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This week’s edition of The Friday Thing has an article about BBC’s The Big Read which conjectures that everyone who voted for Ulysses (#78) actually mean the cartoon.

I actually have a copy of Joyce’s book, and I’m happy to say that it belongs in the part of my collection that I never intend to read, along with War And Peace, Frankenstein, and a book I bought in New York while making a film called How To Make People Like You In 60 Seconds Or Less (I’m pretty certain the first thirty seconds are “burn this book”).

The cartoon, however, I have fond memories of (refreshed of course by listening to the theme tune at TV Cream). Its playful adventures, with some vague moral dimension, were a lot more enjoyable than, say, Tom and Jerry. Plus, the nerd inside me kind of liked the not-terribly-subtle naming rip-offs.

Of course, by comparison with some of the stuff around now – indeed, most of the stuff around ever – Ulysses 31 is crap. But then so are most books, and perhaps this is where the BBC ultimately went wrong – who cares what books people like? Most of what’s read is rubbish, because most of what’s written is rubbish. The only way of feeling in the slightest bit proud of mankind’s artistic outpouring is to consider all of it, not just one medium. For every bad, there is a good – Henry Moore balances the Sistene Chapel, the Flumps makes up for Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch, and for every Mills and Boon novel used to build a motorway, we’ve got another bar of Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Is Lord Of The Rings truly the best book of all time? Of course not – but it’s useful, because otherwise we’d have to spend more time thinking about Universal Soldier III: Unfinished Business.

Metro has a fantastically incomprehensible headline today: “Teachers flunk test boycott poll”. After reading the article, I managed to figure out what the hell it meant, although it still wasn’t easy figuring out which words were verbs and which nouns. “Teachers flunk test”, I read, before being stumped by “boycott”. Maybe there’s a missing comma, I wondered: “Teachers flunk test, boycott poll” – but no, Mr Doug McAvoy of the NUT seemed pretty happy (if stolid and resolute) – his members aren’t failing any assessments.

The headline writer was clearly trying to be clever – ooh look, we can talk about teachers flunking things – but completely missed that the result firstly uses two pairs of words that mean similar things, and secondly has the object noun at the end of the sentence, after two auxiliary nouns. Why no one looked blankly at them while it was being typeset I have no idea.

The trouble is, it’s difficult to come up with anything significantly better. “Teachers’ test boycott poll flunked” has many of the same problems, but at least makes it clear what the verb is. “Teachers skip test ballot” is the best I can manage; it’s almost impossible to misunderstand, accurately describes what the article’s actually about – but isn’t nearly so zingy (although it does still get a teacher joke in). Any other attempts?

On the subject of headlines, The Sun today has “Klum to be mum”, which is simply beautiful.

There are many things I no doubt could – and possibly even should – write about the final capture of Saddam Hussein, following a six month campaign by the coalition forces to find an Identikit with a big enough beard.

Two things, however, strike me:

• Time crowed about the capture, along with everyone else, in an edition on the shelves today – but dated 22nd December. How easy it must be for them to have an extra week to get their front page done and still be bang up to date! Pity the cover looks shit, really.
• Saddam is denying he had WMD, which I’m inclined to believe. However he’s making matters worse for himself by denying that he did anything else wrong at all. Come the trial – in Iraq, in the Hague, wherever – I thoroughly expect him to still be denying having Kurds shot (no – they were dangerous traitors who would undermine the entire region), having Shias shot (no – more traitors), and having horrible gilted faux-rococo furniture in his palaces (who knows – perhaps they’re made out of traitors, to ensure the maximum damnation for their immortal souls?).

Perhaps there are some things we should never find out. The idea of knowing for sure that Time Warner have access to time travel is a profoundly worrying one.

Due to the strains and stresses of advent (a belated happy Third Sunday, everyone), I have been unable to do my ironing in front of Richard and Judy for quite some time. Thus I ended up yesterday with a large pile of shirts and David Suchet, who is, let’s face it, far better value for money than both Richard and Judy.

