The third Collings & Herrin Podcast is available, either at the usual link at the British Sitcom Guide, or go to iTunes and subscribe there. (Just put either of our names into the search engine and you'll find it.) Our friend Mark, who we've never met, at the British Sitcom Guide has done some "stats" and says that 1,000 people have subscribed via his site thus far, and that 4,000 other people have downloaded the last podcast. We don't know how much of an impact iTunes has had yet, but thank you very much for indulging us. We hope this week's offers more entertainment, with its loose talk about Prince Harry killing 30 members of the sudoku-loving Taliban and other burning issues of the day, such as Paris Hilton's kitten, the leap year and the Sun's call for the return of capital punishment. Enjoy. It's about 10 seconds longer than the last one.

STOP PRESS! We are number 28 in the iTunes podcast chart. Get in.

I've loved this series of Masterchef on BBC2. OK, so the quarter finals seemed to go on forever, and judges John Torrode and Greg Wallace took shouting on television to a new level, but the sheer joy of watching great food being cooked, in often ludicrous conditions, has been a joy. And the three finalists, "single dad Johnny", "18-year-old Emily" and "ex-barrister James" (to use the narrator's handy shorthand - I can't work out whether it's worse to be thumbnailed by a job you used to do, your age or your marital status) were all astonishingly good. James won, and by a whisker, and good on him.

However, my problem with it is not unique to Masterchef. It's an epidemic in the western world and TV simply amplifies the trend: we can't stop crying. Never mind the conceptual overload of "chasing dreams", "changing your life" and "going on a journey" which infects every reality-based TV format, it seems that we, as a species, are now unable to do any of this chasing, changing or journeying without bursting into tears. These tears are often tears of joy, or of frustration, or the simple overflow of emotion that comes with even the most minor up- or down-swing in life. In Masterchef's case, a compliment about your food could do it. Poor James let the tears flow down his chiselled features when seven Michelin-starred chefs said they liked his turbot. (Or was it when he was told off for overtrimming the scallops? It's difficult to tell in the edit.)

I expect a psychologist will trace it back to Diana's death. (By the way, it's nice that we let her rest in peace, isn't it, and don't constantly rake over her dead bones? It's what she would have wanted.) Maybe that was when the national stopcock was turned. I generally like to trace any development, good or bad, in the British psyche, back to America, as most cultural and social trends start there, and if so, I wonder if it might be the rise of the daytime freak show, in which people on low incomes are poked with a stick long enough to make them cry for the cameras. Certainly this millennium the waterworks have come a lot easier for us. It's hard to imagine that we, as a nation, were once considered uptight and buttoned-up. Look at us now, weeping and wailing at the drop of a hat. Or the "journey" of that hat from hand to floor.

I'm all for letting emotion out. Who wants to bottle it up and develop a tumour in later life? And women have had the patent on tears for long enough - it's time we men were permitted to well up. It's a sign that something's going on beneath the male surface other than football and engines and rape. (Sorry, men.) But it's amazing how quickly crying loses its value if you do it all day long and for no good reason. What are the contestants on From Ladette To Lady (whose final I also caught the other day) going to do when a family member dies, as one is bound to do at some stage? Will there be any tears left after the ones bucketing out of them during the bit where they had to make a speech on the lawn of a stately home in front of their parents?

The answer, of course, is that we're not crying over the spilt milk of the outcome of a reality-based TV show. We're crying for everything else that's troubling us. When you say, "It's all coming out," that precisely what's happening, isn't it? Diana's mourners weren't crying for a lost princess, they were subconsciously mourning some death of spirit, or death of ambition, or death of hope in their own lives, or simply the realisation of mortality and fragility Diana's sudden and violent demise triggered. Which is why the overdue and seemingly peaceful passing of the Queen Mother failed to elicit queues round the block to sign her death book. (Ooh, I'm a qualified psychologist.) Some of the Diana cortege, a couple of elderly American tourists, probably were crying for a woman they'd never met but found quite pretty, but they were surely in the minority. And they might have been crying about their own mortality too.

What bothers me most about all this crying on telly, especially from men, is that it makes me blub. Pretty much every time.

Bought a tube of Jaffa Cakes to accompany the coffee while watching the Oscars on Monday morning. Not my usual tipple, but really nice, let's be honest. Anyway, I was just squashing the empty tube up for recycling this morning and I noticed that Jaffa Cakes are no longer a tasty little sponge biscuit with a smashing orangey bit in the middle. No! They are now an aid to fitness and health.

The side of the tube says, "EAT HEALTHILY: McVitie's Jaffa Cakes can be enjoyed as part of a healthy diet and lifestyle. Each Jaffa Cake contains lots of energy, and only 1.0g of fat per cake. That is why they are recommended by sports nutritionists." How proud these sports nutritionists must be for having "recommended" and "endorsed" a cake. (I like the way they refer to the weight of fat as "1.0g", as if that's less than "1g" - look, it's got nothing after the decimal point! That's how low the fat content is!) I'm glad a sports nutritionist isn't giving me dietary advice. (Actually, it's probably just two sports nutritionists, not all of them. McVitie's should name them, especially with the Olympics coming up.)

Furthermore, the tube itself says it is "IDEAL FOR SPORTS BAGS". Now, this is meaningless, because a sports bag is just a bag. They may as well say, "IDEAL FOR BAGS" (which doesn't, I admit, have the same dynamic ring). But you can see the implication: it looks a bit like a tube of tennis balls, thus it's for eating between serves. (Hey, don't get your tube of tennis balls and your tube of Jaffa Cakes mixed up! You wouldn't want to eat a ball and play tennis with a cake!) Don't get me wrong, I think it's smashing that fitness is back in vogue and that people are more aware of health problems and their links to what we eat, but let's not fool ourselves: Jaffa Cakes are cakes. They are eaten for pleasure. They are not put in sports bags, except by people who aren't planning on using the bag for sports but are in fact using it to transport cakes.



