The Adventures of Baz Mad

The party lasted long into the night at Madeley HQ, here in our undisclosed part of North Londonshire. The great and good of showbiz had come to mark the end of the Richard&Judy partnership and Bruce Forsyth was there, too, entertaining us all with his soft shoe shuffles and his famous anecdote about a golf umbrella, Jimmy Tarbuck’s 9 iron, and a sticky eighteenth hole.

The night was a success worthy of our long career in television but, eventually, around 2am, I saw Judy tap her nose and fiddle with an earlobe and I knew it was time to ease our guests casually towards the front door. Or, if that didn’t work, drag them by whatever surgical enhancement provided a firm enough grip.

‘Have you seen the genuine Tudor buttress on the end of the house?’ I asked David Dickinson, who had spent most of the evening on his hands and knees, looking for maker’s marks beneath the IKEA coffee table.

‘Genuine Tudor!’ he cried. ‘This I’ve got to bloody see!’

He didn’t, of course, ‘see anything’. But once I’d got him to the front door he did feel the creped underside of my right boot placed in the small of his kidneys. Similar tricks worked on Alan Titchmarsh, Natasha Kaplinsky, and Dame Kelly Holmes, each of whom I’d managed to lure away from the buffet table with the promise of a drooping plumb tree, a photo opportunity, or the challenge of a sprint up the drive in aid of Cystic Fibrosis. In the process, I’d also managed to get Forsyth out the front door by tying a five pound note to a thread attached to Dame Kelly’s dress. I know she prides herself a running a good middle distance race but I’m sure even she was flagging when she turned the end of the road chased by Brucie out to top up his income.

Back in the house, the party continued to shed talent like the BBC during a pay review. A pair of recognisable sandals were sticking out from beneath Vanessa Feltz so I grabbed them by their heels and gave a yank. There was a loud squeak and a ‘pop’ noise, much like a cork coming from giggly bottle, before the yank produced a Yank. An anglicised Yank, to be specific, dressed in quality tweeds to go with his Jesus boots and horn-rimmed spectacles.

‘Oy! What did you do that for?’ cried Vanessa and made a move to drag Johnny Depp back towards her.

‘Where am I again? What am I here to promote?’ asked Johnny, probably confused due to the usual high build-up of CO2 in Vanessa’s cleavage.

‘I think it’s time to let Johnny go,’ I said, quietly pleased with myself for rescuing my favourite Hollywood ‘A’ list star from my second favourite member of the triple D brigade.

‘Well, would you like me to take him home?’ she asked.

I know her games and I couldn’t do that to the poor lad. I tucked a ten pound note into his breast pocket and whispered into his ear the directions for the local bus stop. That’s the thing you can sure about with Johnny Depp: he’s a true professional. You only need to direct him once and he’ll give you a performance worthy of the Number 14 to Kensington.

By this time, Judy had managed to get rid of most of the minor celebs, working her charm to great effect. Whenever they threatened to stay, she’d sob on their shoulders, breath tales of woe in their face and ask if they could help revive her career. There’s nothing more certain to upset an ambitious young celebrity than the taint of failure or retirement. And any that prove particularly resilient to tears will eventually scarper if you offer to put them in touch with Les Dennis’ agent.
Soon, we were down to one old favourite who would be stubborn to shift given that early in evening she’d disappeared with a bottle of Drambuie. Thankfully, Vanessa stayed long enough to help us in our search.

Eventually, I found Cilla Black down in the cellar, blowing tunes over the empty end of the empty whisky bottle.

‘Surprise surprise!’ she’d cried as I opened the door of an old wardrobe in which Judy used to keep her spigot collection.

‘Come on, Cilla,’ I said as I lifted her from the wardrobe and threw her over Vanessa’s shoulder.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Vanessa, ‘I’ll take her from here.’

‘I used to sing with the Beatles!’ cried Cilla.

