Just Writing

"I’m writing because to do otherwise is to think. We rang the hospital. My father has just come back from surgery. I want to say no more. Not for reasons of discretion but just because I don’t think it’s right to do that. I try not to think about, let alone verbalise, certain things. I can only exist from minute to minute, as I have been doing for the last few days. My thoughts are elsewhere. I wait for another hour. Another phone call.

Writing this is an escape and I wouldn't write it if I wasn't going to post it. It has been a long morning in the longest three days of my life. Since Monday evening, I have done so much sitting, waiting, thinking, and changing, in however small a degree, as a person.

My attitude towards bloggers has also changed. The very act of blogging, it strikes me now, has always been a positive thing. I have always made much about writing comedy as a means of making a moral statement about how we should live. I’ve always been inspired by Lord Byron whose early life was couched in writing bleak, melancholic poems such as ‘Childe Harold’, but in later years, chose to write ‘Don Juan’, one of the finest comic poems ever composed. He clearly made a choice. I never thought of bloggers doing the same. I never before realised how much we are a community. That we choose to contribute, for whatever reasons of whatever ways, we are contributing to something that is wholly good.

We have rebels. We have conservatives. I have always seen myself as a rebel. I would always do things that ran counter to the prevailing current. Even in the last few weeks, I have annoyed people when I only wished to amuse them. It’s to be expected. People who appreciate my humour, the things I want to say, would find me eventually. Some might enjoy or see the point in what I try to do.

That a few have understood me has always been of great pride. For me, the real world is not much of a world (at least, not in the North West) and living in my words and through my words, I tend not to want too much an outer world. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t go clubbing. I just write and be with a family. They sustain me. It’s only friends that I meet online, that I come to know and choose by reading their blogs, that have become some of the closest friends I have. I quote them daily as though I have only just met them that morning. It’s hard to convey but as an anonymous commenter puts it: ‘A blogger becomes a secret family member and best friend and they are a special breed.’ However, I never really truly understood this until I witnessed the depth of the support I’ve received in the last few days. There haven’t been hundred of emails but there have been a few, all of which have been very meaningful to me. Some make me cry. Some make my heart swell when it has only been feeling small and insignificant. The messages have sustained me but not in large obvious ways. I feel like somebody has reached out and shared a moment’s warmth with me. In this there’s everything that we forget about being human. Being civilised. Being together.

I questioned when I wrote my previous post, feeling like hell, lying in bed at six AM yesterday, after three hours of weak, broken sleep, that I was reducing my father’s suffering to ‘a blog event’. I disabled comments because I didn’t want to make it feel like some fiction. I am glad that I did that but I am even happier that you still reached out to me. I still wait. I still worry. I still feel so much hurt. But I am also proud to have discovered so many real and decent people."

Update

"I just wanted to thank you all for your kind comments and the supportive emails I’ve received in the last 24 hours. Many of the emails came from people that I’ve never before met, either in person or via the comments. They were the regular but silent readers of this blog. There is much to be said about the kindness of strangers. There is equally as much to be said about the kindness of friends. It's a very real community spirit that exists. You have all given me and my family a great deal of comfort as we wait for news."

A Friend Writes...

"Last night, my father was moved to a neurosurgical unit in a far away hospital. ‘Far away’. Makes it sound like some fairy tale. And yesterday began with such hope. Even thoughts of happy endings.

We’d rang the ward to be told that my father had enjoyed a comfortable night. My mother and my sister went to visit him yesterday afternoon, to take him his medication, his slippers, his newspaper. The nurse told them that he was fine but ‘we haven’t been able to wake him.’ Doctors spoke of a severe infection. So my mother and sister sat with him for an hour, talking to him as my father squeezed their hands though he seemed to be in the deepest sleep. Like a fairy tale too, I suppose. Last night they were called back to the hospital. When my mother rang to tell me that my Dad had suffered serious bleeding to the brain, I broke down in my girlfriend’s arms. I’ve never known such pain.

My sister, who has found such strength, such calm, said to me last night or early this morning, ‘let your writing get you through this.’ I didn’t know then as I don’t know now. It felt like something I would never do: have an overly sentimental reaction to an event of such profound emotional significance. Yet I woke up this morning at dawn crying again. Writing this is the only way I can make it stop for however short a time.

Waking up, there was no sudden moment of recollection. I had feared that I would emerge from sleep having forgotten the last 48 hours. I didn’t want to be subjected to the renewed sense of desolation. Instead there was just the profoundest sadness and this voice; this voice that so often writes inside my head and makes me happy by phrasing phrases, parsing sentences, writing jokes, constructing stories. It’s like another version of me but more self-assured, in control of his emotions. I wanted him to step in and help me for a time. I wanted him to help me overcome the pain I’m suffering this morning. I haven’t stopped crying for 24 hours. I don’t know what’s becoming of me.

My father is the kindest man I’ve ever known. The gentlest too. The perfect neighbour, he’s the man that everybody would turn to for help. And he would gladly give it. He had a tool for every job; his shed a shrine to the post-War make-do mentality with pieces of bent metal to get through every blocked drain or wall cavity imaginable. He has tools with handles he’s fashioned out of other tools, cable he has hoarded for the next electrical emergency. He’s the man who, at the height of summer, would spend hours in the front garden and talk to anybody who walked past. He loves to talk. He loves people. He believes that people are good and that the world is good. Yet for the last fifteen years he’s been in such pain that it changed his character. It made it so much harder that we are too much alike.

My mother says that’s why we’d so often clash. Our relationship is complex. I share his love of laughter, his interest in books and science, his fascination with how things work. I hope I also share his decency. Yet I only ever wanted to make him proud. He was probably the only man who willingly chose to read my Ph.D. thesis, though I think most of it was lost to him as it was probably lost on me. He loved poetry but not, I suppose, reading about poetry. And a deep hurt this morning, among so many deep hurts, is knowing that he never got to read my first novel. I thought having my book cancelled weeks before publication was the worst thing that could happen to me this year. I hadn’t shown him the book because I wanted to wait until it was really a book. Published. His family name on the cover. Yet now it means nothing except I can still hear my father’s laughter and I live in the hope that I might hear it again.

So I’m writing this and I don’t know if I’ll really post something so personal. I don’t know if I want these horrible unstructured words to represent all that I’m feeling because they don’t. But when I write, I do have a sense of something greater than my pain. I don’t mean to make people pity me or perhaps I do. And that also troubles me. Why share this? Why talk about this? Perhaps I want reassurance. I need to know that on the other side of this is a life I’ll be happy to live, that I’ll still have a chance to write, to be the man my father made me. Yet it sickens me to think that I’m even thinking of myself. That I cannot be strong. That I simply cannot stop crying."

Closed Until Further Notice

For the present time, I'm closing this blog for the reasons explained in the post below. Those of you who have read me for long enough understand what I mean why I speak about my friend. His father's condition is described as 'stable' but the doctors believe it's pneumonia. He isn't awake but this is apparently normal for this condition. It is, however, a matter of waiting.

I thank you for your support, both now but over the last year. I would just ask you to prey for a very kind man who we love very dearly.

Brief Update

A brief note to say that updates to the blog will be delayed. A friend of mine, vital to the running of this Appreciation Society, has been called away. His father was rushed into hospital last night. Until we know more, things might go quiet.

I hope you’ll bear with us until we find out the situation, hopefully later today.

A Quiet Monday Morning

It’s a new week down on Madeley Farm and things aren’t looking good for the livestock. All the web traffic has dried up and the blog is like a dry watering hole with the carcases of my last two posts lying there, teeth exposed in a rictus grin and their prime meat worthless now that it sits dead on the bone. What’s apparent is that many of you are either on holiday or out enjoying this unseasonably warm weather, which is good if you’ve got the caravan perched a five minute walk from the beach but not so good when you’re indoors with a woman with knee ligament damage.

The weekend has been exhausting. When I’ve not been waving a fan over Judy to keep her cool, I’ve been running to the kitchen to swap frozen vegetables for those that have defrosted on her knee. There there’s been the constant guests coming to see how Judy is doing. Cilla Black came by yesterday afternoon and the two of them sang a few of their old favourite songs as I tried to provide accompaniment on the Casio. That’s hard to do when you’re ears are plugged with three inches of tightly packed cotton wadding. I was glad to see her go.

Then there was a visit by the Corbetts and Ronnie’s ill-advised comment that I’m surprised hasn’t been picked up by the media.

‘I don’t suppose... Ha! Oh dear...’ he said as he readjusted his glasses in that way he does. ‘I don’t suppose, Judy, that there’s any chance of you bouncing me on your knee?’

Judy’s face flushed the colour of her knee. Ronnie should have known better since there’s a chance that his weight on Judy’s knee is exactly what’s aggravated the problem in the first place. Again, it came down to Yours Truly to save the day. Once I’d bounced Ronnie on my knee for fifteen minutes he seemed happy. Visits by Judith Chalmers (she prophesised ‘good news in knees’) and Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee went without a hitch and Paul amused Judy by pulling a packet of ice cold baby carrots from behind her ear.

As for Judy, after nearly a week’s rest, cure, and frozen veg, she is feeling much better and is now beginning to get movement in the joint. Another seven days and she’ll be back working on the crazy paving, playing snooker at her local association, and sitting beside me on the Richard&Judy sofa. And for me: that’s when I might feel like writing something uplifting on a Monday morning.

Whistling The Planet Goodbye

The whistle of the Kärcher makes it easy to forget that the air is only just smelling like air again since all the barbeques and outdoor fuel heaters of the night before. The whistling hasn’t stopped for nearly three hours now. It’s an incessant tone like something dreamed up by the CIA for interrogating Iraqi shoe salesmen. I’m in the mood for talking. I’ll gladly tell them where the guns are buried if only to make that noise stop.

Not that the Kärcher is the only means of loosening my lips this fine hot Sunday morning in the middle of July. Babies scream, children shout, motorbikes are being revved by grease-smeared teenagers preparing for an off-road scramble across the local beauty spot. A guy across the road is fixing up his car, which is not so much a means of transport but a nuclear powered beat box with a bass unit in the back bigger than the engine in the front. It’s a strange inversion of purpose. He plays music light on lyrics but heavy in the amount of energy it pumps into the ground. The house’s foundations shake. I feel my teeth loosen. I grow a day older with each rhythmic intrusion. Judy is not happy.

The roads around here are thick with cars but the pavements are free of feet. Pedestrians are in the road, trying not to get clipped by the 4x4s. All the pavements are blocked off by Jeeps parked across the path. Woman push prams through the traffic because people with long empty drives don’t want to park their brand new cars in any spot other than where they close off the pavement. Straight across. Nose up to the garden gate. A six foot wall of selfishness, consumerism, and spite. A car completely blocks a mother’s path and I watch her push her pram across the verge, over the high kerb, and then down into the road to avoid the parked car. It’s her fault, I suppose, for choosing to walk, not having a car, or not having a 4x4 pram with beat box and intercontinental used nappy disposal unit.

As the sun begins to warm the day, tempers fray. A fight breaks out somewhere nearby. It comes to us on the light breeze like some black-winged butterfly bringing bad news. I welcome it as butterflies aren’t to be seen this year. All the gardeners have dug up their lawns and plants. They’ve cut down their trees. Gravel is this year’s grass and plants are twisted pieces of ironwork in the shape of a large heron bought from Homebase along with the patio heaters, the outdoor furniture, sleeping cherubs, decking, and solar lamps that burn throughout the night and deny me the darkness I need to see the stars. The world is being consumed by Homebase. It’s the name of the End. The Doom Bringer. The Destroyer of Worlds.

It’s coming up to noon and the trees now come into bloom; parasols in orange, green, gold. The neighbour comes out. His shirt is off, his large Christ tattoo indistinct against his brown tan of his sun lamped back. He climbs up to his decking with his can of lager, his oven-ready meal, his packet of cigarettes, and he takes command of his deckchair beneath his gold parasol. He mutters a few words about all the noise. ‘Terrible,’ he says. ‘You’d think people would think about their neighbours.’ He then fires up his radio to drown out the sound of the hundred others beneath their parasols and the Kärchers, the beat boxes, the babies, the bikers, the bad news butterflies.

England begins another selfish summer when you either join in or you suffer. The rule of the game is simple: make more noise that your neighbour, consume more power, burn more fuel, drive faster, drive further, park more erratically, shout more loudly, drink more, eat more, smoke more. Have fun as you whistle the planet goodbye.

The Real Story of Judy’s Knee

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, War and Peace, The History of the English Speaking Peoples, Jeffrey Archer’s Kane and Abel: it always takes time before all the great stories are told in a way that does them justice. Days have now passed since the news broke that, for at least a fortnight, I’ll be presenting the Richard&Judy show without the right side of the ampersand to keep my hormones in balance. Only now am I in a position to tell you the full tale of Judy’s knee and how this magnificent specimen of Dame Womanhood was brought (or, should I say, dragged down) to her one good knee and glorious shin.

As you probably know, Judy has had problems with her knee for some time. Years of climbing ladders with a hod of bricks on her back haven’t helped. Even after she’d finished building our house, the toil on her legs continued as she set about laying seven miles of crazy paving around our expansive estate here in our undisclosed location in the South East of England. Yet the decision to finally have the knee operated upon only came as late as last Sunday when I was blessed with a visit by Bill Oddie.

Sunday, as you know, is normally a day of rest in the Madeley household. By the early evening, the adventures of the previous week had caught up with me and I was dozing on the sofa ahead of my weekly chuckle at my old friend Clarkson on ‘Top Gear’. Such happy dreams I was having. Vanessa Feltz wore something light and breezy as she played air hockey with Jeremy Paxman who was getting thoroughly outclassed. I watched from on high, lounging in the umpire’s chair and laughing manically as I awarded every contentious decision to the woman in the see-through chiffon.
I didn’t, at first, hear the doorbell ring and when it did wake me, I arrived at the front door still thinking of air hockey. I was certainly not prepared to see Bill Oddie standing there carrying a large suitcase.

‘Bill? What you doing here at this hour?’ I asked.

‘Ha!’ said Bill as he dragged the suitcase into the hall and dumped it at my feet. He turned his back and went outside, only pausing on the doorstep to gaze back at me and say ‘ha!’ again.

He returned a moment later with another suitcase which was even bigger than the first.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said as he set the case down. ‘You’ll soon see what I’ve brought. This will all begin to make perfect sense in just a moment.’

‘Thank God for that,’ I replied. ‘I thought you were about to say “ha!” to me for no apparent reason.’

‘Ha!’ said Bill and with that he turned back to his car. I followed to watch him drag a third suitcase from the boot that was even bigger than the first two and probably exceeded the capacity of the word ‘suitcase’ and should more rightly be described as a ‘travel trunk’.

‘This is what you’ve been asking to see for nearly three years,’ said Bill. ‘And now is the moment when you get to see it.’

My heart soared over eighteen metres of beats like an Olympic standard triple jumper on methamphetamines.

‘You haven’t?’ I asked.

Bill smiled and it was that rarity in all men with beards: a smile full of grace and beneficence.

I helped him drag all three suitcases/trunks into the living room, though I wouldn’t have done this had I not known that Judy would be out until well after midnight. Bill knew it too since the local newspapers have been reporting nothing else but the East of England snooker tournament at Judy’s local Snooker & Billiards Association. Judy was due to play Barbara Winsor at eight in what was sure to be a nine frame thriller. I knew it would go on until late and I intended to make the most of my time along with Bill and his suitcases.

‘I don’t know what to say, Bill,’ I said as I watched him begin to push the sofa back so we’d have plenty of floor space. ‘This really is an honour.’

‘The honour is all mine,’ answered Oddie, now unlatching the smallest of the cases. ‘There aren’t many men who’d get to see this but you, Richard, you have always been good to me. You are one of the few celebrities to treat me with dignity and I appreciate that. I wouldn’t do this for Clarkson. Not after that business with the mask.’

‘I’m sure you wouldn’t,’ I said, trying to peer into the case.

Slowly the lid opened and I saw them all lying there in a heap. The case was packed with thousands upon thousands of glistening polly pockets. Now, for those of you without stationary experience (and, I assure you, I have plenty of that after my two day stint in Manchester), a poly pocket is a plastic envelope for A4 paper, usually punched along one edge for putting inside a ring folder. Only these poly pockets were loose inside the suitcase and inside each pocket was a sheet of A4 white card onto which Bill had attached a single feather. In the corner of each card, written in Bill’s neat if slightly florid hand, were the details of the bird that had donated the feather.

He pushed the suitcase to me. ‘The entire bird kingdom if yours for the night,’ he said.

Well, the next three hours were an education as we began to lay out Bill’s feather collection on the floor. The whole of the house was soon covered with poly pockets, spreading from the front door, around the living room, through the dining hall, round the back skirting the conservatory, through the utility rooms, past my office, into the kitchen and finishing at the back door. The whole thing was laid out in strict classification of birds across the globe. I was naturally in my element because, though not technically a bird watcher myself, I am a man who likes to collect knowledge and has an excessive facility for showing off .

‘I wish Nige were here now,’ I said as Bill lay the final few poly pocketed feathers around the potted plants in the front room and thereby closed the loop of plastic envelopes that now ran a full circuit around the house.

‘This is your moment,’ said Bill, finally standing up. ‘Nige will get his chance when the time’s right.’

I nodded as I wiped away a tear. ‘The Crested Sand Shrike has a distinctive whistle,’ I said, to cover my slight embarrassment at getting so emotional over a million feathers. ‘And did you know that the East European Potato Shrike has a whistle inspired Mozart to write the Magic Flute?’

‘Really?’ said Bill, impressed. ‘Amazing.’

I was about to tell him how the Shrike is a close relative to a chicken and has often been seen crossing roads for no other reason than getting to the other side but, at that moment, there was a rattle of keys in the door. I couldn’t understand it since it was not yet ten thirty.

‘Only me,’ shouted Judy from in the hall. ‘Barbara Windsor cancelled and I ended up playing Julie Walters. I didn’t stand a chance. She’s playing Jenifer Saunders in the final after Jennifer beat Joanna Lumley in the semi. I couldn’t bear to watch...’

That’s when I heard the fateful sound of Judy kicking off her shoes.

‘Hold it right there!’ I shouted, looking for a way to the hall that avoided the thousands of feathers on the floor. ‘There are bloody poly pockets everywhere,’ I said and thought I should explain just in case Judy was without the required stationary experience. ‘Poly pockets are plastic envelopes that protect pieces of paper up to A4 size. Or in this case, Bill’s feather collections.’

But it was too late. Through the door leading into the hall, I saw Judy pass by at approximately forty miles an hour and gathering speed as she slid in her slick silk stockings on a floor made lethal by a layer of polythene.

‘CCcccccciiiiiiiiiilllllllllllllllaaaaaaaaaaaaa....’ screamed Judy as she headed into the dining room and the Eastern European Swallowtails, round the back of the Chinese Mud Skippers skirting the conservatory, through the utility rooms full of North American eagles, past my office full of the tits of the Rockies, and finally into the kitchen where the South American songbirds ran up against the parrots at the back door.

We followed as quickly as we could, Bill the nimblest picking out the fastest route through the bird kingdom.

‘Best to avoid the peckers, said Bill, heading towards the kitchen. ‘We’ll take a short cut through the cuckoos.’

‘I’m following you,’ I replied, nearly coming a cropper on the tricky plume of a Great Reed Warbler.

We found Judy deep amongst the Amazonian parrots, groaning where she’d come to rest against the tumble dryer and the Crested Banana Macaw.

‘My leg,’ she said.

‘My purple eaglet wing!’ said Bill picking up a heavily battered feather wedged in the ruined stocking around Judy’s toes.

I lifted my wife to a seat at the breakfast bar and, other than a few bruises, I was relieved to see that she seemed perfectly well.

‘So, how was the snooker?’ I asked trying to keep her distracted as Bill set about picking up thousands of poly pockets.

‘Richard Madeley,’ said Judy, standing up. ‘If you think...’ She winced and sat back down again. ‘Ooh,’ she said, and lifted her leg onto the table. ‘It’s my knee. I’ve done my knee again!’

‘Hang on,’ I said and called Bill back into the room.

Bill was the model of professionalism as he slipped on the pair of reading glasses that always hang around his neck on a chain. He took a look at the leg and prodded the sort spot. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘My vast experience examining sick and injured birds tells me that you’ve got twisted ligaments in your knee.’ He tried to bend the leg but unfortunately forgot that the human leg went the other way. Judy winced. I gave a cough. ‘Oh yes,’ said Bill. ‘Wrong species. Legs bend the other way. Always forget that...’

And without another word he took a roll of metal tape from his pocket and began to wrap it loosely once around Judy’s ankle. He fastened it with a pair of pliers from another of the many pockets in the world’s most ironically named ‘hunting vest’.

‘How’s that doing to help my knee?’ asked Judy.

He laughed as soon as Judy spoke.

‘So sorry,’ he said. ‘There I go again! Force of habit. I was ringing you just in case I run into you again. This way, I would see how far you’ve travelled.’

‘Get out,’ muttered Judy, who I could see was in some pain and not a little indignation. ‘Get out of this house now, Bill Oddie, or knee or no knee, I’ll throw you out myself.’

Bill paled and I gave him the old raised eyebrow signal that he probably should go and hide before things turned ugly.

I then helped Judy to the car and took her to the local A&E where doctors diagnosed twisted ligaments. I told them that Bill Oddie had already told us that but they didn’t seem too impressed. When we arrived back home, I got Judy straight to bed then returned downstairs to help Bill pick up his collection of feathers. The last I saw of him was in his old Citroën bobbing down the road with the suspension being worked hard back the boot packed with the world’s most comprehensive collection of feathers.

Last Monday was when the best London doctors agreed with Bill diagnosis and Judy agreed to have surgery on her leg. Bill reports that his poly pockets are back home in his hobbit hole, packed in the three suitcases of increasing size, and I have only just caught up with last week’s episode of Top Gear. Judy had had the operation and is now recovering, her knee improving with each passing day and with each bag of thawed vegetables thrown into the bin or the saucepan. If I eat another plate of garden peas, I will probably go green and make people flatulent. Naturally, Judy now refuses to even touch a poly pocket and I’ve had to tell the people at Cactus TV that any paperwork that comes to this house must be staples or bound by a paper clip.

Not that the media report any of this. They are so obsessed with Emma Bunton and, next week, Myleene Klass. I care for none of that celebrity tittle tattle. I care only for Judy’s well being and the state of Bill Oddie’s feather collection. The rest, as we say in showbiz, is greasepaint and curtain calls.

Normal Service Resumed

Friday night and I’m home, happy, and contenting myself with a quiet evening. I also wanted to come on here and apologise for my posting habits over the last couple of days. The blog has been hit and miss and as much a mess as the last few days have been non-stop. I’ve not even been keeping you up-to-date with developments in the area of Judy’s knee.

