Andrew Collins's Blog, page 57

Meta, are you better?

Scream 4 advertises itself with the line: "New decade. New rules." These "rules" are a recurring motif. Because eleven years – that's eleven years – have elapsed since Scream 3, Scream 4 is sort of presented as a "reboot." And I mean sort of. An actual "reboot" would usually either come as an "origins" story, or as a re-cast version of the original which wipes away all traces in order to start again. Well, despite Dimension's desire to re-start the franchise, with a new trilogy mooted, this is neither. And there's the central problem with it.

If ever a franchise could reboot itself, it's Scream. I'm assuming we all loved Scream? I know I did. In 1996, when Kevin Williamson's original idea came to glorious fruition, it was something new: a slasher film in which the characters have seen all the other slasher films. It was funny and scary. This is no mean feat. And it was clever. It rewarded the geeks, and it spoon-fed the non-geeks, while patronising neither. And of course, Scream 2 and Scream 3 worked because they were a sequel and a threequel with plenty of material to draw on from the horror franchise pool.

But Scream 4, despite being written by Williamson, and directed by Wes Craven, does not work. And it does not work because it is a lazy film that can't even be bothered to make jokes about how lazy it is. Which is very lazy indeed. In it, Sidney (Neve Campbell) returns to Woodsboro on the anniversary of the first killing, to promote her self-help book. This ought to be a reasonable way back in: the town is still famous for the original murders, and two other lifers, Courteney Cox's now ex-reporter and David Arquette's now-Sheriff, still live there. Meanwhile, the high school has been repopulated with younger, more nubile kids seemingly happy to leave windows open and engage gravel-voiced nutters in phone conversations: we have Emma Roberts, Claire off of Heroes, Rory Culkin … there are also pop-iconic cameos for True Blood's Anna Paquin, Battlestar's Mary McDonnell and Veronica Mars' Kristen Bell. But it seems that all the fun went into the casting.

The film geeks – here: Culkin, a constant video-blogging Erik Knudsen (Saw II), and Hayden Panettiere herself – keep a running commentary on how a "reboot" or "remake" works, and how "meta" everything is (there's a decent enough running gag about the fictional Stab franchise, now up to Stab 7 and subject to its own Stabathon), and yet Scream 4 is not "meta" enough. References to other developments in horror, such as the Saw movies ("I hate that torture porn shit") and the Ring series are thrown away, and once you get past the self-referential dialogue, you realise that the film itself – the film you're watching – is just another suburban slasher film.

None of the clever ideas in the script find their way into the film, if you see what I mean. Wouldn't it have been funnier, and cleverer, if market forces had made Scream 4 a torture porn parody? Or a Japanese ghost story parody? This way, it would have been a satire on the evolution of the genre. As it stands, it's just a parody of the type of film it set out to parody in 1996. That's a long time in horror.

And guess what? It quickly gets boring. The first time we heard a character reference a slasher trope and then fall victim to that trope, it was revolutionary. When the two cops sent to guard Sidney's house have a "meta" discussion about the fate of cops in horror movies, we're almost there again (at least it's an area not yet covered in previous Scream films), but they don't do anything with it. They talk about how cops get killed unless they're Bruce Willis – which is a pretty dated seeming and lazy reference anyway – and, without giving away if or how they get killed, the pay-off line is … "Fuck Bruce Willis," which isn't funny or clever, or logical. Did Williamson's screenplay actually end with the words, "Will this do?"

Anyway, it's a wasted opportunity. I love "meta" when it's done as well as Williamson once did it. But there's only a very thin veneer of "meta" around Scream 4. And that rather goes again "meta", doesn't it?

(I've just re-read this entry and it does not give away who gets killed or who doesn't get killed, so I am safe with the film company. Mind you, if you care who gets killed or not killed, you are a more patient man than I am.)

Scream 4: The Rules

So, after one false start on Tuesday, I finally saw the new Scream film last night. On Tuesday, there was a fire alarm at the Soho Hotel, where it was screening, and the assembled critics were told that the fire had been in the projection room, so it was cancelled. This was a pity, because a) the film distributor, Entertainment, are known for not always tripping over themselves to lay on advance press screenings, and b) we'd all signed our forms. These are not unheard of, especially in the age of digital media, but most film companies have dispensed with them, and critics are trusted not to be silly.

