Marketing Made Simple

I watched the BAFTA's. Meryl preening like the cat who got the cream, even after losing a shoe. I still think Su Pollard would have made a better Iron Lady. She'd have brought a real urgency to the role. Accurate impersonation is all very well, but how do we know that behind the scenes Thatcher wasn't going: 'Ooh 'eck Dennis, I've gone and abolished free school milk! They'll never let me be PM now!'?

Instead, Meryl gets her award, and Su's last gig - I am reliably informed - was turning the Christmas lights on in Malvern, yelling 'Hi de hi!' to a crowd of uncomprehending kids. If you'd seen her Lady Macbeth, you'd know what a terrible injustice that is.

Jeremy Vine was talking about spitting in the street, Enfield having outlawed it. A man rang in to say that vomiting on the streets was a far more serious health hazard, and that they should have people patrolling the streets to enforce a ban. I'm not sure how these 'vomit wardens' would actually stop people throwing up, which as far as I am aware is not a wholly voluntary affair. But it might be interesting to see them try.

The next day he was talking about David Cameron's crackdown on binge drinking. As a listener, I felt that what would really have improved the debate was if at least one of the participants had been drunk, perhaps violently so. It would have given the discussion much-needed balance.

Meanwhile, doctors have come up with a few suggestions re: organ donation. One is to keep brain-dead patients 'alive' indefinitely (with their permission, of course) so that they can fish out organs from them at their leisure. From a marketing point of view, this is something of a tough sell. They are calling it 'elective ventilation'. Hmm, not sure that name's going to pull the punters in. How about, just off the top of my head, 'organic farming'? People like that, don't they?

not being funny

The human brain was on Jeremy Vine. Apparently, scientists have found a way to make thoughts audible. You could hear the brain talking on the radio and the voice they had given it made it sound alarmingly like Scooby Doo. Scooby Doo drowning. They were getting it to repeat words, and I longed for them to make it say 'Shaggy' so that I could confirm this resemblance - 'Raggy?' - but no. And they weren't taking requests.

I went to see Stewart Lee, who was also talking about Scooby Doo because he said he had only seen two films recently - Archipelago (an art film 'about a middle-class family on a disappointing holiday') and Scooby Doo On Zombie Island, which he had had to watch with his son about 800 times. He did not say whether these films had anything in common, but, having already noted the promising geophysical 'synergy' in their titles, I'm sure that I can find something. Watch this space.

What I like about Lee is that, whereas most comedians are content with just getting a laugh, he is not afraid to demand more and better quality laughter from his audience. He identified sections of the audience that weren't performing well, and told them to 'up their game'. He was right to be concerned, if the person next to me was anything to go by. He laughed only once, and spent most of the second half asleep. But then he was young, and insufficiently embittered.

The other act I saw this week - although, strictly speaking I never did see him - was 'Brian the Cockney Sovereign' playing at the Green Man's Cockney Night. Somewhere at the other end of the pub he was belting out such East End classics as, er, When I'm Cleaning Windows and, um, Ring Of Fire. When I tried to imagine 'The Cockney Sovereign' all I got was some kind of grotesque Mighty Boosh-style character. Or, even more terrifying, something from Noel Fielding's new Luxury Comedy series. Very aptly named, this programme - well, apart from the 'comedy' bit anyway. 'Luxury' implies a degree of self-indulgence, which - or so the bits I have seen indicate - is not too far off the mark. Indeed, so relentlessly 'out there' is it that at first I wondered if Fielding, without his comedy partner to restrain him, had actively gone insane.

But perhaps - and Stewart Lee is something of a pioneer in this respect - the ultimate goal of comedy is to go beyond laughter. In which case, Fielding's show may yet be hailed as a classic - along with The Royal Bodyguard, of course.

Great Expectations

At work we continue the job of filleting old job bags, scanning the contents if necessary. It's a living, and gives us a great opportunity to learn how they did things in the old days. Lorraine happened upon a reference to 'recruitment bags'. What were they used for?, we wondered. 'Perhaps they put them over people's heads', I suggested. In those dark days (2005-6), the only model they had for blood marketing was the press gang.

Alternatively, maybe the recruitment bags were a lot bigger than I had initially suspected, and could accommodate several entire donors, who would then be dragged off for (as it was then known) 'squeezing'.

Someone in the department is 'stepping down', so there has been quite a lot of excitement as to who will replace them. Working on the theory that it is always the last person you suspect, I eventually settled on the spider plant on the filing cabinet next to my desk. You may think this silly, but there is such a thing as diversity, you know. The real question is not: 'Why would a pot plant be offered this managerial post?' but: 'Why would it NOT?'

But in the end it went to the person who I initially expected would, all things considered, get it. Which was unexpected.

Not as unexpected as the snow though. This was so massively over-hyped that I never thought it would actually arrive. Then I looked out on Sunday morning and white stuff had been dumped all over the landscape, as though by the authorities themselves as a way of saying: 'So there!' We said it would happen and now - behold! But the night before there had seemed something a little desperate about all the pre-snow coverage of 'amber alerts' and already-cancelled flights at Heathrow. I was particularly struck by the Channel 4 News reporter standing next to a gritter and rather wildly advising viewers to 'wrap pensioners in blankets'. She didn't actually say 'whether they like it or not', but the implication was there, I think. Well, it should keep them quiet until the thaw.

don't trust the sun

A headline in the Brentwood Recorder says that Amy Childs is 'less interesting than a pot plant'. They've done research apparently. Maybe this is why there is to be no second series of It's All About Amy. In its slot, an hour-long static shot of a geranium is expected to bring the viewers in.

