Last night, as I failed to recover from a third cluster headache in as many days, I curled up on the sofa and happened to catch five’s Greatest Ever Disaster Movies, which I missed on its original screening, probably because I was still able to go out and do things back then.

I wish I hadn't bothered; it was bollocks.

Look at the word “disaster” in any reputable dictionary and the definition is crystal:

Disaster (n.) -

1. an occurrence that causes great distress or destruction
2. something that has failed or is ruined
3. Gigli, a film starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez 

It seems the majority of those who voted via five’s website at the time along with readers of The Times, who I would have thought were intelligent enough to know better, wouldn’t know a disaster if it fell on their heads from a great height, exploded, and washed them out to sea on a huge tsunami that, in turn, overturned a cruise liner on New Year’s Eve.  The paper was even too ashamed to provide a decent host for the show, preferring instead to send its restaurant critic, Giles Coren, last seen in BBC2’s The Supersizers Go KFC throwing up alongside Sue Perkins, which couldn’t have done much for her self-esteem.

Coren’s presentation was at best patronizing, so unlike his sister and late father that I started to wonder whether he might have been adopted.  At worst, it was insulting to both its viewers and some of its guests, with one knowledgeable talking head twice being described as a “posh boy” when he probably was no posher than the presenter (Westminster and Keble, Oxford), whilst another, who was described as an “entrepreneur” but had, in reality, come second in The Apprentice, wasn’t chided at all for her less than enlightening comments, which seemed to have been written with the aid of Jonathan Ross Movie Review Fridge Magnets™ (i.e., “X is a film where Y does something and Z happens, and I thought it was good / bad / no better or worse than average).

Sure, there’s always a grey area when trying to be genre-specific about movies but there must have been a point at which the few experts amongst the 60 or so contributors (Andrew Collins, Derek Malcolm, Kim Newman, and Barry “Pickles” Norman) looked at the list and went: “You’re shittin’ us, right?”

When you look at a list of disaster movies and Earthquake’s as low as #34, the benchmark Poseidon Adventure only scrapes the top ten (despite coming top of a recent UCI Cinemas poll of people who actually watch movies before they're asked to by a production intern), and the epic Towering Inferno doesn’t even make the top three, you know something in the machine is horribly wrong.  But along they came: Critters (horror), Evolution (comedy), Passenger 57 (action), Arachnophobia (horror), Event Horizon (sci-fi), and Cliffhanger (action).

I nearly spat out what was left of my brain when The Taking of Pelham 123 came in at #25, championed as one of the top disaster films by Radio Times film critic Emma “Daughter of Pickles” Norman because it was “poignant” as “it could happen to any one of us”.  Well, actually, Emma…no, it couldn’t because the layout of the London Underground is far different from that of the New York Subway, so what happens to the 6 train couldn't happen on the Victoria Line.  Thanks for playing anyway. 

And still they continued: The Day of the Triffids (sci-fi), Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (sci-fi), The Day the Earth Stood Still (sci-fi), Air Force One (action thriller), Mars Attacks (comedy sci-fi), The Rock (action), Final Destination (horror), Predator (sci-fi action horror), Speed (action), Con Air (action thriller)…the list was pointless mindless meaningless endless.

And when Die Hard was unveiled as the top “disaster movie” of all time, I have to say I felt more than a little melancholic, having finally realized that I would never get those last three hours back.

I mean, really...Die Hard a disaster movie, for fuck's sake.  Honestly, using the programme makers’ criteria, The Wizard of Oz would be classed as a disaster movie because it features a tornado, Singing in the Rain would become a triumph over adversity in the face of chronic precipitation, and Ice Age: The Meltdown would probably be rated higher than An Inconvenient Truth.  And rightly so.

Notable omissions?  Well, Independence Day, for starters (a true sci-fi / disaster hybrid, if not a very good one).  Rollercoaster, perhaps.  If one were to include TV movies, Hillsborough would surely have had to be considered - although I’m not sure the producers would have had the balls, let alone been able to get a cohesive overview from the majority of its contributors.  Either Threads or its US TV equivalent, The Day After, should definitely have been on the list - but perhaps Times readers don’t see nuclear annihilation as being as much of a disaster as Sandra Bullock behind the wheel of a speeding bus.  It's close, I grant you, but not close enough.

As for dramatizations of real events, the 9/11 double whammy (if you'll pardon the expression) of World Trade Center and United 93 would still have been eligible despite both films having only been released a few months before voting took place - but five probably didn’t have enough loose change to cover the cost of airing clips from either movie.  For all the liberties taken, The Hindenberg might still have deserved a place within the top 40, thanks to its special effects.  And as for Titanic, the highest grossing movie of all time…well, that was obviously a romance and not a disaster movie.  How could I have been so stupid?

Strangely, even though five’s Greatest Ever Movies website still exists, its list of the greatest disaster movies has been deleted.  The channel is quite evidently embarrassed about the list appearing on the web, yet not embarrassed enough not to air the show again, which says quite a lot about its peak-time scheduling these days.

In retrospect, perhaps the biggest disaster of all was that no-one at five had deleted the transmission master in time for last night’s repeat.  I could have done with some real entertainment.

