Idiot British Politician Of The Year
Some strong competition this year, what with Lembit Opik's recent headline-grabbing celebrity-girlfriend swap, Tony Blair's pronouncement on Parkinson that God would judge him on Iraq, and our next prime minister David Cameron riding a bike with a ministerial car right behind while thinking about his next podcast or photo-opportunity, but deputy PM John Prescott takes the award for being a walking cliche: shagging his secretary! I actually don't think he should have been sacked for it, but respect is not due. His wife may not understand him, but the rest of us do, all too well. An embarrassment to middle-aged men everywhere. And I actually liked him for smacking that farmer.


Wonder Drug Of The Year
Again, some strong competition, with Tamiflu declared "useless" in dealing with avian flu but stockpiled by governments anyway when some swans died (bearing in mind that even if it is never administered to the public, the drugs companies have already sold it) and Herceptin approved by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence after much hoo-hah for NHS funding even though a single course costs twenty two thousand pounds and may only help one in five of the 5,000 women a year who suffer from the particular form of breast cancer it treats, with side effects on the heart and lungs thrown in. (My beef with this drug is not about whether or not it offers hope, but that it is routinely described as a "wonder drug" in the media, when it patently isn't, and that's not hope, that's hype. Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical company gets millions from an already-strapped NHS. Hmmmm.) I have high hopes for the HPV vaccine for 2007, which the government are threatening to inject into all schoolgirls to protect them from a virus that's linked with cervical cancer: that'll be a "cancer vaccine" then - well done, The Media, once again - but 2006's award, for sheer ubiquity, goes to statins, the blood-thinning drugs which are now available, heavily-promoted, over the counter like sweets. The drug company dream! Get your statins here! Lower your cholesterol using a sweetie rather than than change your diet! Yet another pill for your bathroom cabinet!


Heartbreak Of The Year
Those that know me will know that my heart breaks regularly over the death or despair of animals and birds. Equally, it mends by the mere sight of a goldfinch at my feeders or a fly rescued from drowning in a toilet (don't ask), so you have to go with it. This year, I think the saddest sight I saw, animal-and-bird-wise, was that poor northern bottlenose whale, who swam 40 miles up the Thames to die of what turned out to be arthritis. I suppose you had to hand it to those people who tried to save it, but interference is another word for it; thinking how stressed the poor creature must have been in its final hours still gives me a pain right there.


New Experience Of The Year
For me? Attending Wimbledon and seeing what all the fuss was about. Also, seeing what a lot of fuss is actually made.


Televised International Football Tournament Of The Year
The World Cup, obviously (see: blog entries passim). Loved every minute of it, the commentator bollocks, the downfall of Zidane, even the pitches half-obscured by shadow and England's woeful, then hopeful, then woeful again performance. It's what we came for.


TV Station Of The Year
Do you need to ask? HBO, and I don't even have it on my telly. Respect is also due to BBC4.


Saddest Celebrity Death Of The Year
I'm not going to say Top Of The Pops, even though it was killed off before its time was up. It's hard to place one celebrity death higher than another - I was sad to see Syd Barrett and Arthur Lee go, and Chris Penn, who was way too young at 40, and Allen Carr, who died so that countless others may pack in the fags. Steve Irwin, for all his interference with animals, did love them, and Tony Banks MP had one or two principles. I'm glad to have met Robert Altman, now that he's gone. But Linda Smith was the worst news of all, as I had actually met, shared a joke and worked with her - on September 11, 2001, most memorably - and she had a lot more to give. At least she was remembered fondly and in depth in the papers.


Technological Advance Of The Year
Being a podcast. Not through 6 Music, but thanks to Ebury, my publishers, who turned January's authors comedy evening into a series of downloadable videos, including my little turn about serial killers, which I only did because the slide projector wasn't working. Download it here, should you wish.

That'll do. I'm sick of reviews of the year. Bring on the next one. I've just seen a woodpecker on my peanut feeder, first time in the new garden - my heart is full.

Sopranos Season Six: finished!
It's just too good to put down. That and the fact that I'm on holiday (because it's Christmas) means that half a series has been polished off in two sittings, five episodes on Thursday night, the final two last night. What a rush. That's too many episodes to individually log them, but the last one, Kaisha was written by Terence Winter, David Chase and Matthew Weiner and directed by Alan Taylor, who are close to the dream team. It was an odd ending, as the really big stuff had been dealt with in the penultimate ep, Cold Stones (directed by Tim Van Patten, written by Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider), ie. the horrible death of ... hang on. Let's assume anybody who hasn't seen Season Six yet will avoid any reviews of said season and will stop reading ... spoilers! spoilers! ... now. Though the shooting of Tony was the big arc this season, after which each day was a gift, the tale of Vito Spatafore lay at its heart. Once he'd been outed, in a comedic way, things turned nasty, but his New Hampshire odyssey ran in bucolic parallel to the macho New Jersey he'd left behind. It was beautifully plotted and brilliantly played by Joseph Gannascoli, walking with his dodgy hip towards certain death but enjoying one last chance for peace and "Johnny Cakes" along the way. A bona fide tragedy. He was dead the moment he was caught by Finn in Season Five, but the Sopranos knows how to "seed" a later storyline. Lots of other interesting stuff set up for the final run: a possible clash between Christopher and Tony over Nurse Hathaway, something to do with the war on terror laid down in a conversation between Christopher and Agent Harris, possibly even a war of terror between New York and New Jersey, all dependent on how much time Phil Leotardo wants to spend with his grandchildren when he's out of hospital. And Anthony Jr's relationship with Blanca and her son Hector could be the making of him ("at least she's a Catholic"). It's been a magnificent series, from Artie Shaw onwards, with plenty for the supporting cast to do, not least Paulie, Silvio, Bobby, Vito and even Artie Bucco. The family tableau that ended it was so filled with irony, portent and depth - you need six seasons to earn all that.

