If you haven't already, you simply must hear this radio interview by Les Ross of BBC West Midlands with the fine, upstanding Hardeep Singh Kohli, and weep.

A bit of background: Les Ross is "a West Midlands radio legend." In 1965 he apparently become National DJ of the Year, beating Johnny Walker into second place, aged 15. This sounds hard to believe, but it's what it says on his BBC biog, so how can it not be true? He moved around from BBC Radio Birmingham to Radio Tees, then BRMB (he replaced Adrian Juste, which will give you an idea of the sort of territory he broadcasts in). He has "breakfast" written through him like a stick of radio rock. Now he's back at BBC WM, where, let's say, his many years in commercial radio are easy to hear back in a public-service environment. (Oh, by the way, he's won three Sony Awards, and now hosts the afternoon programme, 1-4pm.)

Anyway, just have a listen. Hardeep is in a London studio, there to talk about his food memoir Indian Takeaway (Canongate, £16.99). Les Ross may possibly not have seen, let alone read the book. This, as you will hear, is not his crime. (NB: The person who posted this on YouTube likens Ross to Alan Partridge, which is a bit unfair.)

While looking for something else today, I found this fantastic press photo from Channel Five's now-defunct soap Family Affairs: this is the original cast line-up, from 1997, when - as regular readers will now - I was working on the show as a rookie scriptwriter, learning the trade. The eagle-eyed may spot such luminaries as Ken Farrington (formerly Billy Walker on Coronation Street), Roger Sloman (Nuts In May, Grass), Tessa Wyatt (Robin's Nest), Annie Miles (formerly Sue on Brookside) and David Easter (formerly Pat the nurse on Brookside). But here, retrospectively, is the best spot:



The great Idris Elba, then playing Tim, very much third fiddle to Duncan and Roy. However, a few years into the future and on the other side of the Atlantic, he would breathe life into Stringer Bell in The Wire. (You may also recognise Cordelia Bugeja, leaning on Elba's shoulder: she's in just about every advert on television, notably Yakult and Sure. Hey, work's work to an actor.)

In an interview in today's Mail On Sunday, Nigella Lawson revealed that her husband Charles Saatchi lost four stone in nine months by eating nothing but nine eggs a day, either boiled or scrambled. ("He ate three eggs for breakfast, three eggs for lunch and three eggs for supper.")

In more important news, Paul Newman has died, aged 83, of cancer. I couldn't help but think of him when listening to the stupid nine-egg story on the radio news today. He ate 50, or at least his character did in Cool Hand Luke, and I believed he did it, even though he didn't. Newman was one of my first favourite movie stars as a kid, even before Gene Hackman, mostly based on Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, but I also saw him in, I think, Harper at my Nan's, and of course, in Cool Hand Luke. I got to meet Robert Redford, but never Newman. He once said that he would have died penninless if his eyes had turned brown. Never underestimate a face in Hollywood. The Brando who never got fat; the Dean who never crashed his car. RIP.

That classic scene from Cool Hand Luke, then:

Wow. People. So, Richard and I did our second ever gig together last night, at the Cross Kings pub in regenerated Kings Cross in London, once a pit of Satan, now a place of art galleries and piazzas and nice pubs and restaurants where Guardian readers are welcome. The result is Collings & Herring Podcast Number 31 - live! It should be up later this morning, if a small technical hitch can be overcome in my cyber-workshop. The recording certainly came out, there's just a slight problem in loading it up.

This top evening was all down to the anti-sweatshop charity No Sweat, who organised the gig, and allowed us to support their excellent cause by mocking it (and thus, ourselves) from the stage at what was a packed gig. Luckily, a number of people in the audience were podcast fans and knew what was going on: ie two men in their forties sitting onstage with a laptop open on another chair in front of them, making things up about some news stories in the day's newspapers and then insisting on taking a poor photograph of them at the end using the very same laptop. The other Guardian readers and tattooed 80s-style lefties seemed to get into the spirit of it straight away. It was a fun night. In the podcast you will hear that we attempt to discuss the departure of Ruth Kelly from Manchester, the arrival of Paul McCartney in Israel and other pertinent issues of topicality, but get sidetracked by Constantine's breasts and people shouting things out, as people do in pubs. A great night was had by all, except the small children employed to make Richard's trainers. You can even hear us going on stage, and going off again at the end, like some bootleg.

