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Saturday April 30
Weighed myself this morning and I was an alarming 10 stone 3 pounds, which is the lightest I've been in my adult life. Certainly since the late 80s. I'll soon be able to advertise The Andrew Collins DJ-Plan Diet on the front cover of Closer magazine.

This time last year I got down to 10 stone 4 pounds, but that was only during the first flush of salads and when I started walking 10,000 steps a day. (How interesting is this? Who cares. Mundane detail is what blogs are all about. I've read loads of them.) I usually hover around the 10 stone 8 pounds mark, but just recently I gave up eating sheep's cheese and sheep's yoghurt and the weight seems to be falling off me! (I gave up dairy years ago, but have been consuming a ton of sheep's cheese in the meantime. However, the results of a recent nutritional blood test top-up advised me to give up all dairy, so I did. I am nothing if not a slave to nutritional advice! Anything to help relieve my asthma.) Anyway, I think that 10 stone 3 pounds is actually too light. So I ate two date slices at work this afternoon and quite a few ginger biscuits. All wheat-free, of course, but hopefully enough to fatten me up a little.

Watched The Grapes Of Wrath on DVD tonight, part of the package 20th Century Fox kindly sent me for services rendered. Sometimes an old film is just the ticket. People forget what an artist John Ford was. He's tremendous in black and white. What a stirring film.

Sunday May 1
Hooray. Up one pound to 10 stone 4. At least that means I haven't got a wasting disease. Unless all I've done is slow it down with date slices. I won't weigh myself now for a week. It's getting a bit anal.

Four-hour clips marathon on C4 tonight: Britain's Most Watched TV , based on audience figures rather than some spurious online poll. It was a good watch. No Jimmy Carr. A fairly high calibre of talking head, apart from the TV critic who looked like a heroin addict, the shouting Dominick Diamond and bumpkin comedian Justin Lee Collins. I looked fairly presentable in my bits, whether or not I said anything earth-shattering or as funny as Justin Lee Collins, but the misleadingly sporty red hooded top was a refreshing change from my usual clips-show uniform of black t-shirt. Sorry to navel-gaze. It's no different to a plumber inspecting his work.

Monday May 2
Big decorating day. It happened to be a Bank Holiday, the first I've actually had off since starting 6 Music. Bank Holiday Mondays have come to mean nothing to me! I've worked every one of them. I didn't even have to negotiate the vagaries of "planned engineering works" on the railways today. Just stayed indoors and painted the walls and the ceilings until there was no White Lily left. Therapeutic? That and boring. The results are dazzling, literally, and it's just the undercoat. (Also, while rollering away, I managed to cook up a storyline for the sitcom I'm doing with the quite well-known comedian.)

Gallant and Neela got it on at the end of ER . Thank God for that. Can we have more Carter next week, please? Watched the DVD The Hunting Of The President , a documentary released last year in cinemas in the US (but not here for self-evident reasons) about the vast right wing conspiracy against Clinton from his seemingly fruity days in Little Rock to impeachment via Paula Jones ("the woman with the nose and the hair"), Vince Foster and Whitewater. Slightly over-stylised, but some great testimony from people like Susan McDougal, who did 18 months for refusing to give false statements against the President to Ken Starr, and a former American Spectator hack called David Brock who saw the error of his ways and wrote a book which I must order called Blinded By The Right .

Democrat strategist James Carvelle (who resembles a bald Quentin Tarantino) said of the media momentum behind the impeachment proceedings, "This might be another Watergate - nobody wanted to get left behind." I must admit I'm a sucker for this stuff. It was the Lewinsky scandal that inspired me to subscribe to Newsweek in 1998 and I learned a lot about the mechanics of Washington from that. I cancelled it when Bush got in.

Received an email from Steve Hovington, singer with the 80s band B-Movie. What a nice man. He sent me his life story for my website . How I used to love B-Movie, especially the 12-inch of Nowhere Girl, which I would play endlessly. I must dig it out and play it on the radio. This is a link to Steve's B-Movie website.

Tuesday May 3
Dreamt that whales were falling from the sky last night. I have dreamt of whales, on and off, for most of my life. But never dropping from the sky. I blame Hitchhiker's .

The hall is glowing, like a breakfast cereal advert. And I had the first unbroken night's sleep last night since March. I feel good.

