Jeremy Clarkson's Infinite Variety

I’m often asked if I find much time in my busy schedule to hate Phillip Schofield. I normally reply that I don’t give him much thought. While there are indeed a great many adjectives I would delightfully hurl at him like so many spanners wrapped in offal, these days, my hands are full holding a fairly broad-hipped opinion about people who watch ‘The Paul O’Grady Show’. They are the only people I currently consider the enemy and I would encourage you to do the same. Full-bodied eccentrics to the last, desperate like a constipative’s final gasp, they are full of that worldliness which leads them to consider cabbages the only fruit. To them a hosepipe ban is a cultural event and they donate their sphincters to medical science expecting to get tax relief. These are not bright people; as blind as a raincoat’s lining and as docile as gravy. Normally when I find myself in their company, I look for the nearest policeman and ask him to castrate me with his truncheon. Failing that, I try to disembowel myself with a coconut.

Unfortunately, last week, I found myself in far off Manchester with no policemen in sight and coconuts out of season. It was not the best time for one of these denizens of Transvestite TV to stop me in the street. I didn’t have high hopes for the encounter. He was a gnomish man who must have been pushing to peer up the skirt of ninety. I thought to make a dash for the nearby Athenaeum but he started to shuffle around me, examining the Madeley profile from side, back, and front, before he set a bead on my face and sighed. I could smell dumplings.

‘You’re looking old,’ he said. As simple as that. No small talk. No baiting it with compliments. Just a straight insult delivered with a slurp of his false teeth settling themselves back on receding gums. And then he was away. With the briefest of waves, he was back to the world of Scouse cross-dressers, cabbage and dry rubber hosepipes.

Yet had he waited just a moment, I would have explained that, like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, age cannot whither me, nor custom stale my infinite variety. Let my face wrinkle and my brow sag, if they must, but you can never deny that my spirit is more youthful than that of many an angst-ridden teenager with a pension plan. It is why I care not a jot about looking my age. It also explains why I didn’t hold my tongue this morning when the doorbell rang and I found a strange man standing on my welcome mat.

Thankfully, he wasn’t alone, otherwise I might never have recognised him. Parked in the drive was a rocket car with AA Gill sitting on the luggage rack. AA gave me a wave as he always does; a flare of crushed velvet something special against the spare tyre.

‘We’ve come to take you for lunch,’ he shouted. ‘We’re off to the Hix Oyster and Chop House where we expect to make wry comments about the cuisine.’

‘Are you indeed?’ I replied and turned back to the tall man threatening me with a bleached smile the shape of scimitar. Without the clues of the rocket car and A.A. Gill to help me, I might have chased this stranger away with a few well times lashes of an umbrella. Instead, I stood staring at the poor man as I tried desperately to hide my disgust at the helpless product of unhindered vanity.

‘Well?’ he asked, standing there and making large hand gestures towards his face. ‘What do you think?’

‘You look a mess,’ I told him. ‘What on earth have you done to yourself? You have more than passing resemblance to Dick Van Dyke.’

‘It’s the new me!’ said Jeremy Clarkson with the euphoria that evidently comes of having your eyelids peeled by a laser. ‘Twenty thousand quid on the best plastic surgeon in London. He’s resculpted my chin and got rid of all my bags.’

‘Got rid of all your sense, I should say,’ I answered.

‘You can’t deny it. I look years young. And my testicles hang a good inch higher. I’d show you what he’s done for the hair on my back but it’s taking a time to heel. The skin graft hasn’t taken but that’s because we couldn’t get the right skin from a bald monkey. I’m having it re-laid this week.’

‘He’s left you looking like Richard E. Grant’s bulimic twin,’ I observed and dragged Jeremy into the hall as a dark cloud hinted at a sudden downpour. The last thing I wanted was a damp Clarkson threatening to split at the seams as he dried out.

‘Come on,’ he said, oblivious to his danger. ‘We’re going to try it out on London folk. See what they make of the new improved Clarkson 2.0 GTI.’

‘GTI?’

‘Grin, teeth, intelligence.’

‘Intelligence? They can help lift that as well?’

‘You’d be amazed what they can do with a laser,’ he replied.

This was an experience I thought it foolish to miss. I quickly changed into a suit and soon joined Gill on the luggage rack as Jeremy climbed into the driver’s seat. Once the cabin lid was shut and Jeremy was out of earshot, I turned to Gill.

‘I know what you’re going to say,’ he said. ‘But he wouldn’t listen to sense...’