Vito: the man deserves a pictorial tribute:



One question remains:

Who put the note on the pinboard in Tony's ward?

Box set scorecard


The Wire Season One: finished!
It was as good as you all said it was. We were forced - forced by the sheer momentum of the narrative - to watch three episodes on this lazy Day After Boxing Day to reach the end. It's done. Barksdale is in prison. D'Angelo is in prison. Wee-Bey is in prison. McNulty's on the boats. Freamon is promoted back to homicide from the pawn shop unit. All meaningless if you haven't experienced this top-flight cops-and-robbers show yet - which was me just a few short months ago. Season Two has been ordered. I am already checking ahead on the excellent HBO website.


The Sopranos Season Six: four episodes in.
Episode Three, Mayham, written by Matthew Weiner and directed by Jack Bender, and Episode Four, The Fleshy Part Of The Thigh, written by Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider and directed by Alan Taylor, were both up to scratch, with Paulie, Vito and Silvio getting plenty of airtime while Tony recovers (as Coma-Tony aka "Kevin Finnerty" - "in finnerty", geddit? - heads towards the light of a family reunion with the symbolic Native American wind blowing the trees behind him). Phil Leotardo is being all too nice as he bounces between Sack and Soprano - this bodes well for some gratuitous pyschopathic violence at a later stage, I think. Christopher's trying once again to crack the movie business with "Saw meets Godfather II". A nice cameo in the second of the two episodes from that fine old character player Hal Holbrook, as a rocket scientist with cancer, and a funny subplot about rappers being shot to improve their commercial stock.

As ever, The Sopranos manages to be elegaic and deep without losing its street cred: "Sometimes I go about in pity for myself and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky." You don't get that sort of guff on The Wire and yet they're comparable in many other ways. Also, in our house, one is just beginning, the other is moving towards its final act. It's wrong to compare.

Because I ended up rattling through The Wire in a matter of days, I didn't have time to log the writer and director of each episode on here. They deserve it as much as the crews of The Sopranos and West Wing. I noticed that Tim Van Patten directed one - a Sopranos alumnus. No surprise really.


Curb Your Enthusiasm Season Five: one episode to go.
But this series has been a rare treat, with a much more entertaining through-story (Richard's kidney) than Season Four (The Producers, which bogged it down, and robbed it of that abiding realism). Bingo! Bin-go!


Upstairs Downstairs Series Five: only four episodes in.
Because not all essential, long-running DVD box sets are HBO. Set in the roaring twenties, this is the final series, and is all the more poignant for that. A full household, with Hudson feeling the strain physically and culturally, and Lord Bellamy straddling the old and new with speeches about home rule in the Lords and a feisty young bride. As soon as we finish, it's back to the beginning of Series One, such is the quality of the writing and acting in this magnficent work. And it wasn't even on the BBC.

Marvin Gayed
Christmas time, mistletoe and wine, DVD box sets arrive just in time. The Sopranos Season Six found itself removed from the gift wrap yesterday, and just in time, as Christmas Day telly was, well, shit. (The Mighty Boosh Live, the George And Mildred movie - Yootha's last hurrah - Dylan Moran Live and Green Wing Seasons One and Two all appeared under the tree too.) We've been waiting patiently for the penultimate Sopranos while it played out, unwatched, on E4, having missed the first couple of episodes. Now it is here. And it is already epochal. Members Only, written by Terence Winter and directed by Tim Van Patten (here we go again), pulled off a great trick: it seemed to be a fairly humdrum rounding-up of ongoing storylines - Carmela's spec-house, the ghost of Adriana, Bobby and Janice getting all domestic with their baby and his train set, Tony developing a taste for sushi - and honed in on Eugene, who wanted out, but they pulled him back in, to the extent that he hung himself, to release his wife and kids from the lifestyle. This seemed like the big story of episode one, but then, in the last moments, Uncle Junior went looking for his teeth, came back with a gun and shot Tony in the stomach, to the tune of Comes Love by Artie Shaw. A punch in the guts. The Sopranos is back, back, back!

Episode Two (of course we watched Episode Two straight afterwards), Join The Club, written by David Chase himself and directed by David Nutter, was a conceptual one that steered clear of the now-familiar dream-sequence surreality and had Tony living the life he might have lived while he lay in a coma at the hospital, a gaping wound in his belly left undressed and open. We saw him as a legit Tony, with wife and kids at home while he was away on business with a brief case, attending some sales convention. All credit to Chase, this imagined diversion was entirely diverting - the parallel universe was as intriguing as the real one. There's a subplot about terrorism, seeded by a warning the two Feds give to Christopher at the pork shop - we'll see where that one goes. Meanwhile, Tony's family gather round him, even Anthony Jr, who vows to kill Uncle Junior in vengeance for the accidental shooting. Coma-Tony discovers that he has Alzheimer's and in a moving final scene finds himself unable to call hom and tell his wife.