Beautifully filmed little episode of Poirot – but I have to admit I can’t quite see the repeated appeal of the programme. Because unlike most murder mysteries, Poirot’s cases are completely lacking in tension; the titular Belgian turns up after everything has happened, talks to people, then gathers them together and tells them what has happened. There are no lurking threats, just beautifully filmed inserts and perfectly costumed caricatures. For murder mysteries, they seem to me to be rather lacking in both murder and mystery.

All quite forgivable, though, when the wonderful Sophie Winkleman is involved.

Anyway. Poirot finished his case before I had quite finished my ironing, so with a few T-shirts to go I found myself watching – quite against my will, but every other channel seemed to be showing a home video of some old man having his teeth checked – The Top 100 Worst TV Moments Ever (Channel 4 – how many times must they be shamed on this website?)

This is my cue to make some wry observational comments about this hideously derivative kind of television. Except that they are comments that have all been made already. In fact, they were being made in the programme itself.

Worst TV moment no. 21 was The Docusoap, as exemplified by Driving School (how the docusoap counts as a TV “moment” is anybody’s guess…) The usual set of “need some extra money to buy Christmas presents” celebrities were on their sofas, talking with a complete lack of irony about how awful docusoaps were. One comedienne of repute (who shall remain Arabella Weir) regurgitated that old, shrivelled chestnut about how “one day they’ll be making docusoaps about making docusoaps”…oh please.

Did none of that postmodernist irony lead Ms Weir to consider that “celebrities talking about docusoaps in the Worst TV Moments Ever” could probably be included as one of the top 100 worst TV moments ever?

If they did that, it would probably also merit inclusion in The Top 100 Most Humorously Self-Referential TV Moments Ever. Using the self-referential “docusoap about a docusoap” comment in this context would give it a kind of triple-postmodernist-self-referentiality which would surely justify the rest of the programme.

Indeed, they could make a docusoap about The Making Of The Top 100 Most Humorously Self-Referential TV Moments Ever, and put the docusoap itself into the top 100, perhaps using a clip of them including the clip from The Top 100 Worst TV Moments Ever in which Arabella Weir makes a joke about docusoaps being made about docusoaps.

Or they could stop being so bloody rubbish and commission some decent television.

Christopher Biggins is, without doubt, a legend.

He represents a wonderfully rich, over-the-top theatricality, a direct descendent of Victorian music hall and an unusually generous brand of showbusiness. A kind of ongoing pantomime that knows how ridiculous it is, unlike the modern consumerist panto with its sports personalities and stars from Eastenders. Biggins comes from a far more honest tradition; a world away from mainstream celebrity culture (for more than one reason), you may not actually want to see him in anything but you get the idea that if you met him in a lift he’d greet you like an old friend and help you carry your shopping. Such is the unique spirit of generosity embodied by Biggins, I feel sure that he genuinely enjoys the panto tradition and everything it entails – it is not just a job, for him it is a lifestyle, and one that he embraces in its entirety.

This is never more evident than in the Cambridge Arts Theatre Carol Service. Every year, just before the Arts Theatre panto opens, its cast joins forces with a hastily assembled and under-rehearsed choir for a service of carols and readings. By all accounts this tradition was started by a panto dame many decades ago, and was recently resurrected by Biggins and friends. The event (broadcast on radio Cambridgeshire on Christmas Eve at 6pm, for people with a complete lack of discernment) is in many ways an awful assault on all the senses, but it seems to me to have a traditional Britishness about it that we are in danger of losing as society turns towards a new, clinical kind of awfulness, completely lacking in character (compare recent bland Christmas singles to the sheer outrageousness of Cliff Richard’s seminal Mistletoe and Wine).

