It's up: Collings & Herrin Podcast 52. In it, we manage to largely avoid talking about the tragedy-filled news by discussing the legality and morality of secretly taking photos with mobile phones up ladies' skirts, Richard's special plan for Lent, the fact that bras used to be exciting, why we should actually have some compassion for Jade Goody, and the fact that, all being well, we will be on Channel 4 News tomorrow (Friday) because we are the news*. Interestingly, it turns out that last week's podcast might not have been recorded using the podcast studio and the nice new mic, but through the internal mic, so ha ha if you thought it sounded better. It probably didn't. And this week it's back to normal until a nerd can help us. The mic looks nice in its stand though, doesn't it? [Thanks to Tina for Richard's t-shirt.]

*It's an item about whether the internet and YouTube etc. is good for comedy. Lee Hurst thinks it isn't. Mr Richard Herring thinks it is. I might be seen in the background.

I am back on the radio, for an hour, on Saturday. The G-Word is the mostly lighthearted documentary I made last year (I recorded my scripted links, tired and emotional, the day after Obama became president), but which was "put back" due - it seemed - to the general paranoia of the post-Sachsgate "climate". Actually, BBC bosses were worried that our little documentary would be inappropriate to air at that time because one of the thugs convicted of murdering Sophie Lancaster had had their sentence reduced in October. She was a Goth, ergo our documentary suddenly became potentially insensitive. Ah well. It's clawed its way back into the schedules and it's on Radio 2 at 7pm this Saturday. I haven't heard the finished thing, as that would involve somebody at Radio 2 actually sending me it, but the raw material gathered by my producer Helen was of a very high quality and I hope I have personalised the narrative. This press release is very funny, as the main person in the photo is my friend Kevin. I am behind him on the left.

It's on iPlayer for a week.

I was sad to hear of the death of Kelly Groucutt, who had a fatal heart attack on February 19. If I have to explain to you who he was, you obviously weren't a member of the Electric Light Orchestra Appreciation Society 1978-79.



He played bass for ELO between 1974 and 1983 ie. the classic line-up; he also sang lead on a couple of songs, including the exquisite Sweet Is The Night. I loved ELO - they were my first "favourite band", after an early crush on glam rock, and I am not ashamed to say that it was my dad who got me into them. (He also got me into Monty Python and Tony Hancock - nice strike rate.) I played New World Record and Out Of The Blue until I had learned every word and examined every detail of the aribrushed sleeve images. Perhaps more importantly, I taught myself how to draw each of the band's eight members off by heart. Kelly Groucutt was as important to me as any other hairy member of ELO. I knew that they were a sum of their beardy parts. Rather poetically, Kelly was completely bald in later life as you'll see from his website, where, rather poignantly, he'd started to pen his life story but only got to the end of Chapter Two. I can't claim to have followed his solo career, or his work with various ELO reincarnations, such as ELO II and The Orchestra, but his passing is significant to me. He was only 63, and looked good on it (I discover he leaves behind four children and two grandchildren). I shall now go and play Out Of The Blue and listen more carefully to the basslines - and to his vocals on Sweet Is The Night.

Sweet, sweet is the night
Now you are near
Dark, dark were the days
They disappear

Here, as a fitting tribute, is my drawing of Kelly Groucutt from my diary in 1978:

Ah, University Challenge, one of those programmes that's seemingly always on, and if I see it at all, it's by mistake, and about ten minutes before the end, when Jeremy Paxman speeds up and tells the students off. I never sit down to watch it, because it's only the very occasional picture or music round that actually elicits any correct answers from my brain. Thus, unlike Mastermind, it's not participatory, merely passive. I was keen to see yesterday's final because of Gail Trimble, who I heard about on Radio 4's PM programme last night - unbeknown to me, she has become a bit of a name due to being really clever and earning Corpus Christi about two thirds of their points over the series. I understand she's also become an "unlikely sex symbol". The media loves creating "unlikely sex symbols" even though they instantly become "likely" once singled out in this way. Trimble is very clever and she's a woman who's more conventionally attractive than, say, Anne Widdecombe or Bella Emberg - that'll do for the media, which is still mostly run by unattractive middle-aged men, hence her elevation for a couple of weeks until these men get bored and realise that a student is never going to get off with them.

Anyway, the hype worked, as I tried to actually watch a full edition of University Challenge on the iPlayer, which wasn't easy, as my connection in the Library (where, ironically, I was surrounded by people who looked like they were on University Challenge) was very weak, and it kept rebuffering in the middle of Paxman's questions. This was no way to take part. Manchester were dominant initially, but I was ready to give up after about seven minutes, as I was sick of seeing that little clock symbol going round and round. The joke is, Trimble had not yet uttered a word apart from hello, and her buzzer remained unbuzzed, so I'd barely seen her move. What a swiz. I soldiered on into the seventh minute - just for her! - and then, at 7.43, she spoke! A question about vectors and cosines which she got wrong.

