Prince of Biscuits

Here at the Pouch, it has long been a bone of contention that not all Custard Creams are created equal. Indeed, Yours Truly has since childhood been of the opinion that the finest incarnation of this prince among biscuits hails from the aisles of Sainsbury's alone. A tick in the plus column for a supermarket chain that, as you may recall, has earned my displeasure for subdividing its cereals into Adults' and Childrens' thereby daubing me, the sprogless grown-up, as some kind of cereal groomer whenever I slink over to the Frosties shelf.

But enough of Sainsbury's crimes against breakfast. We're here today to talk Custard Creams, the most fabulous, most dunkable, most ornate of all tea-time, indeed anytime, snackage. What other other biscuit can boast the intricate curlicues and flourishes of the Custard Cream? Not the rough old digestive, the MDF of the biscuit world. Not the chocolate hobnob, that painted strumpet. Not even the weird pink wafer thing whose name escapes me. No, for sheer design and elegance, the rococo majesty of the creme de la creme anglaise has no equal in all of bicciedom.



Do not gaze at its weird angles overlong...

If Dan Brown were to conceive of a plot wherein the secret lore of the Knights Templar / Illuminati / Freemasons / Tufty Club (delete to taste) were hidden in (gasp) plain sight, he could do no better than to suggest that the strange, twisting symbols embossed onto each and every Custard Cream pointed the way, in the form of a visual map that only Dr Robert Langdon (and millions of readers across the world) could decipher. Surely there is something of the zodiac in those markings, the alchemical? Do they not also suggest the ancient astronaut carvings of Meso-America, and the Nazca Lines of Peru? Did not those queerly writhing frondlike pictograms inspire old H.P. Lovecraft himself when composing the language of the Elder Things in his novella At The Mountains Of Madness?

No, they did not. But they're bloody tasty all the same.

To return to my original contention, I put it to Herself that Sainsbury's taste the best. Moreover, I claimed that I could identify Sainsbury's Custard Creams by taste alone. A bold assertion made on the back of the previous week's Blind Cola Taste Test, in which I successfully picked out proper Coca-Cola from Diet, Zero and Pepsi Muck variants. Clearly I am like the blind superhero Daredevil, whose superhumanly enhanced tastebuds enable him to distinguish foodstuffs that mere mortals cannot detect. This will doubtless prove useful should I become a crimefighter (or royal taster, whichever pays better).

And lo it came to pass that we carried out a proper scientific blind taste test on a variety of Custard Creams from local supermarkets. Sadly this did not include the venerable Peek Freans as they seem to have been subsumed by the Kraft kolossus some time ago, but as I seem to remember, they were crap anyway. Herself, being very nearly a proper scientist at this point, and having watched one too many episodes of Mythbusters and Brainiac, was only too pleased to do all the hard work of schlepping round the different shops and preparing the test under rigorous laboratory conditions (at the living room table).

The test conditions were as follows:

The test subject (hello) was blindfolded and presented with randomly selected Custard Creams from seven different retail brands. This necessitated an element of trust from Yours Truly, especially when it came to Herself popping said biscuit into my mouth, and not sticking it up my nose or substituting it for a stick of celery or some other foulness. Mercifully her scientific zeal overcame her natural propensity for scampishness, and the tests proceeded free of hilarity.

Each of the seven biscuits were dunked in a cup of scientific tea and presented to me for nibbling. I then judged each for taste, texture and structural integrity with a mark out of five. (Thinking about it now, I should have awarded three different scores for each biscuit - we could then have played Custard Cream Top Trumps later. But sadly too late now.) Finally the seven biscuit samples were randomly mixed up again and offered to me for a second time undunked, just in case they performed differently au naturel. Again, I awarded points accordingly.

And here are those results...

The Custard Cream blind tasting test:
                     (Dunked / Dry)

Asda:                       4 / 4
M&S:                       4 / 4
Morrisons:              4 / 4
Sainsbury's:            4 / 4
Sainsbury's Basic:  4 / 3
Tesco:                      2 / 2 (appalling and fell apart)
Waitrose:                3 / 3 (different, just different)

As you can see, Sainsbury's scored among the highest, but was no better than Asda, Morrisons or M&S, causing us to suspect that perhaps these chains are all scandalously subcontracting the Custard Cream production to some unsung hero of the biscuit industry. So while my contention that Sainsbury's taste best has been sort of borne out by our scrupulous experimentation, I cannot say hand on heart that they are uniquely the best. On the other hand, it does mean that I can spread my patronage wider and obtain my fix from whichever dealer vendor is closest at hand. Huzzah.

And for some slightly less subjective numbers, here are a few health facts and figures cribbed from the packets of said biscuits. Some of those packets had already been in the kitchen bin for a day when I thought to do this next bit, so I hope you appreciate the lengths I have gone to in order to pad substantiate my article with cold hard factosity:

Custard Cream health facts per biccie:
                              (Calories / Sugar / Fat)

Asda:                       60 kcal / 3.5g / 2.8g
M&S:                       60 kcal / 3.2g / 2.8g
Morrisons:              59 kcal / 3.5g / 2.8g
Sainsbury's:            59 kcal / 3.5g / 2.8g
Sainsbury's Basic:  56 kcal / 3.2g / 2.6g
Tesco:                      65 kcal / 3.7g / 2.7g
Waitrose:                 59 kcal / 3.5g / 2.8g

I've no idea what we can make of those figures, apart from that Tesco's Custard Creams are not only the nastiest and least structurally coherent, but are also the most calorific and sugary. So they might be good for an emergency sugar boost, but to paraphrase Jules Winnfield, I won't eat the mofo.