Tetra Pak heir Hans Rausing and his wife Eva have been charged with possession of drugs.

The charge stems from an incident in April when Mrs Rausing is alleged to have tried smuggling Class A and Class C narcotics into the American embassy here in London.

It is rumoured that the couple were arrested as Mrs Rausing made several attempts to prise open the embassy’s fiddly doors, only to result in her stash of crack cocaine and heroin being spilt all over the floor.

What a waste.  There are addicts desperate for a fix in China...

I have a confession to make: during my recent sabbatical from this blog, I developed an unhealthy interest in photographs of celebrities, largely taken by the paparazzi.

I’ve never quite been able to make up my mind as to which side of the paparazzi-celebrity fence I’m on.  Being chased by photographers is no doubt unpleasant, but is surely part and parcel of being a celebrity, particularly if one happens to be “of the moment”.  Yet I’m not sure there’s much public interest in the latest Z-lister shopping for groceries or taking a car for a test drive, unless, of course, they’re involved in a nasty case of trolley rage or responsible for a fatal RTA.  But even then, isn’t that what CCTV and episodes of Police! Stop! Owch! on ITV2 are for?

Having said that, celebrities are only too happy to have the paps dutifully lining up at their premieres and charity events when they’ve something to sell.  And whenever their star slips…well, they just call up the paps (or get their “people” to do it for them), tell them which nightclub they’ll be stumbling out of at 3am Sunday morning (and who with), and everyone’s a winner.

Often these pictures appear in the papers, supplements, and celebrity magazines with the surrounding detail taken out, so we often don’t see how the paparazzi capture those around the celebrities, the public who find themselves suddenly in the middle of a photo shoot in the unlikeliest of places, and their own competitors in the search for the next million dollar shot.

And that’s where this new strand is going to educate you, dear reader.  For I have searched the celebrity archives for shots featuring less than flattering celebrity entrances or exits, the unscrupulous behaviour of photographers, the shocked and stunned reactions of those around, and anything else that the finest picture editors would rather crop out of shot, airbrush, or just ignore altogether.

So, #1 in our indefinite series is this shot of Jessica Alba getting into a car.

Now…what does the guy in the red USC t-shirt think he’s doing with that video camera, eh?  Have we identified the webmaster of www.jessicaalbaupskirtpics.com or something?  And why would any jobbing paparazzo be even remotely interested in Ms Alba getting into her car?

I mean, it’s not like she’s Kate…sorry, Catherine Middleton, getting a hefty discount on a brand new Audi in return for pictures of her climbing in and out of it on the front pages of all the tabloids, only to then complain about being harrassed and threaten individual press photographers with legal action, is it?

The man's quite obviously a pest.

It was with great sadness that I received news earlier of the death last Wednesday of Bob Smith, the manager I worked under at RTM Radio (formerly Radio Thamesmead), the community radio station that became my alma mater by sheer virtue of the fact that I spent several years getting the third degree there when I should have been studying for a proper degree elsewhere.

In two and a half years, Bob took a decade-old rapidly crumbling cable radio station with a total audience of three and turned it into an innovative, unpretentious, and fairly decent FM radio station broadcasting to…ooh, at least double that audience.  In so doing, he championed a large amount of diverse talent, many of them not even out of their teens, and gave some of today’s household names their first break in radio.

From what I can gather, Bob left his final managerial post at Plymouth Hospital Radio last autumn through ill-health.  I heard he’d had a triple heart bypass operation a few years back and knew he’d always had trouble with diabetes, collapsing at home at least once during the four years I worked with him.  It seems that he died from complications after having a leg amputated as a result of this chronic illness.

He didn't always give me the greatest advice: at the age of 19, he told me to specialize just as the media began to encourage multi-tasking and our last meeting was soured by a somewhat uncharacteristic criticism of my decision to accept a post that had been offered to me by the station's new management after a year of unemployment.  When I told him I didn’t intend to stay in commercial production, he snapped back that if I hadn’t got out and become successful at something else by the age of 25, I should forget all about radio and get a proper job.  I took his advice, which turned out to be a mistake.

He wasn't the easiest person to please, always expecting others to give the same level of commitment as himself, which was impossible because he was a tireless worker - too tireless sometimes, to the point of affecting his judgement.  He was also famous for changing both his mind and temperament at the drop of a stylus - something that often frustrated many of the volunteers who suddenly found themselves working under him in paid full and part-time positions, including myself.  Ultimately, though, we will always be grateful to him because he put his faith in us, providing the sort of encouragement that anyone with an ounce of creativity should receive from their superiors.

He could be very stubborn too, particularly when it came to dealing with our increasingly political Board of Directors.  After a truly dreadful launch, he stuck with the station, its staff and volunteers when others would have shrugged their shoulders and moved along to the next carriage on the gravy train, continuing to fight a bitter battle with the station’s cumbersome yet fragile hierarchy - even after he had realized that he was never going to win.

He was a true one-off and, despite his reluctance to talk to many of those with whom he’d spent the cusp of the 80s and 90s in his latter years for reasons none of us will now know, our lives wouldn't have been the same without knowing him.

Hi!  We’re an award-winning television production company in Camden, which means we’re really funky and down with the kids.  We're so street that we virtually live in the kerb outside Koko.  Kerr-aaazy!