Well, we have five days together before I’m distracted by ‘Eye of the Storm’ and the full story of Judy’s knee is on its way. I hope to publish the unedited account over the weekend. My mood has also lightened considerably since two days ago when I was not looking forward a couple of days of shuttling up and down the country. That’s not even to mention all the trouble of keeping Judy supplied with frozen vegetables to wrap around her swollen joint. Apparently, frozen asparagus fingers are the best followed by peas. Prawns, she says, melt too quickly and leave her thighs smelling of seafood.

Anyway, just wanted to say that normal service will be resume tomorrow. I promise lots of Oddie and no rants or pretentious nonsense about apostrophes.

Not So Eager For Deaver

A hot stinking lunch break and the smell of grease defies gravity, rising from the Greek burger bar below the production offices here in the heart of the M1 postal district. It’s now that I make my move after a difficult morning working on ‘Eye of the Storm’. I’ve been ad libbing a voiceover for a thunderstorm; not an easy thing to do with that fork lightening which is so tricky to scan. It’s a relief to be making the ten minute dash into the centre of the city, all the time talking with Judy on the mobile. She’s at home, sitting with a bag of frozen king prawns wrapped around her swollen knee. She promises that they’ll be defrosted in time for tonight’s risotto. I can hardly wait.

W.H. Smiths is my target and the book signing is by Jeffrey Deaver, thriller writer and the man who took away Denzel Washington’s legs and made Angelina Jolie look sexy poking rat droppings in forensics gear. In my weaker moments, I can easily give in and pick up a hack-and-slash psychological thriller and Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme books were always a good read. That was until the last two which I thought were a matter of an author growing jaded with his characters, his storylines tired, a publisher demanding more of the same with the promise of a fat pay cheque. I swore that I wouldn’t buy another Deaver. I didn’t want to prolong the poor man’s misery.

It’s why I was thankful that the queue outside the shop was as off-putting as the Minotaurs disguised as security guards standing in the doorway. Beyond them was a wall of hardbacks, either the edge of King Minos’s labyrinth or the blunt end of the publisher’s mantra: pile them high, sell them cheap (unless the author’s in the store and then it’s RRP only). This would have been my first book signing had I not been offended by the very thought of waiting in line for a scribbled signature from the demonic man being photographed at the front of the store.

I think it was the beard that did it. As you know, I distrust men with beards and I distrust men with neatly trimmed beards even more. When he finally arrived, Deaver was nothing like the clean shaved guy on the dust jackets. He now looks every inch the professional writer; a depressing artifice of the publicist’s art, the nationwide book tour, the promotional interview. His clipped black beard looks like it could pen a few novels on its own. Everyone a best seller. Million pound movie rights.

The queue seem excited. I felt deflated and ready for lunch. But these were ‘real’ readers and I took a moment to take them in. It was sobering to see that they look just like me even without my disguise, my cheap black beret, my comedy pimple. In the end, it was all I could do to turn my back and head back to the office. Disillusioned, disappointed, hugely jealous. At moments like this, asking an author to sign a book feels so horribly dispiriting. I even forgot to take a photo.

Manchester: 8:22AM

This morning I lost a close friend under the wheels of a train. It was the button from the shoulder of my favourite casual jacket. It had got stuck under the strap of my bag which, I pulled the bag from my shoulder, went ping and merrily rolled along the platform before it disappeared under the wheels of the second carriage. It was something of a highpoint.

The train was packed. I found a spare seat next to an aspiring Jordan, her jacket and bag sitting in the chair.

‘Can I sit down, please?’ I ask.

She moves the jacket’s cuff all of one inch to make one third of the seat available to me. I’m not a man to make a scene – much as I would love to be – so I sat down as she made a tactical move for territory by taking up the whole of the table with her OK Magazine. This is how I came to I spend my journey from Manchester Airport reading Katie Andre’s column about ‘what a laugh we had at Club Slap which we got to at midnight but I needed to be up early the next day so I called it a night at around three and Pete wanted a shag...’ I have the luxury or reading the magazine because this delightful creature answers her phone (hands free) and I have to listen to her barking laughter in my ear for the next twenty minutes.

‘Life is so hard,’ she tells her friend. ‘How many holes are you going to play today?’

A Fragment From the Madeley Notebook: Thursday, 24th July, Lunchtime

I carry a notebook around with me at all times. Often, I can be found scribbling little pieces down, recording something that has happened to me in my day, or, as is the case here, writing something that means nothing to anybody but myself, yet perfect for posting to my blog to cover for the fact that I’m exhausted with travel, running around the house waiting on a woman with a gammy knee, and hosting a TV show on the day I traveled to Manchester to proofread scripts for ‘Eye of the Storm 7’.

So there he is: Madeley about town. A prime example of masculine real estate, untouched by portliness but dappled by the handsome. The bookshop is not unknown to him, nor he to it. In the doorway, He stares down at Himself; the latter detecting a trace of recognition in the former’s cardboard lips set at a pleased yet pleasing angle. Beside him, a woman browsing the Richard&Judy Book Club racks hitches up her blouse, her own rack a grocery bag with no handles. The only thing to grip is the g-string that sits that sits high on her hip where her sweatpants have run low. A ripple of cellulite reminds him of a beach after the tide.

She doesn’t recognise Madeley watching her from behind his thick sunglasses. His hair is swept across his forehead at a foreign angle, the large comedy pimple adequate disguise for this lunchtime in Manchester. Nobody would expect to see him here in Waterstone’s in the Arndale , dressed all in black, liberated from his fame. He browses the staff picks and wonders if any of the faces really match real flesh, blood and critical opinion. He wants to question them on their selection. Are the shelf-stackers and bar-code swipers any better judges of literary merit than he? He doubts it.

The cool of the shop is a mild salvation from the noonday sun and like a animal, hot from the chase but now scalded by the refrigerated air, he wanders the shelves, a mist of condensed sweat coming off his body like clouds from a mountain. He recognises the books of rivals and wonders what he must do to join these choired ranks for the great, the good, the chosen, the insufferingly lucky.

It’s all too much. He has a flight to catch. He leaves the shop empty handed. Perhaps he’ll buy something tomorrow when he again flies North. There was a F. Scott Fitzgerald that caught his eye, a Dostoyevsky for which he’s never had time, but then, Jeffery Deaver’s also in town in the morning. He might try his comedy pimple out in W.H. Smiths on the floor below. Stand in line with other desperate people hoping to breath in the stale but talented air of a real writer.

So there he is: Madeley about town. And nobody recognises him.

A Question About Apostrophes

Don't think that the irony is lost on me. This morning I rant about would-be writers pestering me and this evening I'm asking a question that would-be writers might be able to answer. Alternatively, this one is for those with degrees in punctuation or jobs in editing and are willing to answer the question of an aging amateur hack.

Is there anybody out there who can explain the following?

I’m currently reading ‘London Fields’ by Martin Amis and at the beginning there’s a bit that has me confused. He writes:

“There followed some more information about the perfumes, ‘Scandal’, ‘Outrage’, and minor lines called Mirage, Disguise, Duplicity and Sting, and beneath, in double quotes, accompanied by an address and telephone number, with misplaced apostrophes: Keith’s the Name, Scent’s the Game.” (Martin Amis, ‘London Fields’, p. 12)

Now, I’ve been pondering this all day and I still haven’t figured it out but what ‘misplaced apostrophes’?

I thought an apostrophe indicates either possession or omission. Here, in both cases, doesn’t the apostrophe represent the missing ‘i’ of ‘is’? ‘Keith is the name, Scent is the Game’? Or have it all wrong and I must go back to basics and learn how to use an apostrophe?

Of course, there might be some super intelligent textual game the narrator or Amis is playing.

And while I’m about it: why are ‘Scandal’ and ‘Outrage’ enclosed in single inverted commas but Mirage, Disguise, Duplicity and String go unpunctuated?

New Authors Beware! A Madeley Rant

It’s Thursday. I’m in Manchester. And my mood is as filthy as the weather which is already hot and thunderous.

Later today I have to EasyJet my way back to London where I will film an episode of Richard&Judy without the right side of the ampersand who is currently recovering at home, her knee raised high on a cushion as she sits in front of the TV eating Ferrero Rocher and rewatching her Richard Gere DVD collection.

I am having a less pleasant time (or more pleasant if you feel the same way as I do about Richard Gere). So far, the midget population of the city has refused to come out to greet me and my Nanus Count stands at a fat but empty 0. However, there have been interesting developments around my groin. On Manchester Piccadilly Station, at approximately 7.49AM this morning, I was smacked in the testicles by St. George in bright green tweeds carrying a golfing umbrella long enough to slay a dragon, probably by smacking it around its testicles.

I have known better starts to my day.

It is in this mood of slightly bewildered misery that I have decided to introduce a new policy here at my Appreciation Society. It’s been a while that I’ve been thinking of doing this but I think that the time is now so ripe that it’s almost swollen. Some might call the following a rant but I like to think of it as a forthright expression of my incalculable rage.

From now on, any recently published writer emailing me to ask if I’ll promote their stunning new novel (‘it’s just so perfect for your club!’) will earn a special prize: I will post their email, in full, here on my blog so the world can see these insufferable bores for what they are. No flattering phrase or self-seeking hint will go unnoticed by the blogging community. Let their entrails be picked over by Nige’s owl until they are a laughing stock and one more miserable novel can be taken from the shelves to make room for more worthy authors such as men called Madeley.

Before I begin to purge the world of their kind, I’d like any eager young things wise enough to be reading my blog today a chance incur my considerable wrath. I know they are out these because yesterday I had three (yes, three!) different people emailing me to ask if I would help promote their books. Well, now I can help them. I have condensed all the begging letters I’ve received in the last year into one easy-to-use template which the budding writer need only copy, paste, and then enter in the details of their book and published name. This way, they too can get their name in lights. Or if not in lights, at least ridiculed on this blog.

Dear Richard, [The classic opening, though some people think it’s polite to skip the pleasantries]

Love your show... [But surely you love the book club more?]

I think you’re wonderful/witty/wise/gorgeous/kind... [Yes/undoubtedly/maybe/unbelievably/ often not always...]

I have a book about to be published... [Now there’s a surprise!]

by Unknown Press... [So it’s either vanity publishing or will be issued as an ebook... Damn you for your success!]

and my friends keep telling me... [get ready...]

that it would be perfect... [here it comes!]

for your book club. [BINGO! You win first prize and the million pounds!]

Cheers, [Indeed, I’m very cheery despite emails such as this one.]

Arthur Jalopy [A name to remember if not enter into the annals of literary greatness.]

You think I’m being harsh and you’re damn right. I am. I’m also in an indescribably foul mood this morning due to the unwarranted use of golfing umbrellas in city streets and a lack of manners in the nation’s undiscovered novelists. There are so many desperate hacks who want to have their work recognised that it’s wrong to mock them. However, too many of these people write to me after spending approximately three and a half seconds reading my blog. That’s how long it takes them to home in on my email address and send me their poxy little demands. They can’t be bothered to spend a minute to read what I’ve written but they want me to read and promote their bloody books! If they had cared to click on anything other than the button marked ‘Click Here So Richard Can Make You A Millionaire Novelist’ they might have read a few things that might save them the trouble of pestering me. They might, for example, know that I write the odd thing myself.

‘Heavens!’ they say. ‘You’re a writer? But what could that mean?’

‘It means,’ I reply, ‘that despite all my good looks, my way with words and huge influence in the world of UK publishing, I’ve had zero books published. In case you don’t believe me, let me just recount... Yep. Zero. Nil.’

‘Surely not, Richard!’ they say in return. ‘Not a man of your profound wisdom and considerable style and flair for comic prose! Even Rory McGrath has had a book published!’

‘But I am not Rory McGrath,’ I answer. ‘I came close this year. Two months before my novel was due to be published it was cancelled. Of course, I considered leaping from a tall crane. I didn’t but there you go. There’s never a tall crane around when you need one. I chose the coward’s way out and continued to write 250,000 words of blog posts in the last twelve months. But hey! Let’s not talk about my publishing woes. I was only writing comedy which nobody cares about these days or wants to publish. Please tell me more about your deathly little story about a woman with Parkinson’s having an affair with a man with a lisp whose daughter lives in Portugal who happens to be having dreams about a Turkish tobacconist who is the living reincarnation of Suleiman the Magnificent and how they all decide to go around the world in a yacht, only it’s not a yacht but a flying saucer and the whole thing is really a metaphor for the imperialist actions of American in Iraq.’

‘So... Any chance...’

‘Listen,’ I tell them. ‘It might just be the case that if I could influence the workings of the Richard&Judy Foundation, who decide on what books go into the book club, I might be a slight chance that I’d have had one of my own novels published by now... As it is, I write too much, promote myself too little, and remain unknown. Read into this what you like but I beg you to bother me no longer. Fear the owl!’

Only this is too much for these earnest young writers to expect or understand. Instead, they want to send me free copies of their novels about penniless paupers in Ireland, books about Churchill’s cigar maker and his miserable life as a Camden transvestite, or the biography of some nonentity whose only claim to fame was that he invented a new variety of tartan (which, I’m told, is sure to sell well in America where everybody is called ‘McSporran’).

If these people would care to read my blog, I might not feel so utterly repelled by their utterly lifeless prose, their unctuous resort to flattery, their bestial willingness to grovel before me and demand that I make them a millionaire. Theirs is a baseless hope that theworld joins up in easy patterns and that one new writer plus a man with a book club equals dreams made forever and ever. I hate to be the one to tell them this but: it doesn’t.

In future, I’m not going to write any more polite and encouraging replies where I explain that I’m unable to help them but I wish them well, despite the fact they haven’t bothered to read my blog. I will be forwarding all their posts to Elberry who I am now employing (on an ad hoc basis at £20 a letter) to write them replies more suited to their overactive imaginations, limited talents, and utterly craven desire for fame ahead of any kind of literary merit.

If they still don’t get the message, I’ll be hiring Nige to train his owl to seek them out and drop dead mice in their cafe lates as they sit in Starbucks and pose the pose of all undiscovered geniuses.

It’s about time somebody stood up to these people. They are giving new writers a bad name.

So?

What did you think? I promised you that I looked good but I bet you never imagined that it would be a show with 'All the Richard without the Judy'.

Judy will be back in a few days after she's recovered from the operation on her knee. The doctor thinks she's been kneeling too long doing the plastering on the crazy paving in the back garden. Which is fine for him to say... I want to know who's going to finish the crazy paving?

Important News

NEWS FLASH: I've just caught sight of myself in the mirror and I think I'm looking pretty damn good. Make sure you tune in at five and see if you agree.

Must dash. Tonight's guests are already arriving.

Reaching Out

One of the most interesting things about writing a blog is to see how many people read me around the globe. I see regular visitors from the BBC, UK newspapers, the American government, and even from my own home (I suspect that Judy logs on to see what I’m saying about her). It often leads me to wonder what interesting lives other people live. How did they get to where they are? Do they find Stephen Fry’s cape appealing? And do they understand what Bill Oddie and Nige get up to with owls?

Yet as many of you know, I also live in constant fear of litigation. Being a man of forthright opinions and a certain ebullient willingness to speak my mind when the moment is right (and, let’s face it, I yet to find a moment that isn’t right), I’m might occasionally say something that might be construed, in a certain light, by people of a certain limited viewpoint, as being somehow ‘wrong’. I know. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Yet causally glancing through my dwindling readership statistics, I often notice that members of various legal establishments are taking a great deal of interest in my blog. Today I'm living in fear of a complaint by the UK Society of Bearded Gentlemen, who might have taken unkindly to my depiction, yesterday, of all men with beards as megalomaniacs and war criminals.

Paranoia and I are old friends and I might just be misreading the signs. So, if you are currently working for a law firm and happen to be browsing my blog for nothing more innocent than a few harmless insights into the world of celebrity, please drop me a line to say that I’m in the clear with the UK Society of Bearded Gentlemen. Otherwise, I will take your silence to mean that the battle lines are being drawn and that Charles Darwin, David Bellamy, and Rolf Harris will be the leading witnesses for the prosecution.

On Skipping

When Judy skipped into the kitchen for breakfast today, I knew that the mockery would not stop.

‘I would have thought that you’d have got tired of that by now,’ I said.

Judy’s lips did a fair impression of shocked. ‘Me grow tired of skipping? My dear Richard. So long as it give you great pleasure, I will continue to skip.’ And with that she skipped across the room to the fridge.

I’ve been suffering this teasing since last night’s show. After watching Meryl Streep skip through ‘Dancing Queen’ in the new film version of ‘Mamma Mia!’, I had said one totally innocuous line. I’ll quote it in full just to show you how innocent it was.

‘For a man,’ I said, ‘there is nothing nicer... and I mean pleasanter, for a man to see and admire in a woman or women, is when they skip, no matter how old they are. A skipping woman is a sweet sight.’

And I maintain that skipping is a sweet sight that fills a man with incalculable pleasures.

Now, I know I’m opening myself to scoffing here. There are some who might even say that skipping merely highlights the shifting contours of the female blouse as it goes bouncing around the room. And I agree. A buxom woman skipping wouldn’t be sweet at all if you look at like that. I merely meant to say that the pleasure of the skip reveals the innocent within us all. Happy go lucky, carefree, it is the child within all of us momentarily escaping the burdens of adulthood. Skipping is to be seven years old again when the greatest worry is whether your pet butterfly has died in the night. Skipping is coming home from school, the first day of the summer holidays. Skipping is going to the corner shop with twenty pence in your hand and knowing that you can buy a bar of chocolate and an ice cream with pennies to spare.

All of which I explained to Judy over breakfast.

‘Oh, Richard,’ she said, laying her hand on my arm. ‘I didn’t realise that you were such a sensitive soul.’

‘Well, I am,’ I answered. ‘And I hope this means you’ll end this horrible mockery of what was an innocent remark.’

She smiled and gathered the empty plates together. ‘Of course I won’t,’ she said and skipped off to the sink.

Some people just ruin skipping...

The Evils That Come of Crusty White Beards

It came as a surprise to neither Judy nor I that Radovan Karadzic has been hiding himself away all these years behind a large crusty white beard. While the talk in the serious press has been of underground rooms and secret hovels in villages sympathetic to Karadzic’s cause, I, on the other hand, have been busy sending countless letters from Cactus TV to those in the intelligence community, warning them that white beards posed a threat to national security. Now here I am, years on and justified in my fears. Yet it still saddens me that MI6 could have wrapped up this whole matter a long time ago with just a bowl of soapy water and a razor.

My suspicions were first raised by Fidel Castro, that great epitome of everything that’s un-Madeley about the world. With the example of this Bearded Satan in Cuba, was it any surprise that Saddam Hussein chose to hole himself away behind a couple of inches of thick whisker fashioned into a living chin-mullet of evil? As Archibald Flunk, my old teacher in the art of disguise once told me: ‘only vagabonds and thieves hide themselves away behind a beard’. He told the same to Cher but she made a song out of it and has never enjoyed an inconspicuous moment since.

Now that people are coming around to my way of thinking, we need to ask serious questions of those people with the means to make things happen in the world of facial topiary. Who else might be hiding behind the crusty white beards we don’t know about? What might we find behind the beards that we have already identified as potential threats? My own theory is that we need to look again at Uncle Albert from ‘Only Fools and Horses’, Harbottle from the Will Hay films, Santa Claus, Jimmy Hill and Noel Edmonds. If I had to put my money on their being a war criminal hiding behind a beard, it’s to these beards that I’d go with a large pitch fork and a willingness to prod. And if we don’t find anything, we should then move on search Brian Blessed, Kenny Rogers, and Ginger Spice, because, I don’t know about you, but I still get that tingle of excitement at the very thought of there being an arch-criminal behind one of their beards.

I know that many of you will be wondering if I’m overstating my case but I’d go so far as to say that growing a beard is morally wrong. In the immortal words of Gillette, subsequently ruined by marketing people, ‘a beard is the first admission of guilt a man can make’. I, myself, have never once considered growing a beard. But, then, I have nothing to hide, being a good-living man who has never harmed a soul in his life, so long as you don’t count Shakin’ Stevens, and, let’s face it, who does?

Beards are as alien to our being as an extra set of earlobes. They are abnormal extravagances that only guilty men grow. I warn you now: ulterior motives were behind every man grooming a small shrubbery between his upper lip and chin. Grizzly Adams had a large beard because he lived out there in the woods with his bear. But did nobody ever wonder why he was hiding? And why he wanted to live with a nine hundred pounds of slobbering snot and teeth? And what about Rasputin or Blackbeard? The only two* exceptions to the general rule that all men with beards are evil are Jesus and Kris Kristofferson, who both, in their ways, wrote songs about beating the devil. They clearly weren’t evil. They were just in hiding from Satan, who, when you think about it, also has a beard. And as Professor Flunk always said, ‘the art of disguise is to blend in.’ Which is another reason why beards are unnatural, immoral, and unholy.

Given that 98% of the world’s population is cleanly shaved (and, to some of us, that means both top and tails) how is growing a beard meant to hide a man’s identity? It’s only going to encourage people to stare, pass comment, or give it a tug. The bigger the beard, the more explicitly do you announce that you have something to hide. A beard should always rouse the curiosity of good, common, descent folk who would do well to drag it to a stake where it would be tested with a trial by fire.

And speaking of the devil, as we were, that style of chin whisker is the worst beard of all. The devil groomed his beard, no doubt with one of those vile razors with an attachment on the handle. Ask yourself: how many blades does a pitchfork have? Now compare that with the Wilkinson Quattro Titanium. You see, there’s the devil’s work in the well groomed beard. TV advertisements for beard trimmers have kept me awake on many a night (although, lately, it has been the Ladyboys of Bangkok on the Manchester leg of their tour). There is a repellent vanity in all men that cut their beards to neat edges. While they appear to have something to hide, they are teasing us you by revealing just enough of their face to keep us guessing. This is like lumping pre-mediated evil on top of some of some unmotivated crime.

The beard says they’re guilty. Shaving it admits that they simply don’t care. The utter fiends!

* There is, of course, a third exception and that's Bill Oddie. But Bill is technically in hiding. His beard hides him from the birds, so it's really a natural form of camouflage and has no greater significance.

Don't Go Dickinson With My Wonnacott

If I were to offer you a three hundred year old Wormwood buttering rack for ten pounds, you’d tell me to clear off and never besmirch your late Edwardian rat-hair doormat again. If, however, I offered you a three hundred year old Wormwood buttering rack for the better part of a thousand pounds, you’d break the bank and a few shins to get the bloody thing into your front room. It wouldn’t matter that Wormwood buttering racks went out with the ferreting needles that Queen Victoria used to pop her pubescent pimples. Nor, for that matter, would you care that European laws outlawed ‘buttering’ in the 1973 Milkmaid’s Charter and that the last man to be hung for the offence was actually incapable of committing the crime because he was lactose intolerant and deficient by two critical glands and a suitable buttering rack.

