Caught up with the first blockbuster of the season yesterday, Iron Man. All the trailers beforehand were for forthcoming blockbusters - Indiana Jones, Dark Knight, Prince Caspian, etc. - and for whatever reason, it brought out the counter-snob in me. It's too easy to sneer at popcorn movies, these expensive, index-linked, machine-tooled, noisy, high-concept, low-subtlety machines for entertaining. Nobody would wish, Morgan Spurlock style, to exist exclusively on a diet of superheroes, natural disasters and CGI, but they serve a purpose. For all their modern posturing - the ironic dialogue, the offbeat casting choices, the nod, the wink, the innuendo - these are old fashioned pictures; pure escapism. And they do not ignore the outside world, either.

Iron Man, another Marvel comics adaptation (this time produced exclusively by Marvel), could easily be written off as a run-of-the-mill, by-numbers 3D paint job. In the first act, we meet playboy inventor-cum-weapons-manufacturer Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr., either relishing the role, or simply relishing still being a working actor in Hollywood), kidnapped by non-specific desert fighters in Afghanistan and forced to build them a rocket in a cave. He tricks them and builds a big old Iron Man suit instead and blasts his way out of there. In act two, he sees the light, changes his ways, becomes one of the good guys, builds a much better Iron Man suit in his underground "shop" and falls foul of the stockholders while attempting to win the war on terror. The geopolitical upgrade is successful enough - the original 1960s strip saw Stark kidnapped by the Viet Cong - and the casting of Downey Jr is a masterstroke. Unlike, say, Ben Affleck in Daredevil, he does not seem in any way embarrassed by the superhero suit. Though his persona is based on flippancy and smirking, this suits Tony Stark, and when he's locked inside the armour, you need someone with the spare personality of Downey Jr to break through the gold-titanium alloy. This, in conversation with his personal computer Jarvis, deftly voiced by an uncredited Paul Bettany, he does well. Jeff Bridges bulges out of his role as boardroom nemesis Obadiah in the same way that his fat neck bulges out of his suit: another key casting decision. Even Gwyneth Paltrow makes something out of her role as the dowdy PA, bringing a lot of meaningful looks to bear. (Apparently director Jon Favreau - yes, the bloke from Swingers - encouraged improvisation among his actors. If so, I think it shows, and such touches of humanity are just what you need around this much CGI and pomp.)

It's not one of the greatest films ever made - the climactic battle is not the best sequence in the film, which can't be right, surely (see also: Spider-Man 3), and yes, there's a scene in a military operations room where everybody cheers and high-fives (ugh!) - but it does its job for two hours and I'm glad I went to see it. Films can't all be 88-minute indie psychodramas about incest and divorce starring Laura Linney. Iron Man cost around $186 million to make. It took about $100 million in its opening weekend in the States, which will please the accountants. But such economics should not necessarily blind us to the armrest pleasure of the blockbuster. It's easy to read bloodless, corporate cynicism into the need of such huge films to turn a profit, but as long as some creativity has gone in at the other end, and the film does its job, why let snobbery stand in the way of enjoyment?

God bless the person simply calling himself "Blogger" on the entry below. (He's actually called Paul.) His instructions were clear and concise and they worked! Whilst travelling back from Brighton to London I followed them and was able to rescue Collings & Herrin Podcast Number 12 from nowhere! It is available as of now. (I just refreshed my iTunes subscription and there it was.) Having acclimatised ourselves to never hearing our discussion of the Bullingdon Club, Ant & Dec, Hitler and what we both did on May 5, 1982, aged 17 and 15, it's something like a miracle!

In order to recover from the devastation of recording a podcast and losing it this afternoon (see: below), I have come to the delightful town of Brighton for the evening, on my own, to appear on a recording of Radio 4's Music Group, presented by Dr Phil Hammond. It is at the Pavillion Theatre and I'm really looking forward to it. If you read this and it's still before 7.30 on Friday evening, and you're in Brighton, you could come along. It's being held here as part of the Brighton Festival. The other guests are Polly Toynbee and Zoe Ball, and we've all chosen a piece of music to play and talk about. Mine is One Hundred Years by The Cure, one of my favourite songs of all time. The very idea of this gothic, nihilistic dirge about sex and death being played on Radio 4 excites me no end. It is a gorgeous early evening by the sea - not very Cure at all. I took these pictures of myself at a beachside bar to prove I was here, although you can't really see the beach behind me due to the glinting, hazy sun. I don't normally blog out and about around the country but - gasp! - I have given in and signed up for brain cancer ie. wireless broadband. If I wasn't surrounded by thrillseekers and holidaymakers I could record a podcast right here and post it up. I'm not going to. I'm going to relax with this weak beer and put my laptop away. (The Brighton edition of The Music Group will go out on Wednesday on Radio 4 at 1.30pm. It is a very entertaining and ear-opening programme if the guests are good, as they were when Mark Ellen, Sue Perkins and Alexei Sayle were on two weeks ago, but not so when Nick Clegg was on last week pretending he liked Johnny Cash.)