A final sobering note: the Wikipedia entry for the Custard Cream warrants a mere eight sentences. This is the equivalent of reducing the entire history of the planet Earth to 'Mostly Harmless'. Shameful. I expect the authorities to rectify this sorry state of affairs as soon as they receive my letter of complaint.

Commie Ceratopsians vs earthbound Pterodactylia

I'm bored. Or as Mr Igward Pop would have it, I'm the chairman of the bored. It is 10:43 am. I have been in the office 27 minutes – yes, I am a terrible slacker for not getting in before 10:00 am – and I have run out of things to do already. The sum total of my email inbox was as follows:

• 1 test environment availability notification
• 1 train service alteration notification from the tweet-happy National Express East Anglia.
• 2 'working from home' emails from people with better sense than I.
• 1 'book in to your hot desk' reminder – already redundant as my pre-booked desk has been inevitably gazumped by one of the teenage laptop-jockeys that have invaded the office this week as part of some appalling 'cash in on the iPhone app market' project that's just been launched. Damn them and their promising career prospects.

So yeah, I'm bored.

I did just manage to kill about 2 minutes looking up the actor Neil Dudgeon on Wikipedia (so much more readable than IMDB). He replaced John Nettles as 'the new Inspector Barnaby' in the closing minutes of last night's Midsomer Murders in the most clumsy passing of the baton since the deceased El Bandido was swiftly replaced by his newly discovered son El Bandissimo.

El Bandido anybody? Bernie Clifton? Anybody?

Sigh. Am I the only person to remember this musical tour de force from Bernie Clifton's Comedy Shop (Radio 2, 1986)? Apparently I am. Poor Bernie. Poor me.

Tum te tum.

The spellcheck's been turned off of Word on this fershlugginer PC. It just let me get away with the 'nihgt'. Shocking. Can't seem to turn it back on neither. It says 'The spell check is complete'. Yeah, complete but bloody wrong. What am I supposed to do – check it myself, using my eyes? Oh, the pain, the pain.

I did once meet Jonathan Harris you know. He was very old. What do you mean you don't know who Jonathan Harris is? Does the phrase 'You bubble-headed booby' mean nothing to you? Tch, I say. Tch.

It's 11:10 now. 1 hour and 5 minutes until lunch time.

I was very keen to show you how I spent my day on Tuesday, by retrieving my Internet Explorer history and breaking it down by website and category. This would have been followed by a detailed review of each web page for interest and content, possibly accompanied by some sort of Excel pie chart representing that day's web-usage. But I can't do that because of the aforementioned youth squatting at the desk I used on Tuesday. So I can't get at the PC and retrieve my history. My great boredom alleviating plan has been thwarted by malign forces. Maybe I can get him to move.

I'm thinking of setting up a kind of Scooby Doo fake monster scam, to frighten him off so I can get at the PC. I'll have to improvise the creature from materials readily available in the office, mind, so the likelihood of fashioning a glowing diving suit or trapjawed robot is slim. From what I can lay my hands on, the monster is likely to be The Plastic Cup Ghoul Of Desk BO19, which I doubt will generate the levels of stark terror needed to scare that meddling kid away. Bum.



I have now established that dour 1970's sitcom I Didn't Know You Cared was written not by David Nobbs (he of Reginald Perrin distinction) but Peter Tinniswood. Though they did collaborate on The Frost Report. So.

Have decided to compile a list of British sitcoms that have been remade in America. So far I've come up with Reggie (starring Richard Mulligan from Soap), Sanford And Son (which is a black Steptoe I think), Dear John USA (I suspect it wasn't called that in the USA though), and Coupling (which bombed unsurprisingly, being a remake of a remake of Friends).

Am thinking of coming up with a few more sitcoms for Americanization, such as Pa's Army (a platoon of overaged Californians stumble around harassing immigrant Japanese in the wake of Pearl Harbour), Y'All Being Served? (set in the unreconstructed deep south, where Mr Humphries is viciously beaten for being a good fer nuthin' faggot in episode one), and The Minister Of Dibleyville (where the main character is a painfully thin woman).

11:44. Half an hour to go.

Have just learnt that Jon Bon Jovi's first record appearance was on the Star Wars Christmas Album. Also, Miss Tibbs and Miss Gatsby from Fawlty Towers once appeared in Only Fools And Horses. So the morning hasn't been a total waste. I wonder what useful knowledge has been pushed out of my head by these recent additions? Probably something to do with traffic signs or how to cook vegetables – stuff I rarely use anyway.

Lunch comes. Lunch goes. Time stretches before me like a trackless ebon void, much in the style of popular 80’s video game Tempest.