Of course, none of this enters into your squalid little thought processes when you think that there’s money to be made. You just see my three hundred year old Wormwood buttering rack and think it a bargain. And do you know what? I don’t blame you. Having just endured half an hour of the BBC’s afternoon output, I now realise that antiques are as sexy as an oiled midget and twice as exciting as Barbara Winsor with a cinnamon topping.

I’m constantly amazed by the success of shows that get misty eyed over common-or-garden tat. They encourage us to buy cheap and sell high and then demonstrate the futility of capitalism by awarding their contestants less than their bus fare back to Toffington-on-the-Snuff, Hampshire. I can’t deny that it’s absorbing to watch a middle-class account manager squander two hundred pounds of the BBC’s money on an ivory-handled tonsil scraper. It’s far more entertaining than any number of execs wasting millions trying to modernise the latest TV snore of Charles Dickens’ ‘Dumbledore House’ or ‘Dobby & Son’. It’s just a shame is that there aren’t more of these shows and that the BBC has already used up next year’s quota of men cursed by gypsies at birth who might host them.

First there was ‘Antiques Roadshow’ with Hugh Scully, who always reminded me of a badger that had voluntarily tried to euthanize itself by repeatedly running into a spade. Then came ‘Bargain Hunt’ which did more for the dandy population of Brighton than any show since ‘The Danny La Rue Extravaganza’ took the south coast from behind. We e must also never forget that ‘This Morning’ was the show that first introduced the world to David Dickinson, and David Dickinson to the world, even if ‘Bargain Hunt’ made him famous. Not only can he smell woodworm in French fluting from the cliffs of Dover but he has handled more wooden knobs than men called Elton with a thing for walnut dressers.

When David announced that he was quitting our screens, the BBC afternoon schedule could have creaked to an arthritic halt with ‘Quincy: QI’ and ‘Diagnosis Dick van Dyke’. Having achieved superstardom and with Stephen Spielberg knocking at his door, David Dickinson could have easily allowed his old show to be sold off without even meeting its reserve price. However, Dickinson was forward thinking and handed his auctioneer’s gavel to his equally gifted cousin, Tim Wonnacott.

Wonnacott is the sort of man to breeze through the heats of the Terry Thomas Lookalike Competition only to blow it in the final because he couldn’t play the cad with as much evil as he has panache. He’s so genial that fluffy hamsters called Mr. Squiggles have been known to find him twee and have penned scathing odes about him. Wonnacott was in charge this afternoon when I sat down to watch the red team outwit the blue in a closely fought contest that went to the wire and a set of wooden birthing stirrups. Luckily for the red team, there was somebody in Shipton Mallet who required a set of wooden birthing stirrups and the two pound profit on the initial ninety pound outlay carried them to victory. They beat the blue team by all of one pound, having only lost a meagre £187 on a suitcase full of worthless brick-a-brac.

Not that we should hold the blue team to account for their profligate losses. When all the lots are gone and the money counted, the people really to blame are the experts who are clearly nothing of the sort. They come in two sizes. The sad little men have delicate 1960s comb-overs and frayed cuffs where signs of repair will decrease their price at auction. The other team is usually assisted by a flirty young female, fashionably blonde, and definitely an ‘antique of the future’. They won’t get ‘all of their money’ today but you know that Timmy would be quite happy to turn them over and check for distinguishing marks on their bottoms. And as for Tim himself. He turns and pouts to camera. ‘Imagine!’ he says.

And it’s a take!

Another classic show goes into the BBC vault. And what’s more, it’s future proof. Ageless and never to be labelled an antique.

Oh... Before I go, I’d like to buy back that Wormwood buttering rack even if it means I have to throw in a mid-century sparrow mangle to clinch the deal.

Hung Over

The Limburger nibbles grated against the backs of my eyeballs have brought out the mice again. They are now frantically chewing at my temporal lobes from where this painful hangover seems to originate. It really is too much to type this morning but I expect most of you are feeling pretty much the same after last night’s party to mark the one year anniversary of this blog’s launch. How Judy kept it all a secret from me I don’t know, but I have to thank so many of you for making the long trip to see us. The evening was a gala of bacchanalian fun with the occasional comic moment. Bill Oddie says he won’t sit down for a week while Stephen Fry is promising a fifty pound reward to the person who returns his favourite green cape. It was good to see a few of you take time to go and say hello to Fred Talbot who has featured so regularly in this blog, as he has featured in my life, over the last twelve months. He is no longer feral and, as many you discovered, he can now converse quite happily about the weather without trying to bite you.

Friendships were made last night that may never be broken.

The only thing I believe I have to apologise about is that Jeremy Clarkson thought it appropriate to show a picture of his recent eye infection to people as they were eating. Judy took him to one side and, as you can see, confiscated the photograph so there should be no repeat performances of that grotesque sideshow. The main event, as you know, was as much fun as you can get when living near to David Dickinson. That he complained half a dozen times about the noise was no fault of mine and I hope you appreciated the efforts we made to keep the party going until four in the morning.

Today is a matter of recovering before I go off to film this afternoon’s show. Judy is in a fine mood and even seems relaxed about the Dennis situation. For my part, I have decided to take more of a hand’s on role with the captions. They will be written by me, so any mistakes are my own.

I’m sure you come for lots of exciting tales today but I’m really too hung over to type for too long. Each keystroke is like a particularly hungry rodent sinking its teeth into my brain.

Perhaps later...

The McGowan Factor

There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, means that their wives will be extremely vexed with them come Sunday. I don’t know what it was that gave me a hint that all wasn’t well in the Madeley household this morning. The thought that my blog is a year old tomorrow perhaps made me anxious about my career plans but, otherwise, there wasn’t anything particularly ominous in the creak of the bed springs, my healthy ablutions, nor the suds and foam on my cheeks as I washed and shaved. Conversations began and ended as naturally as they should, yet there was still something in the air that was more than the smell of Mrs. Corbett spreading muck around her roses...

‘Having a good morning?’ asked Judy as I appeared at breakfast.

‘Indeed I am,’ I said. ‘My ablutions were quality from beginning to end. Happiness, they name is Fruit & Fiber twice a day.’

‘And the toilet flushed first time?’

‘How can you tell?’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘You seem perky.’

‘You’re a remarkable woman, Ms. Finnigan,’ I said. ‘One day I’ll marry you under the eyes of the Christian God and make you a Madeley.’

Judy smiled thinly and watched me as I began to cobble together my breakfast. Despite my outward appearance, I was feeling uneasy about something and I could tell that my wife wasn’t the normal vivacious Judy who is usually up at seven on a Sunday when there’s concrete to be mixed. Naturally, I was suspicious that she was still angry about the third mistake that out caption editor, Dennis Plumb, had made on Friday when he had misidentified another of our guests.

It was when I was finally prepared to depart for my snug around ten o’clock, Rivita and coffee in my hands, that Judy spoke and the whole twisted mess began to unravel.

‘Richard,’ she began, ‘have you read yesterday’s paper?’

‘No, Judy, I haven’t,’ I sighed, knowing what was coming next. ‘I’ve been rather busy.’

‘Busy?’ She began to finger her necklace nervously and I knew I was in for trouble.

‘We had the newsagents change papers twice because you said you didn’t enjoy reading “The Independent” or “The Telegraph”. Yet I haven’t seen you pick up “The Guardian” once this week. I don’t see why we’re paying nearly twenty pounds a month on papers you’re not even reading!’

I took a step back. Two steps back if the truth be told.

‘What is it, Jude?’ I asked. ‘You’re not really angry about the paper, are you? I’ve been thinking all morning that you seem to be in a mood about something.’

Asking my wife about her mood was my second mistake, equivalent to allowing the Germans to rearm.

‘Well, no, Richard. I’m not alright. If you want me to be perfectly honest, I’m disappointed that you’ve not sacked Dennis. And didn’t I warn you about what would happen if he was still in his job on Monday? I’ve gone on and on about this, Richard, and I’ve told you until I’m blue in the face and yet you still won’t listen to me despite every...’

She went on for some time. When Judy begins to list all the things wrong with me, she can sometimes talk for forty five or even sixty seconds, but this morning it was something special. She also began to list all the faults of my friends and that took the speech well into lunch.

‘... and I’ll say this one last time, Richard: if I ever catch Stephen Fry smoking his pipe next to my washing line, I’ll drag that cape over his head and beat him until he stops moving. I found scorch marks in my...’

I tried to close my ears to most of it.

‘... and if Nige thinks that he can come and leave his owl with us while he goes off to France every couple of months...’

Like I said, it went on for some time.

Eventually, there came a point when I noticed that it had ended. I looked up from the newspaper I’d managed to read from front to back and wondered if Judy would allow me to change it for ‘The Times’ on a Sunday.

‘Finished?’ I asked.

‘You have to sack Dennis,’ spluttered Judy.

Before she could start again, I waved my hand. ‘If this is about Friday,’ I said, ‘you don’t need to bother. I know all about McGowan.’

‘You do?’

I had to smile. Despite everything, Judy does her best to look out for me. She has a knack of berating me when all she’s trying to do is to save me from some of the harsher things that life throws my way. She had been trying to hide Dennis’ latest excess from me but I had learned about it yesterday afternoon.

‘I had Alistair on the phone,’ I explained. ‘He was gloating, as you can imagine, and he asked me if he’s allowed to quote it on his next DVD.’

‘He would,’ replied Judy. ‘Everybody wants us to endorse them but it doesn’t make it right. You’re much funnier than Alistair.’

‘You don’t need to tell me,’ I said. ‘I always said that Ronni Ancona carried those shows.’

‘Yes, well... You have one of those things for Roni Ancona.’

‘Things?’ I laughed though I knew that I shouldn’t.

‘It’s in your eyes, Richard... You begin to blink a lot whenever she comes on.’ I wanted to protest but Judy just shrugged. ‘Anyway, what matters is Alistair. He’s probably jealous because your Ali G impression is so much better than his.’

Music to my ears. ‘You’re telling me things I know already, Jude,’ I said.

‘Then sack Dennis and we can put this behind us.’

‘We can’t sack him. He’s a one armed man. We’d have an even number of limbs on the staff and that’s technically illegal under European rules.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘You’ll see,’ I said and gave Judy a wink. She smiled back and I stood up, planted a kiss of her brow, and then headed to my office where I was overcome with emotion.

The last time I felt like this was as a child when I was forced to give the family cat away. There must be somebody out there who has a use for a slightly unstable one-armed man with a Peter Manley fetish. He’s good with children and buries his mess in the garden. What more could you ask for?

Anybody?

A Year On

For a year, I’ve been sitting here sat at my keyboard, fashioning my thoughts into meaningful posts. Only today the words have dried up. Tomorrow marks the one year anniversary of the Richard Madeley Appreciation Society and I still haven’t had a single card.

A year older and 365 days wiser, I now look back on a year of wasted opportunities and failed ambitions. I intended to write the finest blog around but have failed miserably. The world may now have an official resource for people with two rectums and I have become a quoted authority on the history of custard creams, my own dreams remain unfulfilled. However, I don't want you to feel sorry for me. Instead, I want you all to do at least one thing tomorrow to make the day special. Whether that’s breaking out the bunting, wrapping yourself in the Union Jack, or having an underwear free day, please make the statement to the world that ‘Richard Madeley is a vital part of this nation’s culture and it would be wrong to send him off into the backwaters of satellite TV’.

After a year, I hope you’ve come to know me a little better. You’ve seen me on good days and bad. I’ve not hidden my occasional moods from you, nor the disappointments that have dogged me all year. You have come to know the real me. And the blog is also become a sizable chunk of prose. 250,000 words on, I feel like my job isn’t anywhere near complete. The Madeley name is not yet synonymous with wit and subtlety. My novel remains unpublished (technically, the term is ‘cancelled’) and my autobiography still isn’t complete. At 30,000 words, ‘Madeley: Summoned To Greatness’ is the publishing sensation yet to be finished, published, or a sensation. However, The Richard&Judy Foundation’s official publication of ‘Fathers&Sons’ will come out in the Autumn, written by a talented guy on the Richard&Judy payroll but not, unfortunately, by these fingers. I doubt if there are many laughs in it but I hope it does well.

Tomorrow is a new day and a new year on this blog. We'll have to do something special to celebrate.

The Caption Composition

Like sex on a pogo stick, a one-armed caption writer is an interesting proposition but they probably fail due to a matter of balance.

Back in the Land of the South where all the good people dwell, I’m done with Manchester for another week. If I don’t see another brick chimney or stoat-fondling man wearing leather braces and bearing the countenance of a matchstick, it will be too soon. I might also say the same thing about Dennis Plumb, my erstwhile PA, darts fanatic, and man of letters (our captions department to be precise). I’ve spend a pretty torrid evening trying to defend a man who, I don’t mind admitting between the three of us, has clearly gone quite insane. Kurtz upriver getting metaphysical with the natives was never this bad. At least he never had a tea-time viewership well into the millions.

The full extent of the ‘horror’ became apparent tonight when I arrived home. Weary from the intercity and a couple of nights among the Ladyboys of Bangkok, I was looking forward to a relaxing evening with the Right Side of the Ampersand.

Only the Right Side was in no mood for cosy. Judy had promised that she would start bringing tapes of the recording home with her and she did just that tonight. After the incident the other day when Dennis slipped an extra ‘S’ into Wednesday, Judy has become paranoid that it’s an organised campaign by Paul O’Grady to destabilise the show. Personally, I think it’s just Dennis’ way of attracting more viewers in the hope that we might become cult viewing. I think it’s actually a great idea and would think that this is the now the only way to make Channel 4 see sense and keep us on terrestrial.

Only Judy doesn’t understand cult... Tonight my bags had barely settled on the hall floor before she emerges from the living room waving a VHS tape in one hand and her favourite claw hammer in the other.

‘Look what he’s done this time!’ she cried.

‘Welcome home Richard,’ I answered as I moved in for a kiss.

Judy was having none of it. No lips. No squeeze. Nothing.

‘Here,’ she said, thrusting the tape into hands already prepared for something more Judyesque. ‘Go on. Have a look!’

The hammer looked threatening so I thought it best not to argue. Wearily, I went into the living room and slid the tape into the video. Judy had already wound it to the right position and I recognised the beginning of tonight’s show. It was the start of our much celebrated interview with novelist Katie Price (known as ‘Jordan’ to the men of Bristol out there).

‘Look,’ said Judy and paused the tape seconds into the interview.

‘Oh,’ I replied. I could see the problem.

‘Oh? Is that all you can say? Oh?’ She stuck the hammer under my nose, claw raised. ‘I want Dennis fired this minute. Call him up and tell him that he needn’t come into work on Monday.’

‘But it’s an easy mistake to make,’ I told her. ‘You can’t sack a man for a small mistake.’

‘A small mistake? How on earth can you call it a small mistake, Richard? Katie Price looks nothing like Vincent Price.’

‘Well, it’s implied,’ I said. ‘Let’s face it, she’s very orange whereas Vincent was very pale. And she does look like one of the Brides of Frankenstein with her hair piled up like that. Plus, you can’t say that you weren’t frightened when she sat on the sofa. I know I’ll never be the same again and neither will the sofa. It’s a known fact that fake tan doesn’t come out of fake leather.’

‘Leatherette,’ said Judy. ‘Leatherette.’

‘Whatever you want to call it, Judy... You simply can’t sack a man for the tiniest mistake.’

Judy narrowed her eyes and poked me in the chest. Even if Katie Price was all Hammer Horror, it was the horror of the hammer in Judy’s hand that held my attention.

‘Dennis is gone before the next show,’ she said, ‘or I swear that I’ll announce to the world that our caption editor has gone mad and so has my husband.’

Judy should know that there's Iranian blood running in the Madeley line which means that I’m not a man who responds well to threats. That’s why I’m letting things settle down a bit tonight before I decide how I should act. Judy may have a point. A one-armed manic behind the controls of a caption machine is not something you want when broadcasting to the nation five days a week. However, this evening I’m tired and I want to wait to see what the weekend brings. I’ve published this here on my blog and perhaps Dennis will read it and reconsider his actions. As for me: I’m hitting the hay. Quite literally. Judy has locked the bedroom door and won’t let me in until I’ve sacked Dennis. So it’s the shed for me, lying on the bales of hay Judy stores there for her miniature horses. If you want me, you know where to find me. Just knock three times and whisper ‘Dick’.

To My Current Visitor

To the visitor currently browsing the site having arrived via Google using UKOnline, the answer to your question is: no, I'm damn well not!

And what sort of thing is that to type into a search engine?

Your Madeley in Manchester Time Check

I have to beg you to excuse me if I have a post of remarkably little depth this morning (or tonight, as I’m writing this at gone eleven at night). I’m stuck up here in my Manchester hotel from where I’m still enjoying the merry warbling of many a Ladyboy from the car-park across across the way. It’s also lashing it down and I’ve enjoyed one of those rare days when nothing went right.

After working late last night (that would be your Wednesday night), I set my alarm clock for five past six this morning. I rarely catch enough sleep and last night was no exception after a long journey up North. I woke up exhausted to the alarm’s bugle. It was a struggle to turn it off and an even bigger struggle to get out of bed. The morning was so dark and dreary... Anyway, I showered and shaved, dressed myself in my best casuals for a day working on ‘Eye of the Storm 4’. I even put in my best cufflinks, dolloped a dose of the old brylcreamed slap on the Madeley fringe, and topped off my morning routine by slipping on my watch which keeps time by picking up the signal of the national atomic clock and glows green when in close proximity to Iranian scientists.

It was only at this last stage of the proceedings that I noticed that my super accurate wristwatch was saying that it wasn’t six o’clock in the morning. It was actually five minutes to five and, by some strange miscalculation, the time of my travel alarm had jumped forward by an hour and a half. The morning was dark and dreary because it was not morning at all but the middle of the night. To make matters worse, I was ready for the day, albeit a tad sleepy. In the end, I had to get undressed and get back into bed. It’s not easy trying to get some shuteye with the smell of fresh aftershave still bleaching the insides of your nostrils.

To make matters worse, I was trying to keep my head down due to the broadcast of the Richard&Judy show we taped earlier in the week. We were plugging Jordan’s latest novel and I think the least I say about that the better. Graham Greene she isn’t. She’s not even Sarah Greene. Or even Camberwick Green...

As you can see, I’m slightly losing the plot and I should really go and get some sleep. Normal service will be resumed once I get back to London.

For those who are keeping a track of these things: this week’s midget report is a rather disappointing count of one. Manchester is not living up to its reputation as the midget capital of the North West. I’m hoping for better nanus news tomorrow.

[Update: having read this is the cool light of day, I notice that my typing and general elan were disappearing the closer I got to midnight. Forgive me. Humanity is a bit of a burden for those of us blessed with a dose of divinity.]

John Cleese and Colin the Lemur

As much as I feel humbled (and not a little belittled) by the two days I’m about to spend up in Manchester, there are other times when I realise how unique it is to be me. Last night’s show, for instance, was an absolute screamer. One for the archives. It was the sort of show that Judy tapes to VHS, wraps in ribbons, and then stuffs at the back of her sock drawer. By the time we’d finished recording, I felt about ten years younger and a fluid ounce lighter. An hour spent in the company of John Cleese is like a year with any other man. He’s a riot and an absolute hero of mine. He also had me laughing so hard that I don’t mind admitting that I wet myself. And I don’t mean just a little bit wet. I mean wet enough for two grown men.

‘Is that it?’ asked John as the camera’s red light dimmed and we went off air.

‘That’s it,’ I said, wiping away the few remaining tears from my ankles. ‘Listen, that was one of the best interviews we’ve ever done. It’s not often that we do these shows live but you were an absolute pro.’

‘So what do I do now?’

‘Now you go home, John,’ I said.

‘Must I? Can’t I come home with you and Judy? I can make a fantastic omelette.’

‘You want to come home with us?’

‘Couldn’t I? I’d be no trouble. And what’s more, I’ll be just as funny as I was on air. But if you let me out of here now, I’ll be totally irresponsible. I guarantee I’ll be married again before midnight unless you save me from myself.’

I looked at Judy and Judy looked at me. Invisible signs were passed between us that only bats would have picked up.

‘Oh, okay,’ I said, ‘come home with us, John. But before we go, we just have to check the tape.’

For every show that we do live, we always go to the side of the stage where all the monitors are located and have a quick look to see how the show appeared to our viewers. Last night, with John in tow, everything was looking fine until the first ad break. That's when Judy noticed the mistake.

On the show’s credits some goon had written ‘Wednessday 16th July’. It was just the sort of mistake that Judy finds unforgivable. She just went berserk. She began cursing and screaming and lashing out. She tore a monitor from the stand and sent it crashing into a cameraman. John was rigid with shock while I could only strip off my jacket and try to calm down my wife, who I knew wouldn’t rest until the guilty person was found and punished.

‘Come on, love,’ I said. ‘Nobody will have noticed. It’s been proved that 92% of the British public can’t even spell “Wednesday”.’

It was slightly deceitful of me, I know, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that I’ve been employing my old PA Dennis to work on the show’s graphics. The man has suffered enough and I feared for his remaining arm should Judy have discovered that he was to blame for the typo.

‘That’s not the point if most people are too dim to spot it,’ screamed Judy. ‘It made us look like rank bloody amateurs. It is most unprofe...’

At which point she tripped over John’s abnormally large feet.

For the first two steps, she looked like she would recover but on the third she completely lost balance and went stumbling into Rob the Zookeeper who, as you probably know, had been on the show to help John demonstrate how a lemur eats grapes and generally do his little bit to Help Save the Lemur.

I needn’t tell you that it’s generally not a good idea to go stumbling into a zoo keeper, especially when the zoo keeper is trying to coax a male lemur into its cage. Judy hit him around the ribs and Rob fell forward. What followed was a matter of angles. The way he’d been holding the animal and the direction he was falling... It’s probably easier and more polite to say that he goosed the lemur. Unfortunately, the lemur happened to be called Colin and like 82% of males called Colin, he didn’t like where the zoo keeper put his thumb. This made the lemur quite mad but he didn’t turn on Rob but turned on Judy.

Judy tried to bat Colin away but the lemur had his tail around her throat before she could deploy her highly trained fists to fend it away. John, in the meantime, being much closer, leapt straight into the fight and tried to pull the lemur off Judy’s face. Having claimed live on air that they are a very docile creature, he was clearly not prepared for the snarling teeth of a prosimian who have been violated by a zoo keeper's thumb.

