Royal Television Society Awards 2006 announced
I will make no comment other than to reveal the nominees in what's called the Breakthrough Award: Behind the Screen

Lisa Gilchrist (Producer) See No Evil: The Moors Murders
ITV Productions for ITV
Bart Layton (Producer/Director) Banged Up Abroad Raw TV for Five
Lee Mack & Andrew Collins (Writers) Not Going Out Avalon Television for BBC One

The awards will be presented on Tuesday 13 March 2007 at the Grosvenor House hotel, Park Lane, London W1. The evening will be hosted by Mark Austin. Dress is formal: Black Tie. My money's on Lisa Gilchrist. For the other nominations, visit the RTS website. Oh yes, I amost forgot - yippeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!

At long last
I finally, without fanfare, made it on to Richard & Judy! I got the call at 2.30 this afternoon, while I was having a meeting at my agents' office with Simon Day. They needed someone to go and discuss the Oscar nominations. (Last minute drop-out, I assumed, although they later claimed it was simply a last-minute booking - I don't care, I'm not proud.) I said yes, without a second thought. How could I not? A car collected me at 4.15 and I was at Cactus, R&J's production company, in Kennington, by 4.30, there to be greeted by I think about 25 separate people with headphones and clipboards, each one possibly more important than the one before, but it's hard to tell. All very friendly, and one of them, a man, finally fitted me with the lapel mic that goes down your shirt. I've done enough telly spots to know that they are over very quickly, so it's best not to go in with a headful of prepared repartee. You'll only be disappointed. Indeed, in the event (I was on last), I only managed to get in two Oscar predictions (Mirren, Scorsese) between clips, when I'd faithfully learned all the main categories. It was still a huge thrill to be in their presence and I didn't nervously stick my finger in my eye, which is good for me. (Richard scratched his head during his last link.) Like all the othe guests (two young comedians who are in a Sky One programme called Crash Test Dummies, a man from the British Museum, and the director, or possibly producer, of a new BBC documentary about the Wild West), I received a thank-you gift of some expensive bath salts (I didn't even know they still made such things), which I shall give away on my radio programme tomorrow as a prize, although not the card reproduced above, which is my souvenir, even though it is not even signed by Richard and Judy, but by their exec producer, who is so important she wasn't among the 25 people who greeted me in their headphones. Further disappointment: the hosts didn't join us for a drink in the green room afterwards, because it was a Friday and they like to get down to Cornwall apparently. I was looking forward to hearing Richard swear. Still, it was nice to meet the man from the British Museum. Funnily enough, they were a lot of crates at the back of the green room that were apparently full of cash. I wonder where that came from? (I'm joking. There weren't.)

Heroes
What did I think of it? I liked the concept (ordinary people, albeit predominantly good looking ones, develop superpowers and deal with them as if they are "issues"), and I liked the way it all started to slot together, although they might as well have just made all of the superheroes American, rather than chuck a token Indian bloke and a Japanese wage slave in for "international" effect (having said that, I really like Hiro, not least because he is called Hiro - you only get to make that joke once). It has a touch of Lost about it (first season anyway - I bailed out of the second pretty early on and have never felt tempted back), although the characters aren't as varied in shape and age. Where's the Hurley? Where's the Locke? Maybe there are heroes we've not met yet. Either way, despite not a single face I recognise in the cast, I was certainly hooked enough to watch the second episode straight after the first, and now I want the third, to see how they avert the bad thing in the painting. It drew quite a crowd to the Sci-Fi Channel on Monday night: 460,000, their best figure since launching, which is nice for them. (Poor old Nip/Tuck, which we're still faithfully watching on Sky One - it gets a piddling 230,000.)

Controversial enough for you?

Day One of the rest of my life
It already feels good. I went online and read some of the comments underneath George Monbiot's recent columns about 9/11 conspiracy theorists. It seemed to me that the response was fairly evenly balanced between loud, incensed supporters of Monbiot's line (whose go-for-it tone echoed that of Goldacre's supporters when he stuck McKeith's head on a stick) and calm, methodical dissidents. Of course, it quckly descended into a firefight, but from what I read, the rationalists ie. those that accept the official account of what happened on September 11, 2001 (four planes hijacked by Muslim extremists, three crashed into buildings, one crashed into wood due to heroic passenger action, two buildings fell down due to impact and fire, and third fell down due to fire) came across as much tetchier and hysterical - and abusive - than those who question the official account. I'm sure you can find me examples of comments that disprove my observations, but that was the feeling I got from ploughing through hundreds of postings. You operate no door policy, above and beyond simple registration, you cannot complain about who comes barging in. The difference, I realised, between my blog, and the online Monbiot columns is that the author of the original piece does not get involved with the discussion. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't see Monbiot weighing into the 9/11 discussion. This also appeared to be the case with the Gillian McKeith thread on badscience.net - Goldacre himself is probably too busy to get involved. He does have a job, after all.