2:23 pm. Things I have learnt to fear from films:

• Being lost in the trackless desert and trying to walk out but ultimately ending up walking in a giant circle because of my uneven stride length (and grotesquely fat right foot).
• Turning my back on any domestic appliance or kitchen implement without first unplugging them or locking them in a drawer. I've seen Final Destination, which makes my ironing routine a tad more health and safety conscious than it otherwise might be.
• Watching meteor showers, shooting stars or other celestial lightshows. I am genuinely convinced that the result will be total blindness within 24 hours, which will coincide with a disastrous upsurge in the number of ambulatory killer plants loose on the streets.
• Plastic bags blowing loosely in the street. First one will innocently tumble along the pavement next to you, then it will wrap around a foot, then another, then another, until you're completely smothered, just like Robert DeNiro. Brrr.

Have managed to kill some time reading a spirited debate on the accent of the new Worgen player race in online game World Of Warcraft. Is it 'fake Cockney' or 'standard British'? Apparently the cocks on the bulletin boards just can't agree. What is it about bulletin boards and forums (fora?) that bring out the arse in anyone who posts?

3:00 pm. Tea time. Blessed relief. Exchange thirty seconds of pleasantries with charming Polish girl behind the counter of Starbucks. This constitutes the longest conversation I’ve had outside my head in several hours.

Spend some time watching the ongoing chaos on the streets of Cairo, courtesy of Sky News and its shamelessly padded coverage (I stopped watching when I realized the so-called live feed had looped around after 10 minutes. Either that or two identical Egyptians just got two firecrackers lobbed at their feet exactly 10 minutes apart.)

Riveting as the running street battles and synchronized rock throwing events were, I can't help but compare them unfavourably with yesterday's excellent equestrian demonstration in Tahrir Square. Is it wrong of me to have got unhealthily excited at the sight of a man on camelback whipping his way through the mobs? Of course it is. Bloody entertaining though.

Right, there's nothing for it but to comprise a list of something to keep me occupied.

It was a close run thing between the two front-runners, but I've chosen My Top Ten Fictional Dinosaurs over My Top Ten Fictional Ghosts. Better luck next time, you spooks (as Mr Meaker would probably say).

1. Devil Dinosaur. Obviously. If only for his excellent dentistry and furry little chum.
2. Godzilla off the old Hanna-Barbera cartoon. Coz he was heroic and came to the aid of the crew of the Calico whenever they needed him (or whenever the bearded guy pressed the electronic Godzilla-signal, which suggests a questionable element of dino-brainwashing which I prefer to gloss over).
3. The excavator-dinosaur at the beginning of The Flintstones. I always wanted to slide down his back like Fred did at knocking off time. I've tried it with one of the larger chaps at work but it's not the same.

4. Droog. What do you mean you've never heard of him? Well, he was a big orange triceratops who spoke in rhyme and appeared in one issue of The Incredible Hulk in the 1970's. He was technically a bad guy as he was the loyal pet of the communist super scientist known as the Gremlin, but he was very cool, and I'm lobbying Marvel to give him his own mini-series, or at least a cameo in Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers.
5. Gwangi from The Valley Of. I pronounce that with two hard 'G' sounds, by the way. He held his own against a posse of cowboys and a circus elephant if memory serves, which is quite a stretch genre-wise. Well done to him.

6. Pterry. He of Jigsaw fame, home of Adrian Hedley and his tall hat, Janet Ellis and her big bosoms, Jigg the crap animated jigsaw piece, Biggun the unconvincing giant, and the nightmare made form that was Mr Noseybonk. Anyway, Pterry was a noble Pterodactyl, or possible Pteranodon. I'm unsure of the difference. He had trouble flying as I recall, not unlike Orville but minus the suspect relationship with Keith Harris.
7. The Chewits dinosaur. For his sheer voraciousness and fabulously mobile claymated mouth. For years I kept an increasingly squishy packet of Chewits with me, just in case I had the bad luck to be passing a major world attraction when the ever-hungry monster turned up.

8. Big Hungry. He was a nothosaur from the second book of the series Flesh in 2000AD, and spent his idle hours munching up prehistoric sea-life and menacing time-travelling fishermen, before being flung 'up the time lanes' as we Flesh-o-philes say, and plopping down in Loch Ness. Much to the annoyance of the Skarasen I should imagine.
9. The T-Rex in the original Tomb Raider game. My God, that was scary when he came round the side of the valley and charged Lara. But at least he forced me to learn the awkward 'backflip whilst firing' combo.

10. The brachiosaurus at Blackgang Chine. I believe he still looms over the treetop walkway as you enter the chine, which is both marvellous and a little intimidating. Even better his old head, the less impressive 'Ducky' as he is known, can still be seen smirking his big green face off nearby.

Feel free to contribute your own.

5:27 pm. Realize I have become far too engrossed in pondering the relative merits of rhyming commie ceratopsians versus tragically earth-bound pterodactylia, and should really make plans to slope off home, another productive day of work complete.

Annoyingly, workaholic colleagues surround me on all sides, having got into the office before me and are now seemingly intent on working into the evening out of some sort of misguided sense of corporate loyalty. Thus am forced to twiddle thumbs (in reality, rearrange my favourites on Internet Explorer into alphabetical order) until the desks have been sufficiently vacated that I can nip off without looking like a total slackpants.

Belatedly notice that my screen has been unwisely angled so as to be on view to the majority of the office all day and must now hope vainly that nobody noticed that the ‘design document’ I’ve been hammering away at all day has the unusual title of Bored. Tch.

Black-Eared Bolt

Preface: Should you not have grown up worshipping at the altar of American comic books, you may find the following material easier to follow if I can trouble you to do a little preliminary viewing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17eeZPl_Pgo&feature=fvw

At the very least, knowing the name of Thor's first foes may come in handy at some future quiz night. No? Oh suit yourself.