Memo to marketing dept: why not just sell Jaffa Cakes as "really nice"? It would stop McVitie's looking like fucking idiots.

As I said to the audience at last night's Banter recording in Central London, "Thank God you're here!" After all, we had all survived an earthquake. I expected the dailies to be rather more circumspect about this ten-second tremor at 1am yesterday morning. They're not, but they would have been hard-pushed to top the way it was reported yesterday in London, when the wreckage and masonry still lay all about. The Evening Standard, which is published three times in a day, pulled out all the hyperbolic stops. EARTHQUAKE HITS LONDON, it bawled, arrogantly trying to claim for the capital a geological event which actually happened in Lincolnshire! (The "West End Final" edition of the paper had upgraded it to EARTHQUAKE ROCKS LONDON. Fuck! Run!) It used the same agency photographs that were used around the world (none of them taken in London): a hole in a roof in Barnsley where a chimney pot had fallen through (I saw this on the front page of, I think, the Mail today); a woman in her dressing gown ("surveying the damage", which mainly involved her standing on her own undamaged doorstep); some more chimney pots; and, er, that's it. The Sun managed to find a couple who were willing to lie about having had sexual intercourse during the ten-second quake - not something you'd brag about, really - so that they could use a headline along the lines of "The Earth Moved For Us", ha ha.

Not having listened to the radio yesterday morning or seen the news on the internet, I was oblivious to the destruction that had been wrought across Britain. I walked into the London Underground, my curiosity piqued by the Standard's sensational coverage, and found that on the electronic update screens every single Tube line was advertising "good service". An earthquake had hit London and not a single Tube line was showing "minor delays"? What kind of rubbish earthquake was this? Had we called in Charlton Heston and George Kennedy for nothing?

I went to the BBC News website and, as usual, they were lazily asking us to write the news, calling for "eyewitness accounts" of the devastating effects of the 'quake. Here are three - all genuine:

"Our dogs were barking and our cockatoo was agitated."
"It lasted 10 seconds but felt much longer."
"My first thought was that it was an intruder; my second thought was that it was a poltergeist."

I expect a UN appeal has been launched, and food parcels (including cockatoo feed) are on their way. It's our Katrina. It really is.

Wow. The Collings & Herrin Podcast is available on iTunes. Perhaps it has been for ages - I haven't checked for ages. But I checked today, idly, and there are our handsome faces, quite near to Russell Brand's handsome face and Chris Moyles's face. (We submitted the podcast on the day of our first recording, but I'd certainly sort of assumed it wasn't good enough to be on there, or it was too rude.) We are not in the podcast charts. Maybe this will change. That's up to you. Our next podcast is recorded this Friday and should be up and available on Friday evening. Check the link around the end of the afternoon.

Not really. I'm off to bed. But I did just see Kate Thornton doing the red carpet coverage for Sky One and she was forced to chat to Seal and his wife Heidi Klum before the famous people got there, and she actually said, "Heidi! Hi!" (If only Seal had had chipped in, "Ho-de-ho!") Go, girl.

Read this book. I am. I don't want it to end. As someone whose default setting has been, for some years, believe nothing you read in the newspapers, Nick Davies confirms my every suspicion. The conclusions are not pretty, but I always think it's better to know than not know.

The Brit Awards 2008: it was rubbish wasn't it? I realise I only watch it for old times' sake, as I used to have to attend as a gentleman of the music press, but in terms of sheer scale it's lost any connection it may once have had with its audience. The last Brits I went to must have been 1997, when Geri Halliwell sported the Union Jack dress. Maconie and I were co-hosting Radio 1's live coverage for the second year running - something I now find almost impossible to believe, it' s so surreal - so in 1996 we actually watched the messianic Michael Jackson Earth Song routine on a tiny monitor in a Portakabin in the car park of Alexandra Palace. We were literally locked out of the love-in, although we did get to interview all five Spice Girls and Diana Ross, and when Blur won everything the year before, it was great to interview them directly afterwards and share their champagne. Anyway, my spectacles may be rose-tinted, but the move from Ally Pally to the even more cavernous Earl's Court seemed to sound a death-knell for any atmosphere, certainly for the millions watching at home.

I watch it every year with diminishing returns a guarantee. Having also sat through the Grammys this year (oh my God), I can at least say that the TV coverage of the Brits is at least professional and clear. But the headline live performances last night were either dull (Kaiser Chiefs, McCartney - wow, so he does some Beatles numbers does he? it's been a while since I saw his face too! - Kylie) or misfires (the poor old Klaxons forced to be Rhianna's backing group - the indignity!, way too many dancers with Leona Lewis), and although I think Take That deserve their dues, most of the winners were either shrugworthy (Mika, Mark Ronson, Kanye West, Kylie, Foo Fighters) or embarrassing (and I speak of my musical heroes the Arctic Monkeys, who really need to learn a bit of grace). As for the presenters! Vic Reeves making a tit of himself, Moyles making a tit of himself, Andrew Lloyd Webber making a etc. etc. Only Kelly Osbourne emerged with any professional dignity. Her mum was a gurning idiot. And I'm afraid Amy Winehouse just scares the living daylights out of me. Good booking and all, but no thanks. She should be heard and not seen.