And that's the main difference between me and George Monbiot and Ben Goldacre, apart from size of online community. They both publish in a national daily newspaper read by potentially tens of thousands of people; their pieces are automatically reprinted online, where comment is invited, sometimes a trickle, sometimes a flood, either way upholding the double-headed torch of interactivity and democracy. I don't have a column in a national daily newspaper. What I write here is written exclusively for the blog and is thus a lot more off-the-top-of-my-head and free-form than something I'd write for publication. However, once the discussion starts, trickle or flood, I join in. How nice it must be to step back and let the debate rage on its own. I wish I could.

I support the idea of free speech. I just wish I could stay away from some of it, as it makes my ribcage vibrate with ire. This is a shame, as I am actually at peace with my instincts about food and health. Anyway, I have decided to desist from publishing any more posts on this blog from people just prodding me in the chest and telling me that homeopathy doesn't work or that Vitamin C can't prevent cancer or that [insert name of nutritionist here] is killing people. They come dressed as hard fact, and leave no room for counter-argument. The superior tone that comes with their iron-certainty just makes me cross, and I'd rather not post these comments up on my wall. I freely admit to this change in policy. I've never done it before, but this is self-preservation. I have spent so much of the last week feeling pent-up and preoccupied I need to make some changes if I am to live a full and happy life. I hope you will respect that wish. If you want to tell me that homeopathy doesn't work, I can't stop you - good heavens, there's a direct email link on this site. I'm all too accessible. But why not instead hang around churches and try to talk people who believe in God to pull themselves together? Remember, my original post about McKeith was as a counter-argument, on my own wall, to a piece published in the newspaper. I didn't start the argument. Nor will ignoring a few lingering posts about it finish the argument. It's in the public domain. I had two perfectly sensible people I work with tell me why McKeith was a menace to society, both of them quoting what they had read in the paper. The power of the print media there.

Unfortunately, I am one of those people who distrusts the official line. There is so much propaganda in this media-saturated world it's impossible to take anything at face value, whether it's what the drugs companies tell us, or what newspapers tell us, or what our leaders tell us. We live in a post-BSE world and we live in a post-WMD world. Two good reasons to take the official line with a pinch of salt? I say: question everything. Ask: who benefits? Who stands to gain the most? Whose interests are being protected? There's a fantastic, calm, clear, non-hysterical appraisal of biofuels in the latest Ecologist, which pretty much dismisses the Ethanol revolution, giving reason after reason, backed up with figures, why it does not offer a viable alternative to fossil fuels. And it reminds us who stands to gain from its promotion as the quick environmental fix: the biotech companies who can't make us eat GM food but might be able to convince us to put GM fuel in our cars, and the industrial agribusiness lobby (especially in the US, where the subsidised switch to growing profitable palm oil and beet for fuel has already pushed the price of meat up, as there's less cattle feed being produced). My guess though is that we'll hear a lot about ethanol as the miraculous answer to climate change over the next few years, when the real, unsexy answer, which does not benefit the big corporations, is to use less petrol.

Hey, I was only going to publish the cover of the Independent. All comments welcome. Well, nearly all. I'm going to make a supreme effort to get back to blogging about TV programmes and goldfinches. Is it possible to put the genie back in the bottle?

Goodbye
I've made a momentous, hopefully life-changing decision. I have cancelled my subscription to the Guardian. Today's shall be the last to stick out of my letterbox. The only daily newspaper I have read faithfully in my adult life, it's time to move on. I came to the realisation, like a diamond bullet in the forehead, that it lies at the root of a lot of my anger. So I'm no longer having it delivered. This will, I think, greatly improve my health. Barely a day goes by without something in it that makes me cross and winds me up.

Yesterday's piece about complementary treatments for babies in G2 was typical: Risky Alternatives was its fair and balanced headline. In the piece, it was stated that "more and more infants" are being given complementary treatments "as many parents abandon long waits at the doctor's surgery in favour of costly visits to alternative practitioners." (Note: costly.) We're mainly talking about massage and yoga, or acupressure, which is acupuncture without the needles (pressure points are massaged using a toy tractor) - nothing too extreme or nutty. A bit of homeopathy but if critics are convinced it doesn't work, they can't have any trouble with a baby taking the remedies. However, after relating a couple of actual cases where complementary treatments seemed effective against babies with whooping cough and eczema, a sceptical paediatrician appeared, to give the opposite view: "My antagonism is proportional to the degree of harm they can do. At best they are benign and, at worst, can do an awful lot of harm." If this is the case, neither example given involved any harm. As for the lack of research into such practices, it was explained by a paediatric acupuncturist that drug companies aren't interested in funding such research. Then we had the inevitable appearance of Edzard Ernst, "professor of complementary medicine at the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter", whose Medicine Man column, dropped (thank God) when the newspaper switched format, routinely took complementary medicine apart using scientific testing for the benefit of undecided Guardian readers. Ernst says, with the concrete certainty that we have come to recognise, that "kinesiology is nonsense." Thanks. We won't go down that route then. I understand that any journalistic report must present a balanced argument, and it's up to individual parents whether they're swayed by the two positive case studies, or frightened off by the medical establishment, but it's typical of the Guardian's conventional response to unconventional practices: here's a baby having a toy rubbed on his back, and here's a man in a white coat telling you to look away now. It would have been interesting to note, perhaps, that conventional medicines are not tested on babies, only on adults, after which they are passed for use, merely dose-adjusted for weight and age. You see, knowing that untested drugs are routinely prescribed for infants, my antagonism is proportional to the degree of harm they can do. At best they are benign and, at worst, can do an awful lot of harm.