CONFIDENTIALITY AGREEMENT

You are about to view the film "SCREAM 4." In doing so, you acknowledge that this film is property of Dimension Films and as such: (i) you agree to be bound by an obligation to keep certain contents of the film strictly confidential and you will not disclose such contents to anyone, including but not limited to the press, the media and the general public or write about it in a blog, on Twitter, Facebook, etc. These contents include the ending of the film, kill scenes and who remains alive in the film; (ii) you will make no video copies nor take any photos of the film.

REVIEW EMBARGO

By signing this document I hereby confirm my understanding that all reviews (including any article or review containing my personal opinion of the film) of SCRE4M (aka Scream 4) are embargoed in all forms (including newspapers or magazines, broadcast outlets such as TV or radio or digital platforms such as websites, blogs and social networking sites including such as twitter and Facebook etc) until 5pm, Wednesday 13th April unless otherwise agreed in writing in advance with Entertainment Film Distributors.

Hey … that's yesterday. I'd better get on with reviewing it. (I'll give you a precis: Scream 4 is pointless.)

Teenwolf

It's not out until next Friday, but this is not intended as a review of the film per se, more an observation on the teenagers at whom Catherine Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood is squarely aimed.

I will be reviewing it on Zoe Ball's Radio 2 show next Saturday, which is why I found myself at the screening at London's massive Empire Leicester Square last night. Big films are often screened here, in order to give them a sense of occasion and lift them from the fetid, in-bred, subterranean gloom of the screening-theatre circuit where a near-blind, emotionally constipated race of grumpy middle-aged white men hold sway.

I'm all for it, occasionally. The film companies fill the cinema with real people, presumably through competitions and reader offers in magazines, and it's always fun to spot the critics, sitting in their "usual seats" (they really do have them, even in massive West End cinemas) and in gaggles. I do not fraternise with them, but know one or two to nod or say hello to – I'm not a proper film critic, you see, and I am aware of that. They're the hardcore. They do this for a living, and see every screening. They have earned their usual seats.

Red Riding Hood is a fairly blatant attempt by director Hardwicke to recapture the glory of the first Twilight movie, a huge hit and by far the best of the trilogy so far. Rather than adapt a book aimed at teenage girls into a film for teenage girls, she and writer David Johnson have taken a centuries-old European fairytale aimed at young children and sexed it up so that it might appeal to teenage girls. On that score, I should imagine it's job done. With a fetching but willowy and slightly wimpy lead in Amanda Seyfried, she has found her new Kristen Stewart, torn, as is Twilight's Bella, between two hunky men: the hunky English blacksmith and the hunky bad-boy American lumberjack. I wonder, though, if there are t-shirts with Team Henry and Team Peter on them. I doubt it.

I wasn't familiar with the two hunky actors, Max Irons (yes, he is the son of) and Shiloh Fernandez, who play the duelling objects of Seyfried's adolescent affections, but both mounted the stage before the screening at the Empire, along with some other young actors I didn't recognise, but whose hunkiness elicited whoops and squeals from the teenage girl contingent in the packed auditorium. Yes, I turned into a proper grumpy old critic while we were subjected to this cattle market before the film, mainly because it was going to put the start-time back from the advertised 7pm – if it had been advertised on the ticket, I would have chosen a different screening – and felt sorry for the two Kiss FM DJs who had to whip the crowd up into a frenzy and ask one searching question each of the assembled hunks, and Hardwicke herself, who seemed to have even less to say. (I felt sorry for the DJs from the start when they were erroneously introduced as being from XFM.) This was not a Bafta Q&A, and nor should it have been, but it spoke volumes about the type of film I was about to see, and my heart sank a little bit more.

A couple of years ago – it must have been 2008 – I passed through Leicester Square on my way somewhere else and my path was blocked by police and barriers and a heaving throng of teenage girls. The film causing the hormonal riot turned out to be Twilight, and the kids were there to squeal at Robert Pattinson, whose name I did not at that stage even know. I found it quite impressive that all these girls would turn out just to catch a glimpse of an actor, and it was correct that I, a man in his forties, shouldn't care who he was. (He'd been in Harry Potter, but I didn't recognise him.) Twilight was laser-guided in its marketing and, as I say, I didn't mind the first film. I grew quickly tired of Bella and Edward and Jacob's mooning about in the woods, but it's not for me.

