Here's a slightly troubling thing: link. Go there and wait 20 seconds. It's a map of Europe with the positions of passenger planes superimposed. Maybe it's just the fact that they are piled up on top of each other (not really, just on the map) that bothers me. Or that it looks like such a mess - or even like a plane feeding frenzy. Anyway, file it under 'oddly disconcerting'.

Photos of Ro and me in New York here.

Ooh, I do like it here. It's like being at the sea side - the air is all fresh and there are doughnuts. My speech went well, I think, and here's my write up of the event in The Bookseller. Ro is being an utter delight and a charmer and New York has fallen at his feet. Hardened taxi drivers play peep bo with him. Huge doormen tickle his toes. Surly diner staff bring him tiny plates of strawberries on the house. I think we'll come back here.

Blimey. Read it here.

Thanks to all those who saw my anguish at missing the first episode of the new season of Fags, Mags and Bags and rushed forward to help. Em even got an e-mail from one of the cast (good samaritan Omar Raza, who plays Sanjay) who sorted me out with a download of the episode in question. I consider that to be decidedly amazing and great. I also thought, while I was on this subject, that I might try to explain what it is I like about the show, just in case anyone out there has a moment's curiosity on that score.

And I think the desire to shock means that cutting-edge art often deals in extremes. I think I've complained about this before, but I've lost track of the number of 'contemporary literature' novels I've read that deal with madness. Madness is an artistic licence to go wherever you want and as far as you want. And it's catnip to hip authors looking to brew up a bit of polemic. But I don't think it always has much to do with real life as most of us live it.

Similarly, a lot of 'indie' comedy, particularly in the Nineties was very transgressive. Pick a taboo subject and tackle it with the maximum amount of effing-and-jeffing and you're bound to get plenty of shock laughs. No gag was so funny that it couldn't be punched up with the right handful of swear words. But again, that's not real life for a lot of people. It restricts comedy so that it mainly pleases drunk university students, just as Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst fail to connect with a lot of ordinary punters. In the last decade, shock comedy went mainstream with the invention of the 'gross out' comedy, where it seemed that conversations only drunk men would have somehow became movie scripts.

Does that make me sound like a prude? The thing is, I don't mind people swearing. And I'm not often offended by what you might call vulgar comedy. But not being offended isn't the same thing as being entertained. The harder someone tries to get a laugh by grossing out their audience, the more I suspect they don't have anything amusing to say. A lot of people love it, but to me it seems needy and it smacks of desperation. As far as I'm concerned, gentle comedy is the real art form because it can't rely on the cheap pyrotechnics of shock value and f-bombs. It's got to construct its laughs from ordinary, household ingredients.

Of course, gentle comedy risks becoming twee or corny or dull, but when it's done right it has real warmth and charm, in a way that no crude tirade about bodily functions can ever achieve. Gentle comedy can be inclusive and uplifting. It can be beautifully observed and it can contain rich structure. It can generate worlds we want to live in and it can stir our sympathies. None of these things are possible with in-your-face and aggressive comedy-club-style standup.

Fags, Mags and Bags (FMB) knows when it's flirting with cliché or when it's spinning familiar tropes, and it has fun with that. It has the slightly farcical plot structure in which fate swiftly punishes the guilty and all more or less returns to the ante status quo at the end of every episode, but that's how most short-form storytelling works: sudden reversals and unlikely coincidences heighten and condense the themes of the story. And FMB has such fun with them.

The show also turns its potential critics into characters and drags them into the story. Sanjay represents the BBC's all-important youth demographic, who would hate FMB. His character is too cool to be impressed by anything he is actually likely to encounter and he is mercilessly mocked for his attempts to be aloof and unimpressed by everything real life has to offer. Whereas Alok, if his character were suddenly to become a writer of FMB, would make the show grittier, punchier and give it up-to-the-minute mass appeal. In other words he would ruin it. And his character is also mocked for his insistence that a comfy present should be jettisoned as quickly as possible in favour of a poorly-thought-out flash-in-the-pan future.

The faults of FMB are the same faults that P.G.Wodehouse and Jerome K. Jerome share. They are what they are - and unapologetically so. They don't break new ground, they don't shatter preconceptions, they don't deliver anything in the way of adrenaline. They're the opposite of 'gross out' comedy. They celebrate the exact same things that real friends find funny when they chat together. The show looks for its humour in the same places that ordinary people look, and because it's written so skilfully, it finds more of it than most of us do.

For some reason, comedy seems to have two powerful effects. It can cut things down to size - perhaps even destroy them - and it can build people up and make us feel good. Tina Fey probably deserves all our gratitude for helping make sure that Sarah Palin is not currently Vice President. But there's no reason that the power of comedy must always be used to vaporise things. Just as useful and just as skilful is comedy that gives us a nice warm glow. Anyone interested in the latter is invited to slip into the relaxing, Radox bath that is Fags, Mags and Bags.

