Embedded in my boxroom

“I don’t want her first words to be ‘big metal bellend’!” (Hello!)

Bonjour! It’s the start (just about) of a new year, and time for this oaty barge to fly once more, as this fetid writer returns with prose anew. Yup, the big wheezy ones are back for a new string – though maybe, to spare my own mind and yours, this year they’ll be broken up with more mini-gubbins that’ll hopefully give this place a more inviting feel; I recognise that, thus far, this purple babble has been in parts too grey and miserable. But maybe that’s who I’ve become: I had, in my past and recent years, genuinely wanted to be a nice guy, but life it seems didn’t have that plan for me. Maybe my gloomy feelings over recent weeks have been further overcast by the wintry conditions – lengthy periods of darkness and wet, cold weather conditions have had a horrendous impact on my mind and body. There have been moments of brightness amid the gloom, as you’ll hear over the course of the next hours, but I’m certainly at a low ebb, at least physically, and as ever in these situations I’m worried I’m nearer the end of life than the start. But then maybe getting out here the worries and issues I’ve had playing on my brain since before Christmas would be therapy enough to keep my spirits going for a shade longer. So here goes: another big fatty sandwich of problems, solutions and observations that only a very few of the hardiest souls could ever tackle in one session. Just be assured it’s as difficult to write, if not more so, than it is to read. Seriously, these buckers take ages. RAT BRIDGE!

So yes, my mind and body are in a ridiculous state. If you’ve been following these vague diatribes for a while, you’ll know that my insides are, in honesty, a bit shoddy, and all the internal and external stress and pain I’m in is also having a huge impact on my brain. I’m starting to become very forgetful, and that’s becoming a great risk to the health and safety not just of myself but also others as a result. For instance, when preparing dinner for myself and my brother I’ll sometimes have a short-term mind-blackout and forget whereabouts in the microwave sequence I am, and have to think back to determine as best I can what the remaining required time is. Thus far, I’ve always been able to get it right, but there is a danger something will get overcooked or undercooked if I don’t get my chamber in order. I’ve been forgetting where I put stuff almost as long of my life as my hands have had the wherewithal to grip at all, but it’s getting worse by the week (witness phone-case-gate), and my brief time online is rarely complete without my forgetting one of the things I’d taken to the web to do in the first place, only realising the error when it was too late and having to return to the net later to pick up on it. (The stress of having a cheap clonky phone which can’t do t’internet properly adds to the strain, too, as its stumpy access only increases the pressure on those limited periods when I do have access to the full web). Most catastrophically, I didn’t close the front door properly when the family went out for Christmas lunch, leaving us at risk of home invasion (not that we’ve anything worth taking, but still a concern) – luckily a neighbour was at home and able to keep watch over our premises until our return. I should point out that on Christmas Day and the surrounding days my judgement and brain activity was clouded further than normal by fairly severe illness; due to being very badly clogged up and unwell over the festive era, I’d decided I wanted to take things slowly and calmly, not that any of my sticking-to-their-own-schedule family members chose to listen, and in order to maximise my rest and recuperation time I delayed my departure from the house that special day until the last minute, meaning I was rushing to catch up to the others on their departure, hence not taking my usual care over the door. I’m sure I closed it – it would be very unlike me to leave the barn wide open, but perhaps the latch didn’t catch properly and in my haste to keep up when I wasn’t at full health I omitted to double-check; still, whilst no actual harm befell us as a result of my blooper, it’s a wake-up call that my mind and body problems need to be looked at with something approaching urgency. I’m always worried that one day I’ll be one of those addled folks who is deemed a danger to myself and/or others around me and that this will result in either a massive disaster or my loss of liberty, holed up in a care-home (which I fear after the Panorama-led probes into abusive staff) or locked in a prison for public health and safety. But maybe that’s my long-term civic duty – to take myself out of circulation to make the world better for others by my absence. As I’ve said pretty much every year, Britain would be better off without me.

My ill-feeling over Christmas meant it couldn’t be the feast it should have been – despite our stocking-up on treats and meals ahead of the season, I was refusing, or at least avoiding, much food for the bulk of the break, leading to quite a lot of food going to waste, or at least to my human-dustbin brother – I have to take at least partial personal responsibility for the recent reports that half the world’s food production goes to waste – and my body could barely cope with that food I did eat (though I did keep the flagship turkey ‘n veg meal of the 25th down without too much fuss, thankfully). I’m loath to discuss this next factoid on here for fear of coming across as an element of the base and gutter press, but it’s true to say that at one point over the Christmas week the illness moved south and I became quite badly constipated; however, rather than seek professional medical treatment I just picked up some cheap tablets from Savers or somewhere, and that seemed to solve the problem well enough; readers with long memories will, though, know my guts and bowels have been in hideous shape for some years now, my gassy and distended stomach (from a years-long combination of cheap food and lack of athletic ability) putting huge pressure on other parts of my innards, and breathing has never been easy for me, to the extent that even tasks which would be simple for some risk leaving me puffed-out. Then, as 2013 dawned, I had a new problem emerge, my spine now the cause, as it became suddenly quite difficult for me to stand up (particularly after long seated periods) or walk, at times reduced to hobbling. It’s possible that decades of slouching in the seats at home, in job waiting rooms and on rickety buses has coiled my backbone into an unwelcome curve which is potentially adding to the pressure at the base of my body; I won’t know the full damage, though, unless I go for some kind of scan. And we all know that ain’t gonna happen, unless I can convince Channel 4 or someone to pay for the ruddy thing. I’m decaying and falling apart – some days I can barely breathe, and occasional heart pain should be heeded as a warning – and with no job and nothing to live for there seems little worth in investing fiscally to prolong my existence – I may as well just waddle on in the usual manner until the day, presumably coming relatively soon, that any form of movement becomes impossible. I can’t, however, afford to stop dragging myself through the usual grind just yet to get the hospital rest I need – there is little respite from the duties I’m committed to in family and by government. My festive illness, incidentally, saw me squander the little sliver of time which should have been an opportunity for me to get a titbit of rest and relaxation from my standard activities after a difficult and troubling 2012, the festive season being the only time of the year that my usual stresses – such as shopping runs and job hunts – take a back-burner, most recruiters nipping off on holiday for at least a few days over the festive fortnight; during the time I should and could have used for rest, I could in fact hardly sleep at all due to the ill feeling. What a waste. And now, having not yet had time to fully recover from 2012, I’m expected to throw myself into a 2013 which could well be just as harsh as the prior year was, or even worse – one thing I’m certainly not blessed with is foresight. Hell, I barely have eyesight!

