Daily Post - Wednesday

I felt somewhat melancholy this morning on the way to work - a combination of driving rain and having just listened to the surprisingly downbeat ending to 'The Great Gatsby' left me in a reflective mood.

It was a good job, therefore, that I had an episode of Just a Minute lined up on my iPhone to listen to. It's hard to believe that Nicholas Parsons is 85, and he is still sharp enough to chair perhaps the trickiest panel game ever devised, even if he does wander off on the occasional innuendo littered tangent. It seems quite incredible that the same show that I used to listen to as a child is still going strong, with the old masters of the game such as Kenneth Williams and Clement Freud now replaced by such luminaries as Paul Merton and Superkins. The show is a national treasure and as amusing now as it ever was.

The news came through today that Big Brother is going to be dropped by Channel 4 next year and given the current state of the show, that's probably no bad thing. Allowing Siavash to avoid nominating has fundamentally changed the rules of the game for no good reason and it just makes the final weeks a farce. What I'd like to see is the whole show move online - continuous streaming, no editing and packaging stories for the highlights show, and strictly applied rules. Two nominations a week, and any rule breaking is punished with immediate eviction. I think that there would be sufficient interest for people to subscribe for a season - if they only got half of the current C4 audience to pony up £10 or £20 for a 3 month run then it would easily be a going concern with advertising revenue on top. In fact, if they made available via an iPhone app or similar then it could easily outstrip the existing TV based version in popularity. There you go Endemol - send my royalties to the usual address, please and thank you.

I know I mentioned The Moth Podcast the other day, but you really should go and listen to this episode featuring an extraordinarily gutsy young man called Terrence Bruckner who stood up to homophobic bullies at his school, ending up with the last laugh. Inspirational listening.