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I saw two pieces of televisual recrement yesterday which pissed me off beyond belief: first off was Tony Blair on The Daily Show, which saw the former Prime Minister doing what he always did best, i.e. saying absolutely bugger all but in a way bound to make people love him a little bit more. Jon Stewart was at his most accommodating, gushing all over Blair about how nice it was to meet a world leader willing to talk to him, without realising that he might as well have been talking to a grinning cardboard cut-out of Blair accompanied by a mix-tape of Blair’s most repeated excuses for his actions in the Middle East.

If you watch the second half of the interview, you’ll notice that all Blair really says is that “of course it’s a very complicated situation” again and again but occasionally listing a few foreign places to lend his niddering responses the feeling of authenticity. Of course the audience love him because of his quaint British accent and the fact the he actually deigned to go on the show in the first place, but he couldn’t have had an easier ride – shame on Jon Stewart for wasting the opportunity.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, I then sat through Rick and Steve: the Happiest Gay Couple in All the World, which is an animated comedy about gay lego men and therefore seemed quite promising, but which it turns out is the most disgustingly homophobic thing I’ve seen since Paul Daniels. The first episode introduced us to gay couple Rick and Steve, one of them effete and girly and the other camp and horny, who liked eating quiche and were desperate to have a threesome. We also met their lesbian friends, one of them butch and manly, the other camp and boyish, who hated men and were desperate to have a baby. Oh, and even more hilariously, an older gay man with HIV (that famously laugh-out-loud-funny condition) who was wheelchair-bound (as if the virus on its own wasn’t funny enough!) and took lots of pills, along with his toyboy who was – wait for it – effete and girly. And quite camp.

And so the whole olid affair unfolded, in a story that involved more gay people of different stereotypical varieties and a proliferation of jokes about wanking, semen, cottaging, penises and debilitating viruses. It beggars belief that such a thing could possibly exist in the 21st century – if it was about any other minority it simply wouldn’t be on television. It’s impossible to come up with any kind of example without actually being offensive, but Abdul and Imraan: the Happiest Muslim Couple in All the World is the kind of level we’re looking at, and it would naturally be about bearded men who abused their wives and were determined to blow up a building. Yes – ouch. Yet somehow when it’s about homosexuals it gets on the telly.

What is it about gay people that’s different, then? I’ll tell you. It’s that they make this programme themselves. Yup, that’s right – Rick and Steve are the product of a gay television network, Logo, who were apparently keen to treat their LGBT viewers with a series which “satirized (sic) all aspects of gay life”.

All aspects of gay life??? So that’s wanking, threesomes and HIV, then? Oh, and quiche.

Right wing conservatives can put their feet up; there’s no need for them to perpetuate gay stereotypes and whip up homophobia, gay people are doing it perfectly well themselves.

The other day I dug up a sketch I’d written back in 2000 or so. I’m not 100% certain whether it ever saw the light of day; it’s possible that Tori and I performed it at some point. What’s notable about it is the bit I seem to have bolted onto the front before the sketch gets going. This is fairly high up on the list of sins of sketch writing, as it stops you figuring out what the hell’s going on in the crucial opening few seconds, but even more strange is that it doesn’t sound like my writing at all. If I’d read it in any other context I’d have sworn it was written by John Finnemore:

George	Ah, Emily – I was wondering, could you pop in here for a moment?
Emily	Certainly, George. Do I have time to put the cat out?
George	I would imagine so, Emily. Why don’t you have a go, and I’ll tell you if you’re running out of time.

This occurred to me just now, while walking round Sainsbury’s failing to avoid buying discounted donuts, and it rang a bell. A few weeks ago I was with some friends in the pub, and one of them had to berate me for being macho. Which I’m not. It took me a fraction of second to realise that my uncharacteristic behaviour was pretty much just aping one of Aaron Sorkin’s characters from Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip.

If you notice my doing anything like this in the future, please tell me to stop. I do genuinely have a personality all my own, and it isn’t macho.

“We were wondering which of your characters you least want us to bring up!” I told Sir Derek, who chucked heartily.

“Probably the Master from Doctor Who!” he said.

“But…” I said, my mouth running away with me for such is the effect of cheap white wine, “we were all so disappointed when you regenerated!”

“I know,” he agreed, “I regenerated into John Simm.”

“Well, we all wish you hadn’t,” I informed him.

“Me too,” he nodded. “I’m hoping he’ll regenerate back into me.”

Heartening words indeed to a Doctor Who fan. And at at least I didn’t mention his role as a camp undertaker in Nanny McPhee.

Alex Epstein, unsurprisingly making a lot of sense.

MoveOn.org’s advert for Obama. Finally, they’ve done something that doesn’t make me cringe.