It's all good stuff. How will I get The Wire watched now? Happy Boxing Day.

Don't nobody like to hear dirty words like that
Alright, alright, The Wire is clearly one of the great modern American TV dramas. I'm now halfway through Season One, on the collective recommendation of just about everybody who posts on this blog, and it's had its hooks in me since Episode Two. I can't tell the converted anything about it that they don't know, and here I am again, last on the block, but fuck it, who cares? I'm with the programme now, literally. I'm watching it in two-episode chunks. One isn't enough. It's set in Baltimore, whose suburbs appear to have much in common with New Jersey, hence the immediate Sopranos echoes - however, although it's a police procedural first and foremost, it's different to NYPD Blue in its prime, as the the drug dealers and stick-up merchants get equal airtime. We care about the police and the criminals. All have backstories and motivation and character, and because it's a serial, rather than a series, a longer narrative arc unfolds, which makes it compulsive. The language is strong, but nothing to shock a fan of gangsta rap. And there's poetry within it, not least when (in the scene pictured) D'Angelo explains the rules of chess to two young hustlers in the Pit who are using the chess pieces to play checkers. I'm knocked out by Dominic West, who plays chief protagonist McNulty - the boozy cop who makes a special trip to Ikea when his kids are coming to visit and assembles them a bunk bed, despite sucking on a half-bottle of whisky as he does so - but mainly since I discovered he's English! He had a small part in the 1999 Patrick Stewart Christmas Carol they showed on Christmas Eve. The bloke was born in Sheffield. And while we're on the subject of English actors making a decent fist of an American accent in a US TV show, one of the dealers is played by Idris Elba, who used to be on Family Affairs in the early days. I used to write dialogue for him as Tim! Now he's in The Wire, which - I don't know if I mentioned this - is one of the great modern American TV dramas.

I understand it's into its fourth season in the States. I've got some catching up to do. Better cover my ears.

Thank you for the tip-off by the way.

Did a gig
We did a gig. The 6 Music house band, who now seem to be officially called Totalshambles, made their all-in-black live debut on Wednesday night at the BBC Club. Between 6pm and 7pm, as a warm-up for the 6 Music party and pop quiz, we rattled through 20th Century Boy, Rehab, I'm A Believer, Town Called Malice, Knock On Wood, White Man In Hammersmith Palais, Folsom Prison Blues (guest vocalist: Mr Frank Wilson!), Respect, Mr Blue Sky (guest bassist, because Mark had to leave early to sort out the quiz, Mr Tom Robinson, called up from the audience), Sympathy For The Devil and, as an impromptu, unrehearsed, spur-of-the-moment encore, 2-4-6-8 Motorway, with Tom on vocals. It was a blast. (You realise I have now played the drums with Tom Robinson and Cud.) Many photographs were taken by Zoe, who takes all those nice pics of the bands in the Hub, but all except one of Jim looking like he's in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest were lost during a power cut on Thursday morning. Boo! Thankfully, Lauren took a few, and these are the best two, even though you can't see me in the one above because of the speaker. The gig was recorded for posterity and a bootleg is already doing the rounds. Those who thought we'd be shit, including us, were pleasantly surprised - that's all I'll say. Steve Lamacq, in the spirit of the season, played a track out in his Unsigned Band slot yesterday and Gid and I did a phoner (I was in Northampton at my Mum and Dad's, delivering presents). It's all very exciting. Here's a photo where you can see me - another reminder that being the drummer means:

a) You get really hot
b) You have to spend ages packing your stuff away afterwards while the guitarists get all the groupies
c) You look rubbish in live photos



Jim's not smoking a fag, he's smoking a kazoo, by the way.

Visit our MySpace page, for no reasons whatsoever. As soon as we work out how, we'll put some bootleg tracks up there, but bear with us.

Stop Press!
Just received this very short video clip from Lauren:

The Year Of The Wallchart
If I were forced to sum up the year 2006, I'd say it was hard. January to June were dominated by the writing of Not Going Out. Half a year on one project that resulted in far too many seven-day weeks due to my ongoing 6 Music commitment, which really took it out of me, physically and mentally. And then the book filled my days between July and November, its deadline kindly put back by my publishers, but with no room for manouvere. It's easy to get sucked into this kind of working practice when you're self-employed, but I vow here and now never to do it again. I've always considered myself a good time-manager, but in 2006, I let go of the reins.

It was a sad year at home, due to the death of Chilli, and the inadvertant stress caused by - although apparently not to - the lovely Paddy. It was also a decisive year, moving back to London, which has made a huge difference to the general outlook. The bird feeders are alive with visitors now, with goldfinches the most recent addition - eight at a time! - and a few noisy parrots to remind me of Reigate. (Did they follow us up here?) A small garden is better than a big garden: the year's big lesson.

Professionally, I was very proud of Not Going Out when it aired on BBC1 in October and November, and the fact that the viewing figures went against the general trend, rising from 2.8 million to 3.6, still swells my chest. Here's to the prospect of a second series, albeit let's hope a less stressful one for all. I enjoyed doing my weekend shows on 6 Music, with quite a community built around Sunday, one that I hope will follow me to Saturdays in January; my talking head work moved away from nostalgia shows (I did some stuff for The Greatest Disaster Movies in January which has yet to air, and may never, for all I know) towards slightly more intellectual documentary strands on BBC4, such as The Cinema Show and anything made by BBC Bristol, who allowed me to present The Making Life On Mars, which granted me a splendid day in Bath, driving a Ford Cortina into shot and "walking and talking". I'd love to do more of that in 2007. I look forward to That's Me In The Corner finally being published in May. I don't anticipate a bestseller, but I'll be the proud owner of a trilogy either way, and I will no longer have to explain how I got where I am today to media students. Just read the book! I'll let the review of the year unfold in bits, as I remember them.


