It's just like the old days. By which I mean the old days of me taking endless grabs off the 6 Music studio webcam as if I've only just discovered how to do it, and running them ad nauseum on my blog. Though I broke my own two-year duck by filling in for George Lamb two Fridays ago on Goth Day and presenting Genial Jon Richardson's regular show last Sunday, today was the official comeback of Collings & Herrin to 6 Music (the link is to the iPlayer, where we'll be available for seven days): myself and Richard Herring the professional comedian, co-hosting. (In the official billings it described us as "broadcaster Andrew Collins and comedian Richard Herring" and promised a "one-off show", which bodes well for our future career.) We had tons of fun for three hours, protected from Sachsgate-style scandal and censure by the professionalism of my hands on the desk, ever alert to the possibility that Radio Richard might slip into Podcast Richard mode and cross one of the many new lines drawn around acceptable BBC etiquette by the Daily Mail and other interested parties. We were allowed to play Confrontation Song from the first Not The Nine O'Clock News album, which had been passed by "compliance" (which I imagine is a man who looks like Kenneth Branagh in The Boat That Rocked with greased down hair and a toothbrush moustache, stamping pieces of paper with a rubber stamp), and from it gleaned that it was acceptable to use the words "diarrhoea", "bleeders" and "toss". We spent much of the show reading out euphemisms from listeners, which was a nice way of avoiding explicit words, although every phrase and songtitle sounded like a euphemism once we'd broached the subject, including "Barry Norman's pickled onions," which Richard mischievously ran with.

Producer Adam was always there to help us avoid choppy waters. (He's the one on the left in the pic above.) We didn't want to get him into trouble. There was a potentially sticky moment when a listener asked if it was OK to fantasise about a schoolgirl dressed as a 40-year-old woman, at which I interjected "an 18-year-old schoolgirl," like the professional that I am. It was just like the old days, when Richard was a guest on my 6 Music show, and he would tease me by treading close to controversy, knowing that I would leap in and either stop him or play a record. At one point in today's show, I said, "I'm going to have to stop you there ..." and @unloveablesteve on Twitter accused me - lightheartedly - of playing the boss man. I suppose whoever has the controls (or "con" as they say on submarines) has the power, but it was not my show, it was our show. The geography of the studio says otherwise, I admit.




In this picture, "Northampton Jon", Richard and Adam are sampling my homemade chocolate biscotti, live on air, and experiencing all the moisture being absorbed from their bodies, before enjoying the surprisingly nice aftertaste.

And in this one, Richard is still gagging.

Thanks to Adam and Jon for helping to oil these three (in fact, six) hours of radio - and Genial Jon for being away for two weeks - and to Michael Ball for letting Richard and I squeeze into the tiny lift with him and to breathe his showbiz air on the way out of the building. Now there's a professional broadcaster.

Thanks to Tina for these pics from Thursday night in Brighton. Now you can see why people were prepared to pay money to witness this multi-media showbiz extravaganza: two men, sitting on chairs, reading the papers by a small table with a computer on it and two plastic glasses of wine and oat milk. It was theatrical magic.


This is me taking the picture of the audience.


Look at the love in his eyes.

So, we went to Brighton, and the sun shone, and the chips were soft and hot, and the seagulls were massive, and the cottaging opportunities were probably plentiful, and the first ever, paying, non-charity, ticketed Collings & Herrin Podcast (number 65, officially) at the Duke Of York's Picturehouse, was, I think, a roaring success, thanks to the pink pound and some patient babysitters. We drove down there, parked in an underground car park that was letting one car in at a time as another car left, checked in at our chosen faded, past-its-prime hotel, went down the Pier for some greasy potato-based food and - yes! - some pear cider in the blazing heat of late afternoon (Bulmers, not Magners, no idea why, but Richard Tweeted the comedian Mark Watson, "the face of Magners", to tell him it was his fault), having dropped our merchandise off at the splendid cinema, and the nice man who runs it: Jon. Just to keep Jon on his toes, and to cause him to worriedly Tweet the fact at 7.15, we took our time sauntering back up there to his cinema for soundcheck, by which time the tiny buzz I got from the pear cider had worn off and I was no longer drunk. (Damn that pear cider. Damn that Mark Watson)

