Going back to where you grew up is always a nostalgic experience. The streets you grew up on (not literally, obviously, I’m not the Littlest Hobo or anything). The park you played in. The school you went to. The shops you shopped in. The houses your friends lived in.

Of course, in reality it’s a bit weird. The streets I grew up on have been pedestrianised, or blocked off and turned into front gardens to make the place look more attractive. The council have decided to build a replacement primary school on what’s left of the park I played in, having built ticky-tacky box houses on half of it already. The school I went to is now some trendy business and enterprise school. The shops have all become either building societies or coffee shops. And most of my friends seemed to move house every year or so, and hardly any of them live there anymore anyway.

So imagine my surprise when I was presented with this page of the local paper.

‘What is he doing here? Do you recognise anyone in this picture?’

Um. Yes, actually. That was me (yes yes, I know you all want to know the name of my stylist, but they’ve long hung-up their scissors). I am famous. In fact, not only am I famous, I’ve met Steve Davis. STEVE DAVIS!!

Quite a big deal for a boy of 8 or 9 who spent most of his days playing snooker in his spare room with a specially-made waistcoat on. I got a morning off school too to go and meet him as he opened the new sports department in the Co-op. Everyone got a signed picture of Steve, signed in silver pen (I still have it). In true Ferris Beuller style, someone from the paper took my picture, and by Thursday everyone knew I didn’t go to the dentist, or whatever excuse my Mum must have made up.

Funny isn’t it. You expect to go back and feel nostalgic as you go passed places, you don’t expect the nostalgia to come to you!

More pressingly, why did they think he needed a bodyguard in a small Suffolk market town. Any why is he taking such a nervous look at me?

Today the BBC killed it off. Not in a kind of shoot-em-up US Postal service rampage sort of way, although that would have made for an interesting episode… No, they just let it slip away peacefully in the night. No big shindig, just the cast heading up the hill in an old tour bus leaving two trouser-less policemen standing in a ditch beside the Yorkshire Dales. S

The thing is, the lovely Sarah remembers watching it with her Grandparents in Cambridgeshire and wondering if they didn’t think it was some kind of documentary of how people live ‘oop-north’.

It certainly was a retirement home for the UK’s veteran actors. Yes, we lost many of them along the way; Compo, Foggy, Wally, Nora – I’d run out of space on this blog before I listed them all. But Clegg’s still there, and Howard, Pearl, Marina, and now they’ve been joined by Captain Peacock from ‘Are you being served’ and Russ Abbot (how, incidentally does an excellent job of reprising his routines from his ‘Russ Abbot Comedy Show’ in the form of Basildon Bond and slapstick, just with less Nazis and fat ladies).

It’s charm was in it’s simplicity. Family-friendly smutty jokes, double-entendre, and stunts worthy of Michael Crawford in ‘Some Mothers Do ‘ave em’. You watch it and your mind says the stage directions ‘compo exits stage left’ because you know it’s just a stageplay on screen. But whilst that gives it it’s charm, it’s also made for it’s demise. A Yorkshire cafe just doesn’t work in HD – there’s only so many pixels in off-white doilies and creme tablecloths. And the media is all about airbrushing wrinkles, and the caps can only cover so much.

It will remain a comedy great, and it leaves me in two minds – should it have been shipped off to Switzerland to rest in peace a decade ago, or is it as much a part of our national identity as the Queen? Personally, with all the hours of television devoted to Dick n Dom, Noel Edmunds and Adrian bloody Chiles, I can’t help thinking that we could have kept 30 minutes a week for Last of the Summer Wine. Sure, no one would have watched, but we’d have all felt good knowing it was there – like those little tea shops in Cotswold town that no one goes in, but which were they to be replaced by wine bars and internet cafes would soon ruin the quaint charm of the place.

For those that don’t know, this is a computer algorithm that corrects dicky tuning in singers competing on the show. It can nudge their voice up or down if they just slightly miss the note they were aiming for, and give everything a more polished sound.