In the same issue of G2, we had Grumpy Old Woman Michele Hanson having a go at Gwyneth Paltrow for planning to feed her children only "biological food, whatever that is, because she believes that such a diet will prevent them from developing cancerous tumours." This is apparently the thinking of a dangerous nutter (spotting any themes here?) - "nobody is absolutely certain about the relationship between food and cancer," she writes. True enough, but why knock someone else for playing it safe, following their instinct and adopting a preventative approach? Anyway, it turns out that far from not being "absolutely certain", Michele Hanson is, well, absolutely fucking certain! "To think you can definitely stop tumours through diet is a load of old rubbish. And the idea of fighting cancer is a pernicious little argument. It makes people think it's their fault for not fighting hard enough, and it's nobody's fault, ever. Not even a smoker's fault. Yes, you should give up smoking if you can but some people are susceptible, some people aren't. We have enough to feel guilty about, without blaming ourselves for cancer." All this from the news that an actress is trying to feed her babies healthily. Yet again, the same message pumps through. Cancer is a lottery, don't bother doing anything to try and prevent it, it's coming to get us and the drugs and the surgeons are standing by.

I have had my fill. No more Ben Goldacre. No more Edzard Ernst. No more George Monbiot, who seems to have actually gone a bit mad, devoting two entire columns to 9/11 conspiracy theorists, rubbishing them in such an immovable way you wonder if he's forgotten what it was like to be an ardent environmentalist before the mainstream caught on. Anyway, the Guardian will survive without me, just as Starbucks do. It feels great to have made this admittedly miniscule gesture. I realise it won't even be a blip on the Guardian's circulation radar, but my life will be greatly improved and I'm hoping that peace and calm will descend upon me, as I read about the end of the world every day in the Independent.

And I can always read Peter Bradshaw online.

What does it all mean?
The following are a selection of subject lines from the latest batch of spam I have received. There does seem to be a trend of late towards random collections of words, designed, presumably, to hoodwink us into opening the emails by catching our eye. Enjoy (and see if you're thinking what I'm thinking):

No Cadet By Say
An Nook Go Prescribe
Is Vesper or Monetarism
Do At Minimum
Cohen Last Week
Of Settled
Often Astonished The Bar Ventured
Or No Camelback
That Moldboard Be Burma
As The Acoustic On Costumes
That To Barbaric
RE: Sicily Gimbel
For On Concilatory
Not Burdensome The Exportation
Cryptography Ignore
Is Rutty So Calendar
But Reservoir Or Objectivity

It's the tracklisting from the next Fall album, surely!
Cryptography! Ignore-ah!

Seasonal Affective Disorder
Enough has been written about The Wire. I even found myself sucked into a stupid debate about it on the Guardian's Organ Grinder blog where a pugnacious chap was basically accusing anyone who bangs on about it - a growing army - of being part of a sinister viral marketing campaign. Needless to say, he hadn't watched it, and had no intention of doing so. (That'll show 'em!) This is why printing the views of people on blogs and message boards in a national newspaper, as the Guardian regularly does, is democratic but it's not news. Suffice to say, I've just finished Season Three on DVD, which I am going out on a limb to say is my favourite season so far. Season Four, which has begun on FX, awaits. Rather than write any more about the best programme on television and do The Man's work, I'll just run some more nice pictures from HBO's website, whom I obviously work for.







... and finally

Invasion of the Goldacre Groupies
I believe the dust is finally settling on what they're all calling The Nutrition/Homeopathy/Gillian McKeith Controversy - by which I don't mean the matter is closed in a wider sense, but the comments have pretty much dried up under that particular entry. However, over the weekend, I checked the software that monitors the traffic on my blog and got to the bottom of what was an unprecedented invasion by people who don't normally lurk around what is, essentially, "lots of poorly written TV reviews" (that's a quote from someone on the 6 Music message boards called Stella, who clearly wasn't impressed, but I have grown to love her summary of the blog for its simplicity).