Now, a lot of comic heads will cite legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as true fonts of imagination. Men of raw originality who created some of the most iconic characters in comic books from nothing but their own dreamstuff and mindgasm. Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men... Lee and Kirby crafted a 20th century pantheon of costumed demi-gods such as the world had never seen before.

Or had they?

Recently evidence has come to light which casts the reputation of these trailblazing imagineers into doubt. Evidence which is as compelling as it is indisputable. Prepare to have your preconceptions flicked sharply with a wet towel...

Let's start with this case study. In 1965, Lee and Kirby wrote and drew Fantastic Four issue #45, in which we met a strange race of beings who lived hidden from mankind in their incredible city of Attilan, high in the Himalayas. Each member of that secretive society had their own unique super-power, some of them barely human in appearance. They were... The Inhumans:

The Inhumans were led by the regal Black Bolt, whose powerful voice could lay waste to skyscrapers with but a single syllable. Thus he remained ever-silent, preferring to communicate indirectly, through the members of his royal family, Medusa of the living tresses, Karnak the shatterer, Gorgon of the thunderous tread, Triton the amphibian and Lockjaw the uh... giant teleporting bulldog. Yeah.

Anyway, I was struck by the similarity between Black Bolt and another popular fictional character, seemingly mute, possessed of uncanny magical powers and attended by a weird extended family of inhuman creatures. Here he is, with some of his friends:

Yes, the similarities are incredible aren't they? Too close perhaps for mere coincidence. Now let's look at the rest of the cast of The Sooty Show:

Sooty's simpering panda girlfriend Soo is an obvious match for Medusa, the excitable Sweep is a dead ringer for Karnak with his funny dome-shaped head, gruff Butch is a perfect Gorgon, Kipper is the other girl so she must be Crystal, and the sinister snake Ramsbottom must be Triton as he's the only one left. Unless you count that little kiddie version of Sooty in the school uniform, who's probably called Spanky or Zipper or something. Maybe he's Lockjaw. No, Butch would have to be Lockjaw coz they're both dogs, so Spanky would have to be Gorgon. Or something like that. Oh, I don't know. But you get the idea.

Anyway, it's compelling darn evidence and no mistake. And here's the shocking twist - Sooty predates The Inhumans by some 17 years! Which would make Lee and Kirby dirty plagiarists who ripped off Harry Corbett's lovable glove puppets and thought they'd get away with it by sticking them in skintight ziggy-zaggy costumes and sticking an inexplicable tuning fork on their main character's forehead. Look at this damning early draft of Jack Kirby's artwork, before Marvel comics' lawyers insisted he redraw 'Black-Eared Bolt':

Well I'm here to tell you that the revelation may be coming some 45 years late, and 50% of the suspects may have sadly passed beyond the veil, but Sootygate is but the tip of the iceberg at the House of Ideas. Which would make it a very big house, I suppose. Maybe the iceberg is sort of underneath the house. I dunno.

Let's look briefly at some other test cases and see if you agree with me. In each instance, I propose to demonstrate incontrovertibly that iconic characters from Marvel comics, and in some cases their competitors at DC, are actually thinly disguised ripoffs of much-loved British childrens' television shows.

Right, so Rainbow is the obvious inspiration for the mythical rainbow bridge linking the world of men to Asgard, the home of the Norse gods, which makes Bungle and his friends all prototypical Asgardians from The Mighty Thor. Bungle is obviously the noble thunder god himself, his dull mate Geoffrey would be Balder the brave, the sneering Zippy just has to be wily Loki the lord of mischief, leaving girly mega-lashed George in the role of the goddess Sif.

And Rod, Jane and Freddy are the Warriors Three. Simple.

Moving over to DC, we note that the super-escape artist Mister Miracle, with his brightly coloured clothing and irrepressible spirit, is nothing but Basil Brush in human form. And his sidekick Oberon is just Mr Rodney/Derek/Roy/Billy/whatever with mutton chops. We also see in Basil's deerstalker and manic laughter the gestating forms of both Detective Chimp and The Creeper.

That of course takes us neatly onto Basil's dark counterpart Emu, who must surely be the ur-form of the New God Orion - ever struggling with his savage nature. Hull is clearly Highfather whose steady hand stays Emu's bestial fury.

And if that isn't enough to convince you that some of the greatest creations in comicdom are nothing but pale mockeries of older myths, just examine this beloved tale of a saggy old Lord of Dreams:

It hardly needs spelling out does it? Neil Gaiman's cast of the Sandman, those archetypes of the human experience known as The Endless, are nothing but the cast of Bagpuss dressed up for the artsy 'comics are for adults' crowd.

Consider: the sandman Morpheus, whose realm is that of dreams, is so clearly Bagpuss that it's not even funny. The dour Despair is none other than Professor Yaffle, that carved wooden bookend in the shape of a woodpecker. Seductive, androgynous Desire is none other than the collective form of those tricksome mice on the mouse organ  pandering to the unwary's deepest needs, even going so far as to perpetrate the infamous Chocolate Biscuit Scam. Smiling pale-faced Death is a ringer for Madeleine the doll, and Destiny with his chained books of secrets is actually Gabriel the toad and his banjo of visions. That just leaves insane Delirium as the clearly disturbed Emily. Destruction is of course not present, though I strongly suspect he is the Hamish:

http://www.smallfilms.co.uk/bagpuss/stories.htm#Hamish

Why yes, I do have a lot of free time on my hands. Why do you ask?