I don’t know anything about this year’s production of Aladdin, but I do know that it’ll be hard pushed to reach the levels of ludicrous hilarity achieved in St Edward’s Church last night. I was in the hastily assembled choir, which was performing some of the worst Christmas music ever written (John Rutter’s Shepherd’s Pipe Carol for instance, and an unbelievably incompetent arrangement of Joys Seven, the work of Stephen Cleobury who clearly has even less idea of how to write choral music than he does of how to conduct it.) This music had been cleverly chosen to rival the campness of the panto cast, and the choir was encouraged to throw itself into the spirit of thing with as little taste as possible. This was a challenge that I eagerly met, aided by a brief stop in a public house just prior to the service.

Choir and congregation assembled, candles were lit; only then did the great man himself enter the church, resplendent in his red-faced, beaming glory, a huge red scarf around his neck and an irrepressible stage presence surrounding him like a cloak. He greeted the choir like old friends. He performed a sound check, explaining to everyone that he wasn’t going to do any of his reading because he didn’t want to spoil it for us. And there we sat, a slightly inebriated choir facing a front pew full of old queens, both giggling and whispering and openly pulling silly faces at each other.

Choirs are of course notoriously badly behaved. So are actors. We laughed at their readings, they practised their readings out loud during our carols. Highlights included Aladdin singing a horrendously kitsch song from the show; trying to beef up Good King Wenceslas by singing “like a cross between Bryn Terfel and Alan Rickman” (heat was in the very SODDDDDD); the evil Abanazer reading Dylan Thomas; a tenor singing “seven” when we got to the sixth joy of Mary (oh, how we laughed!); a different tenor singing “the sixth good joy that Mary had, it was the joy of sex”; a Vicar dressed as an Easter Egg.

But the most splendid performance of all was reserved for Christopher Biggins and his reading of The Night Before Christmas. My father used to read this to my brother and me each Christmas Eve, but the excitement of those nostalgic winter evenings was far superseded by the thrill of hearing the great Biggins deliver those immortal words. He even did a different voice for Saint Nicholas, making him sound like a randy cockney market stall holder from a Carry On film. “ ’appy Chrrrristmas to orl, an’ to orl a good-naaaht!” A good night indeed.

Today I am back in the Blairite quango and the events of yesterday evening seem like a distant, magical dream. Like the Darlings, I have returned from Neverland and adulthood awaits. And having just come across a company called “Incentivate” I’m somehow losing the will to live.

1. My new mobile phone is so ridiculously impractical it is surely a joke. A very beautiful joke, but nevertheless a complete pain to use.

2. Earlier, I flippantly remarked “there is as much fat in a cup of tea as there is in a chocolate”. Five middle-aged women simultaneously screamed “What?????” and nobody has made any tea all day.

3. “Glass blocks have just arrived in reception.” Eh?

4. Wham’s “Last Christmas” is not the cheerful song I assumed it to be. It sounds Christmassy, it has bells in it, they play it at school discos – it gives every illusion of being jolly. But I accidentally listened to the words in a shop the other day. “Last Christmas I gave you my heart/The very next day you gave it away” – that’s just horrible, and in medical terms extremely unhygienic.

5. I’m dying for a cup of tea.

As I might have mentioned, I’m currently working in a Government Office. Principally, what we do here is have meetings, discuss the issues raised in the meetings, drink coffee, mend the photocopier, organise more meetings, discuss wheelie bins, rearrange meetings which have had to be moved because of other meetings, and formulate plans for special meetings in which we will have time to deal with the things there wasn’t enough time to deal with in the meetings.

But we also occasionally deal with Government Grants, specifically for companies who have had a clever idea that they need money to develop. Things along the lines of a new type of fast-running tap, or a computer mouse which holds a pen so you don’t lose it, or a new type of toothbrush packaging. The general feeling at the moment (as far as I’ve been able to gather from the various meetings I’ve attended) is that the projects coming in are not really of the quality that they used to be; however, we have to give out all the money we’re allowed to give away, or the Government will reduce the amount of money we have next year.

How about a little bit of that money for the arts? Oh, but of course, the arts aren’t really useful, are they? (i.e. not really profitable.)