Even though the podcast hasn't loaded yet, I will come clean and admit that we had to cut a little bit from the show, for reasons of potential libel. (I am so good at editing, you'll never notice.) If you were there, you will know what this was. If not, you can have fun imagining it. Let me know what you think. Oh, and here is a picture of us.

Thanks again to Neil and No Sweat for having us on.

I know it's Mitford-related, but allow me to run this passage by you in full, as it resonates somewhat. It's taken from Nicholas Mosley's splendid first biography of his dad, Oswald Mosley, Rules Of The Game. In 1929, Mosley was a Labour MP (having been a Conservative MP, and an independent), and a frustrated minister without portfolio in Ramsay MacDonald's government. He was charged with sorting out the growing unemployment problem - which had tipped one million - and found his famous 15-page Memorandum on the subject effectively buried by a meek, posturing Labour cabinet. In a way, the contents of that document are not important here (nor the fact that he would turn to fascism in the 1930s, nor eventually marry a Mitford sister!), rather, the familiarity of what Nicholas writes of the Labour government of 1929. Bear with it - and the author's overenthusiasm for colons:

Those who had been in the Labour party or indeed in any political tradition for a long time knew that in some sense all this had to be a game: you had good intentions: you honestly professed them in your manifestos: you hoped by this to get power: none of this was cheating. But when you did get power of course there were often realities which were stronger than the good intentions you had had: you were forced to adapt yourself to realities not because you were betraying your good intentions, but because if you did not you might be betraying other good principles more severly. There was often a choice of evils: you had sometimes, possibly, to do almost nothing. But you could not quite say this. Political language had to be about will, and dynamism, or there would never be hope of improvement.

When [Mosley] made his proposals for strong central government machinery they [Labour] could not attack him directly because, as socialists, this is what they had always been advocating; how else could they have got as far as they had with evolutionary or revolutionary change? But it was by instinct that they feared the exaggerated implementation of government control: there is nothing more irrational, they knew, than human beings who have been given total power - even to act in such a way as they think is wholly rational. But still, they could not quite say this, or how would they ask for, or be given, any power at all? Both they, and the people who voted for them, had to pretend they could be trusted with power: and it was still in fact by dealing in limited power that people could strive and hope bit by bit for reasonable change. But all this only made sense if it was held together by rules of an instintively accepted political game - rules that were known, but not stated, on a supra-rational level.

One of the rules of the game was that you could not exactly explain what was and what was not a game: if you did, then the someone who did accept that there was a game could simply make you seem a hypocrite.

MacDonald's first Labour government had lasted nine months, in 1924, although they passed a couple of useful acts providing unemployment benefit and cheaper housing; it was buddying up to the Bolsheviks that did for them. His second lasted only two years, having resolutely failed to handle ... oops! ... the economic crisis of 1929, which saw unemployment spiral to two and half million by 1930. As true today as it's always been. (And anyone else get the vibe of Fight Club from that last paragraph?)

Let's assume you won't be reading a review of the final episode of a TV series if you fear SPOILERS.