‘Of course you did,’ I replied. ‘There had to be a good reason they broke up.’

The last I saw of the two of them was Vanessa walking down the drive with Cilla over her shoulder, trying to pat out the rhythm of ‘Obla Dee Obla Da’ on Vanessa’s bottom.
With the last farewell made, Judy put out the milk bottles before I turned the lock on the front door and we both breathed a sigh, or, more accurately, two sighs divided by the familiar ampersand that has served us so well.

‘So, that’s that for Richard & Judy,’ I said.

‘We’ve had a good run but I think we’re making the right decision to retire before you hit your mid-life crisis,’ she replied moving in for a cuddle.

‘Indeed we have,’ I replied, my arm draping around Judy’s shoulders. ‘I just wonder what the future has in store for Barry Madeley...’

‘Who’s Barry Madeley?’ asked his wife.

‘Barry is my new name,’ I said, already cursing myself for having spoken my thoughts aloud. These were plans to which I had failed to make my wife privy. It was time for some firm explanations. ‘You see: I don’t want people expecting to hear “& Judy” whenever my name is mentioned during my solo career. That’s why I’ve changed my name to Barry. I’ve been meaning to tell you ever since it became official two months ago.’

‘Two months! But I don’t understand why you’d change it. Richard goes so well with Judy.’

‘Well the name’s now Barry,’ I said, ‘but if you want to be informal, you can call me Baz.’

‘But I don’t want to be married to a Baz,’ she replied.

‘So call me Bazzer or even Bazroid if you prefer the exotic.’

But Judy just fell silent and realising that our hug had gone cold, I gave a shrug and climbed the stairs to bed. I was already fluffing my pillows by the time Judy joined me.

‘I don’t understand why you won’t let me call you Richard,’ she said.

‘Look, Jude,’ I replied, ‘I know you’re attached to that name but I’m seeking a new audience that is beyond your reach. I want to appeal to dynamic go getters in my own age range. If they’re older than 35, they’re ancient in my book, Daddio. Baz Mad doesn’t do fossils.’

Judy’s face turned a shade of beetroot high in the Betanin, which as you’ll know, is the chemical that makes Judy red.

‘Baz Mad?’ she spluttered.

I’d done it again. I hadn’t meant to let Judy in on my plans so early on in my separate career but the cat was out of the bag, as they say. So far out that it was probably thinking of bringing a dead rat back in through the back door.

‘I thought I’d abbreviate my surname as well,’ I explained. ‘“Baz Mad” has a certain ring to it, don’t you think? Sounds a bit like Gaz Top and do remember how successful he was?’

‘Well, I don’t like it,’ said Judy, sourly folding down the sheets on her side of the marital mattress.

‘Abbreviations work in this increasingly fast culture of ours. Twitter has taught me a lot about being brief, Jude, and “Baz Mad” will look great on the cover of my novel...’

‘Your novel?’ asked Judy.

That’s when I realised that I’d done it again. As you know, Judy sees herself as a writer of some potential.

‘That’s right. I’ve decided that I want to write fiction,’ I said. ‘And I know what you’re going to say. We agreed that you would be the one writing erotic fiction and I’m not going to step on your toes, Jude. I won’t touch your eighteenth century courtesan, Jemima Flirt. Oh no! Baz Mad’s erotic fiction will be of a different tone altogether.’

Judy sank onto the edge of the bed without even bothering to fluff her pillows.

‘Erotic fiction? But that means you’ve stolen my dream!’

‘Not stolen, Jude. I merely took an interest and found I had a natural flair for soft-core eroticism. I’ve been writing my book for many months. It shouldn’t bother you. It will have been published months before you get yours in the bookshops.’

‘Oh Richard! It was my dream to publish a book of erotic tales.’‘And your dream is still your dream, Jude. However, Barry just got there before you. Here,’ I said, sliding my four hundred page manuscript from beneath the bed. ‘Cast your eyes over that. But take care. Some of this is so juicy it will drip off your chin. It’s a story set in a Lancashire town about a tyre fitter and his mature lover.

