To cut a long story short...

Thomas arrived yesterday at 12:25pm, via ceasarian section. Jane is recovering well, and the baby is absolutely the best thing ever.

There's a long version of this blog post, but that can be written another day. Right now I just want to get back to the fledgling daddying. Ciao for now!

Danny La Rue

When I was little, Danny La Rue (like anything else to do with boys being girls) was subject to my intense attention.

Like all children, I had hard and fast rules about what girls could do, and what boys could do, and had a great deal of difficulty when people didn't follow those rules. Danny was a man, but he looked like a woman. That took a lot of getting my head around.

Later on, when I started to want to try dressing up myself, people like Danny annoyed me. They were doing it wrong, it wasn't supposed to be easy! Danny La Rue didn't even have a girl's name!

And then, when I did start dressing myself, I realised how amazingly skillful Danny was at what he did. I didn't want to be like him, but I respected and admired what he did.

He died today, aged 81. I can't pretend that I really saw him as a role model, but he was a great entertainer, and by doing what he did with humour and without apology, he did a lot for making all men in frocks more acceptable in the UK.

Garden Birds

I recently bought a mini HD camera, this is quick film I made with it. Just a bit of Blu-tack fastened it to the post next to my peanut feeder, and over an hour it caught a blue tit, green finch and great tit helping themselves to the peanutty goodness.

You might just spot the resident pair of robins, flitting in to eat the raisins on the lawn.

In other news, Jane is keeping well. No news on the baby yet, watch this space!

Post 1,100

Blimey, have I really not blogged for a week? Well here goes...

This week we bought a car. It is shiny and goes fast and has plenty of room for a small person in the back.

We also bought a new "travel system" which is what they call prams these days, apparently. It is shiny and goes about walking pace, is more or less designed to fit small persons inside, and also folds up to fit inside the new shiny car.

If baby turns up when he's supposed to, he'll arrive this month. It'd be wrong to say that panic is setting in. Panic set in about a month ago and has snuck in his girlfriend Niggling Doubts, while his mate Creeping Dread kips on the sofa.

But it will all be okay, won't it? Yes, yes it will...

Won't it?

Last weekend we had a look around the delivery suite on a "guided tour", just so we know what to expect.

It was a bit like a TraveLodge, but slightly less clinical.

Other things happened, erm...

Look, I'm bunging all of this kind of stuff into my twitter feed these days which basically sucks all the creativity out of my brain and leaves very little left for bloggage. Okay?!

Love ya! x

BlogNor09: The Soup Tower

King's Lynn has always been the workhorse of Norfolk. Norwich and Yarmouth may be larger and on first appearance busier, but neither of them concentrate on industry and commerce in the way King's Lynn has. There are no huge insurance offices in Lynn, no sea-front selling kiss-me-quick hats. King's Lynn is a town of industry, and a town where the agri-industry of the surrounding countryside came to trade.

As a child we used to through King's Lynn from my home in rural North Norfolk, on the way to see family elsewhere. The landmarks were all industrial in nature. The huge grey slab of the grain silo in the docks, the sugar beet factory pumping out it's sickly-sweet smelling steam, and the Campbells soup tower with it's transluscent sides revealing a mess of convoluted pipes. It was like a piece of modern art.



Today the beet refinery is long gone, travellers to Norfolk are no longer greeted by it's sugary pong. The power station and the new paper mill have taken it's place along the river, but I kind of miss the friendly smell of warm sugar.

The grain silo is still there, now painted gleaming white. Also still standing, but now unused, is the Campbells tower. It's the nearest we've got to the Angel of the East, a roadside icon seen by the thousands of holidaymakers who channel past Lynn on their way to the Norfolk coast. A few years ago they replaced the glass sides with metal ones, which if anything enhanced it's feel of an art installation.

The friendly Campbells logo instantly recalls Warhol's soup tins. The stark brick lines of the building itself are reminiscent of Giles Gilbert Scott's architecture.

Today it's decorated by a huge banner, "See what Campbells Meadow can become!", Campbell's meadow being the name for the shopping area at the tower's feet.

The banner has been hung by Tescos, who have a supermarket just next to the factory. What they want Campbells Meadow to become is, unsurprisingly, a shopping area dominated by an even bigger Tescos. Ironically, they're using the tower to promote its own destruction.

The soup tower isn't very large (strangely, it looks bigger from further away, where it easily dominates the flat fen skyline), it's not very old, and it's also not very important architecturally, but it is important as a symbol for what King's Lynn is, or was. A town that makes things, in fields and factories, not just consumes things in food courts and giant supermarkets.

If the Campbells tower goes, and I suspect it will, Lynn will have lost one more symbol of it's past, which to me is a sad thing.