We, like, so need an enthusiastic, proactive, organized, and hands-on Office Manager to clear up our shit, man reception all hours, organize and manage company hospitality events, and maintain our IT network in collaboration with someone in the Indian Standard Time zone.

If you’re subservient enough and don’t quit (or threaten to quit) within your first five years, we might let you provide some production assistance (tea and coffee, doughnut runs etc.) on our future output - you know, documentaries about freaks, perverts, criminals, terrorists, chavs, and the like.

In return, we’ll give you £15k and laugh at you when it’s your turn to get a round in at Soho House.

Interested?  Then e-mail us, ensuring you write “I’ve been looking for a job in the meeeeeeeeja for nearly a year and am desperate to get something (anything!) before this year’s spiky-haired bunch of twats graduate…oh, wait…it’s July, they already have…damn it” in your subject header.

And the best of luck with everything…particularly being able to afford to actually live.

The news that Amy Winehouse elbowed some bloke in the head towards the end of her Glastonbury set on Saturday night didn’t come as too much of a surprise to me.  When you’ve been in and out of rehab as much as our Amy, the “involuntary spasms” come with the territory.

The news that Amy to all intents and purposes hit the wrong guy didn’t come as a surprise either.  Someone pulled her hair or called her a name or threw something, and she just went in for the kill.  When you’ve done as much damage to your brain as our Amy, rational judgement kind of goes out the window.

But the news that the injured party captured the whole thing on his digital camera (very 2008) and subsequently handed it in to the BBC for all to see, compare, and contrast with the televised footage of the big fight of the night did get me a bit worried.  Anyone who does that after being twatted by a pop star in front of a worldwide television audience rather than filing a complaint with police and calling Claims Direct seriously needs his head examined.

James Gostelow (for it is he) merely expressed his disappointment, like the thoroughly upstanding British chap the tabloids will probably prove him not to be by the beginning of next week, and even sounded like he’d entered Worthy Farm more resigned to his fate than even the most stoned of festivalgoers.

“At the end of the day it is all part of the Glastonbury experience,” he said.

Yes, the Glastonbury experience, where the beautiful people once let down their hair gently, and the performers and audience came together as one, making love not war, wearing happy hippy hats, is seen by today’s 20somethings as being a place where arrogant and ugly pop trolls treat their audience with contempt just because someone has dared to put a hand on their hair or call them a name, a place where a bruising is expected as part of the ticket price.

Of course, those of us who’ve been watching the festival from a distance over the last three decades know different.  Many’s the time I’ve heard tales from those who’ve attended of performers on the Pyramid Stage dishing out unprovoked violence and abuse, and sometimes a lot worse.

In 2003, David Gray headbutted a party of nurses during one of his trademark wobbles, whereas the last night of the previous year’s festival saw a double whammy: several people were decapitated when Rod Stewart kicked footballs into the crowd mid-set and tens of thousands suffocated after Roger Waters, performing The Wall in its entirety, bricked up the field without adhering to building regulations.

Van Morrison bored hundreds of people to death in 1989 and Robert Smith of The Cure accidentally poked out several fans’ eyes whilst crowd surfing in 1986, whereas festival veterans Hawkwind finally managed to spike the drinking water in 1981 after several failed attempts during the previous decade.

But perhaps the most violent episode in Glastonbury’s history was when Kula Shaker replaced Neil Young on the closing day of 1997’s festival, causing those present to beat themselves to a bloody pulp just to avoid the humiliation of admitting to people on their return home that they’d actually paid to watch the band’s set.

These and other historic examples only serve to prove that ultra-violence is hardly a new thing at dear old Glasto.

But I still blame Jay-Z.

1964 European Championship winners: Spain
1966 World Cup winners: England

Euro 2008 winners: Spain
2010 World Cup winners: ..?

Well..?

Could that be some kind of an omen?

No, not that kind of omen.

© The Sun, The Mirror, The Times, The Telegraph etc. etc.

“I tend to be in Australia for about three months of the year, which can be a problem if I’m the middle of a series like The Sopranos, so what I tend to do is wait a few months and just buy every single episode on DVD.  Frankly, if I can afford to spend a quarter of my year down under, another hundred and twenty quid on a bloody box set isn’t going to make much difference.  Of course, in an ideal world I would use the, er, Sky Plus digital box thing - but, in reality, I can rarely find the correct remote to switch the bloody thing on and, even when I do, I spend hours trying to work out the menu before giving up completely.  I mean, do I look like someone who can operate a Sky Plus box?  Look - I still use a bloody typewriter, for God’s sake!  What chance would I have with a personal video recorder?  Out first ball and back to the bloody pavilion.  No, when you get to my age, there are much more important things to life than whether you’ve remembered to record Most Haunted, like remembering to turn off the gas and ensuring the door on the walk-in bath has clicked shut before you climb in.  There’s hardly anything on television worth watching anyway.  In fact, I actually leave the Sky digital thingummyjig unplugged most of the time because it makes such a racket I can’t hear my Jamie Cullum records while I’m relaxing in my chair - it’s from Shackleton’s, you know.  An analogy I would make is that, um…um…no, it’s gone…”

If you’ve been brave enough to read all 23 of these instalments, then you deserve a medal, let alone a thank you.  But my sincerest thanks is all I can afford at the moment, so consider yourself thanked. 

