No, I wasn't at Kensington Palace, shedding a tear for a dead princess because she was like one of us, and I felt I knew her even though I didn't. I was on the news because Mark Kermode made the mistake of being on holiday again this week, so - having "been" him on Simon Mayo's show on Five Live last Friday, I was drafted in to "be" him on News 24 this afternoon. It was, I have to admit, quite thrilling to be in the middle of the BBC newsroom. I've never been in there before. All those screens and monitors and people running around clutching important pieces of paper and people on phones. (I am, officially, easily impressed, but life would be intolerable otherwise, I think.) And in the middle of it, me in a brown shirt (didn't want to go all black this time), softened and de-shined with makeup, waiting two hours to go on. Why they needed me there two hours before I don't know. Probably didn't trust me to turn up, being the new boy. Anyway, it's on the BBC News Player here, as are all the previous ones ever, I think. That's what we pay our licence fee for!

Here are 25 tracks I have enjoyed this year so far. I've put them in order, but the order's not that relevant really. My iPod died about a month ago (battery finally stopped recharging - I bought it in 2003), and I finally got round to taking it to the Apple Shop on Regent Street - to the "Genius Bar", naturally, and the deal there is good. It's out of warranty, so they offer to replace it, with a new battery, for 49 quid. Anyway, having learned that I can live without one, I'm happy enough to have my iPod back, hence the renewed listmaking vigour:

1 Foundations Kate Nash (Made Of Bricks)
2 Golden Skans The Klaxons (Myths Of The Near Future)
3 History Song The Good, The Bad & The Queen (The Good, The Bad & The Queen)
4 Flouorescent Adolescent Arctic Monkeys (Favourite Worst Nightmare)
5 No Cars Go Arcade Fire (Neon Bible)
6 The Creeps Camille Jones vs Fedde LeGrand (single)
7 Grand Canyon Tracey Thorn (Out Of The Woods)
8 Babylon's Burning The Ghetto Lethal Bizzle (Back To Bizznizz)
9 Boxing Champ Kaiser Chiefs (Yours Truly, Angry Mob)
10 Go Tell The Women Grinderman (Grinderman)
11 Men's Needs The Cribs (Men's Needs, Women's Needs)
12 Dream Of Infinity Shitdisco (Kingdom Of Fear)
13 The Usher The Fall (Reformation Post TLC)
14 My Moon My Man Feist (The Reminder)
15 Green Fields The Good, The Bad & The Queen (The Good, The Bad & The Queen)
16 Free Satpal Ram (Russell Simmons Remix) Asian Dub Foundation (Time Freeze: 1995/2007)
17 Ocean Of Noise Arcade Fire (Neon Bible)
18 On Call Kings Of Leon (Because Of The Times)
19 Wide Awake The Twang (Love It When I Feel Like This) - NB: I hate this album, and I think I pretty much can't stand the band, but I can't help but love this track, and that's what overcoming prejudice is all about. Music transcends such matters
20 Old Yellow Bricks Arctic Monkeys (Favourite Worst Nightmare)
21 Ice Cream New Young Pony Club (single)
22 Police On My Back Lethal Bizzle (Back To Bizznizz)
23 Behave Charlotte Hatherley (The Deep Blue)
24 Morden Good Shoes (Think Before Your Speak)
25 We Danced Together The Rakes (Ten New Messages) - NB: hugely disappointing second album, but I like the single

OK, as you know, series two of Not Going Out goes out from next Friday, September 7, at 9.30. But as the date of transmission has been pulled forward, we've only just started recording. If you'd like free tickets to any of the remaining recordings (they're at Thames in Teddington), use this link. You might even see me, lurking around, trying not to get in the way of the cameras on the studio floor, which is my preferred vantage point. You'll certainly see Lee Mack, Tim Vine, Sally Bretton, Miranda Hart and Simon Dutton being very funny, and getting things wrong, and having to retake them. Ah, the magic of a studio recording! End of plug.

And here are two more nice new press shots I have just taken receipt of.

OK, so we're sticking our fingers in our ears during the narration now on British Film Forever (at one point this week, my fingers slipped out and I heard Jessica Stevenson, reading out the words of Matthew Sweet - both blameless - and she spoke of Boris Karloff "popping back" to Britain, which pretty much set the grating, matey tone), but what happened to the Horror edition, Magic, Murder and Monsters? There was some really interesting stuff in this one, not least about the exploitation years, which are covered in great detail in Sweet's Shepperton Babylon and came to life in clips and interviews, but about 20 minutes before the end, it sort of changed direction and suddenly covered Fantasy, which is different to Horror. Certainly, the previous hour had been exclusively about Horror. But then we had Brazil and the films of Terry Gilliam, followed by a final flourish in which Harry Potter was tenuously tied back into the Hammer tradition. It was honestly as if the programme had come loose from its moorings! Anybody else feel this way?

Gosh, what a confusing experience this series has turned out to be.

Because this week and next I'm presenting Radio 4's The Film Programme (Fridays, 4.30pm), I've been back on the interview trail. I like it. I don't consider myself the world's greatest interviewer, but I do my research, I don't read my questions off a piece of paper and I attempt, usually in a limited timeslot, to ask something original. Last Monday I interviewed Ken Loach. This was a life's ambition. We sat for just over an hour in his Soho office and covered as much as we could from his 40-year career. At 71, and still working hard, he had a real twinkle in his eye, and even though he's dead serious about his filmmaking and his politics, he was anything but dour or hectoring. That interview will air in next week's programme (August 31). Then, on Wednesday, I interviewed the 81-year-old Albert Maysles (which I've never been able to pronounce, but it's "Maizles"), who, along with his brother David, made two of the greatest rock documentaries of all time, What's Happening (since expanded to become The Beatles' First US Visit for DVD) and Gimme Shelter. Mr Maysles was in his home in New York, I was in London, but it was still a pleasure to hear his thoughts. This is for a forthcoming Radio 4 documentary on Rockumentaries. More details nearer the time. Then, on Friday, I met John Waters, also a man of advancing years at 61, at the National Film Theatre, to talk about his one-man show, now captured on film as This Filthy World, which is not released until November here, but is a hoot. He was as I'd hoped he would be: camp, larger-than-life, all the cliches. This interview plays out today, but as with about six months' worth of Film Programmes, stays up on the website for ages, and not just for a stingy week. That was last week.

