almost witty

In lieu of a personality in my youth, I often took bits and pieces from the people I saw around me ie my television set. So I took the fast-talking speed of Ben Elton, and the talking-gibberish hiding a keen-intellect side from the Doctor. That is, aside from the keen intellect - the Internet has put paid to that methinks.

In other words, I have a tendency to talk fast gibberish. Couple that with the general tendency to say the first funny or quirky thing that comes to my head, and it can lead to a couple of uh-oh moments. Especially in a new environment when people don’t quite yet know what to make of me.

Thus today, when a colleague and I were deciding which door to enter a building with, I just happened to mention my irrational hatred of a particular door. I even said off-hand of how I wish I had an axe so I could shred the door to pieces. This is when my colleague adopted the unmistakable look of “ok… right…” …

He hasn’t talked to me for the rest of the day. Oh dear…

Ahhh, dear reader. I have a bit of a quandary - whether to run along the North Wales coast to see a big-screen screening of the premiere episode of new Doctor Who with David Tennant and Freema Agyeman seven hours before the rest of the UK - or to stay in bed and have a nice lie-in. I fear, I may choose the latter…

After all, around this time last year I was in Cardiff hob-nobbing with the press corps at the press preview of Doctor Who and writing Doctor Who preview-related gags for a newspaper. And now I’m not - and besides which, the press previews were in London yesterday.

Watching Doctor Who these days tends to bring up bitter-sweet memories and feelings these days. Whether it’s spotting old colleagues lurking in David Tennant’s fantastic video diaries, or just seeing a random Cardiff location masquerading as London or a foreign planet, it just keeps reminding me of my Cardiff and BBC days. Indeed, that’s partly the reason why I avoided Torchwood - in another universe, that could have been my web project, damn it!

But then I was never entirely happy there either, and a change in my life was well overdue. I think I’d have felt a lot better about it if I’d left by choice instead of having the decision thrust upon me. For the third time. Ah well…

Well, it’s taken two months but I’ve finally managed to get to grips with one of the most important things when starting a new job - where you get your pens, paper, staples, stapler, hole puncher and lever arch files. More importantly, who the administration assistant is - because until you find this diva of information, you’re swimming in treacle.

On my first day here, after a dreary two-hour induction which mostly involved being told how to lift boxes properly, I was sent to my office. Which meant sharing with three developers and a designer in a basement with no mobile phone access, or webmail. So far so good - except there was unaccountably a huge partition separating me from them. Since then, I’ve been languishing somewhat not knowing how to get basic information about how the company works, mostly because the developers are really the types to hunker down until something gets done, darnit.

But now I’ve found the admin assistant, I’m surrounded by all the stationary paraphenalia a project manager needs, I’ve managed to get the partition removed and I can now carry a proper notebook to meetings instead of scraps of paper. Now all I need is a laptop instead of this Celeron machine…

I’ve been watching a lot of Comic Relief programming this week. Forgive me if this sounds as if I’m sat on my sofa with a blanket wrapped around my lap smoking a pipe and shaking my cane at the teen tearaways across the road - but it all seems a bit too slick these days. And (whisper) not actually that funny.

When the only comedy moment out of the incredibly unfunny and dull Comic Relief single, Comic Relief does the Apprentice and Comic Relief does Fame Academy is musing on what Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was on when she was sweating profusely, one has to realise someone’s taken the comedy out of Comic Relief. Which rather defeats the “unique” spin on what is essentially a telethon. Shame, really.

Still, I’ll be tuning in tonight, making the odd donation, looking at pictures of a man who painted himself red and buying Shaggy Blog Stories, essentially a book collection of 100 funny stories from around the UK blogosphere with proceeds going to Comic Relief. I really should have offered one of my oh-so-hilarious anecdotes but I’ve only just noticed.

Shame the-powers-that-be behind Comic Relief haven’t tried to capture the UK blogosphere in the same way - there’s not even a banner you can splash on your webpage.

Why do I have a particular interest in this? It was central to one of my favourite nights at work some eight years ago, when I was behind the scenes on the web coverage for Comic Relief:

- “blogging” from behind the scenes via live web updates, in the days when blogging and broadband barely crossed the lips of even a savvy web developer (whither blog this year, web chaps?)
- encoding and uploading Doctor Who videos in full Quicktime quality live as soon as they’d been transmitted
- hanging out in the infamous BBC canteen and marvelling at how big Dawn French actually is (the camera took away pounds with her then!)
- helping out on the Comic Relief webchats
- watching the frantic goings-on behind the scenes, and realising they weren’t that frantic
- marvelling at my boss’s then new-fangled hands-free thing for his mobile phone, thinking what a prat he looked in them, and how they’d never ever catch on
- being so tired and irritated (at what, I have no idea now!) at the end I didn’t go to the wrap-up party. One of those decisions I shall regret forever.

I really wish I’d done some screencaps.

I have two claims to fame regarding myself and new Doctor Who head honcho Russell T. Davies:

1. During a fire alarm, I had to walk behind him to the fire exit. He’s a very very tall man. (And no, I didn’t approach him. Being at work I’m sure the last thing he needed was a fanboy going on about Doctor Who and all that)

2. Like him, I was often to be found on a Friday night on the train leaving Cardiff for Manchester - although I never bumped into him on said train, and usually had to get off at Crewe.

However, it seems that Russell never liked the train journey. In this Telegraph interview, he described the journey as “Four hours of hell. It’s like Calcutta - sitting on a box of chickens with peasants hanging from the windows outside.”

This strikes me as rather strange, since it’s actually quite a pleasant rail journey. A peaceful four hours riding up the Welsh countryside, with none of the usual hassles of train journeys (changing trains, drunken hooligans) to worry about. Once the masses of commuters get off at Newport, it’s a very relaxing ride in which you can read books, play silly games, watch downloaded TV on your laptop, whatever. And I would have thought that busy man that he is, he’d relish the chance to spend three to four hours by himself catching up on the world without having the hassles of mobile phone coverage.

Ahh, train travel. I do rather miss it these days.