Ah well, serves me right for tuning in. Yes, I'll be tuning in again next year. (Oh, and haven't we done Tom Baker's ironic delivery now?)

OK, some late news just in. This story appeared in the Daily Express last Friday, and seems to be based on a report in Police Review. It appeared in the Express - a newspaper I could get obsessed by - under the simple headline, 800% (in big letters), going on to explain that "police struggle to cope with 800% rise in crimes committed by Romanians in UK."

I say "explain" - what the story actually did was scare the living daylights out of its decent, white, homeowning, Anglo-Saxon core readership, which is the Express's job. "Senior police officers", it said, were "struggling to cope" with "an unprecedented rise in offences by the east Europeans." This sounds like an open and shut case: our once great nation is flooded with pickpocketing Romanian ne'er-do-wells and 800 is a big number.

It certainly is. What 800% actually means though is "eight times more," and the rise seems to be a comparison between crimes committed by Romanians before Romania joined the EU and now. In other words, if one Romanian committed a crime before Romanians were allowed to enter the country, and eight committed one this year, that would be an 800% increase. (In fact, it's gone up from 30 in 2006 to 339 in London specifically, which, if you take into account that there were presumably hardly any Romanians here in 2006, is not that astounding. Also, at no stage does the report tell us what kind of crimes these are.) Many of them are poor, that's why they're here, looking for low-paid jobs, not necessarily to commit crimes. The Express called it a "dramatic increase" and added colour to the story by stating that "migrant gangs began to flood into the UK following EU accession in January last year." Note the emotive choice of words: gangs, flood, even "accession", which is official terminology, has the useful ring of submission and acquiescence! This dovetails nicely into the recent horror story about pickpocketing children, trafficked in and controlled by "Fagin-style gangmasters". The Express purports to be shocked by the appalling treatment of these children, but not as shocked as it is by the notion that pockets are being picked. If they could call them "Gypsies" you know they would.

"One senior officer who asked not to be named" - handy! - said that forces across the UK are "struggling to cope." I'm sure they are. Perhaps because so many officers have been put back on the beat at Labour's behest to reassure readers of the Express and the Mail that there are more bobbies on our streets.

What's at issue here is not immigration itself, but the emotive and scaremongering way the subject is reported in certain newspapers, with tea-spilling headlines like "800%", all adding to the narrative that evil foreigners are coming to your house to eat your swans. It's surely not a coincidence that, according to a Google search, this story was only picked up by the Express and the Mail - and quoted in a Sun online forum where one of the enraged contributors has a non-ironic Al Murray avatar. It can also be found, reproduced word for word, on the site of a rather unsavoury political party, for which I won't provide a handy link - nor name them, for fear of this post ending up in a Google search for that party.

I'm currently reading Nick Davies' British press expose Flat Earth News, which I highly recommend. He reminds us: "The migration argument is complex ... It is particularly complex for the Mail and the Express, because they have been among the most vocal supporters of the creation of free markets; they continue to support the free flow across international borders of capital and services and goods, but not of labour - not if it means Africans, Gypsies and poor people turning up looking for work. As a result, their whole economic model collapses."

Crash!

PS: Davies quotes a 2003 memo from a Sunday Express news editor, which instructed staff to "constantly stir things up. We must make the readers cross."

. . . Just an historic summit, last Tuesday, photographed using what I believe is called a mobile phone by our friend Jim in the reception of 6 Music/Radio 2. (Obviously, it's easier to recognise the pair of us if I stand on the left, and he on the right.) It was nice to have this mini-reunion - which happily involved beer in a old man's pub, the fleeting presence of Steve Lamacq, at least one drunken fan of Stuart's and a Goan curry - and for it to be recorded, photographically, for posterity. People often ask me if I see much of Stuart, and the truth is, I don't (I live in London, he lives in Birmingham and works four nights a week in Manchester), but when we do cross paths, it's like we've never been away!

As you were.

PS: For nostalgia, here's the two of us (flanked by Mark Goodier and Nick Heyward) in a photo taken at the Sony Awards 13 years ago!

Here is my contribution to the thorny debate over Genetically Modified foods. We read in the paper today that GM crops may be grown in "hidden locations" in Britain amid fears that anti-GM campaigners "are winning the battle over the controversial technology". Officials at Defra, who seem concerned about the march of progress being slowed down, confirmed they are looking at "a range of options to clamp down on vandalism". The firms have warned that trials of GM crops are becoming too expensive to conduct in Britain because of the additional costs of protecting fields from activists. Last year, only one trial went ahead in Britain, a blight-resistant GM potato developed by the German company BASF.

BASF? They make cassette tapes! What's a company that manufactures cassettes doing making my food? Are Memorex going to be selling me teabags?

That is my contribution to the debate.

After yet more technical heartache, Richard Herring and I managed to get our second fortnightly podcast up onto a webpage from which it has now been converted by our friend Mark at the British Sitcom Guide. You are now able to listen to 51 minutes (I know that's too long) of me and him going on about Downing Street, Katie Price, feral thugs and the Beijing Olympics. Be aware that the final 20 minutes are quite rude. I don't know why.

Today I made my parents proud and was the first member of my family to enter Number 10, Downing Street, Whitehall, London SW1A 2AA. It's all to do with this charity, PiggyBank Kids, which was founded by Sarah Brown before she was the Prime Minister Gordon Brown's wife (she was just the Chancellor Gordon Brown's wife then). Now she is the Prime Minister's wife, so she can hold a reception at Number 10, which you have to assume is better than Number 11. Ironically, she is the President of PiggyBank Kids, which is better than a Prime Minister and presumably what Gordon Brown and that other bloke who was in before him secretly want to be. (In actual fact, what I found out when I was actually inside 10 Downing Street is that Sarah had to ask the Cabinet Secretary if she was allowed to hold an event for her own charity at Number 10, and he said, "Once.")

