We would like to make it clear - crisply, refreshingly clear - that Collings & Herrin Podcast 57 is not sponsored by Magners Light Irish Cider, created in the same authentic, time honoured tradition as Magners Original Cider, but with fewer calories. However, we did drink a 330ml bottle each during today's podcast, which led to a more sophisticated discussion than normal about the a united Ireland, the Israel-Palestine conflict, the intricacies of expenses claims, the changing nature of titilation, the "phlegminess" of cider and the economic hardship of having a sitcom cancelled. Magners Light Irish Cider is actually not as phlegmy as we remember cider to be from when we used to drink it at the correct cider-drinking age ie. 17. If you would like to sponsor us and have your product spoken about in, at best, ambivalent terms, get in touch!

Don't ask me how I got here, but why not do as I did this morning while chronically writer's-blocked and have a look at Glamour magazine's website; specifically, this article under Health & Fitness called 16 Ways I Learned To Love My Body. (You can even look at it as a slideshow. Woo.) This is the thrust of the piece: 16 "body-image and weight-loss bloggers" who have learned to love their own bodies [not pictured, crucially] offer a tip each on how to do the same. What a splendid, inspirational idea in a world of body fascism, low self-esteem, size-sero angst and epidemic dysmorphia. I can't say I'm familiar with Glamour magazine, other than it launched in the UK in a "handbag"-sized edition in 2001, which struck me as rather smart. It is aimed, I am led to believe, at women aged between 18 and 49. Anyway, let's hear a few of these tips:

Step off the scale
"When I stopped letting the scale steal my happiness and be a gauge of my self-worth, I was able to really build a true love relationship with my body. Learning to love your body and be accepting of everything - excellence and flaws - is a process and a journey but one well worth it!" Stephanie Quilao, Back in Skinny Jeans

Realize [sic] that fitness is not about skinny jeans or skinny-girl stereotypes
"I never felt like I fit in, and I struggled with those feelings for years. Eventually I started looking at myself as a whole and realized that I am intelligent, funny, unique, and yes, I am beautiful. True beauty is not about fitting into a cultural stereotype but a quality that shines from within. That doesn’t mean we should stop trying to improve; it just means that our time is better spent focusing on building a strong, healthy body and mind rather than trying to fit into a cookie-cutter mold [sic]."
Diana Swallow, Scale Junkie

Dare to not compare your body.
"If I compare myself with other women, I can create a million reasons why I should hate my body. Comparing myself with others always leaves me feeling inadequate and unhappy about my body, so I choose not to do it. My body might not be perfect compared with a model or even my neighbor, but it is the only body I will ever have. I would rather accept this fact and love my body the way it is than waste my time hating any part of it."
Mary Thompson, A Merry Life

And so it goes. There are 13 further tips, each one empowering, confidence-boosting, positive and dismissive of accepted body-shape tyranny, if a little gooey in sentiment. Either way: you go, girlfriend! Except, what do you imagine the women look like in the photos used to accompany the 17 tips? Lumpy, different, imperfect, odd, off-message, normal? Nope.



Each lady - a model, of course, not the laptop-bound dispenser of the tip - is gym-toned, skinny, muscular, tanned "cookie-cutter mold", Special-K-advert perfect. Indeed, each one could be popped handily into a handbag. There's even one of notorious fat gargoyle Gwyneth Paltrow. Well done, Glamour magazine - I ask you this, in the voice of Alan Parker Urban Warrior: are you part of the solution, or part of the problem?

If she wasn't such an appalling and brazen little Hitler, I'd feel sorry for home secretary Jacqui Smith, having to leave her house this morning with the whole world knowing that her husband Richard Timney bought two pay-per-view porn movies last April at their taxpayer-funded Reddich home, the bill for which was "accidentally" claimed for on her MP's expenses. (He's also her parliamentary aide - he should be more careful.) Had they not "accidentally" tried to get the taxpayer to stump up for their Virgin Media bill, including the selection of films, nobody would know that he likes a bit of perfectly legal adult titillation.

To be fair to her (I can't believe I've just typed those words), hubby seems to have watched the dirty movies when she wasn't there, so he was probably missing her, and he did also pay for Ocean's 13 (which he watched twice - I could barely get through it once) and the funny animated penguin film Surf's Up, so only two fifths of his viewing pleasure while she was away - perhaps at one of her other taxpayer-funded constituency homes - involved functional, simulated sex. I'm sure these films were only soft porn, if they're available from Virgin, nothing too penetrative.

The details of this bill are now very much in the public domain (ha ha, I really did just type pubic domain by mistake), including the breakdown of costs: a quite steep five quid each for the pornos, £3.75 for each Ocean's 13 and £3.50 for Surf's Up. So how come we don't yet know the titles of the mucky ones? Imagine what good publicity that would be for Virgin to have two of their expensive porn movies all over the papers? I think we should be told. And I expect we will be.

In slightly cheerier comedy news, the comedian Richard Herring and I are recording our third ever live Collings & Herrin Podcast, at the Duke Of Yorks cinema in Brighton on Thursday May 28. Details here (although it says in the blurb that I wrote a book called Where Did Everything Go Right?, which, for the record, I didn't). It's apparently a really cool venue, and it's certainly one of the nicest towns in England, and we are supporting ourselves, with some solo stand-up first (I may do some Mitfords material without interruptions), followed by the one hour, six minute and 36 second podcast, which will be available via the usual outlets by the very next morning. So book early to avoid not booking.

Apparently this was in the News Of The World yesterday, so it's incumbent upon me to confirm it (as who believes what they read in the News Of The World?): BBC1 have indeed cancelled the award-winning sitcom Not Going Out. This is very sad news, and something of a surprise, as we went out with our highest ever audience figure for the last show, Marriage*, and critics seem to have been much kinder to the third series. Plus, we'd run in some new writers and I personally think it was a strong series. Who understands TV controllers? Not me. It all comes down to numbers in the end, even though the BBC is a publicly funded broadcaster and thus not reliant on advertising revenue and thus not really in the ratings game to the degree where, like American broadcasters, it cancels shows that aren't performing to a set of made-up targets. But that's what's happened: over three series, despite the ratings gradually going up, show by show, and series by series, it still hasn't rung the requisite bell.


Oh, and good old Chortle, for making it their lead story:




* Actually, not the last show, as there is an eighth episode, which has not gone out. It may go out at Christmas, which will be a bit like dancing on our grave.