Yesterday the decision was taken to give money to a man developing an anti-ageing skin cream and I lost my rag. I won’t say it’s the first time I’ve had a mildly outraged rant in the office (see previous notes about bomb scares), but this was a particularly vitriolic and sustained rant, which I performed in front of our Regional Director. But really – isn’t it about time people grew up and realised that one of the things that happens when you get older is that you look older? I used to have beautiful smooth skin, now I don’t. That is because I used to be six, I’m now twenty-four. Sorry, but “anti-ageing” is a nonsensical term, skin gets older, people look older, however many preservatives you slap on you can’t change that and why’s it such a bad thing anyway?

Even if people are too immature or insecure to accept the fundamental nature of being a living creature, and too stupid to see that they’re going to spend the rest of their life shelling out for tubs of these anti-ageing ointments and it still won’t stop them getting old, why the bloody hell is the Government funding this useless, delusional, exploitative industry for? “But it fits all the criteria,” I’m told – of course it does, it’ll make a packet, which makes everyone in the Government happy. How ironic that they should want to fund a product which is by its very definition superficial – let’s face it, the smooth-skinned smile Blair’s Government wants for the nation is exactly the same as the one Thatcher was after.

The arts don’t even come into it – rather than funding society’s vanity, what about showing a little bit more interest in real life? Or should we give out tubs of anti-ageing cream to homeless people, to victims of abuse and discrimination, to criminals who keep re-offending because the best solution society can think of is to lock them away for a few days? We could send our anti-ageing cream to the people of Iraq, perhaps, while we wait for anything else to happen to sort out the complete balls-up we’ve made of that situation. Or to the thousands of people dying of AIDS in Africa, the thousands of abused children in Uganda, the millions of people who living poverty in third world countries because they are oppressed not only by their own leaders but by the debt they owe us.

Because frankly as a nation we’re far more interested in anti-ageing cream than any of these problems, just as long as we can occasionally purge our guilt with day of crappy TV and a few meagre pledges in return for watching some minor celebrities take baths in spaghetti hoops. And it must be a comfort to so many people that, whatever else is wrong in the world, at least we won’t have wrinkles.

Yesterday I started using a new toothbrush, having noticed recently that the clever little blue bristles in my old one had started fading away. I’d been pretty impressed by this application of twelfth century dying techniques in the modern era, but as it turns out such innovation is really just the beginning of where our toothbrushes are going.

My new one is definitely Space Age: bristles in three different directions, as many colours (I’m hoping it’s still the blue whose fading will tell me to buy a new one), and sleek, curved and sensual, like a sex toy for your mouth. Erm … like a sex toy. I think back to the toothbrushes I had when I was a child, and feel sorry for their simplicity, their boring tightly-packed bristles, their sheer prosaic utility. If right now even our most humdrum hygiene equipment is becoming exciting to look at, who knows what the future holds? Shaving mirrors with built in stock tickers, soap dispensers connected to the Internet so they can order refills automatically, perhaps even aerosol deodorant that doesn’t freeze your skin – truly the world of Fast Moving Consumer Goods has never been more interesting.

However it’s not just the toothbrush itself that has become advanced. The packaging too has progressed from the simple bits of cardboard I am used to. It’s possible that there is cardboard in there somewhere, under the layers of plastic, glue, and something unidentifiable that looks cool and shiny, but is almost impossible to get into. Perhaps the real future, thanks to a conspiracy at OralB, is that only those who already have very strong teeth will be able to use toothbrushes.

I said that yesterday I started using a new toothbrush; this is a lie. By the time I’d fought my way through its container, it was gone twelve, and I’d almost resorted to a hacksaw.

Last night I had the privilege of being invited to go to a concert in St John’s, Smith Square, given by the Parliamentary Choir. This institution, which I have only recently been made aware of but whose existence brings a warm glow to my heart, is essentially your traditional choral society, with the significant defining factor that it consists entirely of people who work at the Palace of Westminster. This is a choir in which your local MP can give vent to creative energy (as indeed mine does); Parliamentary staff (literally) rub shoulders with Lords and Viscounts, as they peer (no pun intended) at their music and try to follow it with varying degrees of success.