Last year, I was invited to contribute to a book the charity is putting together called Dads. It's out in time for Father's Day this year, and is full of people writing about dads. The charity is all about helping kids, whether they are born premature or grow up with learning difficulties, that sort of thing, hence the emphasis on parents. (They put out a book called Mums: A Celebration Of Motherhood last year, which comprised short stories. It's just out in paperback and you can buy it for Mother's Day and one pound goes to the charity.) I assume I was asked to write something for the book because it is published by Ebury, who publish my books, and because I wrote a book that was essentially about my mum and dad.

Since this was a non-party political event, and Gordon Brown wouldn't be there, I decided it was ideologically sound to get really excited! We arrived at the big iron gates at just after the 6pm start time and did as instructed, showing our invites to the policeman, who had a clipboard with names on it, just like the doorman at a club or launch party. Joanna Lumley was in front of us, which boded well for the guest list. It's weird, after the security search in a little hut, to suddenly find yourself walking up Downing Street. (When I first came to London, as a boy, you could walk up Downing Street and lots of people did, but in 1989 Mrs Thatcher had the barrier installed to protect her from the IRA. It was a bit English and quaint that the leader of the country just lived in a house without even a front garden to protect them from the outside world.) It was dark, and there was no press corps, so it was really quiet. All of a sudden, we were at the door of Number 10, and being welcomed inside. Past the temporary cloakroom on the right, down the corridor, at each stage pointed in the right direction by ushers, pale yellow wallpaper, lots of gilt edged moulding and pillars, paintings everywhere, and then, turn right and you're walking up the famous staircase, with all the portraits of all the prime ministers. (I started recognising them at Gladstone and paid closer attention after Campbell-Bannerman, and yes, there's the photo of Tony Blair at the top. I'm glad he doesn't live here any more. I met him when he was leader of the opposition at the Q Awards and shook his hand and that was the best time to do so, I think.) Top of the stairs, turn left and you're ushered into the first of three state rooms where the reception takes place. I expect this is where Noel Gallagher shook Tony Blair's hand in the famous photograph.

Drinks proffered on silver trays included an excellent selection of red, white and rose wine, champagne, orange juice and - a nice touch (Joanna Lumley had one) - elderflower cordial. Now, we're looking at about 200 people all spread out over three rooms in a slightly worn Regency style, a huge percentage of them very famous, so the skill was to find a vantage point, look like you have every right to be there (which was, improbably, the case) and star-spot without looking like you're star-spotting. Look, there's Sir Robert Winston chatting to Martha Kearney from The World At One and Newsnight Review. And Anna Ford's just joined them! Wow, hasn't Melvyn Bragg's hair grown? And is he going to speak to anyone all night apart from Fay Weldon?

Sarah Brown appeared at around 6.20 and I would say "worked the room", but she didn't really. She looked relaxed and very attractive in red (I'd say the most attractive prime minister's wife ever - they should put pictures of the prime minister's wives - and one husband - on the wall of a different staircase), and spoke to people she knew, but it wasn't one of those events where, like the Queen, all the guests are "presented" to her for a few meaningless words. So, no, I didn't meet Sarah Brown, but I felt happy to be in her charitable and motherly presence and the short speech she gave about the charity was informative and inclusive. Most of the celebs there had contributed to one of the two books, or were connected to the charity. I like the fact that no photographs were taken. It's not going to be in OK! next week (which is the reason why most people turn out for charity bashes) and yet, it would knock the other events in their "court circular"-type section into a cocked hat.

Let's get this over with. The full list of famous people:

[in no particular order]

• Sebastian Coe
• Norman Tebbit
• Joanna Lumley
• Jon Culshaw
• Nigella Lawson (I didn't actually see her, annoyingly, as she came in late, but she was spotted by my companions)
• Kathy Lette
• Anna Ford
• Laurie McMenemy
• John O'Farrell
• Melvyn Bragg
• Fay Weldon
• Michael Simkins (the actor and author whom I happen to know, and was very glad to see)
• Julia Deakin (the actress who played Marsha in Spaced and Jill in I'm Alan Partridge and is in real life Michael's wife)
• Robert Winston
• Gary Rhodes
• Charlie Higson
• Richard Farleigh (off of series three and four of Dragons' Den)
• Peter Bazalgette
• David Putnam
• David Frost
• Davina McCall
• Arabella Weir
• Trevor Beattie
• Martha Kearney
• Ben Elton
• Ronnie Corbett (Ben and Ronnie spent most of the evening together)
• Alastair Campbell
• Piers Morgan
• Fiona Millar
• Michael Cashman (MEP and former EastEnders star)
• Bruce Fogle (I didn't recognise him but Julia did - he's a famous vet who appears on Radio 2, and father of Ben Fogle the TV presenter)
• Jilly Cooper
• Tanya Byron
• Miriam Stoppard

I'm sure there were more famous writers - possibly Mike Gayle and Joanne Harris? - but that's the full list of people we spotted, without looking like we were spotting them. It was nice to chat to the comedians I am acquainted with, Jon Culshaw and Charlie Higson. Charlie had brought along his dad as his guest, because he'd written about him for the Dads book. When he introduced me, I said I suddenly felt bad for not inviting my dad. "And so you should," said Charlie's dad, who seemed a very nice old gent. I made some excuse about my dad being in Northampton, and Charlie's dad said he'd come up from Somerset and that was no excuse. When I first said hello to Jon, I commented that this was a most unusual place for us to bump into each other. "Not for you, obviously," I added, for the benefit of Piers Morgan.

