Archives: T.V.

I have discovered a new feature on my blog which allows me to change the datestamp on the posts, so I can post an entry for Thursday after typing it up on a Saturday (exactly what I’m doing now). This excites me because a) it means I can technically never miss a day’s blogging without feeling like I have to write something hilarious at midnight when I’m straining to keep my eyes awake, b) I can better keep track of all the things I do from day-to-day without having to write a single, enormously long post at the end of the week or such.

Really, the excitement stems from having got lost in re-reading Kevin Smith’s diaries, which I used to follow avidly on his website but have now been published in paperback form. What occurred to me as I waded back in to them (alongside memories of their first reading as long ago as 2005) is that part of the reason for creating this blog was not only to try to give myself a kick up the butt when I needed one, but also to have something on which I could look back in a few years time (God willing) and help me to remember what life was like “way back when” in my old life with rubbish lungs.

So I’m hoping to keep a slightly more day-to-day diary of events from here on out, although I’m sure they will still be peppered with the usual random tangents and streams-of-consciousness as all my posts have ever been.

So anyway, Thursday (today… wait, that’s weird…) saw me waking, annoyingly, 10 minutes before my alarm went off. I say annoyingly, but actually, thinking about it, it’s quite nice to wake up naturally, even if the first impulse on waking to roll over and drift back off to sleep has to be fought off to get up and set the a.m. dose of drugs flowing. Which I manage to do.

I park myself, still slightly dazed, in the chair by the telly and watch something or other while the drugs kick in. By the time they’re done, I’m actually nearly awake, which is quite rare for drug-mornings. I stick on the extras disk from Lost Season 3 (which we finished last night) and immerse myself in behind-the-scenes stuff which always gets my creative-juices flowing.

At 10 I wake K up as we have a visit from our littlest niece and nephew and she just about manages to roll out of bed in time to greet them at the door. They are so excited to get here it’s almost magical, and no sooner are they in the living room than they’re up on the sofa bouncing their heads off or pulling the contents of the coffee table off onto the floor.

We sit and drink tea with their Mum while they tear the place apart (in a nice way) and we play with anything we can find to play with. Most excitingly, because of the delivery of drugs I had yesterday, we have a big, empty cardboard box to play with, which ends up getting decorated with colouring pencils.

I grab my camera and get some super-cute shots of them as they run around, including some wonderful full-paparazzi-style shots of the little on, hand extended at the camera in “get out of my face” mode.

They leave around lunch time and I immediately crash out back in bed. I’m pretty impressed that they didn’t actually totally exhaust me, but I know for sure that if I don’t take the chance to recharge my batteries now, I’m not going to make it through the rest of the day unscathed, and with the hint of a cold still around, I don’t want to use all my energy up.

I wake up a couple of hours later and feel strong enough to run K to college, which cheers me up as I’d assumed I would be house-bound most of this week. I drop her off and head home, spending the next hour or so on the ‘net checking emails and getting a little lost in Facebook, as is my unfortunate tendency.

K calls in a seriously foul mood (justifiably, after a completely wasted and pointless night at a poor excuse for an educational establishment – shame on you Milton Keynes College) and I run out to pick her up.

We get back to find an old friend of mine from the Theatre in the car park, where she’d been waiting for me to get back (I thought K was going to be out longer, so I’d be around to let her in before I had to shoot off to pick her up, but ended up leaving her parked outside for 20 mins while I did the school run). We go upstairs and grab a cuppa while catching up on anything and everything from the last 6-months or so. She has a lot more to share than I do…

In fact, I hadn’t seen her since before she went off on a jungle-trek to Thailand in the summer, through which she raised over £7,000 for the CF Trust and nearly died in the process after an unfortunate incident with a bamboo raft and a set of rain-forest rapids. She fills us in on all the details of everything and it sounds like an amazing trip.

What was intended to be a quick cuppa turns into a lengthy evening’s nattering, which eventually ends with her taking her leave about 10pm. K and I settle on the sofa while I do my drugs and watch tonight’s episode of Studio 60, then hit the sack just before midnight.

It’s been a nervous 24 hours here since the cold reared its head and it was made all the worse last night after I spotted a problem with the line into my port through which I give my IV’s.

