A 'special edition' of Radio 4's culture-fest Front Row gave the bandwagon-jumping conversationalist a chance to 'get in there first' on a subject which a) really only exists as long as people like Lawson are around to actually give it a name, and b) has, as far as we can see, little or nothing to do with him in the first place.

	CLIP OF 'TERRY AND JUNE' HAVING A CRISIS ABOUT THE BOSS COMING ROUND TO DINNER LAWSON For Terry and June - the mother and father of 1970s television comedy - a 'professional crisis' was the possibility of the man who paid your mortgage coming unexpectedly to dinner. Thirty years on, this is a sit-com employee's relationship with his boss: CLIP OF 'THE OFFICE' WHERE BRENT PLEADS "PLEASE DON'T MAKE ME REDUNDANT...", ETC LAWSON David Brent pleading against redundancy in BBC 2's 'The Office'. No matter how bad June's dinner for Terry's boss had gone, the character could never have lost his job. At that time, no-one believed that a half-hour laugh show could survive such realism. But 'The Office' is one of a number of recent British television comedies - others include 'The Book Group', 'Black Books', 'I'm Alan Partridge', 'Phoenix Nights' and 'The League Of Gentlemen' which have explored such levels of pain and humiliation. But they should strictly be called not 'Sit-Com' but 'Sit-Trag' - the subject of this Front Row special. Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