It is what it is, as McNulty said. The Wire is over. Ep 60 was a feature-length reward for all our hard work. It paid pretty much everything off, and how unlike The Wire that is. No Sopranos mystery endings here. No internet chatter required. It was what it was. It felt like two episodes stuck together (and how like the connoisseur's preferred method of watching The Wire that is), albeit the second didn't have an awful lot of drama in it. All the big stuff happened in the first half, the stuff that had been brewing all season: the spectral serial killer and Templeton Vs The Truth. The former - and the illegal wiretap that threatened to undo all the good work - blew up in everybody's face: the mayor's, the upper echelons of the BPD, McNulty and Freamon's, even - almost - the Teflon-plated Levy's. But it was too big to come out, so they buried it in the back channels, and those seekers after justice had to be content with Chris Partlow getting life, with no parole, for the vacants. (Wasn't it sweet when he met up with Wee-Bey in the exercise yard in the final montage?) What did we learn? That politics and ambition win in the end, and all else must fall into line. Even at the Sun, truth was sidelined by prestige and prizegiving. Bubs became a local hero and was allowed upstairs. Cheese got shot "for Joe". Michael, for as long as he could remember, always wanted to be a gangster. Marlo tasted legitimacy but didn't like it. Daniels became a lawyer, Pearlman became a judge, Carcetti became governor, Nerese became mayoress, Dukie became a junkie in a junkyard. Prez grew a beard. Valchek got his spurs. Rawls got a comedy hat. Herc got away with it. Levy got away with it. As far as we could tell, Clay Davis got away with it. Sydnor offered hope that the case was not yet closed. Freamon went back to his minature furniture. McNulty took Mr Bobbles home, having made his peace with Beadie. And yes, that was David Simon in the newsroom, enjoying his Hitchockian cameo. Best part: surely the fake wake at Kavanagh's bar! Jay's "elegiac words", another blast of the Pogues, and black and white united by green! It was a fitting send-off for 60 hours of "natural police". The world keeps turning: corners will change hands, the "connect" will be sold on, stats will be duked, files will be worked, bodies will pile up, backs will be scratched, hats will be exchanged, caps will be popped, chess will be played, wires will be tapped, warrants will be signed, Jameson's will be drunk, backs will be watched, gardens will be walked through, Baltimore will endure. See you back at Season One, Ep 1 ...

Good news! Today's Guardian gave away a book by Catherine Tate, off the telly, called How To Write Comedy. It is a very good book. I have read it from cover to cover. But what's mainly good about it is the fact that Catherine Tate, off the telly, am I bovvered though etc., wrote it.

Here it is.



Hmmm. Hang on. If you look a bit more closely, you will discover that in actual fact, Catherine Tate, off the telly, how very dare you etc., didn't write it, despite the large picture of her at the top of the Guardian front page, and the huge typeface her name is in. In fact, she just wrote a short introduction. The actual book was written by ... hmmmm ...



... someone called Richard Herring. He's very good. Although not, it seems, sufficiently off the telly.

The Guardian has increased the cover price of its Saturday edition from £1.50 to £1.60, having increased the price of both the Saturday and the daily by 10p last September. The series of booklets began on Saturday.

No, not the silver one on the right, the black one in the photograph under my eyes, taken from the Daily Mail: just one of the fascinating stories not about the global financial crisis that we cover in the news-based Collings & Herrin Podcast Number 30. Yes, it's our 30th birthday. Listen out for incisive topical news panel game-style material about Shepton Mallet, Strictly Come Dancing, the ongoing battle between swan and mink, future queen Kate Middleton's lack of rollerskating decorum, Bruce Parry, Creme Eggs, and the striking differences between Starbucks and Caffe Nero. Still no sponsorship. And for one week only: no Mitford Sisters.

STOP PRESS++++++++STOP PRESS+++++++++STOP PRESS



Richard and I have decided to do another live podcast, with an audience ie. you. We are going to do this next Thursday at our gig on 25 September at the Cross Kings in Kings Cross, organised by No Sweat. If you are in London and want to be part of next week's podcast, which will go up the next morning, get a ticket. It's for a good cause and you might get in the photograph, like these people did in Edinburgh:

You'll have to trust me here: I promise you I'm not being deliberately dim about the global financial meltdown, or whatever it's called this morning. I am simply not terribly good on the finer points of economics. I was never taught economics at school - which I really think is a failure of the education system as it was in the 70s and 80s - and although I understand what a mortgage is and what banks do, beyond the "high street", as it were, once we're out into the murky waters of international finance and the stock market and the City traders, I'm an idiot. I'm a sucker. Here are some things I do know: the banks seem to have been fucking about with our money, playing at the roulette wheels, making bad investments while the going was good - and it has been particularly good for the last ten years, during which "growth", that great god we are all supposed to worship, spiraled upwards. I know this is what banks do, and have done for hundreds of years - they "look after" our savings, and use it to buy other stuff or invest in other stuff, or lend it to other customers, or businesses.

