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He’s talking right now on Newsnight about the BBC’s report on Wednesday about Afghanistan, where they interviewed leaders of the Taliban. Fox is claiming that this is not objective reporting; he seems to think that objective journalism only contains information from and statements by the side that the prevailing opinion believes is in the right.

This is, quite simply, utter crap. If he believes it, he is the worse form of complete fucking idiot. If he doesn’t believe it, he’s a political weasel who deserves screen coverage less than those he is seeking to censor.

Quite simply, we cannot sustain a democracy unless the public has a reasonable amount of information to go on. That includes statements that may be complete lies, from people who may be our utter, implacable, enemies. The people must make these determinations: they cannot be pre-decided by people like Liam Fox. Any belief that this is not the case is arrogant, and a worying public admission. That it is not unexpected is perhaps the most searing indictment of our current political system.

Liam Fox does not deserve his seat in parliament. If David Cameron supports him, he does not deserve the leadership of his party, and his party certainly does not deserve to form a government.

That this leaves us with the option of an immature party that cannot decide whether to stick by its beliefs or to chase votes, and a party split by the already-made decision to ignore its history to cynical win victories, should be an indication of the mountain we have to climb to achieve any kind of real democracy in this country.

You might expect me to laud the BBC for sticking up for its reports here. I don’t simply because its reporters don’t have the balls to call Liam Fox on his unacceptable propaganda – precisely what he is complaining about from the other side.

While I’m here: Amnesty International’s campaign against online censorship.

Here at Talk To Rex, we don’t have any of those newfangled things that technology has brought us recently. Okay, so we’ve got a blog. But we don’t have digital telly – in fact, the other James doesn’t have a telly at all. As a result, I didn’t get to see Torchwood on Sunday, when it showed on BBC 3, but instead had to record it off BBC 2 on Wednesday night.

Just in case you were wondering why we hadn’t commented on it yet.

Anyway. I sat down with a very nice lamb dinner to watch the opening two episodes, and my main impression at this point is pretty good. The dark mood doesn’t feel forced, the two main characters feel real (the others are a bit more cardboard, but there is scope for them to develop and round out), I quite liked the music (which means it wasn’t too annoying or foreground), and although the design was sometimes a bit chunky (the Torchwood vehicle could be more cool, frankly) they’ve got the cool gadgets and they battle aliens.

But … but, but, but. There were a couple of bits that reminded me too much of the parts of Doctor Who where the writers can’t find an explanation for what needs to happen, so just come up with a magical explanation for it; that Russell T Davies turned Doctor Who from sci-fi into fantasy was grating, but for him to set up Torchwood as fantasy not sci-fi as well just suggests that he’s in completely the wrong job. And, although they manage to do more per episode than Doctor Who, it’s still a bit slow for my taste.

That’s pretty minor, though – but I do have to wonder whether we really need a low budget X-Files set in Cardiff.

The writer of Ecclesiastes says in chapter 4: “Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone?”

Well – actually there are quite a few ways of keeping warm alone. And whilst I applaud the suggestion of keeping warm by lying down with somebody – for it is certainly a good method and arguably the most fun – I offer the following alternative methods of keeping warm for those who are not in such a relationship during the winter months:

A radiator
An immersion heater
A blanket
A hairdryer
A wooly jumper
A dog or a cat
Or a hamster if you can’t afford the above (a big one)
A warm bath (more of a short-term solution)
Jumping up and down lots
Hugging your pillow and pretending it’s someone you like
Whisky

I’m sure there are others, but those are the main ones.

I’d like to congratulate Cambridge City Council – and presumably somewhere along the line Gordon Brown – for their most Machiavellian of brainteasers, the form you have to fill in to claim council tax benefit – a form which all but the most dedicated must surely toss aside, weeping “I’ll just pay the bloody money…”

Why is it, I wonder, that it is nowadays so easy to fill in a tax return, the form that enables you to pay tax (online forms, easy-to-follow instructions talking you through the different amounts you have to enter, an instant result telling you exactly how much you owe) when the form you fill in to claim back tax seems designed to trick you and befuddle you at every corner (demands for information about people you barely know, demands for documents you have long since lost or thrown away, approximately four hundred pages to fill in, each filled in with warnings that failure to do exactly as they want will result in a delay in the payment of your benefits and possible loss of British status)?