Okay, whoa, stop the tape. I don't know where to begin! "For Terry and June a 'professional crisis' was the possibility of the man who paid your mortgage coming unexpectedly to dinner." Entirely harmless comic parameters. Eric Merriman, John Chapman or John Kane would never have tried to argue that they were directly reflecting the gritty British life of the mid-to-late 1970s. Millions of people were going to see this sort of thing at theatres - you know, Ray Cooney's 'Some Load Of Old Crap With The Word Wife In The Title'. If you didn't like 'Terry & June', never mind - there was 'Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?', 'Porridge', 'The Fall & Rise Of Reginald Perrin', 'Rising Damp', even the sexless marriage of George & Mildred Roper. All these could have been described as 'Sit-Trag'. Fortunately, they were soaked with jokes, and were given the much more relevant tag of 'sitcoms'. So-called 'tragedy' in a sitcom is only noticed on the first viewing by people who don't watch sitcoms to laugh, but to claim that there is some significant shift in society. See also people who present and make Radio 4 documentaries decades later. Interestingly, while Terry & June's 'Happy Ever After' personae placed them in the "what'll we do now our grown-up children have flown the nest", the 79-87 eponymously-titled incarnation featured them as childless. Oddly enough, exactly the same thing appears to have happened with 'I'm Alan Partridge'. Who the dickens is Denise? Moreover, who the fu... well, yeah, exactly. Fernando, etc. In fact there was one reference to his offspring in Series 2 - "Divorced! Got access to the kids but they don't wanna seee meeeeeee..." which didn't ring particularly true. They'd be adults now, surely? It's Received Opinion City, always to cite 'Terry & June' as the tip of the cosy, whoops-vicar sofa-sitcom iceberg. After all, how many other sitcoms of that type can you actually name? 'All Gas and Gaitors'? That's about it really. In fact, sitcoms of the 70s were often pretty inventive and always distinct from one another. Even the weak ones like 'Bless This House' dealt with nice thumping themes, like the generation gap, rather than Whitehall farce-style cupboard-leaping. Funny though 'Oh Crikey' ('The Young Ones') and 'All Cosy at Home' ('Mary Whitehouse Experience') were, I never really understood what shows they were referring to. To paraphrase Graeme Garden, most sitcom living-rooms have sofas because most real-life living-rooms have sofas... Same problem with Lee & Herring's 'The Lettuce Family' - the notion that somehow we've 'refused to evolve the form'. But, for all the bluster, I doubt if any of today's sit-com writers started out wanting to 'drag Brit-com screaming into the 21st century'. I'm sure they'd all rather be writing something as traditional, successful and 'classic' as 'Fawlty Towers'. Unfortunately they can't do it - through their own general cynicism/lack of writing talent and the way the current cut-and-thrust no-second-chance-mate media disallows the necessary slow-burn which can generate 'classic status'. Hence gimmicky 'cheats' like fourth walls, drop-framing, multi-camera nightmares, an over-abundance of 'ooh - real life' swearing and neat little 'buzz-words' to describe non-existant genres. If you can't create a good sitcom then the next best thing is to make sure enough people are talking about it for ancilliary reasons. And since even 'I'm Alan Partridge' managed to squirt out an 'Oh Crikey!'-style 'oops it looks a bit like I'm sodomising someone but I'm not honestly' scenario in its second series, seemingly without irony, the circle seems to have closed now anyway. "No matter how bad June's dinner for Terry's boss had gone, the character could never have lost his job" Yeah, alright, so people are more nervous about job security than they were in 1979. Spectacles not necessary. It's not really a fair comparison anyway. We rarely, if ever, saw Terry's work environment - the episodes usually open with him entering his hallway with a blustering "Phew what a day I've had!". 'The Office' is entirely workplace-based. Surely, though, the motivation of the material was exactly the same - maybe it involved offending visiting African princes or accidentally giving away new furniture as firewood rather than 'gritty realism', but the central thrust of the Medfords' run-ins with Terry's boss was the fear that his slapstick misdemeanours would lead to him losing his job. "At that time, no-one believed that a half-hour laugh show could survive such realism" Ahem. Reggie Perrin. And his wife to boot. Toboot Perrin. This kind of talk has me spitting the most muesli - the implication that people in the 1960s/70s/80s couldn't handle complicated ideas, didn't know what irony was etc, but - hey - thank God we're so clever and sophisticated in 2002, now that we have 'Front Row'. Utter bollocks. If anything, we're more squeamish - I take as my text the League Of Gentlemen's 'rape'/'nigger' worries (see below). Imagine if the 'Young Ones' 'racist policeman' scene was done these days - it'd be like 'The Office's 'black man's cock' episode, complete with cutaways to Neil looking concerned at the local paper shop. "'...The Book Group', 'Black Books', 'I'm Alan Partridge', 'Phoenix Nights' and 'The League Of Gentlemen'" Watch out for that list of examples by the way. They play an important part in this documentary. And Mark Lawson has heard of them too, which is good! Isn't The Book Group placed suspiciously early in that list? I imagine Peter Kay was unavailable for interview. It would certainly be interesting to ponder on exactly how much 'realism' there is in the average episode of 'Black Books' or 'The League Of Gentlemen'. Both use fantasy - or at the very least, a warped and exaggerated take on 'reality' - as the basic cornerstone of their humour, so they can't really be bracketed with the other examples on this list. Edit point. Alexander Solzhenitsyn explains essentially what he was trying to do in "Crikey, Cancer Ward!" [BBC1, 1973-75]. I wonder which came first - the radio slot or the fake genre he's attempting to popularise. Those schedules have to be worked out well in advance! Okay, whack it back on. Let's try and get through this.

	LAWSON Byron wrote that 'all tragedies are ended with a death; all comedies are ended with a marriage'... Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