This week, I interviewed Chris Cooper, the doughty character actor, 55, who's finally landed a mainstream studio lead in the excellent Breach, released next Friday. This interview, in which I was able to tell him that Matewan, the 1987 John Sayles movie about unionisation in the mining industry in the 1920s and Cooper's first film role of note, "stirs my blood", airs in today's Film Programme at 4.30. You will also hear me talking to Judd Apatow, 39-year-old writer, director and producer of Knocked Up, released today, having made over 150 million dollars in the States.

I think Knocked Up is a revelation. I don't usually like comedies aimed at young men (ie. the Frat Pack movies, the Pie franchise, even the latter Farrelly movies), but this is a cut above. Apatow's The 40 Year Old Virgin showed a sensitivity unusual to the genre, and the supporting cast, including Seth Rogen, Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd, who star in Knocked Up, were exceptionally funny. What's clever about the new one is that it's about, as I'm sure you've read, an unwanted pregnancy. Not the sort of issue usually covered in slacker comedies. It's as if Bluto in Animal House was forced to face up to his responsibilities, which would have ruined that film in 1978, but makes this one a real cornerstone in 2007. There are set pieces and gross-out moments, but these are countered by serious discussions about what parenthood and marriage mean. It's been called "conservative" and I guess it is, in that it promotes marriage and family, but it doesn't necessarily attack the alternative pothead lifestyle lived by Seth and his Geek Chorus (which includes Jonah Hill, who stars in the forthcoming, Apatow-produced Superbad and could be the new Chris Farley, except hopefully with a longer life ... and better films). I'd recommend you go and see it. Apatow is rare in that he can write for women (his wife is Leslie Mann, and she's in it, so perhaps she gives him tips on how women think and talk), and for every instance of a slacker hi-jink, there's a short, sharp shock of responsibility for Seth.

Because of doing these radio programmes, and filling in for Mark Kermode on Five Live today (3pm) and News 24 next Friday (5.45), I've also seen pretty much all the films released this and next Friday. I can't review them all. You'd get bored. Anyway, the upshot is, I've really enjoyed meeting and talking to these talented film folk, young and old. I hope you enjoy the edited interviews when they go out. I'll be the one who doesn't sound like Mark Steel.

I began my day by being approached in the coffee shop on the way to work by a well-built, smiling Scotsman with very short hair. He asked me if I was Andrew Collins. I told him I was. He very kindly told me he enjoyed my books and said he had read "all three" (which includes the latest, something that particularly pleases me, considering how well hidden it's been from view). He said he got the last one in an offer, and sort of apologised for this but I said it was cool. I hope my pleasure at being told what he told me was apparent from my face and response. He then said he hoped I didn't mind him approaching me. Of course not, I said. As he walked off, still smiling, he said he doesn't do this sort of thing normally, and he hoped I didn't think he was a stalker. I said I didn't. It was, I admit, a happy start to my working day.

At the end of the working day, as I passed through the train station nearest to my office I caught the eye of another man, who removed one of his earpieces and made noises that suggested he, too, recognised me. What a good day I was having! He asked me if I was ... Mark Steel. I laughed and said that I wasn't, but that I am aware I do look like him. He looked embarrassed and I was keen for him not to be, having crossed the line and asked me if I was him. I told the man that I sometimes thought Mark Steel was me, which must have been a strange thing for him to hear, unless he knew that I sometimes appear on the television, which he may not have done. We agreed between us, as we both walked up the steps, that Mark Steel is very good. The man really liked his lectures. I told the man that I knew Mark Steel, which I kind of do, in that we would stop and say hello if we passed. I hoped this made him feel better - at least he recognised someone who knew the person he thought he was speaking to. (I have never discussed the fact that I look like Mark Steel with Mark Steel, or that I genuinely do sometimes see him on telly and think, in that split second, that I'm on.)

So, a very neat day. At one end I was me, at the other I was somebody else famous.

I would say I urge you to see Fast Food Nation, out on DVD next week, since it's Richard Linklater's dramatised adaptation of Eric Schlosser's landmark non-fiction book of the same name, which blew my mind when I first read it, and made me, yes, smug that I had long since denounced McDonald's. (I used to eat fast food on a daily basis when I was the editor of Q, among other unhealthy habits, and my conversion came circa 1997, when I went the other way completely, and have not looked back. But I know of which I condemn.) Anyway, it's no secret now that fast food is, hey, bad for you. One of the least edifying spectacles in industrial food manufacture of the last ten years was McDonald's launching healthy salads and dropping their supersize option and claiming it had nothing to do with the bad publicity generated by Morgan Spurlock. Just stick to what you do best.

Nobody's forced to eat takeaway burgers. If you like 'em, the libertarian within me says, go and eat them. Unfortunately, it's become much harder to pretend that the big chains are just in the business of selling food, fast, to happy customers. They are bad employers. Their power makes them dangerous. They have a stranglehold on suppliers of both meat and potatoes, which destroys farmland and the environment through heavy pesticide and herbicide use, and it's not cost-effective to farm organic cows when you need that much meat, that quickly, and at a constant rate. Hence: industrialised farming on a scale most of couldn't imagine.

That's what lies at the heart of Schlosser's book, and the film. Both trace the food chain back from the scrumptious burger (and as I say, I used to wolf them down too), via the exploited workers and the exploited kiddies at whom the toy-based marketing is aimed, to the "prison camps for cows", as Avril Lavigne's activist character describes them. (Yes, Avril Lavigne.) it kind of works, although it might actually have made a better documentary. The characters just spout rhetoric, because it's a Message Movie, and the Message must get through. Anyway, the reason I don't necessarily urge you to see the film, whose cast is good (Greg Kinnear, Bruce Willis, Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette, Kris Kristofferson), is that there's real footage from an industrial slaughterhouse at the end.

That's a real slaughterhouse. I don't know how Linklater got permission to film there (if indeed he did), but it's not pretty, and makes a powerful denouement to the story. Moral spoiler! Read no further is you think you'll find this upsetting! The sight of distressed cows being herded down a metal corridor, then shot in the head with a stun gun and having their throats cut while suspended and clearly still alive is grim indeed. They are then gutted and skinned, by which time at least they no longer know anything about it. The guts slide slickly down a chute, the sight of which makes one of the immigrant workers in the film feel faint. And me. I am a meat eater. I eat meat. I choose to pay the dividend and eat certifiied organic meat, which doesn't mean the cows aren't killed in an abattoir, I know that, so I guess by being shocked and yet continuing to eat meat, I am either a hypocrite, or a fatalist. Fast Food Nation, book or film but especially film, could make a vegetarian of you. Linklater's been one since 1983.

