American Pie

I spent part of Easter Sunday catching up on the last episode of series one of Glee. As an admission designed to shatter any image I might have of being macho, I realise this is up there with being word perfect in Judy Garland’s role in Meet Me In St Louis, having posters on my wall of Audrey Hepburn, and just slightly behind choosing Elton John, Ricky Martin, Edith Piaf and Tinkerbell as my all time fantasy band. But I can’t help it. I love it.

Poor old America gets some really bad programmes on television, as we do, but we’re lucky in the UK as we usually get the best of their stuff because that’s what sells abroad. I exempt from this, of course, anything with the word “Model” in it and everything that includes Paris Hilton.

My weekly viewing seems more and more to lean towards Americana with my faves including Mad Men, Glee and True Blood along with comedies like 30 Rock, Modern Family and Fox News. Except, of course, Fox News is supposed to be serious.

Being a news anchor is one of the cheesiest, most shameful jobs in television when you take yourself seriously and, my goodness, they take themselves seriously on American News. The bad acting as they read distressing stories, the forced, unfunny jollity between co anchors as they fill between stories, and the over rehearsed questions and answers with reporters live from a scene, are beyond parody. These nylon headed tailor’s dummies make a fortune and are hammier than Animal Farm during Pork Festival week.

Think of the worst programme idea you can come up with and it’s already been done in America. Just this year “One Thousand Ways To Lie”, an American show where people share the biggest lies they have ever told, was cancelled after just one outing. “The Will”, a show that followed bereaved families attending the reading of loved ones’ wills, premiered in December and was cancelled after the pilot. Also cancelled after just a few shows this month were Past Lives, a detective story based on reincarnation, and Ruby And The Rockits, in which David Cassidy played a “past it” pop star.

But all these lasted longer than a show called Blonde Charity Mafia which followed three blonde twenty somethings who think work is something servants do to feel useful. These princesses worship the Bank Of Daddy and were such poor company the networks hid their embarrassment and it never aired at all. Ditto with Our Little Genius, where child prodigies competed for money by answering questions like “name five Trojan asteroids around Neptune”. No one understood the questions, no one liked the kids.

But before we all start to feel sanctimonious we must remember that because we get a filtered version of American TV, they also get an unrepresentatively good version of ours. They watch The Office or whatever and think all our TV is like that, blissfully unaware of Nick Knowles, My Family, or Last Of The Summer Wine.

We saw off Michael Winner’s Dinners, but you may think a country that allows Ian Wright on Channel Five, or Amanda Holden on anything, or lets Jeremy Kyle earn a living rather than putting him in a cage with Loose Women and a pride of starving lions, is in no position to comment at all.

You may think that. I of course couldn’t possibly comment.

Hey Fatty Bum Bum

With an election approaching, I’ve been chewing things over a bit this week like a cow with more stomachs than it knows what to do with. I’m bored with politics so I turned my thoughts to what I would do as Prime Minister and how I would stamp out obesity. I think I’ve found an answer which is simplicity itself - just as well with my limited brain.

I’m probably a little obsessed just now with exercise as I mentioned last week that I’ve been going daily to the local gym for a blast of cycling, running, sit ups and gossip, and it that has been exhausting. Well, the exercise has been tiring, but coming up with new gossip every day for all the gym buddies and Wimbledon wives is absolutely knackering, let me tell you.

My weight, however, has not been falling off fast enough through diet or exercise so, like a latter day Tony Blair, I have been on the lookout for a third way, and now I think I have it. I will share it with you, but I don’t want my idea stolen and put in some Paul McKenna self help book – he has more money than a Banker celebrating a Lottery win – so I am sharing this for free.

We stayed overnight at a hotel in the countryside on Friday and they gave us a breakfast which was probably left over from the last Apollo moon landing with milk, spoon and cornflakes all contained in a small, shakeable, tub. Very healthy but at times like this I wish I had a gerbil to feed. So we went next door where they had a restaurant run by a gourmet cook who was possibly on the short side, and this Little Chef served porridge that made me feel as if Pavarotti was hiding in my lower intestines. With food very much on my mind then I set off and I noticed Mother Nature giving me the answer to the world’s weight problem.

As I drove I noticed fields filled with sheep, and I idly wondered if I could find one who was not eating. For mile after mile, sheep after sheep, not one of them stopped munching. You never see a sheep just looking around or shooting the breeze with his mates and yet you never see a fat sheep either. So I asked myself Why?

Anyone else would have come to the conclusion that it is because they only eat grass, but not me. I knew the real reason. You never notice fat sheep because we always assume their bulk is down to their wool needing to be sheared off. In other words sheep are masters of disguise by hiding their obesity cleverly under a blanket of wool. Again, someone else would say this means we should all wear baggy clothes, but what happens in the changing rooms at the gym? People would see your playdoh tum and bum then wouldn’t they?