Here's the news. Red Riding Hood isn't for me either. But I wonder if it really works for them? (I didn't come over all journalistic and ask the large party of teenage girls to the right of me what they thought of it, as a quick getaway is essential on such occasions, and I was about as aware of my age as I have ever been.) With its sweeping helicopter shots of Canadian mountains, Hardwicke seems keen to remind us of the Pacific Northwest where Twilight takes place. It's got Gothy-sounding indie music in it, too. Then we're in a fake village, where it's all fire and thatch and ale and pagan ritual, except all the young men and women have modern haircuts, especially Peter the woodcutter, who's stepped straight out of a moulding hair wax commercial.

The whole thing is fake. It makes the similarly supernatural Twilight look like a documentary. The wolf which terrorises the village is at first a CGI smudge, and then solidifies into a massive cuddly toy. It looks fake. Gary Oldman turns up as a mad, Van Helsing-like exterminator priest and tries to take it seriously, but he is soon mugging with the rest of them. It's not scary. It's not mad. It's not sexy. (Or at least, it didn't strike me as sexy – maybe one heaving bodice and a bit of a sweat worked up in the forge are sexy in a 12A.) Seyfried looks pretty enough in her red riding hood but the soap opera storyline about who's-the-real-daddy? isn't enough to prop up 100 minutes of mediaeval running about with flaming torches and hiding in churches while that now-obligatory dandruff snow floats almost permanently down, causing not one villager to put on a hat or coat.

Most of the excitement came before the film. It was interesting that one of the DJs asked one of the actors how it felt to be at a screening with so many "fans"? He was not famous, so she can't have meant his fans. Did she mean fans of the director's previous film? Fans of this type of film? The place was ablaze with camera phone flashes. The girls on my row, and the one in front, and the one behind, were properly excited, and who would deny them that? They giggled and munched free popcorn and stood up, craning their necks to where the RESERVED seats promised celebrity involvement.

In the end, they got Amanda Seyfried, who is actually famous because she was in Mama Mia!, and looked the most awkward, tottering on high heels in a stupidly short dress and gushing about Hardwicke while Hardwicke waved off the praise with her hand. They got Hardwicke – whose "fans" I suspect the girls might actually be – and they got Irons, Fernandez, and two other men, whose names escaped me. (One of them was black, so he must have played one of the two black brothers in the film.) I have since looked up Shiloh Fernandez and it seems he was the second choice to play Cullen in Twilight. The fans are going to know this. And in a culture where X-Factor runners-up have better careers than the actual winners, he's probably already on walls.

Anyway, it's a naff film. And I hope it doesn't turn into a franchise. The kids deserve better than a demographic template being cynically applied to an existing property.

Grandma, what big spread sheets you have.

What's that coming over the hill?

Pictured, above, are three sitcom monsters, who happen all to be white males with goatee beards. At the top we have the newest, Jonty De Wolfe, Vice Chancellor of the university in brand new C4 comedy Campus, from the makers of Green Wing, which is mainly Victoria Pile. He is played, with extraordinary comic ingenuity, by Andy Nyman. Underneath him is David Brent, the creation of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, who is sufficiently iconic to exist outside of the sitcom that featured him. You don't even need to name it. (It's The Office.) And finally, perhaps the least well known, Kenny Powers, the down-at-heel baseball legend around whom the incredible Eastbound & Down is built (Season Two currently showing on FX, with a third, its last, imminent on HBO in the States). Powers is the creation of Danny McBride, who plays him – who lives him – and the show's co-creators Ben Best and Jody Hill.

All three men are horrible.

Having recently created my first ever sitcom character of note – a man called Harvey Easter in the forthcoming Radio 4 sitcom Mr Blue Sky, starts on May 16 – I am aware that I am entering a crowded and tricky marketplace. Every TV or radio comedy writer from Ray Galton and Alan Simpson to Victoria Pile hopes to create a durable and recognised character. Basil Fawlty, Captain Mainwaring, Victor Medrew, Del Boy, Hank Kingsley, George Costanza, Compo, Mr Humphreys, Wolfie Smith, Margo Leadbetter, Hyacinth Bucket, Rigsby, Frank Spencer, Anthony Hancock, the list goes on … who wouldn't want to add to that list? But the immortal sitcom character is usually complex. He or she is usually flawed. And he or she is usually sympathetic.

