Went into town last night for a meeting of the London Comedy Writers' Group, which was, as you might expect, a right laugh. First one I've been to in months as the meetings used to clash with my old shiftwork. After a lot of useful training exercises on how to brainstorm new joke and sketch ideas, we fell into discussing whether the TV (and movies) of our youth was actually as good as we remembered it being.
We decided that the new Dr Who had been a resounding success – which the BBC will doubtless be relieved to learn – and that it had struck a valuable blow for writers against the dominance of reality TV. Then we decided that Sapphire and Steel & Dougal and the Blue Cat were still as scary as they'd ever been, but the Tomorrow People had not aged well. However, we failed miserably to reach a consensus on Ghostbusters.
So now I'm off for a week or so in a tent, because we used to enjoy that sort of thing when I was 15 years younger and considerably less creaky. The tent we're using dates back to my days in the Boy Scouts, and may actually be 25 years old. It's so small that I only fit into it diagonally, and if I sit cross-legged on its floor my head pushes up against the ridgepole.
So we should be in for a fun week…