Best of the Web

After I had unnaturally manipulated the fates by spilling a chicken’s innards over a prostrate Anne Diamond, The Guardian was forced to unwittingly choose my piece on ‘The Trouble With Dames’ as one of its ‘best of the blogs’ items for today. It accounts for all the new visitors and a disturbing rise in the number of people who want me to stop blogging.

Ten percent Thirteen percent Sixteen percent of my visitors now seem to think that The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society is a bad thing. I’m astonished by this figure almost as much as I’m astounded that not one of you have asked me to write more of my award-winning poetry. It’s as though my ‘Mock Heroic Epistle to Jeremy Paxman on the State of His Sock Drawer’ doesn’t exist. All I can say is that you won’t get another if you ignore my poetic genius in this callous way. Stephen Fry need only rhyme ‘chesty wheeze’ with ‘striptease’ and he’s in line to become the next poet laureate. And the less I say about Pam Ayres the better. Do we really need another comic poem about a painful pimple on a dairymaid’s buttocks? I think not.

Taken as an indication of the British public’s tastes, I think ten percent thirteen percent sixteen percent is a rather worrying figure. Would they prefer it if I wrote about politics or sport? Do they want more details about my daily life, what kind of cheese I prefer, and which of my relatives is suffering from a prolapsed elbow? What, in other words, am I doing wrong?