I am only too aware that, at times, these last few posts about my many experiences submitting material and applications to the BBC may have read like the bitter outpourings of a sad old git suicidally bringing a career that had barely started to an end.  But having had conversations with acquaintances in similar or better positions, I remain convinced that the views I’ve expressed are valid and deserve to be “out there”.  I’ve tried to focus on known facts by reporting honest reactions to events that have occurred, rather than the decisions of any producers, script editors, and executives.  The problems I’ve highlighted are more down to the culture of the BBC as a whole, rather than any personalities within.  We all, rather thankfully, have different tastes in humour, and that is why British comedy - even in its lowest of lows - is still rated highly around the world.  Some of us just want to ensure that things stay that way.

And so to last month, when the BBC announced that two lucky people were going to be offered production traineeships in Radio Comedy under a new bursary named after the late Harry Thompson, one of comedy’s most fondly-remembered producers, who, in his position as Commissioning Editor of Radio Light Entertainment back in 1991, was kind enough to forward me a guide to what the Beeb did and didn’t want.

Sadly, the recruitment for this bursary did have to go through BBC HR, but I figured if I was going to apply for one final job at the Corporation, it had to be this.  My first interview there was for a Radio Production Traineeship 20 years ago and, as the bursary was essentially a genre-specific version of that position, I felt that it would more than likely serve as a bookend to my many failed attempts to break into the Corporation.

It wasn’t going to be easy: there were seven supplementary questions to the online application when there were usually no more than two.  Fortunately, one of them only required a short answer and another was the standard supplementary question common to all BBC applications.

They asked me about what skills and experience I had to help me make it in the “fast-moving world of BBC programme making”.  Fast moving?  I had to laugh.  The only things that happen with any speed at the BBC these days are the resignations of key executives over dodgy editing and “horizontal integrations” within senior management following revelations of rigged competitions.

They were interested in programming too: “Tell us about an idea for a programme that you would like to sell to a BBC Radio Network”.  I was asked that at my traineeship interview 20 years back, except the words “sell to” were “make for” back then - as potent a symbol to the decline of the Corporation’s attitude to programme making if ever there was one.

They also asked candidates to suggest an old comedy favourite that was ripe for revival - but I couldn’t see the point.  With the iPlayer and digital channels like BBC12, UKTV Suburban Wendy Craig Sitcoms, and Dave and Ted and Carol and Alice, the original versions will - in theory - be out there for everyone to enjoy ad infinitum post-switchover.  There’s plenty of fresh talent waiting to make their own contribution to this country’s fine comedic heritage, so let’s get on with nurturing them rather than committing vast resources to ill-thought out rehashes of programmes that may have been axed for a very good reason first time around.

And when it came to the last question, the one where candidates had to demonstrate the extent to which their skills, abilities, and experience met the specific requirements of the role, I couldn’t help but sum up my own frustrating experiences as a non-commissioned writer and what I thought needed to be done to remedy the situation:

“Comedy writers are most annoyed by a lack of acknowledgement and feedback after submitting their work. I’d like to be able to raise the BBC’s standing with such writers, to the extent that they feel it’s worth persevering, rather than branding the process a waste of time and the Corporation as unappreciative.

Writer-performers complain about the time it takes to develop shows, often because they’re paired with production companies who treat them like trophies for a year or two without any end product.  Such delays blunt the impact of even the best new talent by the time it finally gets to radio.

Fringe-goers are often disappointed that existing sketch troupes are split up into unsuitable projects, talented solo performers are thrown together in shows in which they cannot play to their strengths, or an act’s debut series takes ages to be transmitted despite featuring their best material, only for them to then be rushed into a second series that ends up poor by comparison.

Podcasting has provided a lot of comedians with the sort of instant (and sometimes brutally honest) feedback that they would get from a live crowd, and many are surprised at how cheap and simple it is to do it themselves.

So the BBC must react quicker, take risks, hit the ground running with acts when they’re hot and then give them time to cool down, and bring in a light-touch production regime.  If it doesn’t, it is going to miss out on a huge chunk of up-and-coming talent.”

A fair comment, I thought.  It’s already got to the stage where any idiot who knows their comedy can turn up at a mixed-bill fringe show and immediately tell which acts will have their own BBC Radio show or a regular slot in something that BBC Three throws up after necking too much Diamond White within the next year or two.  It’s become that predictable.

At one such night recently, I overheard one such act discussing the sort of radio pilot they wanted to do, despite having several ropey and derivative routines within their repertoire including one that features a well-known Alan Partridge line and another that is virtually a re-written Fast Show Ted and Ralph sketch.  They’ve been on the circuit little more than a year, yet someone somewhere has told them to expect a radio pilot when they are actually one of the few prime candidates for a year or two of Development Hell.  Don’t get me wrong - they are young and full of potential, but they are much further away from being the finished product than some in the industry think they already are.  Still, I’d wager a virtual monkey that the pilot they crave will be on Radio Four before the year is out.  I hope for their sakes the fall doesn’t come as quickly as the rise.

