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Saturday May 21
Woke up this morning feeling as if a huge weight was in the process of being winched from my shoulders. First of all, the sitcom pilot is away. Went right up to the wire last night with the script that had to be delivered "before the end of the afternoon". Actually, we went past the wire. I delivered what I thought to be the final version to the quite famous comedian on time, but he then correctly pointed out that I had accidentally sent a version without all of his most recent changes in (the perils of collaborating by email). This was about 7pm, after the deadline. So I fixed it, checked off every single line against his last version, and sent it back to him. Then he had a brainwave about moving a scene from the middle of the episode to before the credits, which we did. It was 8.46pm. So we missed our deadline. The final email on the subject was sent at 11.25pm. Hooray. That was last night. This is the start of a new week.

Further reasons for an unbearable lightness of being: not only is my week-long stint on Gideon's show over (no more getting up at 5.30 to catch the commuter express, no more getting home mid-afternoon with only the stump of a day left in which to do other work, no more having to enthusiastically clap live bands on my own!), but the end is also in sight on my marathon 10-consecutive-day run on 6 Music. Only today and Sunday to go and the listeners will finally get a break from my Jools Holland-style voice! I got up at 8.30 this morning, because I could . A relaxed, mooching-about, poached-egg start to the day. So when the boss called me at 11am and asked if I'd fill in for Marc Riley between 1pm and 4pm - unable to do his show for personal reasons - I had no qualms about hopping on an earlier train to take up the slack. Emergency relief! 6 Music is a family and we must all muck in. I also figured that since I'm not a fire fighter or a nurse or a lifeboat man, this is as close as I'll get to doing something heroic.

Leona is on holiday, so Mark was looking after me, and made what was a five-hour shift, including the 6 Music Chart, very pleasurable. We turned what I christened Not Rocket Science into an ad hoc request show, and it was all the better for it. Only three more hours of radio to go now.

Did I mention that, after what I suspected would be a brief flirtation, the Sudoku (or Su Doku) bug has bitten hard? I'm now going through the recycling bin to find puzzles from previous Guardians and looking for them online. I'm filling them in before going to sleep instead of reading the New Yorker. Can this be healthy?

Watched A Very Long Engagement , Jean-Pierre Jeunet's sumptuous and often horrific WWI romance. I found it captivating, better than Amélie , which it closely resembled in style and look (and lead actress), and even though some may find Jeunet's technique - episodic, hyperreal, narration-dependent - distancing, I still feel the beating heart of the human drama.

Sunday May 22
And that's it! My radiothon is over. I am spent. Batteries low. Head spinning. Nothing more to say on the air. Nothing left to give. I have notched up a total of 28 radio-hours since my appearance on Roundtable on May 13. Does that seem like a long time ago to you? It does to me.

I've gone Class A. I actually bought a Sudoku book from the station bookshop. Mind you, half-tempted to carrying on filling in puzzles while watching telly tonight, I found that as soon as the military drumming started on the West Wing credits (Season Five, Episode Four: Han ), I put it down. Some entertainment demands your full attention. I'm getting into this season now and eagerly return to the huge, fold-out DVD packaging. Missing Aaron Sorkin, but the other writers are pulling together. Peter Noah wrote this one.

Monday May 23
The BBC was on strike today, with a skeletal news output and some networks harder hit than others, especially News 24, Radio 4 and Five Live. 6 Music was weird: Paul Anderson instead of Phill Jupitus, Clare McDonnell instead of Vic, a repeat of The Freak Zone instead of Tom, and none of the usual 6 Music news voices. Since I wasn't due in I had no opportunity to not cross the picket line. With this in mind, early for a meeting at Ebury about the title of my next book, I took a detour past Broadcasting House and dropped in on Jim, Niky and others at the main entrance to say hello and not cross the picket line. They seemed in good spirits and at least the sun was out. It was the big story of the day, dominating Channel Four News , although the big protest with the loudspeakers was outside Television Centre, where Tony Benn turned up. This reminded me of Billy Bragg parachuting in to see us on the picket line during the brief NUJ strike at IPC Magazines in 1992. It was cold that week. See last week's blog for picture.

The meeting: after almost 90 minutes of herbal tea, imponderables and pen-chewing, my editor Andrew and I finally hit upon a title and subtitle for "Book 3" that we're both happy with. Are you ready? That's Me In The Corner: An Accidental Career In Showbiz . I love it. It describes what's going to be in the book and, if not a song title, is at least taken from a song. I almost skipped back to the tube after the meeting. I've already started writing the book, earmarked for publication in July 2006, but how much easier it will be now that it has a name.

Got our busted Freeview box replaced at Argos and have now it set up in the kitchen. E4 arrives on the platform this Friday. I love Freeview.

All three foxes munching away on cat food in the garden tonight. And before that, an equally lovely sight - seven luminous green parakeets hanging off three separate feeders and queuing up on nearby branches. They're native to Surrey and always bring a smile to my lips when they turn up, squawking like no other garden bird.

Eli Attie wrote the episode of West Wing I watched on DVD tonight: Constituency Of One , a really fractious story about relationships in which Leo pulled rank on CJ, Amy was fired by the President, Will fell out with Toby over an offer to go and work for Bingo Bob, and Josh blew everything by precipitating Senator Carrick crossing the floor. Excellent. Best of the fifth season. Stupidly went on the Internet to read up about the sixth season. I really shouldn't do that.

ER was just as fractious, with Luka and Sam bitching at each other, Susan denied "tenure" in favour of Carter and having a go at Kerry, and that irritating ginger fella being made Chief Resident, much to everyone's chagrin.

