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.

Southend And The Banana Of Doom

You can tell it's Christmas, even at work. No Jeremy Vine. Thus we are given the pleasing illusion that the world has stopped turning. Clearly things are continuing to happen, but the fact that nobody has to ring in and give us their wrong-headed opinions about them obviously means that they are of no importance.

People's opinions always seem to be skewed, either by their total ignorance of a subject, or by their inadequate knowledge of it. All they are good for, finally, is the odd choice phrase. A woman talking about a toddler who had attacked another toddler at a playgroup a few weeks ago actually felt it necessary to point out that someone could have lost an eye, but went on to suggest that there was no point in involving the police because 'it won't bring the eyeball back.' The eyeball nobody had even lost in the first place! Nice slogan though, for something.

The other reason we know it's Christmas at work is all the Christmas dinners. We had two in the Centre. First there was the centre buffet, largely an array of brown things, where one member of staff, discussing the spread, nearly caused a major incident by innocently referring to 'those little tarts' just as a couple of women from another department walked in. The fall-out from this is still reverberating through the building.

This was followed by the 'SitDownLunch', as the posters had it, making it all sound rather brutal. Which it was, in a way, but then what do you expect for a fiver? - a phrase used so often in regard to this meal that it ought to have added to the poster as a tagline.

My dinner on Christmas Day was a traditional Danish buffet at my sister-in-law's Danish ex-partner's pub. People just nodded politely when I tried to explain this, as if I was being deliberately perverse. When I think about it, it does seem to tie in suspiciously well with the obscurity of my taste in films, once commemorated on Facebook as 'anything that's four hours long, black and white, and featuring a dead whale'. Although it was in colour, this meal probably was about four hours long, and even if there was no dead whale on offer, there was plenty of pickled herring and smoked eel. Danish kept breaking out around me and I kept looking, in vain, for subtitles.

On New Year's Eve I unexpectedly found myself in Southend, with Dave, and Claire, and Helen. Helen is Dave's old friend and Claire is his new one - and more than just a friend, is what I'm hearing. She doesn't have a TV, but seems to get by. It was not until she came to Brentwood for the first time on Friday that she first became acquainted with the concept of 'vajazzling'. So this has been a baptism of fire.

And Southend-on-Sea too! The home of disappointment, as it doesn't say on the signs - for a start, it isn't even on the sea, it's on a muddy estuary. It does have the world's longest pier though. We found ourselves on it. You can 'adopt a plank' if that takes your fancy. There was a board or boards commemorating these transactions with brief messages such as: 'Grandpa, caring, generous, fun-loving (2 planks)'. Another plank had been assigned to 'the Westcliff Rainbow Unit'. What do they do?, I wonder. Is it like The Sweeney? The phone rings: 'There's been a rainbow!' And off they go, tyres screeching, to hunt it down.

We travelled to the end of the pier on the train. It was slow, grim and unrelenting, with grey clouds lowering on either side - like being in a film by Bela Tarr*. On getting there, however, we were greeted by three seals - well not actually greeted, Southend's tourist industry isn't that sophisticated yet - but there they were, in the water, splashing about. There were also lots of funny little birds apparently called 'ternstones' (or so an old man told Dave). A 'cultural centre' is being built on the pier at some point, but the RSPB have insisted that they build it quietly, so as not to disturb these birds. Maybe they'll have to glue it together.

New Year's Eve I was round Justin and Bobs', with Nicky. It was basically just Allan Carr and a cheeseboard. And wine, obviously. On the aforementioned light entertainer's show, we got to see 'Mary the Mystic Monkey' unhesitatingly select the banana that said that the world would end as promised on 21st December 2012, the day after my birthday. So at least this will be one year when my birthday won't be overshadowed by Christmas.

*Tarr directed Werckmeister Harmonies, the original dead whale epic.