I am, of course, obsessed by Google Analytics (one of the great services offered by Blogger), and I'm still puzzled by the huge drop-off in traffic. This shows traffic between May 12 and today, and the difference between the peak (1,004 visitors on May 16) and the current average (between 40 and 90 a day) is marked. Anecdotally, the amount of comment seems the same. I'm certainly blogging as often again, now my local difficulties have been ironed out, but a tenth as many visitors are dropping by. I have one theory: The Apprentice, which ended in June, may have accounted for a lot of referred visitors, or visitors visiting for a specific fix, who have since walked away. Also, average number of pages viewed per visit, which flatlines for most of that boom period, has perked up a lot since, suggesting that individual visitors are looking at more pages (up to 7 some days). The best theory is this: don't worry about it. It's only a blog.

For all my moaning about the way lads' mags are dragging us all back into a pre-enlightenment age, at least on a different matter of sexual equality, these fuckwits have had their neanderthal views curbed. I quote the story from today's MediaGuardian.co.uk:



TalkSport rapped for homophobia

Ofcom today censured commercial radio station TalkSport after one presenter linked paedophilia with homosexuality and another, former Sun journalist Garry Bushell, called gay rights a "gospel of perversion". In the first incident, Mike Mendoza, who presents the live phone-in programme The Mike Mendoza Show, was suspended for one week: in a discussion about footballers "jumping on the bandwagon" of news stories in apparent bids to boost their image, this sinister boor cited pleas from figures including former England captain David Beckham to help find missing toddler Madeleine McCann, saying: "Now you tell me, paedophiles in general are the type of people that surely would not follow football? Not many gay people to the best of my knowledge are great football fans."

Ofcom said, "To connect homosexuality to paedophilia is highly offensive."

Bushell, on the Football First show on June 3, was plugging his eponymous Sunday night show, and joined in a discussion about an English club potentially playing in next year's European Cup final, which will be held in Moscow. Referring to the gay rights demonstrations recently held in Moscow where anti-gay protestors assaulted demonstrators including campaigner Peter Tatchell, Mr Bushell said: "I would not go to another country and try and impose my views on them, it's up to them what they do. I think there are a lot of things to put right in this country before you go around preaching the gospel of perversion."

It's OK though. Bushell said he "regretted" saying it. (Not thinking it, though, eh readers?)

I have only ever heard TalkSport in taxis. A man called Alan Brazil seemed particularly loathsome in this regard. I wouldn't impose my views on anyone, but it's clowns like these two that put me off "the type of people that follow football."*





(*Ha ha, I was pretending to generalise about football fans in tribute to Mendoza's generalisation.)

I've never had a massage before. I went for one today, for the first time. It was very nice. Actually, it's probably being pampered for half an hour in the middle of a working day that was nice. I feel the same way about haircuts, actually. Indeed, my only experience of a professional massage is the head massage they give as part of the package at the ladies' hairdressers chain I now use. This is less a massage, more of an assault about the head by someone who usually sweeps up hair and fetches coffee, but it's oddly relaxing, nontheless, and the very idea of sitting in a chair while someone rubs my head is so far removed from my usual weekday itinerary (which goes: write at desk, take train into West End to meet someone, take train home again, write at desk, stop writing at desk), it increases the sum of happiness. If I leave my eyes open, which I feel is the wisest approach while sitting in a salon where there are a lot of sharp objects, I can see that the girl doing the massage looks bored. If I washed hair and swept up all day, I think I'd consider the head massage the best bit, but apparently not.

As I have written before, the head massage used to be optional, but not any more. I'm sure you could opt if you wished to protect your own skull, but it's assumed you require one, and I'd consider it rude to the young girl to refuse. I used to tip whichever girl who washes my hair a pound; now I have upped it to two pounds, to cover the massage. I still can't work out if that's stingy or generous. I tip the actual hairdresser five pounds, which seems fair, as there's not a lot to do on my head.

Anyway, having felt a bit of tension in my right shoulder, I booked an actual massage at a place whose website only has pictures of relaxed women on it, and which is actually a spa, albeit a high street one. I felt just a little bit self-conscious going in there, blatantly not a woman, but as we have established, I have a greater affinity with women than men anyway, and I'd like to think they can pick this up. I asked if they had a copy of Nuts while I waited, but they didn't.

So, if you've had one, this will be old news indeed, but massages are very relaxing. No wonder the beautiful-skinned ladies on the website look so calm and peaceful. I booked a back, neck and shoulder massage, as the others ones (deep tissue, for instance), sounded a bit scary and might, I reasoned, have required me to wear nothing but a towel. In the event, I was asked to get undressed and lie under a towel for this massage, but I kept my shorts on, and it didn't seem to impede the woman's work. (Of course, a part of me is mocking the other part of me for keeping my shorts on, but the part of me that has never had a massage before didn't want to look stupid, and even though the other part of me thinks the fact that I kept my shorts on probably made me look stupid in a different way, the other part of me is too relaxed to get into an argument about it.) Frankly, my shoulder still hurts, but the rest of me, including my mind, feels great, and the aromatherapy oil is still giving off a relaxing aroma half an hour after leaving the shop. What's relaxing is letting yourself go. Allowing a professional to take charge. No conversation, just trained hands, very occasional pain, plus oil and piped chillout music, which included the theme from Twin Peaks, adding a certain macabre weirdness to the occasion.

I suppose the best thing would be to know someone who can do massage and get them to do it for free, but I think it's the ritual of turning up at a foreign place, waiting in the waiting room and being led down some stairs to a suitably scrubbed room with a special bed with a hole in for your face that makes massage so effective. It actually made me feel very grown up and in control of my own life. (It's weird that a man of 42 might need such a feeling, but he does.) And no cheap gags about massage parlours, kids.

