Mark Watson's Blog, page 3

For how much longer must all men be judged against Colin Firth?

A lot of questions arise from The King's Speech, the recent film in which - spoiler alert - a king can't speak very well, but then manages to, thanks to an Australian. Among these questions: for how many decades must the rest of us men be judged by the impossible standards of sexiness set by Colin Firth? Did Edward VIII really want to marry the seemingly irritating Wallis Simpson, or did he just want to get out of being king, since it's clearly no fun? And in the script, d . . . d . . . did the screenwriters have to write out every stammer l . . . l . . . like this, or was it covered by the stage directions?

But there's one question that arises from the tense final scene, in which our hero rises to the challenge of delivering a long and rousing speech to his subjects. Could they not have recorded him doing it and played it half an hour later, removing the possibility that the King's erratic voice would fail live on air and thus deal a blow to Britain's spirit on the brink of war?

Earlier in the film, we see that the technology existed to record His Majesty's efforts, because his Australian guru does just that. Even if editing in 1939 was less a matter of going into a Soho suite with a couple of Macs and more a case of someone taking a hacksaw to a piece of vinyl, surely it would have been possible to spare the King the ordeal? It wouldn't have been quite so dramatic a climax to the film - "right, Your Majesty, a couple of little slip-ups there, but we'll snip those out" - but it would have been a lot less stressful for all concerned, at a time when Hitler was causing quite enough stress for most people.

The answer to this riddle, it seems, has less to do with technological shortcomings and more to do with a faith in the idea of live broadcasting. The BBC in its infancy broadcast everything live, not purely because of logistics, but because that was the only way it could enjoy the trust of its listeners. If its material could be recorded, edited and fiddled with, how were we meant to rely on BBC radio for all the things for which we have usually relied on it: news, national morale and very slow-moving farming dramas?

A fascinating book by Denis Norden called Coming to You Live! recounts some of the problems the BBC faced in the 1940s and 1950s as a result of this dedication to live broadcasting. There's one anecdote about a drama that involved what was then the longest tracking shot in history, the camera making its way down an endless line of violinists; but they could only afford four violinists, so the actors had to keep running down the line and appearing again and again. There's another one about a play that was all ready to go when someone realised the BBC hadn't paid for the rights and wouldn't be allowed to broadcast it. When they turned up that morning, the actors were told they'd have to learn a new play from scratch.

All this makes you wonder whether live broadcasting is worth the misery - and yet idiots will keep trying it. And by idiots, I mean myself. On 28 February, I'm doing a special edition of my Radio 4 show absolutely live. This might sound like a plug, but it's not: I'm not even going to tell you what time it's on. The amount that can go wrong is terrifying.

The prospect of saying something obscene by accident - like James Naughtie giving an extra "C" to Jeremy Hunt - looms large, as does the even worse idea of being swept away by that I-might-jump-off-the-top-of-this-building impulse and sabotaging the whole show by shouting nothing but the word "duck" over and over again, just because I can. Then there's the worry that I might completely blank and leave minute after minute of silence on the air. Producers would have to hope listeners would mistake it for a particularly stodgy episode of The Archers.

The King and I

But these dangers are precisely the reason everyone still loves listening to live shows. They're pretty similar to the reasons poor old King George had to brave the microphone all those years ago. We like listening to the tremor in someone's voice, knowing that the anticipation in their guts at the sound of the opening credits is exactly the same as ours.

Above all, we like feeling that we're experiencing exactly the same thing as the person on the other end of the wire. Which is all very well for you, but awful for the King, and - in a rather less high-stakes way - scary for me, too. I don't even have the benefit of a dauntless Aussie to see me through by making me sing. We'll just have to hope that I can channel some of whatever magical BBC energy helped the King. Anyway, I have to make a phone call. I'm trying to get hold of 79 violinists.

www.newstatesman.com - For how much longer must all men be judged against Colin Firth?

Who needs books when we could be watching Cheryl Cole?

TV has spoken; the printed word has had its day.

You might think that it's impossible, as the great British public is made up of such a range of personalities, to generalise about what the "man on the street" likes. But there are people out there who specialise in doing just that. They are researchers, demographics experts and think-tank members. They monitor your reactions in minute detail. They provide ammunition to your grandad, who claims that nobody "has a real job any more". And they report back to the authorities about what you want. At the beginning of another year of television commissioning, I am hearing their findings in the novel ways in which executives are rejecting projects. Some are truly alarming.