The Saturday Times commissioned me to write a really long review of David Simon and Ed Burns' The Corner, a nonfiction precursor to The Wire. They've made it their Book of the Week and given it an inordinate amount of space, which is wholly gratifying. You can read it here, should you wish. I like the Times. It's the only newspaper to regularly ask me to write things for them. I appreciate that. (They used to pay a lot more, too, but since the start of the year their freelance word rate has been slashed - welcome to the harsh realities of the recession, which is felt in the media as much as anywhere else. Still, it's better than being a heroin addict in West Baltimore.)

In the 56th Collings & Herrin Podcast, we give equal, self-defeatingly critical airtime to both Magners Cider and Oatibix in an effort to confuse our potential sponsors. We pay tribute to the Essex Princess, worry about John Terry's mum, applaud Gordon Brown for making Princess Anne Queen, mouth the word "bollocks" to see if it's offensive, and deconstruct David Jason's accidentally racist joke. Thanks to Robin Bresnark for making the superb t-shirts we are wearing in this week's pic, and apologies for anyone making assumptions from the way Richard looks - he's getting into character for the publicity photo session for his Edinburgh show and at the same time baiting Mel Gibson from afar. Perhaps you'd like to suggest a title.

The Apprentice is back: series five, week one. It used to be something of a cult, on some cable channel called BBC2, now it's totally overground and the nation grinds to a halt when it's on: pubs close early, general elections are moved, the streets are empty. (Hyperbole aside, it had around 4 million viewers for series one; the climax of series four almost hit 9 million: it's big business.) Older readers will know that, since 2006, I have been providing a unique service by reviewing every episode on something called a blog. This used to be quite something. Children would gather round. I would watch the programme, then write a review that night, or the next morning, based on memory. Unless I am looking back through rose-tinted glasses, I don't think the excellent Apprentice website even had clips to watch in 2006 (or if they did, my connection wasn't fast enough to watch them). Now, you can watch last night's show on iPlayer at your leisure, and as for blogging: every fucker's at it. You can't move for live blogs, tapped out as the programme airs, but then, this was never a live blog. Who wants to type while this fabulous programme is actually going out? Or, for that matter, read about it while it's going out? I expect Twitter is full of it this year. I'm not complaining. That's progress. Deal with it. But I come to you this year in a very different context. I can sense a backlash against the programme coming. It's no longer "ours". It's about selling your grandmother to make money and worshipping the market and praying to Canary Wharf and wearing braces (well, one of the boys this year wears braces), and that all seems a bit misplaced and quaint as the recession rolls in. It's usually good sport to point at the silly Thatcherite wannabes as they chew the insides of their faces off for fear of not becoming a millionaire before they're 29. Now they seem a bit sad. A bit last year.

Still, I shall be content to offer my own personal view each week for the next 100 weeks, and invite anyone interested to pass comment - as is traditonal, a number of you will, once again, demand that I watch The Apprentice: You're Fired on BBC2 straight afterwards, which I never will, as I have absolutely zero interest in seeing the fired candidate with a new hairstyle being clapped by a studio audience and then forced to watch themselves, edited, in footage filmed almost a year ago, and then either made a mockery of, or reevaluated in kinder terms. (This year, presumably we'll hear how they are now unemployed.) The showbiz side of it is unnatural*, and for me, it does not add to the gaiety of the show, which is an hour long, and no longer than an hour long. Nor have I read any previews, as for me it's a pure experience: 60 cleverly edited minutes of twats in shirts with prominent jaws and 90s gel, hustling for a job they don't really want, as it will be beneath their talent.

So, the all-important Week One. (Expect not a full roll-call of names, it's not what Episode One is all about, and that's why it's so good.) What should have been a hardcore of 16 but was actually 15 - due to "matey" having "bottled it" - defied the economic downturn by putting their continued faith in the kind of bullshit and business jargon that used to wash but frankly doesn't any more. Was Sir Alan having some kind of larf? Getting them all to go out and clean? After all, it's what the entrepreneur of the recession-ravaged future will be doing! I loved the sheer sadism of this first task: putting a bunch of people who don't know what a duster is (seriously - one of them, doesn't matter who at this stage, held up a feather duster and asked one of the other ones, doesn't matter who at this stage, what it was) out on the streets with buckets and pressure hoses. Sir Alan's opening address was way too long and too rehearsed. He didn't even stumble over any of the words, or use a malapropism. ("I'm gonna find out if you're the real deal, or just a bunch of empty designer suits and dresses ... I know the words to Candle In The Wind, but it don't make me Elton John. Right? ... I'm as hard to play as a Stradivarius. You lot, I can assure you, are as easy to play as bongo drums.") Boo! Let not slickness infect Sir Alan. He sold van aerials out of the back of a car.



A woman: "What's this?"
Another woman: "A duster"

Boys at a disadvantage, not due to raging testosterone (after all, the girls on this show have plenty of that), but being one "matey" down. It's all so crushingly yet thrillingly familiar - thank God they haven't fucked with the format - boys choose a name and an ubergruppenfuhrer really quickly, after quashing all the Latin ones from the Asian teacher man ("Carpe Diem - it means I am a cunt") and risking a cloak of uninvited irony upon the multicultural group by calling themselves Empire ("I think Strike sounds a bit Arthur Scargill") and putting forward the seemingly spineless and definitely hapless Howard as their scapegoat. Girls take about two hours to choose a name, and a further three hours picking a leader: Ignite and Mona, which is pronounced "Monna" and sounded in the voiceover like "Momma" the first few times. She seems perfectly OK until it becomes clear she is saddled with the wrong kind of Efrican eccent, less No.1 Ladies Detective Agency, more Nicky Hambleton-Jones crossed with that grotesque gym beast on Harry & Paul. Luckily, for her, she didn't say much. Or project lead much.

Let the task begin - that is, the task of the world-class Apprentice directors and editors, who must produce an hour-long soap with 17 characters in (including gay icons Nick and Margaret), and create enough intrigue and comedy to keep us hooked. They deftly leave clues as if they are directing and editing a Poirot set in a suit hire shop: we learn very early on that the girls have spent £196 ("under budget") on cleaning stuff; we also see very clearly that the Asian girl with a face like a Persian cat (whose name, Anita, we will know by the end) is supposed to be in charge of the money, even though she kind of isn't. Taking notes? She wasn't. No footage of the boys balancing their budget: it wasn't going to be a subplot. I liked it when we saw the girls wiping their chairs before sitting down in the "mafia den" warehouses: subtle.