Feeling slightly under the weather on Sunday, I curled up on the sofa and put on British Film Forever as a slice of easy, undemanding eyewash, thinking, "A few choice clips of some costume dramas - what could be less taxing?" What I hadn't taken into account, of course, was the amount of shouting at the screen involved. I've just finished reading Matthew Sweet's history of the British film industry, Shepperton Babylon, and despite its unecessarily salacious title, it's a committed, intelligent and affectionate read from a man who clearly adores his subject - and talking to ancient protagonists, many of whom have died since Sweet interviewed them. If only a hundredth of the spirit of this superb book had surfaced in British Film Forever (which, as we have established, Sweet writes the links for). Instead, it reduces everything to a joke. On A Room With A View: "Cecil looks like Danile Day-Lewis. Well, he is Daniel Day-Lewis." (Has a more crass comment ever been made on a BBC2 history programme, which, at the end of the day, this is?) Later, we heard talk of "dosh" being made. There was a gag about costume dramas being aimed at American tourists "too fat to get on planes". And the civilians are taking over, with Lily Savage providing most of the comment about Maurice, and Jeremy Vine, Daisy Goodwin filling a lot of gaps where filmmakers might have gone. Even David Oyelowo, star of Spooks, who is an actor and has been in a couple of films and therefore qualified to be here, says the following line, "Chariots Of Fire, I think, is one of the best British films ever made." And that's it. Cut to clip. Let's examine this: we find out that a bloke who we've seen on telly thinks that a film is one of the best British ones ever made. That's the full extent of the insight. The insight is not into the film, it's into Davide Oyelowo. Equally, James Purefoy, another actor, says that Laurence Of Arabia, for him, is "the triumph of all British film." So what? I mean, really, so what? They've got Steven Spielberg saying it changed his life and convinced him to go to Hollywood - that's an insight worth sharing. It's all so bloody matey and chopped into soundbites. We also find out, from critic Liz Crowther, that Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were "the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie" of their day. How much more do we have to reduce history to Heat magazine level before it's ready to show on television?

There were some choice clips, but it didn't make me feel better. I feel certain I'll be on the next one, and the one after that. I hope to God they don't make me sound as shallow and ephemeral as everybody else by chopping out soundbites from my (as I remember them) long-winded speeches about The Four Feathers, 28 Days Later and Norman Wisdom. It's a worry.

I've thoroughly enjoyed the Bourne trilogy - having now seen the third and probably not actually final installment during a preview day at my local Odeon - and in this I am not alone. Identity was intriguing and pacey, but it was Supremacy that really lifted it - thanks to director Paul Greengrass, who seemed to ban all tripods and stands, bringing a touch of United 93's documentary realism to what might have been a fairly standard espionage thriller. I've always liked the bad weather and the gloomy, often European locations that characterise the franchise, and Ultimatum was no slouch in this department, beginning in the suburbs of Berlin - where Supremacy ended - skipping through Paris and a wintry-looking Madrid, and upping the mood by travelling on the Eurostar to London's Waterloo station. That's my station! I kept expecting to see myself as Matt Damon and Paddy Considine (yay!) dodged the bullets of an "asset" (ie. CIA-groomed killing machine) on a packed concourse, in and out of Threshers and WHSmith. Nice touch. Can the people in the background all have been extras, or did Greengrass get in there, guerilla style? Either way, it's this realism, faux or otherwise, that sets Bourne apart from Bond, and the glam likes of Mission: Impossible. You're looking at a two hour chase across five or so locations, ending up in New York, on the Agency's doorstep, for a flashback-explaining showdown with Bourne's evil boss David Strathairn, who looked oddly green-skinned in colour after his monochrome tour de force in Good Night, And Good Luck. Some car smashes, yes, but no explosions to speak of, and no sex, and no witty comebacks. If not for occasional mention of "rendition" and the finest computer systems known to man, it could be a Cold War thriller, it's so hard-faced and chilly.

I'm not really anticiapting a big debate about this one. It was humorous to see the Guardian featuring so heavily, with what might be the first actually convincing fake newspaper ever seen in a Hollywood film, featuring Considine's pic byline as Security Correspondent, and his column actually set in the proper typeface (by the Guardian, one must assume, in return for the largely pointless product placement - I don't see many Americans rushing out to buy a copy).

The lads' mags have taken a well-deserved downtown at last in the latest ABC (Audit Bureau of Circulation, non-industry types) figures. Loaded recorded a 35% year-on-year drop in circulation, "the largest fall in the men's sector for January to June this year." The grandaddy of Lad still sold 120,492 copies in the first half of 2007 (it's not in the gutter yet), but that's down 25.9% on the 162,554 sold in the previous six months and - eek! - 35% down from the same period last year. Weekly stablemate Nuts saw a year-on-year (gosh, how that phrase transports me back to my days at the magazine coalface) circulation decrease of 9% to 277,269 copies, while same-mag-different-publisher Zoo saw circulation fall through the 200,000 barrier, recording an 18.1% year-on-year circulation decline to 186,732 copies. Meanwhile, market leader FHM was down 25.9% and Maxim, dropped 26.3%.

My question is: have men and boys in this country finally started to run out of tissues? Or can a male only look at two women with their breasts touching so many times before they go and do something less degrading instead?

All That Glitters by Pearl Lowe
I never, to my knowledge, met Pearl Lowe - singer with Powder, partner of Danny Goffey out of Supergrass, scenester extraordinaire - but I don't know how come. She reigned during Britpop, the ultimate envelope-opening attendee and party girl and photo-op. I was there, albeit, it transpires, behaving like something of a lightweight compared to what she, and Goffey, were getting up to with the Supregrass millions. Her book - a grimy flipside to Alex James' Bit Of A Blur - is a confessional, the kind that often results from 12-step rehab, part of the process of cleaning up and making peace, in other words. As such, it's an unforgiving portrait of the dangers of self-absorbed excess, as Lowe moves from coke to heroin, her addictive personality putting her in all sorts of scrapes, and costing her a bomb. (At one stage, she and Danny have to downsize from their Camden mansion, but they're allright now.) She basically pulls the rug from under her archly-named band - who I don't remember being much cop, and certainly not as "famous" as she paints them (it was she who was "famous", or at least in certain North London circles and the pages of the boy-run music press) - and even after she's cleaned up and gone healthy, the smack creeps back in to spoil everything. The Primrose Hill set go mostly unnamed - only Sean Pertwee gets a speaking role, and that's because he tells her to stop drinking and drugging - but I understand she and Goffey have forsaken them anyway, and the book has led to her excommunication. They now live in the country, like Alex.