She seemed a bit prim and well-spoken in a Radio 4 kind of way, but confident, relaxed and smart, a combination of attributes that threaten many men. (She was, by the way, the second most attractive member of Corpus Christi, after Marsden to her left, but it's all relative.) After this, the magical spell of Gail Trimble momentarily unblocked my internet connection and the rest of the programme played out in real time, or thereabouts. (I'm not clever enough to be on University Challenge, and I'm certainly not clever enough to understand why KBs sometimes go really fast and sometimes really slowly in the "send" and "receive" boxes of my wi-fi connection panel.) Then my connection ran out of Gail magic, and went all wonky again. I gave up at 13.34.

For the academic record, Richard Herring, St Catherine's, says he got "about one answer right": Petri. (I think he was being self-effacing.) For the same record, despite a 2:1 BA Hons in Drawing Pictures and Photocopying, Andrew Collins, Chelsea, got four answers right in the first 13 minutes and 34 seconds: Freud; Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the attack on Pearl Harbor; Jimmy Carter and the Iranian hostage crisis; George HW Bush and the Gulf War. But it's not a competition.

What I want to know is: why does Gail Trimble get all this attention, when Sophie Hollender, also a posh female student, did quite well on Mastermind in October with her specialist subject the Mitford Sisters?

I have fallen head over heels in love with 30 Rock. I watched the start of season one when it "premiered" on Five way back in 2007 (a year after it has begun in the States) and I admit, I was not taken by it. A bit too slick, was my initial judgment - also, it coincided with the arrival of Aaron Sorkin's godlike Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, with which 30 Rock shared an identical set-up: the backstage goings-on at a Saturday Night Live-style sketch comedy show in a major American city. Incredibly, both shows debuted in the same season on NBC, although only 30 Rock is actually set at the offices of NBC (30, Rockefeller Plaza) and takes the piss out of its parent broadcaster - Studio 60 invented the fictional "NBS". History tells us that Sorkin's more ambitious, hour-slot comedy-drama was doomed to be yanked off after one season, while 30 Rock, the less ambitious, half-hour-slot comedy-non-drama, went on to a second and now third season, with armfuls of Emmys and Golden Globes for its troubles. When creator and star Tina Fey and star Alec Baldwin went up to collect their Globes this year, I felt slightly disconnected from the fuss.

And then, last week, Front Row asked me to preview the second season, which is about to belatedly start on Five, and they kindly sent me the entire set of 15 (a reduced series due to the writers' strike). I watched the first two, reviewed it, favourably, and then ended up bingeing on the remaining 13 over the weekend, in bite-sized 20-minute chunks (which is the actual length of a half-hour sitcom in America, of course). I was officially hooked when, in Episode 2, Jenna (female star of the show-within-a-show - sweet but self-obsessed and played by Jane Krakowski), who'd put on weight after appearing in Mystic Pizza: The Musical, went to see the network doctor. He said, "For your height, your weight puts you in what we call the 'disgusting' range." and then suggested she take crystal meth, to help lose the weight, asking, "How important is tooth retention to you?" I don't know what it was about that scene, but they had me at "disgusting". This is a slick show, but within those 20 precious minutes all five of the principal characters - Liz, Jack, Jenna, Tracy, Kenneth - gets a storyline and all five are tied up. Sometimes one of the supporting characters gets an arc too. Maybe the second season is a lot better than the first, I don't know, but when it's good, it's on fire.

As a comedy set in the media, specifically TV, it's in a fine American tradition: The Dick Van Dyke Show, Mary Tyler Moore, Garry Shandling, Larry Sanders, Murphy Brown, Sports Night ... but for all the in-jokes about network television and NBC specifically, it's really about relationships. There's a sly dig at Aaron Sorkin and Studio 60 in Episode 3. Liz (Tina Fey) says to NBC page Kenneth (Jack McBrayer), "Can you walk and talk?" To which he replies, "Usually, but now you got me thinking about it." At which he attempts to coordinate walking and talking. It's a quick gag, and - hey! - does not drive the story, but it's priceless.

In Ep 5, network exec Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), does a walk-and-talk with Liz and reads through some audience research: "Look how he's testing, they love him in every demographic: coloured people, broads, fairies, Commies ... gosh, we've gotta update these forms." I can't do it justice by typing these lines up. Have a look this Friday on Five USA.

Incidentally, I purchased the Season One box set this morning. If you buy it on iTunes, it costs an astronomical £41.99 - and that's an invisible version. I checked Amazon, where the same "item" (if the downloadable version can indeed be called an "item") retailed for £10.98. Then I checked HMV.com, where the same item was ... £9.99. I'm sure you could probably get it even cheaper secondhand, but I'm more than happy to part with ten quid for a three-disc set containing 21 episodes and 448 minutes of classic US comedy. Who in their right mind would download it from iTunes? I mean, really? (Unless they were desperate to watch it on their iPhone, of course.)