I noticed while I was doing my afternoon dose that the line had gone a little cloudy, but didn’t think much of it.  By the evening dose, it hadn’t cleared up (as sometimes happens) and had a couple of distinct breaks in the cloudiness which started to concern me slightly.

Anyone with a port-a-cath will tell you how protective they are of them, not least people in my position as the loss of use of a post through breakage or – God forbid – infection is a serious problem: replacing ports is not the kind of thing that can be done on a whim and while it isn’t what you’d term “major” surgery, it’s certainly more than most doctors would like to be performing on someone with end-stage lung disease.

With all these thoughts running through my head, I took the executive decision to not give my next dose of IV’s until I’d been to Oxford to get it looked at and replace the needle and line for a new one.

After a late-night phone call with Mum, we hastily arranged a lunch-time pick up when she finished work (trampling all over any other plans for the day she may have had) and I settled down for the night after pumping another mini-monsoon of First Defence up my nose and downing a handful of Vitamin C caps to try to ward the cold off, too.

For once I slept absolutely beautifully.  Without my morning dose of dugs to do, I slept clean through till 10am, when K’s alarm woke me.  Lucky it did, really, because it didn’t wake her, so she’d have been in a spot if it weren’t for my eagle-eyed sense of hearing. (Yeah, I know, that confused me, too.)  That said, I’m sure she’ll jump to defend herself having already been out of bed once to answer the door to a nice delivery man.

A quick call to my team in Oxford and the ever-brilliant Cass opened up a slot for me early in the afternoon.  I checked with Mum and we were all good to shoot on over once she’d got her morning at work out of the way.

I got up slowly and rumbled around the house, hesitantly waiting for the cold to hit with full force, but nothing really materialised.  My sinuses were much less clogged and though I struggled a little with my physio first thing, I managed to clear a good bit and get my nebs done before Mum arrived.  I grabbed some Lucozade for the journey and hopped in the car, leaving K at home for a study session with a college-mate.

Cass looked me over and gave my port a quick once-over and agreed that it didn’t seem to be anything too untoward, although she’d never seen anything like it either.  She swapped my needle out and reaccessed me, giving it a good flush to check it out and all seemed well.  We agreed that although the cold doesn’t seem to have taken hold, an extra week on the IVs wasn’t going to do any harm.  I can’t have been there more than 20 minutes before Mum whisked me off again, but it was worth the 3 hour round trip for the piece of mind it gave me.

We got home just before half-three and I connected up my afternoon dose of IVs and hit the sack to recharge my batteries.  I woke an hour later feeling really quite energised, hit my nebs and did some physio before dinner.

I think – touch wood – I’ve managed to ward the cold off, so am hoping that another good night’s rest and another day not doing too much should keep me back on the well-wagon and I can look forward to another weekend with family and friends.

Off to catch tonight’s episode of Heroes now – we’re all addicted and we’re only a few weeks from the end of the season!  Hooray!

So Saturday night was a bit of a bump, but Sunday and Monday have been a much more even keel – I’ve stayed resolutely on the positivity band-wagon, although I may have slid sideways a couple of times.

Yesterday morning vanished into nothing – a brief wake-up call at 7am to do my morning drugs dose, but the rest disappearing under the covers after another late night.

Shortly after the turn of noon, having stumbled out of bed, K’s Dad swung by with the visiting boyfriend of her Hungarian cousin.  Actually, technically, I don’t think they’re cousins, but once you get into the Hungarian side of the family I’m afraid I rather lose track of her clan.  I can only just keep track of the English side, but that’s because they’re inconsiderate enough to have 2 Uncle Peter’s, which is just foolish if you ask me.  I don’t see why they couldn’t have drawn straws for a name change to help me out just a little.

I digress.  T’s English was immaculate (handy, considering the state of my Hungarian) and it was really nice to meet him and chat.  K was revelling in getting first-hand details of all the goings on with her Hungarian cousins, one of whom is due to have her first child any day now.  K was keen for T to let his other half know that being an Aunty is “the best thing in the world”.  I ventured to point out that I daresay being a Mum might be considered to top it, but I always get shouted down.