It's a rum old do. Two hours of looking around and having your champagne flute refilled and eating tiny pieces of food like a single chicory leaf with blue cheese on one end and a miniature heart-shaped biscuit with a pea-sized blob of something savoury on it and some glitter (no, really). And I have saved the best bit till last ... Gordon Brown did turn up! He just appeared, quite small and grey, and said hello to a few people he knew. Again, he didn't work the room. It was very informal in that sense. And it was his wife's gig.

Out of there by 8pm, when it finished (although Jon Culshaw said he reckoned he could stay till 8.30 to make up for the fact that he arrived at 6.30). We were keen to get to a pen and piece of paper so we could write down the names of all the guests. I hope I haven't forgotten anybody. I will certainly never forget the weirdest Valentine's Night of my entire life. (Yes, I did go to the loo in 10 Downing Street, in case you're wondering. Michael Cashman gave me copious directions, which was nice. Nothing much to report, but something you have to do.)

If you've read That's Me In The Corner, and I know that upwards of ten of you have, you'll know that my prologue is entitled, Jaws Actor Dies. It refers to something Richard Dreyfuss said in an interview that points up the vulgarity - and unmanagability - of posterity. He said that no matter how much worthy work he did for the rest of his career, when his time came, the newspaper headlines would all read: Jaws Actor Dies.

The mighty Roy Scheider succumbed to blood cancer on Sunday, aged 75, and what did all the headlines say?

This is from yesterday's Mighty Boosh event at the ICA in London, which I was delighted to be asked to host. (There's a whole set of photos here, taken by a Boosh fan from the forums called "Momus", who's such a fan, clearly he/she had no interest in getting me in the frame!) It was tied in to the release of Series 3 on DVD. Noel Fielding, Julian Barratt, Michael Fielding (aka Naboo and Noel's brother, he's the one in the hat with the beard) and Dave Brown (the man inside the Bollo suit) spent about three hours at HMV in Oxford Street doing a signing. The idea for the ICA event was to show two episodes from the series on a big screen in Cinema 1 (Eels and Punk, for the record), followed by a Q&A. It being half-term, they felt confident enough to hold the event at 3pm, although I was surprised how many of the 180-odd audience were old enough to have jobs! (In my opening address, I actually quoted Des Lynam's famous line from the 1998 World Cup before the England-Tunisia game, which kicked off at 2pm: "Shouldn't you be at work?") I divided the audience up into "Young" and "Old" asking for a show of hands - always good to do a bit of panto at these things, I find - based on their reaction to the new ads for Skins on Channel 4. If you see the writhing bodies and think, "Hmmm, I must watch that," you are Young. If you see it and think, "Yeah, wait until you've got a mortage," you are officially Old. (A lot more hands went up for Old when I had explained my criterian.)

Inevitably, the Boosh were late getting away from the screaming hordes at HMV and hadn't arrived at the prescribed 4pm, so I had to go back out in front of the audience in Cinema 1 and urge them to be patient. We showed another episode, Crimp. (When the lady from the ICA asked me to go back out and explain what was going on to the audience, she actually used this phrase: "Can you go out and talk some more shit?" I took this as a compliment.) I have met Noel before, albeit briefly, and in HMV two Christmases ago, when Lee Mack introduced us. I knew then, and I was right, that he is a very sweet individual, and incredibly relaxing to be around. It was great to meet the whole gang. Apart from the genial Dave Brown, whom we don't normally see outside of his gorilla suit, I felt as if I knew them already, which is presumably how the other fans feel. (I am a fan, and I don't mind anyone knowing it. When you host this type of event, it's pointless to try and maintain any kind of intellectual distance. They want to know that you love the people they love. I explained to the audience that I was a latecomer and that the Boosh didn't actually come into my life until May 2006, when I gorged on the DVDs, and I hope they appreciated my honesty. At one point, I accidentally said the name "Balloo" instead of "Bollo". It was a slip of the tongue, but the reaction was a massed "Ohhhhhhh!" as if I had blasphemed. That's how sacred the Boosh are.)

We eventually got the stars of the show onto the stage at about 4.45 and the crowd acted accordingly. Having conducted a number of Q&As at Bafta screenings and the NFT with proper filmmakers like Michael Moore and Terry Gilliam and Ridley Scott, it was nice not to have to get too formal. In fact, aside from my role as the man who decided which audience member with their hand up got to ask to next question, I was just the bloke on the end of the stage with a rolled-up sheet of paper in his hand. It's difficult to keep order when you have four mates who are also creative people, and even harder when ... Bob Fossil arrives! And milks it! Rich Fulcher came late and unbilled and was suitably uncompromising and quick-witted. He certainly wins the prize for making the other members of the Boosh laugh the most. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Julian took the questions most seriously, but was soon shouted down by the others.

Anyway, we wrapped up at about 5.30, I think, and retired to the green room, accompanied by half the audience. The Boosh are like that. They are appreciative of their audience, just like a rock band ought to be, and their fans repay them with rock-style loyalty. The Boosh play Wembley later in the year. Of course they do. It was enjoyable for me to breathe their air if not as an equal, certainly as a contemporary, and they let me see which free DVDs they'd stuffed into bags after the HMV signing: Naboo had the entire Laurel & Hardy box set; Julian had a couple of Robert Altmans, The Twilight Zone and The Clangers ("for the kids", he said, who I think aren't yet one year old, so we'll take that with a pinch of salt); I didn't see in Noel's bag. And yes, that was a cape he was wearing. He lives it. And I talk shit for a living.