‘Bloody things are supposed to be docile,’ shouted John as he examined his finger.

I had no thought for John’s finger or the zoo keeper’s thumb. Judy was turning a deeper shade of purple as the lemur tightened its grip on her throat.

‘Docile?’ I cried. ‘I’ll show you docile!’ And with that I cracked Colin across the snout with a copy of my forthcoming book, ‘Fathers and Sons’, which I just happened to have on my person and will be available at all good bookshops in the Autumn.

‘Gosh,’ said John. ‘I haven’t seen a man kill a lemur with a three hundred page hardback in years. You see. That’s why I miss the UK. You don’t get this in Santa Barbara. What else can you kill? Can we get a squirrel in here? I’ve always wanted to stun a squirrel. I could use my shoe if you’re all out of books.’

I let John witter way. With Judy now able to breathe, the four of us stood over the body of Colin.

‘I think you’ve killed him,’ said Rob the zoo keeper.

‘No,’ said John. ‘I think it’s still breathing.’ He moved to slip off his loafer. ‘Do you want me to finish him, Dick? Want me to give him the coup de grace?’

I was in no mood for John's sarcasm. I could see that the animal was indeed taking small gasps.

‘Perhaps mouth to mouth,’ suggested Judy whose had recovered enough composure to be back to her caring self.

Rob didn’t hesitate. He knelt down and began to administer artificial respiration, which, I can assure you, isn’t easy with an animal with a narrow snout.

‘I can’t do it,’ he said after a couple of attempts. ‘My mouth is still dry from the studio lights. I’m not getting an airtight seal.’

‘Look here,’ I said, ‘why don’t you let me have a go? I’ve probably got the healthiest lungs here and I’ve got more than enough saliva.’

‘Yes,’ said John. ‘Let Dick have a go. After all, he’s the one that nearly killed Colin.’

John may be a comic genius but he can be so distracting in situations involving lemurs battling for their lives. To be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to giving the kiss of life to a lemur. Rather filthy looking animals, if I’m to be honest. I closed my eyes and steeled myself as I took a couple of deep breaths before I grabbed Colin and quickly gave him as much air as I could manage in one go.

This, I suppose, was the moment when it all became too much for Judy. She gave a scream and then fainted.

‘Looks like you’re blowing into the wrong end, old boy,’ said John in that rather know-it-all way he has. ‘I’d say that if Colin does ever recover from the mortal touch of your forthcoming bestseller, then he’s going to be an extremely flatulent lemur for the next few days. What on earth possessed you to blow there?’

Naturally, I had no answer except to say that I didn’t know one end of a lemur from the other. I don’t suppose many men do. There certainly aren’t many TV talk show hosts who can claim to have give artificial respiration to the wrong end of a half-dead primate in the company of one of the nation’s most well respected funny men.

But then again: that was just the thing about yesterday. It was just so unique being me.

The Jeremy Clarkson Mask

There have been so many people visiting the blog looking for a Jeremy Clarkson mask, I thought I'd make one available to my blog's readers along with something a little more respectable for wearing in the office.

Simply click on the images below, print in colour to quality card, and then carefully cut around the lines and add a piece of elastic or string.

If you love Bill Oddie, you'll wear these masks with pride for the rest of the day.

[UPDATE: I'm getting so many hits (and now emails and comments) from people searching for a Bill Oddie mask that I've decided to add one to honour this blog’s dearest friend. However, if you do decide to wear Bill’s face, remember that this isn’t some 'Top Gear' bandwagon we're jumping on. This is a protest against the BBC’s humiliation of their greatest asset. Unlike Clarkson, I want you to wear Oddie’s face with pride. But remember: never near owls. We’re trying to get them to naturally land on the real thing and it would only confuse them.]

[Update 2: And for Bertas... I imagine Fry fanatics could excite themselves with these masks in ways that aren't technically legal in certain parts of America and east of Swindon.]

The Kate Silverton Project

My love affair with BBC News 24 continues like some misjudged passion between star-crossed siblings. What began with my stumbling across 'Click Online' has now developed into a full scale admiration for the whole news operation. Can a man find any greater happiness than when he's hearing bad news from an attractive face? I know that I bless the day when I first set eyes on Kate Silverton. Her eyes alone are worth an ice cap or two.

Last night, Judy and I decided to enjoy the fare at a little restaurant not far from our home while we discussed future projects. Through the starter, Judy outlined her plans for my solo career. She intends to go off and become the new Dick Francis, only she’ll be writing novels set around the world of miniature show ponies. I held my peace, knowing that writing isn’t as easy as she makes it sound. I also had more important things to discuss.

Just as the main course was arriving at the table, the subject turned to Kate Silverton’s appearance on 'Top Gear' and that’s when I made my suggestion.

‘Do you suppose Kate might be interested in my gnome project?’ I asked.

Judy looked at me. Her chewing slowed before she reached for a glass of water and took a larger than normal sip. Then she dabbed her mouth with her napkin.

‘Richard,’ she began, her voice so low it was beneath the table. ‘How many times must I say it? Nobody is interested in your gnome project.’

‘But lots of people own garden gnomes,’ I protested. ‘If even one out of every ten gnome owner watched the show, our ratings would be through the roof.’

Now Judy sipped her wine. I could tell that she was disappointed. Lack of vision, you see. She’s always had it or failed to have it, if you get my meaning. Put her in a familiar surroundings and there’s nobody better at asking difficult questions of amiable guests. But in the modern world where we media types have to act quickly, often fighting with guerrilla tactics to take our audience by surprise, she’s about as much use as the Pipes of the Blackwatch. The opposition hear her bagpipes coming a mile away.

‘I don’t see why anybody would want to watch you on a show about gnomes.’

‘But there’s so much more to it than gnomes,’ I said. ‘Kate would understand.’

‘Okay,’ said Judy, taking out her mobile. ‘Let’s ring her and find out.’

Now there are very few things I don’t know but that Judy is friends with Kate is one of them. Another is that Kate is friends with Judy.

‘Hello Kate. Judy here,’ said Judy. ‘Richard wants to have a word with you.’
And just like that, right over her lamb casserole, Judy handed me the phone.

‘Hi Kate,’ I said. ‘Richard here. Left side of the ampersand?’

‘Hello Richard,’ said Kate. ‘Judy’s always talking about you. So nice to speak with you at least.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ I said. ‘But let’s cut the small talk. I’m here with Judy talking about an exciting new solo project and I would like you to come onboard.’

‘Really? And what is it? Current affairs?’

‘Not quite,’ I replied. ‘It’s gnomes.’

‘Gnomes?’

‘Garden gnomes. Imagine life size models of Bill Oddie posed with fishing rods or little red wheelbarrows. People often put them around ponds to frighten away ducks.’

‘Yes, I know what a gnome is, Richard. I have three myself. I’m just wondering how this is an exciting new solo project.’

‘Because it’s never been done before, Kate. Which is partly why it’s so exciting. What I have in mind is a game show where each week we kidnap a gnome from somebody’s garden. We spare no expense. Guys in black balaclavas drive up to somebody’s house, trample their garden and drag the gnome into a black van that speeds off. The gnome’s owner then has to follow a series of fiendish clues to locate the gnome which I’ll have hidden somewhere within the UK. They have 24 hours to find the gnome with your help. If they win, Bill Oddie agrees to stand in their garden for a week. If they fail, we destroy the gnome in some imaginative but highly amusing way.’

‘And what’s the name of this show?’

‘At the moment it’s my Untitled Gnome Project, which I think happens to be a good title but I’m open to suggestions. I had thought about The Great Gnome Kidnap With Richard Madeley. I’d be the guy in the balaclava, in case you were wondering.’

‘I’ll have a talk to my agent,’ said Kate.

‘Well, don’t talk too long,’ I said and gave Judy a wink. ‘Half of the BBC wants to be involved. I was talking with Kate Russell yesterday and I think she’d be almost as perfect as you, Kate.’

‘My agent,’ said Kate again. ‘Now, could you hand me back to Judy. I’d just like to chat with her for a second.’

‘Sure thing, Kate,’ I said. ‘Hope to speak with you soon about gnomes.’
I handed the phone to Judy.

‘Hi Kate... Yes, I know. Hmmmm. No, no. Quite serious... I had thought about that but it’s getting him to agree to see one. No, Kate, I know... I thought some sort of medication. Just to take the edge off. Well, to be honest, I don’t know. I think it’s getting worse. I’m afraid to leave him alone in the house. Well, if you send me the address. If he managed to calm Daniel Corbett down I’m sure he’d be able to do something. Okay. Well speak soon. No, no. Don’t worry. Dead in the water. Bye.’

‘What was that about?’ I asked as Judy slipped her phone in her handbag.

‘Oh, she wanted to know if we could mind her cat for her when she goes away on holiday.’

‘A cat?’ I winced. ‘I don’t want a cat in the house.’

‘But you’re happy to have a beaver in the garden.’

I shrugged. There are places for beavers and places for cats. And somewhere in between there are places for gnomes. It's something that Judy just fails to understand.

The Problem With Probably

‘Smile, Richard,’ said Judy, straightening my hair. ‘Just think. We’ll soon be broadcast from outer space.’

It’s hard to believe but yesterday afternoon this kind of reassurance actually worked. A dose of solar radiation couldn’t have given me the same glow as came from my cheeks as I made my way into London and to the recording of yet another of our immensely popular TV shows.

Last night’s guest was Guy Pearce but let me tell you that after many years interviewing the rich and famous, another Australian superstar to make Judy go weak at the knees was not what I thought of as a productive use of my time. I have as much admiration for Guy work as the next bloke who sat through ‘Memento’ but having him on the sofa meant only one thing: sooner or later, Judy would edge nearer to him in the hope of groping his thigh.

By the time the show was over, I was at a spiritual low and was quite looking forward to getting home. Only Guy insisted on keeping Judy gabbing. In the end, I had to tell the bloke to sling his hook so we could lock up and leave the milk bottles on the step.

‘Honestly,’ I said once we were home last night and sitting in our lounge enjoying a bowl of Stephen Fry’s piping hot otter stew. ‘That Pearce bloke couldn’t stop telling you how bloody wonderful he is. I think he’s got serious issues with his self-esteem.’

To which Judy gave a laugh. Not a warble of a laugh. Not one of those throaty chuckles that we’ve all come to know and love. I mean a laugh that was all vocal cord stressed by a couple lungs of air moving at some knots.

When she’d finished and wiped the last tear from her eyes, she turned to me. ‘Guy can’t help but be enormously attractive to the opposite sex and have a personality to match,’ she said.

‘And what am I? Chopped liver?’

I confess: I don’t know where I’d picked up this phrase. I don't even know what it means. Chopped liver has always had a certain sexual charm that I can’t totally explain. A bit like Esther Ranzten, I suppose...

‘Well?’ I asked after it was apparent that Judy was happy to answer my question with a silence and a look towards the frolicking cherubs we have Duluxed up on the ceiling.

‘Your winkle could do with another coat of paint,’ she said.

‘Leave my winkle out of it,’ I replied. ‘Don’t avoid the question. Aren’t I a man hugely attractive to women and with a personality to match?’

‘Oh,’ said Judy. ‘Probably.’

Probably. I slept on this ‘probably’ all night. I awoke this morning to find ‘probably’ sitting on my pillow and varnishing its nails. Probably followed me around all morning until I tired of hearing its footsteps. Probably. Probably. Probably.

In the end, I thought the only way I’d be satisfied was if I sought independent advice.

There aren’t a huge number of people I could ring to ask about my animal magnetism and the neighbours would be no use at all. Frankly, whether Mrs. Ronnie Corbett finds me attractive is no concern of mine. I thought long and hard about the kind of person who I wanted to judge me. The ideal person would have been Selena Dreamy but I knew she was deep below the Earth’s crust. I had instead to turn to the world of celebrity.

A quick run through the music channels on satellite didn’t offer any help. I thought about ringing up Kim Wilde but after the mess she made treading mud into my office last year I was not so sure I could trust the woman’s judgement. I considered asking Jennifer Saunders but, again, there’s been too much recently history between us. Just because your praise a women’s top lip doesn’t mean that she’s going to affirm your complete mastery of sexual attraction. It was when I accidentally passing News 24 on my way to The Discovery Channel that I saw the answer. There she was: Kate Russell, one of the hosts of Click Online. Here, I thought, was an attractive, upwardly mobile young woman in a dress who knows a thing or two about technology and is perfectly placed to judge my charm. I dialled the old agent who soon had the number of Kate’s mobile.

‘Kate? Dick Madeley here. You probably know me from Channel 4’s Richard&Judy Show. I’m the one of the left of the ampersand.’

‘Ah, Richard,’ said Kate. ‘How lovely to hear from you.’

‘Just wanted to say that we love what you do on Click Online. Judy took your advice to install both a firewall and a virus checker on our broadband connection and we’ve never looked back.’

‘Excellent,’ said Kate.

‘In fact, we’d love to headhunt you for our new show The Richard&Judy Fragging Clan, starting in the autumn on UK Gaming Plus.’

‘Sounds interesting,’ said Kate.

‘More than interesting. I hope it’s excitement personified. More than personified. Made into a creature of larger than human proportions and then set to run wild in a room full of TV executives. It’s a fantastic opportunity for me to introduce the world to my love of computer games.’

‘You’re a gamer?’ asked Kate. She sounded impressed.

‘Indeed I am, Kate. In fact, I’m currently finishing Grand Theft Auto 4 on the Xbox 360.’

‘Cool,’ said Kate.

‘To a point. My quick review was that it was a technical masterpiece but a flawed game, severely undermined by the banal and rather offensive radio announcements that replace the humour and charm of the earlier games with a new found vulgarity that will only appeal to a juvenile gamer. I’ve also started the new Alone in the Dark game, although, to tell the truth, I’m very disappointed by the number of bugs made it into the final product. Clearly a case of a publisher rushing code out of the door before it was finished.’

‘Really?’ asked Kate. I think she was jotting all this down.

‘And as for the driving missions... They are an absolute pain in the arse, Kate, though the gaming experience does improve dramatically once you get into Central Park.’

‘Richard, you’re talking my kind of language,’ said Kate. ‘I’d be very interested to hear more about this show.’

‘And more you shall hear,’ I promised. ‘I’m a man with his finger on the pulse of technology. I have my own blog, you know...’

She went silent.

‘Oh, don’t worry. I’m not trying to impress you. I know that the BBC could never acknowledge the work of a rival. Although, I did wonder if I could ask your advice.’

‘Of course, Richard. Problems with technology?’

‘You might say that,’ I said. ‘My Wife Version 1.0 tells me that women no longer think of me as a man hugely attractive to women and with a personality to match. I just wanted to ask you, being an impartial observer, whether you’d agree with her.’

‘Hard to say,’ said Kate. ‘Have you got USB 2.0?’

‘I’m sure I have,’ I laughed. ‘But seriously, Kate. Go on. Tell me the worst.’

‘Well, you are nice looking.’

‘Is there a but coming?’

‘Well, you butt is... er...’

‘No, no. I mean: tell me the worst. Am I still considered a hunk to a younger female? Am I still that Goliath of Good Morning? The Man Mountain known as Madeley?’

‘Probably,’ said Kate.

I was deflated. Probably again. It was a troubling development and I thought there was nothing left but to be explicit.

‘Probably doesn’t do it, Kate,’ I said. ‘Probably is my asking Katie Humble if she’ll present a show with me about water voles and her telling me that I’m no Bill Oddie. Probably is being refused a chance to appear on “Loose Women” and talk fabrics with Katie Denham. Probably isn’t a show on The History Channel where I chat about Castro with Kate Beckinsale. To be frank, Kate, probably wins me neither Keira Knightley’s eyes nor Hilary Swank’s smile. Probably is the reason why Selena Scott still refuses to take my phone calls.’

The phone went dead.

Naturally, I hit redial but successive attempts to get through were routed to a BBC switchboard where I was advised against making crank calls to members of the BBC staff. And as I told the woman on the other end: none of this solved my problem with ‘probably’.

It sometimes makes you wonder why you even bother paying your TV licence.

Just Passing Through?

The routine rarely varies. I sit down at my computer around nine in the morning and start to type. The exercise is good for my fingers but my brain gets a workout too as I try to unravel my previous day’s activities and associate them with words, selectively chosen, rearranged, and then bundled up into this thing I like to call the Richard Madeley Appreciation Society. The whole thing is usually finished in half-an-hour, sometimes an hour. The rest of my day is then my own or Channel 4’s. I divide my time between writing (lately with some difficulty) and hosting the nation’s favourite tea-time talk show.

The only flaw in this usually quite workable plan is my own mood which can sometimes slip from its usually setting of ‘hyperactive, friendly, and all-knowing’ to one that’s described on the label as ‘sullen, unresponsive, and lacking confidence’. This is never more evident when I feel like my Appreciation Society is lacking appreciation; though, I hasten to add, not among my regular readers who I appreciate with a fanatical love and intend to see buried with me in my tomb when that day arrives. I just mean among a small fraction of the web browsing public who occasionally pass through on their way to Facebook, YouTube or Amazon.

If I’m honest, I’m feeling a little glum this morning because I sense that the written word is dead. Is there any room in the world for an old dinosaur like me putting his life into words? I’m lacking inspiration. I feel like I should be doing something more meaningful with my time.

Who really wants to read about my Monday when you can go and watch a video of a dog’s arse wearing a pair of sunglasses?

On Jeremy Clarkson's Cruel Mockey of Bill Oddie

Necks are very much like testicles. Nobody takes you seriously when you injure them.

I reflected on this when I arrived at the breakfast table this morning, having just endured two painful hours simply trying to get dressed. My condition hadn’t been helped by the bad choices I’d made when it came to put on my trousers. The severity of my bad neck made it impossible to look down to see where I was putting my legs. I had spent half an hour trying to get into my pants before I arrived at the only logical conclusion: that I should hang my trousers from the wardrobe’s door knob and then drop into them from a great height.

And that hadn’t been the success I’d anticipated...

I’d climbed on the wardrobe well enough and from there I’d launched myself on a perfect trajectory to drop me squarely into my jeans. Only, in the process of coming into land, I managed to bash my testicles against the wardrobe’s handle. The pain in my neck was matched by a greater one down below where I now have a minimalistic bruise shaped like an Ikea doorknob and with that same Scandinavian flair.

‘You could have come to help me,’ I said to Judy later, as I rummaged through the freezer drawer.

She was busy preparing our packed lunches to take to the Channel 4 studios and was busy peeling sprouts. ‘I have more important things to do than bother about your neck,’ she said. ‘And I’ve just had a phone call from Bill Oddie. He sounded extremely annoyed.’

‘As I imagine he would be,’ I replied as I slid a bag of frozen runner beans down the front of my trousers in the hope they’d help reduce the swelling around my own recently peeled sprouts. ‘Jeremy was very unfair on him on last night’s Top Gear.’

‘I think there’s something wrong with Jeremy.’

‘Clearly wrong,’ I agreed. ‘He knows how much Bill Oddie means to me and that’s why he’s going out of his way to ruin the man’s reputation among the Japanese. He clearly suspects that my blog has a very large readership around the Pacific Rim.’

Judy sliced off an ear of cheese and began to nibble on it before she turned on the red onions. The onions stood no chance.

‘You should do something to cheer Bill up,’ she said. ‘You could invite him on the show. You always have fun making vulgar allusions to tits.’

‘And believe me, Judy, there’s nothing I’d love to do more. Only, it’s impossible due to Bill’s contract with the BBC. As one of the BBC’s Untouchables, they won’t allow him to appear on any other channel. Do you know that they’ve had him electronically tagged? He makes one false move towards Channel 4 and they send out a snatch squad to take him back.’

‘That’s terrible,’ said Judy. ‘I can’t believe the BBC could be so cruel.’

‘Believe me, Jude. I’ve seen it happen. You don’t know terror until you’ve seen Huw Edwards in a balaclava dragging an innocent birdwatcher from the street just because he strayed off course following a migratory heron towards the South Bank.’

‘I always wished that we were untouchable,’ mused Judy.

I looked down at the peas to check that they weren’t melting over my untouchables.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘before we head off to do the show, I’ll send Bill an email and ask him about his owls. That usually does the trick.’

‘That would be nice,’ said Judy. ‘But don’t email. Ring him up. You know he finds your voice soothing.’

Which is exactly what I did, not much later, once my loins had been frozen numb and I’d returned a pack of defrosted runner beans back to the vegetable drawer.
‘Hello. Bill Oddie,’ piped Bill Oddie in a key above the Lesser Greebled Throatwarbler.

‘Bill? It’s Dick. I understand you rang earlier.’

‘I did. I did. I wanted to chat about that Clarkson fellow. Rather rude about me last night, I figured. What did he think he was doing driving around Japan in a mask of my face?’

‘He was being rude, Bill. That’s all it was. He was using the material from my life to make cruel jokes about the nation’s favourite twitcher.’

‘He did. He did. I noticed that. And that’s why I rang. I wondered if there’s any way we can get him back. I had thought about an otter.’

‘An otter?’

‘Stuff one down his trousers. Then I thought it would be a bit cruel and probably wouldn’t look too good with the RSPCA people if I go stuffing a live otter down Jeremy Clarkson’s trousers. And a dead one wouldn’t be any use.’

‘I doubt if there’s room down Jeremy’s jeans for an otter, living or dead,’ I said. ‘Of course, we could give it a go. He might take it as a warning and would think twice about making fun of the two of us.’

‘I didn’t notice that he made much fun of you, Dick.’

‘He mocked my beaver,’ I explained. ‘He said that you could spot it from a mile away. Now how many people do you know that own a real beaver?’

‘True,’ said Oddie.

‘And that means he was also mocking Stephen Fry give that we’ve named the beaver after the Great Man.’

‘Look,’ said Bill. ‘Leave this with me. We clearly need to do something about Clarkson. I’ll give it some thought and I’ll get back to you. I know a man who might be able to lay his hands on a swarm of locusts.’

‘Locusts sound good to me, Bill,’ I said. ‘But let’s leave it for a few weeks. I’m suffering a bad neck and I can still feel an Ikea wardrobe handle between my legs.’

‘Will do,’ said Bill. ‘After all, revenge is a dish best served cold.’

‘As are otters,’ I said before I could stop myself. I had simply forgotten who I was talking to.

‘Otters?’ asked Bill.

‘Oh, a bad joke,’ I replied, happy to get off the phone but not as happy as moments later when I hit the speed dial on the keypad marked ‘1’ and I heard a familiar voice.

‘Ah, ’tis I Fry, on my still fully functioning iPhone.’