Right, I'm up to speed. Now, somehow, and I know it's all down to deregulation of the money markets (I'm clever enough to know that free market capitalism is dependent on deregulation, and that during the 80s, conservative government policy was to sell off public assets, dismantle unprofitable nationalised industry and let the money markets run riot), it all seems to be unravelling. I still sort of don't quite understand how a bank can go bust, but I know it can, and that Northern Rock did, and that HBOS would've if Lloyds TSB didn't jump in and merge with it, after Gordon Brown lifted some competition regulation to wave it through (oops! another bit of regulation gone!) - however, what I do know is that a lot of people who work for banks are either very nervous or out of a job, due to Lehman Brothers, a US bank, going under this week. What I also know is that there seems to be little sympathy for people who work in banks losing their jobs. Ha ha! Some men in suits are carrying archive boxes out of a shiny building in the City - that must be a good thing, musn't it? Well, no, because surely not all people who have lost their jobs are red-braces-wearing Masters of the Universe? Aren't most of them just ordinary men and women who work in offices? I know plenty of people who work in offices. They do not deserve to be plunged into financial uncertainty.

I'm baffled by the reaction of the US government, which is seemingly bailing out private institutions and thus nationalising them, which is against the entire free-market Republican creed, which demands "small government" and no regulation. It seems that when capitalism fails, as it is doing on an almost daily basis, it is happy to be airlifted out of trouble by public money. Make your fucking minds up, free-marketeers! Do you want to be buccaneeers, playing the markets, spinning the wheel, or do you want Mummy and Daddy to come round and pick you up from the party when you find you have no money for a cab home?

I watched Question Time last night to try and get a handle on the crisis, and Ian Hislop was on barnstorming form, barracking Harriet Harman for her government's abject failure to regulate the City over the last ten years. They're all for "cleaning up the City" now, in Brown's words, but isn't it a bit too late for all that? Does it really take hundreds of thousands of job losses to wake this government up? I had never heard of "short-selling" until yesterday - the act of literally betting on share prices among traders, which I understand has been stopped. If this kind of malarkey has been ongoing while we laypeople have sleepwalked, with our money, into misery, then something has gone horribly wrong.

I've stopped buying expensive coffees from coffee shops. It's amazing how much money you save in just a couple of weeks. That's my practical response. That, and vowing to put down my Mitford Sisters books for a few days and finish The Shock Doctrine before it's too late*.

*Oh, I've just checked, and it is too late.

Yikes! With just the feature-length last episode to go, I wasn't expecting fireworks from Ep 59 of The Wire. I can't write about it without spoilers, so stop reading if you haven't seen it. With a lightness of touch that belies the hard-boiled nature of the middle-aged crime novelists who write this stuff, characters from the past are reintroduced, giving us a glimpse of their life after the fiction of The Wire (but of course not after the non-fiction of Baltimore, where we believe they all still live): Namond, last seen at the end of Season Four, being taken in by disgraced Bunny Colvin and his wife, delivers a speech about HIV at a student debating competition, deftly hijacked by Carcetti, whose desire for the governorship now colours everything he does and makes him more venal by the day. We are not given enough information to know whether this really is a happy ending for Namond (we hope so), but all seems well, and Colvin's blanking of Carcetti draws a line under yet another plot. These last episodes are a difficult watch. All the way through Ep 59, I was thinking, "This is nearly over." When Marlo's operation was uncovered and the whole crew locked up, my jaw was on the floor, because I'd assumed that if it was all going down, it would go down in Ep 60. I certainly didn't see Snoop coming. ("How's my hair look?") This was Michael's Michael Corleone moment. Such emotion packed into a few reasonably brief scenes with Bug and Dukie after he became too "hot" to hang around with any more. That and Bubbles' speech at the church meeting. It seems clear that McNulty and Freamon's masterplan to catch Marlo may well fall around their ears, due to the illegal wire. This means that the 60-episode saga will, after six years, end on a wire, as per the title. That's dedication to duty. I am knocked out by the way Herc is now linked to Levy, who's linked to Marlo and crew, and to Clay Davis, who's giving information to Lester, who's confessing to Daniels, who's going out with Pearlman, who's mixed up in the illegal wiretaps, which are putting Greggs in an impossible position, thus compromising Carver, who used to be the partner of Herc, and so on. Meanwhile, Gus is closing in on Templeton, leaving us with one last crime for the final episode. Discuss.