Needless to say, I didn’t get an interview for the bursary.  I don’t know why but I know it’s not because I don’t know talent when I see it, for I recommended that a friend should apply and he was among the 58 candidates invited over for tea and scones at Henry Wood House in the first half of this week.

He arrived to find no fewer than four panels interviewing applicants simultaneously, some of which were made up of people that hadn’t been entirely complimentary towards his Witty and Twisted pieces a couple of years earlier.  Worse still, one of the other interviewees waiting to be seen at the same time was the other, non-producing mentor to whom he’d been assigned on that scheme.  This set us both thinking: why would somebody who’s already acted as a mentor on one scheme be attending an interview for a place on another?  If the other, producing half of that mentoring pair was to be one of his interviewers, surely this would have been a conflict of interest?  At the very least, it could be considered a trifle unfair to other interviewees. 

Maybe this was the reason why there were so many panels for so few candidates - to avoid them being interviewed by staff with whom they'd already come into contact (although the incestuous nature of the entertainment industry makes this scenario virtually unavoidable) - but there were no obvious signs that such safeguards had been put into action.  Knowing full well that BBC traineeships had in the past been created out of thin air and awarded to people on little more than a handshake, we both wondered whether the creation of two bursaries could be anything to do with one of them being earmarked for a particular candidate from the outset.  These and other questions will only be answered if and when the BBC goes public with details of the two recipients, which it hopefully will.

As for my friend, he knew in advance who his panel would be, and had never met either of them before.  One was the Executive Producer of Radio Entertainment, a woman who up until a couple of years ago had worked almost exclusively in drama, which some might consider to be a contributing factor to why - with a couple of notable exceptions - radio comedy’s generally not as funny as it used to be.  The other interviewer, also female, was a producer with whose very decent track record in sketch shows and panel games my friend was familiar.

They asked him “What writers working in radio today do you most admire?”; he told them there weren’t any.  They asked him “What’s your favourite show on the radio at the moment?”; he told them he didn’t have one, but cited a particular show in which he admired the performers’ camaraderie.  They asked him which show he most disliked, and he told them - thankfully, it was not a show that one of the panel had produced (but, then again, if you aren’t prepared to hear the answer, you shouldn’t ask the question).  He did, however, name a couple of shows from the past that he greatly enjoyed, one of which has recently been repeated on BBC7 and the other one of which featured one of Britain’s leading comedy actresses, a woman who has recently appeared in two BBC television comedies that I can name off the top of my head.  Inexplicably, the two women on the panel knew neither of these shows.  So much for heritage.

They also asked him how he would tell a writer that his / her script needed editing.  Easy, he said - you just tell them.  They’re writers.  They know their work needs to be edited, redrafted, re-edited, and so on - it’s part of the job.  It even appears in a quote on the BBC Writers’ Room website: “Writing is rewriting”.  Writers aren’t stupid; they know they can’t just turn up to a studio with several loose-leaf pages of badly-formatted script (well, maybe Jennifer Saunders can but she’s big enough to get away with it).

By this point, the interviewers’ body language said it all.  In fact, according to my friend, the more senior of the pair “pretty much scowled” throughout the interview - but, then again, I’d probably scowl if I was a drama producer with 16 years’ solid experience having to waste the best part of a week interviewing a largely male selection of wannabe comedy producers.

I guess the interviewers were probably of the opinion that any applicant who disliked most of the department’s existing shows might be someone who couldn't “engage with talent”.  I would disagree; I would actually see such applicants as better arbiters of taste than most and more capable of delivering the sort of innovative programming the BBC constantly craves.  Ultimately, though, if the BBC wants yes men, they'll get yes men.  The listening public, meanwhile, will just get more of what they already have, which remainds me somewhat of one of Danny Baker’s fabulously sarcastic Radio 1 jingles from the 90s: “Thanks for the licence fee - now beat it!”

When my friend was asked at the end of the interview whether he had any questions, he told me that he felt like saying: “No, I had all my questions answered when I saw the other candidates”.  Perhaps his greatest mistake was not saying that.  Harry Thompson himself would have found that rather amusing, I’m sure - much more so than the selection procedure for a bursary in his name.  Two other people I knew were also among those 58 interviewees but neither they nor my other friend made the cut for the tougher second interview.  In my mind, they were all perfectly up to the task.

As for my own application, I think I was considered too old to be a trainee and perhaps my lack of budget management experience put paid to any chance of progressing.  It certainly seems that they were not looking for someone who could actually physically put a piece of audio together, which you would have thought was a pre-requisite.  As for whether BBC HR has a black mark by my name, well…if there wasn’t one before I submitted the application, there most certainly is now!

And there, ultimately, is the problem with the bursary and perhaps with the BBC as a whole: an outsourced HR department cannot be the best judge of creative talent.  It requires input from fellow creatives, people who are not afraid to use instinct but at the same time appreciate that using instinct to cloak knee-jerk nepotism, cronyism, or favouritism of any kind will ultimately damage the reputation of any broadcasting organization.