‘Stephen? It’s Dick. Quick word of warning. If you happen to get chatting to Bill, don’t mention that cold otter stew we had last week. He wouldn’t understand and he’s feeling a touch temperamental due to Jeremy’s jokes.’

‘Will do, or rather, I won’t do, despite it being rather a sumptuous otter stew and one’s natural inclination is to state as much in a loud theatrical voice whilst standing on some high public projection of great prominence. Ah, Richard... Were I more callous man, I would have taken even more pride in that stew if I could have clubbed those otters to death myself. The gristle of an otter tail is this year’s taste sensation but that it leads you into those simply scrumptious bits of otter belly, touched by the brine of the North Sea, gently mellowed under a Scottish sun! Heavens. And the taste of those lovely otter feet, Dick! Weren’t they just something to die for? Weren’t they just?’

‘They were indeed,’ I replied, ‘and it remains a distinct possibility that we will die for those feet if Bill ever finds out that we’ve been eating his relations.’

‘Ah,’ said Fry. ‘Heavens. Gosh. Hushed silence. Groan.’

But for my neck, I would have shrugged. For the second time in an hour I was glad to hang up the phone.

Some days, you really don’t know what you’re getting into just by getting up in the morning.

Neck: Bad

I’m struggling today after waking up at seven o’clock, putting my right arm behind my head and then yawning.

‘Holy Jesus, King of Kings!’ I cried as I felt something go wrong in the place where my shoulder joins my neck.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Judy, lifting up her eyeshades.

‘It’s my shoulder,’ I said, stuck in a position in which I resembled Ronnie Cox when they find him floating in the river in 'Deliverance'. ‘I think I’ve trapped something in my shoulder.’

She grabbed my arm and gently pulled it from behind my head which fell on the pillow to the sound of my screaming.

‘OOooooohhhhh!’ I said, as though there weren’t enough ‘ooh’s in my life recently.

Judy just shook her head and looked at the clock.

‘Well, there’s not much I can do now,’ she said. ‘I’m having another couple of hours.’

‘But what about me?’ I asked, unable to move.

‘I’m sure you’ll think of something.’

And that’s how you find me. The beginning of a new week when I had many great plans to put into operation but instead, I’ve tore, trapped, or otherwise dislodged something in my shoulder which makes it difficult for me to type, look to the left, or hold any kind of beverage in my left hand. I had also intended to write a letter of complaint to the BBC about last night’s ‘Top Gear’. Clarkson was using all my best material as he drove around Japan wearing a Bill Oddie mask.

I suppose next week he’ll be writing limericks.

PS. Oooohhhh...

Lord Richard Gordon Madeley: Poet

There once was a man from Merton,
Who only ate salads with stilton,
He liked pickles of course,
With lots of brown sauce,
And got pretty excited by mutton.

Utterly useless! It was no good. That was my tenth attempt at writing a limerick and I’d failed miserably. I had gone to bed the previous night thinking myself the next Edward Lear but in the revealing light of Sunday morning, I realised that I was no better than a freckle-faced Pam Ayers, aged about 7 and already rhyming ‘duck’ with silence and guilty looks towards her friends.

I still don’t know how I managed to reach the point at which I had come to realise that I have no skill with rhymes. All I do know is that an email pinged into my inbox early on Saturday night. It was from Sir Clive James, who was finally responding to the letter of thanks I'd sent him some weeks ago. After he'd finished praising my blog and telling me a witty anecdote about Michael Aspel, a keg of beer and a length of rubber tubing, he asked me to ring him at my convenience.

‘Hello, Sir Clive?’ I asked, seconds later.

‘Hello there, Dick. You got my email then.’

His voice was a rumble on the other end of the line. It made my chair vibrate and people living in a five mile radius were undoubtedly becoming sexually excited for no apparent reason.

‘I did get your email and very intriguing it was too,’ I said.

‘I meant it to be,’ breathed Sir Clive. ‘I don’t always write my emails in verse but I wanted to entice you, Dick. I have plans and they involve you.’

‘Me? In your plans?’

‘After I finish my Edinburgh show, I’m editing a volume of verse and I’d like you to be involved.’

Now my own excitement became sexual and I begin to perspire. ‘Me? Involved in a book of verse with you, Sir Clive? I’d be absolutely delighted. You probably know that I’m an unpublished but prolific poet. I once wrote you a sonnet sequence that you might be interested in reading. There’s only 157 of them but that’s three more than Shakespeare wrote to his Dark Lady... But you don’t have to worry about my embarrassing you. I only ever refer to you as my Bald Australian Essayist and Critic.’

‘Hold you horses, Dick,’ said Sir Clive. ‘You haven’t heard my plan yet. All my friends are contributing to the volume. I’m asking each of you to take a verse form and then write me half a dozen poems in that form. The only exception is Stephen Fry who is writing me one long epic poem in rhyming Alexandrines.’

‘So you’re saying that I can’t write you some sonnets?’

‘Selina Scott is writing me some sonnets,’ said Sir Clive. ‘I want you to take charge of the limerick.’

‘The limerick?’ I cried. ‘I’m a rondeau man at the very least. Or give me the chance to write a satire in verse. Have you read my 170 line "Epistle to Jeremy Paxman on the State of His Sock Drawer"?’

‘Unfortunately, I have,’ murmured Sir Clive, ‘which is why I’d like you to take the limerick.’

‘But that’s the least important verse form that there is! Did Wallace Stevens ever write limericks? T.S. Eliot? The great Percy Bysshe or George Gordon?’ I protested. ‘Some might even consider it doggerel. No, with all respect, Sir Clive, I think you’ll find that I’m more suited to representing the poems of the great Augustan writers. Who have you asked to be the modern day Alexander Pope?’

‘Russell Brand,’ said Clive. He couldn’t have bloodied his knuckles any more had he plucked out the knife he’d stuck into my liver and inserted his hand into the open wound.

I hung up mortified.

‘I can’t write limericks,’ I said to Judy as I wandered into the kitchen. She just shrugged and carried on putting up shelves.

With the sound of her power drill hitting a burnt brick, I sloped off back to my study where I sat myself down at the desk and began to scribble limericks. As any artist will tell you, beginning is the most difficult part of the act of composition. Finding your way into words isn’t half as difficult as finding a topic that merits action. I just threw ideas on the page, trying not to censor myself but wanting to explore the deep creative recesses of my mind.

There’s a London cabbie called Fry
Whose wit is surprisingly dry,
He’s always up for a jape,
Wears a green velvet cape,
And hosts a popular show called QI.

Terrible but worse was to come...

There once was a lady called Vanessa,
Whose cleavage was delightfully immense-a,
One day on the show,
She bent over low,
And I saw her knees through her crevasse-a.

No. No. No. And No.

There once was a man called Bill Oddie,
Whose sense of style was quite shoddy,
He’d mixed red with green,
In a Hawaiian gabardine,
And hung duck calls all over his body.

After a eight or nine more examples, I finally penned my limerick about the man from Merton. It didn’t please me but this was after nearly five hours work so I went off to see if Judy had finished with her shelves. I found her sitting at the kitchen table drinking a coffee fortified with rum.

‘Have a look at my limericks and tell me what you think,’ I said, handing her my pages of third-rate Lear.

'You’ve been looking down Vanessa’s dress again, haven’t your Richard?’ she asked, five minutes later.

‘Not really,’ I replied. ‘Sometimes I can’t help it. She seems to fill the room.’

‘More like she fills your eyeballs,’ said Judy throwing the pages of hard won rhymes to the table and grabbing a pen. ‘You can’t send any of these to Clive James. He’ll think there’s something wrong with you. Here...’ She turned a page over and scribbled on the back for all of ten seconds. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Give that to your “Sir Clive” and tell him that it's a Judy original. Let him put that in his book.’

I looked at the page.

There once was a man called Madeley
Whose poems were written quite badly,
It made his wife so insane
She'd rather unblock the drain,
Lest she plucked out her own eyes, quite gladly.

And with that she disappeared into the back garden.

The sound of a suction pump soon filled the morning silence and Judy appeared from the shed carrying her set of drain rods.

As I sat amid the scattered debris of my poetry career, I felt quite blessed that I had a woman like Judy who would help me recover. I don’t know where I’d be without her, at times. I certainly don’t know what kind of a state the drains would be in. They’d been blocked since I’d eaten a second helping of Mrs. Corbett’s rice pudding last week.

And that was it! It was like a door had been opened in my brain and light flooded the place where inspiration, that emancipated wretch, had been lying in heavily whiskered filth in the middle of its once dark cell. Inspiration blinked a few times and then rose to his feet. Suddenly moved by a real subject, the pen danced in my fingertips. I looked down and saw the following words, written in indelible ink on the white work surface.

There once was a woman called Judy
Who saw unblocking drains as a duty,
What clogged them, I bet:
Rice Pudding Corbett,
Which I sent down the loo last Tuesday.

And that, my friends, is how art happens! Magical. Other worldly. Like a gift sent down by heaven and given its own show on ITV. And what’s more, it would make Sir Clive James so very happy.

Beat that, Stephen Fry!

I Don't Know About You...

... but I think it's turned quite chilly. Who would believe it? Middle of July and I'm putting my thermal socks on.

Brief Moments

Foolishly tried to get into town and back by noon. I failed miserably. Among other things, I was delayed by a hopping optician who had broken his foot after missing his step. He didn’t seem too happy when I suggested that he needed glasses. I was also busy trying to get a look at Katie Price’s newest book without being obvious about it. In the end, I only managed to sneak a peek at a couple of pages but I was impressed by everything I read. You really can’t beat prose written by a woman with large plastic breasts. It’s where I always feel rather let down by Virginia Woolf and George Elliot.

I also spent too long trying to match the faces of the staff in Waterstone’s to the pictures on the shelf of ‘Staff Recommendations’. I was particularly keen to have it out with the young bluffer with the hair like a bryllcreamed caterpillar who suggests that I try Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’.

After Waterstone’s, I then visited Borders where I had it out with the young Scouse shop assistant who stopped me to ask if I was okay.

‘Okay? Of course I’m okay,’ I said.

‘Only you looked puzzled.’

‘Argh!’ I scream. ‘Won’t you people leave me alone? I spend most of my life in bookshops. It’s the only place where I’m truly happy. I’m just miles away, blissfully thinking about what to buy...’

‘Oh, I thought you didn’t know what you wanted.’

‘Of course I don’t know what I want,’ I snapped. ‘It’s called browsing for books, you fool. I’m trying to remember what I’ve read, what people have recommended that I read, and a thousand other things that lead me to buy a book. I just want to be left alone to browse.’

I then had to spend another hour browsing, just to make my point and then left without buying anything, also to make my point.

At three o’clock, I climb on a train. A guy is sitting across the aisle from me and on his small fold down table, he has three empty whisky miniatures, a can of lager and dozens of empty wrappers from Opal Fruits. Only they’re not called Opal Fruits any more. I think they’re called Starburst.

As I settle myself, he gets out his mobile phone, dials and starts to speak. He’s clearly in the land of the happy pixies where words come with extra slur.

‘Hello luv. I’m nearly there,’ he said. ‘No, no. Ten minutes. Now, listen.... LISTEN I SAID! Listen, I want you to tell the kids that I’m looking forward to seeing them. Really? She gonna be there? Well tell her I don’t f****** want her there. I can f****** well finish her, I can tell you that. Yes well. Just saying is all. I can finish her. Listen, got some cash for the kids. You tell them I’ll be there soon and I got money for ’em. Be there soon.’

He hangs up and I imagine that somewhere just outside London is a woman who turns to her kids.

‘Good news,’ she says. ‘Your father’s nearly here and he’s got some money for you. But I have to warn you now. He’s been on the Opal Fruits all afternoon.’

Two Smokers

Like you’ll find at most stations in our larger cities, it’s impossible to reach the entrance to Manchester Piccadilly without walking through one and a half miles of smokers hacking up lungs, swilling rusty phlegm from their throats, and otherwise spewing lumps of their own flesh into buckets. Despite the signs that read, ‘Do Not Smoke In This Area’, the place is as toxic as a Ukrainian village downwind of the latest leaking nuclear pile.

The smoke usually takes me unaware. Rushing for a train, I rarely register that I’ve moved from the city’s traffic pollution and into the nicotine cloud. Today, however, I was actually running a little early for the express back to London. I anticipated the danger of the Marlborough Miasma and my lungs didn’t go into mild shock when they started to suck up the tobacco. I also had a chance to examine the vertical exhaust pipes that we collectively describe as smokers.

For the most part, they were the shrivelled men, the yellow teethed youths, obese girls looking to make themselves thin. Yet on the far side of the crowd, there were two women standing by the doors. One was a very attractive young woman who could easily have modelled teeth. With enough of an overbite to chew me weak at the knees, her face was blemish free and welcomingly free of makeup. She was a beauty. Or she would have been but for the clouds of yellow coming from her nose.

Her friend was some years down Tobacco Road. Her skin was like Moroccan leather and her lips probably sealed with the strap of flesh that hung beneath her neck. At some distant time, she too had been attractive but now sallow eyed and with features worn down like an outcrop of sandstone years in the desert, hers was the face that should launch every packet of cigarettes.

I can’t explain it now. I doubt if I could explain it then. I don’t look to do good deeds. Sometimes good deeds just demand that I fulfil their destiny.

‘Look here, Miss,’ I said to the former ravishing beauty with all the teeth. ‘Do you want to look like this in a few years? Cut out the fags and I promise that you’ll never really age.’

And with that I walked away before another word could be said.

Cruel? Some might say so. But I think I might just have saved a young life.

But that’s me down the ankle. Madeley: activist, poet. nomad, and saviour.

The Madeley Manchester Midget Census

Today’s count: 3.

A new record.

Question Thursday

It’s late, I'm again stuck up here in Manchester, and these old bones of mine intend to get some sleep despite the continued wailing of the Ladyboys in the car-park across the street.

Not wanting to disappoint you should you pop by to say hello tomorrow, I thought I’d write up some quick responses to genuine questions asked of this blog via Google in the last couple of weeks.

Is Claire Balding a man?

Yes she is. Her name is Eric and she lives in Dartford with her husband, Willie Carson.

Is Care Balding married to Willie Carson?

See above. They honeymooned in the Grand Canaries.

How much prune juice is too much?

If you have to ask, you’ve probably had too much. If in doubt, cough twice and then check your thighs for leakage.

How old is Richard Madeley?

The distinguished side of fifty. Twenty seven horse years. Fourteen by the camel.

Can you have two rectums?

Yes. It’s quite common. However I don’t. I just have one. Amaze your friends! Confuse your enemies! Coming soon from my blog: The Richard Madeley Has Only One Rectum T-Shirt.

Does Richard Madeley wear a wig?

I do though the correct term is ‘merkin’.

What languages do people in Tunisia speak?

Arabic, French and Welsh.

Is Paul Heaton allergic to bee stings?

I should imagine he might be. If I had his email address I’d write to ask him. Excellent new album, by the way. Listened to it five times as I was bounced between trains today. It gets better with each listening. ‘This Deckchair Collapsed’. Masterpiece.

Are the Krankies technically midgets?

The bloke is. His missus isn't. But the whole thing is just wrong in my opinion...

Who invented butter?

Horace Walpole. He also invented the gothic novel and was the first Englishman to eat an artichoke.

Who writes Richard Madeley's blog?

I do. Occasionally with the help of my friends, rarely with any assistance from Judy. Denis Plumb sometimes drops by and lends his only hand.

Has Martin Amis read Harry Potter?

No but he's a huge fan of the films.

Is Clive James a sir?

On this blog he is.

What's wrong with Terry Wogan's ears?

Water on the earlobes. Makes them droop terribly if left undrained.

Are Ladyboys transvestites?

If they’re not, I don’t know what is.

Why do my testicles feel like onions?

I have no idea. Do your onions feel like testicles?

Do radishes smell?

The last time I sniffed a radish it certainly did. A definite radish odour. Reminded me of radish.

Why do the Swiss yodel?

All people born at altitude have this ability. It’s just that the Swiss had the time to develop it into a hobby to annoy the French and Germans.

Is it a tit or a teat?

You have to ask yourself: is it for work or for pleasure?

Sunflowers

A guy drove past me today in a new Volkswagen Beetle in a vivid shade of yellow. He had a large plastic sunflower stuck in his dashboard.

He did not make my day in Manchester any sunnier. Rather, I had a few dark thoughts as he breezily zipped by. One involved a unique way of transplanting a sunflower to a shadier spot.

Sex And The Purple Mongoose

‘Oh my,’ said Judy.

‘Pardon?’ I answered, thinking it odd that Judy appeared to be talking to her mid-morning crumpet.

‘I said “oh my”.’

‘Ah,’ I returned and went back to polishing my instrument.

Five minutes elapsed before my mind had partially recovered from the brass cleaner fumes I’d been inhaling all morning. I suddenly understood the significance of what Judy had just said and why it had so clearly upset the large purple mongoose sitting at her feet.

‘So why did you say “oh my”?’ I asked, still slurring my speech but clearly curious about the crumpet.

Judy didn’t even bother to look up and neither did the mongoose. ‘Oh, for no reason,’ she answered. ‘Just something I read in the paper. It’s not important...’

‘Fine, fine,’ I replied. The crumpet exonerated, I set my elbows back to polishing the bugle I’d been preparing for a morning gad about the shire with Fry.

Only I knew my mind wouldn’t settle. Another five minutes passed before Curiosity leaped out with a lead pipe and cracked Mr. Tiddles across his left cranial lobe. It was left to me to dispose of the body.

‘I don’t believe you’d say “oh my” if something wasn’t important,’ I said. ‘There must have been something profound in that magazine of yours that made you say it.’

‘No, no, nothing in particular,’ said Judy who then flushed the same crimson as a well cudgelled cat. That’s when she shrugged. ‘It’s just something I was reading about Jennifer Saunders. It’s from a couple of months ago. I don’t think you’ll be interested...’

Interested? The purple mongoose vanished and my head was suddenly clear. Naturally, I tried to look indifferent but, as many as you know, I hold the opinion that Jennifer Saunders possesses the sexiest upper lip in the business. For that lip alone I was happy to cast aside my bugle. I literally snatched the magazine from Judy’s grasp and I was soon admiring the lip on page 17.

‘Oh my!’ I said as I began to read the article from April of this year in which Jennifer had made some strange confessions regarding events in the Madeley bedroom. I had to read it out loud just to allow my ears to double check what my eyes were seeing. ‘Jennifer Saunders has revealed that she can't watch Richard And Judy because she keeps thinking about the pair in bed. Says Jennifer: "I hate watching them and thinking that they might touch each other's genitals." She added that she thought husband and wife TV teams were "icky".’

‘Sticky?’ asked Judy.

‘I said “iky” but what does the woman expect when she’s talking about handling people’s genitals?’

‘Oh Richard!’ cried Judy. ‘Stop it. I can’t believe they’d publish something as tacky as that in my favourite magazine!’

‘Listen, Jude, don’t lecture me. Talk to the people at Creative Concrete Monthly. I just can’t get over the fact that Jennifer Saunders is so obsessed with my naked body.’

Judy raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes, I’m quite sure you’re quite shocked, Richard. In fact, I suppose that smile on your face has nothing to do with carnal thoughts about Jennifer’s top lip?’

It’s times like this that I regret having ever revealed my lip fetish.

‘Listen, the woman keeps having dreams about you and me in bed and that’s just wrong. I mean I don’t go around thinking about Jennifer and that husband of hers. I don’t start imaging him getting all sexy in that high pitched voice of his and then hitting her across the head with a frying pan. Which, I might add, was hardly the high point of 1980s comedy.’

Judy nervously stroked her neck as she blushed. ‘Isn’t he the one out of Bottom who wears the big underpants?’

‘You’re thinking about Rik Mayall,’ I explained. ‘Jennifer is married to Adrian Edmondson.’

‘Didn’t he discover the south pole?’

‘I think he did but probably not in his big underpants.’

I threw the magazine to one side and expressed my disgust with a silence that lasted until Judy nipped out. It was the day she was due to have her earlobes realigned ahead of our move to satellite TV. No sooner was she out the door than I was on the phone to our agent demanding the private phone number of Ms. Jennifer Saunders.

‘Hello, Saunders,’ said Jennifer Saunders ten minutes later. ‘Now available for pantos and voiceover work. And I’m also happy to do vicars...’

‘Hello Jen. Reverend Dick Madeley here,’ I joked.

‘Oh my!’ she gasped.

‘Oh my, indeed,’ I said, holding the magazine on my lap for reference. ‘I’m ringing to have a word about this interview you gave the April edition of Creative Concrete Magazine. You know... The one where you’ve been fantasising about me in bed with Judy? What can I say? It’s very flattering...’

‘Dear me,’ she answered breathy like one of her witty sketches. ‘I admit, Richard, that I did go through a period when I couldn’t stop thinking of you but I got over that a long time ago.’

‘Did you really?’ I tried not to sound too disappointed.

‘Of course I did.’

‘And might I ask how you managed that? I would think that thoughts of me in bed with Judy are very potent. Not something that you can easily erase from your mind.’

‘Surprisingly easy,’ said Jennifer. ‘The habit wasn’t hard to break at all.’

‘Really? Well colour me surprised with the tinted ready mix on page ninety seven. So how did you manage it? ECT? Aversion therapy?‘

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I just sang "bring me sunshine".’

‘You sang “Bring me sunshine”?’ I had to laugh. ‘And why would singing “bring me sunshine” de-programme you from lusting after one of the finest bodies on British television?’

‘Well it’s the old theme song to “The Morecambe and Wise Show”,’ explained Jennifer. ‘Once I thought of you as Eric and Judy as Ernie, the whole business of you two sleeping together seemed quite normal. I had a few bad nights when Dr. Raj became Des O’Connor but I’m over it now. I can go days now without thinking of you in the buff.’

I think the cruelty of a sexy upper lip stings deeper than any. I hung up the phone quite taken aback by the strange psychological games that Jennifer is willing to play with a man’s who’d been sniffing brass cleaner all morning. I was still confused when Judy arrived home.

‘I rang Jennifer,’ I explained as I sat in the poorly ventilated living room silently polishing my buge.

‘Really?’ asked Judy. ‘I hope she apologised.’

‘In a way she did,’ I replied, eying the purple mongoose.

‘Well, that’s good. At least we can now forget all about it.’

‘Suppose we can,’ I answered.

‘Fancy a cup of coffee?’

‘No, no. Don’t want to get too excited ahead of the show.’

‘Orange juice, then? Milk? Hot chocolate.’

‘No, no,’ I said.

‘Well how about a nice cup of tea?’

‘Why not?’ I sighed. ‘You really can’t beat a tea, Ern.’