Is it wrong? Well, if you think you don’t want to hear auto-tuned voices you’re too late. Studio time is expensive, and this technology is cheap, so I’d imagine that there are a great many number of records out there that have been tweaked from cuckoo to songbird without everything sounding like Cher in ‘Life after love’. Simon and the entourage of lawyers/spin doctors/PR Gurus and alike were quick to point out that it is only added in post-production and that the stool pidgeons judges hear the real thing, and then it’s altered to make watching the programme more bearable. But hang on, I’m sorry, don’t these programmes make money getting people to vote in a quasi-democratic way for the one they think is the best. Isn’t this skewing the result a little. Why, that’d be like Sky News showing bias against Labour in an election or something.

The truth is though, you’d use it wouldn’t you? I mean, as a classical musician you spend every day of your life trying to make sure everything’s in tune. That your fingers fall in the right place, at the right angle, in the right way. Every time. But if the pressure was on you to make a studio record, with 4 big Texans smoking cigars outside the studio window pacing up and down and pointing at watches, you’d use it wouldn’t you?

The difference comes afterwards though, doesn’t it? I mean, you’re going to go away after the session and practice like you’ve never done before. You can’t mime a concerto with an orchestra, or mime the violin along to a piano trio. And I’m sure the X-factor winners do the same, hairbrush in hand.

Sorry for the abrupt ending – a pig appears to have got tangled in my washing line whilst flying passed my garden. That keeps happening…

So few actors keep their careers on a high for their entire lives. There are countless greats from that old ‘cowboy’ generation who try… Burt Reynolds, John Wayne are a few examples… who nearly make it (okay, maybe not post-moneyloss Reynolds), but it’s great to see Borgnine (after his recent greatly moving role in ER) getting this.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11021875

25 hours. 25 hours until we find out whether more people read tabloids or broadsheets. That is, afterall, what an election is about. 4 weeks of gaffes and political broadcasts to help newspaper owners decide which party to tell us inky-fingered print readers which party we’re going to vote for. The election isn’t decided on sofas, or in front of television debates, but by ragged journalists typing away all day for a paycheck from some media tycoon.

But just in case you’re thinking or excercising your democratic right of free-thinking, you have a choice to make.

Firstly there’s marmite man himself Gordon Brown. I don’t mean you either love him or hate him, I think every poll has made it clear that’s a one-sided thing, I just suspect he has a penchant for the brown sticky stuff. Biggotgate proved that. He rules with an economic fist of steel and a statesmanlike quality straight from the 1950′s. Approximately the same period as his hairstyle. He inhales mid-sentence like a premiership footballer buying time as he thumbs through The Penguin book of English Cliches: Spanish to English version. But it just shows a good old fashioned reliance on learning your lines.

The thing is, as each day of the election campaign has gone by with yet another disaster for Gordon, he’s started looking more and more like the shaggy-haired elderly homeless dogs they put at the end of the RSPCA adverts. You know, the one that gets overlooked for the younger dogs and will have to be put down if no one takes him in soon. It means you get the feeling that he’s a real person, and biggotgate just went to prove my suspicions that he must go home each day and remark that he’s surrounded by baffoons.

Yes he makes mistakes when he’s talking, but he has a strange uneasiness around cameras. Just look at him interacting with members of the public – he recently asked a child how old he was and responded with ‘that must be a nice age’. Bill Gates was no great public speaker, but he did a good job, and very few of the great inventors ot scientists were huge social animals. I don’t mind a Prime Minister not having a motormouth, so long as the brain is ticking-over nicely and he gets the job done.