Off to Radio 4 to pre-record a curious item for tonight's Front Row with the great Mark Lawson, as conceived and produced by my old Back Row producer Stephen Hughes. Great to be back among those people. My task, to illustrate a story about You Are What You Eat 's new branded food range, was to go shopping and bring in TV and film tie-in food products. I went to Sainsbury's in Epsom first thing and bought £20's worth of processed crap, from pasta shapes and muffin mix to peach flavoured water and cheese dips, all stamped with The Simpsons or Star Wars or Harry Potter or The Incredibles .

We had a genial fire officer present so that I could warm up and serve some pasta to Mark in the basement studio (apparently Woman's Hour set the place on fire once!), and we basically improvised our way through an entire, ghastly meal of potato starch, glucose and emulsifiers. I shoehorned in one prepared gag about The Apprentice marketing bags of Sir Alan sugar (ha ha), but it was mostly very casual and natural. (The piece went out on the programme tonight pretty much intact - very gratifying. Even though this one job dominated the whole day, it was worth it.)

Had to stand up on the train home even though it was pre-rush hour because Southern Trains were unable to provide an eight-carriage train and packed us all into a four-carriage one like cattle (I don't usually moan about the trains, as it bores me when people do, but this seems like such a basic bit of mismanagement that causes unnecessary negative energy). Using all my skills and all my powers, I did get a seat, but then a blind man with a dog got on and I was the first to leap up and offer him it. His need was greater than mine, but I hate standing up on trains when I've paid £10.50 for a travelcard. Sorry.

New series called Bad Behaviour on C4 - yet another parenting programme (it's the new gardening), this time with a child psychologist who, unlike Supernanny , never meets the child, simply stays on the other end of a phone while a harassed mum who looks ten years older than she is retrains her delinquent teenage son not to break all the doors down if he doesn't get his own way. It was tense viewing, but the results were astonishing. Miraculous, even. I blame the parents, as ever.

Final reckoning on The Apprentice . After the boat party challenge in which he put long term return against quick profit, Tim won, thank God. I couldn't have taken it if the dreadful Saira had talked her way into Amstrad, although she would've had the same amount of screen time, talking really slowly and deliberately but still saying nothing. It was entertaining to see Paul back, in the final task under Saira's patronising command, and on the live half-hour discussion show presented by funny-lookin' Adrian Chiles straight afterwards, on which he was sparklingly funny in his Michael Corleone suit. I'll be sorry it's not there next week. It's been the TV highlight of the year so far.

Finished writing the pilot script for the second series of Grass , which isn't called Grass , it's called Billy . The Fast Show 's Simon Day and I are pleased with it, but then we were pleased with the last one, which was rejected. What do we know? It will soon be in the lap of the commissioning gods. I hope they give us a straight yes or no, rather than send us back to re-work it again, because we are spent. When we'd finished, at around 2.30, Simon went off to a wig fitting. He's an actor, you know.

Ate some of that takeaway Malaysian chicken from Fresh & Wild that I love so much, and found a smoothie in there that didn't have orange. You'd be amazed how few commercially-made smoothies you can drink if you've cut orange out of your diet, as I have recently. (Yes! Another thing not to eat! One day I will eat only pumpkin seeds and air.) Orange also aggravates asthma, so I've eliminated it to see what happens. So far, so good. It may say Guava, Strawberry and Blueberry Smoothie on the bottle, but check the ingredients - they also chuck in some orange.

6 Music went right up in the new RAJARs (that's the listening figures, released every quarter). This is tremendous news. With 311,000 listeners, we're 30% up period-on-period and a massive 66% up year-on-year. It's not about numbers, obviously.

Having seen two documentaries about the non-fiction White House this week, I needed a blast of the fictional one and squeezed in a West Wing (the one where Glenallen Walken is booted out) before Election Night began in earnest. It's missing Aaron Sorkin already.

Friday May 6
Woke up to a new government, same as the old government. Am I allowed to talk about politics again now? I'll check. Managed to stay up until 3.30 this morning on just honeybush tea, water, oat cakes and salmon paté, then gave in. Stuck with the BBC's coverage for the duration, partly because of the imperial David Dimbleby, the humorous Jeremy Paxman and the unflappable Tony King, but mostly because ITV seemed to be guessing the results rather than waiting for the declarations.
 
 
The views expressed in this column are the views of Andrew Collins and do not represent the views of the BBC.