The Times let me write about The Wire. It's nothing you don't already know, commissioned as a short entree for newcomers, but it's pleasing to go legit at this late stage of the game. (Incidentally, read David Hepworth's interview with David Simon in the new Word: intelligent stuff.)

Against all odds, we recorded Collings & Herrin Podcast Number 29 this morning, despite Richard having poisoned himself by reheating a chilli twice during the week, almost as if he was looking for a way out of doing the podcast. But I am a hard taskmaster and forced him to pull himself together and make himself temporarily better by dosing himself with what we in showbusiness call adrenalin. It worked, although I had to keep this handy modern pomander near my nose at all times (it's a Nivea For Men roll-on deodorant, packed with chemicals) to stop myself breathing in Richard's noxious, poisoned breath. And if that image isn't enough to get your downloading our latest podcast, there's also the tantalising prospect of some new jingles made and sent in by the nerd army, and a clip from Waking The Dead which I recorded off the telly. (Now you're curious.)

I hope you appreciate what we do for you.

There's a discussion on David Hepworth's blog about the parlous state of record sleeve design. It reminds me to tell those of you in London that the University of the Arts London - the great big behemoth that swallowed up all the London art schools, including my old one, Chelsea School of Art - has an exhibition on at the moment of classic record sleeve art from the good old days, when records were records and sleeves were 12 inches square. It's called Spin. Plus, on 24 September, there's a discussion, which I'm chairing, called Can Record Design Survive The Digital Age?, with Peter Saville on the panel, among others. It's free, as is the exhibition. Should be interesting. I'm going to have to confess that I sold all my vinyl albums, aren't I?

The lovely Sue Perkins, with whom I have had the pleasure of working, won Maestro. That means ... she is Maestro. Or Maestress. Or Maestro. It's been an odd series, Maestro, in that I've spent most of it listening to a type of music I don't normally listen to and failing at almost every juncture to divine from watching them doing it whether the contestant were being "good" at conducting, or "bad". No matter what I thought, the judges confounded me. So I gave up, sat back, and enjoyed the show. I must admit I got a bit bored of it last night. Mainly because there were only three of them left and that meant I had to watch them all conduct twice, if not thrice, and also because the BBC felt duty-bound to pad it out to 90 minutes, which meant all sorts of dull stuff.

The facts: at the Grand Final, Sue beat Goldie. Before submitting to the public vote (why, oh why, did we have to get involved at the end? we know nothing!), Sue was in second place with 67 out of a possible 80 points. Sue conducted part of Bruch's Violin Concerto No 1, then the Finale from Stravinsky's ballet, The Firebird. She conducted them very well indeed, really getting into it.

Goldie led the judges' vote with 73 out of 80 possible points. In other words, he was the best. But he did not win because the public liked Sue more than Goldie. Hey, let's say they were both winners, even though they weren't. And Jane Asher, who scored 64 out of 80 points, was a bit too prim to win. Both Sue and Goldie did the first movement of Beethoven's Symphony No.5 in its entirety, which was really boring, watching the same piece of music being played twice, identically, except for one wonky bit in Goldie's. It is sacrelige to say that Maestro got boring, I know, and I ultimately enjoyed it, and I'm more than happy for the BBC to spend my licence fee on it, but ... there's something still slightly wrong with the format, as it grew repetitive, which, for some reason, ballroom dancing doesn't. Maybe it's just not a five-week format?