There’s something rather grey about David Cameron if you ask me. Not in his photos obviously, as here he tends to go with a dark green and brown combo -  page 6 on the Dulux chart if you’re interested. I suspect if he wins tomorrow he’ll be outside Number 10 on Friday peeling off the fake skin on his face to reveal his Cyborg inner workings and asking if anyone knows where Sarah Connor lives. He’s a little too much like the office suck-up: Always at the front of the picture when things are going well, but his Teflon make-up means nothing sticks to him when something goes wrong. Everytime I see him on the telly I have an urge to punch him hard in the middle of his chubby little face, but I suspect I’d break my hand on the silver spoon he has inside his mouth.

Then you have Nick Clegg, currently with the Liberal Democrats as part of his school’s work placement scheme. I think he’s there because his elderly uncle, seen alongside him at all times, works there: Vince Cable I think his name is. We all know he’s posh, but I couldn’t help wondering if he was so surprised to end up on the telly debates with the two grown-ups that he’d had to send a runner out to TopMan to buy him a suit and tie.

I found a curious way of deciding between them today: I imagined them as double glazing salesman trying to sell to an elderly lady – I think it was something to do with them standing around in their various suits. Nick would knock on the door, tell her about the windows and their benefits at great length, but when he’d gone she’d forget what company he worked for or how much it was going to cost. Gordon would come round, and she’d invite him in for coffee – I think she’d see him much like the elderly dogs on RSPCA adverts too. 3 hours later, they’d have exchanged life histories, become friends on Facebook, and would be sending each other Christmas cards, but he’d have forgotten entirely to tell her about the windows. David Cameron would be the one to do the hard-sell. He’d have the elderly lady paying to re-glaze half the street, and he’d get her to put 50p in the meter to pay for the parking on his BWM outside whilst he fills in the paperwork. And when the daughter phones later to complain, he’d deny any responsibility. But he’d ask her if she knows the whereabouts of Sarah Connor, before hinting that he’ll be back.

25 hours.

25 hours to change the shape of Britain for the next 5 years. Or at least prove that James Murdoch and the various newspaper editors of this country aren’t in charge, and give Simon Cowell a bit of a bloody nose as a bonus.

All created in university computer labs, or air-conditioned trendy open-plan offices with stress coaches and Warhol prints on the wall.

All the best inventions come from sheds in the countryside. The car wasn’t invented on a Mac. Nor was the phone. Or the telly. Or the plane. They were drawn up on beer mats and scraps of paper before being made by men called Nigel or Graham, fuelled solely on weak tea and digestives.

So when Mother Nature decides to remind us who’s in charge by setting of a volcano or two it’s back to the drawing board.

The thing is, so far Twitter and the web have found hire cars for a few Tarquins and Hectors so they can get to their conferences in soulless Munich hotels, but it’s the hardy boatists and drivers who are really getting people home.

So it’s computer modelling vs the ingenious shed men. I know who my money’s on to get more people home by tea time.

The problem with playing board games with the entire family is that you’ve already reached rock-bottom before it’s suggested. You’ve listened to everything on your Ipod 10 times in a row. You’ve searched every tv channel, discovered the QVC shopping channel hour-long special ‘scrap-booking with Candice’ is the best television has to offer and are now watching it again on QVC+1. Perhaps the batteries have run out in every present you’ve been given, and you’ve done every square foot of carpet in the house with a lint-roller. Traditionally there is nothing else to do but break out the boardgames.

The thing is, when you’ve hit rock bottom, board games are the only thing that can unlock another level to sink to.

There’s the inevitable build-up. One person has a brilliant idea to play one, and then chirpily encourages everyone else to join in. A little flicker of hope out the boredom lights in every eye.

Everyone rushes around the house. Drinks are got. Biscuits and Quality Street opened and put on the coffee table – the next couple of hours are going to be action-packed, and there won’t be time to go and make a sandwich…

One person, normally the one who owns the most number of pocket calculators, explains the rules to everyone. Then they explain it two more times for granny or grandad, before granny or grandad exclaim ‘I’m sure I’ll pick it up as we go along’. We know they won’t.