My spirits following on from the seasonal period weren’t helped much, it must be said, by the continued media focus on gruesome, glossy celebs during the dire opening weeks of 2013. The brainless, fame-hungry wannabe ‘actress’ Helen Flanagan continued her pointless, post-I’m A Celeb attempt to remain relevant with a presumably-tacky photoshoot (I have to presume, as I didn’t sully my shopping-bag by buying it) for the hopeless paper-waste that is FHM. When will this girl take the hint? She doesn’t need adulation, she needs a bloody therapist! Anyway, hopefully soon Flanagan will realise that now The Bill, Wild at Heart and Heartbeat are gone, there’s not many opportunities out there for former soap starlets – if other young ex-soapies (Roxanne Pallett being the one most often cited) are anything to go by, a circuit of ever-decreasing-in-stature reality shows, tacky and lurid straight-to-DVD horror flicks, and poorly-funded provincial pantos are what awaits Helen on the slow, inevitable march toward the ‘Where Are They Now?’ columns. Meanwhile, also sullying a whole rack of magazines with her seeming omnipresence was Big Brother-winning Bristolian blonde Josie Gibson. Now I’ve got a little more time for Gibson than for Flanagan, if only because your actual Josie is, like me, a Crystal Maze fan. But then, one dry week at the turn of the year, with journos not yet back to post-Christmas productivity levels, and with Gibson herself having a new fitness DVD to flog, she managed to wangle herself a cover appearance on pretty much all the womens’ mags in the same week. This is not an exaggeration. This made walking through the magazine aisle of Morrisons feel like something out of a horror film – like all the potential mag cover stars had been sucked into a black hole leaving only Helen and Josie in this plane of existence. If she’d been on one cover I wouldn’t have found it remarkable, but the Josie shots were approaching double figures. Seeing the now-slender Bristolian glaring down at me dozens of times over, when I was already riddled with the shakes from (a) shopping in general and (b) having seen Flanagan on a mag at all, reminded me why I’ve turned my back on magazines. Hopefully I won’t have to read many of the ruddy things this year. I’ve already talked myself out of buying lady-weekly Now, despite the presence, for the moment at least, of a weekly column by Katie Piper, on the grounds that the magazine as a whole is not for the likes of me. Incidentally, I’ve decided to start mentioning Katie by name again, as that whole ‘Unnamed Woman’ business I’ve been running for the last few blogs has been getting to be a real drag, and in any case it’s a bit of an insult to this fine lady. Although I am concerned about the number of Piper-based web-searches I’ll get if I keep using her name (see my post “Slattern on t’internet” for some of the worst previous arrivals…) Additionally, with a new run of Celebrity Big Brother sullying Britain’s screens during January 2013, many of the cheapo mags and papers – particularly the Desmond organs – have been hawking CBB fameseekers, most volubly (going by press coverage) The Hills-derived telly-despoilers ‘Speidi’, who were at the centre of a row after they were reintroduced to the house after a time away (shades of series five’s horrendous ‘fight night’, the evening I decided I hated BB forever), and gloryhunting glamourpuss Lacey Banghard (alarmingly, that’s her real name) – it’s telling that in the Channel 4 era, those who worked as glamour models weren’t famous enough to appear in Celebrity BB (the likes of Sophie Reade having to slum it in the civilian version, and then-model Chantelle Houghton’s presence in a celeb run being as a non-celeb stunt) but since the move to C5, booby wannabes are now big enough names to make the ‘star’ version. The fact even the dire, vile Big Brother isn’t as ‘quality’ as it once was shows how far celeb culture itself has sunk. And yet we still mop it up in our droves. Sick.

Someone else who’s been on the front of magazines a lot recently is the previously-mentioned-here Kim Kardashian, and since my last pronouncement she’s blindsided us with the news that she’s pregnant with rapper Kanye West’s baby. Whilst not greeted quite with the sort of media trumpeting that surrounded the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s expectancy, this announcement (which the stars insist isn’t just for publicity, albeit in interviews which are themselves good publicity) did cue walls of mag articles about whether Kim’s also-famous sisters are jealous, about whether she’ll marry Kanye while pregnant or when she’s regained her post-baby figure, and whether her prior husband, from whom Kim is separated, is dragging his heels over a divorce deliberately to derail her happiness. Bloody hell. It’s all a little overweening for the childless, non-4Music-watching (their fault for not putting on the shows and tracks I like) likes of me. I wish Ms. Kardashian nothing but the best with her pregnancy – I know baby news, even for celebrities, does not always end happily – but the media noise around the Kim-Kanye-kid is perhaps leading me to side with one online wag whose social-media gag I spotted on Failblog, suggesting award-show-impeded country-belle Taylor Swift burst into the delivery room and interrupt Kim’s contractions with “I’m happy for you, I’ma let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the cutest babies of all time!”. Class. Of course, pretty Ms. Swift has herself been in the media spotlight thanks to her brief dalliance with Britain’s feted one-man celeb-shagging machine, One Direction’s Harry ‘Swordsman’ Styles. The apparent hookup did furrow brows in the celeb-goss circles, but it fizzled out quickly, allowing the meeja to play their caustic “why did they break up?” game, the favoured gambit among some sources apparently being that Taylor didn’t want to corrupt her wholesome image by shacking up with our wild lad and inviting much clucking and tutting from the nay-sayers. Still, I should maybe venture that Swifty will be awarded bonus points (from any points-based scheme I ever end up running) if she ended the relationship by saying “we are never ever getting back together”, and I could at least console young Taylor by assuring her that, whilst I’m happy for her to finish the relationship, Caroline Flack had one of the best Harry Styles breakups of all time. (See, I can do ’em too!) Also in the love pages, “ITV2 hunk Mark Wright”, whatever that is, seems to be shacked up fairly happily with actually-quite-pretty (and thankfully non-Flanagan) Corrie star Michelle Keegan, though whether this relationship leads to long-term family life or simply to a cheap post-Katie-and-Peter ITV2 fly-on-the-wall series it’s too early to tell. They are, though, apparently trying to keep the relationship out of the spotlight, lest the pressure of publicity proves too heavy a burden on their rapidly-forged love. The fact I read about this ‘low-key’ relationship on Digital Spy suggests their attempts to fly under the showbiz radar haven’t quite worked out, though. And yes, I know treating Digital Spy as journalism is like calling the stuff McDonalds pumps out ‘food’, but it’s one of the few sites that works on my muggy mobile. Still: I wish the lovebirds well enough.

Celeb hook-ups, though, are often too fast-burning, too toxic and acrimonious, or simply too damn silly to muster comment from me; my preferred angle on relationships can be found elsewhere, in a Channel 4 series I’m pleased to see get a second run-out. I’ve probably mentioned The Undateables before, when its first run sprang from the traps last spring, and now it’s back for another, longer, series. In the first of the five new episodes was one lady who certainly proved captivating – not just to me but to quite a lot of fellas, it seems! This wonderful lass is a rather gorgeous and sweet blonde in her early 20s named Sarah Scott, whose ‘undateable’ angle was that she now suffered from aphasia having had a stroke aged just 18, and had struggled to find long-term love in the years following the breakup of her prior relationship. Sarah stated on the show that she wanted someone to cuddle with, and I’d certainly love to give her a nice warm hug – she’s exactly the sort of girl I’d go for, a naturally beautiful lady who came across as very warm, charming and endearing. In the series’ prepublicity Sarah had said she was looking for someone ‘tall, dark and handsome’ (the classic combo in a lady’s armoury, the partnership equivalent of the LBD) and ironically I almost fit the bill here – I was tall, over six foot before my backbone started caving in on itself, and I’ve got fairly dark hair (albeit too much of it and in too many places, but still…), the only stumbling block in this particular ointment being I’m not entirely handsome – as you’ll know from seeing my photos online, I look like I’ve recently dragged my face across a wet boulevard, and the internal problems documented above could make a woman two streets away retch, meaning no right-thinking lass would get close to me for more than the government-mandated minimum number of seconds. Anyway, as it transpires I didn’t have to put myself up for ridicule and offer to partner young Sarah as she in fact did make a date during the course of the show, with a fella from the finance industry (and so already better with money than I). As it turned out, when this fella’s profile was briefly flashed up on screen, a batch of eagle-eyed Twitter folk spotted that the chap in question was from, and you couldn’t make it up, Bexleyheath! So it looks like my chances with Sarah may be over before they ever really began – were this televised partnering-up to go sour, Sarah presumably won’t want to hang around this region much, for fear of the awkwardness that bumping into an ex apparently brings those of us lucky (or unlucky) enough to have been blessed (or cursed) with multiple partners in our litany. I hope Sarah’s love life does go well, though, she deserves it, she’s lovely, and whatever happens her strikerate couldn’t be worse than mine, which is a relief to her I’m sure: anyroad, these supposed ‘undateables’ certainly have a better chance of finding lasting love than a bloated sod like me ever does. Taking part in the programme itself, and the subsequent warm and pleasant reception she recieved, appear to have been very positive for Sarah’s confidence, and that can only be a good thing – people have on the whole been very lovely to Sarah, and this encouragement is something which I’m sure would make a beautiful lady feel good. Sarah, as it happens, is now on Twitter – @SarahBScotty if you need – so you can keep tabs on her romantic, social and personal developments without having to wait for me or Channel 4 to update you. (For instance, she remains on good terms, at time of writing, with the chap she was seen partnered with on telly, should you be keeping score). Of course, if you want to tell Sarah she’s cute, you also now have the opportunity to, so make sure you get in there before I can! Though maybe I’ll find my own Sarah-equivalent, someone to hold onto should my life ever be in a sturdy enough position to support a relationship; much like Sarah, I just want someone nice to hug with. Maybe there’s someone awesome out there who’s looking for me – I just have to retain hope. And one thing The Undateables proves is that there are still good, decent people in the world.