Jeremy Vine was talking about brothers and sisters sharing the same bed. Listeners rang in to say that it never did them any harm; or that it did. A woman had to sleep with her four brothers - 'What position did you take?', asked Jeremy. Cheeky Jeremy seems to have been taking lessons from Chris Morris. After a soundbite of Peter Tatchell tackling Robert Mugabe, Jeremy asked Tatchell if what we were hearing was Mugabe's bodyguards 'pulling him off'. You could actually hear Tatchell do a double-take.

There is a feeling in the admin department that JV is inventing most of his stories just to wind people up. Nevertheless we continue to listen. Other things we refuse to endure, like the sun. In admin we are distinctly ambivalent about the sun, which comes in at a certain point in the afternoons and hits Lorraine in the face. At that point the blinds are firmly drawn, plunging us into premature night (or it would do, if we didn't have electric light). Last Friday, they were drawn twice because Lorraine misjudged the sun's whereabouts and opened them too soon. When they were opened the second time it had ceased to dazzle. 'It's gone behind the trees', Lorraine said, but she still didn't sound entirely reassured. Unable to see it from my seat, I requested that she keep us informed of the sun's activities. 'Let us know if it comes up again.'

Such a cosmic upheaval did not seem to be entirely out of the question, since that very afternoon a massive asteroid was due to narrowly-miss the Earth at about four. Steve Wright had joked about it. Which did not seem to provide a cast-iron guarantee that the world would not, in fact, end.

It didn't though.

Bees Blood Countdown

Lorraine said they now use bees to sniff out drugs. I was sceptical - 'What next? Trained mushrooms?' - but she saw it on The One Show, and you can't argue with that.

On the office radio Jeremy Vine was talking about a school where they encourage seven-year olds to massage each other. This got a lot of parents rather hot under the collar, and one came on to say that it was 'potentially opening a can of worms', perhaps my favourite use of this delightful phrase ever. However, by the time a caller defended her viewpoint (anti) by stressing that she worked in the sex industry - so definitely knew what she was talking about - you began to wonder if the discussion hadn't gone astray.

An urgent request came in from a hospital for a leaflet nobody had ever heard of called Will I Get The Right Blood? It does sound uncharacteristically pessimistic for one of our leaflets ('Will I get the right blood? I doubt it. You'll probably die.') But perhaps it belongs to an earlier era, when the service was not quite so customer-focussed, and produced such fondly-remembered information leaflets as It's Not Your Blood, It's Ours and How Are You Going To Stop Us Harvesting Your Organs?

The BBC Health News was saying that NHS staff are being encouraged to take every opportunity to promote healthy living. A spokesman said that this would not be annoying - it was just a matter of 'stating the obvious'. What, like 'You're fat'? Luckily I do not actually work for the NHS as such, but for what they call an 'Arm's Length Body', which means you get to keep the public at arm's length. I think.

Talking of insults, the BBC News website also revealed that someone came up with the word 'wanker' on Countdown. I mean, they submitted it as an answer, it wasn't just a bad reaction to the new presenter, Nick Hewer. Questionable words previously used on the show, we were told, include 'fart, bastards, and erection' - which is, coincidentally, the title of the new sitcom I'm working on for BBC3. A plot synopsis is available upon request.

King's Speech 2: The Tourette's Years

Davoid Cameroon suggested this week that the British film industry should concentrate on making 'commercially successful films' like The King's Speech. What a very clever idea. I'm surprised Hollywood haven't cottoned onto this one. Instead of just making any old shit in the hope that some of it will stick, they could just concentrate on the 'commercially successful' portion of their output.

And how shrewd of him to align himself with commercial success! Because, although I don't know if a survey has been done to prove this, I'm sure that most voters, if asked what films they like to see, would tend to display a preference for 'commercially successful' ones.

He also revealed that his favourite band was Band Of Horses, that notorious hit-making machine, while casting aspersions on Katy Perry and Bruno Mars, those tuneless avant garde wonders whose improvised squalls of jazz-noise are unlikely ever to trouble the charts, thank God.

So at least he's consistent.

End Of The World 2

Is there any point in worrying about the end of the world? I mean, last year (I seem to remember) began with omens of doom - birds falling out of the sky - and it's not like anything happened. Apart, anyway, from tsunamis, earthquakes, nuclear meltdowns, revolutions and riots. This year I heard something about scientists discovering 'a fish with no face and no brain'. Is a guest spot on TOWIE out of the question?

Gemma from TOWIE was on the show they are pleased to call That Sunday Night Show, surrounded by her hair, a massive construction that made her face look it belonged on a totem pole. Only when she spoke did you realise that she was human - all too human. Indeed, there was very little to distinguish her from a member of the public - a total non-professional who had somehow contrived to interpose herself between Ross Noble and Downton Abbey's Dan Stevens. Dan looked as horrified as if the kitchen maid had laid herself a place at Lord Grantham's table.

So maybe the world is going to end after all. Didn't it say in the Bible that the end of the world would 'come from the East'? Essex is in the East. Maybe TOWIE winning a BAFTA was another sign of the upcoming Apocalypse.

Watch this space.