For the next 10 minutes there is action. Everyone’s scrutinising the role of the dice, the spinning of the spinney thing on the board. You’re all planning a winning strategy. The living room is filled with people taking on the mindset of the illegitimate offspring of Alan Sugar, Bruce Willis and the guy who invented the electric can-opener. It’s just like the advert. Who’ll be the first one to break?

Of course, the first one to break won’t be the loser in this situation. Far from it in fact. Since the dawn of time, no attempt to play a board game has ever lasted more than 20 minutes before one person cracks. They get bored. They start taking their turn slowly. The inevitable line, ‘sorry… who’s go is it? Oh, it’s mine’, is uttered from stage-left. The phrases ‘is this game nearly finished’, or ‘shall we just say x won?’ signal the end is nigh.

Within 30 minutes the living room has gone from all the thrill of the fair to the closing moments of The Italian Job. I know this – I’ve played ‘Absolute Balderdash’.

And in many respects the ‘snow event’ (didn’t it used to just be called weather?) is exactly same. The news of oncoming snow creates a little flicker of hope in peoples’ eyes that we’ll be taken out of our routine. We sit around for a few days marvelling in its snow-white glory. We have good, childish fun. Everyone pitching in together with a real sense of community spirit. And then the doubters start: ‘Productivity down’, ‘feeble Britain beaten by snow’. And people want out.

I’m always sad when the board games is put away having not reached its true potential. And right now, I’m sitting watching the snow melt realising that pretty soon everything will be back to normal – the grumbling downers will have us back out of our British Blitz spirit and packing away the sledge boxes in no time.

In the world of the wireless, Sir Terry Wogan will make his final breakfast show tomorrow morning ending his 17-year run creating the country’s most listened-to radio programme. As Sir Terry ended his penultimate show, sister-station FiveLive decided to try and steal some thunder by bringing Rage Against The Machine live and then being surprised when they didn’t cut the 15 F words from their song. Someone please tell the show’s producer that the clue was in the words – ‘F you I won’t do whatcha tell me’.

Simon Cowell may not get the Christmas number 1. He’s been in newspapers with a certain quiver in his lip saying that everyone’s ruining things and is out to get him – someone forgot to tell everyone that the official prize for the X-Factor was the Christmas Number 1 slot.

And now it’s snowing. Canada may get enough of the stuff in an average year to bury the Chrysler building and still get to work in time to harvest a few moose. But we’re going to get a couple of inches by the morning, with only 4 days of warnings which means we’ll be using the opening lines of W H Auden’s ‘Stop the Clocks’ as a guide on how to cope a temperature of -3.

Let’s see if I’m right…

French houses have shutters. Dutch houses have canals outside. American houses have picket fences. English houses have decking and an occasional gnome.

It’s difficult to get exciting about housing.

That is until a slightly eccentric man from the West Country decides to build one out of Lego. And then another man decides that it has to be knocked down.

The news today featured the sad news that James May’s full-size lego house will be knocked down unless a buyer can be found sharpish. Legoland was interested until it found out that it would cost £50k to dismantle and rebuild the house in Windsor. This is absolutely absurd, of course, because building anything in Windsor is likely to cost at least 20 times that for anyone else wanting a neighbour who keeps Corgis and cornflakes in Tupperware*.

I think I have an answer though. Just the other day I was driving into a small town in Gloucestershire that looked like it hadn’t seen a paintbrush since we had a ruling King. Almost every house was boarded up, save one with a window box and fishing gnome sitting defiantly proud halfway up the garden path. Liverpool’s the same. And Wolverhampton. In fact, come to think of it, England’s full of these regeneration projects that are put on hold because of the staying-power of some of its residents.

3 years of council meetings, the tireless work of an entire planning department, and eventually Gordon Brown reaches into his pockets for a bit of funding. And then Mrs Stimpson, who normally writes in to The Telegraph letters page as ‘angry of Dunroamin’, holds everyone to ransom as she’s not moving out until the Daffodils in her herbaceous borders have finished flowering.