Come the middle of last week, I was finally waking up to the realization that the sort of talent trawls, mentoring initiatives, and bursary applications for which I’d been putting myself forward weren’t everything they were cracked up to be.  The relationship between myself and the BBC was surely dead in both employment and creative terms, I thought.  Perhaps it was time to crack on with producing stuff for my own amusement and concentrate on seeking out a proper job to keep me in cheese.

Then, at the tail end of Thursday, I received an e-mail from the BBC’s former Deputy Head of Radio Entertainment, who had listened to a showreel that I had uploaded to a server some months ago and forgotten about in the interim.  I couldn’t believe it: here was a message from a very senior person in BBC Radio Comedy telling me how good my material was, when a couple of its constituent parts had already been rejected or just plain ignored by his former department’s own producers!  I had to laugh again.

The end result is that we are meeting the week after next.  No agenda - just a chat about what I've done and what I want to do.  Something might happen as a result or nothing may come of it at all - that's the way these things are.  Whatever - it’s just nice to know that there is someone in the BBC prepared to meet someone they’ve never met before, someone who’s prepared to look beyond the initiatives and schemes, someone who can hear something promising in just a short piece of audio - in other words, just like old times.  It’s not quite enough to make good all the rotten luck of the last 18 months and it probably won’t lead to me becoming a huge star like...ooh, I don't know...Arthur Mullard, but it might be just the right thing to rekindle my enthusiam for another few years.

Then again, if you see my name on the end credits of the 743rd series of Last of the Lager and a Packet of Crisps, in which Gaz finds himself stuck in a tin bath heading down a steep hill into the path of a train carrying all his mates, then you’ll know that I’ve really fucked up.

Back in a week or two.  Hopefully.

In 2005, the newly-installed BBC Head of Radio Entertainment asked his comedy producers about new writers coming through the system at the time, he himself having been through that system back in the early 90s when it was still in perfect working order.

According to an interview he gave in the Independent a year later, the same five or six names kept cropping up in those discussions, which suggested that some producers may not have been seeing enough live shows (perhaps because they were too busy attending meetings, slaving over budgets, and arguing with the Head of Compliance), rather than there being a severe lack of new writing talent.

The creation of schemes such as Show Me the Funny should have redressed the balance, with the promise of writers being mentored by established names such as Stewart Lee and Jeremy Dyson.  However, as my last post highlighted, this wasn’t quite how the initiative turned out, and actually served to demotivate some writers.

So you can just imagine the collective groan amongst an already cynical gaggle of comedy writers when this March saw yet another call for submissions for a new BBC7 show, Tilt.  The producer in charge was to be the one who’d overseen both Recorded for Training Purposes and Play and Record.  I don’t know what she did in a past life to warrant that but it must have been pretty bad.

According to the brief, Tilt was to be “playful and witty…going beyond obvious topical satire”.  The role of non-commissioned writers was to submit standalone topical sketches, headlines, monologues, spoof ads, spoof trailers, and news parodies (although it later turned out that the headlines were for the scrolling DAB display and not the show itself, much to the chagrin of some writers).  Having just finished making Liar News, I kicked myself in the cock again, as some of that material would have been very suitable for submission in some shape or form.

Undaunted, I decided to concentrate on ad parodies, and e-mailed over the maximum permitted three sketches in good time for the recording of the first episode, despite the weekly production deadline having not been mentioned in the brief (oops).  In addition, I mentioned Liar News and provided a direct download link in case there was even a remote chance that someone on the team would have 20 minutes to listen, figuring there may have been something in there that could have been reworked.  I also asked to be added to receive their weekly e-mailout list of subject matter that was up for grabs for the following week’s show.  I received no acknowledgement of my sketches and never received the weekly e-mail, assuming there ever was one.

Despite a poor first episode, which featured little more than 20% topical material, I listened to the whole series of Tilt, trying to get a handle on where it was going, even managing to send in a second batch of ads for the final show that were ignored just as much as the material I’d sent weeks earlier.  Even though the topicality improved as the series progressed, the quality of some of the material still left a lot to be desired: there were sketches carried over from Play and Record (in fact, the whole programme sounded too much like its two non-topical predecessors) and a running strand was dropped midway through the run - although this actually helped the show hit the mark for a couple of episodes.  There were some good ideas too: a fake BBC4 Curse of Comedy promo pretty much hit the nail on the head and a long-overdue parody of the Kris Marshall-Esther Hall BT ads, though nowhere near as over the top as it could have been, did make me wish I’d thought of the idea first.  However, the final episode was, in my opinion, the closest a radio sketch show has ever come to being made up of mechanically-recovered material.

BBC Radio Comedy thought the series would be innovative but in the end it wasn’t; it was just Dead Ringers without proper impressionists.  Not that the cast wasn’t good - on the contrary, they were a superb group who should have been joined by a couple of decent impressionists.  The problem is there aren’t that many impressionists on the circuit right now, ironically because there isn’t a topical radio show running throughout the year (even the long-running live show Newsrevue changes its cast every six weeks, so it’s impossible for cast members to develop a portfolio of savage caricatures and its many regular writers to gear their material to whatever personality traits those actors choose to exaggerate).