They didn’t stay long, since K’s Dad was taking T off for a round-the-houses meet-and-greet of the rest of Team H over lunch.  I should think he got back to his apartment in London absolutely shattered after getting through the whole gang.

In the evening, we headed over to my ‘rents to catch up with them and have a gorgeous roast.  I know everyone always says it, but my Mum does the BEST roast dinners in the whole wide world and last night she even managed to out-do her usual high standards.  It was but a whisker short of perfection. (The whisker being Tio’s, their lovely little cat, who brought us a wee mouse as a pre-dinner snack).

After dinner we played chilled out and played games for a while before K and I headed home as everyone but me had to be up for work in the morning.  Not that it means I get a lie in as I had to be up for my drugs anyway.  Sometimes you just can’t win.

Today has been a generally un-taxing day.  I’ve not felt 100%, but it’s most just tiredness, largely caused by a busy weekend and the usual end-of-IV-run lack of decent sleep.  Having to be up every 8 hours to do drugs doesn’t sound like a bind, but when you figure it means you only ever get around 6 hours of sleep at a given time, it starts to wear you down a fair bit.

I did manage to catch a movie I’ve been trying to peep for a while now, which actually ended up disappointing me greatly, so I’ll not even go into detail here.  Suffice it to say I’ll not be awaiting the next QT flick as eagerly as I did this one.

Tonight, once K got in from work, apart from nebs and physio, plus another 20 minute bike sesh, we’ve basically just been in front of the telly finishing off the third season of Lost, which just totally blew us away – it’s amazing.  If you’ve never seen it, you absolutely have to go out and get all three seasons in their box sets now and check them out – they’re completely compulsive viewing.

Now there’s just time for another dose of drugs and a catch-up on some of last night’s telly while they go through and it’ll be off to bed and start again in the morning.  I’m determined to be productive tomorrow.  Watch this space.

Up to Oxford today for my mid-IV once-over, during which all signs were pointing to “pretty good”.  “Good” is obviously a relative term, but compared to last week, where I was perched on the verge of a bit of a down-turn, things are doing pretty well.

Lung function is up to 0.75/1.5 from 0.7/1.2, which is a goodly leap (18%/30% from 17%/24%) in the space of a week, my sats are holding steady around the 90% mark on 2l O2 per minute and my exercise tolerance is improving.

Yesterday we took delivery of a brand new exercise bike from the lovely Fitness for Hire, a company who loan out exercise equipment so you can see whether or not you’re likely to get into the habit of using it without throwing away a whole heap of dough on something that’s just going to sit and gather dust.  We’ve loaned it for 4 weeks for starters and if it doesn’t get used, it’ll just go back, no hassle.

The theory is, according to the Physios-Who-Know, that working on a bike is easier on the chest/lungs than step-ups with Goliath as the tendency is not to desaturate so quickly.  I don’t know why that is, or exactly how the process works, but what it basically means is that by using the bike I will be able to do more exercise without getting so out of breath.  This, in turn, should mean that I can make my muscles do more work, rather than my lungs stopping me before my muscles really get a work out, and the muscular improvment will serve to improve the flow and use of oxygen around the body, meaning that I require less oxygen to do everyday tasks, which means I get less breathless while doing them.

Theory is all well and good, but we know how my body likes to throw googlies (or curveballs, if you’re more comfortable with the American vernacular), so having the option to bail out on the purchase of a hefty piece of equipment is a good option for right now.

I have to say, having had a wee spin on a bike at Oxford today, it certainly looks promising as a less intense form of exercise.  Obviously, there are different levels of resistance and speed settings and a whole host of other options, but the great thing about it is that the very basic starting point is easily managable, giving a lot more leeway in terms of turning things up or down as my chest may dictate from day-to-day.  The trouble with step-ups is that they are very set-in-stone – it’s a set distance, with a set weight (my body-weight), over a set time.  The bike, on the other hand, has myriad ways of making things easier or harder as my body goes through it’s yo-yo routine.

Once again – and as usual – we’ll wait and see what comes of it.  I don’t want to get too over-excited at something that’s just going to fall by the wayside again, but the promise is there for something with potential.

