A quick recommendation before I write something more substantial.

Some Nativity-themed radio comedy from the BBC, available on their 7 day Listen Again facility:

The National Theatre Of Brent’s Messiah (2006 Radio Version)

Brilliantly silly and frequently rather touching, the Nat Theatre Of Brent’s style consists of two grown men acting like pompous schoolboys; specifically a swottier boy bossing about his more highly-strung best friend. Full of delicious malapropisms and general tutting at each other, the nearest point of reference is the Molesworth Books. An absolute joy.

A sixth B&D flyer design from Lovisa:

… just saw the documentary and it was interesting… Could have been more about when you write your diary in a suit and tie, I think. I am not so quick as a lot of your other readers but I thought the flyer thing was so much fun so I made one even though you already found your winner…

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting any responses to my open request for Beautiful & Damned flyer designs, let alone five. You never know until you ask. I’ve gone with Mr Cook’s Beardsley-esque design, though I think they’re all great. My gushing thanks to the kind souls whose fast work is showcased below. I shall never underestimate my readership again.
1. From Sofizel:

2. From DrinkMILK Design:
http://drink-milk.net
http://www.myspace.com/drinkmilkdesign

3. From Danny Chidgey:
www.lazygramophone.com
www.myspace.com/nochancemilega

4. From Stuart Mackie:

5. From Gary Cook:

I’m keen to make a new paper flyer for the Beautiful & Damned Christmas Masked Ball. Something simple in B&W A6 size, where four flyers can be printed out on a sheet of A4 and cut up accordingly.

My own talents in this department are found wanting. So if this sort of thing is second nature to you, please do get in touch. I’ll pay what I can.

The flyer needs to have the following text:

BEAUTIFUL & DAMNED – Christmas Masked Ball.
The decadent disco gets festive…
Thursday 21st December.
9pm to 12.30.
The Boogaloo, 312 Archway Rd, N6 5AT. 020 8340 2928.
Highgate Tube.
Free. Dress code: Stylish & Masked.

Some sort of 1920s-themed masked ball imagery would be ideal.

There, I’ve asked.

dickon@dickonedwards.co.uk

I’ve been charged with taking dictation from Mr MacGowan again. This time, it’s for the Guardian website’s blogs section. Essentially, I get him on the phone while he’s on tour, he rants on about whatever’s on his mind, and I write it all up. Rather helps that my answering machine can be switched to recording a live call. The blog has the blessing of Mr O’Boyle and Ms Clarke.

He mentions a Mr O’Neill, who has something to do with football, specifically Celtic FC. It’s fair to say I had to look him up.

Link

Some correspondence and responses in the week since the Imagine programme was transmitted.

Firstly, Stuart of the blog Feeling Listless was disappointed that the programme had no website with further information about its content. Quite unusual for the BBC, really. You’re used to hearing an announcer over the credits of a documentary saying “If you’d like further help about depression / adult literacy / switching to digital TV / doing the Hokey Cokey, go to www. (etc.) or phone 0800 (etc.).”

Not so with Imagine. The individual programme’s title, “www.herecomeseverybody.co.uk” just led to the relevant short description on the BBC’s What’s On site. Perhaps this was a sly tie-in with the DIY spirit of the subject, with the pitting of Unpaid Amateur Webland against Paid Professional TV in the gold rush for people’s leisure time. That someone out there would do the follow-up research for them, in their own free time, for no payment. In which case, they thought right:

I wondered if you’d seen this annotation I put together for the Imagine
programme …

http://feelinglistless.blogspot.com/2006/12/imagine-links.html

Stuart.

Lovisa writes from Gothenburg, Sweden:

dear mr edwards,
I read in your diary that there was a documentary about you and internet diaries on bbc1. Am very interested in seeing it, but I find the bbc website retarded and cannot find anything about it or if there is a possibility to download it. in sweden you can download everything that has been shown on public service for 30 days, which is really cool.

could you post a link or something..? would be lovely.