No, I didn't stay up to watch the Oscars. I've attempted it a couple of times in the past, but I'm too old for that now. Most years I tape them, avoid the media during the following day, and watch them the following evening. This year, with way too much work to do today to watch them during daylight hours, I've had to let them go. It's almost impossible to avoid the results, Bob and Terry style - especially if you're on the internet, which I am. So I've had the least glitzy, least heart-stopping, least effusive, least live set of Oscars ever and just read the winners on the BBC News website as I ate my Polish sausage, boiled egg and smoked salmon breakfast [well, at least telling you that saves me being on Twitter]. My experience of the Oscars has been, literally, speechless.

I'm delighted for Slumdog Millionaire, of course, which won eight. It was their night. (It might not be a "feel-good film" but it's a feel-good story for a film that almost went straight to DVD in the States.) However, its success confirms the 81st Academy Awards to have been surely the most predictable in all the years I've been watching them. Danny Boyle, Kate Winslet, Heath Ledger, Penelope Cruz, best makeup for Benjamin Button etc. The only upset - and one that I think I could secretly see coming - was Sean Penn winning for the excellent Milk. He fully deserves an Oscar for that performance, but I was hoping Mickey Rourke would make the hat-trick. It was not to be.

Objectively - and selfishly - I don't like it when one film sweeps the board. I prefer surprises. There don't seem to have been many while I was sleeping soundly in my bed.

In the 51st Collings & Herrin podcast, recorded for the first time ever on the professional podcast studio Richard bought and paid for while drunk before Christmas [pictured], we allow ourselves to be seduced by the sleek professionalism of the equipment and dispense with puerile jokes and humour and merely pontificate on free speech, for ages. OK, there's also a bit about the enraged, now-dead celebrity chimpanzee Travis, and Peter Mandelson's swear at Starbucks, and Hitler's table manners, and the Church Of England school teaching ten year olds "filth", and hate cleric Abu Qatada and the tabloids' demonisation of men with beards, and why Twitter is good/bad. You decide! (I'm all for doing it the old way on the MacBook, as the loading of the WAV file, which we eventually worked out how to convert to an MP3, took bloody ages. I had to stay round Richard's house for hours! He was getting quite crotchety with me, although that could have been the pint of Diet Coke and two caffeines. Or the fact that he hates me for leaving Twitter. Or that he blames me for the podcast studio not working, even though I didn't buy it.)

Twitter was an interesting experiment. I deleted my profile at 11.04 this morning*, exactly 24 hours after opening it, having posted 27 updates of less than 140 characters each, including one about this morning's breakfast, which seemed in the spirit of Twitter. There is no snobbery in my decision - I had no concrete plans to stay long, but entered it with good intentions and not to prove a point. Better to experience something and reject it than reject it out of hand.

It's clear that tons of people I know and respect use it, and use it all the time, morning and night, probably the same ones who maintain their own FaceBook page and have an iPhone or similar, which seems to be the device from which most people "update" from. Hey, fair play, it gave me something to do yesterday when I couldn't think of anything to write and began to doubt that I would ever write again (I did); and I was amazed by how quickly my "followers" multiplied without me lifting a finger, but I had nothing interesting to tell anybody, and I can read what Stephen Fry writes without having a profile on Twitter myself. (I doubt I will, by the way. In the last 24 hours, he's been filming an episode of Bones and missed his lunch which made him crotchety.) My own personal opinion is that Twitter is a passing fad for stalkers, narcissists and people who talk to themselves. I am all three of those things, which is why I am confident that I am correct.

I would apologise to all those nice people who opted to "follow" me and now feel betrayed and bereft, but I think they'll get over it. (Special thanks to RickyBee, who was my last "follower" before I shut down.)

*Actually it was 11.06 by the time I actually confirmed it, so not as anally-retentive as you thought.

I had writer's block at the library today (a building full of words can do this to a man), so I joined Twitter, despite my vow never to darken its stupid doors. For a while, I had no idea what I was doing, or how to stop or start doing it. I was just flailing around in under 140 characters. Then, something sort of clicked, and within the space of two hours I had 600 "followers". I'm old enough to know that they aren't "followers" in the messianic sense, just people who have clicked on a thing for the hell of it when they should be working, but I was a bit shocked. I took my laptop and went and sat in the British Library restaurant, there to eat my packed lunch (decanted onto an actual plate to make it look like I'd bought it at the restaurant) and I just watched my inbox fill up as I munched my oily fish and salad. It was mad.



In the first instance, it was a funny diversion. Sort of like watching an ants' nest. Then it was a form of insanity, especially as I started "following" other people and reading that Alan Davies was having trouble working because of Twitter - and assuming that this was the case for every other media professional and/or non-media non-professional on Twitter. Then I settled into a Zen-like state of surrender, and guess what, my writer's block went away and I wrote a short piece about Alfred Hitchcock's cameo appearances in record time. I think I still hate Twitter, but I hate it in a different way: I hate it and I hate myself.