This is us at the venue, which is a cinema, with a balcony and everything; the stage itself was deemed solid enough to work with; and backstage, not only did we find a handsome rider of sandwiches, Maltesers, cereal bars, posh crisps, Mars bars, chilled white wine for the lady and chocolate stars, but a whole carton of oat milk, just for me. (I was touched by this gesture, and I think I have Shahnaz to thank for insider knowledge, so thanks.) I admit I turned into a small boy the moment we touched down in Brighton, and became childishly excited by all aspects of the trip, from the car park to the Pier to the large poster of us that had been put up outside the cinema. This is a photo of it, taken after the gig, with various well-wishers poking out from behind it, and Shahnaz herself.

We supported ourselves and did 20 minutes each, solo. Because Richard is a professional comedian, and I am not, I did not attempt to match his seasoned repartee and instead taught the audience how to do Secret Dancing and gave a short lecture about the Mitford Sisters. This went down remarkably well. Then Richard came on, tried out some new material, said something shocking about Madeleine McCann and drew the most laughs by saying the words "wank" and "wee" (thus, finding the level of the sophisticated Brighton audience). After a short break, and a brief panic about an extension cable during which I had to be my own roadie, thus breaking down the fourth wall, we came back on, sat at a table with this laptop on it, and recorded the podcast in the traditional way - while soundman Chris recorded it professionally through the desk. We may release the professional version as an "extra" at some stage, but for now, the traditional podcast is available as usual. In it, we play up to the paying audience of 250 people a bit, admittedly, but still manage to cover Susan Boyle the "Hairy Angel", the resemblance of Kim Jong-il to BBC2's Stewart Lee, the allure of cottaging, the self-defeating genius of glow-in-the-dark monkeys, the perplexing but inspirational lyrics to Take That's Back For Good, the sex lives of Clare Rayner and Edwina Currie, and the return of Dane Bowers, 29.

Say hello to yourself if you were in the audience. Many of you stayed behind after school to join in the first C&H Q&A, which was fun and spanned subjects as diverse as Telly Addicts, Fawlty Towers, Jim Davidson, biscuits, Tibet and Michael Winner, by which time the chilled bottle of white wine had made Richard even more cruel and belligerent and insulting to me, but I can take it. One or two people left around the 11pm mark, but we are assuming it was because of prior arrangement with the babysitter; the majority stayed until the bitter end and, unlike Phill and Phil, who appeared here on Saturday, we did not embarrass ourselves by doing "a DJ set". Instead, we sat in our chairs as if they were thrones and signed things for the hardcore. And, from that session, here's a snap taken for Misty2K (aka Dee) by someone else in the merchandise queue:

Thanks to Jon, Chris, Shahnaz and the Duke Of York's for a splendid night out. We hope that those of you who weren't in Brighton enjoy the podcast and don't get jealous. If there is any demand for it, we might release my 10-minute lecture about the Mitford Sisters as a podcast extra.

Looking forward to the first ever, tickets-only, non-charity, paying Collings & Herrin live podcast, 8.30 tonight at the Duke Of York's Picturehouse in Brighton. I believe there are a few tickets left. The podcast itself will be available either very late tonight, or early tomorrow morning, depending on Orange Mark's energy levels. BBC Weather says sunny intervals, 19 degrees on South coast, so here's hoping for a good day and maybe, just maybe, some Secret Dancing live onstage. (Richard is so busy he might just be writing the second draft of his book onstage. Still, I'd pay to see that.)

Even though Magners, the Irish cider brand which is called Bulmers in Ireland but not in the countries it exports to (even though Bulmers is an old English cider-making company - it's something to do with the original Magners joining forces with Bulmers in the 1960s and adopting their name but then realising they couldn't call it Bulmers if they exported it, so reverted back to Magners - and there was a Mr Magner in the first place, in case you're interested) refuses to sponsor the Collings & Herrin Podcast in the accepted way of giving us money to have their name on it, they do keep teasing us with free alcohol, even though we are both trying to drink less. And they sent me a box of Pear Cider, which purists might call "perry" but that reckons without the stupidity of members of the public, who understand the words "pear" and "cider" but not any other words. I first tasted this on my recent birdwatching trip to Norfolk, mainly because I saw the picture of it in a pint glass with loads of ice in it, we were in an impulsive mood and it was to be our first drink of the evening in a village pub after a long day's birding.