Yes, even aside from Sarah, there’s certainly been some quality people taking part – in the second show of the new run, the adventurous (more so than I) in spite of her dwarfism Sam, and the sufferer of an inherited condition, and my fellow retail-droid, Steve both expressed a liking for good music – or at least, for music which chimed with my own tastes, what with me being a bit of a rock/indie fan myself and that. (Dunno why C4 didn’t punt on putting them together to be honest, they could’ve bonded over their shared admiration of guitary choons!) There’s more Undateables every Tuesday night ’til February 4th, and the episodes transmitted thus-far are on 4oD if you’ve yet to view them. It’s also good to see C4 continuing to put ‘disabled’/’disadvantaged’ people on a fair and equal platform, following on from the warm response to last year’s Paralympics coverage, which also spawned Adam Hills’ lighthearted live magazine The Last Leg, which proved so popular that it’s being revived for a run of new editions outside of its original Paralympic bubble. It’s also been ace to hear Francesca Martinez appear in several editions of Radio 4’s The News Quiz in recent times. The comic and actress – who’s also appeared on Russell Howard’s Good News Extra, amongst other things – is not letting her condition (cerebral palsy, as it goes) hold her back from unleashing her snappy wit, and is more than willing to take cheerful lilt at society – and her own condition – as she showcases her sharp take on the world. Let’s hope we hear a lot more from this talented lady in 2013. Also impressing me of late have been the contestants on the front-runner so far for my favourite gameshow of the year. No, not Loaded TV’s glamour-girl panel-game Babe IQ (though that is quite fun, and good to see it being done like a proper gameshow, complete with catchphrases and audience participation – babe balls ready to fly?) The show I’m actually trying to go on about is BBC One’s new Saturday night talent-quiz thing Britain’s Brightest. With Saturday telly in the last few years having been dominated by cheap clipshows and overweening talent formats, Britain’s Brightest is one of the best things that’s been on Saturday night TV in ages. It’s sort of like the Channel 5 series with Zoe Ball and Jamie Theakston a few years back – ranking people’s smarts via a series of flashy puzzles and challenges – and the calibre of contestants has been quite impressive (some of the games have been pretty fly, too – the ‘solve the puzzles to exit the room’ game played on 19 January was proper Crystal Maze stuff). OK, the scoring system’s more baffling than those of The Krypton Factor and QI combined, but that’s by the by. It’s good that after years of shows where the point has been to see which of a bunch of telegenic warbling wannabes has the best chance of keeping Simon Cowell on the front of the papers, there’s finally a primetime show which rates contestants on their substance. It’s also been good to see a Saturday night show which sees women as equals after years of odiously sexist weekend shows. The first week’s winner, who will return to your screens in the grand final, was a gorgeous (and, sadly for me, married) teacher, who has hopefully proved to those girls who, when polled a few years back, said they’d rather be glamour models than teachers, that you can be both beautiful and intelligent, whilst show two had an all-female top-three (something which the gruesome Total Wipeout only ever managed once, in its final series – even the very short-lived 101 Ways To Leave a Gameshow achieved this before Wipeout did). It’s nice to see strong, intelligent women being given fair and equal chance to showcase their talent and flair. Indeed, with week one’s winner being named Clair, one of week two’s top performers being called Clare, and Clare Balding being the host of the show, we now have a good idea what Britain’s most intelligent name is! (Although if they’re that intelligent, how come none of them can spell Claire? B’dum-tssh!)

It’s good to see women being represented fairly, but we must be sure to avoid oversteering towards positive discrimination – Dave ran a stack of episodes of the US Wipeout over Christmas and New Year, and one of the episodes I caught due to not much else being on was a special featuring solely female contestants. Whilst that recognised the disadvantage women were at in the regular non-divided episodes (Wipeout being an inherently macho format that favours men, if the results table from the UK version were to be believed), surely patting ladies on the head and saying they can have their very own special episode is just as demeaning, if not more so? Anyway, it was a gambit the UK edition thankfully didn’t live to repeat. I don’t have any particular axe to grind against Wipeout contestants, male or female, UK- or US-based, bar to question their wisdom in going on the show in the first place, though as I’ve said previously many times, if that “no bird’s gonna beat me” bloke from the first UK run was to die of something horrible, I wouldn’t grieve. However, I disliked Total Wipeout as a programme, and was glad to see the back of it – until I saw what the BBC, Endemol and Richard Hammond have replaced it with. I’ve never really liked prank shows, from Beadle right through to Punk’d, though used to watch Beadle’s About under a form of self-duress as it was shown back when there weren’t enough channels around to have an alternative choice. Now, though, Hammond’s new Saturday night show Secret Service has launched, and as though to punish me, it’s a sub-Beadle (even with many of the same or similar stunts Jeremy used, in fact) wind-up gig. I don’t like shows that mess with people’s lives, and on seeing the ‘here’s what’s coming up’ sequence for the 19 January episode – featuring a would-be wedding planner being confronted with a parade of on-the-job disasters, and someone’s presumably-carefully-tended garden being destroyed in some kind of Time Team-type prank – I knew what I had to do, and went up and sat on the bog moping ’til it was all over and I could watch Britan’s Brightest without having to seethe at the dumbness which preceded it. Screening Hammond’s show directly before Britain’s Brightest has really messed up my Saturday night, given my intention is to watch one and avoid the other, and it’s also strange for the Beeb to pair a really stupid show and a quite intelligent show – surely nobody’ll watch both! Despite my misgivings, I do have to give Secret Service one nod though, for hiring the talented and beautiful US-born/London-resident actress Kelly-Anne Lyons (previously of Dick & Dom’s Funny Business). To be honest, Beeb, you could dump Hammond and the pranks and just give us 45 minutes of Lyons mucking about on-air, that’d be a much better use of British airtime. And, for once, other male viewers would probably agree with me on that (even if a three-quarter-hour of solid Kelly-Anne does pose a similar danger to my and others’ heart-health that The Vault’s recent similar-length block solely of Pixie Lott videos threatened to). Regardless of whether or not such a Lyons-led broadcast comes to pass, Britain’s Brightest is sadly unlikely to get recommissioned – between the Beeb’s lineup (also including sub-You’ve Been Framed pet-clips showcase Animal Antics) and ITV’s much-derided Tom Daley-centric celebs-in-a-pool barrel-scraper Splash! and the bafflingly-popular Take Me Out, commentators and review-wranglers have been sticking the boot fairly firmly into the current weekend output of our formerly-flagship channels, with few kind words for either sequence, and I must admit the quality of weekend shows generally has taken a dive over recent years. I remember the days of You Bet!, Blind Date… heck, I even miss Gladiators. It used to be, even after my household went digital, that we’d still return to the BBC and/or ITV for fully-funded glossy prime weekend evening output. At the tail-end of last year, so desperate was I to avoid the likes of X Factor and Strictly that I chose to watch a repeat run of Bob’s Full House on Challenge. Oh, how the pendulum has swung. Sadly, it seems not enough people joined me at the Monkhouse master card, and with low ratings Challenge are reluctant to buy in further series, though at least they’re replacing it on Saturdays with another show I actually like, the more recent Friends Like These, and not something else I’d have to flee from.

