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I wanted to like it. I really did. It’s narrated by Derek Jacobi, for crying out loud. But In The Night Garden is the most depressing piece of television I’ve seen since the-one-where-it-took-David-Tennant-three-hours-to-regenerate.

If you’re not in the know (and believe me unless you have children there’s absolutely no reason why you should be), this is a programme from Andrew Davenport and Anne Wood, producers of Teletubbies, who have said that they ‘wanted to explore the difference between being asleep and being awake from a child’s point of view: the difference between closing your eyes and pretending to be asleep and closing your eyes and sleeping.’ The way in which this pretentious concept realises itself on the screen is with a little girl in bed imagining a character called Igglepiggle sailing in a tiny boat (Igglepiggle is a wonky blue character who could pass for a foetal Teletubby). The stars turn into flowers and suddenly Igglepiggle is leaping through the Night Garden, which is essentially a wooded version of Teletubby land. (Clearly, even when exploring the world of dreams, Davenport and Wood have rather limited imaginations.)

And then… well, things just sort of happen. A train thing called a Ninky Nonk clatters its way over the turf, as Sir Derek giggles ‘oh no, it’s the Ninky Nonk!’ Some wooden animated characters called the Pontipines come out of their house one at a time, then dance to tinkly synthesised music. Some CGI birds on a tree nod their heads in time to some tinkly synthesised music. Igglepiggle comes on and Sir Derek sings (rather badly) to some tinkly synthesised music the following information:

‘Yes my name is Igglepiggle
Iggle-piggle-wiggle-wiggle-piggle,
Yes my name is Igglepiggle
Iggle-piggle-wiggle-wiggle-woo.’

And so it goes on. I only watched one episode, though in fairness it was half an hour long (which frankly explains why there’s so much bloody dancing in it – padding, it’s called) but I imagine each of the 100 episodes follows a similar pattern of the same disconnected occurrences accompanied by tinkly music and nonsense words. A sort of story did emerge after 17 minutes involving the loss of Igglepiggle’s blanket (he was too busy dancing to see where it went), but it’s fair to say that this programme is thin on narrative.

And indeed thin on content. The whole ethos of the programme, like Teletubbies, seems to be that the more random, gaudy things there are moving about on the screen, the more distracting it will be for the young people who have been put in front of it to stare gormlessly at a screen for half an hour (half an hour!). Hence the meaningless succession of things happening without any development of ideas – it’s as lightweight and brain-dead as a noisy action film about robots hitting each other.

Children’s television wasn’t always thus.

It’s hard to find an exact comparison in the television of yesteryear, since very little television was aimed at such a young age range (parents still had this old-fashioned idea of letting their children explore real things before plopping them in front of moving pictures; my friend’s mother used to sit him in front of the washing machine if he wanted colourful things moving about in front of him). The makers of In the Night Garden would possibly cite The Magic Roundabout as an influence, and one of their random colourful objects is a rotating pagoda (an homage? Or a rip-off?). But whilst I’m sure any toddler would enjoy the psychedelic visuals and lively characters of The Magic Roundabout, the subtlety of Eric Thompson’s erudite storytelling is probably better suited to a slightly older audience (some would say around the age you go to university…).

A better comparison would be the work of Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate, in particular Bagpuss and The Clangers. These were pioneering children’s programmes and superficially In the Night Garden owes a lot to them: repetition of patterns forms their basis, a variety of colourful characters populate their surreal landscapes, music underscores each event. And yes, there is even dancing in some of them.

So what is it that sets them apart?

Fundamentally, I think it’s this: they tell brilliant stories. Complex, interesting stories involving complex and well-rounded people with characteristics we can recognise in the world around us. Bagpuss is a programme about storytelling, about the tales told by a single object (a shoe, a wooden mill, a ship in a bottle) whilst The Clangers runs the gamut of human experience, from greed to vanity, from friendship to love, from childbirth to attempted invasion. Even when something really surreal happens (and it does), we see the Clangers finding solutions to problems and discovering more about themselves – nothing ever just happens. There was even a special edition of the programme about the workings of democracy.