No room for any really intricate interplay between the as-yet mostly anonymous candidates (ooh look, there's an American, she thinks the team should be called "Shazam!", at which the editors drop out the sound to make it look as if her suggestion has been greeted with damning silence perhaps because she started the Iraq war; ooh listen, there's one from Birmingham; ooh look, one of them has his head on upside down ... unless that's, like, a religious beard he's got there, and whoops, racism! No, it's too sculpted for a religious beard, surely? Phew, we can mock it after all! Oh dear, he said he leaves the cleaning to his wife, does that mean he is religious after all? It's a bladdy minefield!) - we must make do with two basic stories: team leader and "sub-team" leader fall out in a pathetic, too-early power struggle. Over car cleaning. Dusters at dawn. Or whatever those sticks with a sort of fluffy bit on one end are called.

Momma has a bit of a mobile-phone spat with a flat-faced woman with dark hair, while Hapless tuts a bit about a man with a Geordie accent, let's call him Geordie until he becomes the County Durham Lee McQueen (I doubt it). They all wash some cars really unprofessionally, taking about an hour per vehicle, not including the time it takes to go back and actually do it properly. Momma breaks the first rule of sexual equality by selling Ignite's pathetic services to a man on the basis that they are women. She didn't actually offer blow jobs but the implication was there. They also ask a man - the client - to help them with the pressure washer - nooooo! There are feminists watching! (She and her non-sub-team also gave us our first bit of hilarioius overpricing repartee, led by a woman whose sentences go up at the end called something like Pashmina: "We're going to do all three Hummers for £300." "Hmm, our supplier does them for £60." "NO WAY DOES HE DO IT FOR SIXTY POUNDS! I DON'T BELIEVE YOU! GET THIS LOSER ON THE PHONE!" "He does it for £20 a Hummer." "Yes, but we'll give you a blow job.")

One too many comedy cutaways of Nick, looking unimpressed, but a fun episode, with a bit of slapstick, an equal number of useless car-washers among both genders (Margaret on the boys: "I've never seen so few cars cleaned by so many people"), some running around Whiteleys' shopping centre car park squealing at "consumers" and the now-traditional knocking on doors of random suburban houses as night falls, to make a final few pence. Those damn editors made me think it was going to be a victory for the girls, with a Hapless-versus-Geordie clash of the idiots in the boardroom, but by spending ... ah yes! I remember! ... £196 on pressure washers that are just too boo-hoo hard to operate with their hoses and fittings and everything, the girls lost by a tenner. Inglorious.

Both teams made the cardinal error in the boardroom, which is to turn on the project manager before Sir Alan had even declared a winner, thus opening up early fissures in solidarity (Momma hates Flat Face and Persian Cat Face; Hapless hates Geordie, and Geordie hates Hapless because "turnover is insanity, profit is vanity" or something). After an awful lot of shouting over each other from the girls, Sir Alan found himself "straggling" and without "a bladdy clue", eventually picking Persian Cat off from the herd and sending her packing, with her earlier claims of having "a rainbow" of talents still ringing in our ears. How could he split up Flat Face and Momma, now that they'd drawn knives?

Sorry if any of these observations have already been made on live blogs or other websites. Next week, more portent of the new economic climate, as the candidates are tasked to walk naked through the empty streets of the City wearing sandwich boards saying WILL WORK FOR FOOD.

Oh, and for nostalgics everywhere: all 2008 entries can be accessed here.

* That said, I long to be invited on as a pundit. Why won't they recognise my qualifications? I've been a fan since the beginning. I remember Paul and Saira. Don't they know I have to be invited onto every TV show once and then never asked back? It's the rules.

What? You didn't hear it? Yesterday, on Shaun Keaveney's Breakfast Show, on BBC 6 Music, as part of an item called The Ex-Band Factor, the early-80s Northampton sixth-form band Absolute Heroes made their belated radio debut. John Pearson, who used to roadie for us and works at 6 in a technical/live capacity when he's not travelling the world like the man from Kung Fu, put us forward, guitraist Pete supplied the digitised TDK demo tape (possibly recorded in the common room, after hours), and Shaun and whoever his comedy sidekick is played our eponymous song Absolute Heroes (sample lyric: "Jesus Christ ... James Dean"), talking all over it, obviously, and making unkind comments. Fair enough. If you want to hear it - and how much like New Order we wished to sound at that impressionable stage of our A-Levels - it's on iPlayer here (starts around 2 hours and 50 minutes in).

For the record: Jo Gosling (vocals), Pete Sawtell (guitar), Craig McKenna (bass) and Andy Collins (drums and borrow of mum's Mini Metro for equipment transportation). The above photo was taken professionally, by Mitch Jenkins - who'd photographed Bauhaus and everything - outside what, in Baltimore, would be referred to as "a vacant", in 1982.

More pics, at Kirstie's request (including one from our final gig, Black Lion, Northampton, 1983):

No, this is not an Apprentice preview (I'm avoiding all previews, preferring to sit down and watch the new series, cold, on Thursday night) ... Just take a look at the screen grab above. I took it from the Apprentice website this morning. It's all blurry, right? This is a new anomaly I'm experiencing with the internet, and I can't make head nor tail of it.

A couple of times this week, I've had blurry photos - they load instantly, but come out all weird. All graphics are fine. It seems to be across the board, not just certain websites, but the photos come out as if I have conjunctivitis. (And then, next time I look, they're fine. It's as if I dreamed it. That's why I took a grab, to prove I've not lost my mind due to too much Jade Goody contemplation.) I've tried opening a different browser, and it's exactly the same. There's nothing amiss with my screen, as all other photos are as clear as a bell, it's just the pictures on the internet. Oh, and I've started using a new wi-fi broadband connection (Vodafone).

I'm not stupid, and it's not stopping me working, but I really don't know what's causing it.

Any ideas, IT?

Oops, the Sun accidentally left off this item from its 16-page pullout tribute to Jade Goody. It's from the Sun, July 3, 2002. Bizarre columnist Dominic Mohan, wrote: "The pig with the biggest mouth on TV has finally been nominated for eviction and now YOU have the power to roast her ... She doesn't deserve to win the £70,000 prize and you can help stop her getting her trotters on it." Brave Jade, eh?