Hmm - in reference to Shakespeare et al? Very well, but this is the same Mark Lawson who wrote a ludicrous article for The Guardian a year or two back in which he chose to list the great playwrights of the television age. Remember it? Gervais & Merchant smuggled into a sentence alongside Potter, Bennett, Bleasdale - writers who actually care for their characters and the audience. As per the usual list of 'classic sit-com characters' - Fawlty; Mainwaring; Rigsby; Partridge; Brent; Crosby; Stills; Nash... The subtext, as ever, is "Look - the industry is just as healthy as it ever was!" Lawson seems to have a muddled sense of how to tackle the idea that it's possible for high and low art to co-exist and have equal value. He agrees with the sentiment, but always feels the need to validate anything possibly construed as trivial or light with benevolent and unnecessary statements like the above. All it serves to do is emphasise how widely read he is and not the worth of the subject itself. The only major exception I can think of was the review of 'Attack Of The Clones' on Newsnight Review, where Tom Paulin quite rightly launched into an attack of the film's questionable politics, only to have the Mekon lynchpin launch back with "aw, it's just an excuse to sell toys, isn't it?" As I say, muddled. It's Lawson's ludicrous habit of introducing a subject by talking about something completely unrelated - almost like he's winning a bet or something. "When the celebrated caveman Ug invented the wheel, he probably wouldn't have thought that one day the National Theatre would be staging a revival of Hair. This is probably on the mind of Woody Allen at the moment, as his new film is released in the same week as the Tate Modern unveils its autumn season. In autumn the leaves are turning brown from their original green. Green is the colour of Rosy May's desk..."

	LAWSON ...but situation comedy can now accommodate funny funerals, and terrible weddings. Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

So can 'You've Been Framed'. Always could. 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show' did a famous episode where a clown died because he was dressed as a peanut and an elephant tried to shell him, causing much inappropriate laughter from the characters, including Mary guffawing hysterically at the funeral. 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show' won an Emmy for the Chuckles The Clown episode in 1975. Even then no-one claimed it was "original". Almost every sitcom wedding ever transmitted has had its hitches, if not disasters. They would otherwise not be comedies. Funny funerals? 'Mr H Is Late'? 'Four Weddings And A Funeral'? Cor, the problems they had! Not a sitcom of course, although Richard Curtis buys into all that crap about 'The Office' being somehow groundbreaking so there's a certain relevancy. And also, when he smugly crowbarred that "holy goat" line into a wedding in 'The Vicar Of Dibley' I certainly cringed through my fingers! Also, I refer you to 'In Loving Memory' (Thames 1969; Yorkshire 1979-86), which ran for thirty seven episodes and featured Thora Hird as the head of an incompetent firm of funeral directors. Plenty of 'funny' funerals in that, with no need for self-important 'realism'. And the disastrous wedding has long been a staple ingredient of the most inoffensive and lightweight of sitcoms - how about 'Chance In A Million' (Thames/C4, 1984-86), the wedding episode of which involved the bride and groom ending up in jail and their relatives - with the cake in tow - getting lost in a sewer. Or, to further underline this point, what about the wedding-based food fight at the end of 'Carry On Loving'? Has Lawson actually seen any sitcoms ever?

	LAWSON I discussed this breakdown in the border patrols between jokes and seriousness with Annie Griffin, writer director of Channel 4's 'The Book Group'... Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

"Border patrols"! Only a couple of us managed to get through the whole of 'The Book Group', out of a blind sense of duty. Staggered that it got a second series, considering that the multiple endings to part six were such a blatant blag for more work by someone who should never have been let near television. It was all wrapped up in self-defence I thought, which drama shouldn't really concern itself with - 'Magical Realism', one of the episode titles funnily enough, defined the style somewhat, handily negating any accusations of it being overlaboured. Fantasy's one thing, but a heroin addict with a high libido? It had all the same problems as 'The League Of Gentlemen' really, when it came down to referencing. It tried to base itself roughly on the book they'd chosen for that week - 'On The Road' was the first one and that episode rambled like the worst of the Beats. Also, was it a sitcom? Didn't seem to be. It was marketed as one, ish, but then any drama in a thirty-minute slot is going to invite that kind of comment. Anyone remember 'Cardiac Arrest'? Annie Griffin also wrote that theatre group thing called 'Coming Soon' a couple of years ago. Incidentally, isn't a lot of this so-called 'originality' merely some people writing about their own lives and inner demons rather than daring to create the characters of other people? Within three years or so, expect Griffin to do "Perils Of A Screenwriter" for Channel 4. 'The Book Group', meanwhile, is shortly to be re-run on Channel 4. Quelle coincidence. Avid Merrion was unavailable.