The simple answer for us is to do what sheep do. You never see sheep shaving or using a razor under their arms or on their legs. Sheep just let the wool grow, and that is what we should do. No more epilating, no more razors or special creams. Let’s all grow long beards to hide our double chins. Let’s all encourage hairy legs and other bits to hide our excess flab.

Of course chewing gum would be a thing of the past - I’m told lambs don’t appreciate the smell of mint - but, let’s face it, it’s a small price to pay.

If we all live like sheep, our confidence will be higher. Mortgages will be history as we all commune together, fitness trainers will have to retrain as hairdressers, January’s Fitness DVDs will be obsolete, and every TV programme will be presented by The Hairy Bikers.

And politics and elections will be a thing of the past.

Holiday

I’ve just had a week off from work and I would love to tell you that my plan of having seven days of debauchery, lying in bed till the afternoon, getting up to have a breakfast of chocolate Easter eggs and then lying around catching up on unwatched Desperate Housewives episodes, came true. But it didn’t.

Life, sadly, doesn’t turn out the lazy way we plan, unless you’re a WAG or a politician. When the first WAG becomes an MP then the game really will be up.

I had written down loads of things to catch up and do this week, and by the weekend I had accomplished most of the important stuff on the list. I had written my quarterly fan letter to the VAT man, a distant bloke who seems never to give any love back despite the money I send him, I renewed my house insurance so my collection of single socks and dead plants are once again protected, I caught up on a few new albums, and I even dropped in on my daughter’s dance class to watch her end of term display. Being the only person not wearing a bra in the room I felt completely out of place and I waited expectantly for my Billy Elliot moment when I would suddenly jump up and join in. To my daughter’s relief, it didn’t arrive.

Last time I watched her perform it was like looking at a class of seals tapping their flippers in time to a beat that was in their heads but not on the CD. This time was magical. Suddenly they had evolved into mini grownups who actually looked like they could stay on their feet and knew that “coordination” wasn’t the street with the Rovers Return pub. I was very proud.

After the dancing I even managed to get out in my garden, although the word “garden” at the moment seems an exaggeration as it has as much colour as an X ray – unless you count the lovely green moss growing in the brown grass and spreading its joy on the patio.

Our plot is around half an acre which is large compared to a window box but small when next to, say, Beth Ditto’s drawers. It’s big enough to warrant me being out there every weekend from now till winter and I did really enjoy the first weeding, clearing and backache.

If you’re thinking “how sad that in his life that passes for fun” then you don’t understand my neighbourhood. Over the garden walls you can catch up on the gossip from the past few months while everyone has been shut indoors, and a quick try out on the kids’ trampoline means I can see what others are having for their tea or what they’re watching on telly. One neighbour even told me he’d seen things from his trampoline that would make my hair curl, and then he shut up before expanding further. I think he suddenly realised he’d seen them going on in my house.

Talking of expanding further, my proudest achievement this week is that I have finally got around to doing something about my waistline, by going back to the gym. I managed five trips this week to do cycling, running, sit ups, weights and the recovery hot chocolate, and I am now officially obsessed with exercise again.

In my mind the pounds are coming off, I no longer look pregnant, I’ll soon be able to squeeze back in to my XXXL pants again, and elasticated waistbands and smocks will be a thing of the past. I’ll even be able to throw away my new T shirt which Debbie uses as a Slanket.

Having a week off is fun. Why don’t we do it every week?

Mother Of Mine

Well we can put the rhubarb wine away now as that’s another Mother’s Day over. It’s a day that should be filled with joy and happiness. The most important bit of that sentence, of course is, SHOULD BE, because for me it’s a day when just about everything that can go wrong usually does.

As I leave it too late to book a nice restaurant, and the days of getting away with McDonalds and a free toy seem to have paled for my wife, the whole Mother’s Day thing is a minefield.

First up my own mum told me, as she does every year, that she didn’t want me to waste money on a present, which is very kind but leaves me every year asking “but does she mean it?”. She says that flowers just die and chocolates make her fat, but if I sent her paper roses and a box of Diet Chef meals she just might be offended, no?

This year she excelled herself with a new one. After the usual pleas for no presents to be sent she said, “And I don’t need a card either - I’ve still got the one you sent last year”. So I was then faced with a double whammy of potential minefields. So what to do?

I turned to friends who told me the solution was to send her a poem that I should write myself. I tried constructing a work of art but it all looked like a Christmas cracker insert and I couldn’t get anything to rhyme in a way that my mum would have liked. Poems are easy when they’re about girlfriends as you can always get something romantic to go with their name, but unfortunately I couldn’t get away from rhyming Mum with Bum.