STOP PRESS! Just found a decent pic on the Boosh Forum (you have to join to read them though) which actually has me in it, looking almost authoritative, so for the record, I'm posting it. It was taken by "SpaceKat".

The publicity for There Will Be Blood is everywhere, bolstered now by another award for Daniel Day-Lewis. You may have spotted this particular quote, which heads up many of the ads and posters:

"I'D GIVE BLOOD TO SEE THE MOVIE AGAIN."
Baz Bamigboye, Daily Mail

OK, let's run through that again. Baz Bamingboye would give blood in order to see There Will Be Blood for what we may assume is the second time. He doesn't need to. He can just pay for a ticket if he wants to see it again. As a film critic, he could have attended any number of advance screenings before its release, for free, with sandwiches thrown in. There's no need to give blood in order to achieve this. It's easy. Why is he taking on so? Why is he being so melodramatic, as if perhaps it's an underground film, and there's only one print? Could it be that he wrote this line, with its clever allusion to blood, which is in the title of the film, albeit not really in the actual content of the film, which is about oil, in order to get on the poster? More fool Paramount for indulging him. (Why do they do it?)

In that bit just before I woke up this morning, I experienced what I'm assuming was an anxiety dream. I can't recall the details but I do know that my legs felt as if they were made of concrete and that I was lost, and I said these words to somebody:

"I can't walk and I don't know where I am."

That's not in the least bit unsettling, is it? I can't walk, that is, I am unable to move about freely on my legs, and as if that's not debilitating enough, even if I could walk, I wouldn't know where to walk, as I don't know where I am. Morning!

Belatedly caught up with Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street at my local multiplex last night. A friend tells me that his father went to see the film with no idea that it was a musical and felt it had been mis-sold. Steve Rose wrote a short piece about this in the Guardian the other day, and I wrote a column about the way foreign-language films are dishonestly trailered in Word last year. But I hadn't even noticed that the trailers for Sweeney Todd disguised the fact that it is rendered mostly in song. What a strange thing to conceal! I did actually get a feeling from parts of the audience in the almost-full cinema last night of tangible surprise, perhaps even dismay, that from word one, it's sung. Nobody actually walked out, although I could see a couple of younger people to my left shifting in their seats as Johnny Deep exercised his fabulous Anthony Newley singing voice on the ship sailing up the Thames.

They always say we're "media-savvy" (oh, how I hate that term), so you have to assume that most people make informed choices in the foyer before handing over ticket money, and might indeed have read a review, or spotted the name "Stephen Sondheim" on the poster, but it's a fact also that some people - and they tend to be younger, and with little real interest in the cinema - turn up, do a lucky dip, buy a crate of popcorn and enter the darkness. These will be the people like those I had the misfortune to share a cinema with for Michael Clayton, who talked and laughed and texted throughout, hellbent on ensuring that those who actually chose to come and see a talky legal drama couldn't enjoy it. (My first experience of this was back in Streatham, when it soon became clear that the Bruce Willis fans in the audience had not expected the existential and ecological challenges of Twelve Monkeys. Perhaps they'd been hoping for a film about twelve monkeys. They expressed their dismay by talking and smoking throughout. The cinema - one of the old three-screen kinds, recently redeveloped into flats, I note - seemed unstaffed.) To the credit of last night's hoodwinked audience, they all stayed put, and the music was loud enough to drown out any muttering arising from the confusion. Interestingly, a few patrons did leave early, but we're talking an hour and a half into a two hour film. It's possible that the unremitting bloody violence got to them. (It really is graphic and constant and sadistic, by the way. Horror films these days get away with a 15 certificate, but this is an 18.)

As expected, although I'm not Burton's biggest fan (I find him lacking in warmth), I admired the grand design and the audacity of the enterprise, and Depp is a joy to behold. Also, it's incredibly visceral. The singing is real and not always technically dazzling, but it suits the style of execution, as it were. One comment, though: I did get bored. Once the barber shop is established, very little new happens in the story, and the songs are not exactly big production numbers, more like opera on the scale of a kitchen sink drama, so they don't compensate for the lack of vital plot.

You shouldn't get bored in the cinema of a Friday night, really. Not when all that money's been spent on entertaining you. Mind you, I didn't start talking or texting. I acted accordingly.

Can There Will Be Blood really be that good? Well, yes it can. You could call me biased, as I count myself as one of director Paul Thomas Anderson's biggest fans. I was knocked out by Boogie Nights, as I think most people were, but it was Magnolia that took my head off. I know people - people whose opinions I respect - who hated Magnolia. They thought it was self-indulgent, cacophonous, overlong, overwrought and downright silly when that thing happens about two thirds of the way through (you'll know what I'm talking about if you've seen it). I think the deciding moment in Magnolia is when the entire cast sings along to Aimee Mann's Wise Up ("it's not ... what you thought, when you first ... began it"), as if perhaps they are singing along to the film's soundtrack. I find this sequence almost unbearably poignant, especially as one of the characters singing is dying at the time. In fact, hang on, let's play it right now . . .



(Warning: don't expect to get the full impact of this if you haven't seen the rest of the film. It's all about context, although the song is gorgeous on any day of the week.)

