Quote... Unquote

Went into town with Bob for a recording of the long-running BBC Radio panel game Quote... Unquote, thanks to free tickets from a neighbour, and was very pleasantly surprised to see Andrew Mueller - one of my all-time favourite writers - on the panel. I've been a fan since university, when I read his work in the now-defunct Melody Maker. His collection Rock and Hard Places was the best book I read in 2000 and I've returned to it many times; it's damn-near unmissable (and thanks to the whims of the publishing industry, also damn-near unfindable).

The shows were funny though somewhat imbalanced, with Nigel Rees being somewhat codescending to Mueller and downright dismissive of Pam Rhodes, preferring instead to kow-tow to the irritatingly-twee John Suchet, a never-ending source of anecdotes about his brother. Fortunately Brian Sewell saved the day (and how often does one get to say that), particularly with this line:

I'm not going to have a funeral. I'm going to leave my body to science. It'll go to a medical academy where students can practise with it. And people tell me that I mustn't do that because they tend to take the penis and testicles and hide them in sandwiches and give them to girls. But I don't care!

After the show I managed to snatch a brief conversation with Andrew who, along with being incredibly nice, pointed me at his new site which contains a hefty chunk of his writing, including many of the pieces from the book and the complete archives of his current Time Out column.

I'm going to bed now, because I've just turned thirty. Bugger.