I enjoyed - if that's the right word - the relentless spiral of drug-taking and child-ignoring. (Lowe would be the first to admit she's been an absent mother to her kids, the eldest of whom, Daisy, 18, is showing her bosoms on the cover of some fashion mag currently, but you can't help but tut as she abandons them to the nanny once again so she can chase the dragon with her junkie pals.) It's not well-written in the sense that nobody is described apart from the author, and thus there's little sense of the supporting cast being real (as I say, the Primrose Hill set are anonymous, except for Gavin Rossdale, father of her first child, who comes across as a nice chap, then a dick, but then he was married when the paternity question arose, belatedly). It's all about Pearl. There's little clue as to why she is so self-destructive (her parents seem normal, and supportive, always baby-sitting while Lowe is having her stomach pumped or she's at a "health farm"). However, reading it, you do realise what a sanitised account one usually hears of Britpop. It's to her credit that she's revealed the darker underside.

I remember rumours of smack, but I never saw any. Certain members of certain bands clearly needed a more serious fix than a snifter off a toilet seat, and we now know that Brett Anderson and Justine Frischmann were among them. They either kept it well hidden, or I was too naive to see it. Anyway, Pearl and Danny survived intact, which is a good thing. Although he comes across as a very unhelpful boyfriend when Lowe's struggling with her addiction - he seems to prefer her when she's out of it, ie. having "fun". I recommend the book only if you're keen to make yourself feel better about your own occasional lapses into hedonism. Chances are, you've never taken coke in hospital just after giving birth, or ruined the white upholstery of a limo taking you to your smack dealer with a miscarriage, then wiped it down and gone back to the Ivy to resume dinner. Phew.

NOT GOING OUT

The Royal Television Society and Golden Rose award-winning sitcom returns to BBC ONE for an extended second series from Friday, September 7. Meet Lee (played by LEE MACK), a man who has a problem. His flatmate Kate has moved out for good and his best mate and landlord, Tim (fellow BAFTA Award winner and stand-up, TIM VINE), has put the apartment up for sale.

For full press release go to The Corner.

The Worst Album Of The Year . . .
. . . According to the Independent on Friday. I only saw the headline, and now the link to the review is down on their website. Did anybody here read it? Was it by Andy Gill? In a way, I don't need to see it, as I've seen the arguments against Kate Nash ("the new Lily Allen" - oh, really?) rehearsed by other male music writers. Alexis Petredis has a right go at Made Of Bricks in his Guardian review. Well, I've got the album and I really like it. I really like Kate Nash, and I honestly can't see what the problem is. First, there's a Lily Allen link in that she appeared to come out of nowhere, and benefitted, like many artists now, from MySpace groundswell. Fine. And Lily Allen, I think, offered her patronage early on. Either way, these two things don't send a new artist to number one in the album charts unless there's something beneath the hype and the backstory.

Nash emerged from the BRIT School in Croydon, which seems to be a mark against her. We have to get over this. Do we dismiss the work of Francis Coppola and George Lucas because they went to film school? I can appreciate why some will find her DIY music and her "ordinary" delivery and subject matter irksome, because it's not Rock, and it's not Soaring Choruses and it's not Sexy in the conventional sense, but to me she falls in with the likes of Jamie T, Mike Skinner and Plan B, white urban/suburban bedrooms rappers. The single Foundations is a kitchen sink drama in song, with Nash playing the part, I think, of someone a little older than herself and trapped in a co-habitational relationship with a man whom she hopes is not "the one". Nash herself still lives with her mum. There's mention of eating cheese on toast in Merry Happy. Another song on the album is about mouthwash (it's called Mouthwash and is the next single, which will of course actually be playlisted by Radios 1 and 2 before it comes out this time). This mouthwash and toast stuff seems to lie at the heart of much antipathy towards her. Why? God is in the details. This one's about Kate, taking stock of her life and her face and body ("I've got a family and I drink cups of tea ... and this is my brain, and even if you try and hold me back there's nothing you can gain ... "), but it's also shot through with doubt and self-consciousness and hope and entreaties for respect. It's amazing to me to hear anything from the "indie" firmament that's about anything, and the personal is by its nature political. Ken Loach's films (sorry, I'm in a Ken Loach frame of mind - I'll explain later) are human stories, not broadly political ones, but they speak of greater struggles. Kate Nash seems to be an observer of life, but also a storyteller. She's playing parts. That may or may not be her own voice. It doesn't worry me. It's an affecting one. David Bowie used not to sing in his own voice, but he came from a performance tradition as I think Kate Nash does. The song Mariella drops into a kind of impression of someone playing a working class girl in a 1940s British film. It's most beguiling.

Dickhead is like a modern white blues: "Why you being a dickhead for? You're just fucking up situations." Again, I think her bad grammar and sentence construction ("you don't know nothing") are thought of as affectation. But since when did pop music have to be sung in the singer's own voice. What about every British artist who sings in an American accent? At least she sounds English. What she does have in common with Lily Allen is a sense of humour, something I really value in Arctic Monkeys, to name one rare indie band of today I have an ounce of time for. She's sharp with a rhyme like Allen too. But her music couldn't be more different. It's not ska-reggae-inflected pop, it's closer to folk (Birds - "they can shit on your head ... but when you look at them, they're beautiful, and that's how I feel about you"). Even the production numbers, like Pumpkin Song, where her speech turns to sweet song, have a rough and ready feel that's absent from Allen. There's a feel of punk poetry too, and her appreciation of John Cooper Clarke is not a surprise, even if she lacks his bile. Funny thing is, her first single Caroline Is A Victim (which I've never actually heard!), isn't on the album. Whyever not?

The album struck me as too short, which was my only real complaint, but it's not really. It just seems to fly by, which I think does it credit. She sounds a bit like Regina Spektor, yes, but there's less self-conscious New York artiness. It actually reminds me, in its scratchiness and in the rough, unsung nature of her voice, of some of my favourite early 80s post-punk from ladies, such as The Raincoats or The Slits or Delta Five. This is a fine tradition, and from before Nash was born - perhaps her parents played this kind of music - and Cooper Clarke - to her? I'm in love with this record. And I truly believe we're going through one of the worst periods for music since the late 90s when Travis were welcomed as conquering heroes, and the early 21st century, when the Strokes had to save us. That's how bad it was.

Well, Kate Nash is a ray of hope, I think.