Did you know that you're not interested in books? At least, not if you own a TV. You can't be into both. Over the past few weeks, I've been in two meetings about television proposals on the subject of books. In both, the executives were sceptical about the appeal of literature. According to their research, they said, books are a forbidding subject. Not very fun. Not the sort of thing you'd want to know about when you could be looking at images of Cheryl Cole, reading magazine articles about Cheryl Cole or thinking about Cheryl Cole - which is what they reckon the public is keen on. (Cheryl Cole has written a book, we countered. The commissioner's eyes lit up briefly.)

One of the TV gurus even described the idea of books as "a bit 20th-century". I'd never felt so old. I don't know about you, but I was quite keen on the 20th century. Computers, for example, are rather 20th-century. Besides, books have been around for a lot longer than a century - longer, as I was tempted to remark, than television - but there you go. TV has spoken; the printed word has had its day.

Those who "green light" TV shows, films and so on are notorious for their irrational decision-making. There is a story in the industry about a writer in the 1990s who was trying to get a psychological drama commissioned. Every avenue seemed to be blocked. When Jurassic Park came out, however, the writer got a call from an excited Hollywood mogul. "We're gonna make your movie!" he said. "We're gonna make it . . . with dinosaurs!"

This is an extreme (and possibly apocryphal) example - but not as extreme as you might imagine. The imperative to be "zeitgeisty" and "ahead of the curve" boils down to an endless process of watching what others are doing and trying to do the same thing. The "what we're looking for" briefs sent out by the major channels can be summarised thus: "We're on the lookout for The Office meets Little Britain meets Friends, with elements of Doctor Who, just to really cover our bases. Oh, and make sure someone famous is in it."

Then, they receive a script that miraculously achieves all of those things - but it's too late, because someone at head office saw Black Swan last night and they've rewritten the brief to say: "It would be great if it was about ballet, too."

Can the commissioners be blamed for making wild generalisations about "the public", though, when the public has such a short attention span? It used to be said that a new television programme had three series to prove itself. This has gone down to one. With the advent of web forums, a single episode can make or break a show.

Today, thanks to Twitter, everyone is not only a critic, but a hasty one. The virtual axe can be wielded less than five minutes in to a programme's debut, as some hipster's 140-character review - "This is shit, turning over" - receives 20,000 retweets. Before long, there'll be a website that dismisses shows before they have even been thought up, sparing everyone the tiresome business of making them.

Keep on dancing

It's because of all this that high-ranking TV officials with their jobs at stake look everywhere they can for easily digestible advice on what "we" are interested in. And it's also why everyone in television is bound by a set of committee-devised rules that are impossible to find out unless you try to break one of them.

Books are to be avoided. A programme is not worth making unless viewers can interact with it on Facebook. If you have two presenters, one must be male and the other female, or the show will look "too blokey". (Also, the girl must be pretty, though the man can be more geeky-looking.) No one under the age of 25 watches documentaries. Nearly all programmes must involve dancing. And, most importantly, if someone has made a successful programme that shows any of these rules to be nonsense, then forget the rule book and just copy what they did, using a slightly different name.

www.newstatesman.com - Who needs books when we could be watching Cheryl Cole?

My war with Frankie Boyle

When edgy comedy is just bullying.

Tweet

In the past few weeks, I briefly became a hot topic on Twitter; I was in a couple of national newspapers; I was written about exhaustively on every comedy website of note; and I became enough of a talking point - at least in certain small, Soho-based circles - that quite a few conversations I've had have begun with people asking, "How have you been?" You could say that I've been the centre of attention, which is what all comedians want, in a nutshell. So that's the good news.

The less good news is that I got all that attention by being called a c*** by a better-known television comedian, Frankie Boyle, in a tweet. This word is deemed so offensive that I typed it here with the asterisks already in place, rather than waiting for it to be censored, in case I should upset the feelings of a vulnerable sub-editor. I'm only half-joking.

A fair few people don't even like to look at that word on a page, let alone hear it. Imagine having it applied to you in full view of a large number of your peers by someone so influential that thousands of people will be inclined instinctively to agree without looking into the situation. That's been my month.