David Brent was sympathetic. You didn't hate him. He was a twat. But he meant well. Mainwaring was snobby and miserable and proud. But he meant well. Hancock was snobby and miserable etc. But he meant well. Kenny Powers – who I realise less people will have seen – is obnoxious, sexist, bullying, self-centred, self-aggrandising, delusional and ugly. He doesn't even mean well. He means only to further his career and status, and is driven almost exclusively by ego and sexual desire. He will tread on anybody who gets in his way. And yet … and yet … as played by McBride, he is still lovable. He is pathetic, but somewhere deep inside him is a soul. That's the beauty of the writing and the performance: that we can even detect something deep in him. Malcolm Tucker is another shining example, although he doesn't have a goatee beard, so I have not included him in my thesis.

Jonty De Wolfe, whom I have only seen in one and a half episodes of Campus, is thus far a series of tics. Like Brent, he is self-absorbed and prone to the politically incorrect faux pas, which he doesn't even realise is a faux pas. He uses the term "spastic" in Episode One. He mocks an Asian student by mimicking Indian music. He is a monster. But so was Brent, and so is Powers. So why does De Wolfe not work? Well, let's give him a break – he hasn't had time to bed in, and the subtleties of Mainwaring and even Fawlty may have taken longer than an episode to become apparent. But I suspect not. I suspect that both were, if not fully formed, at least partly-baked when they appeared for the first time on our screens. I certainly "got" Brent within ten minutes of The Office. There is nothing to "get" with De Wolfe. Not yet anyway. This is a shame, as there is an awful lot of writing and acting talent on show in Campus.

As there would be. Green Wing was amazing, a proper breath of fresh and bendy air, and a comedy that – gasp! – worked over an hour, rather than 30 minutes. No mean feat. And it did so because, even though its characters seemed like archetypes and idiots to begin with, it didn't take long for hearts to start beating beneath their tics. (I am currently working with one of its writers, by the way, someone whose work I really admire, so this is not a dig at the writers, simply at the more general problem with creating new characters in this vein.) In Campus, so far, the characters seem just to be monsters and idiots. And it's hard to sell a monster.

Am I right? I am now almost pathologically unable to criticise contemporary comedy, as I am in the same game. And I don't mean to criticise Campus, but there's something awry here, isn't there?

No?

The ex-flies

OK, went for a belated spin round this exhibition this afternoon, Modern British Sculpture, during what turned out to be a rare hour of spare time in an insanely packed working week. (Good job I didn't attempt to blog daily about it. It simply would not have happened, with three unexpected 6 Music breakfast shows, which had knock-on effects through my carefully planned days on Wednesday, Thursday and today, pushing their start-times back to around 10.30am and making me that bit more tired due to 5am wake-up calls. Not complaining about the work, mind you.) As I am a Friend of the Royal Academy – a yearly stipend that really pays its way if you ensure that you treat the place like a hotel and see everything that's going – it's nice to just pop in, without the pressure of having to squeeze every last drop out of your ticket fee. This latest blockbuster closes next week, so it's last chance to see great, big things by Antony Caro, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Richard Long and other luminaries. Less of a pleasure to see this:

Entitled Let's Eat Outdoors Today, it's a typically striking Damien Hirst that's typically concerned with death and decay and relies on shock value to make its point, and I object to it. I knew it was in the exhibition, but you always wonder just how cruel these "living" sculptures really will be in the flesh. And this one, a barbecue in two steel and glass cubes inside which hundreds and hundreds of flies are entombed, hits the spot. It's revolting. It smells a bit. And if the hundreds of flies were replaced by, say, a single kitten, there would be outrage at its exploitative cruelty. But hey, it's just stupid old flies, right? Pests. Insects. Irritating buzzing things that vomit on food. The effect is successful. You peer inside, wonder where the people have gone, try to work out how Hirst, or his helpers, managed to fill glasses of beer, say, or a box of mouldy marshmallows with layers of dead flies, upon which live flies alight and crawl, and you come quickly to the conclusion that they died as part of the show. It's snuff art.