I've been wrestling with Jade Goody. When I first learned of her death, yesterday morning, Mothers' Day as it to make the plight of the boys she left behind all the more poignant, I dashed off something harsh and at the same time sentimental to mark her passing. Jade has been on my mind a lot these past couple of months. I know there is something profound and wise to write about her untimely death from cancer, but I'm still not sure what it is. I suggested in the blog entry I knocked off yesterday morning that we are all implicated in her death. This is wrong. We are not, and your sometimes violent reactions against that broad charge were justified. Which is why I'm starting again.

I am implicated in her death, is what I really meant to say. I am implicated because I bought OK! to look at her wedding pictures. I wanted to see them not because I cared that much about the hastily convened nuptials of Jade Goody and Jack Tweed, but because I had a feeling this was a significant point in modern history, like it or not. This woman of 27, dying of cancer that began in her cervix and spread to her bowel, liver and groin, was turning into some kind of icon. It's an overused word, I know, but what better way to describe an ex-dental nurse from Essex who achieved substantial and lasting celebrity through sheer force of personality without exhibiting any tangible talent at any stage along the way? Even before her illness, she had become a symbol, a representation, a picture. Though her celebrity was based upon "reality" TV shows, she was not real. She was a photo spread in OK! or a pap shot in Heat, a press conference for her perfume or a press conference for her autobiography. The closest we ever got to the "real" Jade was when she let the mask slip and disgraced herself on Celebrity Big Brother 3, complicit in lazy but vicious racism with two other young white women. Shock, horror, she was not a Guardian reader.

In creating a Truman Show world around herself (without perhaps ever having seen The Truman Show), and in particular around her terminal cancer, she sealed her own fate: to be vilified by those who despised her already, and deified by a macabre, overstating tabloid press who must turn every soldier into a "hero" and every death into a martyrdom. She was called "the Essex princess" yesterday. I haven't seen the headlines this Monday morning, but I think I can guess them. Cancer gave her courage and meaning, in the eyes of a media that had once called her stupid and ugly and opportunistic. Even her decision to be filmed and photographed, via two exclusive deals, right to the end, was grudgingly accepted because she was doing it for her boys - the same boys she had turned into public property by featuring them in photo spreads and a cookery book and accompanying DVD. When Jade's mum called for "privacy" for the family yesterday morning, she probably saw no irony in that pathetic request. Perhaps, like her daughter thrown into the public eye from nowhere and given a public makeover, Jackiey Budden craves publicity, and would wither again without it?

So who killed Jade Goody? I know, in truth, a compromised immune system did it. She'd had a number of cancer scares during the last six years of her young life. Her body was being attacked from within. Meanwhile, the media kept prodding her to dance for them, and she complied. There is no way of specifying who has the whip hand when a Faustian pact of this kind is struck. Jade had become addicted to her own fame; addicted to Jade. The tabloids loved her and hated her in equal measure. She chose for herself, and for her family, a life in the open. The blanket coverage that did not destroy her, made her stronger. She even survived the racism row - something most politicians and sportspeople would find hard to come back from. She went into the Indian Big Brother house like Cardinal Ratzinger posing at Auschwitz - it was a genius bit of spin, suggesting that darker forces were at work behind the scenes of Jade Goody Enterprises.

I had no love for Jade Goody, but I followed her story with interest. I watched as she and her mother and her boyfriend were cast as performing monkeys by the producers of Celebrity Big Brother, perhaps the greatest ironists in the country, and the family from hell gave us our money's worth of poorly educated circus. But we didn't expect the daughter, so different now in her smart black bob and glasses from the blonde Essex stereotype who had entered that same house of games five years previously, to reveal so much venom, so much anger, so much ignorance. We gave her an inch and she took a mile. We condemned her.

It would be too sensational to say that the media killed Jade Goody, or that Jade Goody killed herself - there is no smoking gun here - but because everything she was, and everything she had, was tied into being public property, we must take some of the blame. And by "we", I really do mean any of us who read about her in a tabloid or gossip magazine, or watched her on television, or bought her book, or read about the fact that she had written a book. If you did none of these things, clearly, you may walk away without a thoughts, furiously scrubbing your hands of Jade Goody. You never cared about her then and don't care about her now. But if you turned on the TV or picked up a magazine in this century and raised an eyebrow about someone you had never met who had been photographed with someone else you had never met and, even for a fleeting second, cared enough to find out their name: surely you're all part of the culture that created Jade Goody.

She's not a princess. We did not know her. We only started caring about her when she became "brave Jade". But it's OK to feel sad at the death of a 27-year-old mother from a nasty disease. By feeling sorry for Jade it doesn't mean you don't feel sorry for the anonymous 27-year-old mother who probably also died of cancer on Mothers' Day, but whose face was not in the newspapers. Most people who die of cancer wouldn't wish their photograph to be in the newspapers anyway. Why would they?

I haven't got to the bottom of this subject yet, which is why I keep writing and rewriting my reaction to it. Something key has just happened. I don't really know what it is. But maybe it'll fall into place at some point.

It's not the end of the world, or the end of civilisation. But it's sad, in many different ways. And the OK! "tribute issue" survives as one of the most ghoulish pieces of publishing I've ever seen. I didn't buy it. A futile gesture of protest this late in the game.

A man called James Falvey paints excellent Pop Art-style pictures of people, mostly people in comedy and entertainment*. Having very kindly asked my permission first, he has painted one of me. He gives his paintings pun-style headlines, most of which are painful. This painting is called Fill Collins, which is why petrol is being dispensed into my head. (It might not be petrol, it could be any liquid, but it's being dispensed via a petrol pump.) Anyway, his latest exhibition is on in Luton in April and most of his pictures are of people more famous and talented than me. His website is here.

* He has already painted one of Richard Herring. Mine is better.