Shock doctrine

What I did to occasion the anger of my colleague was to write a blog, some months ago, which had belatedly come to his attention. In it, I remarked on how he had been involved in controversy after making jokes about Down's syndrome and then refusing to apologise to the mother of a sufferer who was in his audience. I wasn't the only comedian to feel uneasy about the impression of our industry that this incident gave to the general public. Several publicly criticised Boyle, feeling that, this time, he had gone too far in pursuit of shock laughs. But, for some reason, it was I who got on his wrong side. I'm reluctant to stir up the subject all over again, but it is a pressing one and I would like to clarify what I was trying to say: not about that comic in particular, but about comedy.

Stand-up has long been regarded as a kind of outlaw form of entertainment that exists somewhere on the boundaries of good taste and likes nothing better than to stray to the other side. This has made it one of the most successful art forms - for want of a less pretentious word - of the new century. And it has managed to hold on to this maverick reputation in spite of becoming more and more mainstream. You can now tune in to shows such as Mock the Week on BBC2 and hear gags that many comics would have shied away from, even in working men's clubs, not too long ago. I think most of us would agree that this is a step forward. We're adults, we know that a joke is a joke, we can choose to watch things or not, and so on.

The trouble is, if you don't draw a line somewhere, what may have started out as "edginess" can quickly turn into mean-spirited bullying of the weakest members of society. What's an acceptable subject for comedy? Those suffering from degenerative diseases? The Holocaust? Rape victims? I've seen all of these subjects covered by comedians in the past fortnight alone.

It is hard not to wonder whether comedy's freedom of speech is as much of a step forward as we thought, especially if all it means is that a largely white, middle-class audience gets to laugh at other people whose lives haven't turned out as well as theirs; or if, in the process, it allows stereotypes to be hammered home that comedy should be breaking down, rather than reinforcing.

Twitter trial

I am as guilty as anyone else of taking on soft targets to get laughs and saying things on the spur of the moment that, in hindsight, sound awful. I didn't intend to vilify the stand-up comic who called me a "coot" (as I paraphrased it to my mother), or anyone else who has let something slip while desperately chasing laughs, as we all do.

I am also aware - as my adversary pointed out - that I've done things that suggest a lack of integrity (advertising cider, appearing on shows that I knew weren't very good and giving a private performance for the Pope, though one of those may not be true).

I think that comedians should have a debate about the limits of their freedom to talk about things that could hurt defenceless people. If there are no limits, then fair enough. But live comedy might end up losing a bit of its faddishness. People will eventually tire of paying good money to see something that amounts to a crude exchange of insults. I mean, if I want to see that, I could just go on Twitter.

www.newstatesman.com - My war with Frankie Boyle

4,500

...that's how many words of the new book I wrote today

...that's how many words of the new book I wrote today. That is a lot, by any standards. Of course, a lot of them will end up being no use. If you write four thousand words in a day then maybe a thousand will end up in the final book. Maybe fewer than that. Still, it's a good riposte to the disappointments of yesterday and indeed the whole of 2011 so far. I think at these times, all you can really do is put your head down and work.

The book is taking shape. It could be a shape that people don't like. But I will certainly have done my best.

It's less commercial than Eleven by far, but I live in faith that un-commercial things can do well. How did all those people end up buying Captain Corelli's Mandolin, even though it takes place a long way away from here and there are some awfully long words in it? Admittedly, that was set in the war and it really helps to set things in the war if you want to capture the public imagination. But even so.

I'll reveal slightly more about the book as it develops. Suffice to say I not only have an almost complete draft of it, but an entirely different book as a Plan B in case my publishers don't like this - this is to cover my arse, because of the messy way things turned out with the previous publishers - and then there's the graphic novel too, and if all else fails I'll just publish my diaries. That seems to work for some people.

That was Book Preview with Mark Watson.

www.newstatesman.com - 4,500

Why I'm happy to be a non-driver

The assumption that 'anyone can drive' has caused more deaths than I care to think about.

Another 'request blog' today, in response to this:

Mark, I wondered if some time you might like to write a blog about being a grown man unable to drive. We are in an extreme minority. In fact, I reckon I meet fewer people who share this unusual characteristic than my other ones (not drinking alcohol, not owning a mobile phone). Why do you not drive? Do you not want to, or just haven't got round to it? What is people's reaction when you tell them you don't? Are you often pressured to learn by friends and family? I'd be interested to know. - Andrew

It's true, being a non-driver at my advanced age of 50, or 30, or whatever it is does place you in a minority. There are certain minorities I'm happy to be part of, but being in this one does feel like something of a failure. All the same, I'm fairly comfortable with my nondriverness.