The "piece" is new, coined especially for what is otherwise a retrospective exhibition, but I guess Hirst installations are gifts that go on giving: you can rebuild them, and repopulate them with flies whenever and wherever you fancy. I am interested in what Hirst has to say, and I find his formaldehyde suspensions spooky and clever, but mounting dead animals is one thing, killing live ones to make a point is another one altogether. (If, by the way, you are offended by his shark and his cow and his sheep, I respect that, too.) I once saw a Hirst cube that had live butterflies in it. That I found gross too. It's like the "entertainment" of tipping live insects onto celebrities in I'm A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here: a number are bound to be injured or killed in the process, and humiliating Christine Hamilton or Gillian McKeith necessarily involves humiliating maggots and bugs and flies. I don't approve. In fact, I'm not entirely sure why you're allowed to do it, legally, never mind ethically.

I'm all for challenging art. I definitely approve of installation as a legitimate form of artistic expression. But when it involves killing living creatures – there's even a fly "zapper" in one of the cubes, with a few carcasses stuck to its electrified bars like raisins – I squirm. I've read up on it, and it started out as some trays of live maggots, which turned into flies, which then die. It is a narrative. It is evolving art. It's the circle of life, and says something about us being uncomfortable around dirt, while we all eventually go back to dirt. As I say, not the most profound thing ever thought of, but not stupid in its intent. Except in the act of turning insects into performing installations with wings, which crosses an unhappy line for me. (Mind you, I have been known to rescue flies from drowning. This is my curse.)

Still, I loved seeing Hepworth's massive Single Form, Caro's perplexing but pleasing Early One Morning, and Tony Cragg's stupendous Stack, around which you could walk all day. I was also knocked out by the scale of Alfred Gilbert's sincere Jubilee Memorial To Queen Victoria, which is a statue rather than a sculpture, and seemed out of place and all the more imposing in a gallery. Nice to take in these huge monuments at close range and in silence. I realise it is someone like Damien Hirst's job to turn your head and put a pole in the spokes of a traditional gallery-grazing experience, and Let's Eat Outdoors Today definitely does that. But there ought to be another way.

 

The Andrew Collins Mystery SOLVED

Further to the previous post, Detective Inspector Internet has now gathered us all in the drawing room to solve the Andrew Collins Mystery. After relating the facts of the case – the final Tweet, Hurricane Noel, the MIT Sloan connection, the CEO of RentJuice – you collectively set to work. Andy McH found what looked to be an Andrew Collins in Facebook with links to MIT and sent him a message. He also found the same guy on LinkedIn here. The good news was: Andrew Collins, who doesn't live in Miami, but was in Miami on November 2, 2007, didn't perish in the tropical storm. He is alive and well and just not Tweeting. As you can see from the grab above, he enjoyed being the centre of a mystery, and broke his no-Tweeting rule for the first time in three years to send out a message to us all. Bravo to him!

Good work also by Jonathan and Jeanette in the comments section of this blog, where we also heard, triumphantly, from his sisters, Cathy O'Flaherty and Brigid Collins (who described Andrew as "my cool younger brother").

I am delighted that we have found him. He is now officially the Andrew Collins. I wonder if he'll let me have his name?

The Andrew Collins Mystery

OK, here's how it all started. On Thursday, irascible comedian and father Robin Ince pretended to berate me via the medium of social networking site Twitter. I'm going to assume you know how Twitter works. He included my @name in his Tweet, except, distracted fool that he is, he typed in @andrewcollins. My Twittername is @CollingsA, and has been since 2008 when I first signed up.

Inevitably, if you have a common name, as I do, you won't get your actual name, as it will already have been taken. This proved to be the case with mine, and that's why I ended up going down the "Collings" route. This means I have to spell it every time I say it, and it also means I am doomed for the rest of my days to be known by a name that is not actually my name. Anyway, people are often mistyping it as @CollinsA, which is the name of Amanda Collins in Halifax, Novia Scotia, who's probably fed up with getting stupid Tweets to her that she doesn't understand. This happens. It is @CollingsA.

Anyway, out of curiosity, I looked up @andrewcollins, clearly jealous of him for being such an early adopter of Twitter he was able to have his own name in full. Well, here he is.