Richard and I recorded our podcast today and my laptop crashed and we lost it. This would have been the picture to accompany it because we compared our 1982 diaries. This is beyond disappointing. We will try again next week. We have pencilled in Tuesday, as well as next Friday, as we part of the "freeconomics" revolution! (An hour and a half has now passed since the disaster and although I felt very down when I left Richard's there's no saving what we said, so it's best to move on. I am on a train to Brighton, literally moving on.)

Think of today's 54-minute conversation in an attic as just that. For the record, and to exercise your imagination, this is what the blurb was going to say, before we crashed:

In our twelfth podcast, we defend Ant and Dec, defend Hitler, share our memories of being in the Bullingdon club and find out what we were both doing on May 5, 1982 by using our diaries. Don't turn off when we start talking about the bouncy castle as it get unexpectedly much better after it.

Not exactly in the "dead of night", but whilst sitting out in the back garden for the last two nights at around 7pm, we witnessed an unusually large number of blackbirds, up to 45-50, in a loose flock, all flying in the same direction (roughly southeast, I'd say). They're obviously not migrating anywhere - they live here, and should be busy nesting right now - but they were certainly all heading to the same place, wherever that was. It was a strange sight, and I'm guessing it has something to do with the sudden change of weather. (If it were a science fiction film, this would prefigure the arrival of an alien spaceship or giant dinosaur.) Any ideas, birders?

Also watched some beautiful swifts, high in the cloudless sky, but that's not weird.

Pic courtesy of the RSPB, naturally.

I have a new blog about portrayals of "the Troubles" on TV on the Guardian website today (ha ha, they won't let me write for the newspaper, but there I am at the tradesmen's entrance, sniffing the rarefied air inside), and I'm on Richard Bacon's Five Live show between 11pm and 12.30 tonight. As you were. (This should be on The Corner, which is where I said I'd post news items, but I bet you never check it.)

Kosher, Halal, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Greek Orthodox, Muslim, Jewish, half-Jewish, mosque, synagogue, Arab, Israeli, Hamas, Hezbollah, Mujihideen, Gaza Strip, Occupied Territories, Allah, God, Jahweh, "good Jewish boy", "good half-Jewish boy", what's the fuckin' difference? As long as you use the internationally recognised noises for "alarm clock" (Lee fuckin' McQueen) and "chicken" (Michael Sophocles-Cohen), you can trade anywhere in this globalised world - that's what I'm fuckin' talkin' about!

This week's Apprentice was, to quote Michael, the Chicken Fiasco. (Jenny described the chicken as "the chicken article" proving that a noun is not descriptive enough in the world of high finance.) Honestly, it was like The Keystone Cops In Africa. I thought I'd seen these posturing, vacuum-headed twats at their worst, but I hadn't seen them on cultural safari in Morocco, where haggling was the order of the day and Marrakesh was a place where the locals would eat you up, spit you out, pick their teeth with your bones, dance on your grave and pray for your soul without even blinking, or something. Sir Alan appeared on a screen, flanked by Margaret and Nick in suitably colonial attire, while our headless chickens flailed about in the souk in jumpers and rolled-up jeans (nice one, Alex, whose claim to be "full of beans" in the final reckoning was almost right). This was surely one of the highlights of the series so far, with Alphalpha led by Lee McQueen, whose swearing reached fever pitch as he explained what he was talkin' about to baffled traders, but he had a secret weapon, and it was ... Sara, who was the only candidate to know that Morocco is a Muslim country with a Jewish quarter. This geographical/religious nicety was unknown to the other nine, one of whom, Jenny, is 36 (happy birthday you meretricious, scheming, coffin-faced bastard), and another of whom, Michael, claimed to be Jewish when he was only half-Jewish - unfortunately the half that didn't know what Kosher meant and gaily ordered his chicken to be killed by a Muslim priest. And they wonder why the situation in the Middle East is so intractable? It's because Michael Sophocles and Jenny Celeriac aren't government envoys. Renalpha were led by Jennifer, who was in danger of melting into a little pool of Dublin liquid under the Moroccan sun. Neither team looked too clever, despite Raef's excitement at what he saw as "grassroots negotiation", which is "as dirty as it gets." (Was he referring to the natives? Let's hope not.)