It was never a conscious decision, but the fact is that at the age of 17, I didn't feel anywhere near ready to take charge of a motor vehicle. In general I think this is a mentality that more people could do with adopting. The assumption that 'anyone can drive' has caused more deaths than I care to think about. Quite a lot of people could do the world a great service by not going anywhere near the driver's seat. However, in my case it was (at least in part) a symptom of the cowardice which has defined a fair bit of my life. To put it simply, I thought I'd probably be shit at driving, so it was better not to even try. And if that's your mindset at 17, you're only going to get more and more like that. Learning to drive is a good example of something you should get out of the way early; the more you go through life not having done it, the more it feels silly to try and do it.

It's been quite rarely in my adult life that I've regretted this gap (one among quite a number) in my accomplishments. In my early career as a club comic, I would rely heavily on lifts from other comedians. Sometimes, this would result in my being dumped in Central London, an hour's bus ride from where I lived, at 2am after a gig where I'd only been on stage for ten minutes. It would be raining or snowing and the birds would be singing by the time I got home, and it seemed like I would probably be well advised to give up comedy and do something more sensible like dentistry. But even then, I didn't really regret being a non-driver. I think if I'd had to drive to all the shit gigs I did between 2002 and 2006, I would have been even more knackered and discouraged and perhaps let it go altogether.

However, now that I'm a dad, there are many moments when I wish I could drive a car. There is no doubt that at some point I'll have to acquire this skill to avoid being the Weird Dad Who Can't Pick His Son Up From The Party. And when I've got my L Plates, and people can peer into the car and clearly see that I'm 35, I will feel pretty stupid for not getting this out of the way when I was half that age. But that's the way it goes; better late, I suppose.

So, in conclusion: I never thought I'd be good at driving, and I don't want to drive, and I've never needed to drive that much. But the day is coming when it will become an inevitability.

Non-drinking and non-mobile-phone-ownership, I can't help you with. Andrew, you are a rare specimen.

This post originally appeared on Mark Watson's blog.

www.newstatesman.com - Why I'm happy to be a non-driver

Some predictions for the fancifully titled calendar year ahead of us.

Probably by the time you read this, it will be 2011. There's no doubt that as we get older, the years are starting to sound more and more peculiar. The Eighties and Nineties were nice, manageable enough numbers. But once we were into 2000, it was hard to shake the feeling that we'd all stumbled into a sci-fi movie.

The whole decade from 2000-2010 was full of such lurid dates that we were too unnerved even to give it a name - the "Noughties" was tried for a bit, but it never caught on because it made ten years of our lives feel like an extended Carry On film. Now we're into another as-yet-nameless decade, and 2011 is probably the most bizarre milestone so far. It sounds more like a rugby score than something you would be confident writing on a cheque.

There are two options in the face of an increasingly futuristic present: have a nervous breakdown, or stare confidently down the barrel of what is to come. I've tried having nervous breakdowns before and they tend to be a rather short-term solution to your problem. So, instead, here are some predictions for the fancifully titled calendar year ahead of us.

Coalition exposed as hoax. Looking at it in the cold light of day, it all just seems a bit unlikely. The Conservatives team up with the Liberal Democrats, a party they have virtually nothing in common with? Nick Clegg, whom you couldn't have picked out of a line-up at the start of 2010, gets to be the second most powerful man in parliament? People routinely refer to "the coalition", as if we were in some Orwellian state where the idea of "the government" had been quietly phased out in favour of a smoother euphemism? I don't quite see it. The general election was ever so confusing. I think we'll learn some time in 2011 that, while we were all bamboozled by the mathematics of a hung parliament, somebody took the opportunity to launch the ultimate reality show, in which our reactions to the fake Tory-Liberal axis were secretly taped for Channel 4.

Andy Murray not to win Wimbledon. It's become a tediously predictable annual event to stack 50 years of our national frustrations about tennis on Murray's young shoulders, and then mutter about what a grumpy bugger he is if he doesn't do the conga after winning a break point. Cool customer though he is, anyone would feel the pressure of expectation: Tim Henman certainly used to. So let's avoid the mistake we
always made in more or less implying that Tiger Tim only had to turn up to win the tournament. I hereby predict that Andy Murray will definitely, definitely not win Wimbledon 2011, even if Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal break each other's legs in a freak locker-room collision. So, now that we've put that on the record, (whisper) maybe he actually will win it. Clever stuff.