Now, ordinarily, this would be a bit of fun: find a namesake, discover that they are an alumnus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and see how different they are from you. But Andrew Collins, who seems to be based in Miami, hasn't Tweeted since November 2007. Indeed, he has only ever Tweeted seven times in total, between October 21 and November 2 of that year. Did he get bored with it in under a fortnight? Clearly, my first, selfish thought was: surely I can have his name if he's not bothered about Twitter any more. But then I read his last Tweet again and things went a bit eerie:

Did he perish in the tropical storm – officially, Hurricane Noel – which moved in from Haiti and Cuba to the Florida coast in November 2007 and up the Eastern seaboard as far as Canada? It's a horrible and sad thought. But you wouldn't be human if you didn't wonder. Who was Andrew Collins of Miami? From his other Tweets we discover that he was a Red Sox fan. He only followed three other "people", all connected with MIT and its Sloan School. (Hey, back in 2007, there were far less people to follow. If he did get bored with Twitter, who can blame him?)

I looked up Hurricane Noel, and it claimed the lives of 222 people, the majority of whom were in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and none of whom were in Florida, or the United States. This seems to confirm that Andrew Collins wasn't killed in the storm. But where did he go?

I suspect that, as an early adopter of Twitter, he didn't find much use for it. He only followed three people, after all. Twitter's "tipping point" is always said to have occurred in 2007. (It went from around 400,000 Tweets per quarter in 2007 to 100 million in the first quarter of 2008, by which time, Andrew Collins had tuned out.)

I sent a message to one of his 22 existing followers called David Vivero, the first one I came to who seems to still use the site. He's the CEO of RentJuice. But he hasn't responded. Mind you, my Tweet to him must have sounded weird, or a bit like spam. I hold out little hope of him replying.

If I was a proper journalist, or someone looking to write a book, I'd take it further, but I thought I'd share it here anyway. Who is Andrew Collins? And why did he stop Tweeting in November 2007?

I Googled him and "MIT alumni" and found an Andrew S Collins listed in an MIT Sloan Management annual report from 2007 but he's just listed, and it might not be our Andrew Collins, and anyway all it would prove is that he was alive in 2007, which we already know.

Perhaps I should ask all 22 of his followers if they know where he went. Maybe I will.

Day Five Pt2

That's me done then. I'm on my way home on the train after the last of my five consecutive Steve Lamacq shows, looking shifty again, as I don't want anyone to see over my shoulder. I am tired. I am, as previously stated, hot in my layers. Day Five will, I predict, wind down with some telly and me nodding off. I plan to eat something made of eggs. I love eggs. Unusually, I have four fresh eggs in my bag, unless they have all been smashed by me putting the laptop on my bag. These come from Rachel, who works at 6 Music. Actually, not from Rachel, but from her bantam chickens. She had heard that I like eggs and very sweetly offered me some – her hens lay up to 14 a week and she can't keep up with them. I definitely eat 14 eggs a week, on my own! They are small, but imagine how lovely they will taste!

That's it, then. One more working half-day tomorrow, and I will no longer be blogging like this. Thanks for reading. It's been good. Next week: all sorts, including a day of calculating my VAT for the last quarter, more Radio Times, more reading of books about the 20th century, the last 7 Day Sunday of this series (everything's ending!), and I hope a couple of trips to the cinema and one to the Royal Academy to catch the modern British sculpture exhibition before it ends. Also, a secret thing to do with the Guardian.

The man across the aisle from me on the train is ordering Nando's. You can tell he's embarrassed at having to do it with the entire carriage listening to him. He's having extra hot sauce. Richard Herring would be impressed. He's welcome to it. I'm having eggs out of a bantam hen.

Cheers.

Day Five

Day Five. The end of the working week looms. I am wearing what I hope is more cheerful attire: a checky shirt. Now that my Kennedys book is read, I have replaced it at my bedside by this, The Oligarchs by Washington Post Moscow correspondent David E. Hoffman. Subtitled Wealth and Power in the New Russia, I started reading it two years ago but it was usurped, as books tend to be. (Funnily enough, I bought the book because I had come up with a sitcom idea involving a Russian oligarch, and the production company I pitched it to passed on it because they already had a sitcom about a Russian oligarch in development. No idea is new.)