Instead, they are perfect worlds that anyone who hasn't had all their nerve endings fried by too much exposure to the media's mutated version of real life might happily

Well, in radio terms, the almost unthinkable has happened. A new series of Fags, Mags and Bags has started and I've already missed a week. It's my favourite thing on radio, so that's quite a blow. BBC iPlayer will let me grab episode 2, but episode 1 is already lost to the ether. 10 days after broadcast the wavefront of the program will be around 260 billion kilometers from Earth, well beyond the orbit of Pluto. My chances of getting a radio and a tape recorder out there in order to record the programme are slim. So unless the BBC rebroadcasts it, or someone else on planet Earth decides to share their copy, I'll have to make do with the other five episodes of this series. But still, five episodes of radio comedy gold is cause for celebration. Unless something else goes wrong...

The Bookseller ran a piece on our profits this week, and it's subscriber only. Can anyone send me the full text?

On that note, we've just reported to Companies House that we made a profit of £14.5k last year. The previous year was £17k, which we would have beaten were it not for £8k of bad debts from various people going bust around us.

Yes, you heard right. We're profitable, again, in the most ridiculous market where customers keep dropping like flies. Do we get a medal or anything?

So, this is exciting. Ro and me and Rob and Verity Ann (commenter to the SnowBlog and girlfriend of Rob, in that order) are pushing off to New York tomorrow. I have a five minute speech to give at Tools of Change on Tuesday (4pm, the Ignite session, if you're going. Cheer loudly, throw roses, etc) about how to make catalogues in 5 minutes, but apart from that and a bit of listening in at TOC we'll have NYC to ourselves for a week. Any tips on what to do and what to see would be great! I will be taking a copy of Ghosts of Manhattan which is just back from the printer and is very timely.

(Try not to email whilst I'm gone. I won't reply when I'm there, and I'll probably just delete all 1600 emails that I'll inevitably have when I get back. Or, at least, I'll be sorely tempted.)

Think of me at 5pm tomorrow when I take my seat in Economy with a 16 month old...

Whoever drew this little 'infographic' (click on the link or picture to see what I'm talking about) does a nice job of illustrating what I've said about DVD anti-piracy sermonising for a while now. The big advantage to stealing movies instead of paying for them is that you don't get treated like a criminal (you may wish to reread that sentence). If I could buy legitimate DVDs for maybe 50p extra that weren't loaded up with warnings, ads and trailers I think I'd go for it. Currently my only option would be to strip those things out myself, quite possibly breaking the law. I do hope we all get our heads screwed on straight about copyright before I have to read e-books full of ads, warnings and official threats.

Oh now look. Here's a lovely review of the outstanding Thaw from Fiona Robyn. Get it whilst it's hot!
 

There shine brightly two super things this week: firstly, this review of George Mann's forthcoming Ghosts of Manhattan and secondly an endorsement of Mark Hodder's forthcoming Spring Heeled Jack from none other than Michael Moorcock (Michael Moorcock!) who says "This is the best debut novel I have read in ages". Click below for the full glowing review.
Imagine you're me and you started a company a few years back, and stuff happened, time passed, and then seven years later you get a review like that for a book you're publishing from a childhood hero. Chuffed doesn't begin to cover it.

Oh yes, and I'm going to New York next week. With Ro. Whee!

'Yes, there's no "new book smell", no folding the pages over, and if you drop it in the bath you've ruined it - but on the other hand, the whole "electronic ink" malarkey actually works...'

See what Charlie Brooker has to say about e-books in the Grauniad today.

It seems that I'm part of a movement. Some of my lifestyle choices seem to align quite closely with these people. Not sure I want all humans to vanish, though. Could we just keep ten million or so, if they promise not to break anything.

(And CSS doesn't damage our ecosystem. I wouldn't be averse to a bit of prettification of their website.)

26 per cent - a rise of 10 per cent in just three months - do not believe the world is getting hotter. link

I really didn't see this coming. Apparently a decreasing number of people accept the idea of manmade climate change. A couple of screw-ups and a bit of fudging by some researchers has invalidated the whole concept for a lot of people and apparently that's giving the Conservative Party some political cover to back off on their pledges to do something about CO2 levels if (when) they get into power (link).

But if it were an asteroid, I can't help thinking most ordinary non-scientists would be freaking out rather than confidently blasé and they'd be clamouring for more telescopes right now and demanding definite answers with frantic urgency.

And if, instead of climate changes that threaten billions, this was a terrorist plot threatening a few thousand, we'd have happily turned our world upside down attempting to combat it.

I understand that a lot of people are sceptical about manmade climate change, but very few of them truly know what they are talking about. And practically all of the people who do know what they're talking about are saying that a global catastrophe is just around the corner. We're as certain of manmade climate change as we were uncertain about Iraqi WMD and yet the response to non-existent missiles is orders of magniture greater than our attempt to protect our future. Where is our national ability to get into a lather when it finally might do some good? If only climate change was suspected of causing AIDS, cancer or Bird/Swine flu. And was exacerbated by GM crops in those who'd received the MMR jab. Then we'd see some public concern.

And here's The Clamour King - out loud.

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