Shite Critter Fight

Hello. Carrying on from my last contribution, we shall again be looking at that weird rectangular item in the corner of your living room.

Television, it really is the drug of the nation, isn't it? Or is that the potent marijuana derivative skunk? I always get them mixed up. Tch.

Any road up, I have been musing just now on the genre of made-for-TV movies that I like to call Shite Critter Fights, such as the well-known Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus or the excellent Dinocroc vs Supergator:



This is in no way related to the fact that I have been 'working from home' with the Horror Channel on in the background for the last two days. Oh no. You'd be a fool and a communist to suggest so.

Keen observers will have noticed that these films do tend to follow a definite formula. I won't bother to outline how the plots start, as nobody ever actually watches these things from the beginning - we just happen across them halfway through as we're flicking around the channels trying to avoid Murder She Wrote and Everyone Loves Raymond.

But there are common elements. These include:

• Sort of Hawaiian foresty setting, like the film crew have snuck onto the Lost set at the weekend.
• Budget-friendly cast of about 5 people.
• Two enormous CGI animals (often reptiles, possibly because scales are so much easier to do than fur).
• Unshaven rough bloke with a gun, given to shooting at enormous CGI animal (off-screen).
• Hot chick in a tight black vest. She will often be a doctor / scientist / anthropolologist.
• Back-up rough blokes and hot chicks, given to pointing at enormous CGI animal (off-screen) and getting eaten/swatted by a tail (off-screen).
• Seventy minutes of waffle and running around before we get to the money shot of the two enormous CGI animals hissing and biting at each other. Oh, how they tease us.

That's basically how they all work, though I do recommend Boa vs Python for its trangressive inter-serpent sex sub-plot. Challenging:

Now, it occurs to me that we in Britain are woefully under-represented in these cinematic gems. Or rather our noble native fauna is. So, to redress this shocking imbalance, I have put together a proposal for a number of homegrown Shite Critter Fights to be developed by the BBC. I mean, they can do Walking With Monsters and all those Attenborough Refuses To Retire Even Though He Talks Like He's Had A Stroke series, so this should be a doddle. It'll knock the pants off Springwatch. Check it:

• Megafox vs Starbadger
• Duckzilla vs King Coot
• Voleociraptor vs Dinoshrew
• Slayworm vs Grossnake
• Terrorgoose vs Cyberswan

I was going to spend the rest of the evening trawling Google Images for likely wildlife pictures to mash up into movie posters with Photoshop Elements, but even I have a life. Besides, Cobra vs Komodo is on later.

And Now On Ocelot TV…

Long-time correspondents will be aware of my many proposed additions to your nightly televisual offerings, such as the reality shows Celebrity Surgeon and Fuck Island, and so I am pleased to offer you a preview of just some of the programme proposals I have recently submitted to the major networks for development. Brace yourself – some of them are a bit Chris Morrissy, if you get my drift…

First up, the reality shows. You can never have enough of these, as a brief flick through the Radio Times will hammer home to you:

Touch The Coma Girl, a spectacular live 24-hour event in which members of the public, desperate for much-needed organ transplants, must remain in constant physical contact with a brain-dead road accident victim in otherwise excellent health.

A Mummy For Matthew, in which a young boy with severe behavioural problems is placed with a different foster family every week. In the first episode, Matthew meets recovering heroin addict Janette and her on-again/off-again boyfriend Garry. Will Matthew form that crucial bond with his ‘mummy of the week’ or will the presence of Garry’s boisterous Staffordshire terrier Moatie trigger one of his seizures? Next week, Matthew is introduced to needy fund manager Lorraine and her adopted son Ishmael, a former Rwandan boy soldier.

Inmate, Outmate, in which members of the public voluntarily trade places with patients from Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital, to see who copes better. In week one, accounts adviser and father of three Chris submits to a programme of electro-convulsive therapy and pig tranquillisers, whilst delusional sociopath Ewan takes Chris’ family to the local garden centre, with unpredictable results…

Fame Battalion, in which a selection of former soap stars, barely literate sportsmen, disgraced politicians and reality whores are taken through the gruelling process of basic training by the Royal Anglian Regiment, before shipping out for a tour of duty in Afghanistan. In week three, the stars are tasked with policing a known hotbed of insurgents some 20 miles from the nearest support, if they are to earn enough stars for a fresh supply of ammunition and clean water. Watch out for Coleen Rooney’s hilarious attempts to conduct a perilous house-to-house search with only a dysentery-stricken Joe Pasquale for back-up.

Dancing With Tears In Their Eyes, in which a group of people with terminal illnesses compete in the intense world of ballroom dancing. Each week, we follow them through the highs and lows of learning new steps, bonding with their professional partners, undergoing chemo and periodically expiring in mid-tango. As a panel of bitter old choreographers, rampant egomaniacs, preposterous euro-twats and Dr Hilary Jones pronounce judgement on the performances of the increasingly gaunt and hollow-eyed contestants, we give you the audience the opportunity to vote which will receive a much needed ‘stay of execution’ in a hospice to rebalance their meds, and which will be forced to literally ‘dance till they drop’.