23 further people have decided to "follow" me while writing this. More fool them.

I can tell, because it's lunchtime on a Monday and I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Soho between film screenings, which must be how he spends his Mondays when he's not having Half Term off, as he is this week. So, I'm "being" Mark Kermode again, on Simon Mayo's show on 5 Live and on Film 24 - as it's still called, even though BBC News 24 isn't called that any more - one after the other this Friday afternoon. It's a thrill. I love being Mark's deputy dog. Surely that puts me second in line to the throne, or something. (Actually, third, as James King is Mark's natural heir, having been "the" film critic of a national radio station for years.) The difference between me and Mark and James and Peter Bradshaw and Philip French and Derek Malcolm and all the other seasoned film critics you see pissing and moaning - as they might - at all the screenings is that I'm not a film critic. They can probably smell it on me.

I review films, I talk about films, I write about films, I edit a film section in a magazine, I even get to interview Mickey Rourke about films, but I am not a film critic. If I was, today wouldn't be unusual and probably wouldn't be giving me such a silly rush. I will have seen three films by the end of the working day (Gran Torino, Cadillac Records and Push, all released this Friday - these are the National Press Screenings ie. the last ones, mainly attended by the critics from the dailies), and I saw another last Thursday, and another over the weekend (Che: Part Two and Anvil: The Story Of Anvil), which paints as close to a full picture of what's at the pictures this weekend. (No, I haven't seen Confessions Of A Shopaholic, but it's a job to even fit four reviews into my foreshortened Mayo slot, let alone five, let alone six, and that's without the breaking news story that traditionally breaks just as I am about to go on-air - and News 24, who aren't called that any more, only require me to review three.)

In many ways, I'd find this a whole lot less fun if I had to do it every week, week in, week out. (Luckily, I've never been offered the job of film critic by any of the papers, so I've never had to make a choice, although I did see all the films when I hosted Back Row on Radio 4 for two years. It means you go to the cinema less, and I actually like going to the cinema. Some screenings are so big they're in a cinema, but you're not seeing them with people, you're seeing them with critics. You can't gauge public reaction that way. Critics are, by nature, jaded and cynical, and, conversely, sometimes all too easily blown away, due to the sheer volume of substandard toss they have to sit through.) Anyway, today I am pretending to be a film critic, and it's a gas.

Gran Torino is weird. More later. I can nurse this coffee no longer.

PS: Here is a photo of me taken in the 50s where I look a bit more like Mark Kermode.

Help. Quite without warning, when I opened iTunes last night, half of my music library did not load (I ended up with about 4,500 "items" in there, rather than the expected 8,654). It told me my library was "damaged." All the current podcasts and playlists were gone too. I was like I'd been burgled. Now, I sensibly searched for answers on various forums and have now reinstated my entire library by copying an old version of it over from where my music is stored, plus, my podcasts have reappeared (although I had to re-subscribe to them). However, I can't manage to reinstate my playlists. I know playlists are just lists of songs I already have, but I have built up some really good ones over the years and don't relish rebuilding them by hand. But in the current state, I assume the next time I hook my iPod up to my computer, all my playlists will be wiped from there too. (I have tried importing "iTunes music libarary.xml" but it just installs a load of empty playlists, and not my lovely ones.) Any ideas, o clever people?

Thanks to Peter Fletcher for pointing out that this week's edition of BBC2's The Money Programme was about the publishing industry. It seemed that the programme-makers had created an excellent row of random books to illustrate ... books or something, and iPlayer are using it as the still to illustrate the programme (and will be for six further days). Having just viewed the programme, which is quite interesting, I couldn't see this shot anywhere in it. I don't know where the iPlayer people got it from. Still, you have to take subliminal publicity where you can get it.

In this, the 50th Collings & Herrin Podcast, we celebrate by not using the brand new podcast studio because we can't make it work yet. But in what may be the last ever podcast made using GarageBand - and indeed the last ever podcast, if we decide to stop it (letters of protest to the usual address) - we discuss Prince Harry's racism course, bears and cubs, Husker Du, the only good news to come out of the Australian Bush Fires, the complex morality of a 13-year-old having a baby with a 15-year-old and the fact that Richard is touring The Headmaster's Son and wants people to buy tickets so much he is prepared to appear alongside Britain's second favourite racist Carol Thatcher on Channel Five. Here's to the next 50. (The next 50 plugs for Richard's tour, that is.) In the picture we pay visual homage to one of the key media events of the week, which has been beamed around the world.

I love Bob Mould. I've loved his solo work ever since Workbook in 1989 and its ferocious follow-up Black Sheets Of Rain (back at the NME, when our boss Danny Kelly left, we dispatched him to interview Bob, who was his punk-rock hero, and we put the story on the cover, as a parting gift to Danny); I loved Sugar during the grunge years and saw them a couple of times, Copper Blue and Beaster being touchstone albums for the early part of that decade ("I'm not your Jesus Christ! I know! I know!"); and I grew to love Husker Du in tardy retrospect, especially Zen Arcade and Candy Apple Grey and that album's crowning glory, Hardly Getting Over It, which turned out to be a Mould composition and not one of Grant Hart's.