I'm not sure why I haven't written about Mad Men before. I've loved it since the very first pull on a violin in the theme tune of episode one. But as we hit the middle of season two - which, by the way, is even better than season one - the overarching theme has become all too apparent. It's not the vacuity of advertising, or the attractiveness of smoking, or the sexism of the workplace, it's the melancholy of the human condition. They're all so sad. So deeply, deeply, existentially, irreparably sad. Don Draper's sad. Peggy Olson's sad. Pete Campbell's sad. Roger Sterling's sad. Duck Phillips is sad (and now, so is his dog, Chauncey). Duck Phillips's kids are sad. Betty Draper is sad (or at least, just when she seems to look happy, Don makes her sad, as he did when he called her bikini in this week's episode "desperate"). Everyone Don has sex with is sad. Any elements of Paul Kinsey that seem happy are quickly reduced to being sad by Sterling Cooper. Ken Cosgrove, always smiling, is sad. Joan also has moments of seeming happy, but she's sad too. Even with that figure and the fiance. I love it. I love every sad moment of it. And this week's, Maidenform, was perhaps the saddest episode of all.

Hey! Collings & Herrin Podcast No. 55 is out of the traps. In it, we sensitively cover the trial of Josef Fritzl, read out some letters to the Sunday Times, squeeze one joke out of Keith Vaz, enjoy some crazy animal stories, but mainly talk about Richard's tour and the inherent tragedy therein. As an experiment, we try drinking some of the alcoholic drink Perroni while recording it. This was a huge mistake, but we enjoyed it. Shame caused us to hide our faces with some ring binders.

It's funny. I've been getting the Sunday Times for years, and always scan the Culture section, but only this weekend did I notice YOU SAY in the bottom right hand corner of the TV listings. It invites you to email in YOUR VIEWS on the telly, and they print them. Let's assume these are real. My eye was drawn, self-servingly, to one about Not Going Out. It pleased me. This is what it said:

BBC1 comedies Not Going Out and The Old Guys have excellent scripts and are well cast. They both liven up the weekend viewing.
Tudor Williams, Cheltenham

Now, apart from the unlikely name, this was a pleasant little comment. It made me feel fleetingly flattered to have had something to do with a programme praised by a Sunday Times reader. What a refreshing oasis of reason this section must be, I thought. Good on the British public. Then I read on. This is what the next YOU SAY said:

What hold does Jo Brand have on the BBC? She is crude, rude and yet appears on so many programmes - she is even choosing photos for the Countryfile calendar. Her choices shows she has no knowledge of photography
Peter A Rushforth

What?! Her choices show she has no knowledge of photography? That's really sticking it to her - a woman who obviously has photos of the BBC Trust in uncompromising positions, hence her fruitful career. I couldn't help but check out the other entries in this intriguing corner section. I'm afraid they rather give the impression that Sunday Times readers are thundering nutters.

I agree with people who have written about Gregg Wallace on Masterchef (BBC2). I find the absurdly named "ingredients expert" a total waste of space.
Tony Gurmley-Grennan

That can't be a real name, surely? And if it is, and Mr Gurmley-Grennan finds Gregg Wallace a "total waste of space" why does he persist in torturing himself by watching the programme? He is a food expert. Food is ingredients. He is an expert in them.

We agree with the recent comments about Today (R4). We switched off after the Gordon Brown interview. Humphrys's patronising tone was very annoying. It ruined what would have been the start of a pleasant day.
Clive & Eileen Walton

Who writes joint letters apart from the fictional characters Howard and Hilda on Ever Decreasing Circles? And if you want a pleasant day, my advice is: don't listen to Today at the start of it; it's all about war and recession and politics and John Humphrys is usually on it.

The first Red Riding (C4) was intolerably violent. The journalist playing the lead was brutally attacked many times. Also, I could not understand a word due to the dialect. Very depressing.
Clare Chatham, Worthing

The journalist playing the lead? Surely the actor playing the lead? And do some people in Worthing still live in a world where "dialects" are difficult to follow? That really is depressing.

Re Lindsay Duncan's appalling turn in Margaret (BBC2). She was repetitive, robotic and android-like - a sub-Harold Pinter leftie. Had she mixed herself up with her script for a coming Doctor Who? She was truly embarrassing. Best raspberry, surely?
David Smith, Grimsby

Why was Christopher Patten airbrushed out? His name wasn't even mentioned.
Edina Reith, London N19

Tories with an axe to grind, by any chance? You'd think a descendent of Lord Reith might have a better grasp of how TV drama is made. (I'm not sure Patten was important enough for airbrushing out, but I like the Stalinesque paranoia.) And as for Mr Smith in Grimsby: was Margaret Thatcher really played as a leftie? Worse, a sub-Harold Pinter one? (They're the worst kind: lefties who aren't even as good as Harold Pinter at being lefties.)

I think the Culture should recruit some of these definitely real readers as TV critics. It would make a refreshing change from all those reasoned, articulate, knowledgable, TV-loving lefties the papers usually employ! I can't wait for next Sunday now . . .

I feel disloyal for doing it, but I have watched 1983, final part of the Red Riding Trilogy, on DVD. I have the three discs because I'm writing a review for a future Word magazine (the DVD, as I've mentioned before, is released on April 13). Since they arrived on Friday, I decided to treat myself over the weekend, not just with an advance viewing of this Thursday's closer, but with a version of what has now confirmed itself to be one of the finest British TV dramas of the last ten years WITHOUT THE ADVERTS. We all seem to be in agreement that the Compare The Market Dot Com idents alone, with their stupid attempts at linking a website that compares insurance quotes to various bits of criminal skulduggery have been ruining Red Riding. (I'm no fool. I understand why a commercial broadcaster must get down on its knees and beg for sponsorship deals like this one, especially across entire strands of its output, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.) I'm clearly not going to ruin the final film for you - needless to say, it makes a good claim for being the best of the three, is easily the most haunting, and Mark Addy is a revelation. That's as far as my preview goes. Previews always give too much away.

Another note about the DVDs - there are a few exciting extras: a bit of behind-the-scenes featurette action which threatens to let too much light in upon magic, and - more importantly to Peace trainspotters - a number of deleted scenes. Readers of the books will be simulataneously delighted and saddened by the bits they cut out.

Literature update: I'm back into the Quartet, currently reading 1977, the one that got away: Jack Whitehead and Bob Fraser. What a fine, if massively uncomfortable, second film it would have made (and something for Eddie Marsan to get his teeth into as Jack). I can't see them ever making it now.

Yorkshire update: I've just received a review copy of Ian McMillan and Martin Wiley's Richard Matthewman Stories: Adventures In A Yorkshire Landscape, published this very day through the entirely admirable small publisher Pomona. I'm hoping it will act as some kind of northern balm when my Peace obsession subsides.*







* Although don't hold your breath. Once I'm done with my second reading of the Quartet, I must finish GB84 and read Tokyo: Year Zero.