But at least Sue and Goldie seem nice. The most ghastly folk usually win "reality" shows. Which shows how far apart from those this was.

Hey, if you're in London and don't like sweat shops and child labour, come and see us do a gig on 25 September at the Cross Kings in Kings Cross, organised by No Sweat. I hope we'll be allowed to sweat on the night. And use child labour to transport us to Kings Cross in Sedan chairs.

Please don't think me anti-science if I offer an enormous shrug about the fact that some physicists in Geneva working for an organisation whose initial letters don't actually match up with the name of the organisation made some particles go really fast in opposite directions around a 17-mile ring at nearly the speed of light in order to recreate in miniature the big bang, or a trillionth of a second after the big bang. Haven't they got better things to be doing with their time? People think I live in the past with my obsession with 1981, but these white-coated dreamers are nostalgic about the beginning of the universe, so much so that they want to recreate it in a big tube in Switzerland.

I was on the treadmill at the gym, causing some particles to go round and round, while poor old Sky News was trying to make all this seem terrifically exciting. They had a live feed from the lab in Geneva - as, I'm sure, all other news channels did - and Dermot Murnaghan had Professor Heinz Wolf in the studio showing how to blow up a mince pie with a mini-particle collider. (Can you imagine the meeting? "We need a scientist in the studio with Dermot, but a scientist idiots will have heard of. Who can we get?" "Hawking's too expensive." "Magnus Pyke is dead." "Is he?" "Yes." "What about Robert Winston?" "He's a fertility expert." "People have heard of him though." "Professor Pat Pending from Wacky Races?" "Too fictional but you're on the right lines." "Alright, Professor Heinz Wolf." "Nice one, Dominic." "What's next?") Then Sky had some text messages from members of the dreaded public, and one of them was along these lines: "I think it is good that they're doing this experiment as they might find out some things that will help us cure some diseases." That's right. That's why they're doing it.

I too crave a greater understanding, but of the Mitford sisters. And I don't cost you any money while I go about feeding that need for understanding.

The media have turned this experiment into an "event", and those nutters who predicted it would cause the universe to be sucked into a black hole made it almost exciting in the immediate run-up. But it's done now*. They've achieved something cosmic with a big machine. What's next?

*Actually it's not done. All they've done is turn it on, apparently.

For fear of ruining it for anybody who hasn't caught Ep 58 (Clarifications) of The Wire yet, I won't reveal the big reveal. Which actually makes it hard to write about. Sweet to see Poot, now a reformed corner boy, working in a trainer shop - it can be done! Meanwhile, Duquon gets a gig with Baltimore's own Steptoe. (Are they going to give us a couple of rays of hope among the young'uns?) Templeton's world is crumbling around him - good. Gus is onto him. I'm not sure how interesting David Simon's indulgent fifth-season insight into of the minutiae of newpapers is, with its "spikes" and sources and paras and Pulitzer submissions, but I really like it. I like the fat, old, whiskery nature of the desk subs at the Sun, permanently welded into their swivel chairs, or so it seems. (If only the Guardian's looked and worked like that.) I also like the way that, thanks to - yes - the wire, the old firm are not exactly back together - Kima disapproves strongly of what McNulty and Freamon and Sydnor are doing - but at least in the same room. And I loved the look on Bunk's face when he rushed through some lab work by getting McNulty's signature on the paperwork, thus turning things back his way. McNulty got his comeuppance when the FBI profiler at Quantico accurately described him when describing the serial killer. The look on Dominic West's big clown face! Lots of politics again this ep, too, with Carcetti really milking the homeless, as it were, and double-dealing with Clay Davis to protect his own bid for governor. (Oh, how quickly Davis has slimed his way back into office having dodged the "head shot.") With only two episodes to go, it's just as well Sydnor accidentally cracked the clock code using his Baltimore A-Z - but time is running out for us all. Sheee-yit.