Here are the scientific facts (and forgive me if I am misreading them): for the period spanning February 14-19, during which the bulk of the heated debate took place, the site received 12,594 page hits, of which 2,954 were "referred" hits, in other words referred to the site from other sites. Of these, at the top of the stats, I had 990 "referrals" from netvibes.com, which is about usual from this widely-used feed subscription site. In second place, I had 547 in five days from badscience.net (I haven't made that a direct link, for good reason - I don't want anyone accusing me of directing traffic the other way). In other words, much of the assault on my "controversial" and "irrational" beliefs about complementary medicine came directly from Ben Goldacre's website forum, where his fans cheer him on every time he spears a nutritionist using his doctor's brain. Under the reprint of his G2 cover story, one of his acolytes posted a comment about my blog entry at 10.31am on Feb 14, and provided a handy link, even advising people who might wish to come and have a go at me to do so with civility. (And, to be fair, they did.) Well, that link certainly got a hammering over the next couple of days, as Dr Ben's disciples came to sort me out, with some of them sniggeringly reporting back to the rest of the faithful at badscience.net, or just simply expressing dismay at my "non-science-based" views. In some ways, I feel better about the whole thing now. I didn't expect everyone to agree with me (I don't actually write my blog entries for that reason, even the poorly-written TV reviews), but I was pretty stupid not to expect an orchestrated assault from the believers. It reminds me of when I casually insulted Robbie Williams on here sometime last year, and I was suddenly rounded on by Robbie Williams fans, directed here no doubt by one of his fan forums. There's no arguing with Robbie Williams fans. And there's no arguing with Ben Goldacre fans. (I started to read the debate about McKeith on his site but quickly realised it wasn't one. More of a rally. The first "comment" posted was a humorous animation of McKeith eating shit.)

I'm still glad the debate took place in public. It certainly kept me on my toes and stopped me doing much useful work for a couple of days that I could ill afford. Having been forced to take down a couple of CBB threads of late due to actual abuse from one rogue element, I had no reason not to publish a single response to the McKeith entry. I took out a couple of my own later comments because I had drunk red wine and I try to make it a rule never to post in that altered state.

Interestingly, back in the regulated, inky old world of print, the Guardian published not a single response, good or bad, to the McKeith piece. They printed one letter from Patrick Holford relating back to an old Goldacre accusation in one of his Bad Science columns, which he referred back to in Saturday's sermon, but there was nothing explicit. They don't like it up 'em.

Anyway, changing the subject . . .
The Brit Awards then. For the first tiime since Samantha Fox and Mick Fleetwood, the awards were shown live. "Completely live," as both the continuity announcer and erudite host Russell Brand kept reiterating. Well, not completely, in the event, as there was a 15-second delay. The Brits were in fact incompletely live, and even though half of the ceremony went out on ITV1 after the nine o'clock watershed, the sound kept cutting out for fear of us hearing a rude word. Russell himself, by far the best host the Brits have ever seen - clever, satirical, confident, fluent, sincere, reactive, authoritative, saucy and I do believe he wrote all his own material - made reference to vaginas and drugs and shoe-bombers, but what I have to assume was the word "fuck" saw the sound clumsily muted as if suddenly water had got in our ears, even during songs. Liam Gallagher must have said fuck while singing his songs. Something of an own-goal by ITV perhaps? It's live, right, so anything could happen, but it's not live, because we need to take the f-word out. I understand why the delay is there - for libel, if nothing else, and I suppose the unexpected appearance of a penis - and I don't get my kicks from hearing the f-word, but I think it would have been preferable to stop banging on about how completely live it was, when it wasn't.



In all, the prizegiving was unspectacular. Lily Allen robbed. The Killers over-rewareded by precisely two awards. The categories voted for by listeners of radio stations and viewers of cable channels as ever rather odd. (I actually prefer awards to be conferred by some august and unseen panel of industry peers - I don't need to pick the winners myself by phone or text. It sort of removes my right to complain about the outcome, like an actual election or something.) Joss Stone, who presented an award, demonstrates the dangers of taking a teenager from the West Country, telling her she's a genius and sending her to America. I'm glad Arctic Monkeys won two awards (British Group, British Album), but they really need to have a sit down and work out how not to look like a bunch of ungrateful twats. I don't blame then for not wanting to be at Earls Court - the Brits gets bigger and bigger and more of a television event ever year, and having dinner in an aircraft hangar doesn't look like a lot of fun - but after last year's stupid thank-you message, they might have considered making an effort. Instead, they dressed up in daft fuck-you costumes and stood in a row and said, without feeling, "Thank you for presenting us with this most prestigious award. It means a great deal considering the competition and we express our deepest apologies for our absence tonight." If it was a satire on insincerity, it fell flat. They will stop giving you awards, you know, lads.