On the train home last night I leafed through a copy of the Evening Standard and noticed the following article on page 3:

That’s right, they’ve devoted a full page to a story about how nothing happened yesterday morning when the CERN scientists turned on the Hadron Collider in Switzerland. The photograph has the dramatic caption “Time bomb”, going on to qualify it with “passers-by join Evening Standard writer Terry Kirby as Big Ben strikes 8.30 today and nothing happens”.

Indeed, the Terry Kirby goes into a great deal of detail about how nothing happened. Not only that, but he seems to have been the only person around who thought it might. “In Parliament Square, as Big Ben counted down the minutes to what could have been the Big End, there was no sign of nervousness among the citizens of London.” No, really??? You mean people weren’t standing weeping, or huddled together like in the end of the world sketch from Beyond the Fringe? What were they thinking?

The story gets even more wilfully undramatic as it goes on: “Lithuanian building worker Silvester Sutas, 30, when asked if he was waiting for the end of the world, replied: “Actually I’ve been waiting to go to work on a building site”.

It is clear by this stage of the article why Terry Kirby is not writing Hollywood screenplays, if not exactly why he’s still working as a journalist – although perhaps the Evening Standard is a special case, where the journalists are it seems encouraged to fill a lot of space saying nothing. Yet perhaps Kirby hoped there was going to be a story, maybe even the biggest ever – you can sense a great deal of disappointment in his final sentence, “It was going to be another normal day in London”. And it has to be said that if Terry Kirby turned up at Parliament Square hoping to write about the end of the world, it does show rather a lack of foresight.

I had ever such a good time at the Proms last night, listening to an inspired combination of Ralph Vaughan Williams (favourite of Classic FM listeners), Holst (his Planets Suite, almost certainly in Classic FM’s “top essential classic classics of all time” list), and as the filling in this Classic FM junky sandwich, Xenakis – who pretty much epitomises the phrase “plinky plonky music”. Although in this case it was more like bashy crashy music, as six very talented percussionists thrashed the hell out of an array of big bits of metal.

As the audience reviews show, the reaction was divided between those who pretended to like it because they think that’s the cultured thing to do, and a rather bigger demographic who were horrified by the affront to their senses (to somebody on a diet of smooth classics at teatime the work was basically the aural equivalent of hardcore pornography).

Anyway, I’m a real life working composer now so I can say what I like: it was bollocks. Brilliantly performed, noisy and occasionally exciting bollocks for sure, probably unbelievably clever bollocks as well knowing Xenakis – but bollocks nevertheless, and although it didn’t irritate me as much as smooth classics at teatime, I did find the whole thing rather an ordeal.

Still, I’m delighted it was in the programme and it’s just the kind of thing the Proms needs. Listener Nicholas Sayer (who needs to learn the “i before e” rule) may claim “peices like this […] will only generate polite applause”, but he couldn’t be more wrong – I don’t think I’ve ever seen a piece of music at the Proms whip up such a reaction, at least outside the Last Night. My companion (who was of the opinion that we should spend the whole section of the concert in the bar) and I entertained ourselves by counting the number of people making a dash for the exit during the work; we counted 134. That’s enough people to fill the Wigmore Hall. (Maybe that’s where they all went, desperate for a fix of Schubert or something more palatable.)

It’s a super way to spend a concert and I highly recommend trying it next time there’s a piece of Xenakis at the Proms, or maybe Stockhausen or Nono. You can decide on other things to count as well – we didn’t really start counting “number of times one piece can go up and down a xylophone” until too late in the movement, but we did count Gratuitous Lighting Changes: 4 (they’re clearly taking the previously mentioned gay clubbing approach to ambience to a new level) and Cries of Despair: 1.

That’s right, a man let out an agonised scream about five minutes into the concert (I’m sure you’ll hear it if you listen again). And that surely is another sign that it was something rather special.

60th Primetime Emmys coming up (and you can vote for a couple of categories) – but am I the only person who thinks the logotext makes it look like “EMMYs: Goth Primetime Emmy Awards”?

Cut down 9 lbs of stomach fat every 11 days by obeying this 1 tiny rule

In case you aren’t aware, that’s a calorie shortfall of around 2800 kCal per day, or more than you eat. So the “1 tiny rule” is: eat nothing. Or possibly: buy a knife.

The world’s first USB-charged vibrator disguised as lipstick is now available. Which is, I guess, great (although I’m not sure how subtle plugging a lipstick into your laptop is – we probably need a new disguise for vibrators). But why can’t it also have remote control via the USB connection? Nothing complicated is required, and given the Nabaztag is only about twice the price, it should be possible to do it for under fifty pounds. USB control would make it pretty easy to connect up for teledildonics, at a comparable price to the Televibe, and cheaper than the Sinulator. But, you know, easier to write software for.

And it’s called Mia. Aww, how cute.