Let's talk about the big twist in the comments. (If you don't want spoilers, read no further. I have deliberately refrained from running a picture clue. It's better not to have an inkling.)

OK, I get it - the whole thing was an elaborate practical joke. It has now been two months since a woman posing as a photographer from the Independent newspaper came to Richard's house and pretended to take some photographs of me and Richard for their How We Met feature. And we fell for it. In the weeks since, almost every pair of old friends featured in that hallowed section of the actual newspaper has featured one if not two comedians or comedy actors (Ed Byrne, Ralf Little, Alistair McGowan, Ronni Ancona). Today, as if to rub extra salt into our wounds, it's Mel Giedroyc and Emma Kennedy - again, two comedians/comic actors, and Emma was actually in the Oxford Revue with Richard Herring. Was she chosen for this unattainable honour just to annoy him? He is even quoted! Ha ha, the campaigning climate change scientists and bottled-water haters at the Independent must be thinking, that will make him think we might run his stupid How We Met with the non-comedian Andrew Collins in the future, but we won't. In fact, we never commissioned it in the first place. Because we don't care how they met.

This photo, taken to accompany Collings & Herrin Podcast number 28 (how long do we really have to keep this up before someone discovers us and offers us paid work?), is a very clever and accurate parody of the one that appears on Page 3 of today's Daily Mail about concerned mum Debbie Lamb, 33, and her Superman-costume-wearing seven year-old son Jacob. The story and the fabulous picture are here. (I don't think I'd better reproduce it, as it belongs to a photo agency, and although I love the picture, I'm not paying for it. My guess is that it will already be going all around the world, like the one of the man in front of a tank in Tianenmen Square, and the soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima.) In our own amoral version of The Moral Maze, we also talk in an informed and balanced way of gang violence and how to solve it, the similarity of Sarah Palin's name to Michael Palin's, and the likelihood of political prisoners being released just because Richard is prepared to pose in some Amnesty International underpants*. (Oh, and may I draw your attention to the fact that in the photo above, Richard is actually four inches above the arm of the sofa. He is David Blaine.)



* And go to the shops in his slippers, like an old lady.

Bravo to BBC2 for setting aside 90 minutes for a wordy, talky, thinky play, God On Trial, the latest from the lightning typing fingers of Mr Frank Cottrell Boyce. I'm sure you know it was about the apocryphal tale of a hutful of Auschwitz prisoners creating an ad hoc court in which to try God for the atrocities currently being meted out upon the Jews, and that it was shaping up to be an acting masterclass from the cast list alone (Anthony Sher, Eddie Marsan, Rupert Graves, Jack Shepherd, Stellan Skarsgard, Stephen Dillane, Lorcan Cranitch), but I was taken aback by just how demanding it was for a Wednesday night in 2008, when TV drama still means "issues", but "issues" set in middle-class kitchens with magnetic letters all over the fridge door.

Aside from a neat little framing device about a modern-day tourist trip to Auschwitz, this was proper, old-school Play For Today stuff: a load of actors talking for an hour and a half - and remembering their lines, too, as the director filmed in long, 20-minute takes apparently. Oh, and talking about the history of the Jews, and about faith, and about sacrifice, and about human nature, and - of course - making it impossible for us not to think forward to the current state of Israel and all the further bloodshed and suffering and indignity connected to it in various far-reaching forms. Hats off to Frank Cottrell Boyce - who, to declare an interest, I am in occasional genial email contact with after getting on very well with him during an interview for Radio 4 last year - who seems to be able to turn his hand to anything. (A quick, and selective CV: Hilary & Jackie, Welcome To Sarajevo, Millions, 24 Hour Party People, A Cock & Bull Story etc. etc.) I know that Frank is a good Liverpudlian Catholic, so how he tackled this vast subject - or even started to tackle it - with such authority and inquistion, I don't know.

As a writer, I am humbled and inspired. As a viewer, I am provoked and, yes, entertained. Meanwhile, they want to take away the licence fee? Fuck off.

