So Miss R and I have had a weekend of being with the Wii … and while Miss R has not tried to wrestle it from my hands, we’ve had a good couple of games of tennis and bowling on it. Which she beat me at (oh the shame!).

On the Friday night, Miss R’s sister and brother-in-law happened to pop over, and so we showed them the console. The brother-in-law, having had some boxing and golf experience, took to boxing like a duck to water – and it was amazing watching him playing the game while adopting the classic boxer stance. Because while you can sit on the sofa and play these games, why would you want to? Now I’ve got two controllers, I’m wondering whether to get two more in case any visitors pop round!

Having said that, it does take some time to get used to the controllers. Holding it sideways for Sonic? The thing that really baked my noodle for a while was in Call of Duty 3 when you have to move it fast in a certain direction to wrestle a rifle from an enemy. I’m still not sure how that happens, to be honest!

Making a Wii for myself was rather quirky fun, but that’s where my love affair with the cutesyness of the Wii control panel ended. All those jolly sounds, all that Japanese animation – it can get quite grating after a while. Give me the tentacle monsters of anime anyday!

Right now, though, my Wii has been trying to download a systems update from the wireless internet since midnight on Sunday. It still wasn’t done at 8am this morning – hopefully it’ll be done tonight. And for a putatively simple console the whole family can use, getting it online is a bit of a struggle.

Of course, the real test will be whether Miss R likes the Wii enough that she plays it by herself…

I still want a Playstation 3 though! In that spoof Apple-style parody video for the PS3 versus Wii – the “cute as a button” skinny blonde/Nintendo Wii would have me reaching for a garrotting knife sooner or later. Or maybe I just want to keep up with the electronic Jones’ in the work office next door…

If you haven’t seen this week’s superlative episode Gridlock, then go and watch it now before you read my thoughts!

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Like most gadget/tech/game-obsessed folk, I’ve been dreaming and arguing with myself between the PS3, the X-Box 360 and the Wii as my next games console of choice. Which is rather silly, considering I mostly play RTS games and I don’t use my existing game consoles that much any more. But dream on, I do. And unlike Angelina Jolie, a games console is within reach. At least, theoretically.

Why would I want all three?

A Nintendo Wii will get me off the couch, it seems like great multi-player fun and it might just turn Miss R on into the possibilities of gaming.

A Playstation 3 – well, it’s just the games console equivalent of a great big thundering V8 turbo-diesel Ferrari. The idea of downloading games and trailers in HD quality does sound appealing – even if I have a traditional CRT TV set. Plus, the trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV had me *drooling*.

As for the XBox 360 – well, it came out before the PS3, it;s cheaper and it promises better integration with my PC and online, with downloadable movies and trailers. But then the PS3 promises that as well, doesn’t it?

All this came to a head last week, when on one day whispers on the Internet abounded of a discount code that let you get 40% off any goods in their catalogue, at least for the 20,000 customers. Including a Playstation 3. So I ended up ordering a Playstation 3, and wondering if I could have better spent the money on something else. Like a house.

The next day, Miss R told me (on request, she doesn’t check on this all the time for me!) that the local game shops had managed to secure a supply of Nintendo Wii’s. Before I had time to think about it, I’d popped down to the shop, handed over my credit card and became the proud owner of a Nintendo Wii. Mostly because I had aspirations to selling it on eBay – but also because I did want to play it, see what it was like, and perhaps turn Miss R onto the power and greatness of gaming.

Alas, to sell it on eBay meant not touching the Wii. So it’s been sat on the living room floor for the last week, lonely, untouched, unplayed with me only occasionaly salivating at it, wondering whether someone would pay me a lot of money for the privilege. But it was not to be – the only two flickers of interest came from someone in the Phillippines who wanted two (scam alert! scam alert!) and someone from Scotland who wanted it for their church youth group and wondered if I would do a deal.

Of course, in the midst of all this, I was starting to stress about just what I had done, buying two games consoles on two consecutive days. At least until the letter came through saying that the discount code had been withdrawn, and that if I wanted the shiny gleamy Playstation 3, I’d have to pay full-price for it. Baluga. Although my parents are in Hong Kong at the moment, where PS3s cost 73% less than they do in the UK…

So tonight, after the total failure of my attempt to make some money (that’s my application to The Apprentice cancelled), I at least have the small consolation price of having a Wii to play with tonight. Unless you want to buy it from me?

Well, that was a crap ending to a time-travel series, really, wasn’t it? Almost as bad as the ending to Quantum Leap – although at least the ending to Quantum Leap felt more consistent. Although other people seemed to like it.

To be fair, I haven’t seen much of Life On Mars – mostly because I just don’t feel that nostalgic surge for a time when men were men, women were women and the police could do what they like and get away with it.

Spoilers within…
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It’s an oft-quoted cliche that one of the first things British people ask each other is what they do for a living. Which is a wee bit annoying when you work in weird non-descriptive roles in companies because it makes you sound extraordinarily weird or dull.