She looked at the front page.

‘Mrs Chatterley’s Rover: A Tale of Six Strokes?'

‘Catchy, isn’t it?’

She snorted or perhaps just cleared her throat before she began to read aloud from one of the more sexually explicit parts of the book, when the tyre fitter first meets Mrs. Chatterley on the A573 outside Golborne, Lancashire.

As he jacked up her rear, her marigolds squeaked seductively on his bald crown like two rubberised otters in a frisky dance. His passion overwhelmed her; her frigidity falling away like the rust on a large lug nut, oiled with WD40 and tapped with his spanner.

‘I feel so hot and dirty,’ she said but he just whistled and kicked her knees. ‘Perhaps you’d like me to rebore you cylinders,’ he replied.

Ten minutes later, her foot was suspended by the elasticated cord of her pine air freshener as she felt her fan belt snap and her hot exhaust splutter his name. ‘Ronald’.

‘My Rover’s a coupe!’ she cried. ‘It doesn’t have four doors!’ But he knew different as he packed her generous luggage space and ran a masterful finger over her vulcanised tread, every stroke of his foot pump engorging her inner tube, her being swollen to eternity!

Judy sat there in silence for nearly a minute.

‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Did that make you feel better? Did you like that bit at the end. Thought it made it sound a bit like D.H. Lawrence.’

She handed the manuscript to me and slid her legs under the sheets before leaning over and putting a kiss on my upper right cheek.

‘Richard,’ she said, ‘I should have known I had nothing to worry about.’
And with that, she reached over, turned off the bedside lights, and left me listening to her snoring that may have trembled the bed but they also made Baz Mad feel very contented with the world.

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!

Richard Madeley’s Top 10 Things That Gnats Are Good For

I’m busy writing my memoir today (I’ll reach 20,000 words by the evening or my name’s not Madeley) so it's only a small update this afternoon, which, I suppose, is only fitting given that I want to answer the many people coming here wanting to know ‘what are gnats good for?’

It’s strange how my blog attracts sudden waves of visitors searching for the same thing. The ‘John Noakes riding naked’ epidemic has thankfully passed, though 'Vanessa Feltz's cleavage' seems to be a stayer. At the moment, however, Google is bringing me nothing but questions about ‘custard creams’ and ‘gnats’. Well, I’ve dealt with custard creams on many previous occasions and I think it’s only right that I turned my attention to the humble gnat.

So, I'm proud to present you with:

Richard Madeley’s Top 10 Things That Gnats Are Good For

1. Scrabble. I’ve annoyed Stephen Fry on many an occasion when I’ve used that odd ‘GN’ combination to get my ‘genuflect’ on a triple word score.

2. Gnats are nature’s irritants. If it weren’t for gnats, we’d pick on the Welsh.

3. If it weren’t for the gnats that get stuck to cyclists’ teeth, many vegetarians would get no meat in their diets. Being naturally low on carbohydrates, they are also an excellent addition to any low-carb diet. Eat nothing but gnats and I guarantee that you won't feel bloated in the morning.

4. ‘Gnats’ rhymes with ‘spats’ which means we have one of my favourite self-penned verses:

If a gnat wore spats
And a bowler hat
Would they let him dine
At Michael Caines?

5. Picking a gnat from your ear can be one of the most pleasurable things you can do with your little finger. The relief when you squash the little bugger against your eardrum is quite exquisite.

6. Gnats cheer me up when Judy holds one of her insufferable garden parties each summer. There’s much fun to be had watching Vanessa Feltz trying to swat gnats away from her blancmange.

7. Simon Cowell fears all gnats, which is why I always keep a bag of them in the glove compartment.

8. Gnats don’t eat caterpillars. Which means that we have Grizzled Skipper, the Green-veined White, the Painted Lady and the Greater Unspotted Nigel.