‘I blame you for putting all these ideas into his head,’ I replied. ‘You and your metrosexual dinner jackets lined with baby otters. He used to be an honest, down-to-earth bloke who liked to talk about oiling bolts and greasing washers. Now look at him. He’s a monstrosity! He looks like Fred Gwynne’s less manly brother.’

‘Ah,’ said Gill, switching to his TV critic voice, which is at least ten decibels higher, ‘Fred Gwynne from TV’s “The Munsters”. A show of dubious writing quality but salvaged by the charm of a likable cast.’

Luckily the rest of his review was hidden behind the blast of the jet engine. I held on tight as we began to head towards Mach One. On the other side of the sound barrier, things grew quiet once again. Back to being the food critic, Gill licked a finger tip, nodded appreciatively at the flavour, before running it over an eyebrow. I feared the worst. I could hear a full metal wit being loaded into a chamber.

‘I can’t deny that Jeremy is probably a little in awe of my élan,’ said Gill, ‘but as I always say, you can’t catch panache. It’s sad that the same can’t be said of bad taste.’ He looked at me and an eyebrow curled towards the implicit.

‘What do you mean by catching bad taste? You’re not saying that any of this is my fault?’

‘I’m merely pointing out that my tan came from the Côte d'Azur.’

‘Meaning?’

He shrugged. ‘Meaning it wasn’t a free sample in a woman’s magazine.’

I’d heard enough. I hammered on the roof of the cabin and the whine of the jet engine was replaced by the sound of brakes and the screech of Dunlops.

‘Don’t tell me he’s fallen off again,’ said Jeremy, popping his head out his plastic bubble. He looked to Gill who smiled, elegantly as always.

‘Not me,’ said AA. ‘We have a deserter in our midst.’

‘You not coming for lunch?’ asked Jeremy as I struggled to unbuckle myself. ‘We’re having escargot.’

‘A lucky day for the French snail,’ mumbled Gill.

‘I’m off,’ I said, slipping from the roof rack. ‘You can go to lunch without me. When you’re in the mood for the company of somebody who knows his age and is happy eating at home with a Pot Noodle, you know where I live.’

Gill shrugged but Jeremy’s face attempted a frown for which it was clearly not designed. He just looked pleased that ‘Mary Poppins’ had won so many Oscars.

‘Don’t go off like this,’ cried Jeremy. ‘I still haven’t shown you about my ears. They’re fully detachable and have Velco on the back.’

But I was too far gone to care listening, detachable ears or no detachable ears.

Give me lunch with men that are men and people who look their age. Give me men who are thinkers, wizened but wise, true to their principles, or habitually lost. Though my hair is brown and my skin is too, I am a real man at heart. When the crags on my face deepen, the hairs of my head whiten, you will see that I am still being myself and no other. You’ll never find me bleaching my teeth or wearing a baboon’s pelt on my back. I’ll leave that to O’Grady, Schofield and the rest of their unctuous kind. And though I never thought I’d say it, I’ll leave it to Jeremy Clarkson too. God knows. I’ll miss that craggy faced old bugger and his yellowing teeth.

Richard Reviews: The Richard&Judy Show (14/1/08)

There is no way of diminishing the disappointment one feels when watching oneself on television. Things you wish you’d done better, questions you should have asked, intimacies that were probably best left private: they all hasten a man’s hand as it reaches for the remote control as he reviews his day's work around midnight. Yet an occasional glance at the handsome chap chatting on the TV can also be liberating. As the ancient Greeks advised: know thyself! To judge Madeley as though he were a famously gifted contemporary can be quite a revelation if your name also happens to be Madeley. It also stays the hand when all it wants to do is to switch over to Busty Babes UK.

Up to this afternoon, I’d been living in the swampland known as denial. I didn’t want to acknowledge that I had to return to Channel 4. Even as late as this morning, I was more concerned by my life beyond the contract than I was in the guests we’d had booked for the first show of our new series. Judy had only reminded me at lunchtime that the limo would be picking us up at two o’clock. I had planned on spending the afternoon with Clarkson, stalking A.A. Gill around some of London’s choicest restaurants, flicking peas at him as he tried write up his notes on the grub. Instead, I was stuck sobbing in the back of a limo as we made our slow way to the studios down in Kennington.

The Richard&Judy Show may still be the jewel in the Channel 4 crown but the studios had the same unmistakable smell of menopausal pickled onions. The faces were all the same and so were the bodies, despite the constant chatter about diets and New Years resolutions that greeted my arrival. Being the only man working on the show can sometimes make conversation limited. I think it explains the number of male friends I have outside the Richard&Judy phenomenon and why all of them appreciate what it means to shoot black powder long bore rifles whenever we can at the weekend.