The idea of having a pint of beer with ice in it is so bizarre - only the other week I ordered a bottle of beer in the BFI bar and they gave me one with a glass that had ice in it, thus revealing that the beer was not chilled; I refused the drink on those grounds - but I am a sucker for low-temperature liquid refreshment. The pint of Pear Cider tasted good that night in Dersingham. So, I was happy to get this unexpected Pear Cider windfall: 12 pint bottles. A barbecue yesterday seemed the perfect place to try it out, so I took the box along. (I owe Richard six bottles of Pear Cider now, of course, or cash equivalent.) Anyway, here is the Pear Cider news:

The Pear Cider tasted nice, chilled, and with loads of ice in it. This way, it's kind of self-diluting, a bit like alcohol squash. I drank a few bottles of it during the afternoon and early evening yesterday, and it suited a sunny English afternoon among friends and family. Other guests looked at my glass full of liquid and ice and asked me what it was, and I told them. In a few cases, I convinced them to try one, as if I was working for Ian Magner or Ian Bulmer. But it doesn't taste like having a pint. It doesn't really taste like an alcoholic drink at all. It tastes like pop. Watered-down pop. Now, this might lead you to imagine that it's like an alcopop, and that it sneaks up on you and gets you drunk without you noticing. It doesn't. At 4.5% it's pretty weak, and, what with all that water you consume simultaneously, I can confirm that even after a few pints of it, you are not drunk.

So, it was pleasant to drink, and sociable, and looked nice, and sounded good with the ice cracking in the glass, but it left me feeling disappointingly sober at the end of the afternoon. And yet unable to drive home.

They should market Magners Pear Cider that way: all the inconvenience of alcohol, but none of the effects. I wonder if they'll send us any more? (Magners didn't ask for anything in return for the free 12 bottles; I just thought I'd review it anyway, as I should be working.)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Scamalot
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

Ah, I don't seem to have written anything about the MPs' expenses scandal. This just about covers it, I think.

The BBC "library" shot with two of my books on it strikes again!* It's almost as iconic now as the soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima or that Vietnamese man being shot in the head. This time it's on the BBC Technology website. I'd love to find out who arranged and took this shot, as it's doing my books the world of subliminal good. Hey, in publishing, visibility is everything. That and actual sales.

* Thanks to SteveR for the tip-off.

In the 64th Collings & Herrin Podcast, sponsored by the Absolut Dublin Gay Theatre Festival, even though it finished on May 17, we discuss in quite academic terms the miracle, or not, of human evolution, and the fact that we are all descended from 100 people who walked off Africa 70,000 years ago, including Adam and Eve, and Noah and his wife Nelly, who themselves were descendants of a monkey/lemur called Ida, recently dug up in 1983 and now featured in a Guardian poster. We also analyse the ex-Speaker's nickname, the morality of selling your virginity to a 45-year-old Italian businessman, the disappointment of Alfie, and we try not to swear or interrupt each other, in practice for being on the radio again.

I think we should support Nathan Jay, the best Midlands-based deep house/chill house/ambient/acid/techno composer and videomaker to have ever sampled my Mr Bean-style voice on one of his tracks. Lion Man - which is of course already available to listen to and watch in various versions for free on YouTube - is now commercially available at the 7Digital Indiestore, for 79p a track (a top tune based around a true, train-based story I told long ago on the podcast, which was marginally more interesting than the more recent one about the pressure gauge). I am a great believer in the independent spirit, whether it's Scritti Politti photocopying their own sleeves for Skank Bloc Bologna in 1978, or Mark Hodkinson publishing his own lovely books on Pomona in 2009, so why not give Nathan a listen and support your local Lion Man. He is that spirit.

Due to something going right, I am now not only sitting in for George Lamb on 6 Music on Friday May 22, 10am-1pm, for the Goth-themed show ...