Sadly no progress on the script today, because the trip to Oxford has pretty much sucked the energy out of me, so it’s probably a night in front of the TV tonight, maybe catching a flick or something.  But it’s been a positive day, so I’m not going to moan about a little bit of tiredness at the end of it.

Today I am tired. Today made no sense. I think it’s because I’m tired. But really, it made no sense.

I woke up this morning at 6.30am – that’s really early. Luckily, it’s not dark, because the clocks have gone back. So I woke up in the light. But it was still really early. I didn’t get much sleep last night. It was past midnight when the light went out and I then spent the next hour or so getting to sleep, where I then spent the next four or five hours dozing and waking every hour or so to readjust my position because either a) Neve was coming off my face, b) my shoulder was hurting because of the port needle or c) I was lying too much over on my chest and giving myself breathing trouble.

I woke up grouchy. I don’t think many people wake up at 6.30am happy, but when you’ve slept badly two nights in a row, coupled with not sleeping long enough two nights in a row, coupled with being on really high doses of the most drowsy-making drugs in the world (with the notable exception, perhaps of sleeping pills, which I suppose really ought to win the most drowsy-making award and if they don’t then they should really have a different name, or get their makers sued under trading standards) then it’s pretty hard to wake up at 6.30 in the morning without being grouchy.

I did my drugs. This involves (at the moment) doing about 10-15 minutes worth of injecting solutions from a syringe down the tube then connecting up a big bubble-thing which works like a drip, but in a different way. (That doesn’t make sense, does it? If it works like a drip, then it must be a drip; if it works a different way then it’s not like a drip, is it? Told you today didn’t make sense.) That takes an hour to go through, then it’s a couple of quick syringe squirts and hey presto, all done.

So the whole shebang took me up to about 8am. Every Monday morning, I have a delivery of portable oxygen cylinders to give me enough to move around for the week when I want to go out. Invariably, the delivery driver arrives at 9am. Looking at the clock, tired and grouchy, I decided I didn’t want to go back to bed for an hour just to get woken up as I settle into a nice sleep to have to get up and answer the door. So I try to occupy myself to keep myself awake until 9.

Dutifully, the lovely Brummy gent turns up and drops of my new cylinders and whisks away my old ones. Following which I retire to bed for a catch-up nap, aware that I have to be up no later than 11.30 to get ready to go to the hospital for a physio appointment and drug-level check.

I clamber into bed and strap on my Neve-mask, only to discover that the condensation in the mask has done something – I don’t know what and boy, do I wish I did – which makes something on the mask make a really loud, annoying clunking sound every. Single. Time. I. Breathe. In.

Annoying? Slightly. Grumpy-making? Exceedingly.

After, oh I don’t know…. 5 minutes of trying, I give up and clamber out of bed, thoroughly bad-mooded for the day. I wash the mask up, in an effort to have cleared whatever the problem is for tonight, and sit myself quietly on the sofa to start reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which I’ve finally wrestled from K and am keen to get through before having the whole story spoiled for me by people who’ve seen the movie.

Bizarrely, all the time I’m sitting reading, I’m perfectly awake and alert, despite having had not enough sleep and being beside-myself with tiredness when I’d gone back to bed. As soon as I got up from my perch, however – to make tea, to fetch things, to do anything at all, really – I was exhausted. My chest was heaving, my legs felt like lead and my eyes couldn’t have been heavier if they’d entered a Weight Watchers programme and won the prize for world’s worst dieter by gaining their own body-weight three times over.

I was not a happy bunny.

By the time K got up I was happily reading away, but ready for some morning physio, which is never fun at the best of times but when you’re tired it becomes a peculiar kind of torture – long, drawn out, unpleasant, occasionally painful, sometimes exhausting, often breathless and very, very hot (this morning, anyway). Needless to say I ended in a mildly worse mood than I start – impressive, huh?

I did manage to lever myself into a bath and chill out for a fraction of an hour before throwing some clothes on and getting ready to head off to Oxford, only to be phoned and told that the physio I was supposed to be seeing had broken her tooth and wouldn’t be able to see me today, so could I come Wednesday instead? Of course, I said. Why not?