The Madrassa, in which a selection of disaffected youths, credulous buffoons and religious nutbags attend a hardline Islamic education camp somewhere in western Pakistan. In week two, former wiccan Becky is beaten for not lowering her eyes before the men, and Kieran, now Jabalah, studies the processional route of the forthcoming Royal Wedding.

Next, some new additions to the already saturated quiz-show market…

The Vanilla Quiz – 30 minutes of questions fired directly at the viewer, delivered by an unseen voiceover. No rounds, no bonuses, no contestants, no prizes. The only concession to tension is a heartbeat-style sound effect, played in the background, which gradually increases in tempo and speed as the end of the quiz approaches. Viewers like me, irritated by the ‘thinking aloud’ padding of Eggheads or the embarrassing ‘getting to know you’ bits in Mastermind, will welcome the introduction of 100% uncut quizzage.

The Slightly Different Quiz – basically the same as Fifteen To One or The Weakest Link, but whenever someone gets a question wrong, the contestant to the left must slap them full in the face. In the final head-to-head round, the quizmaster, armed with a dead halibut, stands directly in front of the two finalists, delivering a teeth-loosening two-hander for every wrong answer. The winner gets to take the fish home. A TV must for clever clogs, sadists and anglers everywhere.

Just to switch over to the wireless for a moment, here’s my idea for a disappointing 6:30pm Radio 4 situation comedy series. It’s called It Takes Two To Quango. It probably revolves around the chalk-and-cheese relationship between two dull and unoriginal sub-Yes Minister characters. It will feature otherwise reputable actors unwisely choosing to perform the sort of light comedy that should have been compassionately euthanized in the 80’s.

And finally, inspired by our recent New Year’s hols in the West Country, here is my latest drama submission for your approval: Jessie Wallace plays a single mum struggling to survive as Devon’s least likely call-girl. It’s called Westward Ho’. I think it will do well in the prestigious Doc Martin slot.

Happy viewing.

Bat-Frak!

Do you know what really bugs me? A personal appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. That stupid banner takes up half my laptop screen with his stupid beardy face and sparkly crinkly eyes looking like he's about to cry. Has anyone actually clicked on it? Yeah, yeah, it's probably a request for donations or something, I get that. But still, it's gumming up my Wikipedia use, dammit. So if somebody could please just click on the appeal, send Jimmy a large amount of money and get him to take his whiny-assed appeal somewhere else, I'd be terribly grateful.

Do you know what else annoys me? Websites that demand ever more abstruse password protocols. It's got me so annoyed that I've used the word abstruse without even bothering to check what it means. It could mean 'the act of squeezing one's buttocks far too hard' for all I know. I just don't care anymore. But it just bugs me that just when I've managed to get all my secure logons to use the same password (yes, yes - I know...) 'made up of at least nine characters, one of which must be numeric', some new-fangled johnny logon pops up and says my password must now have two numerics, or one upper-case character, or two numerics AND one upper-case character. I mean, Gordon H. Bennett, how'm I supposed to keep track of which sites use which password? Good thing I have them all written down in a secret blog in tiny invisible letters...

But here's what's really, really getting my goat right now, and not just getting my goat - it's jolly well laying a cunning trap with an attractive lady-goat doll ('Realistic Udders!'), bashing it over the head with a frozen chicken, driving it to Land's End and throwing my goat in the sea - what's getting it, right, is bloody platform games. Yeah, topical eh? Oh yeah.

Ok, so picture the scene: it is 1984. You have a BBC microcomputer, not a pikey Spectrum, coz your parents have aspirations for you, and you're playing this game. It is called Frak!

In Frak! you control Trogg, a caveman armed with a yo-yo (obviously), whose mission is to run, jump and climb along a sidways-scrolling world, populated (as far as I recall) solely by Big Freak Pink Things perched on platforms suspended in an endless cyan limbo. It's a bit like how Steve Ditko drew the Dark Dimension of the Dread Dormammu:

Perhaps it is an homage. Perhaps not. No matter.

Anyway, despite Frak!'s clearly rich storyline and immersive characters, it used to wind a fifteen-year old Yours Truly right up. Why? Because in order to get Trogg from Point A (the left hand side of the screen) to Point B (the right hand side), you had to get him to run and jump just so, with absolutely no margin for error. Sometimes you had to edge him pixel by pixel right to the edge of a floating platform before pressing Right Arrow + Space at exactly the same time, or by Hoggoth, he'd plummet to a sanity-defying doom somewhere in the bright blue depths off the bottom of the screen. I mean, you had to have the coordination of a microsurgeon with the hands of a blind hairdresser to complete the bloody game. Ooo, it made me mad.

And Frak! was far from an rarity. Every other game in those days was a platform game (they're probably called platformers these days, but I'm old and rarely watch those 'We got an improbably hot young lady to review Assassin's Cry Of Honor for you' television programmes that seem to crop up on Channel Five of a morning). I seem to recall Killer Gorilla (the Beeb's copyright-dodging version of Donkey Kong) and Manic Miner being particularly demanding in the hand-eye coordination area. And these were the days when you generally just got three lives and then you had to start all over again. From the beginning! No namby-pamby 'Just keep on respawning and replaying until you pass out from lack of food or have to jump up with a cramp in your foot' modern games, oh no.