Magazine Of The Year
The New Yorker, what else? It continues to act as a challenge every week: read me. Come on, read all of me, even the article you don't fancy much. Alright, you don't have to read the baseball article. The coverage of the midterm elections was illuminating, I now rely on Sermour Hersch for a deeper, unspun understanding of American (and therefore global) politics, and Anthony Lane continues to be my favourite critic in the world.


Small Triumph Of The Year
Finding a mistake in the militarily fact-checked New Yorker. Issue dated October 30, 2006, page 99, a picture caption accompanying a review by John Lahr of the play My Name Is Rachel Corrie at New York's Minetta Lane Theatre. Under an illustration of actress Megan Dodds - yes, our Megan Dodds - it calls her "Megan Dobbs". You've no idea how thrilled I was to find this. It makes them more human.


Farce Of The Year
The Wallchart Wars. What began as a sweet but badly-executed marketing idea by the Guardian escalated into copycat warfare. Educational posters of varying quality and usefulness came at us from all angles, as if perhaps the newspapers were giving them away as a parental gesture of philanthropy, rather than to raise their ABC figures using a method much cheaper than licensing old films on DVD. The baroque period was reached by the Guardian in November with a series that included pigs and horses and cows and goats, each one dominating that day's cover above the masthead as if perhaps Vic Reeves had taken editorial control. No more please.


Disappointment Of The Year
Robin Hood. Oh dear.


Columnist Of The Year
OK, there are too many columnists writing too many columns in too many supplements of too many newspapers about too little, but the truly unmissable ones rise to the top. All of the best ones are in the Guardian - although I get an enormous amount of perverse pleasure from Peter Hitchens in the Mail On Sunday - and for me, it's a draw this year between Simon Jenkins on politics (here's a good example, in which he wrote, "Terrorism is 10% bang and 90% an echo effect composed of media hysteria, political overkill and kneejerk executive action") and Jenni Russell on kids and social issues (I particularly liked this one). I always read George Monbiot, but he descends into self-parody and sometimes seems to feel he has to generate righteous anger even if he's not angry, and John Harris gets better and better, although he's my friend so I would say that.


Late Starter Of The Year
I've never been a trendsetter. I'm the first to admit being last on the block. As previously confessed, I didn't even like Curb when I first saw it. And the Wu-Tang Clan were two albums in before I sussed that they were one of the greatest bands in the world. You redeem yourself through retroactive gorging. As I did this year with The Mighty Boosh. Where had I been all their lives? Tore through both TV series on DVD and now wish I'd been at Brixton on one of those five nights. Vince and Howard, or Noel and Julian if you prefer, are now installed in our house as comedy gods.


Bird Of The Year
As ever, the commonest of garden birds gave me the most pleasure, simply by visiting my feeders in Reigate and London: the tits and the finches and the robin. Three cheers to the goldfinches and the long-tailed tits and the starling that's started to appear on the peanut feeder, but if I had to single out one bird, it would be a lifer, the Common Kestrel, which we saw on a post by the railway line on the way into B&Q. We sat and watched it preen for quite a few uniterrupted minutes from the car, before it flew off. A stunning sight, and right in the middle of urban London. Now, back to the finches.


Reality Show Of The Year
You don't have to be a complete snob about these, just selective. I avoided the big ones - I'm A Celebrity, Big Brother, Love Island - and the low-rent hey-it's-for-charity ones - Only Fools On Horses, Celebrity Scissorhands - but showed great loyalty to the ones that worked: Celebrity Big Brother (priceless), The Apprentice (improved for its second series, despite repetition, the scourge of all reality formats), and, the winner, Make Me A Supermodel. Perhaps the only show apart from Diet Doctors I watched on Five all year, but compulsive. It had everything you want from a reality show: idiots, villains and total artifice. I have zero interest in the exploitative, air-filled, eugenic fashion industry, so perhaps that's why it grabbed me.


Website Of The Year
It has to be Wikipedia, for the sheer amount of traffic I've put its way in 2006. It still knocks me out, although I've learned to just assume it's all wrong, and if it's right, that's a bonus. My one niggle with it is the strict search engine, which does not allow for mistakes, and has only grudging guesswork capacity. (I discovered the fact-checkers at Radio Times won't accept Wikipedia as a source for movie trivia. So I only use it as a guide, not confirmation.) My most hated website of the year is MySpace. I wish I had whatever it takes to remove my profile from it and release my 860 or so friends back into the wild. I don't hate the people on it, obviously, I just hate myself for being on it.


Book Of The Year
The mark of a good book is that I cannot wait to sit down on a train to get it out of my bag. All of the following effected this alchemy in 2006 (and very few of them were published this year): The Hungry Years by William Leith; Beyond Belief by Emlyn Williams; Amongst Women by John McGahern, who died this year; Sein Language by Jerry Seinfeld; Chronicles by Bob Dylan (until I stopped); Here At The New Yorker by Brendan Gill; The Years With Ross by James Thurber; and Saturday by Ian McEwan. My book of the year, for all that is tells us about the world we live in, is Bad Food Britain by Joanna Blythman. It's a depressing picture she paints of this once-great nation, and certainly one that Nigella Lawson wouldn't recognise from her glowing hearth, but one that must be addressed.