British male solo artist: James Morrison. He seems nice enough. Not my kind of music, and Jarvis Cocker and Thom Yorke were never going to win it. British female solo artist should have been Lily, but it's hard to knock the innate talent of Amy Winehouse, however she looks and speaks. (Who is Nerina Pallot, by the way?) British album: Arctic Monkeys - anything to keep Snow Patrol from taking anything shiny home. What a black hole they are. British breakthrough act: The Fratellis, who do nothing for me, and should have been Lily Allen. International breakthrough act: I can hardly bring myself to say their name ... the irksome Orson (but hey, another democratic phone-vote award, so blame MTV viewers). British live act: hard to argue with Muse. British single: Take That's Patience, an excellent single, so no gripes there, and again, anything to keep Razorlight off the stage. International male solo artist: Justin Timberlake in a weak category (Beck? Bob Dylan? Damien Rice? Jack Johnson?! - haven't we done him already?) and International female solo artist: Nelly Furtado (stronger category, with Beyonce, Cat Power, Christina Aguilera and Pink). I don't much like Nelly, but it was never going to be the more palatable Cat Power, was it? International group and album: The Killers - there's no stopping this juggernaut now. And Outstanding contribution to music: Oasis. Quite why they agreed to accept this, I do not know, unless Paul Weller doing so last year made it OK. Liam at least did with so bad grace, and if he wasn't actually singing like that for a joke, it's probably as well that they consign them to history now because he isn't going to have a voice left in a couple of years' time.



I'm looking forward to finding out what was actually said in those muted-out censored bits, and I'd like to know if the spraying of champagne on the winners was stage-managed, as it kept happening. If Brand isn't already signed to do next year's the organisers are out of their minds. Brandon Flowers looks so much like my brother with that moustache and hair, it actually causes me merriment every time I see his face.

Guardian continues witch hunt against complementary medicine
I'm getting sick of this. The paper which I doggedly buy every day, and have done for as long as I have bought a daily paper, seems to have a real bee in its bonnet about nutritionists, and alternative practitioners in general. It's there between the lines in all of their health and medical coverage - doctors are good, complementary medicine is bad; suspect; a nefarious cult run by money-grabbing charlatans. To the credit of Ben Goldacre, the arrogant doctor who writes their Bad Science column, at least his hatred is explicit. Yesterday, he was given free reign across four pages of G2 to repeat his well-rehearsed arguments against that well-known war criminal and baby-murderer Gillian McKeith. According to this piece, in its terribly theatrical conclusion (he hates her for being "theatrical" by the way): "McKeith has nothing to contribute; and Channel 4, which bent over backwards to dress her up in the cloak of scientific authority, should be ashamed of itself." Cripes!

Under the heading, A Menace To Science - loudly trumpeted from the masthead on the cover of the paper, and accompanied inside by that daft photo of McKeith cavorting in the nuddy among fruit and veg (I bet she regrets that) - Goldacre does his usual riff on her suspect qualifications, which I'm not going to go into in detail, suffice to say, her crime is to have done a PhD by correspondence course at an American college (not that surprising when nutritional therapy is a relatively new subject and up until recently was not even available as a degree course in this country), and to have used the epithet "Doctor" to legitimise the health products and books whose sales have made her rich. I wish she hadn't done this, as being a doctor and wearing the lab coat - as she used to on You Are What You Eat, the most revolutionary diet programme on television, whatever you think of it - gives out entirely the wrong signal to most of us who prefer to take our health into our own hands and concentrate on preventative cures. I am personally suspicious of white coats. Anyone who has studied longer than a day in nutrition automatically knows more about it than a fully-qualified doctor, as nutrition comes very low down on the curriculum. Ben Goldacre might know an awful lot more than McKeith about conventional medicine, and which tablets to prescribe, but he sure as hell knows less than her about nutrition. Which is why he constantly tries to unpick her thinking by running it through conventional scientific testing. He has no time for anything that exists outside of the closed shop of white mice in labs and peer-reviewed essays in the British Medical Journal. It must be weird to be so sure that what you know is right and not to have any doubts whatsoever. The thinking of nutritionists and other practitioners evolves all the time. Holistic therapists take into account not just symptoms, but use detective work, and individual assessment, to get to the root cause. They also appreciate the role of the mind in the healing process. This doesn't compute in the world of conventional medicine. Not everything is explicable via conventional scientific rigour.