The CITV Channel, fairly surprisingly, also gave me an opportunity to dip into my childhood with its recent Old Skool Weekend. Created as a means of celebrating thirty years since the Children’s ITV block on the ITV network began (whilst this afternoon block is now long-gone, dumped not long after the channel’s launch, it was the genesis for networked CITV in its current form), the weekend dipped into the archive to flush out a raft of vintage shows. Whilst there were some notable omissions – where the hell was Roger and the Rottentrolls, for instance? – there was plenty to be excited about, and I absolutely lapped it up, keeping my excursions away from the telly to an absolute minimum for the whole two days. Many of the shows I’d loved as a kid were represented, from Puddle Lane to Dangermouse to Woof! to Spatz, and recent classics rubbed shoulders with long-hidden gems. One wonders what today’s kids made of the sort of genius we used to get; certainly, a fair few of the shows featured would probably stand full repeat runs mixed in alongside the new stuff in the general CITV schedule – it’s fair to say kids seeing these shows for the first time would probably be wondering what other stories these characters have to tell. Or perhaps ITV3, well-known for mining the back-catalogue of British drama, could be pressed into service for full reruns of the likes of Press Gang or Children’s Ward, well-loved and fondly-remembered dramas which are otherwise gathering dust on the ITV shelves. It should be said that some of the shows and stars featured in this ‘retro’ weekend still appear on CITV fairly regularly, with Art Attack and Sooty just as familiar to today’s CITV generation as they were back in the era of the earlier editions dug out for the stunt, and Tony Gardner pointing out, in response to web comments about My Parents Are Aliens’ inclusion in the event, that the show was looped on the channel every day anyway. But there is scope for ITV to make more use of its archive – whilst CITV were at pains to point out that this was a one-off stunt and the usual mix of Canimals and Horrid Henry would be CITV’s standard diet for 2013, there is also an opportunity to exploit some of these freshly-unearthed strands further – Dramarama, for instance, provided a playpen where writers and actors who would later go on to bigger things could cut their teeth, and two of the strand’s playlets were let out of the bag for the weekend. What’s to stop ITV, which already produces and commissions a raft of dramas and serials for its main networks, commissioning a new run of Dramarama, booking a range of new and established scribes and prodcos to fire ideas into the chain, and thus allow a mine of new formats and themes to develop which could serve the CITV strand well today and in years to come? (It could happen: the original Dramarama contained a one-off, screened as part of the weekend, which spawned the long-running Children’s Ward, two late-era editions of which also featured in the event.) Sadly the once-mighty CITV has become a real dead-zone in recent years, which is a shame not least because whereas pay viewers have Nickelodeon, Disney and the like, CITV is the sole non-BBC provision of kids’ shows on Freeview. When I was a kid, CBBC and CITV were, in their then form of blocks on the main channels, well-funded and rich in ideas and fresh shows despite their limited hours. Whilst the volume of kids’ TV is now bigger – three twelve-plus-hour-a-day channels on Freeview, and further channels running up to 24 hours a day on satellite and cable – the value has dropped, with more repeats, lower investment and now no longer the prominence of presence on the flagship network channels, BBC One having binned its CBBC block at the end of 2012.

One thing notable from the CITV Old Skool Weekend was the presence in the roster of contributors the names of many TV production companies which have now been absorbed into larger entities. Many of the shows came from the archive of the now-defunct regional companies that over time came together into the ITV plc of today, the firm which now runs CITV; Central, Granada and most noticeably Yorkshire TV seemingly contributed huge amounts to the CITV library down the years, Yorkshire’s now-retired chevron being the most-featured of the ITV plc brands. And yet today all YTV is allowed to make are Emmerdale and local news show Calendar, bizarrely, with even long-term Leeds resident Countdown, initially a Yorkshire regional show before debuting nationally at C4’s commencement, having moved to Manchester some time back now. STV also shipped a clutch of shows back south of the border for the event, and in the process proved just how much those regions you didn’t often see productions from in primetime did for ITV’s apparently-less-valuable younger viewers. Indeed, STV’s still a strong producer today, handling shows ranging from Antiques Road Trip to Fake Reaction, as well as continuing to serve local matters to their two Scots patches, albeit now under one brand with much of Grampian having been stripped away. The biggest contributor to the retro-fuelled weekend, though, was the fabled Thames, whose skyline-based logos appeared frequently throughout the weekend, introducing a whole new generation to the excited knowledge that good things were coming over the horizon after ‘Salute to Thames’ boomed out of the speakers, but their contribution to CITV dried up as of the 90s thanks to their defenestration from the network 20 years ago this month in favour of the much less well remembered Carlton, who would go on to form the backbone of today’s ITV plc alongside Northern expansionists Granada. Whilst the Carlton name has now been wiped out by the ITV plc merger, Thames, thankfully, lives on – initially limping on as an indie producer immediately post-ITV, then getting swallowed up into the behemoth hive-mind TalkbackThames for a decade, and then being respun into an entertainment-focussed production minibrand which, with some irony, now produces most of the weekend entertainment shows (Take Me Out, X Factor and so on) in slots which would in a past life have almost certainly been guaranteed to Thames’ old rival, the now-subsumed-into-ITV-plc LWT! At the time The Bill was scrapped, I posted (on the old MySpace) a lament that this signalled the end of the old Thames way, and certainly the new version is much narrower in focus than the original (see clips from some of Thames’ old shows on TVArk, for instance), but at least the firm hasn’t been left to die in the archives like so many other former pre-plc ITV companies. Thames has, incidentally, become another of the recent converts to Twitter, posting as @ThamesTV_ (and remember the underscore, folks), though sadly as it’s 2013 I assume it’s mostly to be BGT/Take Me Out coverage rather than presumably-would’ve-been-more-enjoyable tweeting from the home of Rainbow/Minder/T-Bag/The Bill et al. Even the legendary skyline is no more, and I’m not sure how enamoured and nostalgic viewers of years hence would be towards the modern-age symbol – a magenta disc, if it matters – but at least one of the iconic brands best-loved in television circles is still very much alive, which is an achievement given ITV has even wiped Granada off the map outside its local news shows.