... I am also sitting in for Jon Richardson this Sunday, May 24, 10am-1pm ...



And co-hosting the same show with Richard Herring next Sunday, May 31, 10am-1pm. I could get to like this.

With very good reason, the Mail On Sunday's man-aimed Live supplement (for which I very briefly wrote when it launched in 2005) proudly trumpeted this exclusive story on, yes, Sunday, entitled So These 15 Comedians Walk Into A Room ...

The blurb proudly declares, "Live invited a select group of 15 of its favourite performers on to our largest sofa to explain why, 30 years after the ground-breaking launch of the Comedy Store, Britain is the laughing stock of the world - and proud of it." The main photograph, taken by lensing legend Nicky Johnston (who once took some fetching photos of Collins & Maconie), featured all 15 of these comedians, from Frank Skinner and Dara O'Briain to newcomers Simon Bird and Mark Watson, sitting on or standing behind a long sofa, all interacting and chatting. This is how the piece sets it up:

"On a sunny day in May, you could walk past West London's Jet Studios and never know the cream of British comedy were gathered inside ... For anyone with ears to hear, the noise emanating from these garage doors is unmistakable: a cacophony of yelping, hooting, swearing, shouting and heckling that Frank Skinner describes as 'like some kind of horrible voodoo sex ritual'. This is what happens when you put 15 comedians in a room ... The atmosphere is feverish etc. etc."

Right. So all 15 of these comedians were in the same room at the same time were they? They didn't come in at different times, let's say, and pose for individual shots against the same pink background, later to be expertly photoshopped together? Listen, I worked in the magazine publishing caper when such techniques were still in their relative infancy, and when we gathered together, say, a bunch of disparate rock stars for an awards ceremony, we had to photograph them together, or in groups of two and three, as best we could. Immediately after I left the job in 1997, the trick of photographing a parade of celebrities against the same studio background and on the same studio sofa became commonplace. Hence: those tremendous fold-out covers with everybody who was at a single awards ceremony, miraculously all sitting together and sharing a joke. Since the magazine has been responsible for arranging these celebrities in one place, albeit not necessarily at the same time, it feels it has the right to cheat time and join them together. It's not exactly a lie, more a smoothing over of the truth.

In other words, it hardly qualifies as a photographic deception any more: it's the same sofa, the same studio, the same background, and the work has been done by the same bookers - getting 15 mostly big-name comedians together at different times on the same day is a logistical feat. This is what irks me - as a reader:

1. The way the words weave a fictional web around the more mundane reality of what happened. "The cream of British comedy were gathered inside ..." - yes, at staggered intervals. If you check out the rest of the excellent photos on the M0S website, you'll see that Jack Dee and Alan Carr were definitely in the studio at the same time, as evidenced by the shots of them mucking about with each other and some props. Meanwhile, none of the other comics are seen interacting, which rather suggests that they all came through individually. (I have, in fact, checked, and a number of them did.) If you look at the one of Alan Carr lying down you can see that the sofa is normal sofa-sized and not giant, and you can also see the edge of the studio background. It's not as if the illusion has even been protected.
   
2. The point of this blog entry: during the BBC witch hunt that centred around "Crowngate", the Mail were as quick and enthusiastic as all the other national newspapers to heap shame upon the BBC and other broadcasters for the crime of editing some film together in a way that presented something other than hard fact. How dare a broadcaster do this! Off with their heads!

Yes, I know it would be tiresome to read an introduction that ran, "On a sunny day in May, you could walk past West London's Jet Studios and never know the cream of British comedy were gathered inside - because they weren't really, well, not at exactly the same time ... For anyone with ears to hear, the noise emanating from these garage doors is unmistakable: some individual comics talking to the photographer and sometimes their publicist. This is what happens when you put 15 comedians in a room, one after the other ... The atmosphere is like that of a person being photographed in a studio." But I'm not an idiot, and I can handle the truth. Fifteen separate interviews with 15 entertainment luminaries is journalistic achievement enough.

And as I say, it's a really good photograph.