But here’s the weird thing: having not gone to Oxford, which I took to be a blessing on account of my overwhelming tiredness anyhow, my body then decided that actually, it was feeling pretty happy and perky. After 5 hours semi-sleep, a 6.30am start, a morning of trial after mood-blackening trial, I found myself suddenly feeling an urge to sit at my keyboard and write – to carry on with my screenplay with which I have been having so many recent tussles. (For “tussles”, read: “hit a structural bump which sapped all creativity and forward-momentum and left a big black mark against my 5-page-per-day copy book for the last month or so”)

So all afternoon I’ve been beavering away on my screenplay without so much as a care in the world, pausing only for the occasional break for food, water or the odd episode of Lost (just keeps getting better).

I have no idea what my brain is doing with itself, nor what my body is up to at the moment. My chest feels like it’s improving, but my sleep certainly isn’t. My mind is lost in a mire of lethargy which saps any mental strength and positivity right out of it, whilst still apparently providing me with enough drip-fed muse to be able to carry on doing the kind of creative writing which is usually the first thing to desert me when I’m feeling rubbish.

Literally nothing about this day is making any sense to me right now. But I guess that’s just because I’m tired. Can you tell?

…the IV mood swings and energy dips, Ladies and Gentlemen!

Like all good anti-biotic courses (or at least all of my regular IV courses), it doesn’t take long to start really messing with your body in as many ways as possible.

So far we’ve got: random tiredness springing up out of no-where; random waking-upness springing out of nowhere; unquenchable thirst; over-bloating from taking on too much water; dry mouth; raise appetite; sore limbs/achey legs; irrational dip in mood; irrational spike in mood; regular-season, common-or-garden tiredness.  Although so far (with plenty of wood on hand to touch, knock-on, slap my head against etc), I’ve managed to avoid the usual mouth-ulcers and other thrush-like symptoms.

I have delighted, however, in spending 2 days doing pretty much nothing at all, including going back to bed after my a.m. dose and sleeping through practically the whole morning.  The one thing you can guarantee about IVs is that if they make you feel tired, sleeping is the most wonderful counter to it.

I appreciate that might sound a little “well, duh!” obvious, but it the kind of situation I’m in, it’s actually not a given that sleep helps things.  A lot of the time, the tiredness I feel isn’t actually helped out by sleeping an extra 3 or 4 hours, like you might expect.  It’s a kind of false-tiredness which is more a complaint from the body about having too much work to do than anything else.

On IVs, though, it’s a different story.  The tiredness is much more a sign of the things starting to work and almost begging to be given more down-time in which to do their stuff while not having to concentrate on boring things like day-today operations of eating, drinking and sitting upright.  What that happily means for me is that the next few days will be spent fitting in 12-14 hours of sleep in every 24 and actually feeling refreshed for it when I’m not sleeping.

IVs are pretty rubbish, so grabbing hold of the positives is pretty important and it wasn’t really until today that I realised how much the sleep-inducement of IVs can actually help-out, so I’m going to cling to that for the next few hours while I try desperately not to drop off from exhaustion while I wait for my next dose.  That’s the other problem with IVs – if you sleep at the wrong time, you can guarantee that it’ll come back and bite you on the butt and keep you WIDE awake just when you want to be getting the best of your shut-eye.

Anyway, moving away from all the boring medically-stuff, K and I picked up the 3rd season of Lost on DVD this week.  I say picked up, I mean had the nice people at Play.com deliver for us.  We were both hooked on the first two seasons but then missed out on the 3rd when it switched from C4 to Sky One, so we’ve been itching to get our hands on it for ages now.

Finally, we’re back on the wagon – or off it, I suppose, since we have kicked-off a major addiction which is currently managing to over-rule just about everything else in the world apart from sleeping, eating and doing doses of IVs.  In fact, it’s ideal really, because if I’m going to be making the most of these IVs I really do need to be doing as little as possible, so Lost is keeping me in check, glued as I am to the sofa for endless back-to-back episodes.

