IN ONE!

Revised at 1pm the next day. I must warn you about the silly contents of this post.

I am drinking beer. I have just returned from Brighton where I watched a band called Orson who were far from awesome. They looked like Scissor Sisters without the crippling camp. I and my fellow companions bailed out early. They were terrible. They wore flatcaps. The sound was clear and stultifying; perfect for desert driving where you don't want to think of anything but getting home. And because they were from America and were not sticking ferrets down their pants (as every Northerner does every tea-time!!! Hey, I watched the 15th series of Last of the Summer Wine and that Wallace and Gromit movie with the sexually suggestive vegetables, that's what they all do), they were perhaps even more terrible. They sold millions in the States where they are worshipped, possibly as style gurus and inventors of the flatcap. All I remember are the flatcaps Here they will sell two copies of their latest single, and that will be an entirely accidental transaction, because the people who buy them will believe that they are pirate DVDs of Orson Welles's unfinished cut of Don Quixote. The joke is there is no such film, of course. Also, what a horrid name. What an unbelievably silly moniker. It's unbearable. It really is. Especially if it has something to do with Mork and Mindy.

So I'm trying to finish this before the midnight bell tolls and my keyboard turns to a pumpkin. I have been doing something quiz-like. Only a few moments ago I completed an application form for the TV show that ruled my Sunday afternoons at a time when we never knew such people as Boris Johnson and Davina McCall existed. When Ted Rogers did that thing with his fingers, and everyone had hair like the members of Brotherhood of Man. Yes, I've just done my Bullseye application form. It is my first TV app in about two years (I can't really remember; I've been staying away from TV, it has done such naughty things to my self-confidence). This may be a long enough period of time to let people forget why so many television companies saw fit to chuck away or, is more likely, soiled and then incinerated with all the alacrity of young pups making their way in the cruel, cool world of televisual entertainment, and then grinning with the impunity of someone who will produce programmes with names like What Happens When You Put the Brain of a Human Inside a Wombat's Head, my wonderfully intricate and entertaining application forms. Deep breath. Who knows! (I actually meant to write a question mark there, but let's be eaters of cornballs for a second).

I guess you're wondering who I have chosen to be my arrow-chucking accomplice. I have annointed Dart Vader, my young friend, as my partner in the hunt for a mobile home. Here is his Myspace page. Isn't he a shining example of manhood who will make the nation's female-hood quiver as if their knee joints were instantly replaced by jelly of a yellow hue. It is believed that if he ever wears Speedos again, every woman in a 50-mile radius will explode due to the chemical reaction caused by his lusty gaze. I'm trusting this pedagogical scamp to power his way to some decent points and the speedboat we have always dreamed of living together in in the magical forest that just happens to be in his back garden (it has stone storks cavorting in the pond and everything).

But filling out an application form is an unusual business. For me, it is deja vu. I used to boast with maximum biographical information of how damned hot I was at this trivia lark. How can they resist this colussus, I used to think as I rubbed my hands together for hours on end in a manner that might have been deemed hyperkinetic and weird. Then I realised they rejected me for my total overwhelming intellectual superiority, and that if people watched me display a range of knowledge unequalled since the last decent Michael Faraday lecture at the Royal Institutite (hmm, was it 1957 ... anyway all those old fogies are dead while we live!!!! Like Zapastistas!! Remember I am partaking an amber beverage containing alcohol) they would surely die from the sheer, gob-smacking volume of information that was trying to be crammed in their puny minds.

Now I know: You have to be modest. So I have gone as modest as a titmouse (tee-hee-hee). The words have got smaller yet more legible. I am making a furtive but restrained face in my passport photo. Yes, it still looks like I am a fugitive from a chain gang, but that is what modern photo-booths turn you into. Regular Paul Muni's and Cool Hand Lukes. Yet I have committed no crime and am not an employee of Granada and Challenge TV (I had to take a moment to dis-remember my childhood of decimating ant armies ... thankfully I was never brought up on insect war trials, though I still look over my shoulder to this day for a pair of pliant and scary antennas sniffing for justice).

Dart Vader is fresh young energetic. He's like Myspace isn't he? I'm young, witty, funny and bright (in my dreams). Okay, I admit it. On the application where it says: "Why would you be good on Bullseye?" We said we were young, our pensions were miles in the distance if absolutely non-existent, we were funny as all young people are and we were young when we started filling in the forms. We remain young. If a sex change is in order to make our pairing more palatable I'm sure one of us is willing to give up our balls. It's good that making the transgender leap will not age us into wizened hags. No, that was just me listening to the films I have been currently watching in the cinema. Cinema corrupts everybody. I have seen too many films in which genitals do not make it to the final reel.

But remember one more thing...

We are young. Everyone else is old. At least that is what we are telling everybody.

Youth is all that matters. That is why Vicky Pollard will be the next president of the universe.

I wish dear speccy Jim was presenting, but I don't expect that a youngspunky company like ITV will spring for somebody so emblematic of wild mullets and bad polo shirts. They will choose zesty folk, whose youth will fill every molecule with a sense of joy that has been unequalled since that day we were all happy and stuff. I'm not sure. Was that in the Garden of Eden? But if it is presented by Vernon Kay, however, I may run to the hills. The South Downs perhaps. They're looking majestic and accommodating. Vernon is an elongated tumor. He must be pelted with radioactive chemicals and smelly cat poo. That way we can make sure he stays in his pigeon loft where he can fit all his eggs in the mouth of his poor, GIGANTIC-MOUTHED wife Tess Daly and he will clap like Regency-era street prostitute's sore vagina. Tess got a big mouth.

Just because Vernon has an accent doesn't mean that he will be good for every slightly Fred Trueman Indoor League-like show that pops up. Maybe an alopeciac Gail Porter would be good. I dunno, maybe she just needs the work. However, she does look like that mysterious alien from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Also, I was wondering....

Can you be ironic on ITV? Only Nick Owen and Robson Green always look so serious.

And that band was rubbish. So rubbish. Remember I have been drinking beer. Dissolute days are still here.

Lots of beer. Okay, time's up.

Q. Nicknamed Crawfie, what was the first and last name of Margaret Thatcher's much-revered personal assistant?

And she wasn't married to Richard Gere. Duh.