	LAWSON ...Sunday Times comedy critic Stephen Armstrong... Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

To paraphrase Stewart Lee seven years ago, "a bit like being a food writer for Viz"... Oh, Stephen Armstrong. No knowledge of radio comedy at all, let alone its history. An "Anything with Sean Lock's name on it has to be worth tuning in for" kind of a guy. Refers to the 'I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue' and 'Just A Minute' teams as "the usual suspects". You know the type. William Cook with one A level and a copy of Comedy Review magazine in his loft.

	LAWSON ...and, first, co-writer, co director and star of 'The Office'... Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

£12.99 from the BBC shop.

	LAWSON ...Ricky Gervais. GERVAIS I really like to pile it on. LAWSON Mm. Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

LAWSON: Could you sign my copy of 'The Office', please? I voted for you in the Newsnight Review poll. Did you see it? It was their big finale piece, to end the show on a high note before they went off and had their festive drinks. Ugh. (Do you reckon the Newsnight Review team do a Secret Santa by the way? Must be tricky. I bet Ekow Eshun got given one of those nodding dogs.)

	GERVAIS You know those pictures of, like, chimps on a toilet you get from Athena. I've always thought of someone getting that, and then, his wife leaves him, and he finds out he's been made redundant, and he just looks up at the poster. And he just thinks "It's not working - it's not... it's not cheering me up!" Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

If Jane Fallon has moved out, then we'll see Ricky's hilarious reactions to relationship break-ups in 'The Office' Series 3. Which should really be worth waiting for, seeing as no-one has ever tackled such material head-on before. Apart from 'Dear John', 'Miss Jones & Son' with Paula Wilcox and 'The Montell Williams Show'. Or 'Joking Apart' - trying to murder your ex wife's boyfriend, getting her to scream "I'm an adulteress" in front of everyone she knows. About as "head on" as you can get. And there's a comedy funeral too. That's a very bleak show, but with actual jokes! He's painting a 'tragic' picture which doesn't ring true anyway. In those circumstances only an eternal optimist would expect to be cheered up by an Athena poster. Plus of course the very fact that he's bought such a poster from Athena loses our sympathy in the first place. Quite deliberately so. If the writer has no sympathy for the character, why should the audience? A similar (very similar) joke occured in 'The Simpsons'. Marge is depressed and looking at at a poster of a kitten hanging from a tree with the caption "Hang In There, Baby!": "'Copyright 1968'. Hmm, determined or not, that cat must be long dead. That's kind of a downer." The late great John Walters meanwhile was too busy gasping with horror at Susan Polis Schutz cards to have ever bothered mining primates-on-the-bog postcards for comic material. Gervais would no doubt prefer to be cheered up by a zoetrope animation of Joey Deacon falling over...

	GRIFFIN I find myself interested in embarrassment. And I was thinking a lot about that - I was thinking about a situation which you had to make new friends and try and make new lovers and how, um, how embarrassing that can be sometimes. Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

Can't get work in America. Hum.

	ARMSTRONG Probably every nation has satire. Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

ARMSTRONG: I've absolutely no idea whether or not every nation has satire.

	ARMSTRONG What we have, that you don't tend to find in Europe and in America is that hyper-real silliness which... which you see as being Monty Python which them leads into the 'dark' version today. Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

Arrgh - he said it. He said the word. Did you hear it? You heard it, didn't you?

	ARMSTRONG ...we have 'The League Of Gentlemen'... Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

Of course Python never ever did jokes about mutilation, religion, sexuality, cancer, race, murder, torture, etbloodycetera. America of course did all these things in Soap, The Simpsons and Seinfeld. With silliness too.