So, part two of the Red Riding Quartet ... sorry, Trilogy: the year of our Lord 1980. Directed by James Marsh, who won a Bafta and an Oscar for the outstanding documentary Man On Wire (here's me interviewing him at the Baftas), this was, I felt, more successful than 1974. It was less opaque, easier to follow and the tone was set very much by Paddy Considine's quiet, note-perfect performance as Peter Hunter. It's so refreshing to see actors at work who aren't just trying to win awards. And in a hell as vivid and overwrought as the Yorkshire of David Peace, that's even more of an accolade. When all around are losing their heads, Considine/Hunter keeps his.

Once again, screenwriter Tony Grisoni has found a linear story within the dank, tangled prose of Peace. Although it has clear links with 1974 and - as anyone who's seen the trailers or glanced at the billboards will already know - next week's 1983, 1980 stands alone. Having read all the books in the Quartet now, I'd say that they are interlinked in such a way as to make the reading of one, in isolation, an incomplete experience. Having just finished reading 1983 - this very morning, in fact - I feel an urgent need to go back and re-read 1974, armed with the knowledge of the other three books. That's a set of books, right there. Anyway, on TV, Marsh seemed to hold his camera steadier than James Jarrold last week, more focused, and it suited the approach of the unhurried, analytical protagonist. (Eddie Dunford was an outsider, too, but he was stumbling around, searching for the truth, and the dreamlike quality of 1974 suited him.) Because this one featured a vaguely fictionalised Yorkshire Ripper - the names of the victims had been respectfully changed and, in the book, he's called Peter Williams, although we never heard his surname in the film - it felt more like a history play, despite all the extraneous, fictional detail.

The real Ripper story is grisly enough but of course Peace makes it worse. And believe me, TV viewers were spared most of the gory details - not least the ordeal of Libby Hall. There really is no point in comparing the books and the films. (The endings of the films are clearly all going to be neater than the books - you can see why.) I actually wish I'd read 1980 before knowing about Considine's casting, but hey, there he was, in my head throughout, getting in the way of my imagination. These films need to be owned on DVD - they're coming out on April 13, with extras - so that those fucking idents for Compare The Market Dot Com, with their inappropriately silly, crime-linked theme, can be banished forever. It's been said before, but why oh why must the ads on TV be SO MUCH LOUDER than the programmes? (They are the best advert for the infinate continuation of the licence fee that I've ever heard.)

On the 54th Collings & Herrin Podcast, one of us is caffeine-free, the other is virtually insensible on the stuff. Ethical and moral discussion moves almost imperceptibly from Prince Charles's detox tincture to the quality of placard at the Luton anti-war protests; from monkey vengeance to sheepdog love; from Horden to Corden; from the wheelie bin police to reincarnation as a bee; from just about anything to Richard's tour dates. I remain in a Zen-like stated of decaffeinated calm throughout. In the picture you can see Richard eating his pathetic fish fingers and me tucking into a superb spicy seafood, bacon and asparagus bake, which I brought in a Tupperware tub and decanted onto a plate Richard kindly gave me.

Incidentally, despite the deluge of well-intentioned technical advice two weeks ago, we still can't make the podcast studio work in the USB port of my laptop. I think we need to go to the next level of advice, whatever that is. Help!

An update, and I hope a pertinent one, as it seems like the country has gone David Peace crazy, on account of Red Riding (can't wait for tomorrow night's installment, can't wait for tomorrow night's, can't wait for tomorrow, can't wait for - can't wait etc.) and the imminent movie adaptation of The Damned United, which I have seen and although there's a review embargo I can say it's as good as Peace fans will have hoped ie. rooted in the book and the author's parallel Derby/Leeds narrative, but writer Peter Morgan has actually turned a serious book into a terrific period comedy, so odious comparisons need not be made.

Anyway, I'm over halfway through 1983 and hurtling, via a triple parallel narrative and three layers of flashback, towards the horrible conclusion of the Quartet - and thus the Trilogy. I'm now convinced that 1980 is better than 1974, and 1983 is shaping up to be even better than 1980. We'll see. There's certainly stuff in 1983 that will make your hair curl in terms of retrospective evidence, and I almost know whodunnit. Piggott, the solicitor who turns up in 1983 and dominates one strand (he's played by Mark Addy in the third film, so I'm unable to picture him as anybody else - damn those films), achieves a new poetry of self-loathing and physical disintegration. You'll love him.

The past couple of weeks have been intense, in terms of fiction consumption. Quite out of the ordinary for me. For the record, the two non-fiction books that I've had to forsake in favour of devouring Peace to the bitter end, are Lenin by Robert Service and Israel by Martin Gilbert, which will have to wait. Once I've finished 1983, which might be today, might be tomorrow (today, tomorrow, tomorrow, today), I'm afraid I'm returning to GB84, which I haven't finished, and then, with crushing finality, it'll be onto Tokyo Year Zero, Peace's most recent, and first to venture outside Yorkshire, where the skies are always black and grey and it's always starting to rain.

I love him.

Well, probably not, but amid all the obituaries for this once-great, now-bust broadcaster, may I make a case for something really good on ITV1? It's that rare thing, a successful translation of a US drama: Law & Order | UK. For those that aren't up to speed, the long-running American original, which has been going since 1990 - 1990! - has a simple premise: each hour-long episode covers one stand-alone case and follows it through from investigation and arrest to prosecution and verdict. Simple. But brilliant.

Thus, it's a show of two halves: the cops and the silks; law and - geddit? - order. In our version, which is currently recycling scripts from the American version by Britishing them up in a very effective way, that's Bradley Walsh as crumpled, divorced old cop, Jamie Bamber as pretty, idealistic new cop and Harriet Walter as wry, seen-it-all commanding officer; and Ben Daniels (who I once saw in a bathroom shop) as not-crumpled-but-actually-well-turned-out, possibly-not-divorced old-ish prosecutor, Freema Agyeman as pretty, idealistic new prosecutor and Bill Paterson as wry, seen-it-all CPS boss. A cracking cast - the biggest revelation among whom is Bradley Walsh, who seems born to play DI Ronnie Brooks. I never saw him on Coronation St, so only know him as himself ie. insufferable, certainly on Maestro, where he seemed pathologically unable to stop messing about. But a fine actor. Who knew? And the quality of one-show-only guest starts they've managed to line up is an almost Red Riding-like parade of TV talent: Patrick Malahide, Dervla Kirwan, Lesley Manville, Juliet Aubrey, Sean Pertwee, with Iain Glen to come next week. (Alright, so Sean Pertwee is a bit "in reception", but I'm always glad to hear his unique throaty voice, even in a supporting role as the boss of a paintballing company.)