With this in mind, there was a defeatist air about the brief for Tilt, with the producer stating that the team would “rather not have to do impersonations of Gordon Brown”.  I, for one, would argue that if they didn’t want to lampoon the Prime Minister, they shouldn’t have launched a topical show in the first place.  If only the show could have continued until June or July, then more writers and performers might have started to come out of the woodwork, and that would have been extremely good long-term for both the show and radio comedy in general.  Instead, the whole thing went off half-cocked, leaving writers utterly confused about what BBC Radio Comedy actually wants from them.

“It's all been a bit of a mess,” said one such writer to me after finally getting a sketch accepted midway through the run.

If you want to launch a topical show, you shouldn’t do so the week after Easter, which is usually a slow news week, and you should dry run it for three or four weeks beforehand as if you were going live.  This helps bring the cast together, gives the project momentum from the first transmitted episode, and weeds out unsuitable writers (although that doesn't mean said writers are poor - with the exception of children's comedy, topical stuff is the hardest to write, simply because there are so many people coming up with similar ideas and you have to push that much harder to be heard).  In addition, dry running should provide the producer with enough stand-by sketches in case a week comes along when there is one overriding news story that perhaps doesn't lend itself well to satire.

There was also the matter of some items in Tilt bearing some similarity to items in Liar News.  Had someone written a parody of the same ads or the same topical gag as me, I wouldn’t have batted an earlobe.  But there was a news story in the first episode that sounded like someone had listened to that week’s podcast, which featured a story about zombies driving tube trains, and used it as a basis to write their own sketch about the same subject.  I mean, I know ideas are “ten-a-penny” and “in the ether”, but it still seemed a bit too coincidental to me.  Of course, I then became paranoid and found myself tutting during the remaining episodes upon hearing several other gags that sounded a little too close to home.

Although none of these ideas were actually plagiarized, I was mindful of the possibility that a contracted writer having a bad week might have been entrusted with the task of reading my submissions and / or listening to an episode of Liar News, so there would certainly have been an issue to address if that were indeed the case.  Any commissioned writer who says they wouldn’t steal an idea or a line from a non-commissioned writer if they were having a temporary brainfart is a liar - it happens, it has always happened, and something tells me it always will.

Even before Tilt had fallen over the edge of a cliff (or was it pushed?), the BBC announced that it was creating yet another scheme: the rather pompous-sounding College of Comedy.

To apply, writers needed to submit the first ten pages of a narrative comedy script or a portfolio of six sketches, together with a c.v. to the College administrators, not to BBC HR.  A shortlist of writers would then be interviewed, with six successful applicants then attached to an existing production and mentored in the creation of original work for a year.

What the brief failed to say was that the productions in question were all in television.  Many writers, including myself, submitted a mixture of radio and television sketches to prove that we could write for both mediums.  If we had been told to concentrate on material for the visual medium, we might have been able to make a better judgement on what to submit.

However, the brief did specify that applicants had to be able to demonstrate “a record of achievement”.  It read: “[Applicants] may have had their work broadcast on television or radio, received a script commission, had a theatrical or filmed performance of their work, be a writer-performer, or have completed or be attending a writing course in a recognised institution.”

What surprised a lot of people was the extent to which some of the successful applicants already had a foot in the door at the BBC.  I had actually met two of them on the circuit some months earlier and - although I’m very pleased for them both and wish them well - one had surely contributed to more shows than most applicants, whereas the other applicant was already developing something for BBC Three.  Of the other four, one had already shadowed a writing team at the BBC, which had in turn led to the development of a sitcom for BBC Three, and another had been in the business so long, his first writing credit was WeekEnding back in 1994 (just three years later than the current Head of Radio Entertainment’s first credit).  Some argued that if a writer had already been through the development process several times over a number of years they were too big to be attending college.

Most interestingly, five of the six “pupils” already had agents - one of which obviously had more connections than most with the BBC, having been a writer on Grange Hill.  Personally, I couldn't help feeling that some of the winners might have been encouraged to apply and then shoe-horned into the final six to gee-up existing BBC projects that had fallen foul of budget cuts - particularly given its former Editor of Radio Entertainment's admittance in The Guardian that funds from a regional new talent initiative were diverted to The Mighty Boosh because the show had been rejected by Radio 4.

The College of Comedy received 1300 submissions in all, about 100 of whom were completely unqualified.  There was a process of long-long-listing 40 applicants, before moving on to long-list 20 of those, then short-listing 12 for interview.  All of the long-listed 40 who did not make the cut for interview received a letter informing them how close they got, as did those whose work impressed but failed to make the cut.  Even applicants whose lengthy CVs suggested they were over-qualified were flattered with a response.  By comparison, the majority of failed writers had to make do with a comment on the BBC Writers’ Room blog confirming that the administrators had written to everyone to whom they’d intended.  This was particularly confusing, as I’d been told by one friend that someone he knew had received a “letter of rejection” and had then assumed in my madness that I was under serious consideration because I hadn’t heard anything.  Bloody fool.

Thankfully, the administrators will address this and several other ambiguities before advertising such mentorships in the future - although I think most failed applicants have more than enough idea of what they have to do to be considered in the years to come by now.  And by this time next year, we’ll have had the chance to see what the lucky six writers have been up to.  Hopefully they’ll set a high standard for the rest of us to emulate.