	ARMSTRONG ...and then you have the individual undergoing a massive personal crisis which in real terms is deeply tragic - Basil Fawlty, an incredibly tragic character... Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

Note the use of 'incredibly' - to reinforce what an interesting and original opinion he's imparting. Yes, you may think you've heard this viewpoint before, but - woah - listen, he was actually incredibly tragic. Incredibly. Horrible undercurrent of 'What you don't realise' about it. Who started all this 'Basil Fawlty = tragihero' stuff anyway? John Cleese probably. And it's all true, of course - Basil is sexually frustrated, snobbish, trapped by his blah-de-blah, but - unlike 'The Office' - this isn't the only thing happening in the show. It's an underscore to the amusement happening centrestage, an undercurrent so skillfully constructed that it genuinely doesn't occur to you until the third or fourth viewing. If at all. You could make a case claiming that Tony Hancock was an early 'dark' character (depression, boredom, loneliness, frustration and all the rest of it), but what's crucial is that he doesn't HAVE to be read that way. He can also be seen as an amiable buffoon who has problems at a blood bank. With the likes of David Brent, however, you're not given a choice - there's only one way that character can be viewed. Gervais and Merchant, for all their 'subtlety', more or less spoon-feed the audience. There are no lines to be read between. As a viewer, you can't personalise the show.

	ARMSTRONG ...leading today to David Brent who is equally tragic but in a much, kind of, tighter, closed, psychotic environment. CLIP OF 'THE OFFICE' - THE BIT WHERE HE ADDRESSES THE SWINDON BRANCH FOR THE SECOND TIME ARMSTRONG Basil Fawlty now looks, to some extent, like a Brian Rix farce - it's very 'people hiding in wardrobes'; it's very 'clowning'. Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

Again, reinforcing a 'when you look at it' stance, implying he thinks Fawlty Towers is shit without having the balls to actually say so. These people's absolute terror at brightly-lit, out-and-out COMEDY (when it's done well) is so transparent. I always found that 'Faith In The Future' was, to some extent, a Jamie Rix farce.

	ARMSTRONG David Brent - he's a... he's a very 'darkly real', and... and far more painful to watch! Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

Well, the attraction of 'Fawlty Towers' never was that Basil was 'painful' to watch. In fact, the audience were supposed to side with him, and it's mainly either Sybil or the more pompous and annoying guests that come off worse. When Basil furiously covers Bernard Cribbins' character with custard pies at the end of 'The Hotel Inspectors', the audience are quite clearly cheering him on rather than 'cringing' in embarrassed recognition.

	LAWSON Many critics and viewers have said that they have to look away from the screen during the scenes of Brent's deepest embarrassments in 'The Office'. Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

No, just critics. And only because the phrase 'watching it through your fingers' was in the press release. The only 'cringeworthy' thing about 'The Office' was the fact that every single reviewer obediently typed out the same exact phrases week after week. Some viewers said it too, but only the sort of viewers who enjoy passing off truisms as their own opinion. The same sort of people who say stuff like "Ooh - I like that Jack Dee. D'you know why? Because his humour is very dry!"

	LAWSON It was also wise to have your hands close to your face... Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

Or the remote.

	LAWSON ...for 'The Book Group'... Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

My hands were near my face whilst watching 'The Book Group', but mainly to cover my yawning mouth.

	LAWSON ...in which Clare, a desperately lonely American living in Glasgow, establishes a reading circle in the hope of finding friends and lovers. But Clare watches while both go to others. Sitcom used to be escapist but now it's just as likely to trap us in our deepest fears. Why? Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

Because almost none of its current practitioners can get past comedy's lack of cool. If you're laughing, you can't be cool, and do that thing with your hair. Good job too. Means nothing anyway. The latter is an observation often made about 70s sitcoms ('the characters are essentially trapped' etc). Sitcoms have never been escapist. Apart from maybe 'Diff'rent Strokes'. Which, oddly enough, dealt with child abuse, drugs, teenage pregnancy, mugging at knifepoint(!), racism, and just about every other social problem imaginable. But because they did it with a sugar coated moral, bright studio lights and a man called Conrad Bain rather than a Jane Root-sponsored bucket of dog vomit or an attractive American female bawling "awwwwwww gawwwwwd I need a fuck why can't I find anyone to fuck my cunt waaaaaah", all of this gets overlooked. 'Essentially trapped' scenarios: Harold Steptoe unable to escape the family business, the 'Dad's Army' team wanting to go out and give Hitler a jolly good pasting but being prevented from doing so by their physical state, Arthur Dent caught in a universe he'd rather have exited with the Earth. The early series of 'Red Dwarf' were about a handful of individuals trapped in deep space with no way home and no contact with any other lifeforms - the bleakest setting for any sitcom ever - and all of the central characters in 'Friends', 'Frasier' and 'Seinfeld' are plagued by doubts and dissatisfactions that they never quite manage to overcome. Not much in the way of 'realism' in any of those.