And of course even very young children can follow this, it’s simply patronising to think that they can only deal with colour and movement and baby talk (‘eh-oh…’); children learn to read body language long before they learn to talk. And of course the other half of the target audience (the parents) are equally entertained on a different level. (I happen to be writing a substantial orchestral work celebrating Firmin and Postgate’s achievements, so I’ve been immersed in both programmes and, at 31 years old, am thoroughly enjoying them.)

In ten minutes, each episode of these programmes packs far more in, in terms of story, character and meaning, than In the Night Garden seems inclined to attempt in three times as long. These are characters with aspirations and dreams – it’s no coincidence that an episode of Bagpuss is about a flying machine whilst the dream of flight is one of the major obsessions of the Clangers. They are looking to learn, to develop, to better themselves. So music is not just there as an arbitrary accompaniment to their actions – in Bagpuss it’s the way the characters communicate and tell stories; the Clangers actually use music to fly! And when Small Clanger dances it’s not just for the sake of it (why are you dancing, Igglepiggle? I mean, why???), it’s always the result of a personal triumph.

It’s not just about the stories and characters, of course – the wit and style of these children’s programmes is arguably unsurpassed to this day. In fact, to list the reasons why Bagpuss or The Clangers or indeed Ivor the Engine and Noggin the Nog are superior is simply to run down the criteria of good television in general: the music is uniformly superb (not the plinky plonky crap that runs through In the Night Garden like a hernia, which is entirely written by one of the producers, though that’s not very impressive since he only managed to come up with one tune), they each have a distinctive look of their own (no Teletubby land lookalikes here) and they are underpinned by the comforting, nuanced narration of Oliver Postgate (better, in fact – and I can hardly believe I’m going to say this, but I am – better than that of Sir Derek Jacobi). And miraculously, they were all filmed for next to nothing in Oliver Postgate’s shed (In the Night Garden cost £14.5 million and still manages to look cheap). Ultimately, the Postgate/Firmin collaborations were made by people who really cared about their characters, about their audience, indeed about the future of humankind. In the Night Garden seems to have been designed primarily to shut kids up and sell merchandise.

So my heartfelt advice (nay, plea) to parents of children who have reached an age where the washing machine is no longer providing ample entertainment, is to invest in some DVDs; load up on Bagpuss, The Clangers, Ivor the Engine – you’ll thank me, and you’ll keep thanking me, because when your children become too old and too young to continue enjoying those DVDs, they will have grown up with the discernment to drag you along to sophisticated, well-made films at the cinema rather than brain-dead ones about robots hitting each other.

I see sacred cows being given an injection of new life, I see discussion about faith and God in all kinds of media; I see churches sending ordinary people into prisons and praying for people in the street to be healed and I see positive discussion and growing understanding between different faiths. Nowhere at all can I see religion being marginalised.

Just my point of view of course; but then, I don’t travel around behind bullet-proof glass.

It’s with dismay that I read that Cambridge University’s admissions tutors reckon getting rid of AS-levels would be a bad thing, an attitude which suggests to me that they haven’t had much contact with the students in their university in recent years. Dr Geoff Parks’ letter apparently assumes that schools are there to ensure that universities know who to admit; whilst I’m all in favour of fair admissions, especially in the state sector, the responsibility for this lies with universities – they shouldn’t expect the government to run their education policy simply to make things easier for them. What schools ought to be doing is educating people so that it’s worth sending them to university at all, and in this respect the AS-level has done nothing but damage. And it’s not, as Dr Parks seems to think, simply a matter of content; the very presence of AS-levels gets in the way of education, so whilst I find Gove’s ideas about education worrying in many respects, on the issue of returning to traditional A-levels I wholeheartedly agree with him.