Try a torrent site like www.uknova.com. UK Nova has an admirable sense of responsibility: only programmes which are unavailable on DVD or anywhere online are allowed to have their torrents hosted. You can find all sorts of rare gems there, past and present – the 1979 Tom Stoppard play ‘Professional Foul’ starring the late Peter Barkworth, for instance. Last year’s ‘South Bank Show’ on Alan Bennett. It’s completely replaced my video recorder. Though like VCRs, it takes a while to work out how to work torrents, along with something called ‘Port Forwarding’. Which sadly has nothing to do with getting a letter to a sailor boy.

Here’s a blogger’s response that singles me out, via Googling my own name (an ‘ego-search’). Yes, I know that way lies madness, and I’ve more or less kicked the habit these days, but on this occasion of Internet Use As Solipsism I feel it was warranted. From Nathan Williams of Simiant.com (link):

Uh so I sat down to watch Imagine on the BBC last night, the one where Alan Yentob tells us about the Internet, and was disappointed to find that at least, what, 15 minutes (?) of the program was dedicated to shots of Alan either posing or pulling confused and puzzled expressions. Shame, could have been much better. Also who was Toby? And where was Tom Coates et al? And why Dickon Edwards? Why?

As my mother must think on occasion.

Why Dickon Edwards? You’d have to ask the programme makers. I didn’t seek them out; they came for me. Though perhaps it helped that I came with a selection of suits and ties to choose from, and had done my own make-up.

By the way, I’m writing this while wearing a tie, shirt and suit trousers, even though I’ve only left the house to go shopping in Highgate and have barely spoken to anyone else in person today. I wouldn’t want newcomers to the diary who saw me on TV to think I dress that way purely for the cameras. I dress this way so I can think straight.

As for Toby, the young man who sat on Mr Yentob’s Internet Sofa and showed him around the Web, I ‘imagined’ (or rather hoped) he was a kind of BBC Houseboy, an arcane position available to executives during the earliest days of the Corporation, and never revoked. Like the Pronunciation Unit, but more frequently consulted. It’s said Michael Grade was once offered a half-naked Indian boy from the 1930s to follow him around TV Centre whispering into his ear “You ARE right about Doctor Who, memsahib.” Said purely by madmen, I must add.

I didn’t know who Tom Coates was, so I looked him up. It transpires he’s ‘well-known as an expert in Social Software’. Which is where I feel like Mr Yentob somewhat. Mr Coates has been blogging since 1999 and has won all kinds of awards for it. ‘Bloggies’ they’re called. Including a Lifetime Achievement Award, defined as a one-off gong for “Webloggers who have been blogging at least since January 1, 2001.”

Though I’ve written this diary since 1997, and have been quoted in magazines (Select Magazine featured the diary once – that rather dates it), and have a known following of kind readers, I guess these are just not the sort of readers who vote in awards for blogs. They can’t all come here out of sarcasm.

Besides, I’m not part of that gang, by design or default, accident or deliberation. I don’t see myself as part of what some call the ‘blogosphere’. I don’t keep tabs on what other bloggers are saying, I don’t ‘tag’, I don’t allow for comments, and the one time I tried to Join In – converting the blog to a LiveJournal – I realised it just wasn’t me. I’m better off going it alone like this. There is danger in numbers.

Competing with other blogs, counting the comments, is not my cup of Twinings Aromatics. The only competition is with myself – I struggle to write at all some days. I just want to provide something you might not get elsewhere.

“I may not be better than other people, but at least I’m different.’

-Rousseau

I write as if I’m read by people who don’t usually go on the Web. When I began the diary, there were no blog communities, no comments boxes, no sidebars with a list of Blog Friends. I had no Web friends; that was the whole point. I was not so much an explorer on virgin soil as an outcast shipwrecked. When the colonies came, I tried to join in; then I realised they were from the same world which had exiled me in the first place. Although I’m happy to co-exist with them as they draw up new boundaries and name the things I was doing already (‘Web diary’ becoming ‘blog’), I feel a fraud if I try to pass myself off as a citizen of their world.

Am I still talking about blogging? I’m not sure.

My fellow DJ Miss Red had now re-branded this month’s Beautiful & Damned as a Christmas Masked Ball.

As ever, the dressing-up is optional, but the addition of a suitably stylish mask is strongly encouraged. Even those cheap Zorro-style eye masks will do.