This is what they had to "source", while scoring points for how disgracefully they could patronise the locals ("In England it is very less"):

A mosque shaped alarm clock in green (that's fuckin' greeeeeen!)
A cream Berber bedspread with silver sequins
Grey slippers
Santos orange juicer
A blue cactus (specified height)
Large cowhide with tail attached, ideally purchased at flyblown tannery
Kosher chicken
Dye
3 red Akal branded tagines
2 tennis racquets, medium strung

It was a race against time. Could they find all ten things, buy them for about three-quarters of what they were worth by talking slowly at the shopkeepers and making chicken noises, and get back to Brentwood in time for prayers? (Oh, and some of them would be praying hard come the endgame.) As usual, it was difficult to follow which idiot was in which team, as Sir Alan shook them up again at the start of play, and they split up into sub-teams. It felt very much as if Jenny and Michael were against rather than with Jennifer, Alex and Claire, doing high-fives and trying to pay off the "dirty" locals in a sports shop not to string the other team's raquet. (They were the dirty ones, and Nick took notes.) They certainly got the marbles out of their mouths (thanks, Jennifer) with the French language, mastering "hello", "how much?" and "good luck" within hours. The rest was just shouting. We didn't see much of the grey slippers or the dye, but the Santos orange juicer provided many a laugh and tear.

Anyway, never mind the travelogue, the real high adventure occurred back in the boardroom, where Sir Alan went all predictably unpredictable on us and fired two people with the same name. Leenaissance showed what he was fuckin' talkin' about and won a glamorous balloon trip in Leeds, while Jenalpha ran out of hot air, with the Bullying Ray turned on Claire, who deflected it with her big Rottweiler's face and streaked hair. (I don't know about you, but I found her "role-playing" with Alex utterly convincing. Assuming they were playing a couple who despised each other. Imagine being Alex's girlfriend and having to literally chase his lips as they scuttled around his face!) Was it too much to ask, the nation asked, to see Jenny and Jenny-fir jettisoned in one sitting? No it wasn't! Jenny went first, having tied her air hostess's neckerchief up in knots trying to remember whether she knew was Kosher was or not, and whether Michael told her what it was because of his "Jewish roots", which she'd always known about, but not necessarily in that order. ("How could you sit there like that and lie?" he asked, not understanding the rules.)

Sir Alan suggested that Michael could pull his trousers down so they could check to see if he was circumcised or not, but I don't think he got the joke, as he didn't know that Jewish boys were circumcised. But he earned a reprieve for reminding the dewy-eyed Sir Alan of being 23 again. And off Jenny went ("No good. No good. Same old story"). Followed in her uncomfortable looking yellow silk blouse by the best salesperson in Europe, Jenny-fir, who actually said, "Fire me now." And he did.

God, I love this programme.

Recaps: Week One, Week Two, Week Three, Week Four, Week Five, Week Six

Some early, and quite alarming, "tough guy" photos from the genius Steve Brown. Who knew two pansies could look so hard in real life? This is just Phase One in Steve's dastardly visual plan. More to come.

This afternoon, Richard and I found ourselves in Holloway in North London (see how non-Londoncentric I am, explaining where Holloway is), having our photograph taken by a professional photographer. "Steve Brown" had lured us into a deserted church having claimed to be the same man who took really brilliant photographs of Torchwood and Doctor Who and My Chemical Romance. We believed him and innocently turned up, with various changes of clothing, which he asked us to bring. While we stood outside the church, we contemplated the possibility that "Steve Brown" wasn't actually Steve Brown at all, but a stalker-style fan of the podcasts who had sent us a link to Steve Brown's website making us think it was his work. In fact, he planned to lock us up in a cellar beneath the church with only Richard's laptop and some newspapers to entertain us (he'd asked us to bring these items as props), and with only a suit each and a selection of shirts and t-shirts to wear for the next 18 years. Luckily, he turned out to be Steve Brown the photographer. He even showed us the pictures after he'd taken them, and he had one of those big umbrellas and a roll of green paper. If it was a charade and we never hear from him again, it was an elborate one. Anyway, I decided to mark the occasion of proper photography by taking a couple using the in-built PhotoBooth programme on a Mac laptop. Here are two more (in which Rich is being ordered to look moody, and does indeed look like a moody university lecturer - I wouldn't cross him and hand my essay in late):


When the photos are finished, we'll show you them. Apparently we are going to look like we are in an action film like Bad Boys.

. . . And this man was my mayor.

. . . And this man was my next Prime Minister. The world looks very different today. Where did it all go wrong? Damn right I've got the blues.

... for this photograph. It seemed like a clever idea for Collings & Herrin Podcast number 11 because we cover the Miley Cyrus controvery, but already I'm a little self-conscious about it and I'm all chaste in a blanket! (This is why we're having some professional photographs taken next week, hopefully, by a nice man called Steve.) The podcast is go. I think you'll like the bit where we phone 118 118. We are Fonejacker.

Somebody has posted this uninteresting video of me and Richard on YouTube. Who would look at two photographs of two men for six minutes? (It's worth reading the comments, just for the one from a Jon Gaunt fan. To save you doing so, he/she says, "i think these two men on this clip are being immature and childish. I dont agree with everything Jon Gaunt says but i do admire his honesty and integrity ... two things these two twats on radio will never have.")