9. Gnats never voted for New Labour.

10. Gnats give talented TV types the chance to make exciting new documentaries such as ‘When Gnats Swarm! Narrated by Richard Madeley’.

How Big is Vanessa Feltz's Cleavage?

For the person in London currently searching Google for 'How big is Vanessa Feltz's cleavage', I can end your quest right here.

It's big. Bigger than even your 1280x1024 desktop resolution could handle. I mean it's really, really big.

I wish you well and hope I answered your question. I now feel that my afternoon, spent fruitlessly looking for a post-Channel 4 job, has not been totally wasted.

The Night I Swapped Stephen Fry For Vanessa Feltz: The Truth Finally Revealed

Because the internet knows no reason when it comes to rumours, lies, and insinuation, the true story of the ongoing animosity between Vanessa Feltz and myself needs to be told. Though only six or so months old, the hostilities feel like they’ve rumbled on for a decade or more. Think Vietnam, Korea, and the Second Franco-Moroccan War in order to get a sense of the scale of this conflict. It’s only by the grace of God that the whole thing hasn’t gone nuclear.

It was February when the producers of Celebrity Wife Swap got in contact with the people at Cactus TV and asked if Judy and I would like to ‘swing it’ for the cameras. Judy had said yes before I had chance to object. I’ve never been into the swinging scene. The whole idea appalls me in the same way that I don’t buy things from flea markets. Having somebody’s cast-offs is not the Madeley way. Jeremy Clarkson once told me an anecdote about a Top Gear producer who bought an ‘unused’ second-hand electronic toothbrush from a car boot sale, only to find a pubic hair in the bristles.

So, before I could object, the producers had twinned me with Vanessa Feltz and, one Friday night in March, earlier this year, Judy moved out and in came the woman who was to be Mrs. Madeley for the next seven days. Only, the way things worked out, I think I became the new Mr. Feltz.

Things went well until the camera crew disappeared for the evening, leaving the two of us alone.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ I said to Vanessa as I cleared away the plates from the dinner table, ‘but Stephen Fry is popping over a bit later. We always get together every Friday night to play Scrabble. I have a pretty good two letter word involving a “J” that I can’t wait to try out on him.’

‘Scrabble!’ cried Vanessa. ‘I’m not allowing any husband of mine to play Scrabble.’

The outburst stunned me, as I believe it also stunned a squadron of migratory geese as they flew overhead. They came down in a neighbouring village and Defra immediately formed a twenty mile quarantine zone until they’d worked out the cause of their deaths. Only now can the truth be told and the people of Snipschurch, Surrey, released from their private hell.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘you’re not actually my wife so I’ll do as a damn well please in my own house.’ I went to pick up Vanessa’s napkin but she grabbed my arm. If they made my life into a film, this part should be made my James Cameron and Vanessa would be an animatronic.

‘Listen, squirt,’ she hissed. ‘I came on this show to demonstrate to the world that I can be a caring wife. I’m not going to let you ruin this by bringing Stephen Fry into the house. Got it, buster?’

For the sake of my wrist, I had to agree. ‘I’ll ring him at once,’ I whispered.

‘’Tis I, Fry, speaking on my newly imported iPhone,’ said Fry when I rang him later.

‘What’s an iPhone,’ I asked, that being the first time I’d ever heard the item that was to behome his own new spouse.

‘It is a technologically marvellous thing from the Americas,’ he said. ‘It has a touchy screen on which I can now see your face as I speak to you.’

I looked at my own handset to see if I could see Fry peering through.

‘Listen,’ I said, realising the stupidity of my actions, ‘tonight’s Scrabble is cancelled.’

‘My vim is nil,’ sighed Fry, showing off the supply of three letter words that serves him so well around the board.

‘It’s not your vim I’m worried about,’ I said. ‘It’s this Vanessa woman who has taken over the house. I think she expects to sleep in the same bed as me.’