I remember one work outing to a comedy club, where Rich Hall (superlative American comedian with a sour face permanently based in the UK) asked our party of web geniuses what we did for a living. Dylan piped up that he was a website writer. The look on Hall’s face as he realised that he’d have to spin some kind of song or riff on a very dull-sounding job was just priceless – although he did manage it, something throwing in references to yarns of wool and sheep-rustling en route. (Don’t ask me how, I was very very drunk)

Fast forward to this morning, and I suddenly find myself on local radio station Coast FM identifying a Take That song for the chance to win some cinema tickets to go see Blades of Glory. Despite being sleep-befuddled, I do my best to sound lively and interesting, mostly because I’ve listened to independent radio enough to categorise the listeners into being either:

• dull and dull (“Hello… Ta for the tickets.”)
• lively but dull (“Gosh, I’m so wacky me, I’m a party girl. I love to party and I rilly rilly want to hear Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars!”)

(wait till I write the blog post about the inanity and stupidity of listeners to independent local radio!)

But then he asks what I do for a living – and it’s too early to think of a reasonable answer, so I reply project management. Somehow he mishears this as product management, and then somehow asks me about octopuses. And in my own imitable fashion, I talk about eating them or something like that – possibly not the best idea on a radio breakfast show.

Honestly, when I signed up for a stint as project management, I had visions of being snowed under with pie and GANTT charts, trying to co-ordinate teams from around the world – but all from the comfort of a nice comfy chair in a nice office next to a farm. This hasn’t quite turned out to be the case.

I share my basement office with a few developers, and a collection of old books, desks, bookshelves, office equipment, computer logs, dot matrix printers and magnetic computer tapes dating back to the 1970s. With the arrival of another employee, all this had to go. A task that fell on my shoulders.

So the logs got shredded. The books were recycled or given to the library. The desks went to the big depot in the sky, as did the bookshelves. We all cooed at the office equipment and dot matrix printers, before giving them back to systems. Which left the magnetic computer tapes. My boss told me to get rid of them – so I took the box down to the skip, and threw them in.

Whereupon a breathless analyst (who saw me at said skip – honestly, there’s no privacy when you step outside around here!) ran up to me and told me not to throw them in said skip, since they all contained data that needed to be magnetically erased before being disposed of in a proper recyclable manner. Who knew that magnetic computer tapes could be recycled? Who’d want to?

But this left us with a problem, of about 30 tapes inside a skip. Which would have to be retrieved somehow. My suggestion of simply clambering in was immediately nixed, since apparently the scientists in the office also used the skip to dispose of their test tubes and chemicals. So unless I was prepared to wear a chemical protection suit on a hot summers day, clambering into the skip was out. Thus, I found myself on a hot summers day running around trying to find any kind of rake or spade that might help in retrieving said items from the skip.

For comedy purposes, I would like to say that I eventually had to wear a rubbery yellow suit and dive into the skip to rescue these tapes from a landfilled-death, while sweating inside the suit and smelling nothing but the foul stench of the skip and my own body odour – but fortunately (or unfortunately), after an hour or so of skillful manipulation, the tapes were out. Phew.

Then a week later, I found myself on the roof of the building helping a colleague erect an aerial mast so we could detect signals 40 miles away.

I know the job description offered travel to unique locations, but I’m not sure a skip and a roof is what they had in mind.

So Get A Grip heralds Ben Elton’s return to stand-up comedy – with a funky female sidekick to act as a younger hipper person to his old-dad persona…

So it’s a bit of a shame that it hits off with a quick comedy skit about the effectiveness of spam. Gosh, that’s so 21st century. No, it hasn’t been done to death by every other comedian up to now… Plus, for a supposedly topical TV comedy show, to go on about the Diana conspiracy theory doesn’t exactly scream of bang up-to-date comedy.

And it just gets worse. Alexa Chung might be ok at reading off an autocue, but she certainly doesn’t seem human doing it – couldn’t they get a funky young female sidekick who actually looks capable of responding to Ben ad hoc instead of reading from a script? (Shame I have to diss her really – how often do you get half-Chinese people on prime-time ITV?) Hell, she looks like Tracy Barlow as she smiles there watching her ranting sidekick go on. Plus, someone should have told her that one of the first rules of comedy is not to smile and laugh at your own jokes.

Ben hasn’t exactly moved on either – all the comedy sketch interludes are almost exactly the same format from his BBC series The Man From Auntie (which was 17 years ago), right down to the upside down chins. He’s kept his ranty persona – but now it sounds like the old dad (that he is), rather than anyone actually funny.

Producers of Get A Grip, there is one thing you can do which would make it so damn better. Get them out from behind the desk – it might make the show just a little more dynamic instead of having two people just sat there reading off an autocue.

Of course, this followed the hilarious comedy City Lights which had our two main characters hounded out of your house after witnessing a gangland killing. ITV’s Wednesday comedy night has some way to go methinks.

PS: I would link to my superlative Ben Elton website at this point, but I’ve got no idea where it’s gone. Such is the way of old web sites.