Blogging Norfolk

TV Finds Religion

No, it's not a book

Apparently those big balls you get in gyms are good for pregnant ladies. Jane's been on about getting one for a while. I really hope she doesn't guess what her present is.

BeckysWeb Wilfully Betrays the Public Trust

Well, what are the chances? The votes to decide the ending of Tranny and TV are in and - after weighting the votes using a very complicated algorithm that takes into account that I wrote all three endings and didn't want to waste one - every option got exactly the same number of votes!

Well, you asked for it, so here it is. Three possible endings to the "TV Goes to Prison" saga. Sit back and enjoy. And don't say I didn't warn you about the pun. And I I think actually after this I really do need to get out more.


The Typical Transvestite Behaviour Ending




The Incredibly Bad Pun Ending




The TV Actually Goes to Prison Ending



Tune in next time when TV finds religion! No, really.

T&TV Go Interactive

I'm taking the almost total lack of comments on the last Tranny & TV to mean that you were all stunned into silence by TV's conviction and are now eagerly awaiting the conclusion to this nail biting story.

For that reason, I'm going to offer not one, not two, not three... well yes actually three... Three possible endings to the story!

All you have to do is choose an ending by commenting on this post with your choice of the following:

Option 1: The "Typical Transvestite Behavior" Ending

Option 2: The "Incredibly Bad Pun" ending.

Option 3: The "TV Actually Goes to Prison" ending. (There may be some reset button pushing involved if this one is picked).

You'll find a key pad under your chair, vote now!

Reset required

What happened to the "reset button"?

In the old days of telly, fantastic things would happen each week. Someone would discover a long-lost evil twin sister. Everyone would suddenly turn into sex fiends because of a virus. The moon would explode and rain fire on the Earth every week. Even in Little House on the Prairie.

But it was okay because at the start of the next week everything would be back to normal, because of the reset button. It let writers run wild with their imaginations, safe in the knowledge that no lasting change would befall their characters.

Some people hated the reset button, but I actually quite liked it. It meant you could miss an episode without losing the plot. The programme makers also loved the reset button because it meant they could show the episodes pretty much in any order without having to worry about the whole thing making sense.

Entire series survived quite happily with the reset button. Good series. Stuff like M*A*S*H and Doctor Who and Cheers.

Then something seemed to change and the programme makers seemed to fall out of love with the reset button. The new fad was the "story arc". Rather than telling lots of little stories, you'd tell one big one.

The insidious rise of the story arc can best be charted by looking at the venerable Star Trek in its various incarnations:

The Original Star Trek - No story arc whatsoever. The only way you could tell the chronological order of the episodes would be by watching Shatner's almost imperceptible paunch growth.

The Next Generation - Slight signs of story arc. Character allowed to grow a beard. Character gains a child that doesn't immediately get forgotten in the next episode. Nothing major.

Deep Space Nine - Some story arc at the start, by the end completely abandons episodic plots (and any real Trek-like sci-fi) for a seasons-long story line about war. Because everyone loves war, apparently.

Voyager - Not as arcy as DS9, but a bit shit. A blip in the generally upward trend of the story arc.

Enterprise - Never mind interesting characters, plot, situation or the established canon, just feel the arc!

Nowadays, no fictional TV show seems to be green-lighted unless it's effectively an epic 120 hour movie split down into 45 minute chunks over 7 years.

I don't know about you, but if you can't tell a story in 10 hours or less, I don't want to know about it. If you can manage it in 1 hour, all the better.

What makes it worse are the people who have the full pay packages on satellite or cable, because even if you did fancy watching something when it comes to "normal telly" you're so fed up with everyone telling you how good it was on cable you'll stubbornly refuse to watch it.

I don't want to be told about programmes that "get good in about episode 7", I want programmes that start good straight away!

To enjoy telly you need to discover it for yourself. In the old days, you could catch a mid-season episode of a show and think "hey this is rather good, I'll think I'll watch this", without having to worry about the episodes you'd missed. Those episodes would be repeated sometime anyway, and you could watch them without them being spoilt by you "knowing the ending", because each episode stood on it's own merits.

Long story arcs just make for lazy writing. If you're not bothered about how you get from A to B because B isn't for another 18 weeks, you won't necessarily bother concentrating on making this episode particularly interesting.

I think I know why the story arc became de rigueur, and it's nothing really to do with writers wanting to "tell big stories", it's more to do with boosting DVD sales and box sets and paying for subscription channels. Because if you want to catch up with a series that's already in it's second season, you have to buy season one, or watch the "catch up" shows on the same network. If you don't download them from the internet, of course.

Of the TV I watch regularly, I can only think of one show that gets it right. The new Doctor Who manages to have compelling story arcs and make each show a gripping and complete story in itself, with no need for a reset button.

Bring back proper episodic telly, not epics cut into episodic chunks. Maybe I'll watch a bit more then. I might even buy the box set.