So I have a plan. Forget dismantling the house. Forget national news coverage showcasing the most exciting new-build since Mr Fraser decided on single rather than UPvc double-glazed front windows in Forest Drive, Billericay. Forget the eco-argument that a dozen polar bears will be saved everytime someone builds a cul de sac out of lego rather than bricks and mortar.

Just find an ‘angry of Dunroamin’ who wants a child-friendly, 100% blunt and Teletubby-coloured house. Let her move in, and I guarantee that house will still be standing in 2012 even if it was in the middle of the planned olympic velodrome.

I’m sure it happened a little more gradually, but essentially some primitative people must have woken up one day and decided to work together for everyone’s benefit. Rather than competing against one another for food and shelter, they found they could pool their resources and make collective decisions which would allow everyone to move on together. An amazing event which would ultimately bring us Starbucks, vote-based television shows democratic legal systems hundred of years later.

Inevitably there would be those societies who would safeguard this gift and value their cooperative above everything else, and there would be those who would use it as a front to bring in their favoured cronies as leaders under a smokescreen of fake democracy and a heabily-censored free-speech.

One of the great things about any society is that they all have their watchmen. People who are looking out for everyone else. People who give up their time to make sure the things that happen do so without damaging everybody else, and thankfully that happened this week.

I’m not sure if it was a slow week on Jeremy Kyle, or whether the economic disaster gripping the world has led to a catastrophic rise in the cost of needlework kits, but eighteen people complained about a television advert in which a Welsh d-list celebrity rides a bicycle through a supermarket and a thorough investigation was launched and reported its findings this week.

Now, I’m not the greatest fan of Health and Safety. It’s ridiculous that we can’t play conkers, throw snowballs or run with axes. A questionnaire for teachers this week suggested that children can’t build things out of egg cartons through fear of salmonella and teachers must wear goggles when using drawing pins. But for once, I don’t blame the helmet-wearing high-vis-clad steel-toe-capped goggle-wearing HSE.

What were those eighteen people thinking? There they were, outraged that Duffy was not wearing a high-vis vest whilst riding her bicycle. And wait. What’s that? I don’t think she’s got lights on her bike either. Presumably they’ve come home from a hard day at the office, put their feet up with a glass of chianti in one hand and suddenly found themselves so insensed that they just had to write in and complain with the other. Except, of course, they hadn’t had a hard day at the office – they’d probably spent all day polishing their Mary Whitehouse bust and waiting for something to come on that they can complain about.

A further 4 people complained that children may emulate the Welsh pop-princess. I’m fairly certain we weren’t going to have elderly ladies knocked over beside the frozen peas as dozens of tweeny-boppers raced laps around aisles 12 and 13 in Morrissons. But thank you. You are the Guardians of liberty and watchkeepers of our security.

At least they complained, of course.

Also this week people around the world where aghast at the situation in Iran, and hundreds of people turned their Twitter avatars green in a gesture of solidarity to Iranian protestors. I’m not sure how many people fighting on the streets for their democratic rights, and in some cases lives, will have taken time-out to logon to see people around the world changing the colour of their avatar to show solidarity with them, but it was at least some kind of action.

President Obama went from ‘showing concern’ earlier in the week to talking directly to Iran and today warning them that ‘the world is watching’.

The truth is that we have a leader in this country who will take time out to phone a slightly troubled singer from a television talent show who is in the midst of her fifteen minutes of fame, but who takes a far less radical and direct approach to the more serious and fundamental problems in the world.

But don’t worry. We can all turn out logos green and the twits will tweet about injustice from every last corner of the globe with uncensored and unblocked mobile phone reception, but I have a better solution. If we can get Duffy to rig a mock election and then embark on a genocidal rampage throughout some town in Mid-Wales whilst advertising a tasty beverage, we’ll see the world leap into action in direct response. Well, only if she forgets to wear the appropriate safety-wear.