The trouble is, we’ll be through this season in no time, and then we’ll be lost without Lost.  So I’m thinking we might have to find some new old TV to catch up on in DVD box-set format.  US TV comes in such handy little 40 minute chunks that it fits perfectly into little treatment slots like gaps between nebs and physio and doses of IVs, so it’s ideal for life at the moment.  I think we may be getting through a lot more soon.

But first it’s back to the island to unravel more of the might mystery….  It’s sooooo good!

The good news is, I don’t have a cold. The news-that-isn’t-really-good-but-considering-
how-bad-“bad”-could-have-been-really-can’t-be-counted-as-being-bad (phew!) is that my body is keen to make me perfectly well aware of the fact that’s it’s been working very hard thank you very much and has decided to tell my legs, head, arms, neck and just about everything that’s not a vital organ to stop working for the time being. Essentially, my body is currently the French rail system.

Still, compared to dealing with a cold, I can definitely put up with feeling a bit tired and finding tea-making a chore. If I had to spend the next week in bed doing nothing and seeing no one, I would happily accept it for not having a cold. As it is, I am hoping to be able to make it over to my ‘rents tomorrow night for the Rugby, although there is the slight hitch that I may expend so much energy on screaming at the telly (judging by the semi-final), I may not be able to drive myself home.

(I’m acutely aware that the end of the last paragraph will have been hopelessly lost on my American cousins who look in here, so for translation’s sake: there’s a World Cup (think “world series” which actually involves other countries) going on in the sport of Rugby (“Football” without the nancy-boy pads and tea-breaks every 30-seconds) and England (that’s us) have made it to the (Grand) Final, which is somewhere akin to the Texans making the Superbowl (ie, so outlandish at the start of the competition that if you’d suggested they might do it, people would have either laughed in your face or had you committed).)

I’ve made a deal with my body – limbs and all – that I won’t do anything at all during the day tomorrow besides rest and refuel so that I can enjoy the game in the evening, and that I will do the same on Sunday so I can enjoy a meal in the evening with my bro, who’s deigned to reappear from the far side of the world where he was “working”. I use the term “working” very loosely, as he mostly seemed to spend his time sitting up a mountain finding it hard to breath. Heck, I do that in my own living room – I don’t try to call it work.

The only possible barrier to the deal on Sunday is that the Saints are live on TV, but judging from our performances so far this season they aren’t likely to be causing me a great deal of excitement or giving me much cause to scream at the telly. More likely I’ll be slumped in resigned resignation (it’s doubly bad, you see) as they let another 2-goal lead slip away and wave good-bye to another 3 points at the hands of some woeful defending while George Burley makes excuses about us “playing well”.

Still compared to spending the weekend lying in bed with snot dribbling out my nose, my throat closing up in protest, my chest kicking off in a major way and the beginnings of the mother of all chest infections, I think I can handle any sporting disasters coming my way.

It’s all about perspective, see.

Today, I have felt good ALL DAY.

It’s a mystery where it’s come from, and I don’t harbour much hope of it lasting into the weekend, such is the nature of my up-and-down life at the moment, but damned if I haven’t enjoyed it today.

I woke up this morning after a good night’s sleep (which is rare enough) not feeling horrible.  As I plodded around the flat after rousing myself from the bedroom, I waited for the inevitable on-set of hideousness which usually hits about 20-30 minutes after I get up, but it never seemed to materialise.

I had the smallest glimmer of a headache after doing my morning physio session, but I hurriedly popped some paracetamol and ibuprofen and by the time I’d done my nebs it had passed, never to return.

We were joined, late morning, by our little niece and nephew on a spur of the moment visit with their mum.  There’s really no better way to start your day than with the fun and laughter of a pair of adorable children.  I even had enough energy to police the tiny terror as he rampaged his way around the flat – a job that’s normally delegated to K or his mum.

In fact, he didn’t cause too much chaos being mostly occupied as he was with emptying the fruit bowl and putting it all back again, before deciding to re-home most of its contents around the living room.  We’re still finding oranges in the most unlikely of places and I’m sure we had a lime earlier, too.  His main occupation after fruit picking was wall-drawing, but we managed to get away with just the mildest hint of blue in the hallway, largely down to the grown-up party-poopers who kept spoiling the fun.