Other details are unchanged; the club is on Thursday 21st December, at The Boogaloo. Full club information is on the News page.

I’m going to start quoting email correspondence that may be of interest to the Reader. If only so I can try out the Indent Block Quote button on this new diary entry form.

Master Hughes writes:

Oh, Mr. Edwards –

“Including the spam email, the swines.”

the plural of ‘swine’ is …..’swine’. Tsk, tsk!

Just looked this up. Both the Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries give ‘swines’ as acceptable in the plural, as long as I’m using it to mean the old-fashioned slang for contemptible person, and not for pigs.

Oxford link
Cambridge link

It’s also seems funnier than just ‘swine’. I’m aware of the comedian Russell Brand’s endorsement of phrases like “the swines!” as part of his curious mix of 2006 Estuary English and an affected old-fashioned vernacular. But he’s picking up a tradition. Though I concur that there’s more to Mr Brand’s style than just that. And I’m hardly best placed for accusing others of using an archaic vocabulary to attract attention.
“You dirty rotten swines” is a Goon Show catchphrase, and Mr Sellers uses it in Dr Strangelove when playing the stiff-upper-lip RAF officer:

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: I was tortured by the Japanese, Jack, if you must know; not a pretty story.
General Jack D. Ripper: When they tortured you, did you talk?
Mandrake: Well, I don’t think they wanted me to talk really. I don’t think they wanted me to say anything. It was just their way of having a bit of fun, the swines. Strange thing is they make such bloody good cameras.

The talented Master Of Webs Mr Neil Scott has kindly upgraded the machinery behind this site, in the interests of vaguely keeping up with the Internet Joneses. Or at least, vaccinating against the latest security risks. So this now comes to you courtesy of WordPress 2.0.5. The new colour scheme for the diary entry box (which readers can’t see) looks a bit like one of those stylish notebooks from Liberty Of Regent Street’s Gift Room on the ground floor. So, many thanks for the Christmas present, Mr Scott.

One side-effect of the implementation appears to be a few recent entries inadvertently re-sent on the RSS feeds, looking like I’ve having November’s Beautiful & Damned all over again. In which case, please forgive such erroneous electronic burps as the new system’s stomach settles.

Tuesday Dec 5th – the BBC1 documentary about blogging (“Imagine: www.herecomeseverybody.co.uk”) is transmitted. I’m only in it fleetingly, but the visitor statistics for the web diary quadruple.

My volume of email multiplies. Including the spam email, the swines. I get a few volleys from bored loafers, but also a number of kind emails from friends and regular readers, plus a few messages of praise from newcomers.

I pass my next door neighbour, Ms V, in the street:

“Saw you on the TV the other night. I didn’t realise you were into computers.”

At one point in the programme, Mr Yentob is shown reading this diary. It’s the entry where I talk about having already been filmed for the same programme, particularly the part where I say I’m disappointed with the lack of tie-wearing among current BBC staff.

So this entry is about me observing a programme… which observes me observing… a programme which… is observing me.

Snakes are eating their tails, cameras are filming their own playback monitors, mirrors are held up to each other. The pool loves Narcissus only because it sees its own beauty reflected in the boy’s eyes. Still, it keeps us off the streets.

Among the emails is one from a TV production company. They saw me on the programme. Would I be interested in meeting them with a view to working on new TV projects?

Well of course I am. But I’ll see what they have in mind.

If I could do ANYTHING on TV… however unlikely…

– Writing for Doctor Who. Obviously.
– Appearing in Doctor Who. “I could play all day in my green cathedral.”
– Presenting BBC4 type documentaries on JK Huysmans, Paul & Jane Bowles, Saki, HP Lovecraft, Donald Barthelme, Dennis Cooper, Hans Christian Andersen, the Arabian Nights, Quentin Crisp, Whit Stillman, Lindsay Anderson, Stephen Tennant, Tom Lehrer, ghost stories, the history of transgenderism, deviant sexuality in Greek & Roman myths, Lars Von Trier, Mary Renault… Oh, they’ve already done that last one.

I’ll have a serious think about what I might be good at – or good for. Any burning suggestions to the usual address, please.

As long as it’s not Reality TV. I’ve never been very good at Reality.