The music itself is but a small factor in the whole exciting set up (although soloists included the splendid Catherine Wyn-Rogers and one of the country’s finest tenors, James Gilchrist, so the choir can’t be short of a bob or two – and not surprising, given the extortionate pricing of their programmes). It’s hard to explain quite how charged the atmosphere of social, political and artistic worlds meeting in head on collision can be, and as I took my seat amongst the political elite (a few chairs away from Rt Hon John Redwood MP) it looked unlikely that things could get any more bizarre.

That was before the concert started.

The performance was of Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle, a work I was previously unacquainted with. One knows about Rossini, of course – The Barber of Seville, The Thieving Magpie, pretty overtures, catchy tunes etc. But one expects a classical mass to have rather more dignity.

Far from it. The Petite Messe Solennelle is possibly the composer’s greatest comic achievement. I listened at first slightly aghast and embarrassed, then with increasing enjoyment as Rossini went through every musical joke in the repertoire; silly melodic phrases, comic repetitions, false endings…one movement waited until the soloist had finished, then finished off in a different key. And the whole thing was accompanied by a glorious mixture of pastiche, operatic melodrama and fairground music, all rendered with camp perfection by pianist Malcolm Martineau (when I told him afterwards that he made me chuckle several times, he grinned and said “that was the intention”).

The Credo has never been so jolly, the crucifixus section ludicrously upbeat. The final “dona nobis pacem,” which almost seems to take itself seriously, is followed by a ridiculous series of false starts and stops, each one daring you to think that the work might have finished, before it finally leaps in with an explosive final chord (the audience got the joke: it laughed). It was all utterly utterly inappropriate for a mass. Apparently the Credo is headed “allegro cristiano” – surely it has to be a piss-take? Even the title is a joke: solemn mass? My foot. It has all the solemnity of Monty Python’s fish slapping dance.

Rossini wasn’t a Mozart or a Beethoven, but he wasn’t a fool either. His small solemn mass is a deliberate piece of silliness, a work of comic ambitions unsurpassed even by Sir Arthur Sullivan. I’m not sure what to make of that – did he just think “these Latin words are all very serious, but hey! we can still have some fun!” Was it a more anarchic two-fingers-up to a ceremony he didn’t believe in? Or was it a still more radical reinvention of the same ceremony, the 19th century equivalent of a hippy Vicar with a guitar and a rainbow strap?

What I suspect is that it was simply a big joke, the aging Rossini’s knowing wink at a musical establishment that was never going to rank him as one of the “great” composers. Either way, it seemed entirely appropriate that it was being belted out by a choir of MPs, Peers of the Realm and Parliamentary staff, alongside four properly professional soloists and a magnificently camp pianist, with Sea Cadets all dressed up in their ridiculous costumes to do the ushering and representatives of BT waiting to give us food and wine.

Rossini, I feel, would have approved.

I can’t hope to rival James’ entry for sheer bile, but a question has been bubbling to the surface here at the Uncertainty Division, namely how to deal with our cumbersome name.

I once knew a London-based music outfit (with hestitation I’ll call them a band) called Noise Union who, after some consideration and a few gigs at places like The Marquee, dropped the first word to make themselves simply ‘Union’. By analogy, some people try to call us simply The Division which, while making sense (being shorter, and taken directly from our name), makes me think of annoying German industrial groups (probably musical, definitely involving metal).

There are some other options, none of which are particularly nice:

• UD – looks nice as a logo, completely useless as a name, as you can’t pronounce it without sounding like a caveman
• The Div – makes me think we’re in some weird gang
• Improbable People – not strictly an abbreviation, but I thought I’d mention it because we’ve been called it in the past

If only we’d gone with our original name, Old Man Harris’ Card Shop, we could call ourselves, simply, Card shop – although that smacks altogether too much of Spontaneity Shop for my liking. Dang, this naming thing is difficult.

Anyway, let the suggestions roll in.