Subsequent to the retro weekender, the wider ITV has also, you may have noticed, been making changes to modernise itself in recent days, introducing a somewhat curly new logo across its activities. I have to admit that when I first saw the logo, in isolation on media websites when the rebrand was unveiled, I didn’t think much of it – a bit too kooky to actually be taken seriously – but rather than badmouth it here and there I decided to wait until it entered use in its proper location, on the screen, before casting judgement. And you know what? On telly, it sort of works, the way they’ve animated and coloured it, though the switchback from ITV1 to ITV after twelve years is something which may take people a while to get used to, particularly those of us who keep forgetting stuff. Elsewhere, ITV3’s come off particularly well with classy ‘origami’-style sequences, and I don’t mind ITV2’s quirky restyle myself, though quite a few of the channel’s more ardent fans online have bemoaned the swap to red after seven years of a lime green look. But whilst ITV has invested heavily in a rebrand, planting the new logo everywhere it can get away with, there’s been little improvement in content – the output of ITV’s channels is, give or take, pretty much the same mush it was before the repaint. That said, ITV2, not normally noted for showing actual comedy, has pulled up one of the new shows I’ve been liking this month, US sitcom Ben & Kate, and here’s hoping the usually-reality-led channel has the gonads to stick with the series and does not, as commonly happens to shows I like, punt the thing to the arse-end of midnight or vanish the show from the screen for months on end before burning off the remaining episodes unheralded in the middle of nowhere, as Channel 4 and E4 did with another Chernin Entertainment production, New Girl. ITV2 has also tried to build on the success of Celebrity Juice – which along with BBC Four’s Only Connect is one of the best-performing digital TV entertainment shows ratings-wise – by launching a new flashy entertainment series, Fake Reaction, which despite the very ITV2 focus on celebs and grossout gags, is at heart a proper classic light entertainment bluffing game, similar in skein to ITV1… oops, ITV series Odd One In. And there aren’t many of these proper entertainment formats around just now, as you’ll have seen me bemoan above. Away from ITV’s channels, E4 has added to its own roster of imported sitcoms with The New Normal, though as with Pramface (which has returned to BBC Three for a new series) the attitude and behaviours of some characters means it can be a difficult show to enjoy, in New Normal’s case principally because of the racist, homophobic, and at times deranged Jane, who I assume is there to provide a contrast to the general tolerance shown by most others in the show, who represents the portion of society set against modern rights and freedoms, and who many of the audience would presumably mock and laugh at for her outdated and irrelevant views; during the first episode I had to hold myself back from wanting to put a foot to her windpipe, perhaps because I’m one of those people who is never tolerant of those who show intolerance. Ironically. But then, how do you represent the real pain and prejudice felt by gay people without, if you’ll pardon the expression, fudging it? Maybe I’ll have to try not to get too upset with those characters who badmouth Bryan and David, and accept everyone’s entitled to their view. Ironically for a show where prejudice is a key theme, the show was dropped by some US stations who didn’t want to screen the series after anti-gay mobs of ‘viewers’ protested. So maybe, though it’s difficult to watch, I should stick with it, in order to show support for a community too often maligned.

Converseley to the above, sometimes contrary and challenging views can be entertaining, and I’m glad to see Charlie Brooker’s “…Wipe” analysis strand return after too long away with a new weekly series for BBC Two, which should be an oasis of right-thinking in the ocean of media ‘meh’ we now find ourselves eddying in. There are some people trying to push against the grain, and it’s never been more important to support them. In a world where all roads seem to lead to Rihanna, some new musical acts have begun to see patches of light through the cracks. You’ll have seen my top-tunes-of-2012 post (the previous post here, if you haven’t) and further badass tuneage from that year was unearthed in BrokenTV’s top 20 (which, interestingly or not, only included one track also present in my rundown), and that site’s footage is worth seeking out – the very-post-80s ‘Madness’ by Hits, for instance, is one I missed first time out. Elsewhere, the BBC’s Sound of 2013 list pulled up some emerging quality, including AlunaGeorge and Chvrches, who I’ll have to keep an eye (or ear) for, and was topped by Haim, who’d also got the biggest writeup in my chart post: the Yank sisters have marked themselves out as ones to watch with their classy, edgy pop sound, and I’m glad new, fresh music is still getting an airing, albeit one which in this case was hidden away behind the red button – surely this sort of show should have been put out on BBC Three or even Two? Is music really that minority an interest that it now has to be hidden away on what is not really a real channel? Mind you, the state of music TV today is not a healthy one: I’ve berated 4Music and Viva for their policy before, but clearly there is scope in the market for a channel which broadcasts some of the less well known music and gives a wider range of genres an airing. Having channels which focus solely on a tiny playlist of the very most mainstream music – and which dump music entirely in the evening in favour of block-booked Kardashians or South Park – isn’t really serving the audience. Unfortunately, these channels aren’t there to serve, inform or even entertain the audience – they solely exist to make money, and so it’s on with the Rihanna, Bieber and 1D loop. 4Music in particular could build on its C4 association to allow a wider range of voices and genres to be heard; instead, all the 4-link seems to provide the channel is repeats of Alan Carr: Chatty Man. That said, there is quality if you know where to look: in the week that most magazine covers featured Helen Flanagan, Josie Gibson or Celebrity Big Brother rubbish, NME had, would you believe, Haim. If I’d have bought a magazine that week, it would probably have been that one – I want to support quality new talent, not tawdry reality trash (even those who are a fellow Crystal Mazer).

But at least magazines remain available in stores: soon, there won’t be anywhere left on the high street to buy a CD. HMV recently collapsed into administration, and though its survival in some form seems likely now Hilco have stepped in to take control of the firm’s debt, the potential loss of the last big music chain (and some of its stores still could shut) really brought into focus the loss of music and entertainment from the high street. Our Price is gone, Virgin/Zavvi has had it, MVC went, taken over by Music Zone which then itself bit the big one, and many indie shops have also lost the fight. In this area, if HMV were to go, Head in Bromley will literally be the last CD/DVD shop left. Again, not an exaggeration. Many towns, particularly since the loss of Our Price, now have no music shop at all – Dartford, Lewisham and Woolwich are all now music-free, and if HMV’s Bexleyheath store cops it there’ll be another town without audio-visual. There have been others: Dartford had not just Our Price, which survived, under various names, right up ’til Zavvi’s demise, but also Challenger & Hicks, a proper local record shop that was both vocal and instrumental in assisting the expansion of my early collection, the always-good-value Slam Entertainment where amongst other things I bought my first-ever DVDs (nothing special, just some cheap comedies to get my then-new player up and running) and the previously-mentioned-on-here Stacey Dash video, and Tracks which replaced Playhouse/Our Price Video (whilst Playhouse was mostly a VHS shop, in its dying, throw-anything-on-the-shelf phase, I even picked up a Blameless cassingle in there, and it’s still one of my favourite tunes.) Bexleyheath, meanwhile, had Our Price (what is now Vision Express, and Beefy’s biggest music retailer ’til HMV pitched up), a belated MVC/Music Zone, though this wasn’t one of the MZ sites saved by Fopp, and local store TW Records, a wonderful little local shop pulled down along with its neighbours to make way for the similarly-initialled but sadly non-musical TK Maxx and JD Sports. (There was also, further down the Broadway, the Mixmag-admired and also-now-cut dance/urban specialist Uncut Records, though as an indieboy I never went there.) The much-missed TW’s was actually a chain, but its other stores (in Erith and Plumstead) have also now packed it in. Woolwich only had Our Price – altogether now, 27 Powis Street, now Designer Kidz – the scene of my first ever self-propelled singles purchase as mentioned here many times, and pre-Head, Bromley played host to US chain Sam Goody, MVC was there for a bit, and at one point the town had two Our Prices (later reduced to one, which then transferred its business to a Virgin Megastore, itself felled in Zavvi’s collapse); Sam Goody also turned up in Orpington for a time, as did CD World, the shop from which I picked up a long-hunted-for copy of Headswim’s ‘Tourniquet’; even the retail monolith Bluewater has seen its largest entertainment store (Virgin/Zavvi) swallowed by H&M, and also lost short-lived post-Playhouse DVD-seller Silverscreen, leaving only HMV ticking away above the foodcourt. It seems the days of music on the high street really are numbered.