It all comes down to what Gove describes as ‘the art of deep thought’ and what Dr Parks calls ‘intellectual development’, but in both cases that’s just a wanky way of saying ‘discovering who you are’. The lower sixth was the year in which I found I loved reading Dickens and poetry, started listening to music by composers I hadn’t heard of, took an interest in current affairs and, with teachers and pupils alike, debated and argued at great length the burning issues of the day. I started scripting and filming silly but competently crafted short films, started composing music with genuine sparks of imagination and wrote a colossal score for a school production of The Tempest, all of which are directly relevant to who I am and what I’m doing now, and all of which was possible because at no point did I feel the pressure of impending public exams. In many ways, it was a more formative year than any that I had at university itself.

I have long felt that teenagers have been cheated of that experience. I watched my younger brother and sister go through the sixth form with a constant presence of coursework whilst the same teachers who had thrown me into a world of creativity and discovery cut back on their extra-curricular activities and threw all the ‘messing about’ out of their lessons to cram factual information into tighter deadlines. I am fortunate enough to work in a school where every effort is made to keep the sixth form as varied and creative an environment as possible, which is largely the reason I have employment at all as a composer-in-residence, yet even I feel the pressure only one term into the lower sixth to hit deadlines and ‘achieve’ (in the least meaningful sense of the word) because these are, after all, the marks that may decide which universities offer you a place. When I do try to broaden pupils’ horizons I’m all too often met with the response ‘do I need to know this for the exam?’

It’s all very well for Dr Parks to suggest the AS exams could be sat ‘in mid to late June and no earlier’, as if that will make all the difference. If he knew how things work in schools he would realise that a public exam at the end of a school year, wherever it is scheduled, massively changes the way teachers approach a course. It requires them to be focussed from day one on syllabus and performance, rather than approaching subjects from the very different angle of education (in its broadest sense). What this means in practical terms is that, aside from the whole issue of students developing as people, certain key skills are overlooked, such as constructing arguments or even constructing a bloody essay. (I’d be interested to know how Dr Parks justifies his claim that performance in Cambridge exams has improved – as a Cambridge superviser I have observed the quality of written work in the first year slipping year after year, whilst as an examiner I have been urged to use ‘the full range of marks’ more liberally, so if Dr Parks has reached his conclusions about performance purely from the marks awarded I fear he is on dodgy ground.)

Meanwhile, the continual presence of public assessment forces schools to put limits on the extra-curricular activities they can allow both staff and students to get involved in, as there is suddenly a new pressure for everyone to be seen to perform. Schools will of course run mock exams to prepare students for AS levels, which means they are thinking about revision before they’ve even completed a term. So, most sadly, with the presence of a public exam at the end of one short school year, what could potentially be the relaxed and fertile arena for development that I enjoyed and which produces well-rounded students with varied interests who are capable of complex and mature thought and indeed of writing a decent essay, becomes a pressured machine for churning out results.

Whether or not you call it ‘the art of deep thought’, it’s a big price to pay to keep admissions tutors happy.

I dreamt that I was at a big dinner party hosted by Peter Sellers, who actually came round to each table himself to construct the dessert. I assume it was of his own design as I’ve never heard of the like before, so I shall share the recipe:

Take two pieces of crustless toast and sandwich in between them a generous helping of demerara sugar mixed with dark brown soft sugar. (Peter Sellers mixed the sugars at the table, which was obviously particularly showy.)

On top of the two slices of toast, spoon a generous helping of a mixture of golden castor sugar and white granulated sugar.

Blowtorch the toast until the sugar is melted and golden.

Pour over a generous amount of port.

Add strawberries and cream. (Peter Sellers left his guests to do this themselves, which seems sensible as they could decide exactly how many strawberries they wanted and adjust the cream ratio accordingly.)

Enjoy!

As I recall, I enjoyed it very much. Noël Coward, on the other hand, sat and laughed at Peter Sellers throughout the entire operation.