But never mind all that; I learned to actually love Bob Mould when I met him, a few years ago, on 6 Music. As my producer Leona will attest, he was a fabulous guy, a real joy to have in the studio. He was a "confused, self-hating gay man during the Reagan years" - that's how he described himself. He was outed by Spin in 1994 (pretty much against his will), and it seems it was the decision to move to New York City that gave him the space and confidence to open up and come to terms with his own sexuality, since which he's been more than comfortable with it. He moved to Washington DC seven years ago and you can read all about his daily life on his excellent, self-effacing but often funny blog, a superb mix of domestic bliss (he's put a fence up) and gay clubbing (bears and cubs) with a lot of links I feel sure I'd be out of my depth by clicking on!

Anyway, his new album is Life And Times (released here in March) and I interviewed him on the phone about this and other matters two nights ago for the next issue of Word, which you'll have to wait to read. The funny thing was, I'd just been watching old footage of Husker Du on YouTube before our call, and Bob had just been watching my interview with Mickey Rourke on YouTube. It's a small world.

We're on YouTube. I had no idea. All Bafta interviews here. Hey, somebody called me Mickey Rourke's "little bitch" in the comments. Fucker.

This episode of the third series of Not Going Out, titled Winner, is a half-hour of television that I am very proud of. As you know, I only co-wrote one episode this series, for boring reasons, and it went through the usual machinery of Lee and the other gag-writers before it was ready to be made, but compared to other episodes I co-wrote in series two, a substantial amount of what I came up with - plot, lines, jokes - has stayed in. I didn't see it being shot, nor did I see an advance tape of it. I just watched it when it went out on the telly. Because it was repeated on BBC2 last night, you have seven more days to watch it. I've already had some heartwarming compliments and they mean a lot. (I was at a an NUJ meeting last night, doing a talk, and whoever paid me that compliment in the Q&A, I thank you very much. I also heard from someone at Radio 4 who told me how much his eight-year-old daughter had enjoyed it, which makes me happy too.) It's not a set text: you don't have to watch it, but it's in circulation here.

OK, you're looking at one of the highlights of my professional career. Back in the 80s, my friend Nigel and I formed an unofficial Mickey Rourke fan club. We loved his work in Angel Heart and Diner and Year Of The Dragon and Barfly, and duly rented everything else of his we could find, from the excellent Pope Of Greenwich Village and Body Heat to The Rideout Case, a ropey TV movie. Nigel was a medical student at St George's, and we even put on our own Mickey Rourke double bill at the film society there. (I drew a poster for it, which I have somewhere in my archives.) So who knew that 20 years on, not only would Mickey have passed through the eye of a storm of his own making and hit rock bottom, but risen again to award-winning prowess, thanks to The Wrestler - and, after winning the Leading Actor Bafta on Sunday February 8, 2009, he would offer me a glug from his bottle of champagne. "Here, have a drink." This would be mind-blowing enough (you know how much of a kick I get out of meeting famous people whom I respect and I will take this child-like awe with me to my grave), but it's also captured on film. You can watch it, along with 37 further Bafta interviews I did, here.

So, yesterday was the culmination of all my recent work with Bafta. We've made three 15-minute Essential Guides, which are all still up on the Bafta website. But joining them, as of last night, are 38 individual interviews we conducted in the foyer of the Royal Opera House as the stars stepped off the red carpet, improperly attired for the freezing cold and light, sleety drizzle, and backstage, in a specially convened Bafta bunker/studio in a staff and artists' cafe, where pretty much every winner was ushered after coming off stage and passing through a photo call. It was full on.

