It's very rare that I will admit to watching reality TV. It's about as worthy of air time and similarly original as yet another Cliff Richard Xmas number one chart single. You could say a worthless original - those horrid boiled sweets that look like dollops of.....advertised by white haired old narks pretending to be granddads. A worthless load of cobblers: reality TV and those sweets!

Right enough on that.

It was the programme The Secret Millionaires that I found fascinating to watch. I've only watched two episodes but observing the men behind their money was immensely addictive. But more compelling were the folks he (this week's secret millionaire) intended to help. Throughout the programme I kept asking myself was this a set-up, staged like a Hovis cobbled street, purely to pluck at your nostalgic heart strings like a finely tuned harp? Those folk were jaw-droppingly generous to a fault. The term "hearts of gold" begs for attention but they were poorer than the poverty box outside in the rain. Yes these folks had every disadvantage. Ranging from cancer to a disabled daughter in a wheelchair after a drink-drive car accident. Yet it didn't stop them dancing in the chippie. Their dancing was their love-making. And without musical accompaniment, just the sizzle of background battered cod, they made an elegant old couple.

Then there was the whippet thin young mother of three working in a care home for the elderly. What a fucking humbling experience that was to behold. She had a strong and principled work ethic. Took responsibility for her charges with unaffected kindness and actually confessed to enjoying her work. I know I kept harking back to the Hovis cobbled street, my cynicism barely keeping me in check but I wanted to believe in these people.

It's the human condition. Good to triumph over bad. Help and kindess to others over greed and self-promotion. Was I being naive (and can I ever spell that word)? And what was the secret millionaire doing secretly? Starring in a TV programme in a gloriously self-promoting manner? I wanted to believe this man and the people he wanted to help. The people he did help had such generosity and fortitude of character in the face of such grinding daily difficulties that it made me feel ashamed. From the old folks stuck in an under funded care home and their carers on the basic miminum wage, to the old couple struggling with cancer on the housing estate. These people helping one another had humour, real humour, and a basic trust in human nature. It's cliched to say "salt of the earth" and indeed what does that mean? But I cried when at the end of the programme the secret millionaire handed out cheques for various sums of money to all of those most needy.

Reality TV? I don't know. But when always assailed by such despicable acts on a daily basis in the media, we all want and need to believe in the inherit goodness of humanity.

I want for nothing this Xmas

"What better present for the person who has everything than a poignant reminder that they want for nothing? This lovingly crafted vial of emptiness is filled to the brim with unfettered nothingness. Free from the burden of possessions, the weight of responsibility, Nothing is as idiotic as it is brilliant.

Indeed even old Macbeth, though mad as a whippet, realised that life, whilst full of sound and fury (and that was before iPods and ring tones) is inherently daft and ultimately signifies Nothing. And let us not forget, that 'Nothing' is so important that most of our universe - and the contents of a lot of people's heads - appears to be made up of it.

It's a statement, an empty gesture if you will, a nod at the futility of ownership, and yet despite 'Nothing' being nothing, it is of course packed with millions of protons, neutrons and forget-me-nots, which is pretty good for Nothing."

Uses triple-nothing batteries not included

Features
A packet full to the brim with nothing.
Suitable for ages 14 years+ & Nobodies
Size: 17 x 9 x 7cm.
Battery operated

Please ram my nothing into a jiffy bag faster than Parcel Force can put their van into reverse. I enclose nothing not even a cheque to pay for this

Out in the cold?

Castigated by a smug, non-smoking society?

The perfect companion on a winter fag break*

*20 Lambert and Butler not included!

The latest lazy bastard initiative (?) under the heading customer services - a contradiction in terms surely - is simply this:

A bank gets their computer to call your home.

You pick up.

A pause.

Then a pre-recorded message kicks in with "this is the voice of the mysterons/this is an important call from Lloyds bank

"Calling for" .....(plucks name out of virtual top hat with vaguely robotic precision).

Enough. No wonder there are serious security issues in this country. Any pre-recorded call announcing "important" messages purporting to be from a bank simply should not be allowed. Indeed, if a banking institution cannot be bothered to speak but would rather click button "play recorded message" then frankly-Mr-Banky I can't be arsed to listen.

As it is I've just received my grovelling apology from HMC & Devil-may-care cackhandedness regarding the loss of my data. And that makes me feel a whole lot better - NOT.

We all just wanna be......................

Didn't Bill Wyman do something similar?

Question: Is it so wrong to fancy this woman?

She was on the South Bank Show last night and what a gutsy woman. Apart from a couple of navel-fluff, extracting moments, she was bang on the button with her interpretation of music touching and stirring the emotions and the soul.

It transcends, art and literature for me, it's something you just feel. It communicates on a most fundamental level.

Annnie and her androgyny - "sisters are doing it for themselves"

In a week that was beyond parody, well actually...not really, an article about the hazard of falling pears was probably at the top of the tree!

Forget the football - Steve and Terry did that before last week's ignominious match.

Forget the cds - more have gone missing anyway so the rest of the nation can join the sinking ship, last seen listing in the antarctic. EUREKA! That's where all those greatest hits are now. At the bottom of the antartic sea bed. A certain Bobby Darren tune is humming along in my head "somewhere under the sea".

Worcester, the town with the sauce, is now cordoning off trees with that dramatic, doom-mongering sellotape. Stop! Danger! Do not cross this line! Day-glo hazardous post-it notes had been stuck, or dramatically pinned by an archer firing a crossbow, to each trunk with the dire message:

"WARNING. PEARS FALLING!" It's autumn......fruit falls of fucking trees! Or so we have been led to believe.

Killer pears - what breed? What brand? I think it's those bullet-proof, green bastards that leave your gums sore and blood on the white fleshy bit under that grenade-green skin.