Once they’d gone – with the elder of the two climbing backwards down the stairs (all 18 of them) on the way back down the car park, cheered on by her little bro who would doubtless have been counting them down if he had any concept of numbers – we had time to chill a bit and grab some lunch before I ran K to the docs for a quick hello.  From there, since it’s just down the road from her ‘rents, we stopped in for a quick cuppa, which is lovely because it’s a good 20 minutes from our place and we don’t get to do it very often.

When we got home, another of our friends popped over, enjoying his day off, and while K busied herself baking in the kitchen, we sat through Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.  It was awful.  Not just not very good.  It was abominable.  Like the snowman, but with less fur.

Mr S, who brought it over, had refused to see it at the cinema on the basis that he was sure he wasn’t going to like it, so thought it would be amusing for the two of us to sit through the DVD together on the basis that we’d both spend most of the film shouting obscenities at it for being so rubbish.  We, unfortunately, share a few friends who suffer under the delusion that it’s actually quite good and would be very upset to hear us bad-mouthing it all the way through, so this afternoon proved very useful for both of us.

Seriously, though, it’s AWFUL.  Don’t touch it.  Not even for the kids.

Since then, I’ve managed my neb and second physio session and nebs (lots of those, these days) and am still – touch wood – seemingly going strong.  Dinner shortly, then a catch up on last night’s telly, methinks, before hitting the sack for what I hope will be another bonza night of sleep.

You never know these days how long the ups are going to last, but I seem to have perfected the art of making the most of them when they are around.  It’s good to feel good.

As previously detailed in the hereabouts, I have a mild addiction to Studio 60. Not only that, pretty much all the drama on TV that really passes muster (read: gets on my Sky+ series link) can be found with an American accent on one of the 4 channels. (That’s not as in “one of four channels” because that’s just stupid: I have Sky and therefore a zillion channels, most of them pap. One of the 4 channels meaning Channel 4, E4, More4 or Another4*)

What this means, apart from the fact that I’m essentially paying my television licence fee in order to sit and watch dramas from the other side of the Atlantic whilst my money gets frittered away on 2 Pints of Lager and a Packet of God-Awful Soap Operas, is that I spend most of my viewing time fast-forwarding between ComparetheMarket.com idents which would appear to crop up almost randomly within any given Channel 4 show.

I fully suspect that were I, in my late-afternoon stupor, to sit and watch an entire hour of Richard and Judy, I would find that they’ve replaced the You Say, We Steal Your Money feature with Same Car, Dramatic Difference.

It’s not even really the fact that by the time you’ve seen them for the 44,352nd time they get a bit repetitive, same-y and repetitive. It’s the arbitrary way in which they are shoe-horned into the programs that really gets my goat (if I had a goat).

I know it’s unfair to blame it on ComparetheMarket.com, but hey – we live in a world where it’s necessary for Blue Peter presenters to apologise for the mistakes made by THEIR BOSSES to the littl’uns who wouldn’t even understand what they’d done wrong if they had it explained to them Very. Slowly. Seriously – if you’re old enough to understand what they did wrong, you shouldn’t be watching Blue Peter by now anyway. Go put your hoodie on and sit on a street corner with the rest of the degenerate youth of today.

The timing of the ad breaks in Channel 4 dramas is so ridiculously out-of-place as to be almost comical. I say “almost” because despite it’s cosey up nicely to the mistress of mirth, I still find myself throwing objects at the screen every time they break the flow of a scene to blare 5 more minutes of capitalist propaganda (too far – sorry, go all high-horse Marxist in the middle of my rant there…). It’s getting worse, too. Last night it was the TV remote, which threatened serious damage. Tonight I damn near through K at it.

I KNOW the Americans have a very weird system of throwing ads in almost willy-nilly, but at least they do it at moments that feel right to the show – in fact, all shows on Network TV in America are written AROUND the ad breaks, they actually plan for them when they’re knocking out the scripts.

So why oh why oh why oh why and a few more why of whys can’t Channel 4 either ride shotgun with the Americans and surrender to their ad patterns or – at the very least – work the ads into a sensible spot in the drama.