As for the actual recording of the show: I thought it went remarkably well. Only watching it now on the Sky+ box do I see how we failed in our stated objective to begin the series on a subdued note. It will hard to maintain this quality over the run of the whole series. All I can guess is that the adrenaline took over. After half an hour, I was in blisteringly good form.

We began with an interview with Janet Street Porter. As soon as I saw her in the green room, I knew she was going to clash with the sofa. Before we went on air, I even asked her if she’d slip out of her horrendous green tights but Janet just responded by calling me ‘a misogynous prig’. You might have read about our long history of mutual dislike going back to our well publicised falling out over the matter of Lebanese butter. It was back in the days of ‘This Morning’ up in Liverpool. I’d made an offhand remark about Janet’s taste for low fat spreads and she’d told me off for being uncultured. That had led me to make an offhand joke about her love for butter made from camel milk. I still don’t know what she has against me but the feud has simmered for all these years and I can't see there ever being peace. Either in the Middle East or between Madeley and Porter.

Despite this, when the cameras are on her, Janet remains the consummate professional. She chatted away through the segment without once mentioning camel butter. I managed to avoid commenting on the gangrenous colour of her legs. That’s not to say that the first ad break wasn’t tense. Janet had me pinned against the wall and threatened to remove my feet at the ankles. Judy had to beat her off me with a cushion and things were barely settled by the time we all came back from the commercials. We chatted about her new book and then I had security escort her from the building as Judy and I moved on to chat with the nation’s chirpiest toff, Ben Fogle.

I hadn’t seen Ben since the incident at Ainsley Harriott’s house when one of my least sociable gastric discharges had re-stained the Italian marble in the bathroom. Ben was on the show to plug his new series in which he’s been helping people overcome the problems in their lives through adventure. I was so sure he was going to mention my tricky gut and recommend that I try canoing up the Nile to teach it a lesson. He didn’t, which shows what a good sport he is. But I was still a bit worried about him spreading malicious gossip about me so he too was soon being led from the building by security.

To be honest, after the next break, the show became pure Judy. I had to sit there in the presence of some of the ghastliest paintings produced by the wit of man. It was, quite frankly, embarrassing as I listened to Judy turn poetic as she described pictures made from vegetables and raw fish. My poor wife has so little taste you’d think her a custodian of the Tate. I’d wouldn’t mind if she’d allowed me to give the segment a bit of class by asking Carl Warner if he compared his studies of foodstuffs with vanitas paintings of that period of counter Reformation in Europe of the seventeenth century. I wanted to know if his garish landscapes were a comment on the artificiality of food and by extension, human life, at the beginning of the twenty first century, in a similar way to those Protestant artists who depicted decaying fruit as symbolising the mortality of the flesh and an ethic of worldly suffering. Judy just thought it better to ask him if he enjoyed working with vegetables. I was relieved when we’d made it to another break and that’s when I told the artist what I really thought of his work and had the security guard escort him from the building. For the life of me, I still don’t know why we couldn’t have used that time to help some talented unknown artist find a market.

I’m similarly dubious about our video clips segment which is another of Judy’s babies. This week’s selection distinguished the brain dead from the truly moronic: a dancing parrot, a whistling belly button, the ubiquitous accident involving a caravan, and a comically frowning baby. My favourite remains the German juggling hammers, which gives me endless delight to know that we’re promoting dangerous stunts on national television without any warnings about ‘trying this at home’. Mark my words: this year will be known as the year when accidents with claw hammers shot through the roof. Or, more accurately, got stuck in the roof before coming back down and embedding themselves in the skull of some inept juggler.

The last segment was our interview with Martin Freeman. By this point, I was completely out of it. I can barely remember what I said. As usual, I hadn’t read the notes before the interview and had expected Martin to be my favourite black actor from America. I was hugely disappointed that I couldn’t ask the questions I’d prepared about ‘Seven’ and ‘The Shawshank Redemption’. Instead, I had this pasty-faced English Joe blathering on about some film he’s made with an unknown filmmaker, who just happens to be Gwyneth Paltrow’s brother. There is no man working in show business who takes a dimmer view of nepotism in the arts. If Paltrow had been on the show, you can be sure that I’d have had an security escort him from the building.