In the transparent 63rd Collings & Herrin Podcast, we declare every penny of our expenses, including both fingers of a Twix, while discussing infinity, morality, hypocrisy, prejudice, sexism, racism, homophobia, the coming dandelion menace and what Jordan said to Richard when he met her on the GMTV sofa. For one week only, we include the Daily Telegraph among the newspapers we analyse - because it is at the centre of the expenses story - and find it much too big. Way too big. I mean, look at the size of it. It's ridiculous.

Well, I was accused of name-dropping in my blog entry about the Al Murray gig - sorr-ee! - but this can't be helped. On Sunday I was on Michael Ball's Sunday Brunch on Radio 2, doing the entertainment guide, except Michael's on holiday and Eamonn Holmes was filling in. I'd never met Eamonn before but was impressed by his cheerleading personality. At the end of my bit, reviewing Bono's Elvis poem on Radio 4, I said that my Mum loved Elvis almost as much as she loves Tom Conti - thereby providing Eamonn with a segue into a plug for Tom Conti's appearance after me (I am nothing if not a smooth radio professional). It's also true: Mum has always had a thing for Conti - way before the Shirley Valentine bandwagon-jumpers! Anyway, once Eamonn had put the next record on, he insisted that I meet Tom and have my photograph taken with him to give to my mum! He went out into the green room, grabbed Tom, bundled him into the studio, introduced us and proceeded to take our picture on his camera. Eamonn promised to send me the pic and he did, today. So here it is.

I apologise if this is just name dropping. It's what happened. And my Mum should see it.

Remember this?

It seems that 6 Music have closed down the Feedback message board just in time*, for I am all set to briefly return - twice! - to the network. On Friday May 22, I shall be filling in for George Lamb. It's a special Goth-themed day, which is part of a special Old Rockers-themed bank holiday weekend. Then, in two Sundays' time, Richard Herring and myself make our co-hosting debut, filling in for genial Jon Richardson. It will be our first appearance on actual radio together for over two years!

So, that's me: Friday May 22, 10am-1pm
Collings & Herrin: Sunday May 31, 10am-1pm

Now all we have to do is train ourselves to stop swearing.

* Incidentally, since I have been unexpectedly welcomed back under the 6 Music umbrella, I am unable to comment on the decision to temporarily suspend the Feedback message board. However, the official statement reveals an amazing statistic: on the famous George Lamb thread (a snowballing lobby which had reached 11,370 posts), 10 regular users were responsible for nearly 7,000 posts. That's 10, ladies and gentlemen.

I attended my first ever stadium comedy gig on Friday night. Alright, arena comedy gig. The O2, which is inside the Millennium Dome, apparently holds 14,000 people (I had read 20,000 but maybe that's for music gigs - either way, it's a lot bigger than Wembley Arena, the nearest London benchmark). On Friday, Richard Herring and I were two of those 14,000 people at this comic version of a Nuremberg rally, there to display our collective solidarity towards Al Murray The Pub Landlord - not to be confused with Al Murray, whom Richard has known since he had wavy hair. I saw Al Murray supporting Harry Hill many years ago at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, when he used to come out and make the sound effects of various weapons using his mouth, which was a pretty neat act in itself. I first saw Al Murray The Pub Landlord supporting Harry Hill too, at a London Theatre, since which the character has grown and grown and in many ways taken on a life of its own. The bits I have seen of this act over the years on stage and on telly confirm that Al Murray is a skilled performer, good on his feet and the proud owner of one of those characters who catches on a big, mainstream, ITV1 kind of way. That few people bothered to watch Al Murray's recent sketch show just proves how inseparable he has become from the character of Al Murray The Pub Landlord.

Richard and I travelled East on public transport. Richard had his Hitler moustache on. I observed other travellers and very few seemed even to notice that they had a potential beerhall agitator in their midst. There was something quite apt about being with a man pretending to be one of the most right wing people in 20th Century history as we travelled towards a convention of either right wing people, or non-right-wing people who think a left wing man pretending to be right wing is funny. It would be offensive to suggest that the right wing people in the audience are stupid, and that they actually think the things Al Murray The Pub Landlord says about national identity and sexual politics and foreigners are the things that Al Murray thinks. I'm sure pretty much everybody knows he is a fictional character. He is a pub landlord with his own chat show on ITV1, for a start, which is clearly a fictional conceit. But that doesn't mean that the non-stupid right-wing people don't agree with many things the fictional Pub Landlord says. This makes for a very interesting night of comedy. (OK, let's go mad and imagine that there are people not clever enough to know that Al Murray The Pub Landlord is a fictional character: we must never tell them the truth and ruin their lives.)