So anyway, I actually fell in love with Paul Thomas Anderson when I first saw that sequence, and it will take a lot to dissuade me of the notion that the man is a genius. I enjoyed his next film, the much shorter Punch Drunk Love, despite the fact that it had Adam Sandler in it, and when I found his first movie Hard Eight on cable, I congratulated myself that I could see promise in its downbeat style. And now this. There Will Be Blood is such an old-school epic it makes you think of Citizen Kane and Giant and The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, and it makes you think of Chinatown, because that, too, was set in California, albeit 30 or so years later, and concerned greed and corruption and utilities. It also makes you think of Chinatown because Daniel Day-Lewis seems to have based the voice of the central character, oilman Daniel Plainview, on Noah Cross, the tycoon played by John Huston in it. I don't know if this is literally true, but when I first saw Blood, it took me a while to work out the voice and I'm looking forward to seeing it again and not having to waste any brain-time thinking of it.

I need to see it again. Although it unfolds like any Hollywood movie about a man who rises to great power (we first see Plainview hacking away at some rock down a Godforsaken hole, digging for silver, on his todd; from here he builds his empire), it has a strangeness about it that marks it out from the herd. It's not exactly arthouse, but it swerves just when you think you know where it's heading, and its ending, which I won't go into, is not the ending you're waiting for. That's why I need to see it again. Jonny Greenwood's score, disallowed from the Oscars because he'd already written some of it beforehand, is dissonant and creepy and glorious, and Paul Dano, last seen almost mute in Little Miss Sunshine, really pulls one out of the hat at the preacher who must be bought off before Plainview can have his oilfield. It's an unsettling film, not especially violent, certainly not comedic, but thrilling and stimulating and, as I've said, odd. Those who find Day-Lewis's technique irritating should stay away (and I thought he was a bit much in Gangs Of New York, but he's never less than entertaining), and if the idea of yet another 158-minute ordeal is too much, wait for the DVD. You have to put the work in, but it pays back.

Can the dating website Match-com really have attracted one single new customer with its ugly and unappealing new ad campaign featuring the sweaty grotesques "Cupid" and "Fate"? I really want to know.

I think it was the word "sharking" that distinguished Martin Amis in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001. Writing in the Guardian a week later, he wrote, "It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment." It was his defining moment, and that piece now provides the title to his latest anthology, this time of comment, journalism and short stories, The Second Plane. I'm not going to write a long review of it, but I will say this: I went mad on Martin Amis in 1988, devouring everything he'd already published, The Rachel Papers to Money, plus the collections Einstein's Monsters and The Moronic Inferno. When London Fields came out in 1989 I bought it in hardback, that's how much of a fan I'd belatedly become. I loved his prose style, as everybody did, his inventive new word-combinations and his evocation of deep global dread. (The teeth nightmare that opens Dead Babies is an image that will never leave me, nor the pivotal, existential soiled undergarment in The Rachel Papers, nor this phrase from Money: "The tooth is gone, but I am still here. On reading London Fields, I wanted to go and hang around Notting Hill and wait for the apocalypse while playing darts. I didn't.)

Then came Time's Arrow, which again I bought hungrily in hardback in 1991, and didn't really like. It was clever - boy, was it clever! - but I found it hard to love. The Information was much better, but still not, for me, among Amis's finest works. Then I stopped buying and reading his novels. Was that impertinent of me? Disloyal? Either way, I have maintained an interest in Amis, since his work brought me so much pleasure during a period in which I did an awful lot of fiction-reading. What I have read of his, has been non-fiction, and that has still seemed vital and nourishing. I loved Experience, his memoir, in 2000, which - along with Frank Skinner's - really inspired me before writing my own. And his imagined short story, The Last Days Of Muhammad Atta, first printed in the New Yorker in 2006, and reprinted in the Observer magazine, I think, blew my mind. Thus it was with an eagerness reminiscent of those late-80s days that I scooped up my hardback copy of his new collection at the end of last week, knowing that its September 11 theme was going to be right up my alley. It was.

It seems to me that regardless of the recent hoo-hah over his spat with Terry Eagleton over whether or not he is a racist (he claims not to be an Islamophobe, but an Islamismophobe, but nevertheless admits moving to the right whilst living in Uruguay for two and half years), critical opinion has turned on Amis since September 11. Is that because of September 11? Certainly, this book implies that there's a pre-September 11 Martin Amis and a post-September 11 one. Whether or not it actually changed the world - a truism I resisted with all my being at the time, but have now come round to - the sharking of the second plane certainly had an effect on the literary community. In perhaps the best essay herein (The Voice of the Lonely Crowd, from the Guardian, June 2002), Amis writes about the "de-Enlightenment" of the September 11 attacks: in other words, their effect on writers of fiction. Again, this has been dismissed in some quarters as solipsism, even egomania, but I could read a great writer writing about writing all day long. Perhaps it's because ... eek! ... I'm a writer. Whatever. One of the most profound things I ever learned in Art History was that, after the Holocaust, when the world had seen the images from Belsen and Auschwitz, art was stopped dead in its tracks. This came back to me while reading this essay. "An unusual number of novelists chose to write some journalism about September 11 - as many journalists more or less tolerantly noted. I can tell you what those novelists were doing: they were playing for time."

Whatever you think of Amis's views on Islam and extremists and America, you don't have to agree with him to see that the shift in geopolitics has energised him, hardened him, inspired him. Perhaps because I'd already stopped caring about him as a novelist, I have no problem with him apparently letting down his old allies. (Public opinion - by which I mean the opinion of a slim elite of books editors and critics, handed down through the usual channels - turned against Amis when he changed agents, fell out with Julian Barnes, and took an advance of half a million. Do the public care about such administrative details? I think not.)

Because I have conspiracy theory tendencies and fall into the general area of knee-jerk leftism (the group he disparages as the "nut-rissole artists" while frankly sucking up to Tony Blair for a piece of reportage for the Guardian that I never read in June of last year), I disagree with a lot of what Amis says, but that doesn't stop this collection being, in my opinion, riveting.

