I drove past a house in Morecambe last Thursday that had their tree up already.

It's so familiar to me it's never struck me what an odd decision that is, or how those first few tracks flip between the early pop stuff and the weird psych-y ones, and the best known tracks (All Or Nothing, Lazy Sunday, Itchycoo Park) are all left until later.

That's better than the one I had (which was still good) www.discogs.com/release/2538...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-89K...

News is cheap if you already have a 24-hour news channel and can just throw to that for a couple of hours. Sketch shows are NOT cheap AT ALL.

When the BBC was first told it had to farm out at least 25% of production to indies, a lot of producers quit, set up their own companies and made the same programmes they'd have made in-house, only now they could set their own salary so they gave themselves a raise, increasing the overall budget.

Added to which it's often news people who go into management, because they have an interest in running things and setting policy and so on, whereas people in other departments usually just want to make stuff. So management is full of people who think news is the most important thing.

I think it's a real problem that so much production in other departments has been tendered out to indies, whereas most news remains in-house. It makes news feel disproportionately important. And with all the budget cuts it's cheap and easy to fill schedule gaps with MOAR NEWS.

It's remarkable. I really thought you'd struggle when Frank moved on. A properly run club, that.