In the end I decided to send something that would remind her of how important and indispensible she has been in my life. I sent her my washing.

Here in my own home we are past the stage of our kids making necklaces from sweeties and painting the word Mum on stones from the garden and calling them paperweights. The kids are a bit more mature now, even if their Dad isn’t, so they bought Mum a teapot and made a card.

I booked a restaurant which was great for atmosphere and food tho’ I could have done without the kid with the hula hoop knocking dishes over and generally confusing the dining table with a Tumble Tots picnic.

I also got the flowers. The last bunch of roses I bought was for our wedding anniversary and they died quicker than the smile on a flying ant in a room full of spiders. So I had to source these ones with all the care and research of Doctor Who looking for a heart surgeon. I’ve noticed, by the way, that the good doctor, the man with two hearts who should be able to give twice the love, gets rid of his companions before they get too close. Saves on poems and dodgy roses.

He’s not daft as it also means he’ll never have a mother in law to worry about, wondering if Mother’s Day falls on the same date on Earth as on Gallifrey or Mars. In fairness mine never says “don’t send me anything” but we still have to make sure she gets a call.

Marriage should come with a warning. Get hitched, have babies by all means. But they don’t tell you when you get married that you’ll end up with three Mothers’ Days to worry about do they?

I Go Ape

I sang a duet with multiple Grammy award winner Neil Sedaka this week.

As he has a new musical about his life story being premiered I was lucky enough to meet and interview him again and, as we chatted afterwards, I mentioned a favourite song of mine that he’d written years ago. Unfortunately it’s not a song he sings often and he’d forgotten the words, so I sang them for him and his eyes lit up as he joined in. Of course I should have told him to butt out, one singer one song and all that, but I figured “well if he’s enjoying it let him have his moment”. Having duetted with Elton John, Carole King and others, he probably saw this as something his career had been building towards.

Over the years many have fought to sing with me – at least I think they have as fighting usually breaks out when I sing - and I’ve lost count of the number of times folk have shouted at me the title of that classic Joe Dolce song “Shaddup Ya Face”, presumably expecting me to burst in to song with them. Simon Cowell even told me I could win the X Factor and he rated my voice. Actually, what he said was “your voice is X rated”, but I knew what he meant.

Whoever is behind the publicity for Cowell’s various money making projects is doing their job too well just now as I’m suffering from Cowell fatigue every time I look in the papers or on television. Even his partners in crime are so horribly over exposed that I find myself wishing Piers Morgan would join all the other great British piers and catch fire before falling in to the sea.

Then there’s Cheryl and Ashley, toughening it out in their Cole bunker and only coming out when there’s an emergency like an album to plug or a party to attend. As journalists try to unearth ever more dirt on them they make it impossible for me to go anywhere without wanting to scream for sanity, and I cannot bear Brat King Cole and his missus any more.

That’s why I was delighted this week to come across a web site called Happy News Dot Com. It sets out to show only the good news from around the world, and this week it featured the warming tale of Grace Groner, an American lady who died aged 100. She had lived all her life in a tiny house and bought all her clothes from car boot sales yet, in her will this week, she left her former college a surprise seven million dollars.

Then there was the story of two eight year old boys in Australia who saved a man from drowning, a diver who wrestled a Frisbee ring from around a suffocating shark’s throat, and the tale of a dog collar and lead, billed as “once belonging to Charles Dickens”, being auctioned off for twelve thousand dollars. I’m hoping that it actually belonged to Charles Dickens’s dog rather than to the writer himself.

But no matter how hard I looked amongst the good news stories, I couldn’t see any sign of my duet with Neil Sedaka. I should email them with the background and suggest an uplifting headline like “Old Man Made Very Happy”.

Or perhaps I’m being selfish. Maybe the headline should be about Sedaka instead of me.

Honesty

I’ve been loving the new series of Mad Men, the television drama set in the Sixties at a New York advertising agency where men are men, and women are either pregnant or have typewriters sewn to their fingertips.

Every week I fall for the style and sophistication, the clothes and the power, but it goes hand in hand with smoking and drinking, rampant sexism and lack of morals. It’s like watching a Premier League football team.

In Mad Men they make no bones about how advertising manipulates the great unwashed in to buying stuff they really don’t need, at prices they can’t afford, with slogans they can’t understand. They remind us constantly that success is all a matter of ripping off other people’s ideas and not letting your clients know that you’re making it up as you go along.