To be fair, I have played my part in its downfall. I’ve started shopping online more, not just on cost ground (though for someone in my poor life position every pound saved is vital) but also because of choice – online stores can by nature have a bigger range than a high street store ever could, and my outside-of-centre tastes mean the mainstream retailers can’t always take a punt on stocking the stuff I like in the slim chance I’ll pop in to pick it up at some point. But the real catalyst for me going mostly online was the death of the single. I’ve always been more of a singles buyer than an album man, perhaps driven by the fact that much of my musical education came from multi-artist, skipping-between-the-tunes formats such as pop radio and The Chart Show. So, after Dale Winton and chums (see earlier posts) had broken the levee on singles buying, and I’d started to get into the habit regularly, I would spend, subject to that week’s releases, a few quid a week (this would have been pocket money from parent’s pocket, being while I was still at school and before I was of non-working age) on the latest tracks – initially on cassette for a couple of years as that’s what sort of player we had in the house, then latterly on CD once I’d got my hands on a disc-playing device. The cost, on a week-to-week basis, wasn’t massive and I picked and chose my favoured releases from those available – some weeks had more than others, with nothing really grabbing me some weeks and a large number in others – one week (it was the week ‘The Boy Is Mine’ by Brandy and Monica came out over here, if you’re looking back through the calendar) there were about eight singles out that I’d have wanted, and I had to be selective and pluck the few I most wanted in my collection. Overall, though, it worked out fairly well, and through the years I built up a fairly broad church of platters. The rise of my interest in music came at about the same time as I started travelling more widely around the area – pushing the envelope with Saturday solo shopping trips to Bromley, Dartford or Woolwich to look out the latest tunes and that – and the opening of Bexleyheath’s HMV, in November 1994 (in what used to be Miss Selfridge, as it goes) couldn’t have been any more perfectly timed. With this and Our Price, plus TW’s and then from 1997 MVC, trading in Beefy this was the golden era – if I’d found a tune I loved, there was a pretty strong chance I’d be able to ferret it out in at least one of the four, or by taking a trek to stores in a nearby town. Indeed, music shopping became a hobby of mine – on a family holiday to York in the mid-90s, one of my first ports of call was not a museum or historic monument, but the city’s Virgin Megastore. But then, around the turn of the millennium, the band started to break up. In Bexley, TW got the bulldozer, Our Price became a Vision Express, MVC got themselves and then their successors Music Zone into all kinds of trouble, and before you could know it, HMV was all we had left, and now rather than having Dartford and Woolwich as alternative hunting grounds, people from those towns had to come to Beefy for their sole shot at CD shopping.

But then downloads started to have an impact. Whilst people had been flinging MP3s around since the late 90s – initially illegally peer-to-peer, and latterly through paid sites like iTunes – I’d not been a downloader, preferring music on tangible format that couldn’t be put at risk by computer crashage. The fact I didn’t often have full web access – or, until the advent of USB, any means to get files from the computer home – also played a part in my decision to remain a high-street shopper. However, when the supply of CD singles began to really dry up, I had little other option. I’d noticed the fall of singles for some time, and seen my local HMV’s singles section decline over the years from a pretty huge part of the shop, taking up one whole wall, down to a can’t-be-bothered kickstand. And so, grudgingly, I started downloading, choosing Amazon as (1) I already had an account there, for the increasing amount of physical stuff I’d not been able to get at HMV, and (2) their downloads weren’t tied to a proprietary device, as Apple’s market-leaders were. And so the money I used to spend in HMV started going to Amazon instead: well, only part of it, actually, as downloads are cheaper, and what I’d previously had to spend £1.99 or more in HMV to get I could get on the ‘Zon for as little as 49p – or even less – depending on the track. That’s why, while my ‘best 80 tunes of the year’ list looks like a huge outlay (it’d have cost at least £160 to get that little lot in Nipper’s store), with the individual track prices below £1, and many of the tracks on special offer or even (legally) free, that whole chart probably worked out costing me the equivalent of around £1 a week – which even in my straitened financial situation is not an enormous damage. The damage, though, was done to HMV. My spend of £2-£4 a week on singles through their tills equated to about £10-£20 a month of regular purchase. With my singles buying now done online, I don’t think I spent much more than £20 in HMV in the whole of 2012, and that was mostly on gifts for other people. Whilst I’d never describe myself as the typical customer, if my singles-buying shift is replicated across the population, that’s a huge sum of money disappearing from HMV’s tills, which may explain their debt. (With downloads, I can also dig up older tracks as well as the new stuff; much as with Orpington’s long-sought Headswim CD, I was able to find a long-hunted-for track – in this case Not Katies’ ‘2 Halves of 2′ – on Amazon having struggled to seek out a CD during the preceding eight years). The death of singles also hit part of HMV’s business model, which was based on building customers’ relationship with artists through singles and then into albums – with no more singles, HMV can’t grow artist-customer-store relations in that way anymore. Similarly, part of HMV’s business model had been to support their range – their wider mix of more diverse, and perhaps slower-selling, specialist music – with the underpinning from their volume of sales of bread-and-butter chart releases. But discounters and the big grocers have begun to shift this mainstream music in quite some quantity, devaluing music and taking away the volume sales that HMV needs to support its broader aims. The traditional midmarket retailer has been squeezed very hard by supermarkets and online – Clinton Cards, whilst offering a different product mix to HMV, had similar competitive problems, leading to their own collapse and partial salvation. HMV reacted to the declining of the original model by cutting the space given to music and DVD in favour of giving more space to high-ticket technology products such as iPads, but while these attracted a premium price they didn’t shift in the sort of volume that CDs had once done, particularly in the tight economic times when consumers have been holding back their spend, as Comet recently found out. HMV, like many retailers and individuals, also perhaps put too much faith during the boom years of the late 90s/early 00s that the good times would continue – like other chains, HMV expanded rapidly during this economically-positive period, only for these expanded networks of retail stores to be more starved of income when the crunch hit. With the high street still sluggish five years on from the sub-prime bubble, it seems some towns are destined to sink for good.