And that, as they say, was a wrap. Despite all my prevaricating about going back on TV, I can’t recall ever being in such good form at the beginning of a series. I won’t be re-watching any future episodes, so I won’t be boring you any more of these behind the scenes anecdotes. I know you all love the show but, to be honest, it’s not for me. It helps pay the bills but what man in his right mind wants to spend his day admiring luminous landscapes made from potatoes and peas?

Now, I have to get some sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a tough day for Madeley, the unpublished writer. We’re interviewing Pauline McLynn (Mrs Doyle from Father Ted) about her sixth novel. That’s right. Her sixth! I have some interesting anecdotes about Norman Mailer I want to run past her.

The Trouble With Dames

‘That bloody Michael Parkinson is going to spoil this for all of us,’ I declared to Judy soon after I’d powered up my old laptop this morning. I tapped the screen where that ungrateful Yorkshire prig was staring out at me as though I’d just asked to hear, yet again, about the time he met Muhammad Ali. ‘Look here. It says that he’s going to be knighted in the New Year honours! I bet his publicist leaked that to the Press. No doubt about it, the damn heel… And after all we’ve done for him.’

A wan hand appeared from under the duvet. It recoiled from the light before whispering. ‘Richard, could you please be a little quieter when you curse Parky? It sounds too much like blasphemy.’

‘Don’t tell me you’re going to defend him!’ I snapped.

‘He is the nation’s favourite talk show host.’

That was low, illegal blow, especially on Boxing Day. ‘The last time Parky asked a penetrating question it was 1973.’ I said. ‘And even then he questioned Lee Marvin about his sexuality.’

‘Oh Richard, give it a rest,’ said the hand. ‘Or at least lower your voice.’

‘I can’t give it a rest,’ I answered. ‘And you know I don’t have any sympathy with hangovers. If you can’t hold your liquor, you shouldn’t drink so much.’ I turned my attention back to the news. ‘If Parky spoils this for us, I’ll never forgive him.’

The instructions from The Palace had been quite explicit: don’t respond when asked about Her Majesty’s New Year honours. It wasn’t my own knighthood that concerned me as much as knowing that Judy has become really attached to the idea of becoming a dame. The weeks of excitement had pretty much been centred on Judy’s outfit for the day. I think my own elevation to the knighthood had passed without even a single mention.

I closed the laptop and slipped from the bed. The hand retreated under the sheets, no doubt rejoining the rest of Dame Judy who had over-exerted her liver at the previous night’s party. Things had been going well until Stephen Fry began supping champagne from Selena Dreamy’s shoe. Judy shouted that had to try it herself and kicked off a slipper. The poor woman was now suffering, not because she’d miscalculated the potency of the drink but the size of her own feet. It stands to sense that it one can get a touch tipsy by supping from Selena’s small pumps then you can get totally bashed by drinking from Judy’s size elevens.

I pulled on my dressing gown and quietly headed for my office, having decided make my phone calls from there and allow Judy chance to sleep off her bad head.

One soon learns about one’s friends when the Press are sniffing about and it’s important to remind some about their loyalty. The man I was about to call is well known for being unable to keep a secret and it was important that I got to him before the newspapers.

I dialled, I sat, I waited as his phone rang, all the time staring at my unfinished Airfix model of Crown Prince Willem Hendrik and wondered if I’d ever find time to finish making the complete Great Dutch Potentates Collection. Eventually, somebody picked up the phone.

‘Jeremy?’ I said, loud and cheerful. ‘It’s Dick. How you feeling?’

The phone groaned. I knew it wouldn’t be the last time I’d hear that this week but Clarkson had more reason than many to be tender between the ears. He’d got himself in a drinking game with Sue Lawley and lost consciousness on the eleventh round. The last I saw of him was when A.A. Gill dragged him by his ankles, out to their waiting taxi.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I don’t like bothering you on Boxing Day but I just wanted to give you a warning. Looks like the Press are out to discover the contents of the Queen’s Birthday Honours. If they contact you, please don’t mention our names. It’s meant to be a secret.’

‘Yes, yes, sure,’ muttered Clarkson. ‘What time is it?’

‘Nine thirty,’ I said with a crisp alertness.

I heard a head impact on a pillow. ‘Oh! You bast…’ began Clarkson before the phone went dead.

Need you any more proof that the man’s a wit and wag from morning till night? I think not.

I dialled the next number on my shot list of those ‘in the know’.

‘’Tis I, Fry, whispering on my iPhone,’ said The Great Man.

‘Morning Stephen. Feeling a bit peaky, are we?’