	LAWSON Stephen Armstrong believes that there may be a clue in the visual style which 'The Office' adopts. Reality TV. Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

As previously used to superb effect by Chris Morris (early 1990s), Victoria Wood (mid-1980s), 'This Is Spinal Tap' (early 1980s), NF Simpson (1960s), and countless others long before this current vogue. And they didn't need to be 'dark' or 'grim' to succeed. Armstrong doesn't 'believe there may be' - it's something he read on the back of his Bran Flakes packet one morning. But now he's going to pass it off as his own revelation.

	ARMSTRONG I've got a friend who's an actor... Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

ARMSTRONG: I know what I'm talking about, I'll have you know.

	ARMSTRONG ...and he was watching the first series of 'Big Brother', and halfway through he said "Acting has changed forever now because people know what real people are like!" Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

Or, what they're like in front of a camera. Well exactly. People should know what "real people are like" by interacting with real people on a daily basis. By being alive and stuff. And look how they behave in front of the camera - in itself, a type of mannered performance. Horrible, over-confident little shits, all of them. A side point - why do you never see nervous people on TV any more? Members of the public, I mean. There used to be loads of them - on the news, on quiz shows or whatever. Trembling, polite people, awed by the privilege of being onscreen. Now everybody's as slick as the presenters themselves. You can hear them, night after night, stupid people calling radio phone-ins with bone-headed confidence ("Wewll, yeah, Ian, wohIreckon, right..."), taking their fifteen minutes for granted. These are the people who end up on 'Big Brother'. And these are the people sitcom writers want to emulate?

	ARMSTRONG Any 'mannered acting', any 'actual acting', anything other than sort of the method 'being' the part is now no longer 'feasible' to the audience. They just don't believe it. Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

This is such a load of garbage that it barely merits commenting on. Audiences were aware of notions of 'good' and 'bad' acting - and indeed of what 'real people are like' - long before the likes of 'Big Brother' came along. And if what is being said above was true, then the viewing public would have risen up en masse and forced, to name but a few examples, 'Heartbeat', 'Casualty', 'Coronation Street' and 'The Bill' off air years ago. Well, they didn't know any better did they! Poor fools. Mannered acting went out of fashion in the first half of the 20th century: Stanislavski and his "method acting", the realism movement in which theatre sets were designed to look like real rooms with furniture and props placed at the edge of the stage to create a fourth wall and James Dean howling about how difficult it was to be young. This certainly changed dramatic acting forever. Comedy and comic acting is a different discipline. The only way to make a sitcom realistic is to remove all of the comedy. See also 'The Office', 'The Book Group', etc, etc. Comedy isn't there to be realistic unless it's parodying something directly. Otherwise we have real life itself. Yeah, but the pictures are always better on the radio.

	GRIFFIN I think film and television is voyeuristic in the broader sense that you... you want to see things, and not just people getting naked and stuff, but you... you wanna see them get upset, you wanna see them get hurt, you wanna see them get embarrassed, just because you're curious. Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

Speak for yourself. I don't personally revel in the misfortunes of other people, fictional or otherwise.

	GRIFFIN One of the things about writing is that you get to experiment with things that you wouldn't do yourself. 'What's the worst that could happen?'. Front Row - a 'Sit-Trag' Special 7.15pm, 27/12/02, BBC Radio 4

The Book Group.

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