Bloody annoying, that's what they were. I never did get Miner Willy past Eugene's Lair and his predatory, roving khazies:

Sooo, fast forward twenty five mother-loving years to 2010. In a moment of incaution, a far older (and prettier) Yours Truly wanders into an HMV shop unchaperoned, and a wouldn't you know it, a copy of Batman: The Brave And The Bold (for the Wii) leaps into my hand, just as my debit card leaps onto the cashier's counter. That's just how it happened. How could I resist? It looks just like the recent cartoon of the same name, has simple, well-rendered graphics (do we still call them graphics?) and bears the following promise 'Play through the exciting terrain of the DC Universe in this side-scrolling action thrill ride as you solve puzzles, fight dozens of foes, discover new foes, save the day and see if you truly have what it takes to be a superhero!'

And you can summon Aquaman to make a subsea whale attack - what's not to love?

(As far as I can tell this isn't actually a scene from the game, but hey - it's got Plastic Man and Gorilla Grodd in his special mento-hat!).

The first level of the game's great - you play Batman and/or Robin as they punch, jump and swing through a sideways-scrolling Gotham City, hot on the heels of an unidentified cat-themed villain. And the best bit? Every time the Caped Crusaders get to an obstacle they can't jump over, like a yawning chasm between rooftops, all you have to do is press the '-' button and they automatically throw out a grappling Bat-Line and swing across. Which is very cool. You get all the grooviness of Batman navigating across a dizzyingly vertiginous cityscape, and none of the fiddliness of pressing Forward ('Right on your Wii nunchuk') and Jump ('the B button on your Wiimote') at just the right time in just the right spot. That would be madness, of course; an irksome nigglance that we have long since abandoned to the back room of gaming history.

Until we get to the second level, and I'm playing Blue Beetle with his cute little flappy beetle wings. Surely he should be able to make any leap that Batman can make with his Bat-Line? Apparently not. Poor Blue Beetle - how often did he fail to make the all important leap up the cliffs of Science Island in pursuit of Grodd's rogue primates? Too bloody often, that's how often. Ditto Hawkman in level three (honestly, who decided to put Hawkman - a man with whacking great hawk wings on his back - in the level set almost entirely in underground tunnels? Tch.) and even more so with Green Lantern in level four - there are whole sections of this one where you have to run and bloody jump just right to clamber up platform after misbegotten platform. And to add insult to injury, they take Batman's Bat-Line away and give him some lame-ass Bat-Wings that allegedly enable to him to jump further. Allegedly.

Holy retro-gaming conundrum, Batman - all I want to do is play a nice simple game with pretty pictures and not too many controls. Something that plays to my gaming strengths (i.e. hammering the attack button continuously for two to three hours). But instead I've been sold Bat-Frak! The 25th Anniversary Edition. And he doesn't even have a yo-yo.

Backfarts and Ocular Horror

Here's something that annoys me: novelty Google banners these days. Like today, it's Robert Louis Stevenson's birthday, but the banner in no way represents a cunningly Stevensonised version of the letters G O O G L E. Oh no, not these days. Now it's just a long picture of pirates 'n' shit. Okay, so the compass symbol could pass for an O, but no way is Long John Silver there on the left a G, not to mention the cliffs, the ship and pile o' treasure. They're just taking the piss now. They're like "Oh, we're Google, everyone knows that we usually put the word Google in the middle of the screen. We can just put what the hell we like there now and everyone will still know what it means. We could stick up a plate of spaghetti, a dead cat, Anthony Eden, a map of Namibia, a helium atom and a green lobster, and they'd still be OK with it. We rule the world. Nobody uses Yahoo anymore anyway."

Well that's what I think.

You should know that I've just finished squeezing soap bits. I'm sure you know what I mean by that - those skinny slivers of handsoap (for those of you who haven't switched over to pump-action space goo) that are too small to use on their own anymore, so you end up trying to squish them in with all the other older soap bits that you've prepared earlier, in the hope of fusing them into one mega-combo-soap-zord. Doubtless other people just throw their slivers away, or else actually manage to use them up individually - massaging each mono-filament soaplet into their hands/body/companion with a manual skill I just don't possess. At any rate, I was just now squeezing soap bits together in one fist, really bearing down on those mothers, and when I released my grip, they were all squooshed into one. It was just like when young Clark Kent compressed a lump of coal into a diamond. Just like it. I just thought you ought to know that that is how I roll.

And to prove I am an adept multi-tasker, you should also know that not only am I typing this here article, I'm also dunking as many digestives as I can before Herself gets back home and admonishes me for ruining my diet (again), and I'm running an ohrwurm of a tune constantly through my head on an infinite loop. Said tune is a variation on Ronnie Hazlehurst's timeless 'Blankety Blank' theme tune, but instead substitutes the name 'Bethany Black', a comedian I saw last night. She said I'd be humming her name all the next day, and she was right. Actually, here in my head it keeps sliding into 'My United States Of Whatever' and Eminem's 'Without Me'. It's quite the mash-up you know. Now would be an ideal time for me to commit a crime and then undergo questioning by telepathic police. They'd get nothing.