I heard Fry give a shudder. ‘Shudder,’ he said.

‘Indeed. What should I do?’

‘Alas, Richard, I have not a yen for knowing and it would make me wan to even eke out an answer. Now, ’tis I, Fry, on my iPhone, signing off.’

Michael Palin and Bill Oddie were no better when I rang them and I didn’t expect much in the way of helpful suggestions when I rang Paxman. He just spent five minutes chuckling into the phone.

Vanessa finally found me in the airing cupboard, still clutching the phone thirty minutes later, as I tried to get through to Ronnie Corbett.

‘What you doing in there?’ she asked, as she grabbed me by my collar and dragged me across the hall. ‘You don’t think Channel 4 have installed all those cameras in the bedroom for you to go sleeping in the cupboard? Come on, Dicky. Be a man! Come get in bed with your cuddly Vanessa.’

My own sweet T-101 had spoken. I got changed in the bathroom, that night, sliding the lock on the door for the first time in the ten years I’ve been living in the house. I also dressed myself in fleecy pyjamas for the first time in my life. Beneath them I still wore my outdoor clothes. I feared that might need to make an escape during the night.

‘Okay?’ asked Vanessa as I walked into the bathroom.

‘Fine,’ I said, moving quickly to my side of the bed so she might not notice the extra bulk beneath my PJs.

Vanessa smiled and walked to the bedroom door. I didn’t realise what she was doing until I heard something go click.

‘See,’ she said, ‘holding up a key. Judy said that you might try to escape during the night so I brought my own padlock.’ With that she slid the key into the deep canyon of her cleavage. ‘You’re not getting out of here until dawn.’

Dawn. Has ever a single word so utterly misrepresented an eternity?

I climbed into bed and turned off my bedside lamp before I felt the springs give as Vanessa climbed in beside me.

‘Goodnight dear,’ she said as she threw her arm over me.

‘Goodnight Vanessa,’ I replied. I didn’t know if I’d be able to sleep. It wasn’t so much the arm as the fact that Judy normally plays the trombone for half an hour before she puts her head down. Slumber wouldn’t be the same without the sweet melody of a Strauss waltz played on brass.

I was still awake around three o’clock when Vanessa released me from her grip. She rolled over and began to snore in the other direction. Slowly, hearing began to return to my right ear and as feeling returned to my body, I slipped out of the bed and into my shoes.

The bedroom window opened without a sound and I had soon edged myself out onto the trellis.

‘Richard?’ said a voice behind me.

I made an instinctive choice and jumped. Twenty feet later, I was limping to the car. I thought I’d be a mile or two away before Vanessa found the key to the padlock in her cleavage.

Two days later, I rang Judy from a small bed and breakfast on the Fylde Coast. Apparently, Vanessa had taken great offence at my deserting her in the middle of the night. She had also lost the key to the padlock and because there was no telephone in the bedroom (Judy fears them more than she fears anything), Vanessa had been trapped in the bedroom until the camera crew discovered her on Monday morning. Apparently, the video footage of her captivity is now a cult classic. Arab businessmen have distributed it around the Middle East where it now fetches a high price.

The outcome of all this is that the show’s producers sacked me and replaced me with Paul Daniels. Vanessa lived with him for a while the following April and the whole thing made for, as we say in the business, ‘good TV’.

Since then, Vanessa has been quite outspoken about me in private, though she remains the consummate professional publicly. However, there has been a long simmering Cold War between us, with much of the British entertainment industry secretly siding with either Vanessa or me. I may have the slightly smaller army of supporters but I can count all the big animals: Fry, Oddie, Clarkson, and even Paxman, in his fashion. Now I’ve made the feud public, I hope you’ll also choose a side. If I can get enough troops, we might be able to end this futile war once and forever. We might be able to liberate my reputation forever.

I can smell a storm coming in.

Or it might be Judy making beef and onions for her tea... I’ll leave it for you to decide.