On reaching our seats in Block A1, Richard and I quickly found ourselves playing along with the conceit of the live show, waving our little supplied Union Jacks in unison with the 13,998 other people in the O2. (Mine broke, I was waving it so hard.) Part of the appeal of a massive stand-up gig is the unity of a large audience, the reassuring knowledge that thousands of other people are laughing at the same joke as you. Listen! That's the sound of your laugh, multiplied thousands of times, resounding round a big barn! Al Murray is very good at insulting people on the front row of his gigs while keeping them onside - this, of course, being a pact between performer and fan: I will mock you in front of thousands of other people and your embarrassed face will be projected onto giant screens so that even people at the back can see it and laugh at it, but it will be done for comedic effect; it's nothing personal. The first half of the two-hour show (no support act) comprised mostly Al Murray The Pub Landlord gathering information on about a dozen paying customers, and skilfully linking this information together, while storing it for later callbacks. It's not a new trick in comedy, but done well, it is hugely satisfying.

The second half had more content in it, more written material, and this became slightly boring after a while, unless I was just tired. The long mime about a man bringing a lady to orgasm using his hand was very clever, and quite daring. However, the long section during which Al Murray The Pub Landlord showed photos of famous people he considered "lucky" (including Greg Rusedski, who was sitting in the row behind us and clearly enjoyed the joke*) dragged a bit, and when he just showed pictures of himself posing with guests from his ITV1 chat show, the fiction of the show and the character were stretched to breaking point. The encore, which was a singalong and involved an embarrassed conga line, was quite poor, I thought. But having watched one man hold the crowd for two hours, it seemed churlish to criticise. Aside from some beer pumps, a prop gun that was used to fire crisps once and the screen with the photos on, Al Murray had entertained 14,000 people using just his voice and his physical presence. This is not to be sniffed at.

There was one uncomfortable moment for woolly liberals, when, as part of a longer routine, Al Murray The Pub Landlord impersonated an Indian person at the other end of the line in a call-centre: this got a massive cheer from the audience. Some of them were cheering Al Murray The Pub Landlord for cleverly observing that some call centres are in India, and some of them were cheering Al Murray The Pub Landlord for insinuating that being Indian was either inherently funny or inherently bad. Because the brief impersonation of an Indian was not commented upon, or contextualised, or turned on its head to make comedy from our preconceptions, it just acted as a Pavlovian cue for recognition laughter, and recognition cheering. The man dressed as Hitler next to me did not cheer, and nor did I. There was actually nothing to cheer, when you thought about it, which I did, and some people did not.

I was glad to have seen this concert for free, as a guest of Avalon, as I don't think I would have chosen to go and see Al Murray The Pub Landlord, and I would be one experience poorer. I was also glad to see the inside of the O2 for free, as I have been resisting its ubiquitous charms. It is actually a really well-run, well-staffed venue, with excellent digital sound (the critic Ben Thompson explained it to me during the interval), and it's a piece of cake to get to by rail. On the Tube carriage we were on, there was a group of young men who were almost literally communicating with each other using grunts and noises. We agreed it would have been funny if they had confounded our lazy preconceptions and not got off at the O2 tube stop. But they did get off there, and carried on making noises at each other. Beautiful people, beautiful British people.

It was fun to be stewarded up in lifts and along secret corridors to the VIP bar before and after, where I was pleased to bump into Harry Hill (or Matt, as I know him - I have known him since he had hair), Ben Miller, Danielle Ward, Robert Ross the tireless chronicler of old British comedy (currently working on a Sid James biography) and Giles Coren, who did not call me or anybody else a "cunt" and impressed me by using his restaurant critic instincts and sensing lamb-based canapes at 100 paces. (Richard introduced me to Marc Bannerman, too, which was very exciting as I used to really like him on EastEnders, even though he left the programme just as I was starting to write for it.)