Goldacre goes after McKeith because she's visible. She's loud and annoying and she prods people to get their attention. She also sells books and products under her own name. These, he dismisses as ineffective simply because they are not classified as medicines. "She has pills to give you an erection," he states, on the same day this it's announced that Viagra will soon be available over the counter at Boots. And that's OK, apparently. "Her face is in every health food store in the country." Yes, because her products are popular. People don't buy them because they like her face. Her face is actually quite scary, even in the airbrushed version she puts on her bars. "And yet, to anyone who knows the slightest bit about science, this woman is a bad joke." So what? She helps people lose weight and get fit. Her TV programmes might inspire others to do the same. Her diets are not expensive. They don't involve buying her products. They're about fresh food, raw food, whole food, imaginative meals. Nothing dodgy there, surely? But the pharmaceutical industry would collapse if we all made ourselves feel better by adjusting our diet. The pharmaceutical industry, by definition, needs us to keep getting ill for as long as we live.

McKeith, Goldacre states, "appears on television every week, interpreting blood tests, and examining patients who had earlier had irrigation equipment stuck right up into their rectums." Colonic irrigation? How disgusting! Where else might this equipment be stuck in order to irrigate the colon? For a doctor, he's awfully squeamish. I'm glad she's moved away from hanging about in labs on the programme. It gave the wrong impression anyway. She does what all nutritionists do, and that's monitor a patient's diet and then modify it to suit their needs. She prepares menus and encourages exercise. A doctor will prescribe you pills without even asking about your diet. A doctor knows which pill treats which symptom but doesn't have the time, or the imagination, to ask about other factors. This is why endless scientific testing does not tell the whole story. Which is why conventional medicines, tested and approved and released onto the market to paid-for media fanfare, are still recalled after unforseen and often nasty, sometimes terminal side effects. Food supplements are natural. You can't overdose on Vitamin C. If a patient suffers side effects because of a combination of a conventional medicine and, say, a Vitamin A supplement, it's the vitamin that gets the blame. It's David and Goliath.

Goldacre mocks the validity of the references in McKeith's PhD, revealing with glee that some of them relate to "funny little magazines and books", such as Creative Living, Healthy Eating, and Spiritual Nutrition and the Rainbow Diet (oh, how he laughs at that one). This is all rather cheap, don't you think? He attacks her for relying on "anecdotal evidence" to support her work. But she's been a practising nutritionist for years. Wouldn't she have gathered up a lot of anecdotal evidence in that time? She gathers this by listening to her patients. This is how you learn.

"You don't get sober professors from the Medical Research Council's Human Nutrition Research Unit on telly talking about the evidence on food and health," he says. "You get the media nutritionists. It's like the difference between astrology and astronomy." Now I for one would switch over if some sober professor came on to tell me what to eat. A media nutritionist is simply a nutritionist who's on the telly, it seems. Does he think Robert Winston is a media fertility doctor? And does that mean he is less qualified to tell us things than a sober professor? Ben Goldacre clearly hankers after his own TV programme.

Here is a description of the Nutritional Therapy degree at Westminster University (the first of its kind in this country, I think): "Nutritional therapy seeks to involve patients in the management of their own healthcare, and is based on individual patient uniqueness. Health is viewed as a state of positive vitality related to the maintenance of a homeodynamic physiology. Tendency toward disease is related to the interplay of the patient's history, triggers and 'mediators', which can be modulated by the use of food as a therapeutic tool along with nutriceutical prescription and lifestyle advice. These concepts link nutritional therapy to its naturopathic heritage." Does that sound like the work of quacks? It certainly doesn't sound like the work of GPs. Nutritional therapy should be treated as doctors might osteopathy - as a complementary practice that might enhance what they do.

Let us guess what Ben Goldacre's background is like. Could perhaps one of his parents be a doctor? Both? Doctors often have a "family firm" mentality. Nutritionists, meanwhile, often come to the subject later in life, sometimes after an illness upon which diet had an unexpected bearing. If you look into it, you'll find that a lot of nutritionists are women. I can't say why for sure, but let's generalise and say that women are more in tune with their bodies, cycles etc. than men. They're certainly less scared of talking about ailments. I'm generalising, but there does seem to be a trend. More women go to see nutritionists than men, too. (A few years ago, I attended a day's seminar on the causes and treatment of cancer, chaired by Lynne McTaggart, whose newsletter What Doctors Don't Tell You provides a constant antidote to orthodox medical opinion and hype. Most of those attending were women. I was in the minority.)

I draw your attention to this, quoted in a book called Sugar Blues by William Dufty. It's from the fourteenth century, before the advent of the printed press, when all knowledge was passed down, when the church was all-powerful and when women were forbidden from healing. Such healers, who had prescribed herbal remedies based on a patient's symptoms, were rebranded sorceresses, and this is what the church proclaimed:

If a woman dare to cure without having studied, she is a witch and must die.

