it for gongs, bafflingly enough (unless fooling the public into thinking you're something you're not is a consideration), with GQ a close second. (It was nice to see my old NME and Q pal and former Loft member Bill Prince on the GQ table beforehand - where he is still deputy editor - another good, social reason to attend such an otherwise gruelling event.)

RT didn't win anything, despite nominations for Best Design, Best Subbing Team and Best Cover (the Daleks and Cybermen one, in case you're interested, and unless you're "in the industry", you're entitled not to be). But it was good to see them all, including the venerable Andrew Duncan, who was walking with a stick after a recent accident. Main drawback to the evening? The sheer density of carcinogenic smoke on my bloody table. I was literally hemmed in by smokers: all four of my RT colleagues, plus most of Top Gear, who in line with the programme they are branded after, look death in the face and laugh. It was, if I may say so, disgusting. The smoke screen and the excrutiating a capella soul group, The Magnets, who were our "entertainment", hastened my teetotal exit when it was all over.

But not before what turned out to be an actual piece of "networking." (Use of the very phrase nauseates me slightly, unless it's the fag smoke.) I was moved to go over the victorious NS table, already carousing with champagne and their backs sore from slapping, to state for the record that Andrew Billen deserved to beat me. He seemed unsurprisingly bamboozled by my fan-like behaviour, but it was sincere, and from a peer of sorts, and not a drop of drink had been taken on my part. (Drink at these dos and you end up sucked into banging the table and being a corporate dick.) I think a good TV critic needs telling, and I was happy to have done so. Anyway, before slipping away and leaving them to it, I was accosted myself by Martin Bright, their award-winning political editor, who declared himself a fan of mine. How topsy turvy this all was! I batted back the adoration and explained that I was an NS subscriber of long-standing, and then he told me I should write for them. I informed him that I had, in the distant past, written a piece about Billy Bragg and a couple of reviews, but under previous regimes, so he demanded that I meet their editor, John Kampfner, who probably had carousing to be getting on with, but was polite enough to engage me in conversation and give me his card.

So, I walked back to Vauxhall Station with a possibly champagane-fulled and certainly vague NS offer of work in my wallet, and a deep strata of smoke in my dry-cleaned suit and poor old asthmatic lungs. We'll see if John Kampfner remembers me in the morning, when I turn up at their offices demanding work!

At last!
The little-seen BBC3/BBC2 comedy Grass, starring Simon Day, is finally coming out on DVD. All eight episodes (plus exclusive audio commentary on two episodes by Simon and myself) available as part of this post-Fast Show box set from November 6, which also houses two series of Swiss Toni and Ralph & Ted. I wish it was available as a stand-alone DVD - and there are plans for such a release in the new year, I believe - but for now, at least it's out in the public domain, ripe for either reassessment, or just plain old assessment. Compensation for the frankly random way Grass was scheduled on BBC2 in 2003. Not the first time this has ever happened to a programme, of course, but that kind of treatment is usually reserved for US imports, or ratings failures, and Grass didn't even have chance to become a failure - it was on at different times every week on Saturday night, some might say a self-defeating tactic for a serial, which is what it was. (You might equally say that making a serial comedy is self-defeating, but Grass is in some ways the polar opposite to Not Going Out - no audience, no laughter, heavy on story development, lighter on gags and punchlines, and shot mostly on location in the beautiful Norfolk countryside.) Anyway, must get back to work, but I'm delighted it's finally coming out.