In the summer of 2007, when Gordon Brown’s government was full of youthful optimism, I enjoyed a brief period of being an on-tap minor celebrity political pundit, of the kind that populated Andrew Neil’s boat of drunk people on the BBC’s election night coverage (on a scale of Joan Collins to Armando Iannucci I’d say I was a poor man’s Martin Amis). This was because I happened to be playing Gordon Brown in a musical about Tony Blair which I also wrote, which in a delightful twist of media logic meant that I was automatically qualified to give interviews to broadsheets about current politics, appear on flagship BBC shows like Today and PM and Simon Mayo’s show on Five Live (though that day Simon Mayo was being played by Colin Murray, which I found hugely disappointing but my little sister told me was very exciting).

I say that like it’s ironic and I wasn’t really qualified to do any of it – in fact, I was about as qualified as anybody else who pretends to know what’s going on and considerably more qualified than Joan Collins so I don’t know why I’m being so apologetic. Indeed, one piece of political punditry proved me to be considerably more astute than the people who are paid to do it professionally.

It was an interview with the Daily Mail for, as I recall, an article about actors-who-were-playing-real-people, and the final question they asked me was ‘do you think Gordon Brown will call a snap election?’

Now, it’s hard to believe in the aftermath of an election that ended with Gordon Brown clinging weeping to the doorframe of number 10 and begging to be allowed to stay until September so he could organise a coalition government, but back in 2007 a snap election was considered something of a certainty which he couldn’t possibly lose. But I was playing Gordon Brown in a musical. In preparation for the role I had researched him, got under his skin, got inside his head, got inside his accent. I knew what he was thinking.

So I confidently told the Daily Mail journalist, ‘absolutely not. Gordon Brown has wanted this job for his whole life and he’s not a gambling man – he won’t risk losing power in a snap election, however unlikely it is that he would. He will cling to number 10 until the very last moment and only call an election when he is required to.’

The journalist sort of laughed at my youthful naivety and pointed out that everybody else disagreed with me, so I shrugged and said everybody else was wrong.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Infuriatingly, the Daily Mail only printed a brief paragraph about Nathan Kiley’s teeth, so evidence of my superior political wisdom was lost forever.

In order to ensure that this time there is record of our prophetic abilities when it comes to current affairs, we at Talk to Rex would like it known that, contrary to popular opinion, Cameron and Clegg’s coalition government is going to last well beyond six months. James Aylett gives it two years – I am prepared to optimistically predict an even longer innings.

I use the word ‘optimistically’ deliberately: if the coalition government works it will be a Good Thing for British Politics. It will show that a cabinet need not be made up of members of the same party, that progress comes through co-operation rather than confrontation and that the petty party squabbling that has come to dominate the House of Commons is as wasteful as all those other wasteful things George Osborne keeps going on about. In spite of the ideological chasm that theoretically separates them, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives are clearly determined to make big changes together to make the country a better place – and good luck to ’em, says I.

I have a number of friends who I know will vociferously object to all of that, and I willingly invite them to be as vociferous as they like. On this condition: in two years’ time, when our economy is more stable and our government still happily co-operating away, I will absolutely say ‘I told you so’.

More than any previous election – much more – the General Election last week was defined by strong, vocal public opinion. There are lots of reasons – the TV debates, the economic crisis, and most of all the internet. Social networking sites were awash with sweeping statements and twitter was atweet with downright irrational feeling on all sides (or does it just seem irrational in 140 characters?). For once, the negativity displayed by the public actually outweighed the negative advertising of the actual parties.

Which, on the whole, is no bad thing. If it got people interested, if it got people passionate, if it actually got people down to their polling station (and the turnout suggests that it did), then hurrah for the internet. If it meant people were better informed (a bigger if, certainly) then also hurrah. People exercising their democratic right to have a point of view and encouraging others to engage with politics is most definitely a Good Thing.

Only… some people haven’t realised that the time for that has now passed. That the election is over and, however thrillingly ambiguous the result, the role of the public has now ended.