Oh how the "row" that broke out about Paul Watson's documentary Malcolm & Barbara: Love's Farewell irked me the week before last. It risked engulfing what was a beautiful and harrowing programme - a victim of the ongoing "fakery" witch-hunt, which has got so out of hand. (At least it was ITV being in the dock this time, and not the BBC - the newspapers' usual whipping boy in all this.) The "issue" was the implication made in Watson's narration that we were seeing the final moments of Malcolm Pointon's life as he faded away after 15 years of Alzheimer's, at home, in his wife Barbara's arms. It transpired that what we were actually seeing was Malcolm drifting into a coma, from which he would not recover. He actually died three days later, off camera. Now, on a technicality, I can see why ITV was forced to overreact and order the usual enquiry, but at the end of the day, indeed at the end of a life, does it actually matter whether we are seeing a man's death, or a man slipping into a coma?

Paul Watson is a filmmaker of immense moral fibre who seeks to show us what we might wish to turn away from. This film was made over 11 years with the full blessing of Barbara Pointon and, in the early stages of diagnosis, by Malcolm Pointon. This was no easy film to make, and no easy film to watch. Anyone leaving their TV comfort zone to do so will have witnessed an unforgiving slide of one man into dementia, torment and eventually helplessness. Although to see Malcolm concentration-camp thin, a shell of his former physical self, being hauled out of his bed in a harness, unable to speak or feed himself, was horrifying, it was the early stages of the disease, in 1996 and 1997, that were the most disturbing, as his speech went through its transformation into babble, and it wasn't that you couldn't understand the words he was saying, merely that you couldn't understand the sense of them. Oh, you could throw the usual barbs: that it was a middle-class man who got an 11-year film made about him and not a working class one (he played the piano, was a lecturer, once had a show on BBC radio about music), but the condition itself knows no class prejudice, and although his piano skills featured heavily (he could still play when he had stopped making sense verbally), the misery suffered by his loyal wife Barbara was not made easier by their comfortable house. Put into respite care, Malcolm was given increased medication that took away his ability to walk, without Barbara being consulted, so she took him back home.

In the end, this was not a film about Malcolm, so much as a film about Barbara. Sadly, we couldn't hear from Malcolm, as he disappeared into himself, sentenced to take out his frustration on the world with uncharacteristic violence, so it was down to his wife, marooned without him but unable to leave, to explain what Alzheimer's does to people. She was strong, yes, selfless, noble, patient, but she was honest, and admitted she would like to be with someone else after Malcolm had gone, and was candid enough to admit that she missed the sex. (His drugs made him impotent.) Barbara allowed Watson to film her self-medicating with a few gins at night, and crying at the memory of a trip out on she and Malcolm's anniversary to a special place from their past that he seemingly had no recongition of. (This, of course, is an assumption. He may have recognised it quite well, but he was unable to express this in any conventional way. Barbara's pain was something we could identify with, but she appeared on occasion not to credit her husband with cognition, simply because he didn't appear to understand where he was, or what he was supposed to be doing. I expect this is a common reaction to an alien experience.)

An immense, moving piece of work from a real documentarian. (I actually don't know how Watson affords to live, his films seem to come so infrequently, by their nature.) How sad that the salacious need of an imagined public to see a man die on camera came between us and it. Watson re-worded one line of the narration, so that the emotive phrase "journey's end" was excised, and all was well. In that, all was not well.

I'm not sure I have anything profound to add to the general sadness surrounding the death of Tony Wilson. I didn't grow up with So It Goes and became hugely jealous when I met those who had done. I was at the NME at the very moment Madchester challenged the rest of the world, and it was a glorious time. We spent an awful lot of shuttling back and forth from London, where it used to be at, to Manchester, where it now most definitely was. In that, Tony Wilson became an ambassador. You could not fail to be inspired by his civic pride and mouthy self-confidence. I attended he and partner Yvette Livesey's In The City music conferences on a couple of occasions in the early 90s, and it was like Wilson ran the city, even though he didn't. Up there, at that time, you really started to believe the world revolved around the Hacienda. Even if Tony wasn't around, he sort of was. He was in the iron girders and the concrete floor and the flooded basement, and his picture was on the wall in the box office. I spent more qualilty time with Tony when he started to come down to appear on 6 Music (he once deputised for me, for a whole week, on Teatime, and ruffled a few feathers - I must admit, I was rather proud to have someone so august and important sitting in for me). His legacy is unquestionable. And even though a lot of Mancunian scenesters have a "problem" with 24 Hour Party People, for me it was chock-full of affection for Wilson's World. And that was a good impression of him by Coogan. Tony Wilson did the best Tony Wilson impression, at the end of the day.

The Simpsons Movie, then
I snuck off work and saw this at lunchtime, on my own. It made me chuckle on more than one occasion, but on points, it didn't really deliver. I'm not one of these Simpsons nuts who can tell you when the programme started to go downhill - I have absorbed that information by osmosis - but as someone who always finds something to enjoy in whatever episode I happen upon on Sky, I wanted more from an 87-minute-long episode than, well, an 87-minute-long episode. The animation was very good - defiantly 2-D but with some nice computerised touches, such as the whole town with burning torches - and there were one or two bits of business worthy of the brand: I liked it when President Schwarzenegger was given five options - the exchange between him and the Environmental Protection Agency's Russ Cargill (Albert Brooks) was nicely honed and delivered. But at the end of the day, there wasn't enough story for an hour and a half (Springfield placed under a dome due to pollution, Homer takes family to Alaska, family leave Homer, Homer follows them home), and none of the subplots really paid off. Bart's were particularly ragged - the drinking? The move towards Flanders? Even the naked skateboarding sequence, while technically brilliant, was a bit odd. Who wants to see Bart's penis? Condensed, this might have worked as a single episode. All told, I'm glad I went, as I needed to see it, but The Simpsons Movie wasn't much of a moviegoing experience. The South Park movie, oddly, worked. Perhaps that's because it was made very early on, before expectations rose to unmanageable levels, and while the show itself was still on fire. Full marks for self-awareness: the film starts with The Itchy & Scratchy Movie which Homer stands up and complains about, asking why go to the cinema to see "something we could see on TV for free"? The question still remains, in this case.

I'm talking about me, obviously. Thanks to the sterling work at the very top level of BT, I am now reconnected to my broadband. You shouldn't have to take these matters to the very top - and if you do, it helps that you have some bargaining chips - but I cannot fault the level of care and follow-up. We'll leave it at that. I hope.