More to follow in Part 2

A tall story
I have mentioned before how much I like the coffee chain EAT. Of the chains, it's the smallest; they do ground decaff rather than instant, which is by no means a given, and the soya milk's organic. (As is their dairy milk, lactose fans!) Because I have takeaway coffee so rarely, I have decided I can live with the dose of soya, as long as it's organic. There's also a nice chap called Arthur who works at the Regent Street branch of EAT who I usually have a natter with when I pass through on a Sunday morning, on the way to work. It's a pleasant place to visit and it's actually opposite a Starbucks, so you can enjoy the act of not giving them money and look at their logo at the same time.

They do two coffee sizes, Tall and the ubiquitous Grande. The Grande, which seems to be about half the size of a Costa Grande - you can certainly lift one - costs just two pounds, even if you have decaff or soya. There is no surcharge for these lifestyle choices. A Tall costs 1.70. Anyway, I ordered my usual Grande Decaff Soya Latte to take away on Wednesday and the person at the coffee machine accidentally prepared me a Tall Decaff Soya Latte. I pointed out the excusable error, and the coffee was decanted from a Tall cup into a Grande cup. To my astonishment, it almost filled the Grande cup!

It turns out that the Tall cup is wider than the Grande cup, so that even though it's shorter, it contains almost the same amount of coffee. The difference is a quick glug of froth. So, from now on, I shall always order the Tall, save myself 30p and get virtually the same hot drink.

I don't mean to do EAT down here - I'm sure cup discrepancy is similar in other outlets - but it's worth knowing. If I drink two cups a week, that's 60p I'll save, which is 2.40 a month! I could almost afford to buy a coffe in Caffe Nero with that money!

Sorry. I know the Aids pandemic in Africa is a serious business, but read this, from Thursday's Guardian down to the bit where I started laughing:

Breakthrough hailed as study shows circumcision can halve HIV risk
Circumcision can halve the risk of a man picking up the HIV infection which leads to Aids, scientists in the United States said last night. Two major trials, in Kenya and Uganda, have confirmed what doctors and campaigners have suspected and hoped for several years. The results have major implications for the fight against the Aids pandemic raging in Africa and Asia.

Yesterday the head of the World Health Organisation's HIV/Aids department, Kevin de Cock [you can stop reading now] said it could cut the numbers of infected men by "many tens of thousands, many hundreds of thousands and maybe millions over coming years" etc.

I suppose some people are destined to fill certain jobs. Look, here he is, the admirable gentleman:

I'd change my name though, wouldn't you? If for no other reason than to prevent juvenile idiots from laughing at it.

Hub session
For them that's interested, here are some photos taken at tonight's 6 Music band rehearsal in the famous Hub, where the like of Kasabian, Paul Weller, Beck, The Guillemots, Primal Scream and Yo La Tengo have played. (We are not called Momentum, but if we were going to play the wine bar circuit with our cover versions, it would be the right sort of name.) Only Mark, our bassist, was missing. Our first gig - the 6 Music Christmas party - is next Wednesday. We've added Sympathy For The Devil to the set, and dropped Bennie And The Jets, because even if you get that right, it sounds wrong. Highlights tonight included White Man, Mr Blue Sky and Rehab. Wish us luck. For me, it's like being 17 again.


From left: Jax (vocals), Verity (used to work at 6 Music, not actually a member of the band, just dropped by to break one of the maraccas), Jude (vocals), Gideon (guitar, vocals), Mike (guitar, vocals).


From left: Gid, Mike, Jim (keys, vocals - frankly, the creative kingpin, our musical director and player manager), me (drums).


A view from behind our backing singers, the John Sugar Babes (which is only funny if you work at 6 Music - ha ha!)


This is a close-up of myself and Jim, concentrating hard, trying to sound like the MGs. Nice branding!


Hmmm. I think that looks like a flourish.


Oh look, here's some famous bloke playing in the same hub. But did he do Town Called Malice - I think not.

Bodies
Ouch. Jed Mercurio's mighty medical drama ended on Wednesday, back on BBC3 where it belongs. It flopped on BBC2 on occasion of its transfer, but it's all comparative, and 296,000 viewers is about 30,000 more than The West Wing finale drew on More4. (I could stop going on about ratings, but I won't.) A 90-minute extension, it basically tied up all the loose ends from the last series and left one hanging, presumably forever, since it ain't coming back. You have to hand it to Mercurio. I've not read his original novel, but he's done an amazing job of stretching the material out to two series (16 episodes) and one special, without ever stretching it out. Until now.

If you're already a fan, like me, you will allow Bodies the indulgence of this special episode. It merely extended what was already there - the incompetence case against Dr Roger Hurley (Patrick Baladi, whose affable role in The Office is now almost expunged from my mind!), which reached a rather meloldramatic climax; the battle for Dr Rob Lake's soul between professional loyalty and moral imperative, which Mercurio moved to a new hospital, but it was the same old battle (I won't mention how they ramped up the stakes, in case you haven't watched it and you're going to, but it was this episode's stroke of dramatic genius); the continued devil-may-care insouciance of Dr Tony Whitman (Keith Allen, who really found his brand in this series, no matter what you might think of him), reinstated from the eternal golf course for one last round of being a wanker, using the term "vag" and trying to chat up Dr Polly Grey (Tamzin Malleson), who for almost no discernible reason other than narrative convenience was pregnant by Rob (Max Beesley) who managed to get through the whole 90 minutes without smiling, true to form; and the hospital administrators were still slippery, closed-ranks pantomime villains.