As he says of Mark Steyn in a book review, "his thoughts and themes are sane and serious - but he writes like a madman." Amis's thoughts and themes are sometimes those of a madman, but he writes as if he were sane and serious. And he overuses the words "fabulist" and "boredom" and the phrase "cassus belli", but we'll let him off, as these pieces were written over six years. Perhaps he will write that "campus novel" while teaching at Manchester. I might just buy it.

Take me back . . .

The first time I ever heard the greeting "Yo!" was in the original Rocky. ("Yo! Adrian!", "Yo! Paulie!", "Yo! Butkus!") I must have seen it on video in about 1980, '81, and I loved it. The fact that you have to now refer to it as "the original Rocky" is a crime, but of course, it turned into a franchise. I saw Rocky II, which had interesting things to say about fame, but after Rocky III, I tuned out. Thus it was with high expectations that I taped last year's Rocky Balboa on Sky Movies last week, and caught up with last night. I'd read good things about it, but I didn't honestly expect it to be this good.

Sylvester Stallone wrote and directed it, which is as it should be. And, 17 years after Rocky V (the one where he had brain damage and trained up his son), the whole thing was a nostalgia trip for fans of the original. Adrian is dead (not sure whether Talia Shire declined to appear, or whether this was always the plan, but it worked dramatically, as it put Rocky in a retrospective state of mind, harking back to past glories), and Paulie is still at the meat plant. Rocky's running a restaurant, telling boxing stories to the customers and trading on his name in what seems to be a fairly respectable manner. His son, now called Robert rather than Rocky Jr., works for some financial corporation and is uncomfortable living in his dad's shadow. (This subplot is notable only for the appearance of Heroes' Peter Petrelli, and is somewhat tossed off.) Anyway, after a computer-generated hypothetical bout across the generations is staged on a TV sports show, pitting Rocky against the current world champ Mason Dixon (played by an actual boxer, Antonio Tarver), Rocky decides to come out of retirement. As with the first film, he merely wishes to "go the distance".

There are many treats for Rocky fans. He and Paulie go on a tour of Philadelphia to mark the anniversary of Adrian's passing and visit the pet shop where she used to work, and where Rocky used to buy turtle food (he still has turtles), and the ice rink where they courted. Bill Conti's score is effectively a tribute to the music of the earlier films, and Take Me Back appears at the beginning, to ease us back in Philly life. Pedro Lovell reprises a small role from the original, Spider Rico; we see Mickey and Adrian in hazy flashback; Little Marie, the smart-mouthed kid from the original whom Rocky escorts home and gets an insult for his troubles, is now grown up, and almost becomes Rocky's love interest; Butkus is replaced by a rescue dog, a mongrel he names "Punchy", which is what the other boxers called Rocky in Rocky III.

Although I hate boxing, I have a soft spot for boxing films. I don't know why. And I really liked Stallone's decision to frame the final bout as if we were watching it on HBO pay-per-view. It's easy to knock Stallone, now 60, and we're next seeing him reprise John Rambo, but there's something real and crunchy about him, and let us not forget that he was totally unknown when he won Best Picture in 1976 for a film he wrote and directed and starred in. And he taught us the word, "Yo!"

My newspaper today reports that British scientists have created "a mouse that can catch colds." It will "help to develop and test new treatments for winter coughs and sneezes and also help people who suffer from severe asthma." I know we're very clever now and we can clone things and screw about with genes and play God with nature on a daily basis, but the way the story is presented (in today's Guardian and, no doubt, all the others), it's just accepted that this is a perfectly reasonable and indeed positive thing to do, to "create" a certain kind of mouse - indeed, one that's going to catch a cold in a cage. It's all to do with Rhinoviruses, apparently, which cause three-quarters of our colds. I had a bit of a cold last week, and I expect it was caused by a Rhinovirus, which I bet I caught in the gym changing rooms. I know colds can lead to other bad things if the person who catches it has a weakened immune system or if they're very old, but mostly, you get a cold, and it goes away a few days later. You feel a bit shit and get through a load of tissues. If, like me, you're a bit asthmatic, the cold can aggravate your pipes.

So hallelujah! Scientists have genetically modified a blameless mouse to catch a cold! I'm getting undernotes of Josef Mengele, but that's just silly old sentimental me. What I really object to is the way these stories are blithely printed as Good News. Not for the fucking sniffly lab-mouse it's not! I've heard all the arguments about animal testing, but they all boil down to the same logic: we are great; animals are there for us to muck about with and they should be proud to have helped us all live longer. Without all the mice and chimpanzees, we'd all be a lot more ill. Well, we all look pretty ill to me, thanks to all the rubbish we eat and the pollution we absorb (oh, and the failure of capitalism) - so did all those mice and rabbits suffer and die for a good cause?

Sebastian Johnson, boss of the white-coated Imperial College God squad, is quoted as saying, "These mouse models should provide a major boost to research efforts to develop new treatments for the common cold, as well as for more potentially fatal illnesses such as acute attacks of asthma." I've got a treatment for the common cold: stay at home, wrap up warm, drink boiling water with lemon in it, take Vitamin C, watch comfort telly. No mice - or "mouse models" - were genetically modified in the thinking-up of this "treatment."

Talking Point: I realise I'm on thin ice, so before certain parties start bombarding me with accusations of being anti-science or reporting me to the headmaster, I don't really wish to have the animal testing debate here because I've heard all the arguments before and I still don't agree with the practice, so further persuasion isn't going to budge me. I just want to know if anyone else is freaked out by this?