* Jon Culshaw was in the row in front of us, and Jim Rosenthal the sports presenter in the row behind us. It was like an audience with Al Murray The Pub Landlord.

In the 62nd Collings & Herrin podcast, one of the most boring we have ever recorded which means it will probably be the most popular, we take just about every ideological position under the sun on such complex issues as Gurkha justice, Nazism, bra size, MPs' expenses, the British position in India, the possibly fictional "ugly" man with pitted skin and Hugh Cornwell's hairstyle suddenly accused of having something to do with the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, the futuristic nature of an information carrier called "a disc", the wisdom or otherwise of using a cartoon of a keyboard key for the word "by" in byline credits in the Daily Mirror (a subject that only really animates one of us - guess which one?), and the magical "optical illusion" of glass between a child and a tiger in a zoo.

Thanks to Robin Ince for pointing out that, via the miracle of that BBC library shot of "some books" and the spine of Heavens Knows I'm Miserable Now, my face was on Newsnight last night, as Jeremy Paxman dolefully introduced an item about electronic reading devices and the threat they pose to the printed book.



Ha ha, look, my blurry face is right above Paxo's. And heaven knows he looks miserable now.



In further news news, I was invited onto the Today programme this morning on Radio 4, to talk about some new action figures, but after a game of phone tag with the researcher, after which I disappeared into a screening of Angels & Demons, we never quite worked it out. Still, I was on Newsnight. Ha ha, library shot. Geddit?!

OK, the prospect of a swine flu pandemic has been with us for almost two weeks. Last week was the media epicentre, during which the TV and newspapers whipped a potential health risk into a panic. Without getting into the intricacies of virology - because, hey, I'm not an expert on such matters and wouldn't wish to get out of my depth - these are my thoughts on what just happened. They are merely my thoughts. This is not a newspaper article, but a blog entry, written mostly off the top of my head and not researched, and intended as a personal reflection upon the way the media dealt with the story, which is what interests me.

Swine flu (whose name itself caused some head-scratching but you know which flu I'm talking about) was first reported on April 21, when the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that what was initially thought to be "late season influenza" in Mexico was actually be a new strain of H1N1. Since, as I understand it, this is a mutation of four other strains of flu, and that the World Health Organisation haven't even confirmed that it actually originated from pigs or one of the "manure lagoons" reported in the papers, we don't even know if it jumped from pigs to humans, or whether or not it was caused by intensive farming in Mexico. This is a pity, as it would have been fun to say that the disease spread and thus presented a potential global threat because we can fly, and pigs can't.

The beginning of the week saw the British media in full panic mode, with particular honours going to the Express, the red-tops (who found that "pig flu" took up less letters than "swine flu") and - from where I was sitting - the stupid free London papers, one of which, The London Paper, ran with the comforting headline: TUBE ALERT AS SWINE FLU 'ALREADY IN CITY', deliberately and specifically targeting the Tube travellers who pick up the useless fucking rag on the way home. Know your audience. And treat them with contempt.

The TV news was no better, and I include the BBC, filling the screen with maps and graphs and repeated footage of people in Mexico City in facemasks, and filling our heads with numbers and projections. (I came to admire chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson, who kept a cool head, and told Jon Snow that he hoped Glastonbury wouldn't be at risk as he was a big Springsteen fan.) There exists a constant and very real risk of a mutated strain of flu spreading through the population at some stage, mostly thanks to the mobility of humankind, but the possibility that THIS WASN'T THE BIG ONE was not allowed to get in the way of a good scare story. Whatever your views on risk management, it seems that the British media runs on a macabre brand of wishful thinking. Be careful what you wish for.