I’ve lost count of the number of times an episode of Brothers and Sisters has stomped all over the emotional denouement of a scene to go to commercials mid-thought, when there is a fade-to-black which pops up within 2 minutes of the return of the break. Would it kill them to hold off on the ads for another 120 seconds? Would the regulators go bananas? Would their ad clients be raging on the phone? I’m going to guess not – if for no other reason than I chose to heap all of my scorn for the shoddy ad-break practices of Channel 4 Television onto ComparetheMarket.com who have the misfortune of having spend hudreds of thousands of pounds on a sponsorship package for shows which get ruined by arbitrary commercial breaks thrown in by editors with no sense of emotional beats or story arcs.

So come on, people, sort yourselves out. We clearly can’t all enjoy US TV series ad-less, like Heroes on BBC 2, but at the very least we can stop the ad breaks being quite so unflinchingly (or is that flinchingly?) annoying.

I’m starting the Campaign for Correct Placement of Ad Breaks (or, rather more niftily, I think, CFCPOAB) today – to run right alongside Save My Remote Control.

*May or may not be a real 4 channel.

I have an unnatural love of Aaron Sorkin.  It’s really not very becoming for a man of my age.  I have a kind of giggly school-girl relationship with everything and anything he does.  Oddly, though, not many people actually know who he is.

Most people have never heard of him and fewer seem to have seen his TV shows.  The only thing most people know him for is A Few Good Men, the Tom Cruise/Demi Moore/Jack Nicholson movie, and even then most people only know it when they hear Nicholson bellowing, “You want the truth? YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!”

He wrote that.

He went on to create and write the immensely under-rated Sports Night, which ran for 2 seasons and 40-odd episodes in the States a decade or so ago, starring some proper actors who went on to big things in Six Feet Under and Desperate Housewives, but never really took off.  It got buried in the schedules on ABC1 over here a couple of years back, but I don’t think anyone noticed it.

After that he hit the big time (at least in the States) with the unbelievably brilliant West Wing, probably my all-time favourite TV show and multi-Emmy award winner.  Sadly, English audiences never really took to it and after the first series was broadcast to critical acclaim but rubbish ratings on Channel 4 it got shifted and bumped around the schedules on E4, More4, Another4, Someone Else’s4 and other such channels.

It was, however, consistently the best thing coming out of the States for 3 seasons, dropped a little in the 4th just before Sorkin left.  It carried on for another 3 seasons and was cancelled last year, ironically after its best season since Sorkin left.

So what did he do next?  The master wordsmith, the writer I most admire, the man, the myth, the legend went and created Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip – a behind-the-scenes comedy-drama about working on a weekly live sketch comedy show for a fictional US Network.

It’s inspired, sublime and completely riveting – I love the whole thing to pieces, even before you add in to the mix Matthew Perry (ex of Friends) in a role that let’s him loose with his very real talent, and two of the West Wing’s best regulars in Bradley Whitford and Timothy Busfield.

The only problem with watching the series unfold week-by-week on More4 as it is at the moment is the horrible knowledge that comes from following TV production in the United States.  You see, Studio 60 is SO good that the network (the real one, not the fictional one) pulled it after one 20-episode series.

Bummer.

Which leaves the tantalizing question of what it did wrong to get cancelled.  All shows have their bad weeks, especially when you’re working in the American system where they write the shows as they go (as opposed to the UK where all but the longest series like Dr Who or Robin Hood go into production with all of the scripts in almost final form), but Studio 60 has so far, in 5 episodes, hardly hit a bum note.

Did the American audience just not go for the show?  Did they just not carry on watching?  Or does it suddenly, mid-season, get completely rubbish.

I’m a Sorkin addict – I’ll watch anything he does because I think he’s one of the most talented writers on the planet.  And I know I’ll keep watching this to the bitter end (and you know already that the ending’s going to be bitter), but it’s kind of turning into car-crash TV, to be watched with your fingers over your eyes from behind the sofa.  Because you have to imagine that for a show this good at the start to get canceled after a single series, something BIG has got to go wrong with the quality of the output somewhere in the middle.

Ah well, you can’t win ’em all.  And even if it does get rubbish, I’ve got 115 hours of The West Wing on my DVD shelf to give me my Sorkin-fix.