The Tim Marshall Letter

Apropos of almost nothing: is there a more annoying song than 'Things Can Only Get Better' by D:Ream feat Professor Brian Cox? I didn't actually know Cox was in the band until he was talking about it in The Independent this morning. I'd forgot how annoying that song is, though not musically. I mean the lyric: 'things can only get better'. It's a terrible song for a political party to adopt as its anthem. It's like saying, 'we can't do much worse than the last lot', though, obviously, there's always room for things to get worse. I would have thought a professor of astrophysics would have realised. Unless we're talking about the complete heat death of the universe, there's always a 'worse' direction for entropy to go.

Right. Glad I got that off my chest. I was slightly reluctant to blog today simply because I didn't want to push my previous post down the page. I rarely look at anything I've done and think it particularly good. I don't believe a person can ever gets real satisfaction from their own work until enough time has passed for them to forget the process by which they arrived at the finished article. You write what you know about and therefore nothing you read back to yourself can be much of surprise. Yet having said that, my previous blog post is one of my favourites. I think I dug deep enough to find some genuine blood and spit.

It's been a week and I've still not heard back from James Harding, aka 'Harding the Hack', aka the honcho in the chief's poncho down at BBC News. It's a nervous wait though I can't separate that mild nervousness from a deeper dread since I'm waiting to go to the hospital where my sister has an appointment to see a consultant. I expect nothing from the appointment other than a sense of frustration. However, deep breath and hope for the best.

In the meantime, I might as well post my original James Harding letter here so as to keep my records in order. The story so far: Tim Marshall announced that he'd left Sky News and I was determined to do something about it so I dusted off my Stan Madeley mask and once again became my alter ego as the UK's top Richard Madeley lookalike and cabaret chisel thrower to the stars.

The Tim Marshall Letter

Well, I found a stamp. My 'Tim Marshall' letter has gone. It's now on the long two hundred and six mile journey to London and BBC headquarters where I hope (but doubt) it will cross the desk of James Harding, aka 'Harding the Hack', aka BBC's Director of News and Current Affairs. I felt quite nostalgic writing the letter. Perhaps there are lots of crazy people out there who write letters. I've never considered myself one of the 'crazies', though no doubt some people have questioned (and will question) my sanity. The 'comedy' is merely the justification for writing otherwise serious letters which, in truth, it really would be mad to send to people in authority since, in reality, what are our opinions really worth to them?

At one time, I was writing three letters a day and I did that like a religion for about 18 months. It cost me a small fortune in stamps but I think I learned quite a bit about letter writing. I find writing them a wonderful outlet. In them, I become the person I wish I could be. Gone is the indecisive man who cares too much about his work yet questions himself to the point of impotent indecision. Instead, I adopt this strangely confident voice which isn't my own. I love calling people by their Christian names and being chatty and informal and terribly direct. My letters have a cocky swagger which isn't me but probably is me at some deep level where the id rages. I suppose in a way they're the expression of my rebelliousness. I refuse to address anybody other than as a fellow human being. In that respect, letters are wonderfully egalitarian and an expression of our simple shared humanity.

Perhaps I'll get an answer. Perhaps I won't. My success with the BBC has always been around 50/50. Some of them clearly enjoyed my letters. Others, by their silence, either didn't or never received them. I suspect quite a few of them suffer that terrible dullness of 'professionalism' which means they take what they do far too seriously to understand the serious edge to my apparently trivial letters.

Printing the letter has itself been quite the struggle. I haven't used my printer in a long time and I was disappointed to discover that I didn't have any yellow ink left. I use an old Canon printer for which I used to buy cheap cartridges without security chips. I had some reprogrammable security chips I could stick in them using a chip reprogrammer. It saved me a fortune over the years but now I find I have a draw full of yellow ink cartridges but no chips. Even if I had the chips, I think my reprogrammer has bust. Stan's head came out looking purple. It means I couldn't print my letter with the usual handsome face at the bottom right corner.



Strange looking at this face. I got such mileage from such a simple combination of a comb-over and Richard Madeley's face. I had such great hopes for those books. I still maintain my second book is even better than the first and the first was the best thing I've ever done. Poor Stan. Staring into those big bright optimistic eyes, it's hard to believe that so few people got the joke. Perhaps Jim Harding (or his PA) will. Perhaps he'll be on the phone to Tim Marshall over the weekend and he'll stop the world travelling even further down the road towards the banal and bland. Probably not. The point is: I tried my best and I can do no more.

Wish I could go back to letter writing. Of all the things I've done, it was the only one where I actually felt quite at home.