Meanwhile, pregnant women were wheeled in and out, usually destined for a Caesarian section that might or might not result in complications, an awful lot of blood being vacuumed up into those little Dysons, death of the mother and/or baby, and a dispassionate explanation using an overhead projector. Only Donna Rix (Neve McIntosh) had a new role - that of an investigative journalist (happily divorced, she'd done a degree in the meantime), but she was posing as a nurse, and banging the same drum as before. The only thing she didn't actually do was have rough sex with Rob, something she could always be relied up on to do in the previous series, which brightened things up a tiny bit.

In all, I loved it, but then it is Bodies and he is Jed Mercurio, and they are that fine cast. But it wasn't actually necessary, and it probably is time to end it. Whatever Mercurio does next, I'll be in the waiting room, clutching my notes and hoping for the best. I'm kind of expecting more of the what-happened-next This Life, but they've got a ten-year gap to play with.

"Shocking ... " was the announcement by a medic in the operating room when yet another poor, hapless mum required CPR. It kind of summed up the whole programme.

OK then, the 14 best films of the year
As ever with these lists, this isn't definitive, as I haven't seen all the films that have been released this year. Most of the important ones, but a few slipped through the net, for various reasons, that I think I would have liked (The New World, The Child, The Death Of Mr Lazarescu, Little Miss Sunshine, Requiem, Paradise Now, Three Burials Etc., The Host, all of which I'll tidy up in the new year on DVD). Anyway, here goes:

1 Good Night, And Good Luck. For having a fully punctuated title, which I like. Liberal porn at its most handsome. Let's watch the good guys bash McCarthy again, live on telly! I love George Clooney. No, I love him. I was, of course, tempted to put Hidden at number one like all the Sight & Sound critics, but I expect French films directed by German auteurs to be good, and I don't expect American ones to be good, so when one is this intelligent and frugal and powerful, it deserves extra praise. Best DVD commentary of the year, too. I love George Clooney.

2 An Inconvenient Truth Dismissed as uncinematic - and indeed it is a fat bloke in a blazer talking about the weather - Al Gore's PowerPoint presentation was still one of the most gripping experiences I had at the cinema this year.

3 United 93 One of ours, Paul Greengrass, doing well over there. I am obsessed with September 11, and this brave, low-key telling of the tale brought it all back, but in a way that watching the news, or allowing Oliver Stone to idiot-filter it first, never could.

4 Hidden I'm still thinking about it. That's the mark of a film. It stays with you. I watched The Sentinel, a thriller starring Michael Douglas, two days ago, and I wasn't even thinking about it during the film.

5 The Wind That Shakes The Barley Ken Loach at his indignant best. The moment the right wing press started laying into it - without having actually seen it - for being anti-British and pro-IRA, I was there. Not as much of a polemic as parts of Land And Freedom, its obvious cousin, Loach and co-writer Paul Laverty found a way of telling a piece of history through a human story.

6 Volver One of the strangest pieces of criticism I read all year was Peter Mathews' burial not just of this film but of Almodovar's entire canon in S&S. The magazine's critical standing still feels damaged. This was a glorious piece of work. Certainly full of Almodovar's ticks, but what ticks.

7 Red Road Andrea Arnold: one to watch. This, her debut, was like Lynne Ramsay meets Paul Verhoeven. Stunning. Out on DVD in February, having enjoyed anything but a wide theatrical release in '06.

8 The Squid And The Whale Now that's what I call indie.

9 Brokeback Mountain Just to prove I have nothing against big, fat, Oscar-winning American studio pictures. Landscape meets subtle performance and changes the way we look at something we thought we knew all about.

10 Children Of Men Alfonso Cuaron, a Mexican, captures everything that's wrong with Britain. (I know it's based on a British novel, but still.) Clive Owen may never regret missing out on Bond.

11 The Queen Who'd have thought it? A film about the Queen!

12 Capote More than just a world-beating performance from a former character actor, but not much more.

13 Borat Funniest film of the year, by a long chalk. Mind you, looking back at the list, there's little competition

14 Breaking And Entering I find myself defending this pretentious and contrived film now, wherever I go. My pet theory: if it had been in French, critics would have fallen over themselves to praise it.

Discuss, obviously.

I have The Wire season one box set, and The West Wing season seven box set sitting on the coffee table, unwatched. For their shameful neglect we must blame Sky+ and the resulting volume of telly now in a constant, self-regenerative holding pattern, from George And Mildred and The Late Edition to The Choir and Nigella's Dirty Christmas. But this is surely better than there being "nothing on". As it happens, two fine drama series on the BBC have come to an end after six weeks. Both compulsive in different ways.