So there are vociferous groups popping up on Facebook declaring that ‘if 100,000 people join this group then it proves David Cameron should never be Prime Minister!’ and hashtags across twitter presuming to tell Nick Clegg what decision he should make about a coalition – and Lord knows what’s going down on the BBC’s ‘Have Your Say’ pages, I haven’t dared to look. Invariably, the people who are being most militant in their anger are those who voted with the expectation of something completely different happening. They wanted an unexpected Labour win. They wanted an unlikely Lib Dem majority. And, ad nauseum, they are determined that the Conservatives can’t possibly have any say in the running of the country. Because it looks like the Conservatives might now have that chance, people are beating the walls and screaming ‘my vote has been ignored!’

Well, actually your vote was not ignored. (Unless you’re one of the people who got turned away at 10pm. But on the telly they all looked a bit mad and wet so maybe that’s okay.) Every vote was counted and, whilst the Conservatives didn’t get a majority government, they got the majority vote by quite some margin, which would be true even under proportional representation – so if anyone can make a coalition work, it’s them. You might not like it, but that’s democracy for you.

So 40,000 people on Facebook are against a Lib Dem coalition with the Conservatives. Why do they think that means they should be given special attention? They should try fighting all the people who voted for the BNP. The BNP lot would win – partly because they’d fight dirty, but mainly because there’d be over ten times as many of them. Getting together a-lot-of-people-what-reckon-the-same-as-me does not demonstrate that you should get your own way, and for the sake of keeping the BNP under control we must be extremely grateful for that.

By all means write to your MP about the unfair voting system. Sign petitions and go on a protest if you really care. There’ll probably be another election later this year so you can vote out your MP if they ignore you. We are privileged to live in a country where we are allowed and encouraged to make our voice heard in these ways. But the system requires a government with decision-making power to enact any such changes, and the people who are in the best position to form one are doing their best to make it work – and indeed, the grown-up way in which they’re going about it is the first positive sign that those of us who hoped for a hung Parliament were right about its possible advantages for our political system: it has forced parties to work together, to stop bickering and look for common ground in the hope of finding mutually satisfying solutions to problems. That’s democracy.

So we may end up with a Liberal/Conservative coalition – and if we do, it will be because a lot of very clever people have found a way to make it work. You might not like it, but using the internet to build up an artificial sense of majority feeling is not only undemocratic, it’s actually not your place. As John Finnemore pointed out in his excellent From Fact to Fiction play None of the Above, the reason we elect other people to do the governing is that they know a lot more about it than we do. Even with a hung Parliament, the decisions about what happens next lie with People Who Know More About It Than You. Do you think Nick Clegg’s going to see the #dontdoitnick hashtag on twitter and suddenly think ‘oh my GOD, there are people out there who think I shouldn’t do it – I’d better NOT do it!!!!’?

He’s not.

So sit back and enjoy the drama and complexity of what’s unfolding while the people whose job it is to sort out the mess get on with it. Unless you’re one of them, you’ve had your say – now go back to tweeting about more important things like Doctor Who.

Political commentator Iain Dale, who is rather too partisan to be able to commentate accurately on anything much, has written this naive little article on why a Hung Parliament would be a bad thing.

By extension we are, I think, meant to conclude that a Conservative government is the only desirable option, but let’s leave that aside and look at why his argument against coalition governments is so wrong.

First of all, as many commenters on his blog have pointed out, he had to look back nearly a century to find an example of an ineffective coalition, which is pretty willfully blind when it was a coalition government that saw us through the Second World War.

But even more glaringly, his example is useless for this reason: it is not 1922 any more. Lloyd George may well have been riding a two-headed donkey, but that image is simply not relevant any more because in principle the main parties all want the same (they all want to get us out of recession, blah blah blah), and where they disagree about how to achieve it they also disagree amongst themselves (nobody – nobody – seems to have a fucking clue what they’re talking about).

Iain says that with a coalition government ‘postponement and indecision become the order of the day’. It’s the order of the day now – have you seen how many bills there are outstanding compared to the ones this government has actually passed? Another comment on the blog says that a coalition government won’t be able to handle the economy; um… insert your own joke here.