The Queen appears on Strictly Come Dancing. Unlikely? But did anyone forecast a year ago that a whole swath of the population would spend their autumn watching as Ann Widdecombe was dragged across a dance floor like a sack of laundry? The producers of Strictly have set themselves a pretty high bar. John Sergeant was an audacious choice, and Widdecombe took the pantomime a stage further. Now, what elderly citizen can they drag out for next year's contest? Logic suggests they can only go right to the top. Aside from that royal wedding, which will be done and dusted by May, Her Royal Highness could certainly fit in the eight weeks' training to get the basics down, and then the popular vote would surely keep her in for at least a few episodes.

Snow. Some time in early December, a completely unexpected series of snowfalls will lead to "arctic conditions". The nation's transport infrastructure will be paralysed, Christmas plans will be ruined, and all the news channels will run more than three weeks of interrupted coverage of the crisis. The nation will rise up as one to ask why on earth we can't cope with the weather over here, when places like Canada are so good at it. This will continue for a couple of weeks. Then the sun will come out on 29 December and everyone will forget about it until the exact same point next year.

That is pretty much how I see the year shaping up. I went down to the bookies' and they offered me fairly generous odds on an accumulator. I think it must have been the Queen-on- Strictly bit that tempted them.

Well, we'll soon see who is right. In the meantime, whatever plans you might be hatching to survive 2011, best of luck with them and have a Happy New Year.

Next week: Nicholas Lezard

www.newstatesman.com -

Snow is like the Pussycat Dolls

Snow is starting to get too big for its boots. It needs to be put in its place.

Snow! When I woke up this morning, it had been falling stealthily for hours with that strange, magical, I'm-thicker-than-rain sound. As I glance out of the window at my quiet street, it's coating the cars and hanging thickly in the branches. The pavements and lawns are covered in unblemished white layers of it.

Pretty soon local schools will start admitting there's no point in trying to restrain the kids, who will be let loose like wild animals. By this evening, with a couple more flurries, the whole neighbourhood will look like a Christmas card - fittingly, as local shops have been pretending it's Christmas since mid-September as usual. Good old snow!

White gold

And if we get another couple of days of the white gold, it'll start to bring about all the other magical effects we see every winter. Elderly people will fall over and crack ribs and break legs, but the emergency services won't be able to do much about it, because they'll be dealing with "youths" who've chucked handfuls of it in each other's faces. Public transport will grind to a customary halt, and if there's one thing more tedious than that, it's people complaining that public transport has ground to a customary halt.

Radio phone-ins and local news bulletins will be full of nothing but people asking: "Why, oh why, can't we in this country deal with a little bit of snow?" But even as they're doing this, the national media will be embarking on their annual snow-fest, with wall-to-wall updates on exactly how white everything is at the moment. The blanket (of snow) coverage will push everything else out of the headlines: if Elvis were to fly in to the country during a cold snap, the main focus of the reports would be on whether or not his airport was going to be closed.

On top of this, it will be horribly, horribly cold for weeks. It'll be difficult to get around without slipping and sliding like beginner ice skaters. In fact, the whole of Britain will look like the early stages of Dancing on Ice, except without the alarming leotards. Queues in

Those air heads are off the rails

Over short distances, train travel trumps air travel in every department.

It is rare that I am seized by the desire to grab a complete stranger and urge them to change their ways. I don't consider myself to take the moral high ground on many issues. I eat animals even though I'm aware it would probably be more ethical to stop, and I regularly pour massive quantities of oil on to previously unpolluted stretches of countryside (in the light of the recent Twitter joke trial, I should probably place on record immediately that the last remark was humorous, with no basis in reality). "Live and let live" would be my philosophy, if I didn't come from a generation too vacuous and addled by MTV to have philosophies.

But this week I found myself overhearing (by which I mean deliberately eavesdropping on) a conversation in a caf

Trying to catch up like a mad man

As I struggle to keep up with the world, I'm forced to cast my suspicions on an unlikely culprit: loyalty cards.

In past columns, I've lamented the modern obsession with "things to do before you die" lists, which oppress us all not just with the reminder that our time on earth is cruelly limited, but with the further bad news that we "must" watch a thousand films, visit a thousand beauty spots and so on, in order to have lived a full life. What with the continued pressures of a nationwide tour and a house-wide struggle to deal with an eight-month-old, it won't come as a surprise to hear that I've made little progress on the "before I die" lists this year. But in the past week I've at least come to terms with one source of cultural authority, by finally watching the first episode of Mad Men, the American ad-agency drama set in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which people seem to have been recommending to me pretty much since the 1950s.