The State Within
A top-class, high-production-values British political conspiracy thriller from writer-director Daniel Percival, actress-writer Lizzie Mickery and director Michael Offer (credit where it's due) which will go down in the almanacs as one of the BBC's biggest flops, in that it started out with a healthy 5.7 million viewers, shed two million by week two, and was struggling with a viewership of 2.6 at its nadir, almost beaten by Monty Don on BBC2 for its big finale. An ignoble fate for such a thrilling, intelligent, politically brazen piece, and with a proper film star at its centre, Jason Isaacs, unflappably heroic, stoutly principled and sexually rapacious British Ambassador in Washington. Sharon Gless made an iron-knickered US Defence Secretary at the centre of a phoney, contracts-led invasion of a blameless country after a self-inflicted terrorist act, the like of which are anything but unbelievable in a post-September 11 world. Why did audiences desert? Was it too complicated? I mean, it was, but bracingly so. Unanswered questions litter the roadside, but hats off to overambition and punching above your weight. Isaacs was well supported by shifty cohort Ben Daniels, recently seen in BBC4's Ian Fleming biopic Bondmaster (it's bound to end up on BBC2 at some point), and Lennie James was enigmatic and tortured as the mercenary on death row. Never really come across Eva Birthistle before, but she was diverting and charismatic as the embassy underling dispatched to Florida, and I hope we will see more of her on telly. No point in going on about it further as nobody saw it. A great shame, and I hope its baffling but spectacular failure doesn't dissuade the BBC from investing in political drama in the future. I wonder if they've sold it to America? My guess is that the Yanks wouldn't much go for its central premise. Mind you, the same might be said for this:


Into The West
Never mind the commitment of an hour a week for The State Within, this was 90 minutes an episode (two hours with ad-breaks in the US, where it aired on TNT last summer). A miniseries! How quaint. Executive produced by Steven Spielberg at DreamWorks, this was big telly, charting about 60 years of American history from what is pretty easily identified as a guilt-ridden white liberal perspective. This is not a problem per se. If Into The West reminded me of anything, it was Roots, which, although based on a black American author's book, also played to liberal guilt in its unforgiving telling of American history's other shameful chapter. As a teenage boy watching Roots in the 70s, I found it mesmerising and thoroughly informative (if only history at school had been so vivid, I might have passed my O-level). This sought to do a similar job on the ethnic cleansing of the Indian population between 1825 and 1890. Of course, it's the European settlers who are implicated in this slaughter, as it was us who drove rapaciously West, destroying everything in our path, including millions of beautiful buffalo. But for modern Americans, it's worse, as it confirms that their great country is founded on disrespect, cultural rape, genocide and the law of military firepower against bows and arrows. Great! Let's make a sprawling historical drama about it!

William Mastrosimone was the main writer, the directors various (credit where it's due). With so many generations and tributaries of one white and one Lakota Indian family to plough through over nine hours, it's pointless to try and pick out the main cast, as they kept being replaced by older actors, although John Terry (not the England captain, the bloke who played Jack's boozy surgeon dad in Lost) was a recurring presence, very nice in his white beard, and Keith Carradine looked very comfortable on his horse. What Mastrosimone did was use fictional characters to foreground factual events - the Gold Rush, Little Big Horn, Wounded Knee etc. - and the efficiency of this was only undermined by our inability to keep track of who was who. There were a lot of people called Wheeler, I know that much. Some of the actors convinced as leathery pioneers, others less so. All the Native Americans were played by Native Americans, and spoke in what I assume is authentic native tongue, subtitled. This gave the series a good balance. History is written, as we know, by the victors, and that has always been the mythological case with Westerns, but it turns out that, hey, the "Indians" weren't savages, but an indigenous population frugally in touch with the land they lived off, whipped into "savagery" by the heavy-handed justice meted out to them when they got in the way of railways, gold and stuff.

I found Into The West fascinating, despite its creative deficiencies: lapses into meaningless slow-motion, over-reliance on the "snapshot" technique of freeze-framing in sepia to suggest photography, unhelpful leaps forward in time papered over by narration ("ten years had passed etc."). The energy-lightbulb starpower of the cast helped focus on the story (people like Beau Bridges, Tom Berenger, Skeet Ulrich, David Paymer, Matthew Modine, recognisable but not too dazzling), and of course the locations looked impressive, even though they weren't in Dakota or Virginia, but in fact New Mexico. Perhaps I am too easy an audience for this kind of liberal porn, and I'm not saying it's in the same league as Roots, but I must say I thoroughly enjoyed the ride over the last six weeks. And I've never seen Deadwood, American telly's other Western, with which I imagine it shares very little common ground.

There's a very nicely tooled Into The West website, which has an interactive map showing the white man's progress from a small strip on the East coast to total landmass domination in less than a century.

Playlist 2006


Rather than list my favourite singles and albums of the year, painstakingly ordered, here instead is a playlist of 33 tracks I've made up for my journeys across London gathered from my favourite singles and albums of the year. It does the same job. It's not in order of preference, just on shuffle, although you must always start with Intro by DJ Yoda. There has been an awful lot of average music this year riding high in the charts while clinging to a certain NME-style credibility it doesn't, to my mind, merit. But looking down this list, you'd have to say that 2006 was a good, diverse, original year, with some fine debuts, more singer-songwriters of note than I'd usually expect to include and some vintage fare from a couple of big hitters. It may or may not be significant that a large proportion of this lot didn't trouble the Top 40, while, say, The Kooks did. (It's also thanks to the 6 Music Chart that I've become so familiar with a lot of it.)