Allison Graham in my very own Radio Times was down on it, but I think she may be too enamoured of the original to give it a fair crack of the whip. Three episodes in, and I'd say it's really shaping up to be appointment-to-view. That's a drama on ITV1. I repeat: a drama, on ITV1. (Ratings have slipped a bit from a solid 6m debut to closer to 5m, but let's hope that plateaus out. And that ITV doesn't cancel all drama, of course.)

The best part is: I've never seen Law & Order | US.

Posh author Julie Myerson has talked in graphic detail of her anguish about the decision to help publicise her own book. In an interview about her previous interview, Myerson says she had no regrets about giving interviews about her son's five-year battle with cannabis which can soon be read about in her novel, The Lost Child, a book which ordinarily nobody would be writing about before its publication. She adds, in another interview: "I don't regret helping to publicise the book ..." Myerson, 48, has been accused of being "available for interview", while others have said that she is using the forthcoming publication of her book for commercial gain.

In response to the controversy, her son Jake last week did his own interview and claimed his mother was "an author". In an interview in The Sunday Times, Myerson admits her decision to do broadsheet interviews to help advertise the book before its publication is controversial. "If you allow your book to come out without publicising it, you will get flak," she says. "But I don't care what people say about me in the press, as long as they're saying something about me in the press."

Myerson reveals she spoke to her publicist several times last week after months of silence. "He called me to say, 'Have you seen what you've done?'," she says. "He was delighted." Myerson adds: "Obviously I love my son. He had this plan to talk to the tabloids and get as much money as possible. I said, 'Darling, this will backfire. The tabloids have literally no idea who I am. They don't even watch Newsnight Review.'"

The Lost Child is being rushed out two months early by its publisher in order to cash in on the fact that Julie Myerson's nice face has been all over the grown-up newspapers. The novel, which her publisher, Bloomsbury, had originally intended to bring out in May without anybody even noticing, is now coming out "in a few days" before the storm in a teacup dies down. "Given this week's extensive speculation about Julie Myerson's The Lost Child, we felt that it was right to bring forward publication to allow everyone the opportunity to buy her brilliant book and consider the complicated questions it raises," it said in a statement. "The least complicated of these is: should the publicity department get the rest of the week off?"

So, the first of the Red Riding Trilogy - 1974 - has aired. I haven't seen a single newspaper yet, so I'm reviewing this cold. First of all, it's entirely odd watching a two-hour film of a book you've read and loved. It's distracting. You spot snatches of dialogue that have been lifted wholesale, you see characters you've imagined made flesh - and the case of this super-high-profile series, made familiar flesh, as barely a character comes onscreen without a known actor attached - and you feel strangely betrayed when a bit is missed out, even though you know that this is how it works.

Julian Jarrold, who previously directed Kinky Boots and Brideshead Revisited, did a superb job on the atmosphere of David Peace's Yorkshire and the overarching brown-and-dogshit palette of the period (which I remember, and is captured in the carpets and ornaments of so many snapshots in the family album from my childhood). He found brutalist poetry in Peace's descriptions: the rolling skies and the dank underpasses and the bare rooms. He also injected an element of beauty that is entirely missing from Peace: how deliberately angelic Paula Garland (Rebecca Hall) looked, against her windows. This never came across in the book: she was merely sad and desperate.

Hall, by the way, gave one of the best performances, along with Andrew Garfield as Eddie (even though I kept seeing Richard Ashcroft with a pencil), Warren Clarke as Molloy and the sublime Sean Bean as Dawson, who was very much in the background in the book, and more explicitly disgusting. 1974 was nasty, but you see worse on an episode of Trial and Retribution, and I commend the filmmakers for holding back and leaving much to the imagination. Even the sex acts seemed relatively erotic in the TV version; on the page they are nothing but self-loathing in physical form and "rapist sweat".

I congratulate writer Tony Grisoni for finding a linear cops-and-corruption potboiler within Peace's novel. The text is so tangled and repetitive and there are so many names, hoving in and out of view, it's a far more intense ride than the film. But the film worked, for me. I was stupidly looking forward to seeing so much more than we got. It was pretty grisly in places - especially the later scenes which I won't describe for fear of spoiling - but only a fraction as grisly as the book.

It's a shame that Red Riding arrives at a time when we're hearing about drama budgets being slashed and slates being wiped. This series already shows just how good we are at adult drama when the material is sound. I mean, just look at the endless parade of great TV actors this trilogy has attracted. By "TV actors", of course I don't mean that's all they're fit for, as I hold TV in high regard. I appreciate that taking the odd Hollywood movie is good for the bank balance of, say, Eddie Marsan or David Morrissey or Rebecca Hall - or even Garfield, who was in the useless, woolly Lions For Lambs, playing an American - but their presence on telly is so much more meaningful.

Look how supporting players from series like Shameless and Coronation Street end up populating high-profile TV drama in high-profile roles. This is a formidable machine, and it should be looked after and lubricated. I hate the fact that the mismanagement and greed of ITV is now leading to a cut in drama budgets (which of course affects technicians and directors and makeup and crew as much as it affects actors). You may not watch a programme like The Bill, but The Bill acts as a drama school for the major players of tomorrow. Fewer episodes a week means fewer actors and technicians coming through.

Sorry, carried away there. I'm off to finish reading 1980 before next week, so I can lament the loss of characters and plotlines and gory detail again.

Like many others, I fell for David Peace, the now-ubiquitous, overground Yorkshire-born novelist, after reading The Damned United (NOW A MAJOR FILM!), which I remember grabbing off the shelf at Borders when the two books I'd specifically gone in to buy turned out to have "three for two" stickers on and the woman at the till helpfully pointed out my missed opportunity. He had me by the end of the first page. (Actually, I liked the table before it even starts, showing Leeds United's progress during the 1974-75 season.) Having been an actual football fan in 1974-75, aged 9-10, the subject matter of Brian Clough's 44 days at Leeds gave me a lot of Proustian rushes, but this is a grown-up book, not a book for boys, and I would recommend it to anyone who's interested in how the male mind works, whether they have an interest in the game or not. I'm seeing the film tomorrow - it simply cannot replicate the book.