Judy looked at me as I fell about laughing. The mongoose just shook his head. But then, purple mongoose are like that.

Grey Clouds At Two O'Clock

Like some well-crafted metaphor about a man trying to overcome a bad mood, I took aim at the grey clouds with a bazooka of my own making. I’d had no hand in designing the warhead. That had come straight from the BBC props department via the 'Top Gear' offices with a slight detour through the Met Centre where currency was exchanged for enough silver nitrate to dose the skies of East Anglia.

‘You two don’t actually think you’re going to achieve anything with that thing?’ asked Judy through the open kitchen window.

‘Pah!’ said Clarkson rather pithily.

While I'd only got Fry's answer phone and Oddie was busy doing things with Nige and a snowy owl, Jeremy had responded to my SOS by shattering the sound barrier in his rocket car and leaving a half mile scorch mark down the M1.

‘This is the best quality television explosive, Mrs. M,' he assured her. 'And with all the silver nitrate I’ve loaded in this baby, those clouds will dump all that rain over Norfolk and won’t come anywhere near us.’

And with that he turned back to me where I was holding the length of drainpipe on my shoulder and he slapped me on my motorcycle helmet. This, as J.C. usually says when he's about to put his foot through the throttle of the latest Italian supercar, was the moment of truth.

I aimed at a particularly offensive cloud which reminded me of Hughie Green’s chin and I squeezed the trigger. It moved all of an inch before the rocket ignited with a pop.

And then it whistle softly as though it were Roger Whitaker taking a leisurely stroll down the length of the bazooka. When it reached the end of the tube, the rocket fell out and landed at my feet from where it mocked me with the message ‘Norwich or Bust’ which Jeremy had earlier scribbled on its side.

Clarkson peered over my shoulder.

‘I think we should move,’ he said and made a dash towards the shed. I joined him there moments later.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘I’ll be buggered if I know,’ said Jeremy, thick with sweat. He sat down as he looked at his watch and counted off a few seconds. ‘Where’s Judy?’

I looked out at the house. Judy was standing in the kitchen where she was about to do the washing up.

‘She’s in the kitchen,’ I said.

‘Near the window?’

I looked again. Judy looked up and saw me watching. She gave me a wave. I waved back.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She’s right in front of the window. She’s just putting on her marigolds.’

Jeremy winced as he took out his mobile and dialled a number.

‘Hello Judy,’ he said a few moments later. It all left me a little confused. ‘It’s Jeremy. Yes, the Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear fame. I’m currently sitting on a pile of imported Afghan merkins in your garden shed... Yes, odd isn’t it? I know... He was waving to you too. Anyway, I just wanted to get you away from the window. Why? Oh, I think there’s going to be a rather large explosion in your back garden right around...’

The shed shook, Clarkson fell from his seat and Afghan merkins were soon covering every inch of his seven feet one inch frame. I might also say that I thought he deserved every last one of them. When I stepped out of the shed, there was a hole the size of a quarry in the middle of the lawn and the air with thick with the smell of Daniel Corbett’s best silver nitrate.

‘Well, if that doesn’t make it rain, I don’t know what will,’ I said as Jeremy emerged behind me. An Afghan merkin sat on his head and he looked like some misshapen, freak-show version of Bruce Forsyth.

‘But I bet this cheered you up, Dick!’ he said and slapped me on my back.

I couldn’t say that it had or hadn’t. There were only a couple of hours before I would have to go and do a show for Channel 4 and I really didn’t know how to feel about an enormous crater in the lawn or a man wearing a merkin toupee. I was more concerned about the state of my wife who had appeared at the back door.

Judy, as we say around these parts, was simply distraught.

Typical Wednesday

Some days on Google are more typical than others and today is more typical than most. However, 'what stockings was frank bough wearing?' is cut above the normal search term.

I happen to know that they were by Pretty Polly with extra support in the gusset. Don't ask me how I know, I just know...

A Brief Diatribe About Art

I am at my most human when it’s late at night and I begin to feel sorry for myself. Which is why I have to beg your forgiveness for my last pitiful excuse for a post. As somebody recently told me, I simply have to try harder. Even a year into this blogging exercise, my fingers still haven’t found the pulse of you, my deeply intelligent and selective audience. I’ve failed to understand what makes any of you come back. Clearly, Hughie Green is far from the top of that list.

Judy often tells me that I should abandon my light-hearted attempts at biography. In her opinion, I should join in with the greater fraternity of bloggers dealing with the important issues of the day.

Gordon Brown arrived at the G8 summit with some hard words for world leaders. Robert Mugabe remains in power in Zimbabwe and it’s clear that South African president Thabo Mbeki is not providing the kind of leadership that Africa needs at this present moment. Clearly Brown is... is...

Nope. Sorry. Can’t keep that going. It’s a ‘will to live’ thing. I keep losing it.

But that’s exactly what’s wrong with me. I can be horrendously temperamental when I’m writing and my mood was made doubly bad last night because I had spent a couple of hours browsing the web to research a book I’m trying to finish.

As you know, I’m a man of many talents. There may be books coming out from the Richard&Judy stable written by real writers, but I like to keep plodding along doing my own unprofitable thing. My autobiography is coming along well and I also have a novel which is very slowly amassing chapters. A theme of that novel is contemporary art and my recent browsing habits have been restricted to sites dedicated to promoting the arts in the UK.

It was while I was going through an Arts Council website last night, that I found footage of some nameless old colleagues of mine who happen to work in a field tangential to my own. Neither of them are particularly creative but they are both fanatical about commentating on the work of others. You might describe them as ‘critics’. Different national bodies seem to always send funds their way from for projects they initiate. They are both themselves in charge of some additional funds, or know the people who control those funds, which they can also ‘tap into’ to help promote their cockeyed schemes, meant to promote the arts but only really functioning as a rather squalid form of social work.

The footage was part of a current scheme they are running and was advertised as a celebration of the work of a well known artist. Basically, it was a five minute video of my friends enjoying themselves on a recent holiday in Spain. They looked out over the Med, made a few comments about the artist, and then shared a bottle of wine. While I’m pretty sure that the holiday would have been paid for out of their own pockets, those pockets are filled by their work promoting the arts.

I couldn’t help but feel a little piqued.

Maybe it was always so but we seem to be living at a point in our cultural development when we have some very fundamental problems with art. Government policy is generally to throw money at projects that are either sickeningly contemporary or involve the regeneration of our inner cities. Money goes into youth projects in urban settings. Graffiti is encouraged while the fine arts are diminished.

Naturally, I have a vested interest as I know friends who are comic novelists on the breadline while ‘socially aware’ poets get funds to travel around to schools and talk to children about ‘issues’. A recent visitor to a local school charged £500 for the day. I don’t begrudge any writer money, from whatever the source, but I do find it frustrating that the only people to really succeed in the current climate seem to be social workers and critics. And I suppose that’s why I was feeling so utterly dispirited last night and this morning. My two friends, the critics, sit enjoying their sangria on the beach while I’m still facing another long day at the keyboard.

I’m off to write something more uplifting to cheer us all up.

Back soon.

An Epiphany

It was an epiphany of sorts. I had spent the day away from my computer and reading Saul Bellow’s ‘Herzog’. Here, I thought to myself, is prose of the highest calibre and I should try to use it to improve my blog. If it takes me eight hours a day, I should only present words that have been sifted by the finest critical methods. My blog's readers should only face words that are meaningful. Not a single superfluous word should appear anywhere in my posts.

They were noble ambitions and I suppose these thought processes were only going through my mind because I’d become aware of the anniversary of this blog’s launch on the 21st of this month. To date, I’ve written over 237,000 words for your edification and amusement. It is only natural that when I’m away that I begin to wonder how it’s going and I make all kinds of vague plan to make it even bigger and better.

And then I come back after twenty four hours away and see that my last post, a troubled little piece about my future career, had all of one comment. Lord James Bigglesworth had written to inform me that ‘I take my yoghurt to the loo’.

‘I take my yoghurt to the loo’...

And that’s when I had my epiphany.

Madeley, I thought, you’re wasting your time. There are TV scripts that I could be writing or meetings I could take with high level TV executives to discuss all my great ideas for new shows. I could be crossing deserts or climbing mountains and making cutting edge TV. I could be doing all these things but instead I choose to blog so a peer of the realm can tell me that he takes his yoghurt to the loo.

In the end, I threw ‘Herzog’ to one side. I don’t know how Saul Bellow, Clive James or Stephen Fry do it.

All I know is that, some days, it's just not worth the effort and that writing just sucks.

Getting A Hughie Over Sir Clive James

Judy may have threatened me with a pot of yoghurt but there are some principles I simply will not compromise.

‘I don’t give a tuppenny f***,’ I told her. ‘I’m not wearing a kilt and if you don’t give me time off to see Sir Clive James then I’ll refuse to go.’

Even Crunchy Nut Cornflakes failed to mask the silence that fell across the breakfast table. This wasn’t your average family dispute. It was much more profound. The future of UK broadcasting lay in the balance. Not to mention the fate of one half of a grapefruit.

I had not reacted well to the news that Judy had booked us in to lead a discussion at this year’s Edinburgh Television Festival. It was enough to make me wish for another season of Grumpy Old Men and an episode dedicated to the headache of contractual negotiations involving a tanned man and his yoghurt-wielding spouse.

While I’m not averse to occasionally swinging my tonsils in the direction of an opinion or two, I do draw a line when our careers get in the way of my more academic pursuits. First I wasn’t allowed to take the job at Harvard teaching practical criticism. Then I’m told that our schedule doesn’t leave me enough time to develop my new SCRAM jet for bicycles. Now it would appear that I won’t be allowed to blog live from this year’s Edinburgh Festival. A straw had been definitely been loaded too hastily onto the back of this brittle-boned camel.

The Edinburgh Festival was to have been my awakening. I would attend it as the Richard on one half of a hugely successful ampersand but I would emerge a Madeley in my own right. The news that Sir Clive James would be appearing nightly at the Queen's Hall had sent me into such paroxysms of joy that Judy had called for an ambulance.

I suspect that knowing about my plans had given rise to her sudden wish to turn Edinburgh into a professional date involving a kilt. Even the offer to donate my right wingnut to any charitable cause of her choosing hadn’t been enough to get me up to Edinburgh to see Sir Clive Live.

‘We’re going to attend our debate and that’s it,’ said Judy again waving her yogurt at me. ‘You know that we can’t have you lounging around the Fringe and making comments that haven’t been vetted by The Richard&Judy Foundation.’

‘Damn you and your foundation,’ I replied and developed a sulk as cultured as any dairy product. ‘This is Sir Clive James I’m talking about. You know how I intend to follow in his footsteps when I go solo...’

‘And how many times have I told you, Richard? You are not following in the footsteps of Clive James. You’re following in the footsteps of Hughie Green and that’s the end of it. I’m not going to have another argument about this when it’s all been decided.’

‘What is there to argue about?’ I asked. ‘I’m simply making the point that if I could get out of the studio setting, I’d stretch my wings. This idea you have of my hosting “Double Your Money” is never going to give me my big break. I want to show people that I can develop programmes just as edgy as anything by Louis Theroux but also as intelligent and witty as Sir Clive at his best.’ I stood up and walked to the refrigerator where my list of future projects was pinned next to the list of groceries. ‘Listen to this and tell me that I’m not onto something. Madeley Goes Eskimo. Madeley On A Bike. Madeley Meets The Quakers. Madeley Meets The Mormons. Madeley Meets The Munchkins. Madeley Meets Morrissey. Madeley Meets The Muppets. Madeley On Mogodon. Madeley Meets The Mongols. Madeley Does Manchester...’

‘Don’t you think it might get a little repetitive?’ asked Judy, now peeling back the foil from her tub of strawberry yoghurt as though the argument were already won.

‘Repetition is good,’ I explained. ‘It’s a staple of the broadcaster’s art. Doing it this way, I will become a national institution. My blog has already proved that I’m developing into a cult figure. The country is crying out for a new Alan Whicker, Jude. I could be that man. I’ll be the twenty first century’s version of Sir Clive James.’

Judy slammed her spoon onto the table. She hadn’t even tasted her yoghurt.

‘Sir Clive! Sir Clive! Sir Clive! All I bloody hear about is Sir bloody Clive James and the man isn’t even knighted.’

‘I’m working on it,’ I replied. ‘Powerful people read my blog and I know that if they get it into their mind, a knighthood for Sir Clive is marmalade.’

‘I’m also getting worried about all these strange phrases you’ve started to use, Richard. How can Sir Clive be marmalade?’

I wasn’t going to allow her to get away so easily. ‘Ha! See!’ I laughed. ‘You just said “Sir Clive”! I told you that once people start to hear it they’ll begin to like it. Catching, isn’t it?’

There’s one thing that Judy does not like and that’s losing an argument.

‘Richard Madeley,’ she said, her voice turning breathy like an aspirating python. ‘You are nowhere near as talented as Clive James. He’s a published poet and essayist. He studied at Cambridge and is now considered a national treasure. Can you say the same?’

I stood up and looked at my wife. She was of course right in nearly everything she said but I had to prove to her, once and for all, that I had it in me to become a success on my own. I might lack Sir Clive’s education but I had more than enough pluck. After all, mine was a spirit forged in the red heat of Granada Reports.

The Australian accent was the best I could do at short notice but I had Sir Clive’s nasal pinch about perfect.

‘In the Madeley kitchen, the aroma of fresh morning strawberry yoghurt is enough to make even the neighbour’s cat frisky. In the olden days, when frisky neighbours had docile cats, they said that a strawberry yoghurt was simply good for you. Now that the cat is friskier than its owners, they say yoghurt is the key to longevity. I say if this is what probiotic bacteria can do for you, I’m sticking with my Crunchy Nut Cornflakes and bugger the frisky cat. Judy has been eating yogurts for years so I thought I’d ask her for some tips...’

‘What exactly are you doing Richard?’

‘She had too much to say but that’s the thing about yoghurts. Everybody has too much to say. Especially the cats...’

‘You sound nothing like Clive James,’ she said. ‘You’re much more like Hughie Green...’

‘Judy said I’m more like Hughie Green. I say bugger Hughie Green.’

‘I’m not impressed Richard...’

‘"Double Your Money" was a show in which people won neither cats nor yoghurt. People also didn’t get to bugger Hughie Green. Which was a pity. But then Hughie wasn’t the kind of man you’d bugger. And that’s the thing about yogurt. No matter how frisky it made you, you’d never feel like buggering Hughie Green, his frisky neighbours, or his cat.’

‘Is that it?’ asked Judy.

I sank into my chair. ‘Well?’ I asked, exhausted but spiritually revitalised after living the dream, for no matter how short a time. ‘You've got to say that it was pure Sir Clive.’

‘It’s pure something,’ she answered and picked up her yoghurt before walking off into the conservatory.

I smiled as I watched her make a retreat before I turned back to my ever trusty Crunchy Nuts and half a grapefruit. A battle was won but the war had a long way to go.

Project: Richard Hammond

The huge disappointment I feel every Sunday evening cannot be easily put into words of less than nineteen syllables. When eight o’clock arrives, my intense hostility towards Richard Hammond becomes a quite evident fury towards anything or anyone that might get in my way.

‘Goddamnmotherfreakingcelebritymyarsefreakshowuntalentedhack’ is often heard over the ‘Jessica’ theme tune that should otherwise make me excited in many mysterious (and sometimes sexual) ways.

‘It’s only Richard watching "Top Gear"’ is what you’ll then usually hear Judy say to visitors unfortunate enough to have arrived at the house during the hour of the show.

It was during the show, a week last Sunday, that Sue Lawley became the latest innocent victim of my Hammond wrath. I had been walking to the kitchen to top up on nacho cheese for my dips when I lashed out at a plant pot which took an unexpected rebound off Sue’s chin. It was then that Judy took me to one side and told me that I needed to sort out my ‘issues’.

‘You can’t go kicking every plant pot you see,’ she said as Sue sat sobbing in the kitchen with a bag of frozen king prawns held to her rapidly Bruciefying chin. ‘Have a word with Jeremy and find out if he can do anything to help. Because, quite frankly, Richard, this can’t go on. And I wouldn’t blame Sue if she changes her mind about inviting you onto Desert Island Discs.’

Judy was right and Sue did have a change of heart. Spite was the only reason she had to ask Richard Hammond to choose his favourite songs instead of me. It’s not the insult to the Madeley name that bothers me as much as my concern for the wellbeing of the Radio 4 audience who aren’t ready for a whole show dedicated to the boys from Westlife. And that’s why I decided to say something when Clarkson made his regular trip over to the house last week to play our usual games with petrol and gas canisters.

‘Jeremy, I want a word in your ear,’ I said to him after I was done filling milk bottles with lighter fluid. ‘You’re recording the new series of Top Gear on Wednesday?’

‘We are indeed,’ he said as he lit a canister of Judy’s favourite underarm deodorant. I watched from the recliner as he hurled the deodorant into the shrubs. The dumb sound of the detonation was followed by the heavy scent of lilac. ‘I love the smell of lilac in the morning,’ said Jeremy, topless but wearing his favourite US Cavalry hat. ‘You know that smell? That light lilac smell... It smells like Judy.’

‘Indeed it does, Jeremy. Now tell me this: is there any chance that there might be room for one more on that Top Gear sofa? I hear that a few contracts are about to expire...’

He looked at me surprised. ‘You surely don’t mean you?’

‘Of course I mean me. I’ve always wanted to host a show with men of similar intellects.’ I shrugged. ‘But I can tell you think it’s a stupid idea. You wouldn’t want me on the show...’

‘No, no,’ replied Jeremy. ‘I think it’s a great idea. Only...’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, I know James would welcome you with open arms. In fact, I’d have to warn you about that before you came on. You shouldn’t wear any strong aftershaves otherwise he might get excited and try to get you involved in a run to Brighton. It’s just that Richard might be a problem.’

‘You mean the Hamster? Can’t you just put him in a wheel? I’m sure I have a cardboard box he’d fit into.’

‘I wish it were that simple,’ said the Great Clarkson. ‘You see, he seems to think that he’s now the star of the show.’

I laughed one of those scoff-shaped laughs, all scoff and very little chuckle. ‘That’s crazy,’ I said as I felt my ill feelings towards Hammond take hold of my mouth. ‘You’re the only star of “Top Gear”, Jeremy. James is the foil to your mannish silliness and Richard is only there for the ladies who like small unthreatening men with mild narcissism issues. I have to tell you, Jeremy, but Hammond is letting the side down. All that looking towards the camera isn’t the way we professionals do it. I’d call him "Richard Hammy", if I were you. He's more gonk than man and an insult to petrolheads. And I don’t know if you notice this but he’s started to wear a necklace. A necklace on “Top Gear”! I thought the hair gel was bad enough but now he’s got a child’s activity set hung around his neck.’

‘You don’t need to tell me,’ said Jeremy. ‘Isambard Kingdom Brunel never wore a necklace, not even a child’s activity set made of iron bolts. But what will little Richard do if another Richard came on and showed him up for what he is? You’d out-tan him, out-smart him, out-handsome him, and you can reach to the top of the cool wall.’

‘Which reminds me that I wanted a word about that cool wall,’ I said. ‘I think you should move BMWs back into the cool category. All the cocks who used to drive beemers are now driving Audis...’

He looked at me, shocked for a moment, and then nodded. ‘You know, I think you’re right.’

‘And that’s what I can bring to the show,’ I said. ‘I have so many ideas, Jeremy, I could help take Top Gear to the next level. Have you thought about doing a regular feature called “Reasonably Priced Stars in Expensive Cars”?’

‘We haven’t but how would it work?’

‘It’s quite simple,’ I said. ‘Instead of paying a fortune to get these Hollywood types to drive a crap car around the track, you pay cheap celebrities nothing to drive high performance racers.’

‘Can’t see how that’s interesting for the viewers,’ said Jeremy.

‘And there you go. You lack the Madeley imagination and that’s why the show is stagnating. Which would you rather watch? Bill Oddie drive a reasonably priced Suzuki Liana around a test track or one of the Nolan Sisters driving a dragster around Alpine roads littered with deep ravines? How about Charlotte Church in a Ferrari hitting a crash barrier at a hundred and forty?’

Jeremy was clearly overwhelmed by the possibilities. He dropped his Molotov cocktail to the ground unlit. ‘I’ll speak to the producers immediately and I’ll get back to you on this, Richard,’ he said.

That was over a week ago. Plant pots throughout the house were feeling uneasy last night as I watched Hammond move BMWs into the cool category. Jeremy still hasn’t got back to me about my proposed move from Channel 4 and into the ‘Top Gear’ offices but I don’t expect to be asked to appear until the next series. I’ve already suggested to Judy that she might be happier with a slightly smaller Richard joining her on the sofa on UKTV Living. She sounded quite excited by the prospect of my losing weight. I haven’t the heart to let her in on all my real plans.

The Right Sort of Juice

(Judy recommends that you click on the picture.
She says that it looks better enlarged.)

‘Richard!’ screamed Judy. ‘Moles!’

Slippers be damned, I thought. Underwear too. I jumped out of bed and grabbed the mallet that I’d hung from my tie rack the night before. Moles had dug their last hole in the lawn of Richard Percival Madeley or my name wasn’t Richard Percival Madeley.

Sprinting like a serious case of the steroids, I ran down the stairs, out through the kitchen, and my bare feet hit the lawn by the time I’d taken my third lungful of the fresh morning air. Then it was all me and my mallet. I swung it to every point of the compass and then a few more for good measure. Each time a mole stuck his head out of a hole... WHACK... The wooden head smashed a good six inches into the lawn and, I hoped, the sweet-spot of another of the blind little buggers that have been making Judy’s life such a misery and ripping up our quality turf.

After half an hour, I fell back on the decimated lawn. Sweat coursed over my naked body and I was flecked with mole but otherwise feeling pretty good about myself.

‘I’ll have myself a mole-skin hat out of this,’ I promised my wife who had been watching nervously from the patio.

‘Do you think you got them all?’ asked Judy.

I didn’t doubt that I had. ‘Every mole this side of the Corbetts,’ I promised her and gave a wave up to the rear window the next door house. Ronnie was standing there, his spectacles peering over the window ledge, his sleeping hat still on his head. I knew he wouldn’t be happy, what with him being a mole-loving man, but these moles had strayed into our garden and were hostage to fortune, to speak nothing of a very large wooden mallet.

Judy helped me up and I stumbled back into the house for a quick debrief. Half an hour later, I was recovered enough to return to the scene of my latest victory. Showered and fully dressed, I took my morning glass of fresh orange juice out onto the lawn where I walked the battlefield and examined the many hundred holes that I’d made.