‘To paraphrase the Bard, my revels now are ended and I have foresworn all spirits that have melted my brain into air, into thin, thin air…’

‘Yes, well,’ I replied, ‘if you insist on drinking like that with The Merry Wives and Windsor, then your hangover is “As You Like It”.’

‘Very droll,’ muttered Stephen. ‘But how was I to know that Mrs. Madeley and Mrs. Titchmarsh could handle their liquor as well as Barbara Windsor?’

‘I’m sure it’s a hard lesson learned, Stephen,’ I answered, ‘but I’m sure you’ll recover your elan in no time. However, that’s not why I’m ringing. I just wanted to warn you against mentioning our names if anybody asks you about the New Year Honours. It’s supposed to be a secret.’

‘You should know that I’m the model of discretion,’ said Fry. ‘Fortunately, I’m currently also a model of forgetfulness. That was quite a party, or at least what little I can remember of it. Perhaps you can you shed some light on why I can taste shoe leather and anti-fungal cream?’

I did just that. He seemed less than amused. I then asked him if it was true about him buying Weasel Vomit coffee for Prince Charles.

For some reason, the question brought out conversation to a premature end. He had to dash off to the bathroom, leaving me with no other alternative than to ring the final person who knows about my impending knighthood.

‘Morning Bill,’ I said to Oddie. ‘Hope I didn’t wake you?’

‘Wake me?’ laughed Bill. ‘I’ve not been to bed. Nature doesn’t rest for Christmas. I’ve been out watching hibernating moles.’

‘That doesn’t sound exciting,’ I replied.

‘To be honest, Dick, it’s not the most fun you can do at four AM on a freezing cold December morning. However, you learn a lot about yourself watching a mole sleep.’

‘I’m sure you do,’ I replied, though not at all sure that I believe a word of it. ‘I’m just surprised you’re not feeling a bit bloated in the gills this morning. You were putting the drink away as well as anybody.’

‘Oh, I feel fine,’ said Bill. ‘But that’s probably because I’m immune to whisky. Ever since I was bitten by a raccoon, alcohol doesn’t affect me. I might as well have been drinking tea.’

‘Well it would have been a bit cheaper if you had,’ I replied, sourly. ‘Listen, I’m ringing to make sure you’ve retained your ability to keep a secret. The Press are nosing around for hints to the Queen’s New Year honours. I want you to remember that nobody is meant to know about Judy and me.’

‘I’m keeping it under my hat with my pet dormouse,’ said Bill.

I believed that he would.

I listened to Bill go on about moles for five more minutes before I hung up the phone and came out of the office to find Judy creeping slowly down the stairs. It looked like she was heading for the kitchen so I moved ahead of her to get the door open.

‘Did I hear you on the phone?’ she asked as she shuffled past me.

‘I was ringing Bill to remind his to keep the New Year honours a secret. He’s a wonderful man but prone to blurting things out that he shouldn’t. Wouldn’t want to jeopardise our honours because of a slip of his wayward tongue.’

‘Our honours?’ asked Judy, stopping by the sink and looking a bit puzzled.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You know… The letter from Buckingham Palace…’

‘Oh, I remember the letter,’ said Judy. ‘I just didn’t remember your name being on it.’

‘Well, it was addressed to me,’ I said, amazed at how the drink was affecting my poor wife’s faculties.

‘It was addressed to Mrs. Richard Madeley,’ said Judy. ‘And it was about my DBE. There was no mention of a KBE.’

I sank down onto the wicker stool as Judy stumbled to the cupboard and took out the jar of salts. After she’d downed a pint of the stuff in a single go, she turned to me and belched gently. ‘You didn’t think they’d knight you after all the things you’ve said and done? I’ve warned you before, Richard. You should do more charity work.’

‘And what about all my work writing my blog if it’s not charity?’ I asked. ‘If it weren’t for me, there would be thousands of people going through life without the hope I give them. My regular readers would soon go off the rails if they didn’t have me.’

She waved down my complaint as shuffled away on her way back to bed.

‘Sir Richard Madeley,’ I heard her laugh before the bedroom door closed. I sat in the kitchen, listening to the echo of her laughter dance around the house, beating its merry step on all my hopes for the New Year.

Frothing About Froth

What should the froth/liquid ratio be in a good cappuccino? Is ‘a good cappuccino’ a oxymoron or does it only become so when we change it to ‘a good Starbucks cappuccino’?