It seems the sinking of society is being felt across the board. Not only am I sensing a more tense, powderkeg type of an environment when I’m on a bus or in a shopping mall – or even a library – but society as a whole is struggling: recent reports, lined up for red-button consumption on the self-same day, revealed a rise in the volume of individual/personal fraud in the 2011/12 reporting year, as strained souls struggling to make ends meet stretch the rules – or break them entirely – to squeeze more than they’re entitled to out of the system, presumably as what they’re entitled to isn’t keeping them in the style they’re accustomed to. Another report indicated a rise in the number of suicides in 2011 compared to 2010 – the latest data which is available – which indicates some people really can’t take it anymore and have, in their hour of desperation, sadly resorted to the final solution. I know the circumstances we find ourselves in are not pleasant – as a rifle through the old MySpace posts would prove, I’ve been circling the drain almost as long as I’ve been writing these bloody things, if not longer – but I know there has to be a way out. One thing that will help the gloom lift is, ironically, if I stop getting so wound up about things I see in the news. It’s difficult, though, as there’s been some controversial cases these last few weeks. There’s been a lot said about attacks on women, which as you should know by now is not something I condone, following the internationally-discussed case in India where a woman was brutally gang-raped and later died of her injuries. A horrible situation, for certain, and one which shows up how the role of women in society is still a struggle in some of the less-developed-than-our-own nations; it’s always difficult to judge how far we should impose our values on other territories, however, for fear of being accused of cultural insensitivity: many Muslim countries, for instance, still see women as subservient and a commodity, something we in the West find abhorrent, and they often, in particular the more conservative states, also see Western values and cultures as a threat to their own, and resist our creeping global influence by any means necessary, up to and including terrorism. It’s difficult for me to judge the situation writing as I am from the position of a white man in England who’s been brought up on Western values and media, but hopefully we can all agree that the aghast response to the brutal and fatal attack should serve as a watershed and help Indian society move towards a more enlightened and peaceful culture, and on its own terms rather than having it forced down upon the country from outside. Not that the Western world is always right when it comes to sexual violence – in the United States, a guilty verdict in a rape case was quashed because the court learned that the victim was unmarried. I’m just going to let that one sink in for a moment. A victim of abuse was failed by the justice system because she wasn’t married. And they call us civilised? Of course, brutality and violence takes place everywhere, as the attack on Katie Piper in 2008 proves – though there are some people who want to make life better; Channel 4 recently screened the Oscar-winning documentary Saving Face, in which the plastic surgeon who gave Katie her smile back – the Pakistan-born UK-based Dr Mohammad Jawad – travelled to his birth country to treat some of the hundreds – HUNDREDS! – of women a year who are attacked and burned, often by abusive and dismissive partners. This film – as with many of the shows I’ve watched lately, right through to The New Normal – proves that while there is prejudice, hatred and outright evil in the world, there are also those who are prepared to fight it and stand up for what’s right. I want to be one of those who fights the good fight, but it will have to be within my limited circumstances – I have little money, power, skills and influence to change things – I can’t even use Twitter properly right now, thanks to my cheap phone – so doing the right thing will mean I have to fight harder. But if it makes people’s lives better, then it’s a fight worth trying.

Someone who tried to support others but lost out through no fault of her own was the good Samaritan who stopped at the scene of a road incident and gave two ‘walking wounded’ shelter in her otherwise-uninvolved vehicle; whilst the victims were able to get in OK, when paramedics arrived they decided, to reduce the risk of further injury, the injured patrons should be removed from the car by way of having the roof cut off. The good-deed-doer has thus had her car written off, with no guarantee that it will be replaced – maybe, if nobody comes forward to pay for a new vehicle in respect of her sacrifice, she’ll have to spend the next sixteen to seventeen years living like me, travelling slowly with the disadvantaged and underachieving, and the potheads and lunkheads, on those life-sucking buses that have damaged me so, until she can afford a new vehicle, every day regretting the good deed that cost her her freedom wheels. Elsewhere, the big news here in London town is the fatal helicopter crash, in which a pilot flying his chopper across the capital despite the prevailing poor conditions clipped a crane in Vauxhall, killing himself and a man on the ground in a devastating, much-discussed fireball. Again, there’s little to have been done in the situation – if I had been there that morning, there’s more chance I’d have been victim than hero – but there are always a lot of what-ifs when something like this happens. Someone who had been due to be a passenger on the ‘copter had called on the pilot to call off the journey given the conditions, only for the ill-fated captain to go ahead. Once in the air, the flight was diverted from its original route due to the weather – did this change of flightplan put the pilot on collision course with the construction crane? Thinking too deeply about these variables in these kind of situations is one of the things which has really raddled my brain over recent years, and you’ll have seen this for yourself in my gabbly, breathless whinges about news events in many of my prior posts, and perhaps it’d be better for me to leave well enough alone and let things be. At least we can be thankful that, given the busy and built-up nature of London, the Vauxhall crash didn’t cause more death and destruction than it did. Vauxhall’s day of horror, though, wasn’t the only helicopter disaster to strike the world recently; in Sao Paolo, a ‘helicopter taxi’ – they’re popular due to the congested streets – ditched into a house. That case reminded me of something else I’ve had on my mind recently. Not far from me there’s a train bridge which passes over a road. I’ve only recently noticed, though, how close the trains come to the buildings on the street below – one perhaps-poorly-sited house is so close to the tracks, trains pass literally inches from the loft. That’s a recipe for disaster. Perhaps I’ve seen too many Coronation Street clips, but I know that these close calls can sometimes be missed – I certainly wouldn’t want to live in a house that close to the tracks, as all it takes is one misplaced pebble on the rails and the express service to Charing Cross could skip its usual route and end up embedded in my boxroom. If I was a father, I wouldn’t want to bring my daughter up in a situation where she could be bisected in her sleep by an unintended metal visitor through her ceiling. It can and does happen, not just in Weatherfield but also in the real world – see the recent case of a couple’s rented home in Utah being crashed by a loosened-by-nature boulder; the husband wasn’t at home at the time, but the wife was injured, and the couple have decided not to return to the premises, which is maybe wise given the risk posed by further rockfall in our rapidly-changing environment.

Something that always gets me down, though, as you’ll know if you’ve read my prior posts on the subject, is when young life gets snuffed out before its time. And, sadly, there have been several cases of this in the last few weeks. We’ve seen the shocking case of the eight-year-old sickle-cell anaemia sufferer being shot dead while on a family holiday to Jamaica, her school having sanctioned an extended trip to the sun on the grounds that such a stay in the sun could be beneficial to her health; in fact, it transpired returning to the island was a great mistake, as the innocent girl was apparently targeted by a gunman with a grudge. Back here in the UK it’s no safer, as a criminal contributed to the untimely passing of a teenager not involved in his lawlessness: just over the way in New Cross, a car being pursued by police slammed into an otherwise-unconnected family vehicle, killing the 13-year-old girl in the back seat. There is some correlation here with the death of the pedestrian slain in the Vauxhall copter disaster – someone going about their innocent journey being taken from us through no fault of their own by the thoughtless actions of another, and whilst the Vauxhall pilot took his error to his own grave, let’s hope the old bill absolutely throw the book at the little scrote whose reckless, out-of-control, self-preserving danger-driving has robbed us of someone who would presumably have gone on to be far more valuable to society than he. The recent snow and ice, as with previous cold snaps, also unnecessarily claimed several lives. Finally, I should update you on the situation of someone who’s been mentioned here several times before, the much-admired Cumbrian teen Alice Pyne. However, it’s not good news. Sweet young Alice has sadly lost her lengthy battle with leukemia. Whilst her passing was not a sudden, unexpected shock, given she was terminally ill and thus we all knew this day would ultimately come, it is still sad to see someone noted for her strength, warmth, bravery and good spirit lose the battle. The lovely Alice did a lot of good in her short time with us, raising awareness of the plight of kids and teens struggling with life-limiting conditions, and ultimately setting up her own charity, Alice’s Escapes, aiming to provide fun trips for families with sick children. Let’s hope the charity can continue to be strong and successful, and deliver on Alice’s legacy, to make more people happy in the way she set out to. Alice’s case also encouraged people to sign up to the bone marrow register, something she was particularly keen to see. So her life was, despite her condition, a success which could have positive repercussions for others for years to come. She certainly did more for society in her 17-and-a-bit years than I’ve done in my near-31, which is sobering. The way I’ll remember Alice, as it goes, is most likely the smiling, happy girl who took the stage at the Pride of Britain Awards, and beamed from ear to ear when she was presented with a gong by her favourite pop star, Robbie Williams. It was a lovely moment, and it was wonderful to see someone so kind and sweet being celebrated and respected. There will always be love for you here, beautiful Alice. Rest easy.