Jamie Oliver's also back. After three series in which he was a slave to format (turning yobs into chefs, sorting out school dinners and having them thrown back in his face, going on holiday to Italy get away from yobs and school dinners), his new series is back to basics: Jamie At Home. Now, figures show that Jamie's Dinner restored a lot of people's faith in Jamie - they saw him in a new light. I must say I've always liked his programmes, and his personality, if not Toploader, and despite that awful moment around series two of The Naked Chef where it looked like he actually thought his band could have a hit record off the back of it. Luckily, common sense prevailed. I've always used his cook books, and I wish he'd never sold his soul to Sainsbury's, whose chirpy, dishonest adverts continue to turn me into Marcus Brigstocke on a purely ethical level. (Jamie's doing them so many favours by attaching his name and cuddly image to their evil work of destroying communities and putting growers out of business and filling us all up with processed food because that's where the profit lies, but hey, here's some coriander in a packet.) Anyway, the Sainsbury's dollars have helped pay for a very nice house in the country, and it's here that we join Jamie for the new series. No mates coming round, no wife and kids (yet), just the man-child himself, reassuringly tubby now, getting excited and using words like "bosh" and "wazz" about simple ingredients. This week: tomatoes. I'm glad to have him back, and I'm definitely having a go at that tomato salad and the sausage stew, although I doubt I'll be doing it in my brick fire oven in the grounds of my house while my gardener uses organic methods of keeping the white fly off my vines.

Let me guess - you all hate him?



What a surprise: I love Studio 60. Fucking love it. I cheer when it comes on, already. Great to have Aaron Sorkin's crunchy dialogue back on the telly, Matthew Perry has found a role to match Chandler, and the plotting is already immaculate. However, I can quite understand why it didn't find a big audience in the States and why it was cancelled - and why it's only on More4 over here. It's about the making of a television show! Who, at the end of the day, apart from people who work in television, or who would watch an Aaron Sorkin drama if it were about a call centre, cares? (Or cares enough to watch more than one season of it?) Praise be, all the same.

it's nice to be back. Again. Again.

Broadband is off again. Despite coming back on last week, it's been cut off today again, due to the same erroneous "cease" order as before, and there seems to be nothing anyone at BT can do to override it. The System is more powerful than the people. Isn't this was The Terminator was all about?

Anyway, yet again, apologies for what will be another quite week blogwise, while BT try to sort me out.(They're giving me an estimate of about a week, as I have to place a new order! And if I don't, I have to pay for the remaining 20 months of my two-year contract, which seems fair.)

I am feeling remarkably Zen-like about it, tell the truth. But as soon as I am away from this computer, which is at my agent's office (and she needs it back), my blood may start to boil again.

Gnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn.

OK, so I've never read a Harry Potter book. I've seen no need to. They're kids' books and I am an adult, and there are too many books aimed at adults that I haven't had time to read yet. I am also not a parent. However, and here's the odd part, I have dutifully been to the cinema to see every single one of the films, usually within a week of release. At the weekend I caught up with part five, The Order Of The Phoenix (or The Pre-Order Of The Phoenix as I couldn't help but think of it during the mad rush to buy the book). I quite like the way they make almost no effort to welcome in new viewers by, say, recapping on the story or anything - they just assume, quite confidently (and that confidence is not misplaced) that everybody has seen the other four, and know that Cedric got killed by Voldemort at the end of the last one, and that Harry started fancying the Chinese girl. The new one just opens, bang, with a Dementor attack in a Surrey underpass and a fat kid, whom I must admit I didn't recognise as the offspring of Richard Griffiths and Fiona Shaw, gets something nasty sucked out of him. Then we're into some kind of wizards' tribunal, and Imelda Staunton takes over Hogwarts and stifles individual creativity on behalf of government denial and spin. (Was this about the Iraq war then, or does JK Rowling not do contemporary allegory? - actually, no, it's set in the present isn't it? Or is it? Clearly Hogwarts and all its trappings are relics from the past, which is what makes the stories so appealing? Or am I missing the point?)

What can I say? For another two and a half hour film, and a very dark one at that, it never gets dull. It's repetitive, and the climax just seems to be about three or four variations on the same duel, but the action and the story keep you hooked. That and the possibility at every turn that you'll see another venerable British character actor doing one scene, or less, or even just appear in a moving photograph, like Timothy Spall. There's no option for the actors to do anything other than mug. This is not a problem, but it sets a tone that makes the younger actors seems stilted and awkward. (And I fear Rupert Grint and Emma Watson may never emerge from drama school.) It's actually Staunton and Gambon and Gleason and Griffiths and Bonham-Carter chewing up scenery that makes all the fantasy work.

Again, we must have been the only people in the entire Odeon not familiar with the text, and thus at least there were some surprises. It was great to see tiny children gripped by it throughout, the spell only broken by toilet visits. I saw the third film in Galway, and a tiny child was literally on the edge of his seat next to me throughout, entranced. That's magic. On points, I'd say that Film Number Three, as I sentimentally call it, was the best in terms of story and direction. Number Four was bogged down with the Tri-Wizard tournament, Harry's involvement in which was never propertly justified, and this one relied too heavily on one character (Dolores Umbridge - God, how I hate Rowling's names) for its entertainment value. But, hey, I'll be there for the Half-Blood Prince in 2008.

You'll have to check out The Corner to see it. I'm very keen to keep me-me-me stuff separate from this, the more general, inclusive blog. You can tell, can't you?

OK, let's declare an interest first. Two episodes in and I have yet to be seen on the seven-part landmark BBC2 series British Film Forever, but I have been filmed for it, and hope to see my freakish face on those devoted to Social Realism, War and Comedy - or not. The people who produce the series are Good People (I have worked with them before), and Matthew Sweet, who writes the links, is a nice chap who also sits in on Radio 4's Film Programme (see: entry on the other blog that nobody visits). At Radio Times I have been actively involved in promoting this series, and the British Summer Of Film it's tied in with, all of which strikes me a something worthy of support (classic British movies being shown at Odeon cinemas all summer - a chance to see the likes of Henry V, The Wicker Man and Withnail And I on the big screen). However ...