It's Nick Hornby's World: we just live in it
I won't preempt the piece I've just written for the next issue of Word, but I have rounded up the latest batch of non-celebrity memoirs, and this has meant I've been wallowing in the ordinary - and extraordinary - lives of largely ordinary people, from the latest "heartbreaking true story" of child abuse, Damaged by foster carer Cathy Glass (not her real name), which will presumably sell by the lorryload, since most of the current non-fiction paperback Top Ten are books of similar formative woe, to The Memoirs Of A Punk Romantic, a self-published account of growing up as an androgynous Bowie fan in Leeds by Mick McCann, who I take it is a non-professional writer, but does a very evocative job with dialogue and northern vernacular. My theory is that since the Millennium, our hunger for the past has become voracious, and since Nick Hornby opened the gates in the 90s, the market for memoirs by people who aren't famous has remained buoyant. Publishers have to pay through the nose for famous people's autobiographies, and many of these famously undersell - David Blunkett's, Ashley Cole's etc. The non-celebrity author is a much less risky bet.

One of the latest wave of non-Blunkett, small-advance memoirs deserves special mention, mainly because its author, another first-timer, Imran Ahmad, is a reader of this blog and was kind enough to insist his publishers send me an early proof copy to read. I really enjoyed it - it's the tale of a Karachi-born Muslim growing up in 70s and 80s Britain (a kind of Asian-experience flipside to my own childhood and student years) - and the publishers have rather flatteringly put my quote on the dust jacket between Sue Townsend and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Sue Cook called it "delightful", and I note that it's already attracted its first five star Amazon customer review. (I'm jealous of that, clearly. My average scores for both memoirs are constantly pegged by those who hated them and felt compelled to post one- or two-star reviews as revenge against me for conning money out of them.)

Imran, who I admit I have been in email contact with ever since receiving the book, is a very crisp writer, and although it's incredibly dry, this is a book of immense humour. I met the cultural commentator Sarfraz Manzoor at Christmas, and he's threatening to send me the proofs of his Muslim-growing-up-in-Britain memoir, Greetings From Bury Park, out in June. I suspect that Muslim memoirs may be the next big thing. Imran can at least comfort himself that he got in early.

His website, including details of the charity book launch, is here.

So, the tremendous Ian Richardson died, aged 72, on Friday. The live Bafta coverage that went out for most of this evening on BBC1 included its traditional montage of those in the industry who have passed away (or gone to the realm of their ancestors, as Forest Whitaker so poetically had it about his recently departed grandmother), but no sign of Ian Richardson. They can whip up a montage of the evening's best frocks while the awards are going out, but they couldn't add some footage of Richardson, or at least a still with a caption, in two days? It was left to Helen Mirren to tearfully pay tribute, but this was a pretty shabby own goal by the programme-makers. Even if he'd died this afternoon, they could have quickly edited him in. It must have been a simple, but unforgiveable, oversight.

Otherwise, not a bad show. Most of the right awards went to the right people, except for Alan Arkin, who just didn't deserve best supporting actor, and Eva Green for rising star, who is not in the same class as Cillian Murphy, for instance. I was lucky enough to meet and interview the editor Anne Coates, recipient of the Fellowship tonight - she came into Back Row and actually talked us through the editing of certain bits of Lawrence Of Arabia, including the bit where the setting desert sun dissolves into the lit match. What a nice woman.

And nothing for The Departed, which is totally fair. It'll make up for it at the Oscars.

First Truly Great Album of 2007, then
Let us proclaim it from the rooftops. The debut album by the Klaxons, Myths Of The Near Future, is tremendous. Never mind all the hype from last year about them spearheading "New Rave" (a term the cheeky Southeast London trio seem to have introduced into the vernacular themselves, only to see the NME pick it up and run away with it), this album puts any associations with glow sticks and second-hand Aciiiiiiiieeeeed to one side. It's a wondrous, varied beast, full of hooks and high voices; yes, it has a certain thumping beat that's refreshing in a world made sludge by The Killers, Razorlight and the Kooks, but it's also a thing of tunes and good singing. The drumming is nifty throughout, and if I say bits of it remind me of Pop Will Eat Itself, I hope you'll know me well enough to recognise the compliment. Golden Skans, the current hit single, is every inch the swooning, heady, harmonic pop song, while the hypnotic Isle Of Her ("Row! There's only seven more miles to go!") is laced with both sexual metaphor and Classical Studies. There are sirens and block-rocking beats too, and the energy throughout is electric. I can't stop playing it.

So, a number of letter bombs have gone off, causing reasonably minor injuries to those post-room operatives unlucky enough to open them, the most recent turning up at the DVLA in Swansea. Police seem to be making a link between the destinations of these pyrotechnic A5 Jiffy bags that points to an "extremist motorists' group or individual." (One tabloid I read over someone's shoulder on the train this morning labelled this a "TERROR BLITZ", naturally. What would they call an actual terror blitz?) Run that past me again - an extremist motorists' group? There are motorists who are that angry at the Congestion Charge and some speed cameras that they'd actually set out to maim innocent office workers? Surely, I mean surely, there are more important things to get angry about? A woman was injured in the offices of Capita, the company that collect the Congestion Charge. That's really hitting them where it hurts.