It’s also good to see Alice influence other young ladies in difficult situations to stand up and be counted: eighteen-year-old Hannah Booth also punted a bucket-list onto the internet, and much like Alice’s list beforehand, this grid of wishes took root online, and has even been given publicity by digital radio station The Hits, based in Hannah’s native Manchester, with the station able to pull strings to get some of her dreams realised, including a trip to Italy (good choice, girl!) and a meeting with X Factor cheeky-chops Olly Murs, though obviously as The Hits is a commercial enterprise it’s likely the motive here is not completeley altruistic but also brand-positive, as offering the hand of help will also, one presumes, get The Hits a fairly positive writeup. Thing of note: The Hits is run by Bauer, the same multi-skulled media empire that farts out the Flanagan-friendly FHM so violently derided earlier in this mailout. Another Hannah whose plight has barrelled onto my radar in the recent weeks since I last did one of this, is US television presenter Hannah Storm. The ESPN and ABC (they’re both Disney-owned) anchormanwoman suffered severe burns at the rear-end of December when a cooking grill in her home garden exploded, causing injuries to her face and arms. However, the Storm was made of strong stuff, and sitting sobbing in recuperation was not her bag: just a few weeks after being burned, ever-professional Hannah was back on Yank telly, her toasted arm still in bandage and with the aid of hair extensions to sit-in for her scorched-off locks, and her return to TV was widely cheered. Hannah’s clearly keen to rebuild her life and not let her injury hold her back any more than is medically necessary, so let’s hold hope that her dedication and professionalism continues to serve her well and her TV career continues to shine. One thing that did strike me on hearing of Ms Storm’s incident was the realisation that, given American TV stations now seem content to pinch ideas off our Channel 4 and remake them rather than come up with their own ideas – everything from Skins, Shameless and the Inbetweeners to Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and One Born Every Minute has been purloined across the pond – could we get an American remake of Katie Piper’s 2011 series? Katie’s show, where she visited Brits with life-changing injuries and medical conditions, has screened in the States, on OWN (the station recently graced by the disgraced Lance Armstrong for a much-discussed interview with Oprah herself) and there are presumably people in the US who have similarly touching tales they’d like the opportunity to relate to a kind ear. Essentially, one wonders if another format will cross the water such that we get ‘Hannah: My Beautiful Friends’ or somesuch. I’d watch the heck out of that if it fetched up over here – I loved Katie’s shows, and as I’ve said many times it’s always good to see decent, honest people being celebrated. Incidentally, our very own Katie has been working on a new documentary, which will lodge itself on Channel 4 shortly, and it’ll be one of the last times you see her with dark hair: the excellent lass has returned to the world of blonde after a time in the brunette camp. So some changes can be reversed after all, it seems! And you’ll know by now I find blonde women attractive, from Pixie Lott to Mollie King of the Saturdays, and from Ellie Goulding to Sarah of Undateables, so this is one reverse I can react to positively!

Whilst I’m not planning on going blonde, I do have to make changes in 2013. As denoted at excessive length above, my health needs improvement, as just right now it’s only really getting worse. Not only is it physically and mentally uncomfortable to be me right now, the internal and external decay is becoming ever more unavoidable and noticeable, and it’d certainly have a negative bearing on any subsequent attempt I make at dating; it’s likely to have an impact on my job success too, as if I keep turning up for interviews looking, sounding and smelling like the decrepit pusblob I am, the employer will be keen to send me flying out the door empty handed as rapidly as possible. I’m not an attractive man in present form, and my luck won’t improve unless serious rebuilding is undertaken. However, so much has gone wrong that I simply don’t know where to start – and on my tiny budget I’ve not got the confidence I could afford the massive amounts of surgery I need unless some billionaire benefactor steps in to back me. And given the likes of Comet, HMV and Jessops struggled to find backers, it’ll be a lengthy hunt to find someone endowed enough to support my needs. I also need to improve myself culturally and take more risks – read more books, listen to more radio (Adam & Edith shows on 6Music at the tail-end of 2012 helped draw me back in, and introduced me to Haim among others) and, should I happen to find myself with free time sufficient to do so, I would like to see myself tuning into any radio stations which remain broadcasting in the UK in 2013. Sadly, we’re likely to see the back of Real Radio this year when it’s absorbed into Heart – having had access at various times and via various devices to both Real and Heart at various points (though Heart is the more commonly-heard due to its permanent London FM/DAB berth and Freeview/satellite carriage, whilst Real, whilst available on satellite, was only briefly on DAB in the capital, immediately following the closure of Century), I’ve found myself preferring the wider range of ‘variety hits’ pulled out of the box by Real, which appears to have a wider range of genres and eras at its disposal than Heart (Real playing a quite wide mix of pop, rock and rhythmic music stretching from the 70s to today, whilst Heart has a narrower ‘hot AC’ playlist, in part because much of the network now operates on stations originally licenced as local contemporary-hits services). Still, it could be worse – had the Beeb got its own way a few years back, the space devoted to the lustrous 6Music would today be vacant, but thankfully those who fought to save it – including me – stood up for what we believe in.

At this time of year, with the new year only just finding its feet, it sometimes becomes too easy to look back, and I think starting 2013 the same way I started 2012 – dipping heavily into retro TV and music, and spending much of the first quarter rooted in the past – would be a mistake. That said, it’s good to look back over where we’ve come from, the CITV oldskool weekend was a nice nostalgic trip back to remind me of the person I used to be before reality went sour, and when I spotted the legendary 80s film Mannequin, on Channel 5 of all places, one Sunday, I tuned in and wallowed in a couple hours of a true classic, and it left me in a lifted, happy mood. (And yes, I have Mannequin on VHS, but can’t watch it that way just now ‘cos of my busted bedroom telly, which like the rancid stopgap phone has yet to be replaced.) Indeed, it was later that evening, whilst still on a post-Mannequin buzz, that a very sluggish perusal of the BBC’s mobile site informed me of the passing of Alice Pyne; however, given as I was minded at this point to look back fondly on past gloriousness, that evening I was not morose, instead recalling the happy and bright young lass as seen on the POBAs, whose light shone brightly and who contributed so much to this world. So sometimes a dip into the past, either distant or recent, can bring back glorious memories. And indeed, sometimes past wrongs can be righted many years later: a handbag stolen back in 2006 by one of the grubby, opportunistic thieves that make up a too-sizeable portion of the UK population, was recently recovered, with most contents and cash intact, when a bush yards from the rightful owner’s home was pruned back – it seems the thief had grabbed the first thing of value spotted in the sac – £20 in the cash purse – and flung the rest of the purloined material into the hedge to make an escape; freed from its captor and protected from the elements by the foliage, the bag simply sat pat for six-and-a-bit years awaiting its collection. So, it would seem, sometimes, when we think all is lost, what we actually have to do is look in the right place. Good advice for someone like me, who really can’t remember how many things he’s forgotten in the rush to get through the day. Maybe if I’m patient, the good things I seek will come my way. Of course, I can’t rest on my laurels completely, what with various individuals and organisations breathing down my neck, barking their demands that I hurry up and become a man, but perhaps if I take time to put my mind in order there’ll be less agony and more cheerfulness in my life. Which could make this blog an easier read, too. I do want to make this thing more enjoyable for you, given you’ve made the friendly, kind commitment to read it. Thanks for putting up with the current format, though: it gives me the opportunity to share my thoughts, feelings and opinions, even those which contradict each other; it helps give me mental peace as it lets me put my thoughts in order and release some of the pressure that builds up in my life on a daily basis; and it gives me the opportunity to tip the hat to the people, concepts and objects that are actually doing a bit of good for the world. And I can personally guarantee that it has spent less than twenty minutes resting on an astronaut’s penis.

“Tonight, we nail that little fartblossom!” (Goodbye!)