• 12.30: arrive at Stage Door of Royal Opera House, with much of London's Covent Garden closed off to traffic, in my black suit, black shirt, black shoes and with a choice of black tie and black bow tie about my person. I am nervous about the work ahead of me, but not as nervous as I was when I went to bed last night. We have a job to do. Let's do it. Production meeting in the canteen with the Bafta Web Team, as we are called on our Access All Areas laminates, swinging off orange lanyards, of course. Exec producer David, producers Diane and Ben (who had the sometimes unenvious job of hovering at our end of the red carpet and relaying back via headsets information on who was approaching, and then steering them politely but firmly in our direction, or, worse, urging them to wait, in the cold, while I finished up the previous interview), edit liaison Glenn, cameraman Guy, soundman Andy, and runner Jo, whose job it was to relay the tapes, as and when they were full of superstar interview footage, to two couriers, James and Robert, who shuttled them to the edit suite, where Ian, Elaine and various others would make them website-ready using all their powers and all their skills. (I know, that was a bit like an acceptance speech, but hey, it's a team effort.) All I had to do was talk, be nice, keep the Bafta-branded mic at just the right distance from celebrity mouths, and remember everything about everybody, so that I didn't need to hold any notes.
• 15.15: rehearse winner interview, with Diane sitting in for Kate Winslet, so that the Broadcast News-style tape relay can be checked for speed and efficiency. (In any downtime, I am to be found sitting with my notes, reading up on every single expected nominee and presenter.)
• 15.45: change into awards outfits - in the same rooms in the bowels of the Opera House where the stand-ins for famous people get changed - the ones who fill seats while winners are onstage. I am already in my costume, but the others have theirs in suit bags etc. Even though we are "crew" we must dress according to the awards dress code ("black tie"), and that includes everybody. We look very nice. I go for tie over bow tie. I know that actors do this, so who's going to mind?
• 16.15: repair to ROH foyer to soak up the atmosphere and do a reccy of our special Bafta spot inside the doors. At this point, it is not raining. Crowds and film crews line the red carpet. It's a familiar sight, but, not having been the Bafta Film Awards before, ever, only one I have seen on the telly. It's quite breathtaking to be here, in amongst it.
  
• 16.30: record (or "RX" as it says in the call-sheet) Arrivals Intro, which is me, walking down a bit of the red carpet and getting anybody clicking onto the Bafta website enthused about what's to come: 2,000 people, 23 awards, etc. This goes off without a hitch, despite Alesha Dixon doing the same thing for some broadcaster or other, whose warm-up man keeps getting the crowd to cheer on cue. We kindly ask a large security man to move out of shot, and he complains that he's only standing there because Alesha Dixon's people have asked him to move out of her shot. Welcome to showbiz. It starts to rain.
• 16.45: people start to arrive, in the reasonably gentle rain. According to the strict schedule, this bit lasts until 18.15 (the length of a Woody Allen or Ingmar Bergman film), for a prompt 18.45 ceremony start. In rain-soaked reality, it goes on until 18.45, when the final stragglers, ie. the really, really famous ones, finally cross the threshold. Thus, our great-laid plan is made exponentially tricky by the fact that, in hour one, pretty much only Eddie Redmayne (handsome young actor here to present an award that they don't even both showing on telly) and Nick Park arrive, dutifully interviewed, after which it's a bottleneck, with Stephen Daldry coming in just as Penelope Cruz arrives. You can't rush the director of The Reader off in order to grab the star of Vicky Cristina Barcelona! But there she is, sashaying straight past us! Ah well, this is a foretaste of how the final hour will play out. (David manfully chased her through the foyer, but she wouldn't come back out into the cold, oddly. Freida Pinto, star of Slumdog, refused to stop and speak to us too.)
  
  For the record, we managed to interview the following dignitaries. Unless otherwise stated, these were admittedly fairly perfunctory grillings, with the interviewee polite and practised, and the interviewer full of bonhomie, but in the finished clips you do get a sense of the mad atmosphere, with people coming in the whole time, and flashbulbs popping: Dominic Cooper, Toby Kebbell, Noel Clarke, Sharon Stone, Michael Sheen, Matthew MacFadyen, Thandie Newton, Patrick Stewart, Sir David Frost, Ron Howard, Amy Adams, Jason Isaacs, Anil Kapoor (the host of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire on Slumdog Millionaire: he was brilliant, he just came through door and introduced himself to us, virtually demanding to be interviewed - I don't think he made the final edit, though), Amy Adams, Danny Boyle, Meryl Streep, Dev Patel (whom we were talking to when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie swept through, very keen indeed not to talk to us, or anyone else - still, at least I breathed in their regal air), Brendan Gleeson, Robert Downey Jr (genius - he was with his wife, and forced me into a group hug, mugging all the time for the camera: see pic), Mickey Rourke, and, finally, Kate Winslet.
  
  
• 18.55 approx: ceremony actually begins, by which time the team have reconvened in the backstage area, ready to accept the winners. All of us are frozen to the bone. Even though we were inside the Opera House, the doors were wide open and the wind was whistling through. It's marvelous to be inside. But very little time to relax on our laurels. The raw show is shown on a monitor (it will, of course, be edited for broadcast, with some of the less sexy "craft" awards shunted to the end credits, and Mickey Rourke's "fuck" carefully excised), and Ben sits beside it, calling out the winners as they are announced, while we get into a rhythm of interviewing them, holding their heavy Baftas, with just enough vital seconds in between each to do "cutaways" of me asking some of the questions again, to help with editing. It's a tough gig. Again, no notes on my lap, and barely time to glance at them before the winner is ushered in, beaming, ready for their close-up, whether it's the visual effects supervisors of Benjamin Button, the writer and director of Best Short Film, September, or the writer and director of Best Foreign Film, Philippe Claudel, who was literally sat down next to me when our camera rolled and I didn't know who he was or what he had won for! (It's worth watching that particular clip, as you will see a true professional at work, deducing who he was and what he had done almost imperceptibly, and you'll sense the relief in my voice when it dawns on me that it is I've Loved You So Long, which I really admired. Phew. There is a hoof; we were on it.)
  