I've watched the first two episodes, Thrillers and Romance, and there's no doubt that this is a major undertaking, the kind the BBC does best - a vast survey of British film in terms of genre, with a high calibre of interviewees: filmmakers and actors, mostly, but with an admirable bias towards the older generation, still with us, and with valuable contributions to make (the likes of Ronald Neame, Lewis Gilbert, Guy Hamilton, Jack Cardiff - all of whom I interviewed while on Back Row, due to my own prediliction for veterans with a unique viewpoint). The graphics are good. The clips are enjoyable. And the long running time (an hour and 40 minutes) allows for detailed dissections of individual films. But there are three things wrong with British Film Forever and I hope I'm not biting the hand that feeds me in pointing them out at this early stage:

1. The narration. It seems that Matthew Sweet's brief was to "keep it light" - thus, we get a jokey tone throughout that seems almost embarrassed to take any of this silly cinema stuff too seriously. In the first episode there was a daft line about Harry Lime having something like "a strange taste in hats" (really?), and mention at one stage of something called "Cool Britanniadom" (sorry - is this Smash Hits?). The linking text should shed light, or contextualise, or provide information not provided by the talking heads, not demonstrate that the writer is awfully witty. Worse, Jessica Stevenson has been employed to voice the narration. Again, nothing against her, but the choice seems to have been made to soften the blow of a serious documentary; to make it more palatable; to get Spaced fans to watch it. (See also: Julian Rhind-Tutt, Seven Ages Of Rock, and Green Wing fans.) It's not because she's a women, but because she's been directed to deliver it with dropped "t"s and "h"s, as if to remove any boring sense of authority. She's just like you and me! The combination of the self-consciously casual writing with a recognisable comedy voice conspires to drag the seriousness of the analysis elsewhere to a much less challenging place. The voice sets the tone. The tone is one of, "This is not The World At War." Why shouldn't it be? It's about art. It's about social change. It's about British history.

2. The spoilers. At Radio Times we are ultra-sensitive about spoilers. We even rejected the idea of a piece about Great Last Lines in Films last week as it might give away endings to people who, through no fault of their own, might not have seen every classic movie ever made. The same with our Movie Moment series - we never do the final scene, or a scene that gives away the ending, no matter how much of a classic the film may be. British Film Forever, despite positioning itself as "a laugh", also wants to have its cake and eat it by treating its audience as if they were film studies students, where analysis of a film includes analysing the ending, because understanding is more important than entertainment, and because to study a film you must watch it first anyway. In a clips show, which is what this is, and one that's part of a drive to get the audience to watch the associated films on the BBC and at Odeon cinemas, why give away the endings of the films? It's actually vandalism. In the first episode we found out the precise endings - and were shown clips of them - to Brighton Rock, Get Carter and countless others, including (and this was a real crime), London To Brighton, which only came out last year and on DVD this year. It's a small film, and a brilliant one, but as yet mostly unseen by a broader audience. Any of the two million tuning in last Saturday has now seen the ending. The actual ending! They've seen it! This is a huge own goal. Unforgiveable.

3. The Clips Show Disease. This is not a problem uniquely associated with this series, but it shows how much the Top 100 and 50 Greatest and Britain's Favourite format has infected more serious documentary strands. The talking head format is not in itself inappropriate for this kind of histography. Indeed, the daddy of them all, The World At War, was powerful because of its talking heads - that is, its eyewitness testimony. Hearing from filmmakers and performers connected with the film or genre is absolutely right. As a viewer, I can also allow for film critics and academics, who can help to contextualise and offer a more critical view than the participants, who are bound to fall into luvviedom. (There, that's my potential appearances in the future justified!) But really - and again no disrespect to these individuals - do we need to hear from John Sargeant? Or Jeremy Vine? Or Paul O'Grady? Or Phill Jupitus? Sure, these are film fans, but when you've got Michael Caine and Dickie Attenborough and Daniel Craig and Richard Curtis, shouldn't their airtime be given precedence? Again, it's cowardice on the part of the producers. "What if people turn over because they haven't seen a jolly, familiar face off the telly for ten minutes?" Let them. I do not blame the makers of British Film Forever for this lapse in judgement - it's a much wider problem with the way documentary is now presented on telly.

Rant over. I am grateful that the BBC have spent this much money on a seven part series on British film, and I will, like Seven Ages Of Rock, watch to the bitter end, but there's something worrying about it. I'd value your thoughts on this matter, if you've seen the show, or if not, since it's a general moan. (I think I've made it clear that my talking head will appear on the series, but I hope I'm not part of the problem, since I don't make the programmes, I just appear on them when asked.)

What is there to say about the fate of Chris Langham? I remember so well the day it went public that he had been arrested in connection with child pornography in December 2005 - I was at the annual radio light entertainment Christmas party at the St Georges Hotel, which is always held in the afternoon, and all talk was of Chris Langham. I spoke to Chris Addison, one of his co-stars in The Thick Of It (for which Langham had famously won a British Comedy Award two days before) and he seemed as mystified as anyone else. There was no "inside track", not even within the comedy fraternity. Nobody had a clue what was going on, and in fact, you could sense that nobody in that hotel bar wanted to entertain the possibility that he might actually have downloaded kiddy porn. (I maintained a healthy cynicism, as I know for a fact that a number of men had been questioned and arrested as part of Operation Ore who were innocent.)

Any admirer of his work, especially his renaissance years in The Thick Of It, People Like Us, Kiss Me Kate and, more poignantly, or so it turned out, Help, will find it hard to stomach. Any adult downloading images and videos of child abuse is abhorrent, but to see somebody you admire go down for it is pretty disappointing. The Pete Townshend Defence only stands up if you can imagine yourself idly searching for and downloading such material (and typing in your credit card details in order to facilitate that deliberate act). As far as I'm aware, it's not that easy to find these sites - I don't suppose they're on Google or Yahoo, but I'm not even prepared to type the words in to find out. You'd really have to make quite an effort to find this stuff, I reckon. "Research" may be a catch-all in terms of claiming back expenses on tax if you're in the media, but it's no moral Elastoplast. Would Langham have claimed this back on his tax return?

From what came out in court, it seems that the woman who accused him of having underage sex was ambulance chasing, although, again, his relationship with her seemed distinctly odd. That said, there's no crime in being odd, and nor is there crime in having sexual thoughts about minors. The crime here is not necessarily one of paedophilia, it is one of supporting the abuse of children for adult pleasure, and that's unconscionable, whatever the exuse. The big question is: how do you feel when you hear a Gary Glitter song now? (Not on the radio, obviously, but perhaps in a documentary, or on a compilation of 70s hits.) And how will you feel when you watch The Thick Of It on DVD? Will you, in fact? I rather suspect the BBC won't be showing the first series again. Is that right? Or should the art stand apart from the man?