And now Ken Campbell, aged 66. Hard to put a label on him, really. I knew him mainly as an amazing performer. And I was lucky enough to meet him - coincidentally when Simon Day and I were developing Grass for Geoffrey Perkins. We were called upon to do a full cast read-through of our pilot script, in order to make the case for it being commissioned, for various controllers and high-ups. This was a new experience for me, and I couldn't work out whether it was a good sign or a bad sign that the BBC weren't prepared to commission off the back of what we'd written.

Anyway, a cast is assembled for these things that may bear no relation to the cast of the programme itself, should it be made. You're ahead of me here . . .

Ken Campbell was cast as Derek the hitchhiker (I don't know how many of you know Grass - I'll assume a bit of knowledge). He was, of course, outrageously funny in the part. On the day, having done a "table read" the day before, the actors turn up and read the episode from scripts, as if performing a radio play, except it's in a conference room at TV Centre with bigwigs making up the audience. It must be a tough gig. If anything, Ken was too outrageous for the part, which was minor. He muffed his lines and over-acted and hammed it up and, who knows, might have subconsciously helped get it commissioned. It was certainly a memorable occasion, enjoyed by all. A video exists of this read-through, I must dig it out.

Very few of the actors used that day (including the great Frank Harper as Harry Taylor and Edna Dore as Billy's Mum) were cast in the series. Leila Hoffman, who played Derek's rambling wife Margaret, was, if I remember correctly, in the read-through and the series, but Ken was replaced onscreen by - embarrassment of riches alert! - Roger Sloman. I imagine Ken was considered too much of a handful, although I wasn't involved in the casting sessions.

I'm so pleased to have been in the presence of greatness, that once.

Rewards, always rewards. Let's just imagine for a moment that nobody is watching Season Five of The Wire who hasn't watched Seasons One to Four, also. I mean, it's conceivable that someone is actually watching this as their first series, but also needless, since all are freely available - and enough warnings have been made. For our loyalty over five years of Baltimore life, it strikes me that in the final run, David Simon and his big, manly, spittoon-using co-writers are having a bit of fun among all the death, deceit, dope, corruption and homelessness: they keep hooking back into previous stories. A good example was Carcetti's press conference about the newly gentrified docks in last week's show, whereby Season Two was explicitly referenced. This week, on a much lighter note, Kima had her kid over and asked McNulty where to buy kids' furniture. His answer: "Ikea." I actually thought that would be it - a one-word callback to Season One, Episode 5, when McNulty attempted to assemble bunk beds for his kids, with the help of his old pal Jameson, and ended up in a pile of MDF and screws. This time, we had a repeat of the very same scene, with Kima trapped in a world of Scandinavian self-assembly. ("Gotta assemble some shit," she announced. McNulty mentioned the "Allen wrench", which of course we call the Allen key.) I wonder if this sequence was put in because Dominic West was directing? Or is it just a long-standing hatred of Ikea from David Simon? Much bigger stuff was afoot in the very humid, vest-wearing Ep 57 (Took): Clay Davis showboating his way out of a Grand Jury hearing ("What the fuck just happened?" asked Bond on the courthouse steps); McNulty's serial killer taking on yet more life, turning him into a sort of Father Christmas figure at the homicide unit, handing out squad cars and police, giving Bunk even more chance to simmer and groan (it's not been a very varied season for actor Wendell Pierce, has it?); Scott Templeton cruising for a fall - although it may be that he walks away a star columnist to Washington, a bitter indictment of the new journalism from David Simon; and of course, hobbly Omar moving ever closer to drawing Marlo (unseen this week, but never forgotten) out onto the streets for a final dance. When Omar whacked Silvano, you knew the stakes were raised. (You thought it was another "warning" being passed on, didn't you? I did. Then blam! A bloody new logo on the baseball cap.) There is a farcical element to the serial killer plot, but the more it draws the whole city in, the darker it becomes, and we have Gus as a kind of Gary Cooper hero. Is there time for him to move in and stop the madness? Like Templeton, McNulty either walks out of this a hero, or a dead man.