Neighbours, Tuesday

After a game of fives that made the acute tendonitis in my ankles chronic, I burnt the roof of my mouth off with a corn on the cob. Impatience.

Sat feeling sorry for my aching body on the couch for my 9pm BBC2 fix. This week a series on Paris began. Not as riveting as Andrew Marr's Modern History of Britain (probably the best tv series I've been glued to in years) it was still good to see some of the places we saw in the summer and more and the background of Europe's finest city.

Then followed the BBC1 news reporting on the floods in Sheffield, the BAE/Saudi scandal and Blair oot Broon in. It was side-splitting. Armando Ianucci couldn't have penned it better himself. Like an episode of the Day Today - the roving reporter in Sheffield was Alan Partridge and the fella on the BAE scandal was Chris Morris with hilarious editing. The news ended on some cracking photographs of Blair's last 4 years by some respected photgrapher who was allowed "unprecedented access" to him from Iraq onwards. Alistair Campbell was in the majority of pictures from that time. Frightening.

If that wasn't enough Newsnight descended into a classic episode of the Thick of It. Paxman sat between two squabbling school kids as Alan Duncan smugly tried to bring Quentin Davies (defected from the Tories to Brown Labour today) down a peg or two. He failed and only strengthened Davies' argument that the Tories are image-obsessed, bland, "green", anything-you-want-us-to-be-if-you'll-vote-for-us, nothingness. Alan Duncan actually said the words directly to Quentin Davies: "They'll chew you up and spit you out in no time". No shit - he said that! I just about spat out the burning hot corn I was chewing on. You couldnae write it - but Ianucci already had!!
For every Brown there's 20 periphary cretins like Duncan in politics.
Send out the clowns bring in the brains.