Intro DJ Yoda The Adventures Of DJ Yoda
I Was A Lover TV On The Radio Return To Cookie Mountain
A Tried And Tested Method The Longcut A Call And Response
Ain't No Other Man Christina Aguilera single
Christobel Joan As Policewoman Real Life
Go Figure The Race Be Your Alibi
(My 1st) Big Break Cut Chemist The Audience's Listening
Black Swan Thom Yorke The Eraser
All Too Human The Rakes single
Gold Lion Yeah Yeah Yeahs single
Bombs Faithless To All New Arrivals
Alone, Jealous And Stone Secret Machines Ten Silver Drops
Life Is A Pigsty Morrissey Ringleader Of The Tormentors
Operated On Union Of Knives Violence And Birdsong
The Stuntman Kasabian Empire
The Killing Moon Nouvelle Vague Bande A Part
Little Derek Sway This Is My Demo
Take What You Take Lily Allen Alright, Still
Peace And Quiet The Rifles No Love Lost
Shakey Dog Ghostface Killah Fishscale
Pretty In A Panic My Latest Novel Wolves
Sing The Dresden Dolls Yes, Virginia
The Way It Is Sunshine Underground Raise The Alarm
Too Much To Ask For Radio 4 Enemies Like This
Up To You David Kitt Not Fade Away
No More Eatin' Plan B Who Needs Actions When You Got Words
Walking Home Through The Aim Flight 602
Trains To Brazil The Guillemots Through The Window
The Young Idealists Lloyd Cole Antidepressant
Sea Of Love Tom Waits Orphans: Brawlers
That Time Regina Spektor Begin To Hope
When The Sun Goes Down Arctic Monkeys Whatever People Say I Am That's What I'm Not
You Only Live Once The Strokes First Impressions Of Earth

Comments and your own choices gratefully received.

Goodnight!
I didn't even mean to watch it, as Parkinson just makes me sad these days in its soulless dotage, but I switched the TV on and there he was: Ben Elton. I know, nothing unusual there, he's always on. He's the new Billy Connolly. He writes a novel a week and these books needs promoting. He's written a new one called - wait for it! - Chart Throb, which is a satire on the X-Factor, and he was duly wheeled on to talk it up. This is not a crime. He doesn't seem to be very funny or original any more, but that's been the case for a while. (I can pinpoint the death of his stand-up: it was on an edition of The Man From Auntie when he did a routine about how the chocolate vending machines don't work on the London Underground. The only problem was: the chocolate machines did work on the London Underground as they'd been replaced. Ben's man-of-the-people persona was revealed to be a case of the emperor's new suit.) What really depressed me about his appearance was the fact that I used to worship him.

I'm sure I can't be the only one of my generation to have regarded Ben Elton as a guiding light in the mid- to late-80s. His anti-Thatcher, anti-sexism, anti-racism, anti-homophobia schtick captivated me when I was at college, and afterwards, and I considered him a beacon of good, socialist sense. Whether this schtick was sincere or not, I don't know, but with age and success, Ben's edge was blunted, and once he'd sat in for Wogan on Wogan, it was all over.

So when I heard Ben Elton say to Parkinson last night that he supported the war in Iraq, I shouldn't have been shocked, or betrayed, but I felt both. Ben Elton? My Ben Elton? Supporting an illegal war? Part of me died. Many of you will be reading this and saying: what did you expect? He writes West End musicals. He was happy to have a bit of that football one he wrote (The Beautiful Game) performed at George W Bush's inauguration. He sold out long ago. But to know that Ben Elton is actually pro-war is just too much. It was like finding out that Billy Bragg has shares in Esso. He's actually gone across to the dark side.

Is this the fate of all idealists?

We formed a band

It's all fun and games at 6 Music at the moment. We have formed a house band, and we're currently rehearsing on Wednesday nights - in the Hub! - when the studios are empty as we switch to Manchester for Marc Riley at 7pm. It's like one of those things that people threaten to do, but never do. All credit to Jim for getting it off the ground - he's the keyboard wizard. Other members include Jude, Jax, Nemone, Gid, Mark and Mike. With me on drums, thanks to the excellent junior kit Frank has lent us for the duration. (That isn't it, by the way, but it's similar.) Apart from a couple of impromptu sessions in Frank's basement when he used to produce Teatime, and that one soundcheck with Cud in Wakefield, circa 1991, when their drummer went AWOL and I bashed my way through Rich And Strange, I haven't really sat behind a kit since the mid-80s, when I went to college and had to leave the Northampton goth band I was in, God Bless The Grass. I used to love being a teenage drummer, even though it meant I could never get drunk at gigs as I had to borrow Mum's car to cart my kit home. It was actually good exercise too, certainly the only exercise I did at that age!

It feels great to have a pair of sticks in my hands again, and I really enjoyed blowing off the cobwebs on Wednesday night to an already-forming set full of standard and not-so-standard cover versions: Mr Blue Sky, Folsom Prison Blues (Gid's big moment), The First Of The Gang To Die, Get Back, Rehab, Ballad Of John & Yoko, White Man In Hammersmith Palais etc. Our first and possibly only gig is the 6 Music Christmas party. The rest of the band really are excellent, and though we may still be a little rickety, we actually sound a bit like a band. The wine bar circuit awaits! Three more rehearsals to go before the big night. It's a thrill. And it's what I love about 6 Music - the people. Always remember that.

Oh, and here's me drumming with Cud, just to prove this historic moment is not just in my fevered mind: