p.s.  Evelyn why are you in China and what is is it you're asking me about?

Blog 40a.

Well in response to your question Evelyn I would say that its generally accepted that the era of the Main Battle Tank (MBT) such as the T90, M2 Abrams or Challenger 2 is over and the North Koreans are going down a blind alley in building their own (apart from all the other blind alleys they are going down).  There is however an account in "Stalin Ate My Homework" (which you have very sensibly pre-ordered) of how I came to be obsessed with military hardware.

Russell I’m glad you’ve found out the difference between a Mac 10 and an Uzi.  The Mac 10 of course is connected with my greatest triumph.  I’m  sure I’ve written about it before but  in 1993 I was in a Showtime movie called “Deadly Currents”  Starring Bill Patterson and I think the last film of George C Scott.  I recorded it a while ago when it was on in the middle of the night on the TV and I’m actually not that bad in it.   In the end I get to fire a mac 10.  As there was no armourer on the film, one of the producers was doing the guns and when we came to do the scene he didn’t know how to cock the Mac 10 so I had to show him!  Which made me feel really good.

It’s interesting to hear about “Selling HItler” being released in the states.  For it I had to learn to forge Hitler’s signature as in one shot the director wanted me to do it on camera, in a scene when I was forging the diaries.  For a long time it was my party piece to produce Hilter’s signature with a flourish.

The day after my reading I was back on the South Bank when I was made a Fellow of the University of the Arts.  The Unversity of the Arts is all the London art schools, Chelsea, St Martins, Camberwell and so on.   I wore a proper gown and hat and everything.  I didn’t want to say anything too encouraging in my speech so I told the audience of graduating students and their families about how Chelsea were going to throw me out after my first term until I made a short film cruelly mocking the teaching staff then they let me stay.

In this South Bank themed blog I am pleased to see the return of The South Bank Show to Sky Arts after it as cancelled by ITV.  I always longed to be on this pretentious arts show, it would have played to my intellectual vanity but I was never featured even though they had Ben Elton about seven times and Lenny Henry at least twice and now it's back maybe I’ll still have a chance.  I plan to begin my interview with a long diatribe against Melvin Bragg for not having me on sooner.

More importantly we’ve got a new cat!  Our beloved Tiger died three years ago and I’ve been grieving ever since but we heard through a friend a few weeks ago that a, lovely but clearly lost cat had turned up in the front garden of a friend of theirs and was refusing to leave.  They put up posters and checked with cat charities but nobody reported a cat matching his description missing so we brought him home on Saturday.  They’d actually called him Tiger but we’ve named him Wilf M’Banga after a Zimbabwean freedom fighter and journalist.  The guy whose garden he was living in, had been a journalist in what was then Rhodesia and had known the original Wilf M’Banga well.

Wilf seems to be a Main Coon cat, he is certainly huge with gigantic paws. I have always dreamed of running through the streets of London late at night with a pack of giant cats who would do my bidding or possibly riding a war chariot pulled by giant cats through the middle of the Hay Festival so this is stage one. 

It was funny refereeing that writers v scientists football match on the South Bank on my bicycle.  The organisers had said “Oh its all a laugh and nobody’s taking it at all seriously” but as soon as I tried to make a stupid joke during the game one of the players gave me such a look that after a couple of minutes I just left them to get on with it.  My only contribution was that since I wasn’t wearing a watch one half of the game was 11 minutes long and the other half 17.

I watched the semi-finals of the World Cup at my house in Spain, every time Spain scored the villagers would run out into the streets and fire rockets in the air then run inside again to carry on watching the game, so I can only imagine the noise last night, like a sort of fun invasion of Gaza.

I have spent the last two days in John Lennon’s house in Liverpool making a programme for Radio 4.   After a while I got to thinking that it was my house and was getting annoyed with these four tours a day coming through my front door.  It was really weird yesterday, we let the tours go through then interviewed them when they had some free time at the end so in between times I would just lie in the sun in Aunt Mimi’s garden under the apple trees she planted. Some people get very moved when they’re in the house and I think I probably spoilt the most important moment in their lives by asking them stupid questions.  But they were all very nice about it, a couple of Americans sang Please Please Me for us in the porch where John and Paul used to play.

Another weird thing is that quite rightly the National Trust limits access to the house to these four tours every day but there is a constant stream of tourists in taxis or on foot who come to the gate and stare at the house unable to enter, like Gazans staring through the border wire.  Its a little disconcerting.

Hi Elak, yes it would be good to have Panic on Mp3.  Can you just send it or do I have to get in touch with you?

Blog 35a

Hi Shane.  Yes it as me on the 82.  Thank you for posting and confirming my "man of the people" image.
I do really like the formality of the passengers on Liverpool buses though, a lot of people still say "Thank you driver" as they get off as if he's driven them on a three day stagecoach ride from Derby.

Blog 35b

Hi Evelyn,

I watched the game at Matthew Norman's house.  He is a sports writer and restaurant critic.  If you look at his last column for the Guardian it was me who was with him when we reviewed Stevie Gerrard's restaurant in Southport and though we gave his place 11 out of 10 so as not to affect his performance it clearly didn't work.

Blog 35c

The details of my Autumn reading tour are now in the Appearances section.  

This Sunday I'm in the Independent on Sunday, a big piece on cycling.

Sorry to call this blog 34 but I thought nobody would notice if it was blog 33b.

Blog No. 34a.

London Tonight  is like Chicken Tonight but with bits of London in it.

Blog No. 34b.

Chicken Tonight is a TV show broadcast in the London area and aimed at the metropolitan chicken, it has features on chicken clubs, chicken fashion, poetry and literature written about and by chickens and regular music from Elaine Page.

Currently I am in Malaga because, I’m writing an article on Picasso, whose home town this is, for the Sunday Times but also because we wanted to visit the IKEA near the airport which was actually a bit disappointing, I don't know why but I thought an IKEA in Spain would be more exciting than the one in Wembley but it isn't. Today I had my photo taken at Picasso’s birthplace by a Sunday Times photographer so I avoided paying the €1.00 entry fee.  I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before but I’m a big fan of what the Spanish call the Casa Natal.  In fact in June I’m  making a documentary for Radio 4 about John Lennon’s home in Liverpool.

We drove down here via Ronda and stopped on the way for a coffee at a roadhouse in the mountains where the menu had been translated into English in a very odd way.  Tapas were listed as “Cold Lids-Snacks” and “Hot Lids-Snacks” while “Rosada a la Plancha” somehow had become “Hoar Frost with Rime Irons”!

Sitting on the terrace of the hotel last night , behind me there was an elderly-ish American Couple and a French woman.  They were talking about Picasso’s most famous painting Guernica which both women had seen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York but the American woman’s husband had never heard of it so she explained its content to him.  She said “It’s like about this town that got like completely bombed and flattened. But I don’t know what the town was called.”  “I think the town was called Guernica.”  the French woman said.  “Well there you go.” replied the American woman.

BLOG 33 a

Well funnily enough it was on the terrace of the Parador next to the Castilo Gilbrilfaro where I overheard the American woman talking about Picasso.

But I’d never heard of El Pimpi and now its too late because I’m back in Granada but I liked Malaga a lot so next time I visit I’ll definitely check it out.

I meant to mention I had a bit of a shock watching Channel 4 the other week in my house here in Spain, they had that Top 100 Comedians programme originally broadcast in 2007 with the same interviews but redone for 2010.

And I found I’d gone from number 18 in 2007 to number 72 now!  While I thought number 18 was perhaps a bit high, number 72 seems a bit too low for my place in the firmament of comedy.  Its very hard knowing your exact ranking in the world.  Up until two weeks ago when I was 18 I was a very demanding person, constantly sending paninis back in cafes for either being too hot or too cold but now I’m 72 and small Spanish children have started pushing me off the pavement.   How did this happen?

Southend Library was very well organised and a great audience of over two hundred (take that Russell Howard) and Huddersfield was also terrific.  I’d never been there before and was astonished at how beautiful the town centre is and I also had a very reasonably priced pizza over the road from my hotel.   The audience were very serious at Huddersfield, we spent a long time talking about Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance then somebody asked what I thought about identity politics. I didn’t know what this was so they explained that  Identity politics refers to political arguments that focus upon the self interest and perspectives of social minorities, or self-identified social interest groups.  I said that this was all getting a bit serious and I was more used to being asked questions about The Young Ones or what it was like when I was working with the Daleks.  She replied that in fact the Daleks were a good example of Identitiy Politics since they acted as a coherent group based solely on their Dalekness.

I checked with my agent and she said that actually I own the rights to “All New...” and “Merry go round” and that we hadn’t signed them over over to the BBC because otherwise they’d be streaming them for free to mobile phones and so on.  But if Worldwide or somebody esle wanted to make me an offer I’d happily let them do DVDs of these shows, so its still worth lobbying though apparently the DVD market isn’t what it was due to the BBC  be streaming programmes for free to mobile phones and so on.