‘You know, Judy. Some might say that I’ve done more damage to this lawn than an army of Iraqi moles could make in a lifetime but I say it’s the principal that counts. Ronnie can breed them if he likes but I’m going to smash them if they come onto my land.’

Only Judy wasn’t listening. I watched her as she lifted a bag of cement onto her shoulder, carried it across the garden, and then dumped it into the mixer that was churning away next to the hole she’d already dug for our new ornamental pond. I’ve lost count of the number of Sundays that Judy has spent building rockeries, laying paths, or making her life-sized concrete statues of our celebrity friends. Our arboretum on the northern edge of the Madeley estate is now a no-go area on account of the Ainsley Harriott statue that Judy cast from the man’s actual body. It’s not his naked body that I find particularly gruesome but the fact that it has nearly taken my eye out on more than a couple of occasions. I’ve asked her to file a few inches from his tongue but Judy won’t listen to reason.

As I walked around the garden, I realised how little I get to spend with nature. I examined a few of the shrubs and then wandered away from the beaten lawn, so to speak, and found myself taking the path down to Lake Talbot. Perhaps I was feeling in a generous mood but it came to my mind that I’d go and see if I could coax Fred from out of his tree.

Since Rory McGrath made the discovery that Fred the Weather had gone feral in the trees bordering the lake, putting an end to the myth that he’d gone down with the ‘This Morning’ map which I had scuttled many summers ago, we have been doing our best to get Fred to return to civilisation. I’d had a shed put in under the branches, complete with dry clothes, a camp bed, and some of Fred’s favourite dark chocolate digestives. So far, he’s failed to abandon his feral life for something more fitting for the nation’s favourite weatherman.

‘Fred?’ I shouted as I walked into the small copse of woodland. ‘Fred?’

Silence.

I shrugged and walked down to the shed whose door was open but the bed untouched.

Even Fred’s favourite digestives were still in their packet. It didn’t even look like the poor man had even come to sit in the shed.

The cot squeaked as I sat down on it and sipped my orange juice. After an unusually busy week, I’ve been sleeping longer hours than normal but still felt somewhat tired. I put my drink to one side and thought I’d have a lie down, just to lie there listening to the sound of the wind through the trees. I don’t know how it happened but I was soon in a deep sleep.

The dream was more vivid than any ITV quiz show you could imagine. I was stood on Blackpool Beach, directing Eric Sykes as he drove an earth mover constructing tidal defences. Each time we got the sand stacked high enough, Eric would drive a hole right through the wall and we would have to start again. I was berating him for the third time when I noticed that the digger had dug up something that glistened under the hot Blackpool sun. On closer inspection, they were golden doubloons struck with the face of Lenny Bennett. I woke up not knowing where I was but obsessed with the idea of not letting Bennett in on the booty.

You might say I was confused. I didn’t even think it odd when I sat up and saw Fred standing in the doorway.

‘Fred!’ I whispered.

He gave a snort and turned his head as though examining me. His nostrils flared as he took in my musk, which was half man and half mole. How he had changed! His muscles stood out like nylon cords against his small TV friendly frame, built exactly to the same scale as all the other models on the ‘This Morning’ map. His glasses were still balanced on his nose but they were caked with filth, as was the rest of his body. The only shed of clothing was the last of a once-brightly coloured knitted jumper that was now a tangle of knitting around his neck and upper right arm.

‘Don’t you know me, Fred? It’s Richard. Richard Madeley. You know... The guy who first suggested that you fall in the Albert Dock...’

Fred bared his teeth and pawed out into the space between us. I knew I had to take care. Men of Fred’s delicate character go feral more often than not when they leave showbiz. Noel Edmonds once had a shin bitten clean through by an employee who had gone savage after spending a year in the Mr. Blobby outfit.

I reached slowly out and picked up the pack of digestives. My hands were shaking but I managed to open the wrapping at one end. I held the biscuits out to Fred and gave the packet a shake until a couple of digestives fell out onto the floor. Fred dropped to his knees and began to sniff the chocolate. It was a start, I thought, so I picked up my glass of orange juice and tried to push it towards him.

It was a mistake any beginner might make when trying to tame a feral weatherman. He lashed out and his teeth took a chunk from my elbow.

I screamed in agony. It was pain like I hadn't known since I was once kneed in the testicles on live TV by a hyperactive Shakin' Stevens.

‘Richard?’ came a voice in reply. It was Judy.

‘Don’t move!’ I shouted as Judy appeared in the doorway. Fred was standing again and looking menacingly towards the woman who had so often handed over to him from the studios.

‘He’s just bitten my elbow,’ I explained as I examined the wound. His teeth had gone clean through to the bone.

‘Are you okay?’ asked Judy.

‘I’m okay but you mustn’t come any closer. Run down the street and bring Palin. And ring Stephen. Ask him to bring his tranquillizer gun.’

‘Does he have one?’

‘Of course he has one,’ I snapped. ‘How on earth do you think he manages to get so many guests on QI? Half of them are out of their brains on tranquilizer darts. You don’t honestly think that Bill Bailey always looks like that?’

There are rare moments when Judy doesn’t do as I suggest and she goes on to surprise me. This was one of those moments.

‘Oh Richard,’ she said. ‘This is ridiculous. It’s Fred. Our old weatherman. Fred Talbot. He’s not going to harm me.’ And with that she took a step towards Fred who backed away, worryingly towards my other elbow. ‘Come on Fred,’ she soothed. ‘You’re not going to harm old Judy, are you?’

What happened next was remarkable. Fred’s body began to shake and a sob broke from his throat.

‘Juuu,’ he managed to say.

‘Oh, Fred,’ said Judy still coming forward. ‘What have you done to yourself?’

Judy knelt down and picked up the glass of juice I’d set on the floor. She took a sip and then held it out for Fred who paused and then moved towards her. It was a sight to see Fred begin to lap orange from the glass as Judy began to stroke his head. His whole body seemed to wilt and the creature of the wilderness become a man once again. Judy shed a tear.

‘There, there,’ she said, ever so kindly as Fred began to nuzzle against her waist, sipping from the glass.

What could I say? In my wife's hands, orange was suddenly the right sort of juice. I gave Judy a wink as if to say well done. She could be sure that I knew how to handle things from here.

Fred didn’t know what had hit him. I had landed hard on his back and had him down on the floor before he could turn his teeth on us. He gave a groan as I twisted his arms behind his back and pinned him down but I was determined that I'd show no mercy.

‘Grab my belt and tie up his feet,’ I said to Judy who was standing there holding juice and digestives and looking quite shocked.

‘Oh Richard, what are you doing? Get off Fred at once.’

‘No time for your empathy now, Jude,’ I said. ‘This isn’t some tea-time chat with weight-watchers sitting on our cosy sofa. This is a feral ‘C’ list celebrity and he’s already bitten off my elbow. This is the only way we can be certain. Now, go and find a large rock and we’ll see about knocking him out. And if you can’t find a rock, bring Ainsley Harriott’s concrete tongue.’

‘You’ll kill him with that,’ said Judy.

‘That’s a risk I’m willing to take, Jude,’ I replied. ‘Now go and fetch me that tongue!’

The Problems of Paul Heaton

After all I had said about moving on, my mood on Friday darkened once the ceremony was over. Fry packed away his Olympic standard composite bow and left me with my grief. My manuscript had sank to the bottom of our ornamental lake and I was supposed to look forward to the next stage of my creative life.

Only it wasn’t working.

‘Damn you!’ I raged to the Gods of Publishing. ‘How could you do this to me? Just when I thought I’d achieved something to establish my artistic credentials! Just when I thought I was worth more than my interview with Sharon Stone when we shared underwear secrets! Why do you mock me so? Why?’

And that’s how Judy found me, knee down in the mud and trying to rewrite my novel with a stick in the banks of Lake Talbot.

‘Come on, Richard,’ she said, helping me to my feet. ‘We can’t have you feeling down. What will the readers of your blog think?’

‘That I’m not really me. That this deeply intelligent creature of violent mood swings can’t be the same handsome, carefree spirit they seen on their TV screens every night.’

Judy tutted in the confident way she had when she is sure she has a way of cheering me up. I wiped away my tears as she started to walk me back to the house.

As we reached the patio, she handed me an envelope. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘This might cheer you up.’

‘What’s this?’ I asked and cracked the seal with my thumb. I looked inside and found two first class air tickets to Manchester, booked for last night. My heart sank. ‘Why would I want to go back to that hell hole of Ladyboys and fundamentalist haters of all things Amis?’

‘Because of these,’ she answered and produced from behind her back two bright red glistening tickets.

My heart sank again. It double sank. It sank quicker than a burning pile of comedy novel. I could see very well what she’d done. It was printed proud on the tickets. ‘Paul Heaton Live at the Manchester Academy’.

‘You could have told me about this before I came all the way back from Manchester last night,’ I protested.

‘But where would the fun be if I did that?’ she asked. ‘And I know you were looking forward to having Stephen around and burning your unpublished book.’

The staging of this whole charade was typical of Judy. As was the pretence that any of this was meant to cheer me up. While Judy has always been a huge fan of both the Beautiful South and Heaton’s solo work, she knows that I’ve always held fundamental doubts about the aesthetic choices he makes.

Heaton’s eye for the ordinary details in everyday life is like no other writer of contemporary lyrics. I admire the huge bravado he displays with lines like:

And your love light shines like cardboard
But your work shoes are glistening
She's a PhD in "I told you so"
You've a knighthood in "I'm not listening"
She'll grab your sweaty bollocks
Then slowly raise her knee
Don't marry her, have me

While the lyrics delight in all their ugliness, from ‘cardboard’ to ‘bollocks’, I find it hard to key them into the breeziness of the Beautiful South sound. Perhaps it is part bravado and part madness. It’s a mix that I’ve never truly understood or much liked. It might be excessive to describe it as being a touch too ‘twee’ for my tastes, but Heaton’s writing has always reminded me of the work of another otherwise glorious Northern writer, Alan Bennett. The northern spirit is always there as they rummage through the sprawled detritus of council estates or, in the case of Bennett, old folks homes, but the melancholic energies of these two men from opposite sides of the Pennines are often disguised by a gentility that I don’t particularly like. Last night was my chance to see if Heaton could overcome my indifference to his gentility.

The Academy 2 is a small all-standing venue and we arrived early and made the perennial mistake of all inexperienced concert goers. Judy took up a position in the middle of the floor, a good twenty feet behind the small crowd of Heaton zealots who had lined up along the front edge of the stage. I would have been happy standing back there but I was thinking of Judy who sometimes struggles to see over a crowd. With my luck, an outing of police cadets was sure to line up in front of us, so I pointed to a gap by the stage where I also thought we might avoid people questioning our disguises.

Naively, we went and stood a metre from a tower of speakers the likes of which could have won World War 2 for the Nazis if only they’d had the warm-up act on their side. As soon as the band hit their first chord, my hearing disappeared in my right ear. By the time they’d finished their set of five songs, I was suffering a loss of my hearing in both ears and I was sure they would never recover. Perhaps the more knowledgeable out there can explain to me the rationale that every band has to play at top volume, irrespective of the venue, the audience, and especially the material. A light, quite likable band, singing songs reminiscent of The Beach Boys, were turned into Gods of Rock with a sound not too dissimilar to Neil Young torturing small animals with his oil-stained machine grunge.

A welcome respite came about in the form of the forty minutes it took for the stage to be made ready for Heaton.

‘Isn’t this exciting?’ asked Judy, her face beaming.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Isn’t this exciting?’

‘I can’t hear you. I’m reading your lips but I can’t hear you.’

Actually, if the truth be told, I couldn’t even hear myself and I couldn’t even see my own lips.

On the stroke of nine, Heaton emerged from the back of the stage with his band of three and the crowd began to chant: ‘Heaton! Heaton! Heaton! Heaton!’ which made for another of the striking contradictions of the evening. Already heavily juiced from the beer taps in Manchester Students Union bar, some in the crowd had all the subtlety of a bus of football hooligans careering down a twisting country lane. Heaton, on the other hand, has the stage presence of a character from the Last of the Summer Wine. A strange anorak reaches barely above his navel but is zipped to the collar. His short hair compliments a face that is pleasingly comic and, when his brows lower and he looks quizzically to audience, he looks somewhat like an English Robin Williams. He also had a likable comedic line running throughout his set. His drab replies to the audience’s questions reveal a quick left-of-centre mind. It makes such a welcome change from the usual clichés (most of which were evident in the desperately pleased-with themselves warm up act).

Heaton has the appearance of an immersion heater but his lyrics scald. This same is also true of Heaton’s voice which has a rich nasal quality but it capable of being strident and stretched. And herein lies the greatest paradox of all. The lyrical dexterity, the precision of the small words that cram the metrical line, the provincial urgency that lies deep in his accent: they are all lost somewhere beyond the huge speakers that dominate the stage. Strident guitar lines and the hammer blows of the drums are all that we can hear. Every twitch of the bass player’s fingers plucks the spine from ours back and lyrics which are probably the best of the current crop of English songwriters are neutralised by this attempt to assail the audience with a wall of noise. It wasn’t much better when I moved to the back of the hall and it left me wondering how good Heaton would be in more intimate surroundings, with an audience less drunk, and the sound system more in harmony with his real gifts.

I arrived wondering if Heaton could be less gentile than the Beautiful South. I left wanting more of that gentility. I wanted less of the crowd that insisted in whistling down my ear before songs were finished. The hot stench of beer on the breath of a small wingnut of a woman to my side – ‘we luv you Paul’ stank of cheap perfume and rolling tobacco – was not the fault of the band but the fault of a public that goes to these events for something other than the music. A group of woman were clearly only there to prepare for an all night bender. They rarely stopped laughing and chatting through the whole of Heaton’s hour on the stage. A severely drunk guy was dragged from the crowd and in the process of falling over head-butted me in my hip. They were all details that might fit well in a Heaton song and this, perhaps, was the truth I had come to realise. In the solitude of the recording studio, Heaton produces beautifully crafted vignettes of a world he recognises. They have a quality of a Lowry painting, with the same lines, twisted perspectives, and remote view. On stage, reality doesn’t allow him to retain that distance. There is no opportunity to create that purity. I wondered if the sound is there loud to drown out the crowd; to obscure the ugly world that is so much a part of the Heaton’s music.

Paul Heaton’s new album is out on Monday and I have no doubt that Judy will be first in the queue to buy it. I might well be second. We have a moral duty to reward talent and Heaton deserves the patronage of anybody who wants to see the craft of intelligent song writing flourish in modern Britain. By being everything we don’t think of in our performers, he flies beneath the radar. He joked about his new single being number 188 in the charts and his wanting to break into the top hundred. He’s far too intelligent for that. It is a shame that all his greatest qualities work are more like defects. He is unapologetically loyal to his region and displays that rarest of qualities in human beings – a dry sense of humour.

‘Did you enjoy last night?’ asked Judy this morning.

My ears still sounded like somebody was pumping air through them. Either that or my head had developed a slow leak.

‘I can’t hear you,’ I replied, ‘but I thought he was very good. I’ve been checking out his website and I’ll be buying all of his albums on Monday.’

Judy smiled and looked quite pleased with herself.

‘Such a funny man,’ I think she said. ‘Somebody should encourage him to write a novel.’

I dropped my spoon. Now it was my spirits that had suddenly developed a leak.

The Nanus And The Ladyboys

You must never be ashamed to admit that you don’t believe half of my stories. Life in the celebrity vacuum is unreal and it will often be unlike anything you’ve experienced in your everyday lives. After all, how many have you ever watched Stephen Fry fire a flaming arrow into a 300 page manuscript soaked in petrol and pushed out onto a beaver-infested lake, complete with a dam built from the half-chewed remains of the ‘This Morning’ map?

More than the fame which accompanies them, a certain degree of rewriting also goes on when I set my fingers to type my stories. Like any author working on his own biography, I can choose to elaborate upon the truth or omit a compromising detail. What is left, however, is as close an approximation to reality as any political diary or celebrity memoir picked from a bookshop’s shelf. Take yesterday as a perfect example. You might not believe what I’m about to tell you but the following is a page ripped from the book of verisimilitude. It positively bulges with fact. In other words: this is pretty much exactly as it happened. I really couldn't make this up.

Oversleeping is usually a good indication that I’m about to have a bad day. Other clues involve discovering the Madeley zipper stuck at 10%, the loss of a vital piece of equipment (which is always likely when my fly is at 10%), verbal misunderstandings with Canadians, or any incident that involves a person of diminutive stature. Yesterday, in one way or another, I lived through all five, and yet the day didn’t turn out too bad.

Sleeping through my alarm clock's histrionics happens too often when I stay in Manchester. Rooms in cheap hotels hardly encourage you to lift your eyelids at six o’clock in the morning. From the deepest slumbers where all things are made of Feltz, I am suddenly thrown into the grey business-end of an economy-class Bunkhouse Dreary. Only an insomniac sadist would deny me the right to roll over and bury my face in my pillow for another fifteen minutes.

Yet having missed many appointments this way, I have devised many redundant systems to ensure that I don't sleep till noon. Judy's elbow is usually in the first line of that defence. The last is the travel alarm which I leave in the bathtub. In a good cast-iron tub, the sound from that little beauty gets focussed into a funnel of noise that can peel the wallpaper from the ceiling, disable communications satellites and neuter low flying pigeons.

I imagine a few of Manchester’s pigeons grabbed for their valuables at 7.15 yesterday morning. Three seconds later, I stumbled back from the bathroom and began to thread my ankles into my trousers. I was relieved to see my knees follow and I breathed a sigh of relief once my belt gave my narrow hips a squeeze. A quick brush of the teeth, a dab of gel on the old mop, and I was then running around my hotel room to pack my bags and pick up all the machinery vital to living in a city far from a woman called Judy. My Bluetooth enabled headphones, mobile phone, notebook, pen, Army issued switchblade, Oddie-licensed duck call, hygienically cured ear trumpet, eye drops, flint and steel for making a fire, and a length of waxed string. It was all there.

Except for my mp3 player which had mysteriously gone missing.

The last time I remembered using it was when I was trying to get to sleep the previous night. Mozart could never have imagined how well his 'Magic Flute' could drown out the sound of the Ladyboys of Bangkok whose show was taking place in the car park across the road from my hotel room. As I began to search for my mp3 player in the sheets of the bed, I begin to vaguely remember throwing it across the room in the middle of the night.

Without music to calm me, the city becomes a hostile environment. I spent fifteen minutes searching for the player before I had to give it up as lost. By then I was woefully late for the office. I endured a tram journey into the city centre that was memorable only for the endless tannoy announcements, chatter of passengers, the noise of traffic... I suffered the full 'humanity experience' and when I jumped off the tram, I then had to endure the insults of builders who made comments about the state of my zip which I had left semi-elevated.

It was what is known as an arse of a morning, or what we in Channel 4 like to call a ‘Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’.

Work on ‘Eye of the Storm 2’ went relatively well and by four o'clock, I was finished for another week and I left to catch the Virgin Pendolino back down south. Luckily, we’d already recorded Thursday’s 'Richard&Judy Show' so I had no reason to get back early. However, to preserve the illusion that the show is live, Channel 4 executives demand that I remain in disguise whenever I’m in public during the hours of 4.30 and 6.15PM.

I made the train in plenty of time but I was disappointed to discover that my seat was the airline type whose front was to the back of the one in front. My mp3 player still lost, I had to settle myself in a cramped seat for a two hour journey. The only consolation was that it would be heavy with Graham Greene. I had picked up a copy of ‘The Heart of the Matter’ after hearing Amis talk about it the other night. When the train began to move, I was looking forward to reacquainting myself with Greene’s voice. I spread out my legs into the well of the vacant seat next to me and I sank back expecting bliss.

And that’s when a late arriving passenger appeared at my side and began to push a large suitcase into my leg space. I was about to say something when I looked up. Only I didn’t have to raise my chin very far. For this was a nanus or a small person.

Like many of the small people I’ve known in my life, he was extremely well dressed and, as I would soon discover, unerringly polite and extremely intelligent. His black flat cap looked rather fetching against the tan of his waistcoat and his face radiated a smile. I radiated back.

He pushed his luggage further into the well of the seat and I tried to move my legs out of the way.

He smiled again but this time with the recognition that he was putting me to some trouble.

‘You’ve got very long legs,’ he said in a thick Canadian accent.

I didn’t know how to reply. Life has a habit of forcing me into these situations when I risk being too quick witted for my own good. Situations that any normal person would consider unreal are, to me, everyday. A Canadian dwarf was commenting on the size of my legs. And how did I feel? I felt terribly hurt.

‘Must you always go on about my height?’ I scolded him. ‘“Oh, isn’t he tall? Look how big he is!” I know what you’re thinking. Always chattering among yourselves and thinking I can’t hear you. Well I can hear you. I see the looks on all your faces. And I have feelings too. I’m a human being, for God’s sake...’

Humour is always the best way to build bridges. Even little bridges with low hand rails.

The man laughed and I knew at once that we’d be fine. He sat down (though ‘down’ was more of a ‘clamber up’) and we began to talk. It turned out that he was a rep for a large Korean electronics company and had finished a trade show in Manchester where he’d been demonstrating their latest products. He showed me the catalogue from his bag and I mentioned that I’d been up in the city to see the James Wood / Martin Amis lecture. He said he was sad to have missed it.

‘Mind you,’ he added. ‘I’ll be glad to get home.’

‘Really?’ I asked. ‘And why’s that?’

‘It’s those goddamn Ladyboys,’ he replied. ‘I’ve not had a wink of sleep all week. I tried to change rooms but the hotel said they were fully booked.’

I gave a snort of derision. It seems that I wasn’t the only man in Manchester to have suffered from the vocal warbling of Thailand’s finest female impersonators. ‘You too? I’ve had exactly the same problem. An utterly miserable weekend which only got worse this morning when I lost my new Bluetooth mp3 player.’

He winced. He obviously knew what it’s like to lose a Bluetooth connection.

‘I couldn’t take it anymore,’ said my friend. ‘If I had to listen to one more chorus of “My Shlong On The Mekong” I might have lost every inch of my postmodern liberal sensibility and told them a few home truths about gender identity...’

‘Ooh,’ I said. ‘You can’t say that...’

‘Don’t worry,’ he replied. ‘I can say that. I was actually born a woman.’

I looked at his in utter astonishment. 'Really? That's amazing.'

‘Got you!’ he said, bursting out into laughter.

I smiled but felt rather uncomfortable, not knowing how to take the humor of a politically incorrect nanus.

It turned out that Eric – for that was my new friend’s name – had been staying in the same Sheraton Of The Ever So Noisy as I had slept in the night before and that the problem of inebriated Ladyboys singing late into the night was the perfect subject to bring two strangers together on a long train journey. We chatted for an hour or so and once the express passed Birmingham and left the North, I began to savour the aroma of the south. That’s when I thought it time to reveal myself to my small friend.

