Headline writers' dreams come true

Tomorrow the headline writers can almost construct the famous headline:

"Small earthquake - no one dead"

The Doctor is too sexy

The third series of the new Doctor Who continues to entertain (apart from one boring episode so far, Gridlock).

However, one minor gripe why does writer head writer Russell T. Davies insist on inserting a gay agenda into the series?

Yes, I know he is homosexual and yes I have heard that Queer as Folk was brilliant. But this is Doctor Who for Heaven's sake.

He should be sexless.

If he can travel with the gorgeous Peri Brown (Nicola Bryant) and not raise an er eyebrow, why does he now appear to be some great sexual creature?

In the boring episode Gridlock why was it necessary to tell us (and all the watching children) explicitly that the two elderly women were lesbians?

And in Daleks in Manhattan why did he offer Frank the opportunity of kissing him?

It is unnecessary.

Film reviews

This week I watched two films that the critics raved over.

On Saturday night I watched Helen Mirren in The Queen. As we all know it won Mirren an Oscar but I didn't think I had watched an Academy Award-winning performance.

We knew the story - the royals' reaction to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales and how Tony Blair saved them.

It was an entertaining film but Oscar-winning? No. And one scene did make me laugh - when Alastair Campbell comes back from the meeting at the Palace to discuss Diana's funeral, he walks into Downing Street and exclaims, "Flipping heck!"

Alastair Campbell? Flipping heck? I don't think so...

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The other film was Borat.

I had seen clips and yes those clips did make me laugh but the whole film left an unpleasant taste in my mouth.

The Americans in the film were narrow-minded, bigoted or stupid but you can find those people in any country. And if some man tried to kiss me on a train, I think I would probably take umbrage as well. Similarly, if I was attending a function in a hotel, I would be shocked by the site of two naked men wrestling.

Good in small doses, not so funny in 1 hour and 20 minutes.

From the funniest TV critic in Britain

RICHARD MADELEY misunderstanding of the month.

Subject: Celebrity Wife Swap.

Vanessa Feltz: "Debbie McGee's got a plastic pig in the fridge that goes 'Oink oink oink, you fatty. Don't eat anything'."

RM: "She got that just for you?"

Feltz: "NO. In her OWN fridge."

Though she needn't dismiss the idea.

The most ridiculous fashion ever!

By far the silliest fashion of recent years is this ridiculous habit of men wearing their trousers slung low over their buttocks - which usually means the crotch is located somewhere around their knees.

I live near a Tube and police station and coming home a week or two back I saw three likely lads leaving the cop shop. As they walked down the steps one spotted a bus on the other side of the road. They made a run for it and two vaulted over the barrier that divides the road. The third wearing his trousers round his knees had to stop and pull up his trousers before he could jump the barrier and catch his bus.

What a prat!

Oh, how I laughed...

Ease up on the Photoshop

One of the great inventions of recent years is Adobe Photoshop. Pictures can be edited (for which read manipulated) and unsightly blemishes can be removed (I think Tony Blair would like to Photoshop Gordon Brown out of Downing Street, but that's another matter).

However, some magazines are taking Photoshopping too far. Take, for example, the latest edition of Hello! There is a nine-page interview and photo shoot with the model Rachel Hunter. Rachel is 37 and the mother of two children. Now while no one would dispute that Miss Hunter is beautiful she is, as I said, 37 and the mother of two children. So why has the picture on page 78 been Photoshopped to within an inch of its life? Not a line, not a blemish in sight. Why? Is anyone really fooled?

TV review - Life on Mars

I watched the first series of Life on Mars and enjoyed it immensely. The second season started out with some great storylines and even greater lines from DCI Gene Hunt (the excellent Philip Glenister).

• “So? He pushed a bird out of a car. Doesn’t make him a bad bloke!”



• “Gene Hunt smashes doors down. He does not pick girly locks.”



• “I’ve come at this from more angles than Linda Lovelace.”



• “She’s as nervous as a very small nun at a penguin shoot.”



• Suspect: “I want a lawyer.” Hunt: “I wanna hump Britt Ekland, what we gonna do?”



• Hunt to a suspect in a cold store: “My friend is going to ask you some questions. Personally I hope you don’t answer them because I want you to die in here and end up inside a pork pie.”



• “Don’t move, you are surrounded by armed bastards.”



• “He’s got fingers in more pies than a leper on a cookery course.”

I awaited last night’s last episode with glee and anticipation. Was I the only one disappointed by it? It left an awful lot of unanswered questions: was Sam in a coma? Was he mad? Why did he jump off the roof? Was he really in 2006 and imagining he was in 1973, or was he really in 1973 and believed he came from the future?

I suppose some may be answered in the follow-up Ashes to Ashes which is apparently going to be set in Eighties London

For God's sake woman, smile

Once again Victoria Beckham's "friends" have come forward to say how lovely and caring she is and how much her friends appreciate her sense of fun. She is apparently cheering up Katie Holmes and Geri Halliwell.

It's not the first time that we have been told that Vicky is a laugh-a-minute girl.

If it is true, why does she always look so miserable in public?

Essex Murders

Just got the proof cover of my new book today and I think it looks fantastic, don't you?

New book

My new book - Essex Murders - is now listed on Amazon. It features around twenty gruesome homicides committed in God's own county from the seventeenth century up to the 1960s.

If you like true crime, it's one for your library.