As an Oxbridge educated 27-year-old I just about made it through the taxing (ha ha) process of filling in the form, though I still have to get vital information from my long since missing Uncle in Australia and somehow fake bank statements that I got rid of at the turn of the century. And it took me two and a half hours to get this far, not including the bit where I hurled things at the wall and shaved off my eyebrows in frustration.

I’m thinking what a useful diversion these forms must be for pensioners, though. It’s not like they have anything to fill their hours, after all. And I understand the pension form itself is rated “IMPOSSIBLE!!!” on the sudoku scale.

Apparently over a third of all pensioners never claim it at all. I mean – how stupid can you get??!!

I don’t really have anything to add to what James has written. Catherine was always friendly, keen and a pleasure to work with and be around. She will be much missed.

Two weeks ago Peter Jackson announced “I’m getting a little bored with films”.

This should at least enable him to empathise with the people who are unwillingly forced to sit through the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

On Friday afternoon I heard that Catherine Stevenson – or Cathy Steve, to use the name she was fondly given by the Uncertainty Division – committed suicide last week.

Her long-term boyfriend Michael Nabarro has written about her here.

Catherine was the technical director for our 2003 Edinburgh show, Out of Your Mind – since then she often willingly stepped in to do the lighting for shows I was doing, including the first trial run of The Rise and Fall of Deon Vonniget and most recently the London dates of Impromime. I was always immensely grateful for her quiet efficiency and for her ability to work wonders with tiny resources within very tight time limits.

She tended to keep herself to herself – which, especially in the frantic world of theatre, was one of the reasons why she was such good company. To walk into a venue and see her calmly putting gels in lights, or to get in from a day’s awful flyering and sit down on the sofa with her, never failed to have a soothing effect.

I had no idea that she was suffering from depression – as Michael says, she kept it very well hidden.

I know that I’m one of many people for whom the world feels a slightly colder, darker place without her.

Everything seemed so simple on Wednesday. Even quite good.

Somewhere along the line since then things have got terribly complicated, via miserable.

Coincidentally, on Wednesday we finally got a piano. Almost instinctively, I went into my student-learned habit of playing a Bach prelude and fugue before breakfast every day – starting, for simplicity’s sake, at the beginning of book one.

I say coincidentally, because on Wednesday (when things were simple) I was playing the C major prelude and fugue; yesterday’s miserable mood coincided with the slightly gloomy C minor, though I didn’t make the connection at the time. But this morning, as I struggled into the twentieth minute of playing the C sharp major fugue, where even simple chords like C major are relabelled B sharp major and F double sharp gets way too much attention, I thought to myself “what does this remind me of?” and then I thought, “oh yes – my life”.

If this trend continues, I’m in for a rather gloomy, old-fashioned time tomorrow, but things ought to be quite manageable on Sunday.

So. Did I really have a conversation with someone about how annoying Dan Mazer is, or did I dream it?

So…I’ve had something of an altercation with one of my churchwardens over some equipment that was “safely” left in the vestry and which was then sold, in the way that you don’t with somebody else’s stuff. The details are not important. Naturally, the altercation has been expressed entirely through polite, friendly, simmering unspoken resentment, because we’re Anglicans.

But I was discussing with Alastair a polite, simmering note I received yesterday from said churchwarden, and he told me the whole thing was outrageous and that if he was me he would “dip his pen in poison” and retaliate through the powerful medium of words.

I just smiled and shook my head, enjoying my aura of quiet grace.

This morning I went for a swim and with every length found my strokes becoming more aggressive and Alastair’s poison pen running paragraphs past my slightly sleep-deprived mind. When I got home I put them all into a letter, which turns the heat under “simmering” up to “boiling slightly” and does away with the friendly bit. I then angrily sent six or seven emails to various unrelated people in much the same vein.

So…er…basically, if you’ve received an unaccountably rude email from me this morning…well, sorry.

And if you read about any great rifts in the Anglican communion this week – that’s my fault.