✏️Hello! I’ve just finished writing on the current (tremendous) series of R4’s Dead Ringers and am now, quite literally, “available” for all your TV and radio writers’ room needs. Get in touch, as they say, to discuss!✏️
What’s the best insult you’ve ever heard? My favourite: a man in khaki trousers was talking loudly on the bus (in Norwich) and a bloke at the back said “pipe down, Tenko”.
@SteveDoherty1
21 years ago I reviewed a Meat Loaf gig for a newspaper without attending the gig (I was ill/an idiot). An hour after publication the paper called to inform me that the gig had, in fact, been cancelled. I was sacked. The Sun wrote a piece about it. The headline: “MEAT OAF”.
Top 6 Adrian Chiles columns:
I’ve given up wild swimming. So why does my Volvo smell like mince?
£11 for a jar of coffee? I got my forearm stuck in a fruit machine in Powys.
I buried my father with my bare hands. It’s time we stopped talking about glamping. 1/2
Apologised to a woman in Primark for bumping into her and my long-suffering 11yo said, “You don’t say sorry in Primark, Mum. It’s not a place of forgiveness.”
Jacob Rees-Mogg. With your face like a consumptive chimney. Like an abandoned B-road. Like a whittled posset. Like a vertical whisper. Like a spatchcocked flute. Like a hangman’s baguette.
What’s the most hauntingly specific insult you’ve ever received? I once made a joke about Dennis Waterman’s dentures and a man wrote to tell me I was “obviously lonely”.
7 reasons why The Thing (1982) is a Christmas film:
1) snow
2) bearded men concealing surprises 3) compulsory party games
4) introverts shunning group activities 5) digestive issues
6) revellers bursting open to reveal partially assimilated canine lifeforms
7) knitwear
But what if Greta Thunberg was a man? Or an amphibious combat vehicle? What if she was a YORKSHIRE TERRIER and her tights were stuffed with HAMMERS and she was travelling the world to fight CHIPS? What then, eh? WHAT THEN.
If a Greta-like teenager was organising school strikes and travelling the world to fight abortion, I wonder what we would make of her and if she would get 1pc of the publicity?
Stop pretending Dr Birx is helpless, or sad, or “struggling with her conscience”. Sitting in uncomfortable silence while Trump bangs on about bleach doesn’t make her a victim. It makes her a complicit sack of shit.
There’s an antiques emporium in Norwich of such unfathomable strangeness every visit produces fresh gasps of bewilderment and terror. Today’s finds:
1. Mounted photo print of depressed steam train driver (£1)
Why is the writing on shampoo bottles getting smaller? Baboons stole my plimsolls at Longleat.
Should I tell the postman he has halitosis? My first wife wouldn’t let me wear shorts.
I blocked the pub toilet. Now my dog barks when I say Dundee. 2/2
President Trump: "The Continental Army suffered a bitter winner at Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware and seized victory from Cornwallis of Yorktown. Our Army manned the air, it ran the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do."
Ken Allen, the orangutan from San Diego Zoo, escaped his enclosure three times in the 1980s.
His apparent goals were visiting other animals, throwing rocks at a despised orangutan rival, and taking photos with tourists. He never acted aggressively towards anyone during his