  I must confess, I was really pleased when Wallace & Gromit won Best Animated Short, as at least I knew who the filmmakers were without looking them up! Highlights for me, personally, included meeting Simon Beaufoy, telling Steve McQueen how much I loved Hunger, and meeting Fellowship-winning Terry Gilliam again. (I had interviewed him onstage at the NFT for Brothers Grimm in 2005, and he rather brilliantly signed a Monty Python book for my Dad's 60th birthday at the same time, and I was able to thank him, on camera!)
  
  Oh, and we got Penelope Cruz. I'm afraid I told her, to her face, that she "lit up the screen" in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Oh dear. By the way, I must lose some weight.
• 21.30 approx: ceremony long since over but our interviews are only just coming to a conclusion. We've had to drag Danny Boyle out of the post-ceremony love-in in the auditorium, but it was worth it, as Slumdog won seven out of 11 and he is the man of the night. (I first met him around the time of Trainspotting at the very first, and very low-key, non-televised, lunchtime Empire awards. We repaired to a pub and enthused about Apocalypse Now for many hours. He hasn't changed a jot.) We are unable, even using our own muscle, to persuade Kate Winslet to come back and see us. Still, we got her on the way in. And frankly, I'm ready to pass out. David and some of the others are off to the edit suite to finish the work we have started. I am allowed to clock off and go to the awards dinner. I am bloody starving, and dying for a drink, having only had a swig of Mickey Rourke's champagne all day. Did I mention that? Sorry.
• 21.58: the courtesy coach, the last one to leave the Opera House, pulls away through the police barriers, containing just me, three security guards and a team from Bafta who look like they might have only just finished their GCSEs. I'm texting like mad. Imagine if I was on Twitter!
  
• 22.15: arrive at Grosvenor House Hotel, where dinner is about to be served (and where all awards dinners are held, by law). I meet my agent and we eat some food on a Bafta table, which is up on the balcony and frustratingly not down where all the stars are eating. Having said that, I have spent most of the day talking to stars. It's nice to talk to real people, actually. I missed the free champagne on the way in, and don't fancy the wine that is on the table. I yearn for a beer. Instead, I drink water. It's fine.
• 23.01: the bottle of beer I ordered from a waiter arrives. It looks good. Even though it's Beck's. It costs £5.75. That's £5.75. I drink it in two seconds and start on another, which also costs £5.75. That's five pounds and 75p for a bottle of Beck's. I decide instead not to drink tonight.
  
• Midnight: I walk out of the Grosvenor House Hotel and into a black cab, absolutely exhausted. My agent and I took a spin of the main eating area after the dessert and spotted Brendan Gleeson and David Fincher and Armanda Ianucci and Mark Kermode, but I was too tired to schmooze.

A tremendous working Sunday, full of surprises, and perhaps more demanding and draining than any other working day I can remember since Sainsbury's. It's fun to watch the footage. It seems like it was weeks ago.

Happy birthday to us! We - that is, the Collings & Herrin Podcast - are one year old! That's 51 podcasts over 52 weeks (don't ask), and in our 49th (don't think too hard about it), we try a Twitter experiment, consider where snow comes from, discuss the origins of the word "Golliwog", have a pretty serious theological debate about Jesus [pictured*], discuss the game of rugby and rise above any comments made against us on iTunes, because that's the kind of seasoned professionals we are. Warning: this podcast is not as good as the scripted, edited, produced, satirical radio show On The Hour. We're sorry about that. Although not as sorry as Carol Thatcher, who is the sorriest person around.

* Actually, you might think that's an effigy of Jesus, but it's actually an effigy of Richard Herring.

So, let me talk you through my Cardiff Adventure. (I am actually writing this on the train back to London on Tuesday evening - I've been in Cardiff for two days and two nights, which counts as an adventure in my book.) I was in Wales as the guest of Go Faster Stripe, otherwise known as a man called Chris Evans, who has decided that the only way to fund the folly of putting out endless DVDs of Richard Herring is to make a bestselling audiobook. Because Frederick Forsyth was already taken, he asked me, which is why I've spent most of the last two working days sitting in a recording studio in the depths of Cardiff's magnificent Millennium Centre, reading out Where Did It All Go Right? into a microphone for another man called Gerald, whilst sat at a table covered in soundproofing foam and trying not to make stomach noises or pop on words with the letter "p" in them.

This is the view from the cubicle, with me on the other side of the glass. This is what Gerald, the sound engineer has been looking at for two days. (Chris and Gerald made the excellent little film of Richard and I doing a podcast, available on the Oh Fuck I'm 40 DVD.) Although I suspect Robert Powell would have made a better job of it, it would seem weird for him - or anyone else - to read out a book about me. So I did it. I am much cheaper than him anyway. I only cost the equivalent of two nights in the Holiday Inn, an off-peak standard return, some spicy carrot soup and a Thai chicken sandwich, a chilli con carne, a couple of coffees, a smoothie and one or two refreshing cold drinks in the hotel last night while the snow fell outside.