These are the somewhat unexpected questions I find myself asking after a day on the front lines of the Christmas sales. We made it home, leaving the field of battle with only moderate lesions. Behind us there were a few isolated scenes of destruction wherever Judy did decide to tread. Some days I fear she’s more elbow than woman. Presents have been bought for our nearest and dearest. I tried my best for all you regular readers, though I fear that some of your comments didn’t get through in time. It was unfortunate that I couldn’t check my email on my iPhone due to an issue of incompatibility between my gloves and the touch screen.

The highlight of my day was an argument I managed to start at the local Starbucks where I refused to accept a cup of their milky java which contained 70% froth and 30% liquid. It amazes me when I do complain, being on the whole a rather placid man. I would say the Christmas spirit brought the best out of me but I like to think it’s because I’ve been reading A.A. Gill’s ‘The Angry Island’. It has encouraged me to become more overt in my displays of disappointment. Not for me, this hypothesis that we’re a nation of people who suppress their anger and then go and invent new and exciting types of lagging. There are no trips down the Nile because I couldn’t tell my wife that I don’t like the colour of her curtains.

Instead, mug in hand, I stormed the serving counter and demanded action.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t normally do this but I’ve been reading A.A. Gill’s “The Angry Isle” which has encouraged me to be more overt in my displays of disappointment. This cappuccino is more froth than milk.’

The serving assistants looked at me as though I’d asked them to run my cup through a battery of highly scientific tests to detect neutrinos. After one of those long moments in which the world seems to stand still, in silence, one of them gathered the general gist of what I was saying.

‘Cappachino is supposed to be half froth.’ she said, her eyes as empty of wits as the mug was devoid of dairy product. 'They all vary quite a bit.'

I looked at her and smiled. ‘The average human IQ is supposed to be 100 but I sure this fact didn't stop one's mother feeling a great sense of disappointment when it was recognised that we fell below that.’

She was surprisingly quick. ‘There’s no need to be rude,’ she said. ‘It’s not my fault that you don’t know your coffee.’

‘I don’t know it because I’ve yet to have been introduced to it.’

‘Well,’ she replied, picking up the jug of milk and topping up my cup. 'Nobody else seems to have a problem.'

‘I bet they don't,’ I said, darkly. ‘It’s this kind of shoddy treatment that makes me long for less professionalism in the catering service.’

And that, I think, is a truth of our consumer society. We have the perception that things improve because coffee shops have better decor and a more varied menu. Yet the identikit façades mask highly evolved organisms that put the customers’ needs a distant second to profit. Froth is the battleline where we stand nose to nose. They will know the exact froth to coffee ratio that ensures that 9 in 10 people don't complain. If they can sell half a cup of froth, that’s 9 half-cups of milk they save themselves. Transfer that to every Starbucks across the land and they must be saving millions. I fear for the milkmen. Starbucks must account for the majority of those notes left out in the morning that read, ‘No milk today, thank you’.

I think I made a difference today. Gill has clearly changed my attitude and my life. Though whether I was right to subsequently buy two collections of his essays is yet to be determined. There is only so much change that Judy will accept and what that cantankerous / placid ratio might be is much harder to judge.

Madeley Restored

The sparrows were not at fault.

I should have known all along that they could not be culpable. It shouldn’t have taken my ringing up Bill Oddie to bring them back and install them back in the eaves for me to know they do not boost a WIFI signal. According to Fry, the reason my broadband failed was because the line had been ‘severed by either a vengeful rodent or a sullen wife’. Judy claims she knows nothing of snipped cables, though if you were to put her on a lie detector, I’m sure the truth would come pouring out of her. She’s been oddly happy today and, if I didn’t know better, I’d say that my broadband was sabotaged in order to get me out of the house.

If so, then I need to thank her. I sometimes forget how good it is to get away from this office. I spend relatively little time in London and I sometimes forget how much it frees the brain of the cobwebs that accumulate over the weeks and months of labouring with words. Writing the scripts for the next series of The Richard&Judy Show, along with writing much of the material for Dick Justice, I have become like the proverbial candle lit at both ends. Yesterday, the two flames met at the middle and there was no more. I could barely rouse myself to write a word, despite their being an episode from Sunday that’s worth relating as it’s both festive and involving Clarkson at his most argumentative.

Now I’m home, I’m eager to write and I’m burning white hot with ambitions and ideas. You might have to give me 24 hours or so to catch up. I’m also working my way through a copy of The Angry Island that began as pristine and slowly getting dog-eared.

I’ll end this update here. I can hear the sound of a ladder being propped against eaves. It will be Oddie, back to remove sparrows for the second time today. Hopefully my broadband connection will hold up and I’ll be able to post this.