Personally, I’m all for a Hung Parliament. I doubt it’ll be much different in reality to any one of the parties gaining power, but maybe, just maybe, everyone will stop bickering and ride that damn donkey in an actual direction for once. And even if they don’t, it’ll be highly entertaining watching them on all in the saddle.

In his latest novel The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman, who famously pissed off a lot of Christians with the His Dark Materials trilogy, continues his vendetta against Christianity (the source of which remains something of a mystery). And although I suspect this book is rather less commercial, it certainly seems designed to round up any of the Christians who weren’t pissed off before and make sure they’re properly pissed off this time.

It’s not that he re-imagines the Gospel with Jesus and Christ as two people, attributing all the nice things Jesus said to the first whilst Christ takes on the role of tempter/Satan/Judas; it isn’t even that ‘Christ’ fakes the resurrection after Jesus is crucified (though that does seem like the Easter equivalent of a big ‘bah, humbug!’). Most Christians have spent too long enjoying The Life of Brian and The Last Temptation of Christ to be upset by such petty blasphemy. The thing that’s much more likely to get them riled is the suggestion that in faking the resurrection to carry on Jesus’ work, ‘Christ’ creates the church – i.e., the modern church is the spawn of Satan.

Provocative though the wrapping paper is, I can’t help but think that this flogged horse is already a little bit dead. It’s an idea based on two tiresome fallacies: first, the Dawkinsian* [*Just made this term up. Am sticking with it.] idea that the church wields power and influences people, therefore the church is bad. It’s not an idea that stands up to much scrutiny – the government wields power, it doesn’t mean that government is bad. Every teacher in the country has influence of sorts – are teachers therefore bad? Indeed, Dawkins himself ought to be victim of his own criticism, given the numbers in which his books sell – and the same goes for Mr Pullman. It’s not authority that is bad, but the abuse of authority – something which the church clearly has to deal with and be aware of, but so must the government, teachers, Dawkins and Pullman. The solution is not to get rid of the church, or indeed the government, teachers, Dawkins and Pullman (and in the Big Brother house, I’m pretty sure the church wouldn’t be out first, either).

Second, giving ‘Jesus’ all the nice things to say rests on the naïve ideal that Christianity’s qualities hinge around its niceness – the patronising atheist view that what Jesus said was totally, like, yeah, but he didn’t have to go rocking the boat and upsetting people and getting crucified. Well, bollocks to that: Jesus said ‘love one another’, but love is not always the same as nice, as anybody who has loved knows. Jesus overturned ancient traditions and (literally) overturned tables in the temple to make his point, and people got upset when he said he was doing it in the name of God. It’s that ‘arrogance’ that Dawkins rails against now, and I’ll admit it’s pretty galling when an American President invades the Middle East and says God told him to; on the other hand, people got really pissed off about Martin Luther King (and Martin Luther, lest we forget) and I don’t doubt that both of them did God’s work, even at the risk of their lives.

Pullman’s conceit is very convenient, for sure: he’s taking the bits of Christianity he likes and giving them the stamp of approval, whilst continuing his tirade against the aspects of Christianity that annoy him. And wouldn’t we like to do that with everything? I’d happily divide Philip Pullman the fine children’s writer, who has continued a grand tradition of bringing good writing and weighty concepts to a young audience, from Philip Pullman the bore, whose The Amber Spyglass lets said weighty concepts take over and as a result is flabby, overlong and is a hugely disappointing finale to the first two books in the trilogy; Philip Pullman the humanitarian, who clearly has a set of laudable moral values and despises oppression in all its forms, against Philip Pullman the hypocrite, who will proselytise against C. S. Lewis’ ‘Christian propaganda’ yet serve up far more polemic material as children’s literature.

It doesn’t work like that. Jesus Christ, singular, left the church to carry on his work. His message actually doesn’t work without the church, and the church, by necessity, is staffed with human beings. Human tend to fuck up, and yes, when that happens in the church that’s bad. But some of them – a lot of them, God willing – get it right a lot of the time. It’s easy to lose sight of the day-to-day success of the church given that it doesn’t make much of a news headline, but it’s there. Try to take the Christ away from Jesus and you really are left with a very empty bath and a very angry Mother.