I'm glad I travelled out on the train on Sunday night, as by Monday morning, London was at a standstill due to the inclement weather and I wouldn't have been able to get to Wales. Oddly, Cardiff was spared most of the snow that turned Britain into a post-apocalyptic wasteland and filled the newspapers with cliches and nonsense - maybe it's because it's coastal? - and this morning, as I sat eating my chilli in one of the Millennium Centre's many eating outlets, I gazed out at blue skies, bright sunlight and hardly a trace of last night's snow on the ground. Look:

This is the view of Roald Dahl Plass, the open-air amphitheatre named in honour of the famous writer.

I could hardly imagine that my own city was up the spout. I hope it allows me get home from Paddington station. Anyway, here are some some photos I took of myself using the MacBook's excellent PhotoBooth application. I've tried not to get in the way too much.

This is me, waking up in the Cardiff Holiday Inn on Monday morning. You can see the Castle over the road.

This is me, waiting to be picked up by Chris and Gerald in Gerald's car to take us to the Millennium Centre.

This was what Cardiff looked like on Tuesday morning. Not exactly at a standstill, although the schools were still closed.

This is the Millennium Centre, from the inside. I really liked treating the enormous place like a hotel for two days. Our studio is owned by the Welsh Language Society, I think. To get to it, you have to walk through some offices and use a secret door, as if perhaps it's MI5. There's a secret toilet, too.

This is me doing the actual hard graft. You may scoff, but I was actually exhausted after the first day. My throat hurts today. But I managed not to lose my voice, and we nailed it in two days. (I had worked quite hard on editing the text, rewriting some parts and shortening others. So it's officially abridged. I don't know when you'll be able to buy it, but I'll keep you posted.)

A big thanks to Chris and Gerald for helping make the whole thing go off so smoothly and for being good company too. It seemed very fitting to be in Wales, reading out the chapter about holidays in Wales, and trying really hard to pronounce the placenames correctly. I really like Wales. And I even got the chance to have a touristy wander around the redeveloped Bay area. I saw the Norwegian Church and the Welsh Assembly building (with a single policeman on guard outside), and a lovely cormorant and some coots, and on points, I decided that the new Cardiff looks lovely. I really had trouble remembering what it was like before. I wonder if the locals like it as much as I do?

Props to Paul for bringing this superb, weather-related local news story to my attention. (You should really view it on his own blog, which is here. I hope you don't mind me spreading the love, ie. borrowing your timely grabs, Paul.)

Fig. 1
Handiwork by Nottingham resident in last night's snow, captured on the aptly "frozen" Old Market Square webcam on BBC website:



Fig. 2
Amended image this morning on same website. Stalin would have been proud.

It's a sad day*. Scientists have failed to clone an extinct goat. The Big Idea was to bring the Pyrenean ibex back to life. Once a resident of the mountain ranges of the Iberian peninsula, it died out in 2000, but luckily they had one in the freezer called Celia and used skin cells taken from her ear to make a new one. Unfortunately, according to the story in today's Independent, "the newborn kid resulting from the cloning attempt died within minutes of birth as a result of breathing difficulties."

Previous attempts to clone the ibex from skin cells stored in liquid nitrogen failed in 2003 with two pregnancies that ended prematurely during the first two months.But they're nothing if not tenacious, these cloning enthusiasts at the University of Zaragoza in northern Spain, and all is not lost: "The cloning and pregnancy using the egg cells of domestic goats, which also acted as surrogate mothers, demonstrated that it may one day be possible to bring back extinct species with the help of closely related animals which have not died out." Hooray!

Here comes the science bit: the latest attempt involved the creation of 439 ibex-goat hybrid cloned embryos made by inserting the cell nuclei of the ibex's skin cells into the egg cells of domestic goats which had their own cell nuclei removed. Of these cloned embryos, 57 were transferred into surrogate mothers and seven resulted in pregnancies, but only one goat gave birth and the newborn clone died after seven minutes as a result of lung deformities. (I bet they were on a giddy high for those seven minutes, sweating and cackling at the tops of their voices, shouting, "It's alive! It's a-live!" as lightning flashed overhead.)

I've scanned the article and it doesn't even say that the cloning experiment may be the first step towards curing all known diseases, as it usually does. They seem to be doing it for its own sake. At least they're honest.

And here's the best bit: "The failure of the experiment is a setback for scientists who believe it may be possible to use cloning technology to bring back more exotic species, such as the mammoth and the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger."

Paging Dr Hammond! Paging Dr Hammond! (I hope they kept a few of Michael Crichton's ear cells in the fridge.)

*It's a sad day because I have to read the Independent, as it appears to be the only newspaper they offer at the hotel I'm in.