And another thing - I had my nails redone yesterday and I've just realised that the colour I chose is exactly the same as my new(ish) car, Elwood. Holy serendipitous silicon gel, Bruce. I think this is rather cool, though many may see it as hopelessly sad. Those critics would doubtless have felt justified had they seen me in the car park half an hour ago, holding my hand palm down against the driver's door, admiring the chameleon-like blending of nail into bodywork. I felt like some kind of Transformer. Does this edge me into Legally Blonde chihuahua-in-a-handbag everything-must-coordinate territory, or is the fact that I colour-matched against a blood red Chrysler that looks like it was left over from the set of American Graffiti nudge me into some sort of blokey car obsessed midlife crisis zone? I am, as ever, a bit confused.

Here's a thing - why am I unable to resist the siren call of an 'Updates Available' icon on my desktop? That little yellow shield's been staring up at me from the bottom right hand corner of the screen for the last 15 minutes, but I've finally given in and clicked on 'Express Install'. Look at my poor old hard drive thrash away. That's my fault that is. I couldn't wait.


Anyhows, there was something I was going to tell you about today, and that's my trip to the tanning place. I say 'tanning place' but it's actually a beauty salon that happens to have a couple of ultraviolet light tanning booths; one stand-up (like the Quantum Leap accelerator) and one lie-down (like a hyper-sleep chamber from a deep-space adventure fillum). Said tanning place is manned at all times by one or two dolls. Dolled by one or two dolls, I suppose. The dolls are young, female, skinny, mahogany hued, blonde, oh so blonde, and adorned with eyelashes the weight and density of fruitbat wings. It can be quite intimidating to slob in there with no make-up and hair waging its usual civil war between the straw-like split ends and the greasy roots, laden down by a collapsing third-time round Tesco's plastic bag, only to be greeted by one or both of these brown and yellow fembots, wafting the air into my lumpen face every time they blink.

As usual, signing in at the tanning place includes me lying about using some sort of 'special cream' that they banged on about when I first went in there. Nowhere else goes on about special cream, so I suspect it's a little money spinner they've come up with, if they can gull the customers into shelling out for some sort of exotic guava-jollop to enhance the natural bronzing effect of two-dozen megawatt purple tubes blazing away at your naked flesh from a distance of 6 inches. Not me though - I just smile, pat my bag suggestively and mumble that I've brought my own. I shall develop my melanomas at my own pace, thank you very much.

Thence to the lie-down tanny capsule thing. First off, it's in a sealed room. You'd expect it to be in a room of course, not alongside the people getting their nails done, but I mean that the room itself is sealed, in some sort of air-pressurey, eerie whistling noise, can't-open-the-door sort of way. I think it's something to do with the extractor fan or the cooling unit from the lie-down capsule thingy. But it's a bit weird all the same. You can hardly wrench the door open while the fan's going, which would make it a good place to trap a particularly feeble vampire, I suppose.

The capsule itself, unlike most others I've used, is contoured to the shape of the human body, not flat as a board. This may sound great at first, but there are a couple of problemettes. The first is that it's bloody hard to climb into, coz you have to sort of roll into it and down into the depression all in one go without bashing your head on the enormous coffin-like lid that never opens up enough. It's even worse trying to get out afterwards and can be a little panicky, but this may be because I have enfeebled limbs from years of steadfast and regular non-exercise.

The second problemette is actually quite fun but a little naughty. I discovered, quite by accident mark you, that you can make the most amazing backfarts by raising and lowering one's body off and back down onto the contoured surface of the tanning capsule thingy. It must be the concave shape of the capsule. Or else my flabby and enfatulated back. Whatever the acoustic causes of this phenomenon, the sound is really quite remarkable. I'd liken it to a copulating hippopotamus. Disgusting you might say, but think on: that regular raising and lowering motion is doing wonders for my lower abdominals and general core stability. It's like my very Ab Circle Pro(tm).

Before we leave the tanning place, I'd like to draw your attention to one final thing. It's a poster on the wall of the worryingly airtight tanning room. The poster was issued by Eye Pro, the makers of the hilarious little tin foil stickers known as Wink-Ease that you can use in place of protective goggles whilst undergoing the ultraviolet treatment. The poster is one of those health and safety jobs, warning of the dangers of unprotected eyes being exposed to UV, or of using contaminated eye-protection (manky Wink-Eases I imagine). I borrowed Herself's digital camera so I could show you a bit of the poster. This is conjunctivitis or pink eye:

Great Krypton, is that horrific or what? Put me right off my digestives, I can tell you. It's odd to see such outright foulness in a place dedicated to beautification and the employment of bat-lashed dolls, but I guess they're obliged to warn you of the dangers.

I wonder what the rest of the person's face is like? It might be quite pretty. They might be smiling ruefully at their foolish snubbing of the eye-safety guidelines. They might have really good hair to make up for the ocular horror betwixt nose and ear. We shall never know. I am minded, and I believe I am one of the few people living still to be minded of anything, of those other health and safety posters we've probably all seen over the years - leprous feet on the chiropodist's wall, receding gums on the dentist's wall, possibly snaggled genitals on the fertility clinic walls, I don't know. But wouldn't it be great to collect all those posters together into a catalogue of medical horrors? Splendidly Victorian. I'd like to pick out all the really ghastly body parts from each poster, and then photoshop them all together into one supremely ruined body. Blasphemy, you say? No, science!

(Be grateful I resisted the urge to blurt out She's alive! Ah, too late.)

So yeah, that's the tanning place.