I have been following the pandemic online and in the papers (and counting the facemasks on public transport - four), and for me, the first symptom of good sense came when the Gurkha story pushed sensational speculation about a global plague off the front covers of the Times and the Telegraph on Thursday. The Guardian have been fairly sensible, too, with columnist Simon Jenkins breaking ranks and voicing the skepticism felt by many of us, and Ben Goldacre advising caution and arguing that we just don't know. Which we don't. Once again, our news has been about what might happen rather than what is happening. The biggest risk, it seems, is that people in this country are so fed up with the news media and so distrustful of our politicians, that we automatically downgrade any alert - if the World Health Organisation says it's a five, we'll treat it as if it's a three. (Some will always panic-buy bread if they see an empty supermarket shelf on the news, but we've been stung so many times now, even this reactionary tendency is slower to grab the shopping bags.)

My instinct is to think: relatively poor country, intensive livestock farming, increase in tourism, fast spread of virus. I may be wrong. But with so many conflicting messages being flung at us from a media competing with itself for a headline, it's been difficult to know what's actually going on. If it really was going to be 28 Days Later, it would be the discrepancy between tabloid alarmism and official advice that killed us all. I'm sure I wasn't the only one to be amazed at how tricky it appeared to be for the authorities in this country to track down everybody who'd arrived here from Mexico once the nature of the flu had been confirmed. (It's almost a relief for those us who feel we live in a police state to know that we can still move about, coughing and sneezing and with pig's ears growing out of holes in our souvenir Sombreros, under the radar.) I felt very sorry for Iain and Dawn Askham, the honeymooning couple from Scotland, who were splashed across the cover of the London Evening Standard as if perhaps it was all their fault. (They're better now, by the way. Although the Sunday tabloids tried to whip something up out of the fact that Iain went to a Doves gig and was told by the hospital that treated him not to mention it. Fair enough - we don't want an avian flu panic too.)

On Saturday, with a grand total of no deaths from swine flu yet reported in Canada, the UK, Spain, Germany, New Zealand, Israel, France, Costa Rica, South Korea, Italy, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Austria, Denmark, or the Netherlands ... and only one in North America (a 23-month old Mexican child), Mexico revised its death toll from 176 to 101, and the tide seemed to turn. Certainly Sunday's Observer came out almost entirely swine-free, perhaps even defiantly so. (At the NME we once advertised an issue, with great irony, as a "Morrissey-free zone".) Not that 101 dead people isn't something to feel bad about, but if 75 Mexicans have come back from the dead, that has to be a good new story. (NB: I don't actually believe they have done this.)

When, at the height of the panic, our own newspapers were forced to lead on the first "onward transmission" in the UK to someone who hadn't been to Mexico - a friend of Iain and Dawn the hapless honeymooners who did go to Mexico - you knew they were in trouble. When the second one, and the first in England, was reported, the Director of Public Health for South-West England Dr Gabriel Scally told the BBC, disappointingly, "Like many of the other cases in the UK, it has been a relatively mild illness for him." No! That's no good!

The papers must have taken their ineffective blue masks off and breathed a sigh of relief when a photoshopped Madeleine McCann reared her pretty head again on Friday to save them from running headlines like MAN IN SCOTLAND STILL OFF WORK or WE COULD STILL ALL DIE, REALLY, SO PLEASE BUY THIS NEWSPAPER.

Of course, it could still happen. I do not gloat. I merely despair at the accelerated media age in which we live. Because I always think it's best to follow the money, I noted that shares in Roche, which manufactures Tamiflu, and GlaxoSmithKline, who make the less aggressively-marketed Relenza (both of which reduce the symptoms of flu, if taken within 48 hours of infection, but won't cure it or mitigate against it), went up this week. A lot of ineffective facemasks were bought too. The Mexican tourism industry took a big hit and airline shares went down, but it wasn't all bad news.

I expect Kimberly-Clark and other tissue manufacturers will see an upturn too. Those evil tissue companies!

You know how good I am at getting in with a new comedy at the ground floor, and then evangelising about it until people catch up? I've just discovered Arrested Development. It's as good as ... hmmmm, let me see, oh yes ... everybody in the world has been telling me for about three or four years. I won't go on. Just to let you know that, finally, I've started to watch a show that was cancelled in 2006. (Oddly enough, it was seeing Jason Bateman in a cameo role in Dodgeball last night that reminded me that I still haven't sat myself down in front of a box set - so thanks to Richard Herring, who has all three seasons.) I'm currently at Episode 9 of season one. God bless America.