Naturally, having devoured The Damned, I was keen to investigate this mystery man's previous books - it turned out there were loads of them! Funnily enough, it was another offer, in a different Borders - this time "two for one" - that helped me take the plunge: I purchased 1974 and GB84.

Peace, who absorbed so much pride and prejudice from his Yorkshire upbringing he was able to relocate permanently to Tokyo to write his books about it, is my kind of novelist, as he sets his fictional stories - or fictionalised stories - against living, breathing, documentary backdrops. Although the characters that run through the Red Riding Quartet - 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983 (GB84, set against the Miners' Strike, is separate, but very much in the same groove) - are made up, they operate in the real world. So, the Yorkshire Ripper is named in 1977 and 1980, but his victims' names and dates are changed, to protect the families, presumably. George Oldfield, who led the case, becomes George Oldman. John Stalker becomes Peter Hunter. These may seem like cosmetic changes, and they are to a degree, but the surrounding detail is accurate to the dates of the singles played on car radios and other news stories of the time. Police forces, riven by corruption and brutality, are named. If the names of precise streets and locations in Leeds and Preston are changed, they feel all too real. (Did or does The Gaiety exist?) This deliberate blurring of fact and fiction is probably what excites me about David Peace's work the most. I'm not a big reader of fiction, but this is a halfway house and it's a place I like to dwell.

His prose style - interior monologue, mundane conversation, dreams, repetition, swearing, mantra, gory detail, snatches of songs and other sources, sometimes a pretentious switch in typeface - is utterly compelling to me, but may well be tiresome to others. Perhaps he's an acquired taste, although it didn't take me long.

Last week, I put the thrilling and hypnotic GB84 on ice, in order to finish 1974, which I'd already started, stirred on by the imminence of C4's Red Riding Trilogy (three films, starting tonight, adapted by Tony Grisoni from 1974, 1980 and 1983 - he did 1977 but they scrapped it because they couldn't afford to make the Quartet, which is insane, by the way, but money seems no longer to be falling out of TV's ears). I finished 1974 two days ago, and finally found a copy of 1980, in the miraculous Foyle's on London's Charing Cross Road, yesterday, which I'm now reading while the partially-read 1977 sits it out.

I am actually too excited about the Trilogy. I can't remember when I was this animated about a TV drama. Beware, though, I will become one of those twats who compares the film to the book.

I'll leave you with this choice David Peace quote, from 1977 (if you don't like, you won't like him):

I woke in a rapist sweat from dreams I prayed were not my own.

I guested on the Word podcast this week. I haven't listened back to it yet, but it was, as ever, a rare pleasure to assemble round the conference table and breathe the same conversational air as the mighty David Hepworth and Mark Ellen off of Live Aid, even when one of them's this side of a nasty bout of flu and has his microphone balanced in a bowl of individual sugar sachets [see: pic]. And I was able to pay fulsome tribute to Kelly Groucutt. Something I didn't share with the group: I first listened to Astral Weeks in 1992. I bought it in an HMV sale. I can take it or leave it.

What? A new podcast already? That's real value. Collings & Herrin Podcast 53 is here, a matter of days after the last one because Richard is on tour or something. Even my homemade biscotti cannot cheer him up. In the podcast, we find out that grapefruit juice can cause heart failure, television can give you asthma, having a job can get you stripped of your University Challenge glory, teenagers can cost nine thousand pounds, Sir Fred Goodwin was named by William Makepeace Thackeray, Tesco's offer real baskets as opposed to surreal or figurative ones, Richard's got another idea for a Slumdog Millionaire sequel, beer is a surprise sedative and teenagers' pants are designed to be seen.

Can I just apologise for the burp with which this podcast begins. He was very tired.

Where Did It All Go Right? is a hidden gem. Not my assessment, but the business-driven assessment of Waterstone's, who have gathered together some old books and called them Hidden Gems in order to try and sell them over a limited promotional period in March. In their words:

• Hidden Gems brings together an eclectic and wide-ranging collection of outstanding books which, for one reason or other, have not had the success or recognition that they so richly deserve. Enjoy the selection!

Some might call this the very definition of faint praise. I am far more pragmatic than that. I'm glad they've chosen a book that was published in 2003 and put it on display at the front of their shops with a generous discount attached. No author could possibly complain about this, even if the promotion was called Some Old Books We've Still Got Copies Of. Funnily enough, the first Waterstone's I went into on the day the promotion began had an eclectic and narrow-ranging selection from the eclectic and wide-ranging Hidden Gems selection in a specially marked bookcase, with no sign of my book at all. Perhaps it is more Hidden than the other Gems.

Incidentally, the pic above is of two of my books prominently displayed between a book about inspiring holy people and a book about Casanova in Borders in Coventry, taken by Dee Richards. It is evidently easier to find, unpromoted, at Borders than it is, promoted, at Waterstone's.


And while we're publishing photos sent in by people, here's one by Tina Wiseman of me and Rich after his gig at the Leicester Square Theatre last Tuesday. If Tina turns out to be a stalker, I'll probably regret printing it. But at least you all know what she looks like now if either Rich or I turns up dead.

Photo: Philip Wilding

I know how much Richard likes it when I make screengrabs of when I've been on the telly and post them here, but in this case, I think he'll forgive me, as it's our debut on More4 News from Friday night. (Hey, my mum and dad were down - you can imagine how proud they were.) You can watch it here. I do like the fact that the podcast attic has now been on a minority television channel's news in all its unprepared glory, along with the hamper we always rest my laptop on, the laptop itself, and the now-ubiquitous mug of home-frothed latte resting on the first volume of Andy Kershaw's biography of Hitler, Hubris. The man who made the film - amazingly called Rags - in which Richard bravely takes a stand against Lee Hurst's fear of the internet, fooled us into thinking he was filming us faking a podcast, but then used the conversational bit where Richard was eating a bun (paid for by listener Tina, whose t-shirt also makes an appearance) and I was not yet using my Radio 4 voice. It's nice to be on the news. Here are those screeengrabs anyway. It may not happen again.









A lot of blurred wrist action from me, and some good hair from Rich. And finally ... a duck on a skateboard.