This Week:
Bloke Out Of Middlebrow
Hospital Drama Serial,
Probably

He says he's alive, alert and alliterative, and was certainly wrongly accused of assault by a grotty downmarket rag! Or so he says!

Let's begin by asking you what you watch on TV so that our readers can identify you as just like one of them, even though obviously your life is much more hectic than theirs. Just think of one programme - Have I Got News For You would be ideal seeing as it's witty, urbane and recognisable, and a BBC programme. OK?

Can't I just say something infuriatingly general, like the news?

Ah well. We here at BBC Worldwide understand the Corporation's heritage right from its inception in...oh...1965? (Note to sub: Check date, might be 1975). We love old programmes, like Only Fools And Horses, and things starring Joanna Lumley. So what's your first memory of TV? Oh yes, and radio, I suppose.

Oh, I don't know. Something cosy and unthreatening. This is quite similar to that format Rosanna Greenstreet invented for The Sunday Correspondent in 1989, isn't it?

Er, no it isn't. Get on with it.

I could be kitsch, but I think I'll be sickeningly sentimental instead. That children's hour favourite The Fluffy Shelves from about 1961.

Aaaaah. We all remember that in the RT office too.

No you fucking don't. I just made it up.

The readers will have lost interest by now. They don't give a shit what you think about telly, and frankly, it's hardly been worth asking you. So, who on TV do you find sexy? [Editor's note: Don't forget this question should only be included for the benefit of heterosexuals. Or Lord knows what may happen!]

Um...

Look, we'll just put Helen Baxendale or something. Everyone else says that.

Whatever.

Here's the deal. All our readers who are worth their salt watch soaps. And even if they couldn't care less about them, we're going to bludgeon them with non-stop features and profiles about their uninteresting plots and stars.

I do quite like Coronation Street .

That wasn't a question, it was a bald statement of fact and intent. Now, you're just like our readers, only better, clearly. But even you must have had a bad review from someone.

God, yeah. Some silly cow once wrote in the Radio Times that when I had a bit part in ITV's Rural Health Crime I had all the acting presence of a small piece of wood, even though my character was supposed to be dead at the time.

Oh, naughty Alison Graham! She didn't even mean it, such are her journalistic credentials. Anyway, we didn't mean her, we meant "Could you please recall if Victor Lewis Smith said something about you?".

I think he said I was a bit uninspired and unmemorable. Although he might have been talking about Noah Huntley. In an entirely different programme.

Yet, as a moderately famous person, you must have an elephantine ego. So if you were world leader, what would be your first act?

Christ, what a grandiose, and yet deathly dull, question. Did last week's subject say with mock-humility that they'd resign? No? Great, I'd resign then. What a modest person I therefore am.

Do our job for us, and describe yourself in a few words, so that we can copy it and put it at the top of the page

Alive, alert, alliterative.

We're a quality, licking-the-greasy-sphincter of Middle England magazine, oh yes we are. But we like some dirt and gossip, same as everyone else, much as we'd like to pretend otherwise. So please repeat some false allegation for no good reason other than to give this otherwise hopeless column some downmarket but credible standing.

I got wrongly accused of assualt once, suffered a breakdown before I was acquitted, but I don't really want to talk about that.

Do you like crisps?

Fucking Ada, at least RT used to ask people what programmes they'd switch off. But that's when it was still (just about) a magazine about broadcasting, and not a complementary Daily Mail supplement.

Radio Times 2 - 8 December 2001