‘Eric,’ I said, ‘I want you to prepare yourself for a shock.’

He looked at me. ‘You’re not a ladyboy?’ he laughed.

‘Better than that,’ I said, ripping off my fake nose and comedy pimple. ‘I’m actually Richard Madeley!’

He gasped, a small terrified yelp of a gasp. Pocket-sized surprise.

‘And who is Richard Madeley, exactly?’ he asked.

‘Oh, I’m quite big in the UK. My wife and I have our own show on Channel 4. If you weren’t leaving the country, we’d have had you on. Show your products to the nation...’

‘So you’re in TV?’ he said. His eyes had filled with the usual Gods-come-down-from-Mount-Olympus look of excitement. ‘That’s great because I have a fantastic idea for a TV game show.’

‘I doubt if you do,’ I told him. ‘You wouldn’t believe how many times I’m told about the next big idea but do you know how many are ever made?’

‘No idea,’ he said.

‘Nearly all of them. So fire away, little buddy of mine.’

He took a deep breath and puffed out his cheeks. ‘Barrel-O-Monkeys,’ he said.

I paused. I nodded. It had the advantage of being one I’ve never heard before.

Eric explained. ‘Back in Canada, it's very popular with the kids. It's an old game with plastic monkeys in a barrel. You have to try to pick them out using a fishing hook.’

‘I can’t quite see how you’re giving this a unique televisual twist, Eric,’ I told him, trying to let him down as gently as I could. ‘TV is about spectacle and, no offence intended, I don’t think watching a small chap like yourself hooking plastic monkeys from a barrel with a fishing rod is going to bring in much of an audience. It might work on ITV3, of course, but who would really want that audience?’

‘Ah but Richard,’ he replies, ‘what if we use real monkeys?’

Damn it! The dwarf had a point but the conductor was already announcing our imminent arrival at Euston. I knew I had to act quickly. I gave Eric my card.

‘You’ve got an amazing talent there, Eric,’ I said. ‘This Barrel-O-Monkeys idea might be a winner. When you come back to England, you must look me up.’

His brows narrowed. ‘That some sort of joke?’

I bit my lip.

He smiled. ‘Got you!’ he said and pointed at me.

And hadn’t he just? Again...

'Why...' I began but he waved me back.

‘Here,’ he said, reaching into his bag. ‘Take this to replace the one you lost.’

And with that he handed me a brand new mp3 player. A model not yet on the market and only slightly soiled by handling on a trade show floor.

‘I couldn’t take your only sample,’ I said as I stuffed it under my shirt.

‘Remember, Dick,’ he said. ‘Barrel-O-Monkeys...'

'It’s a sure winner,’ I said as we both stood up to leave.

He seeme unhappy to see me go but I had to rush since Judy would be waiting for me in the car park. Eric waved and waved back as I walked down to the end of the train. And there in Euston I left behind the one person you would always want to sit next to on a long train journey from Manchester. Witty, wise, a great instinct for TV, and he left me plenty of leg room.

Obituary: My Novel (May 2007-July 2008)

I had already written an interesting and incident-packed post for today but I’m putting it on hold for a couple of hours out of respect for an old friend of ours.

You might not be aware but this is a dark day in the Madeley calendar and, quite frankly, I don’t know how I’m going to cope.

Those of you who are regular readers might want to bow your heads at noon today in an act of remembrance for a friend that never stood a chance. I want you all to take a moment out of your busy lives to remember our old dear friend, ‘My Novel’.

My Novel was due to be published today. It was going to be a day of great celebration. Judy was going to go to the local bookshop and try to buy a copy of my book and get me to sign it. I was going to pose next to the bookshelf while Judy took snaps for the blog. I would have then come on here and encouraged you all to go out and buy it. It would have been the best £7.99 you would have spent all year.

Alas, it was never to be. Due to the buyout of one publisher by another, my book was cancelled. The cover was designed, the proofs read, and many of you were listed at the back in my acknowledgements. It’s still listed on Amazon. It just doesn’t exist in the real world. I think it’s every writer’s nightmare to have an ISBN number for a non-existent book. It’s much worse than never getting published. You can’t know how bad I’m feeling this morning.

My Novel came into this world on a wave of great optimism. People said that my political satire cheered them up enormously, that it was well written and as funny as hell. Others said ‘mehhh’ but it still found a publisher willing to publish its three hundred pages of artfully crafted nonsense. At noon today I’m going to give it a Viking funeral by burning a copy of the manuscript to commemorate its passing from the publishing world. As I watch it drift out into the middle of the lake in our back garden, I’ll probably shed a few tears as I blow my Nordic hunting horn to tell Stephen Fry to shoot the flaming arrow that will ignite all 90,000 words of my carefully written prose. And when I’m done, I’ll come back here and post something to mark a new phase of my life.

I’m not abandoning my hopes of becoming a writer. It’s just a bit harder to find the words this morning.

My Novel.
“You deserved better.”
(May 2007-July 2008)

Even The Kitchen Sink

I have sent myself a punishing schedule for today. I have a Viking burial to attend at noon, a post to finish writing for this afternoon, and then I want to get back to my autobiography, which had been delayed by the two days I had to spend in Manchester.

However, none of this can get done when I have waste time deleting SPAM comments from my old posts.

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The English Summer":

For kitchen sinks, have a look at this kitchen sink catalogue.

Posted by Anonymous to The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society at July 4, 2008 11:25 AM

I really don’t want to enable word verification since it only punishes the innocent but we have to make a stand against the slime who produce nothing themselves but are happy to such the goodness from the work of we serious bloggers. And would anybody really want to buy a sink from a company foolish enough to leave SPAM comments on the blog of the nation’s sexiest consumer rights watchdog? Have they not heard about my forthcoming series of ‘Dick Justice’ when I’ll be going after the nation’s top spammers?

I’ve sent the company in question an email in the hope of setting them straight. An IP addresses has been logged and I’ll be contacting the internet provider in question. I’ve also threatened to put Judy on their case if they try it again. The next stage involves South African mercenaries set out to hunt them down. I hope that Elberry will lead the charge.

They have been warned.

(And, in case you're wondering, I've now changed the timestamp on this post so it doesn't have the honour of sitting above my novel's obituary.)

Viewing Martin Amis From Behind A Comedy Pimple

When Martin Amis appeared on stage, I cursed my luck. Virgin’s InterCity had got me to Manchester far too late. A dash from Piccadilly and I had arrived at the University five minutes before the debate was due to begin. So much for seat A2. I was forced to sit a dozen rows back and there was no chance that Martin would recognise me through my false nose and beret. It was the eternal dilemma of the celebrity in a non-celebrity guise: I’d be unable to reveal myself to my old friend and sparring partner for fear of causing a stampede of unpublished writers desperate to get into our Book Club. The situation was familiar yet still so frustrating.

I was in Manchester to work but I had arrived a day early to attend the Centre for New Writing’s Public Debate on the subject of ‘Literature & Belief’. I’d had barely made it. I was still out of breath when the porter of Whitworth Hall climbed up on stage and welcomed those of us packed beneath the gothic ceiling.

Balding and set heavy in the middle like an unexploded beer barrel, the porter had a broad Lancashire accent that fell over us like pint glasses down a coal chute.

‘I’d like to welcome you ladies and gentlemen to Whitworth Hall,’ he said, ‘but before we start the evening’s entertainment, I want to discuss a few matters of housekeeping...’ Which meant that he proceeded to locate the toilets and give us some helpful advice about escaping the building in the case of a fire. It amounted to him warning us that once all best-selling authors were out of the room, it would be every man for himself.

‘And so, with no more ado,’ he continued, ‘I want to thank you all for coming and I hope you enjoy the entertainment we’ve got lined up for you this evening...’

I had the strange feeling that a game of darts was about to begin and as I began to search the room for Peter Manley, I didn’t notice that Martin Amis had already walked up onto the stage.

As the room fell silent, I looked up and heard a loud sarcastic voice announce ‘game on, ladies and gentlemen, game on...’ The woman to my side elbowed me in my ribs. She told me to be quiet.

Amis always surprises me. He’s of slight build but his head is large as though it has rolled off some hill on Easter Island. Constructed in clay by a sculptor with big thumbs, he has an appearance that makes you suspect that God himself took a hand in creating this caricature of the perfect literary type. The lines of his face are strings of flesh held together by eyes that rarely engage the audience. His gestures are slow. His right hand hangs from his wrist as though it’s weighed down by an invisible cigarette. Most alarming is the way he wears his spectacles on a chain around his neck. There is something of the village shopkeeper about his manner. Touch my produce and you should really consider buying, he seems to be saying.

He was followed on stage by James Wood, who was actually the main reason I’d bought a ticket to the event. Wood’s recent book on ‘How Fiction Works’ is one of the best pieces of literary criticism I’ve ever read. Wood appeared less at ease in the surroundings. Balding, round featured, and with a gentle calm, he seemed much more amiable than Amis, that demonic tobacconist. When Amis brooded, Wood looked merely nervous, though his opinions were always confident. His right hand rarely moved from his chin and his body language was that of a man more at home in his study. He was still peering out from behind his books, throwing gems to an audience probably there for the man from Easter Island.

Yet as far as his prepared statements went, Wood had the more interesting things to say in the first half of the debate. He explained how he suspected that literature’s rise caused many of the doubts about Christianity at the end of the twentieth century. I agreed with him, to a point, though I think popular culture has had much more to do with it. Judy is far more significant that Zadie Smith, for example.

For me, the second half of the debate was edged by Amis who made some delightful allusions to two of my favourite writers, Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene. After an hour, I was orgasmic with ideas and when it was time to open the debate up to questions from the floor, I was first to wave my hand. Unfortunately, I think my bright blue beret, false nose and comic pimple were not to the moderator’s liking. I clearly looked too sane. With hindsight, I should have been prepared for what followed. Somewhat naively, I thought that the people of Manchester would not waste the chance to ask five decent questions of two of the sharpest critics of literature in the last twenty five years.

How wrong I was...

The first question amounted to some confident fellow sporting a quality beard explaining how he felt dispirited that his faith was continually under attack from the likes of Richard Dawkins. It was only natural, I suppose, that from this he wanted to know: ‘could the two distinguished speakers tell me if they think I should write a book like Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” or something by C.S. Lewis?’

Amis gave him a look loaded with buckshot. ‘How dare you finger my quality shag tobacco!’ I thought he would reply.

‘I think you should ask a higher authority about that’ is what he did say.

It was a better answer than the question deserved. Unexpected too since I doubt if there are any higher authorities than Amis. Wood, however, was much more polite. ‘I think you should try to write allegory,’ he said and sounded like he meant it. But doesn’t that just mark the man? He probably catches moths and sets them down beside open windows before putting on some quiet cello music to help them on their way.

As I winched up my lower jaw after the sheer banality of the first question, the second was being asked from the front row and I had missed my chance to grab the radio microphone.

‘I have written a book,’ began a woman who I couldn’t see from where I sat but probably looked quite earnest, ‘and it is still unpublished...’

‘No surprise there,’ I muttered to the amusement of a few around me.

‘In my book...’ And here I have to ask you to insert some generic hokum. I really can’t remember much of the nonsense that came out but I think it might have involved elves. ‘But my question is... I recently had a dream in which I dreamt that that I was standing here asking you gentlemen on the stage if you could tell me what a perfect world would look like. So, could you tell me what a perfect world would look like?’

I forget what answer came from the stage. I had pretty much had enough of it by now. Two questions wasted and I was in no mood for stupidity. Unfortunately, nobody had told this to the person asking the third question.

‘I am the lost woman from the Book of Ezekiel!’ she said, her voice bellowing it out like a railway bomb alert. I zoned out pretty quickly and I noticed that neither Amis nor Wood wanted to answer the lost woman from the book of Ezekiel. I could see why she was lost and I felt pretty bad for Ezekiel.

The fourth question was the only decent question of the evening and related to Dickens. Both Wood and Amis answered it well and Martin did tell a nice anecdote about Greene that I hadn’t heard before. However, even as he was speaking, I knew that I must act. If I wanted to ask my question, I needed to wave like I’d never waved before. And this time I also gave a cough to attract the attention of the panel.

And it worked... to a degree. The moderator looked my way, smiled a thin evil smile and then pointed to a woman on the other side of the hall.

‘The last question, I’m afraid,’ said the man who I suspect has some vendetta against pimpled men in berets.

‘I think the panel don’t have a clue about postmodern Christianity...’ began the last interrogator. I wanted to shout ‘bollocks’ but I resigned myself to sighing loudly as I slowly sank down into my seat.

There was nothing for it. My ears ached as I listened to another question woefully inadequate for the quality of the brains up on the stage. Shortly after, the event broke up and I was left with my question about dogma, art and morality unasked. Amis and Wood were whisked off to wherever it is that a university fills their honoured guests with cheap wine and I was left to trudge the long way back to my hotel room. As I walked through the night, the glowing red sign of the Palace Hotel far behind me, I felt so terribly lonely. I suppose that’s why I rang Judy on my mobile.

‘Had a good evening?’ she asked. ‘Did you get to speak to James Wood? And how was Martin?’

‘They blanked me,’ I said as the Manchester rain began to fall. ‘They were off the stage before I could get James Wood to sign my book. I hate this city. The people here are mad! Do you know that, Judy? Absolutely mad!’

I turned up the steps of my hotel just off Princess Street. The view from my window was onto the Sackville Street car park that had been turned into a mini Thailand. ‘I’m not going to get a bit of sleep,’ I told her as I climbed the stairs. ‘The Ladyboys of Bangkok are playing in the car park across the road and all I can hear are the strange laments of men with large breasts and thick makeup.’

Judy fell silent. ‘Sometimes, Richard, I just wish you would tell me the truth instead of making up all these silly stories... You don't honestly expect me to believe that there are Ladyboys in the car park opposite your hotel?’

I was too tired to tell her that this was the absolute unadorned truth and that in order to understand the madness of Manchester, you really have to hear every dumb question, see every heavily corseted young adult male, and you really have to see life from behind a false nose and a comedy pimple.

Poll News

Come on guys! My poll has less than sixty days left to run and I’ve got a consignment of Afghan merkins due in from Kabul in three weeks time. I really don’t want to send them back. Have you ever tried to return an Afghan merkin? I don’t think you understand the difficulties you’re all giving me.

The other reason I want you to reconsider your vote is that, to be honest, the supplies of house-trained dwarf helpers are not what they used to be. I blame Hollywood filling their heads with ideas of stardom. Once a midget has seen the inside of an Ewok suit, they really don’t want to go back bringing you your slippers and sharpening your favourite crossword pencil.

If you allow me to influence you at this late stage, I’d like to also say a few words about the tins of prunes. My previous prune offer was a great success. I posted twenty seven cans to different people around the UK and I hope they received them undamaged. Admittedly, my bank balance took a larger hit on the postage. A tin of prunes is expensive to send by registered first class but it was the cost of the bubble wrap that really made things difficult.

So, in summary: forget the midgets and the prunes. Peeled monkey nuts are a good alternative but, if we are really sensible about this, I think we’re talking Afghan merkins.

Nige's Owl

First of all, I want to thank Nige for last night. He was the perfect host, even if we did come to blows over my attempts to take his picture for this blog. He did, however, allow me the very great honour of posing with his owl. The claws were sharp and the beak rather strong but the experience of meeting Nige was one that I would recommend to all. As for the owl, it was perfectly docile, even though it was was bit too happy to take a nip out of the Madeley earlobe. According to Nige, my ears do resemble baby mice, which just goes to show you that there’s nothing the man doesn’t know about English wildlife.

The highlight of the evening was Nige’s three hour presentation on the current state of English moths. I thought it could have gone on for another three hours and not one of his guests would have been any more bored than they were in the first five minutes. I was simply spellbound. Judy later told me that she had never seen such excellent photographs of the English Frilly Bumswain Moth, which made it an especial shame when she left early. No sooner had Stephen Fry arrived to pick her up in his taxi than she was professing her love for all moths. She intends to show them her devotion by starting her own collection this very night my massacring hundreds of them using the 100W light bulb she’s rigged up in the garden.

Nige was typically Nige throughout the evening, of course. Ebullient and gregarious, he was congenial to the last. Although, I must say, for a man who keeps owls, he is surprisingly lacking in nocturnal habits. When I was still sitting in his living room at a quarter past midnight, I got the distinct impression that he wanted me to leave. I honestly thought he’d nipped out to refill his drink. He came back fifteen minutes later dressed in his pyjamas and wondering why the living light was still on.

Yes, I was a little embarrassed, but the night ended happily. Despite having left his teeth to soak in the upstairs bathroom, Nige wished me well and promised me his very next hatchling.

Nige, I salute you for a wonderful evening. Next time, you must allow me to play host and I’ll let you frolic with my beaver.

Might The Answer Be Choc Ices?

What more noble pursuit is there for a blogger other than asking important questions otherwise ignored by the mainstream media? In my humble opinion, the pressing issue of the day isn’t Zimbabwe, the price of oil, or even guessing when that Scottish lad will get knocked out of Wimbledon (I say he'll be gone by Friday). It’s the question posed in this post where some of the greatest minds in the blogosphere are now debating how Lord Jeffrey Archer managed to carry 10 ice creams through a gay wedding celebration. I've read 'Papillion' so I know all the tricks a man learns in prison. But I think it's hard to see how ten ice cream cones would fit up there, even if they are pushed narrow end first.

Which makes this puzzle, I think, really worthy of the title of a Thought Experiment.

Bryan, I salute you. And I eagerly await the answer.

Running Late

I’ll be glad when it is next week and I can find some routine in this crazy patchwork life I’m leading.

My mood will be low and the blog posts short tomorrow and Thursday since I’ll be back up in Manchester. I’m helping to devise new series based around the approximately fourteen hundred hours of weather footage we’ve amassed over the last two years. ‘Eye of the Storm 2’ will be just the first of many programmes I hope to present about inclement weather. On Friday I’ll be preoccupied with a pop concert that Judy is dragging me to see. I can’t honestly say I’m looking forward to two hours listening to a singer I know nothing about but there’s another example of the things we do for love. My ears will be suitably bled by Saturday. All this mayhem kicks off tonight when I’ll have another busy night as I’ll be attending a celebrity bash. I can’t go into too much detail but I do hope to have pictures of me with a few famous faces tomorrow. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

With so many things happening and the afternoon show eating up a considerable part of my day, my life has had to adapt. My blog will consist of short posts for a couple of days and I’ve been forced to go on my early morning jogs later than usual. I normally hit the roads around six o’clock in the morning, do a quick ten miles, and then it’s back home for a shower, a couple more hours in bed, and then a late breakfast with Judy.

Yesterday I was jogging at ten o’clock, which I have to tell you is a totally different experience.

It wasn’t too bad when I was running in the neighbourhood where the likes of Michael Palin and Ronnie Corbett will often wave and give me a word or two of encouragement, but once I got into the more urban settlements, I began to attract attention.

‘You’re that Madeley bloke aren’t you, mister,’ said a young boy who was suddenly striding along at my side.

‘I am indeed,’ I said, ‘now buzz off. Can’t you see that I’m running?’

He obviously could see that I was running because he shouted to his friends: ‘Oy, look here! It’s that Madeley bloke running.’

I was soon joined by five youths running behind me and they in turn were soon joined by a couple of teenagers who, being teenagers, are happy to jump onto whatever senseless bandwagon happens to be approaching or, indeed, ambling by.

To cut a long story short by about three miles, it wasn’t long before I had a crowd of people following me that wouldn’t have looked out of place in ‘Rocky 7’. The only thing I was missing was the ubiquitous dog and that joined me at five miles. I commend the stamina of the British working classes but the whole thing was becoming unworkable as we’d begun to hold up traffic and police helicopters were circling overhead. I think somebody feared rioting had broken out, led by a handsomely tanned man in nylon running shorts.

When I tried to turn for home, I hit a snag. I had hundreds of people blocking my path. How do you get such a mass of humanity to act as one? I was just pushing a woman with a pram out of the way when there was a sudden bark of a car’s horn. I turned around and there was a black taxi cab driven by a man in a green cape.

‘Stephen?’

It was indeed the man I have come to call 'Great One'.

‘Ah, ’tis I, Fry,’ said Stephen, ‘earning a few honest bob driving people around this area of south east England which I prefer not to mention for fear of my location being divulged on your internet blog. Were I a man of more bold enterprises, I might not cherish my privacy but, alas, I do, and so this location shall remain unspecified.’

‘Forget about your privacy and unspecified locations in the area of North London,’ I said.

‘Tsk,’ said Stephen. ‘You give too much away.’

‘I don’t care,’ I answered. ‘I just want to know if you can help me get home?’

‘Indeed, I can,’ said Stephen.

‘Thank God!’ I replied and moved to climb into the back of his taxi. Before I had even laid flesh on the handle of the back door, I heard the locks engage.

‘But I fear,’ sniffed Stephen from the driver’s cab, ‘that I cannot allow you to enter my carriage with those damp thighs of yours.’

‘My damp thighs?’

‘Indeed. I understand you have run some considerable miles in those high cut nylon running shorts, which, I might add, do little to hide your manhood...’

‘And why should they?’ I asked. ‘Hanging free like this is what made Britain great. And it helps me keep rhythm as I run.’

‘Be that as it may,’ said Stephen, ‘I cannot allow you to put damp Madeley appendages onto my back seat. I’m willing to help you get home but I cannot allow you in my taxi. I am more than happy to help you clear the road by driving ahead of you and your friends.’

What else could I say? I wanted to get home and Stephen did have a point about sweat damage. The Madeley perspiration is notoriously potent stuff. My only dalliance with piercing led to a tungsten stud and chain melting between my buttocks.

And that’s how, around nine thirty this morning, should you have been in an unspecified region of South East England (roughly north of London), you would have seen the odd sight of a man in a green cape driving a taxi slowly in front of a handsomely tanned man in high cut nylon running shorts followed by a mob of children, teenagers, men with dogs, pensioners, nuns, postmen and other assorted working class types who were not sure why they were running but were running nevertheless. When we got to the outskirts of the estate, the mob fell back as all mobs do when coming close to David Dickinson’s house and by the time I arrived home, it was only Stephen and myself.

‘Many thanks Stephen,’ I puffed as I began my cool down stretching exercises. ‘I understand totally about not allowing me in your taxi but it was good of you to take time to drive slowly like that.’

‘Not at all,’ said Stephen. ‘I was charging you by the minute and not by the mile. And that’s forty seven pounds fifty. And please take your leg off the hood of my car. It might do your hamstrings the world of good but I fear that I’ll never eat dumplings again... Heavens!’