Those elusive cds with half the nations personal details can be found hanging in trees as bird and squirrel deterrents.

Personally I blame Alan Titchmarsh and the ground force team

http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/core/Matt/pMattTemplate.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/22/ixmatt.xml

After watching a flaccid football match.

The one.

Last night.

My summation would be:

Best player: The Fans

Best coach without a brolly: The other one

Now the point is, you can't have the determination to win, the fire, the passion the giving-it-all, if you are standing under a fucking golfing brolly. How does that equate with managing a team? I'm sure that brolly obscured his view of the match. Or was his head in the clouds dreaming about his next job?

Stand-in for Mary Poppins!

Notice the "other coach" lean, mean, hungry, earring-ed and simply getting wet, caring not a jot!

Thank you. Here endeth the technical summation

Well (pauses for dramatic effect) I feel that when viewing the BBC news these days its sort of like watching a modern version of the misadventures of Laurel and Hardy. You know........"that's another fine mess you've got me into, Stanley".

Or in todays modern/modem world (a beleagured sigh)...."that's another fine mess you've got us into Gordon!

The dumping of dead fish quotas back into the sea is an obscene waste of the biblical variety. Viewers look on agape (rather like a fish out of water) as tons of perfectly good cod are discarded because,.....well,....because, we are just not allowed to catch that much and those errant fish got in the way when we really wanted prawns. Do we really?

The entire global mass of gaseous fart called earth should seriously be sectioned.

I don't want daily lectures on plastic shopping bags and carbon emissions from cars when I witness such a depraved act of waste. We catch these fish that we are not allowed to catch, haul them out of the sea, check that they are the fish we are not allowed to catch, then lob them back dead because we are not allowed to catch them.

Is this a Monty Python sketch? Not the cheese shop or the dead parrot sketch but the fish slapping fiasco? Maybe fishing boats should emit ultrasonic, sub-aqua warning sirens to alert fish as to which ones are going to be the "catch of the day".

"It's prawns today love. Yes, prawns. Squid, Cod, Bream, Haddock, John Prescott/Dory, and anything with scales swim away from the net. I repeat swim away from the net".

So there's a good idea for any thick-skinned, budding Dragon's Den entrepreneur then.

Indeed!

Revving up and opening the throttle on the Black Rebel Motorcyc..........(yawn) I've had enough of the full title. Just Black Rebel from here on in. I was really thrilled to have managed to get a ticket for their gig last Thursday at the Camden Roundhouse. My jacket squealed with delight as on arrival, I discovered Nine Black Alps on the menu too. Nine Black Alps was apparently taken from a Sylvia Plath novel but I like to think it was more a depressed bar of Toblerone. Dark chocolate naturally.

Back to annihilator rock and BR. In the mosh pit the heads bobbled up and down as the vee-haff-vays-off-making-you-talk searchlights swept through the circus to the throbbing and grimy beat of "666 Conducer". Liquid bombs (could have been water, might not have been) arced through the air as desperate sinners were picked at random and body surfed through to the front of the stage. There, they were swiftly despatched by the burly, bullet-headed security guys.

From what I can remember, they played:

RED EYES AND TEARS
SPREAD YOUR LOVE
FAULT LINE
RESTLESS SINNER
AIN'T NO EASY WAY
BERLIN
ALL YOU DO IS TALK

And the aforementioned "666 conducer". Oh the thrill of watching the lone frontman play a faultless "fault line" with just an accoustic guitar and a keening harmonica.

So after a truly memorable evening, and with a rebel yell, I zipped up my black patent leather biker jacket and headed back out into the "Cold Wind" and frosty Black Rebel Motorcycle night.

"In forensic science, “powder burns” are analyzed to determine the distance between a victim and the weapon that killed him; from the evidence available, Greg Dulli was getting too close to the smoking gun. “I have a deeply addictive personality,” he confesses. “God forbid I like something, because if it’s bad for me, I’m in trouble. But it’s always been the most interesting and unpredictable way to live.” Greg Dulli, of course, remains one of the most interesting and unpredictable figures loitering at the razor’s edge of pop culture.

Justifiably controversial, provocative, literary and utterly compelling as a performer as well as a songwriter, Dulli has never shied away from his demons. On the Twilight Singers cathartic, brilliantly hallucinatory new album Powder Burns, he continues this pattern—but only to subvert expectations."

Always last up to dance, The Twilight Singers sounds a mellow perhaps one would say innocuous title for a band but on listening only once to this album it was an edgy, hazy, dirty thrust into the Twilight zone of addictions, insomnia, private pain and all other clambouring infestations of the soul. A great album for driving away in the dark

Considering that I posted a tribute to "Never Forget" by Take That it is only fair now to flip the other side of the coin.

Take That and the Twilight Singers - the two faces of Janus.

I'm away to the Camden Roundhouse tomorrow evening to see this amazing band. Better give my black patent leather biker jacket a polish before I go. It makes the most amazing semi-raunchy sound. It's the friction of black leather (motorcycle club)!

I was first introduced to this amazing band by Moonie.

A feel good moment for a chuckie-egg,

And I don't even like TAKE THAT but in this instance - sound!

Roll on the cold bleak days of January 08

It wont be very long before we are not allowed to smoke in our homes. Indeed I feel ciggies will be banded with the rest of the class As. You know, smarties, crystal meth, crack cocaine, sherbert lemons/lemon sherberts, skunk, swarfega, maynards wine gums and my best friend: the bacon butty below:

I think these novelty numbers might make a great gift at the office Christmas party. Well it might keep people away from the photo-copier xerox machine illuminating their plums, steamed puddings or crackers!