Anyway, I was only ever a couple of chapters into it, but found its stories fascinating, so I've gone back to the beginning of the chapter I'd marked and I'm back in Perestroika-era Russia. A nice change from the United States, Britain and Israel.

Today I will be forced to conceal details, as I'm involved in a writers' brainstorming day on a new project, hosted by the production company who are developing it for the BBC. I was asked to go in to meet the producers in September when they were asking various outside writers to give their reactions to an existing pitch document. I gave my thoughts. I was actually paid for my thoughts, with no obligatin on their part to call me back. They have called me back. This is good news. They must have liked me and my ideas. As I've stated before and often, as a writer, you spend a lot of time auditioning, except unlike an actor you are sort of auditioning to play yourself: a writer. I really liked the producers – one of whom I'd crossed path with in the late 80s, as good fortune would have it – and I think their idea is a possible hit. I am happy to be involved in its development, but you'll have to bear with the secrecy.

The meeting is being held at a theatre. I may take a sneaky picture of myself there.

And look, Chris at Go Faster Stripe has sent me some Secret Dancing DVDs. These make me very happy. They're still selling well, and if you'd like one they are available here. While I'm plugging, if you wish to come to the May 18 performance of Christ On A Bike and/or the live Collings & Herrin Podcast, both being filmed for Richard's next DVD at London's Leicester Square Theatre, get your tickets here. These are also selling well. I haven't seen Richard now for almost two weeks. Am I allowed to say I sort of miss him?

Incidentally, if you got wind of the Andrew Collins Twitter controversy yesterday, I'm going to write about it in a separate blog entry. And while I'm here, this is a graph of my stats for the past week. Look how solidly popular these diary blog entries are. (The left-hand scale indicates "visits.") This doesn't mean I can, or will, keep it up – indeed, I'm looking forward to stopping at the end of today – but I will say it's been a fun experiment, simply to see if I could do it. I used to write day-to-day blog entries on the 6 Music website in 2005, but stopped when I moved over to my own blog in 2006, and although some of those early entries were about mundane, personal things, I pulled up the drawbridge about four or five years ago, and I'm not about to start it again. But writing about my working week seems like a reasonable compromise.

Well, the brainstorming meeting was alright. There were just five of us round the traditional oval conference table: two producers – one of whom came up with the original concept – and three writers. I don't think it's betraying any confidences or bringing bad juju upon the project by saying they had hired a meeting room in the Soho Theatre in London's Soho (where me, Stuart Maconie and David Quantick did the first run-through of Lloyd Cole Knew My Father back in 2001, and where I have seen many great comedy shows, including Stewart Lee and Will Smith). In this photo, you can see some posters behind me advertising shows.

And in the bottom pic, I am holding up the coffee pot. The coffee wasn't too nice, but we did six hours of brainstorming, basically building a storyline for a potential pilot – actually, I did five, as I was allowed out early in order to get to 6 Music, which was very decent of them. At 1pm, the theatre provided us with lunch, which turned out to be enough sandwiches, wraps, cherry tomatoes, sausages and goujons to feed at least ten people. We did our very best to eat all of both platters, and those that had come to London on trains put the remainder in their bags. We do, after all, work in television, and are thus basically beggars at heart. (We will be begging the BBC to commision a pilot. Any further developments I can veil in secrecy and ambiguity will be passed on as and when. Needless to say: I hope it comes off. Most things don't. This one should. Which still doesn't mean it will.)

It's really hot today. I am wearing a shirt, a hoodie and a soft jacket, and I was wearing a scarf when I left the house this morning. I am way too hot.

Day Four Pt2

Cheers. I look happy in this picture, too, don't I? This never happens. I mean, it pretty much never happens. I am in a pub. On my own. At lunchtime. Here is my excuse: I left the coffee shop at St Pancras and headed over to Tottenham Court Road in Central London to where the studio is. The studio where we are recording the extra scene for Mr Blue Sky. When I got there, it turned out that, it being lunchtime, the producers and editor had gone for lunch. So, unwilling to give any more money to a coffee shop and having used up my Costa loyalty card privileges, I went to the nearest pub, and, using a special logic based on a combination of factors (it's a nice day; I never do this; there were lots of spare tables; I felt a bit spare and lost; I need somewhere to wait for Michael Legge; it's what Steve Lamacq would do and I am Steve Lamacq this week), I gave money instead to a pub for a pint of Staropramen, which I am hip enough to know is called "Star" when you ask for it, if you are an experienced drinker.