There’s a random catchphrase site on the web just now called The Advertising Slogan Generator, and it really shows up how stupid the whole industry is. Go to it and you type in the name of your product then wait while it makes up a slogan for your campaign. I typed in the word Flatulence and got “We Bring Good Flatulence In To Your Life”, and it then gave me alternatives like “You Can Be Sure Of Flatulence”, “Watch Out There’s Flatulence About”, “The Flatulence Of Champions” and, my favourite, “Do You Love Your Flatulence Enough To Share It?”.

This selling nonsense has made me wonder how much better it would be if advertisers just admitted the truth about their dark art and we all got back to telling the plain facts about products. I know that in an ad man’s dictionary the word Description lies next to Deception, Truth next to Twaddle, and Fact next to Fantasy but I can dream, can’t I, of how life changing it would be if they started to tell the whole story?

Wouldn’t you stop to look twice at a billboard with “Global Warming – We Might Just Have Made It Up”? Wouldn’t you be riveted by an ad that said something like “Selfish? Got Nothing To Offer? Make A Career In Banking.”

In these days of celebrities getting accused of textual harassment, there’s an advert running in magazines and papers for a mobile telephone company that asks “What would you do with unlimited texts?”. Why not add the truthful answer to it? Something like “I’d get splashed all over the papers, then chucked out of my home and have to give my wife fifty per cent of my earnings.”

Comedian and writer Ricky Gervais made a movie last year called The Invention Of Lying about a society that always tells the truth to each other. I’d be lying if I said the movie was any good, but it did make me smile at one point with an honest advertising slogan on the side of one bus that said “Pepsi. For When There’s No Coke”.

It’s too late for me to go in to the advertising game now, but if I did then I would ask to be given the difficult accounts and then I’d set about making them more honest. Forget selling Viagra with photos of weedy men turned in to supermen. Why not just a slogan like “Viagra. Something For The Weak End.”

Or I could help Toyota with something along the lines of “In A Hurry? Try Our Cars. We Stop For No One.”

Honesty! That’s what we all need.

Hong Kong Garden

If the blog seems a bit confused this week it’s simply that my body is just back from Hong Kong but my head is still half way over the Middle East, racing to get back and catch up as I try to get some sleep.

Before I flew to the Far East, I took my daughters to the first anniversary party for the Michael Jackson musical Thriller. The noise was deafening as the cast and friends packed a London nightclub and we had to shout over the chatter and music. I was especially impressed with the cast members who played the Jackson Five in their young days and had grown big, bushy hairstyles for the role.

I jokingly shouted to my older daughter “I’m going to get an afro”. She shouted back that this was a great idea and I should do it as soon as possible. Disappointed that she hadn’t laughed at the idea of me looking like an extra from Car Wash, I carried on drinking until my youngest came up very excited. “Who’s going to get your Blackberry phone?”, she asked. I had no clue what she was on about until she shouted “Annalie says you’re going to get an iPhone”.

iPhones were in plentiful supply in Hong Kong, but there were no afro hairstyles that I could see. I had a great, tiring time, and you can still see the video blogs I kept if you wish. The link is below. Check out especially the video where I had my feet nibbled by fish at the Kiss Kiss Fish Spa. It was very unenjoyable for me but our listeners loved it as I was in pain. What a kind lot.

I got to fly a 747 Jumbo plane in a simulator used to test Cathay Pacific’s pilots so I now know how to make the flight go slower and last longer. This is important as I had watched the movie An Education on the way over but fell asleep so had to start it again and we landed about ten minutes from the end. So if you know what happens in that film let me know. It’s up for an Oscar and I’ll be the only person who doesn’t know if it has a happy ending.

While recording in Ladies’ Market on Wednesday a lady came up to me and told me more about myself than is natural. She wasn’t a fortune teller but had recognised me and reads my blog, has watched my shows, and now watches my wife on Shopping TV. She felt we had something in common as her husband stars in the TV show Casualty. On talking to him, though, I found he’s a driver for the cast who was once asked to stand in as an extra in a crowd scene. Showbiz is glam isn’t it?

Now I’m home to cold, frost and sleet, and life is starting to get back to normal. But I’m armed with the knowledge of what the year ahead has in store for me as I had my fortune read twice. The first reader, a Feng Shui expert, said I was soft on the outside but metal on the inside and I have to take fish oil capsules to stop the metal corroding. The second fortune teller said I was like a Princess from centuries ago and that, sadly, like her, I would not get a new husband in the next year. I’m gutted.

If you want to catch up on my adventures, watch the videos at http://www.smoothradiolondon.co.uk/presenters-shows/shows-xmw1/graham-dene-breakfast-show-myfc/win-a-fantastic-trip-to-hong-kong/pvhmwfz7/promo-pauls-blog/