I was disappointed: it's really good. The last thing I need is something else good vying for my attention. If it had been irritating and overrated, I could have stopped worrying about the menacingly large box set awaiting my attention. But I already care about the characters and that means I'm going to have to watch the next episode as soon as I can, and before you know it I'll be staring down the barrel of three of four "seasons" or however many of the damn things these intimidatingly prolific Americans have already made.

Then I'll have to succumb at last to The Wire. The next thing will be admitting that I only ever saw about half of The Sopranos, and there you go - my life will disappear into a black hole of handsome people in braces, almost-unintelligibly-fast dialogue and millions of moody shots of skylines. Damn you, American producers, with your inexhaustible knack for the addictive, film-quality drama. You're as bad as drug dealers, in my book. And you probably wear shades even more.

Loyal highness

"What are days for?" Philip Larkin once asked. I'd like to ask the opposite: where can I get some more days? Since I'm not much of a procrastinator, I've been trying to work out what keeps stealing my time. I admit I've got a family and a peripatetic career, but lots of people seem to manage this and are bang up-to-date with The Wire. After ruling everything else out, I'm forced to cast my suspicions on an unlikely culprit: loyalty cards.

It's now almost impossible to buy anything without being asked whether you have a loyalty card, whether you would like one, whether you would like a leaflet explaining the benefits of having one, whether you would like a customer service representative to sit down with you for ten minutes to talk you through some of those benefits in person, and whether, after all this, you would fancy going out for a coffee with the staff and ultimately making one of them the godparent of your firstborn.

Boots Advantage Cards, Costa Cards, Nectar Cards: if you signed up for all these things you'd end up with more plastic about your person than the late Michael Jackson, but that's not my main reservation about them. It's the sheer time all this takes. What was once a queue of ten people buying simple items in Boots is now a queue of ten people explaining, one at a time, that they're quite all right without a store card. So if you're reading this and you're ever likely to serve me in any establishment: no, thank you. I do not want one of your cards. I'll still come back, I promise. But let me go for now.

Roboshop

Mind you, we consumers often don't help ourselves. I was in a checkout queue the other day when it dawned on me that there were four or five of those quick checkout machines waiting in vain for custom. An employee was gesturing at the machines but the other shoppers all rolled their eyes as if sidestepping an obvious scam. "I don't trust those things," said one.

"I'd rather deal with a person," another observed. I went over to one of the neglected robots and was out of there long before the competition had even heard the first "bleep" of a scanned item.

It's heartening, in a way. We used to fear that the human workforce would be replaced by a mechanical one. What we didn't know was that the human workforce would be retained to persuade people to use the mechanical one. But from a time-saving perspective, refusing to use these machines makes no more sense than refusing to look up cinema times on a website because you'd "rather hear it from someone who owns a watch". And speaking of watches, I'm almost certainly late for something. Get out of my way, everyone. I've got to get back to Mad Men before I die.

www.newstatesman.com - Trying to catch up like a mad man

Why I'm hooked on Mad Men

If you only watch one thing this year, watch this.

Cambridge. Grimsby. Hull. High Wycombe. Yep, this week has been like a pretty badly-planned caravan holiday. The final and probably best-attended of the four stop-offs is tonight and I will be setting off shortly. I don't know if there'll be an opportunity to blog, so just in case, here's this.

Just started watching Mad Men. People have been recommending it to me for about the last hundred years, same as The West Wing and all these other well-made American dramas with 1,200 episodes per season. Since I'm so far behind already, I've not had the courage to make a start, especially what with my TV-watching time ration being about an hour a week maximum, and me being addicted to The Apprentice and all, and also having football to keep up with, etc.

But anyway, Mad Men is really good. Everyone was right.

So is there anything else I should DEFINITELY be watching? Assume I've got space for, maybe, one more big heavy American (or for that matter British) series in my life. The Wire? Everyone seems to love it. Or should I go back and finish the Sopranos (only saw about half of it at the time)? Or something else? Or can I safely miss everything because it's only telly? You tell me. As I say, time is very tight. So I'm talking essentials, here.

(And yes I know The Apprentice is a reality show and probably not essential, but I do love it. Sorry.)

This post originally appeared on Mark Watson's blog.

www.newstatesman.com - Why I'm hooked on Mad Men