This year has seen record complaints to the ASA about adverts over the last 12 months. I don’t think this means that adverts are getting any worse, I just think it’s probably easier than ever to complain (you can probably do it by text / e-mail or even using your iPod these days. Or something.) And gor blimey, we do love a good complain….

Title of a Take That CD listed on eBay - Everything Change’s

And then he goe’s on to repeat the mistake three time’s during the listing itself.

For the sake of fuck….

… on Grandstand, formerly proud bastion of the BBC’s sport coverage, but in recent years home only to the Budleigh-Salterton Under 12s Tiddlywinks Championship and events of a similar prestige. I suppose it had to happen, but it’s yet another thing to make me feel slightly old and rueful.

On a lighter note, Davina’s been axed; good thing too. It was the televisual equivalent of a really boring coffee morning with a group of women who think they’re all kooky and crazy, but are in fact banal beyond belief. Women who go on ENDLESSLY about how much they like chocolate. Actually, that may well be all of them…

Five Live are asking “what are you doing for St George’s Day?”

I thought I’d put on a massive prosthetic belly, shave my head, drape myself in an “Eng-er-land” flag and go around singing loud repetetive football songs whilst the middle class media desperately try to make out that I’m a patriot, and not a thug or a racist. Later, though, I’ll drink a shit-load of lager and go out ethnic minority-bashing. This will of course be an isolated incident.

HMS Liz (or whatever) visited our beloved public service broadcast behemoth today as part of her 80th birthday shenanigans. Part of the agenda for her visit (hallegedly) was to have her Beefeaters beat the crap out of whichever BBC bright spark suggested that her 80th birthday official portrait should be done by Rolf Harris. She looks like she’s having problems keeping her dentures in.

Just to confirm my worst fears, episode 6 (I think) of season 4 of “Six Feet Under” features the normally placid David having his life turned upside-down by an extremely unlikely encounter with a crack-smoking sociopathic homosexual car-jacker. It’s not quite the shower scene in “Dallas”, but it’s a fairly desperate attempt to sustain a moribund plot.

Indie-loving gurning Northern berk Stuart Maconie was interviewed in The Independent today -

“A lot of radio stations now work on the principle we know what our audience want and they want James Blunt and Robbie Williams ad nauseam, you know, 24 hours a day… that way lies madness and the death of anything inspirational or intelligent”.

This, coming from the man who sucks the corporate televisual cock at every opportunity by appearing as a talking head on EVERY SINGLE shit-ridden “100 greatest…. I remember the 1980s… the clips for this one were quite cheap and I’m sure we can get Jimmy Carr to present it” programme on Channel fucking 4. If he’s looking for the cause of the death of anything inspirational or intelligent in the media, he should look a little closer to home.
AND the dumb journalist who interviewed him thinks that The Damned wrote a song called “Meat Meat Meat” (it’s “Neat Neat Neat” for anyone who cares).

According to any book you read about writing a novel, “rising tension” is the key to retaining reader interest. So I guess the same goes for TV programmes… problem is, to maintain rising tension, you either have to go “soap opera” and have unrealistically quick / 2D plotlines, or you have to have characters being fundamentally changed in reaction to regularly-occuring cataclysmic events (as in more “serious” HBO-type dramas).

In something like “The Sopranos”, this isn’t a problem; cataclysmic events happen all the time to a mafioso don. But in “Six Feet Under”, season 4 of which I’m watching at the moment, it’s a lot harder to “keep it real” - how interesting can a sodding funeral parlour be? As series 3 and 4 go on, the plotlines are becoming increasingly strained, bordering on a bit loopy (especially when it comes to Nate). And I suspect this problem is at the root of why the programme ended after season 5.

It only took me 10 episodes (nearly 5 hours), but I finally twigged as to the pun in the title of “Ideal” (starring Johnny Vegas). He’s a small-time hash-seller, hence “I deal”… hardly the cryptic crossword in the Times, is it? Still, got there in the end…

As for the show itself, the weaknesses are manifold - the plot has gone completely mental since series 1 and instead of a series of “normal” dope-buying clients, it’s now gangsters and kidnappings - indeed, most of the series 1 characters have disappeared completely. Further, the whole thing is very “kitchen farce” and the source of the humour is often no more sophisticated than endless repetition of character catchphrases (”I’m on probation”… “Isn’t he scrummy”… “Are you in or are you out?” etc), and most importantly, without Johnny Vegas, it would be charmless and probably boring. But despite all this, it’s good fun, one of the most watchable things on telly at the moment and a great vehicle for the big man.

Woss didn’t show up to present his Radio 2 programme this morning, as he was “unwell”. What that actually means is that he stayed up late with Johnny Vegas and possibly the Red Hot Chili Peppers (guests on his TV show last night) drinking Guinness and badmouthing Carmen Electra (another guest). He no doubt got in at around 5am to a justified tirade of abuse from the long-suffering Jane, and is still drunk and incapable as I write this (11.42).

And his new hairstyle looks stupid. Sorry, stupider. Mutton dwessed as lamb.