Now, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you have read the last few posts and spluttered: “Who does he think he is?  If he thinks he knows everything about producing radio comedy, he should apply to become a BBC radio comedy producer.”

Well, I did.

My submissions to BBC Comedy competitions started with the most appalling radio sketch show, submitted at the age of 14 or 15.  It was so bad that, when I discovered the script lying around some years later, I immediately burnt it.

A couple of years later, I submitted a plotless radio sitcom.  I still have this script for one reason only: it was returned to me with a staple mark in the back page.  Someone obviously thought it showed promise or thought it was total crap.  Nevertheless, that staple mark is the reason I’ve continued writing in the 20-plus years since.

In the years following that, I worked in local radio for several years, writing and producing radio commercials for a living, and presenting for fun.  When that came to a shuddering halt in 1993, I was burnt out and only wrote stuff when I felt I needed to get something out of my head and onto paper.  There wasn't a great deal in my head; therefore, I wrote very little.  But by 1999, I’d got to know a few writers and performers through my otherwise humdrum day job, was writing something every day in my lunch breaks, and started attending fringe events again after a decade or so away from the scene.

Around that time, I submitted a television version of the plotless radio sitcom I’d written as a teenager.  The intervening life experience not only made the episode in question a lot funnier but actually allowed me to create six full episodes and choose the one that I thought had most potential as a calling card.  The script was eventually rejected and I decided to ditch the idea of creating sitcoms, finding the format too unrealistic and convoluted for my style - although I did return to the scripts a few years ago with a view to using the characters and some of the funnier dialogue to create a pilot episode of a real-time sitcom, only to then discover that a similar idea was already in development.  I decided to concentrate on sketches, which was a stroke of luck, as most of the opportunities that have appeared since have virtually all been sketch-based.

The talent trawls came thick and fast for a few years.  In the spring of 2001, a call was put out for Lucky Bag, a character-based BBC Wales show produced by Gareth Gwenlan, who knows a good idea when he sees one.  Which is probably one of the two reasons why none of my stuff got used; the other one being that there was no way for me at the time to watch the previous series and tailor my material, as this was pre-YouTube and the show was never networked.

Next up there was the BBC Sketch Writers’ Award in 2003 (I think), which asked writers to submit three sketches in either script or video form, with a view to a shortlist of clips being uploaded to the BBC website.  Again, I was unsuccessful - but it was at this point that I started questioning elements of the standards and practice of certain BBC initiatives.

Firstly, the final shortlist of clips featured more than three entries from several writers, one of whom won (if I remember correctly).  I seem to remember a couple of really funny entries, including one about a man having cancer of the shirt, which I think was one of those by the writer who won but was not the winning sketch itself.  I do, however, remember one particular effort: a bloke walked up to a shop that was clearly shut, banged on the door until someone opened it, and then asked him “Are you open?”  A joke lifted straight from the ark.  It won second prize.

In 2004, I turned my attentions away from the BBC and submitted a hybrid version of two episodes of a six-part TV sketch series to Channel Four’s Comedy Lab.  I burnt the midnight oil on getting everything just right and walked the mile or so to Horseferry Road to submit the script in person the Saturday before the Monday closing date.  I received it back via post the following Wednesday, suggesting that the winners had been selected long before the deadline.  Not only that: the script was as unblemished as it was when it had been handed in with nary a fold around the binder, which suggested it hadn’t even been read.  Of the eight winners aired, only the superb Modern Toss impressed, and it remains by far the funniest thing currently on C4.  Of the remainder, the barrel was scraped by I’m Spazticus, a show where disabled people played pranks on members of the general public, which is sadly the level of entertainment most commonly found on C4 these days.

From there, I changed channels again to ITV1 and Shoot the Writers.  There’s nothing much I can add here to what I wrote on this blog at the time, so go here, here, here, and here (sorry about the text colour and font on the last one - there seems to be a formatting error there that I haven't got the time to fix).  If you’re short of time, here’s a summary:

In series one, I submitted 20 sketches, the “script editor” chose the worst one and added a pointless line of dialogue, thus making it longer than it needed to be, and I didn’t get put up for public vote.  It remains my only credit.  Postscript: a couple of writers who wrote some very good stuff managed to delete all the posts on the BBC Writers’ Room forum where they’d slagged off the show and its producer just before they won the final.  Now that’s funny.

In series two, submissions were limited to four sketches plus three short stand-bys in case the show’s £3.75 per episode budget couldn’t stretch to hiring actors with a modicum of comic timing.  My sketches were miles better than my efforts in series one but I didn’t even get shortlisted.  The voting process was suspect on both series and some entrants who were clearly less capable writers than their competitors managed to get through to the final by the critical mass of friends and family, rather than any writing ability.  It was a worse series than the first and has never been repeated.  There has never been talk of a third series.

From here, I started cutting out the middleman and wrote a few bits for Sketch Club, the pinnacle of which came in June 2006, when Maggie Gordon Walker took a piece we’d cowritten to the final of Funny Women.  It was the first time I’d seen my work performed at The Comedy Store and it even went on to be performed at Edinburgh, where it was better received.  Chortle described my gags as “lame”.  One day I will have that made into a t-shirt, thus making me even lamer.