Tuesday May 24
What a treat: a whole, uninterrupted day of writing. Specifically, writing my book, which of course now has a title. I've been looking forward to this for so long. I started at about 7.30am and wrote right through to just before 7pm (don't like to miss the start of Channel Four News ). I broke the back of Chapter 2, which I've been fiddling with for a while. It just needed some concentration to start knocking it into shape. (When I say I wrote right through, clearly I had breaks for food and tea-making; I also drove into Epsom to buy some office supplies from Office World and some soya milk from Waitrose. Can't look at a screen all day.)

Looked at a screen all evening, beginning with another episode of The West Wing : Disaster Relief , written by Alexa Junge, a clever juxtaposition of Jed tarrying too long at the site of a tornado-struck town in Oklahoma while Josh discovered the full extent of his disenfranchisement after the congress cock-up. We have to see him knocked down to see him built up again, but what a sight, stopping a cab to get out and drunkenly rage at Capitol Hill.

Delighted to see Gordon Ramsay back doing Kitchen Nightmares - he's a self-parody anyway (and very good at it), but I'd rather see him doing his schtick with failing restaurants on C4 than shouting at celebrities in a fake kitchen on ITV. It being the first of a new series, I suspect they served up the best one: an appalling Italian restaurant in Letchworth run by a bloke trained by a taxi driver and his useless mate. The state of their kitchen! True to form, Gordon shouted at them both, swore his arse off, and valiantly mucked in with the cleaning. Too tired to see out the tape of last night's Dispatches , but I enjoyed what I saw of the secret filming inside Labour's election machine. No great surprises though.

Wednesday May 25
Another full day of writing. No trips out to buy anything this time. I think I've finished Chapter 2. By 'I think', I mean I know it will require a polish before I can show it to anyone, but it's getting there.

Glad to see my strike-themed diary in the Guardian this morning. God bless the powers that be for allowing it through unchanged. (It's not exactly controversial, but because I'm representing the BBC, it does have to be submitted via the press office.)

Episode 7 of The West Wing - Separation Of Power s - was a proper cliffhanger, with Jed threatening to shut down the Federal Government in a showdown with the Speaker, played by Stephen Culp, off of Desperate Housewives (he's Bree's husband Rex) but even more familiar to me as Bobby Kennedy in the film Thirteen Days . You can't keep him out of the White House! Good to see Matthew Perry back; he really can do serious drama. That's his next career move, surely?

More telly: Explosive 80s: How Heysel Changed English Football , taped from Monday, an excellent, respectful, emotional documentary about the 1985 stadium disaster in Brussels. Phil Neal was particularly cut up, remembering how Liverpool and Juventus were ordered the play the match even though 39 Italian supporters lay dead out in the car park. Shocking. (As is what Gary at work told me about Neal refusing to talk about that day unless he's paid, which puts a slightly different perspective on his tears.) I was amazed and yet not amazed by the fact that a fire officer's report that blamed the stadium as much as the English fans was effectively buried thanks to a Conservative government hell-bent on discredited the game. Funny how all this death led to the Premiership.

Desperate Housewives now hurtling to its conclusion. It's not the equal of West Wing or ER during its golden era but the plotting is excellent and I love the way it all links together in the final narration.


Last but one Footballers Wives tonight (it's all building up to an end-of-series shooting next week). Quite enjoyed the Abi Titmuss documentary on C4 - she's no fool (except being filmed by John Leslie having it off). Talking of the highly-paid bra and pants model, it's rumoured that ITV are going to cut short Celebrity Love Island (of which I haven't even caught a passing glimpse) from five weeks to two. It's a thankless world. Did a much harder Sudoku (it seems you can spell it any way you please) from the Guardian . Took me two hours, but I was listening to the telly at the same time.

Thursday May 26
Having spent two days at home, intensively writing, it was nice to get out today. I had managed to group three gigs into one day (the freelance life is all about time management): an interview about Jaws for a Radio 2 documentary (hugely enjoyable - I could go on about Brody reasserting his masculinity all day); the third and final talking head session for Dr Who Confidential (the most enjoyable of the three, as it was basically summing up the series and indeed the Ninth Doctor, since Eccleston's off after Episode 13); and my first 6.30 film screening for three years: Silver City , the new John Sayles. I love his work dearly but this was merely average, a political satire that got bogged down in a polemic about immigrant workers and pollution and really lost its way as it went on. I shall give it two stars with a heavy heart. Sat between Ian Freer from Empire and my old friend Sarah Roome from Radio Arts - reminding me how sociable screenings are. It was good to talk to professional people who actually liked the new Star Wars , as I did.

Spilt a big bag of mixed nuts all over myself and the floor on the train home. Bummer. I was really looking forward to eating them as well.

It was like a summer's day today. Too hot for an outer layer.

Footballers Wives , last in the series, was nuts. Big cliffhanger, of course. Let's hope Conrad is dead. He looks it. Having missed the first episode of Westminster satire The Thick Of It twice last week, I caught the second one. Foul-mouthed it certainly is, but subtle too. I do love Chris Langham, but Chris Addison, who I've only ever seen doing stand-up, was very good too as a boyish advisor, the type all ministers seem to have by law. (Certainly a better political satire than SilverCity.) Noticed my old friend Simon Blackwell in the writers' credits. Is there anything funny on television he doesn't write now? I knew him when he was co-writing links for Wyclef Jean at the MTV Europe Music Awards ! (Because I was co-writing them with him!)

Friday May 27
Back to writing the book then. Talking of which, a fantastic illustrated 1975 hardback history of the New Yorker by long-serving footsoldier Brendan Gill arrived yesterday; I won it on eBay. Can't wait to finish my current 1958 history of the New Yorker , so I can start it.


The views expressed in this column are the views of Andrew Collins and do not represent the views of the BBC.