I am no longer an experienced drinker. I feel illicit. I know that I can drink a whole pint and still operate for the rest of the day without falling asleep, especially as I have many packed lunch elements still in my bag to help see me through my radio show, but it's rare at my age to feel illicit. This is highlighted by the fact that I am clearly in a student pub. It's near to the University of Central London, or UCL, which is huge, and if you ever hear students complaining about tuition fees again, tell them to stop ordering lunch from a pub, as all these students are. It's seven or eight quid for a fish and chips or burger, and if they can afford to pay that when I can't, they must be rolling in it. (Debt. They are rolling in debt. But they would be rolling in less debt if they made a packed lunch every day, like I do.)

Because I don't go to pubs much, I like going to them. When I was at college, I used the canteen, where food was cheap and subsidised, and so were we, as we still got grants for being a student. Maybe UCL doesn't have a canteen. I bet canteens are nicer now than they were then, too. Ours was like a school canteen. We loved it, but it was. I bet university canteens are all modern and healthy now, and I bet they have sandwich shops too. I do not deny students the right to go to the pub. But they shouldn't eat in them.

(Ha ha, I accidentally pushed in front of three students at the very crowded bar because they were too busy talking, presumably about the cuts, to hear the barman say, "Next, please!" They were next. But I went next as I was alone and not talking to anybody. They should take pity on me. I have no friends.)

Well, here I am in the edit. This is where my Radio 4 sitcom, Mr Blue Sky, is currently being turned into an actual thing that they can play out on the radio by my producers Anna and John and editor Rich. I don't think my presence there on a daily basis would help. Better to just turn up, as I did today, and listen to a completed edit. Also, we had Mark Benton and Michael Legge in to record my brand new scene, one which we didn't realise we needed in Ep1 until it was lashed together. It's an establishing scene which, when you hear it on May 16 on Radio 4 at 11.30am, you won't notice, hopefully.

I had to leave for 6 Music before they'd finished, and it took a while for Mark and Michael to get back into character, after two weeks away from the show, but as I left, they were Harvey and Sean again, and in safe hands. (The studio requires a code tapped into a keypad to operate the lift, and another code to get into the actual studios from the corridor – that's high security.)

The 6 Music show was dominated by Roundtable, which, neatly enough, was revived for what used to be the Teatime slot when that slot was mine, and is now Steve's. But for this week, it is mine again. Not much has changed. Some records, reviewed by a trio of guests, either musical or comedic, or, in the case of Matt Berry, both, as his new LP is why he's on the market. As ever, it's a potentially sweat-inducing presenting job, as you have to keep on top of the tracks being played, jolly along the panellists, read out extracts from what used to be called the "chatroom" and time your way up to the news, and to the handover to Marc in Manchester at 7pm. Also, it's your job not only to impart information about the records under the hammer, but to elicit meaningful comments from the guests.

Dave from Frankie & The Heartstrings – a lovely band from the North East, whose singer, Frankie, I have guested on Roundtable alongside – is a bone-dry individual, but very funny, if you can listen past his deadpan delivery. He's the one who came up with the line, "Crosby, Stills and Gash," to describe Fleet Foxes. A fine, upstanding individual, and drummer (finest member of any band), he drank a glass of white wine in the pub afterwards before heading back to Sunderland. (If it turns out to be Newcastle, I will be killed.) Matt Berry, so familiar from The Boosh and The IT Crowd and Darkplace and Snuffbox, was very technical about the production techniques on the records, and held back from being overtly funny, even though he is. (He orderd a "scotch and coke" in the pub.) Meanwhile, Legge (pint of Becks) whom I know too well to be dispassionate about, brought a welcome frenetic energy to proceedings. I would say this, but he's very good on the radio, I think. (Paul Simon and Yuck drew in terms of points given, for the record.)

Only a quick "one drink" in the pub afterwards, as we all had gigs and homes to go to, or trains to catch, but it was nice to unwind for a blessed hour.

A full day, and an exhausting one. Another full and exhausting one tomorrow.