In the Guardian it said, "an angry motorist could well be responsible for the latest attacks, according to 'Captain Gatso', the campaigner responsible for attacks on speed cameras and who operates under a pseudonym."

Captain Gatso isn't his real name? How disappointing. He told them, "What we are looking at now is a war on the motorist." That's like saying rain is a war on umbrellas. I assume he thinks petrol should be free and all zebra crossings should be rubbed out with Turps. What a melodramatic Captain he is. It turns out he represents Motorists Against Detection. "The motorist is fighting back," he said. "It's payback time." No it isn't, it's set fireworks off in the faces of some people who work in offices time.

Gatso denied that he and his group were responsible for the letter bombs or had ever been responsible for attacking people rather than machines. "I would happily punch Ken Livingstone on the nose," he said. Well, that's assault, Captain Gatso, go right ahead. See what happens. Ken Livingstone is no saint, but the Congestion Charge is intended to reduce traffic in the centre of London. You're still allowed to drive through the capital, you just have to pay, just as you have to pay to park in a car park or in a parking space in London.

"My group only terrorises the government's cash machines, he says. He's talking about speed cameras - geddit? His group claim to have carried out 1,000 "attacks" on speed cameras, causing more than 29 million quid's worth of damage. And who does he think pays for the replacement of these cameras? Taxpayers and road-users. Captain Twatso, more like.

9/11 is a joke - or is it?

OK, you've probably heard about Loose Change. It's a no-budget, homemade documentary methodically questioning the veracity of the official version of events on September 11, 2001. In its initial incarnation it was available to view and download for free on the internet - then it was taken down, as it used certain footage without permission. That seems to have been cleared, and for a few months now the Second Edition has been back up, on Goodle Video, again for free, although you can buy a hard DVD copy via mail order, which I have done. The free video is here and the mail order site is here. The filmmakers encourage you to view their work, now an hour and a half in length, for nothing, and have offered free copies to relatives of the victims. If the first time you head about LC was in George Monbiot's article in the Guardian this week, you may have a distorted view of it - and its advocates, who are all apparently off their rockers. I don't know why he's taken against it so, when all filmmaker Dylan Avery is doing is asking questions and offering up alternatives, something Monbiot is known for doing on his own issues, such as the environment. (Remember when he had a go at The Day After Tomorrow as "lousy science"? He does seem niggled by anyone else dealing on his corner.) Anyway, I say, watch the film. It doesn't really have the "authoritative voiceover" that George rails against - it sounds like a young American bloke reading, which it is. Dylan Avery himself. It's assembled from fragments of other people's films, plus lots of telling on-the-spot news footage from the day, and some computer graphics. But the way it refuses to take at face value anything the mainstream media or the 9/11 Commission tells us is certainly bracing.

I am a "gibbering idiot", according to Monbiot, for believing any of it. Loose Change goes out on several limbs and suggests that September 11 was stage-managed by the Bush administration to put the American people at a psychological disadvantage so that it could rush through draconian new laws and throw its weight around globally, which it certainly did, and has continued to do. This is a big mental leap for some people, not so for others. I personally wouldn't put anything past any government. The more powerful, the more corrupt and venal they are likely to be. I'm currently reading The Trial Of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens (written, crucially, before September 11 turned his head) - nobody would call him a gibbering idiot, and yet the crimes he uncovers, in Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia, are very real, all covered up at the time. It's safest to distrust those in power.

Here are the main points in Loose Change: the Pentagon was hit by a Cruise missile, not a commercial airliner; the Twin Towers collapsed after controlled explosions set off inside the buildings; Flight 93 never crashed in a Pennsylvania field. The pumping soundtrack of the film gives these theories a certain compulsive momentum, and while watching it, you may become convinced. It doesn't all stand up, but it does make you think, and that can't be a bad thing. It's certainly a compelling 90 minutes, occasionally chilling.

There are arguments and counter-arguments, the most thorough of the latter I've found being this one, which literally takes Loose Change word for word and refutes or challenges it, using detailed evidence against it, and sources. It's all rather thrilling, if you like that kind of thing. The same scrutiny fell upon Michael Moore's films, and Moore in general. It's interesting how much time those who seek to debunk the debunkers have on their hands. The left are usually seen scrabbling around for bits of truth, piecing it together as best they can, while the right systematically bring them back in line. There's a pattern.

At the end of the day, I'm just glad people are going to the trouble of questioning events as they are handed down to them, whether it's the government or the media, or even fellow conspiracy theorists. I know I am obsessed with that day, but it's too significant not to be. I expect I'll be on an FBI list for writing this. I'd just like to know why it's called Loose Change. Somebody's hiding the truth about that.

What do you think? No gibbering idiots please.