Similarly, we’re left with Philip Pullman, singular. A good writer? Sometimes. A good man? Well, he obviously means well. But we all know what the road to hell is paved with.

Pompous fiction, amongst other things.

Those of you who haven’t been paying attention to Sport Relief (which is like Comic Relief with more running and climbing) missed out on a series of what this article generously describes as ‘comic skits’ featuring Gavin and Stacey‘s James Corden.

In what the same article actually describes as a ‘hilarious skit’, Corden is seen with David Beckham wearing fluffy dressing gowns, preening, arranging flowers and sitting in bed crying at the video of Scott and Charlene’s wedding. The joke is that they’re gay.

In another ‘comic skit’, Corden is seen beating Andy Murray at tennis, returning the ball while doing other things like talking on his mobile phone and reading. The joke is that Andy Murray is actually really good at tennis.

In another, we see Corden running a warm-up for the Manchester United squad. The joke is… um… well, I haven’t actually worked out what the joke is in this one; I thought it might be that James Corden is a fat man doing a warm-up, but I think that’s kind of more his comedy gimmick than a joke in itself.

Yeah, it pisses me off that under the guise of charity we’re supposed to find these ‘comic skits’ funny purely because there are famous sporting people involved when none of them rise above the level of Jeremy Beadle’s Hot Shots (you remember, the show where the public sent in their home made films to the delight of the ex-grinning bearded loony) (in fact, I’m pretty sure I remember seeing the tennis skit on that); but I’ll have to live with it because it seems such skits are the staple of any charity event (though why people can’t just give the money to charity and watch proper TV beats me).

But I have genuine concerns about the undertones of the Beckham sketch, especially in a sports-related event basically aimed at children. I’d describe it as homophobic, except that it’s too shoddily put together to be deliberate – but what are we actually supposed to be laughing at, given the lack of actual jokes? Presumably it is simply the fact that two men are acting like they’re in a relationship (two men in a bed? but that’s crazy!!!) and are also being, like, really gay (flower arranging?! but they’re men!!!). Moreover, one of them is a famous footballer – and it’s not like a footballer could be gay, is it?!? I mean, that would be ridiculous!!!

So in the name of a good cause, let’s lazily reinforce a few stereotypes, both of gay people (like flower arranging, cry at Neighbours) and of sportsmen (actually really butch, actually never gay) and on those grounds put it out as a ‘hilarous comic skit’ for the delight of all children except the one who likes flower arranging because he’s going to go through the rest of his school life being called ‘gay’ and not being allowed to join in with games of football.

At the same time, James Corden is praised for his humanitarian efforts and lauded as a comic icon, which probably makes him good for another sketch show as far as the BBC is concerned, when it’s clear he hasn’t got an original idea in his head or a funny bone in his body. And before you protest that you love Gavin and Stacey: when people rave about Gavin and Stacey they invariably invoke Rob Brydon or some hilarious Welsh accent or this really funny thing that a Welsh person did. The Welsh bits are the Stacey bits. James Corden writes the Gavin bits. The Gavin bits aren’t funny.

How many James Cordens would it take to pay for BBC6 music? I’m thinking not many. And that, friends, is a fucking travesty.

Am I the only person that cares that BBC7 broadcast the final episode of the superb In the Chair with the last five minutes missing (and, oddly, substituted with the last minute of a different episode altogether)?

Certainly the BBC don’t care, as I emailed them about it and nobody replied.

And nobody else has mentioned it.

Yet this was the last five minutes of a murder mystery. Which presumably contained some final reveal, an unmasking, a pay-off. It is probably going to drive me mad.

Unless I buy the bloody thing on CD. Which is perhaps what the BBC intended all along.

Alright then, I’ll buy it. But when BBC7 is threatened with closure by the DG, I won’t be signing any petitions.