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Friday June 10
A decisive day, in that I finally got round to sending off the paperwork for a replacement passport at the Post Office in Banstead. They reckon as little as ten days. It seems an age since I applied for my first, temporary passport when I was sent on my first foreign trip by the NME - New Model Army, 1989, somewhere in France (I wish I could remember where). Up until that point - I was 24 - apart from a school trip to Normandy (for which they obviously rustled up a group passport) and one or two Channel crossings for holidays on the island of Jersey, I had never been abroad. What an unworldly young man I was. The NME changed all that. It was like joining the army. Joining New Model Army, at any rate. It's sad that you don't get to keep your old passports. My first permanent one - the NME one - was held together with the ink of various international stamps. Most of them Germany, admittedly. I'm glad I went to America so much during those intense few years, when you could just waltz through immigration, drunk, burning an American flag and wearing a false beard and they didn't bat an eyelid. Indeed, I remember check-in time going up from one hour to two during the first Gulf War, the end of the innocence.

For some reason I gave myself another day off today. That's three this week. (I didn't feel like writing my book, I'm between issues of Word and I'm in sitcom limbo.) I spent perhaps a little too much of it in a car, but things needed doing that were not local: that trip to Banstead for vital Waitrose supplies (if they had a branch in Reigate I'd walk, but we are cursed with an ill-stocked, ill-lit Safeway that treats organic produce as a novelty); a trek to our old pet shop in Streatham to purchase a litter tray bigger than the ones available in the nearer pet supermarket (better to support an independent local store than a barn anyway - Lambeth are selling off that parade of shops to a property developer who will inevitably push up rents so that they can clear everybody out and install a Carphone Warehouse and a Tesco Metro; I signed the petition on the counter for what it's worth); a diversion via Wimbledon to patronise what is without doubt the best-stocked health shop in South London (we get most of our pills and potions mail order, but sometimes a shop purchase is necessary); and finally a quick round trip to Reigate to swap Layer Cake for Elephant at Blockbuster. Probably watch it tomorrow. Seeing Last Days has inspired me to go back into Gus Van Sant's previous low-budget work. Finally put the new Coldplay album X&Y on in the car. It's so Coldplay I feel I've heard it all before. Have they lost all trace of creative ambition? Is this what fatherhood has done to Chris Martin?

It was a battle for tonight's tasty chicken carcass on the lawn between one of the foxes and the magpies. I think they all went away happy.
Read the New Yorker while tonight's BBC programme on Beethoven was on. I don't approve of drama documentaries. Is it a drama, or is it a documentary? Make your mind up. I don't mind dramas based on true stories, and I love costume dramas, but this was presenter Charles Hazelwood talking to camera, linking some promising-looking dramatic vignettes, all intercut with - and fatally undermined by - fake talking head interviews with key players, like Beethoven's brother-in-law and so on. Great fun for the actors, no doubt, but it makes a nonsense of history. Who are they being interviewed by? Sorry to be such a grouch, but this kind of format, intended to please everybody, fails to please at least one person.

Jonathon Ross's guests: missed most of Charlotte Church, but she seemed natural enough, and he kept his dirty mind in check; Bob Geldof seemed genuinely confounded by Ross's willful idiocy; Teri Hatcher was blander than I'd hoped. Not a classic. Give that man an OBE.

Saturday June 11
Given up trying to find my sunglasses (last seen: September, when we got back from Madrid), so with heavy heart bought a replacement pair: cheap, cheerful. On the same shopping diversion on my way to 6 Music this afternoon I also treated myself (I love that decadent phrase) to a new summer jacket, light, linen, something I can throw on with a t-shirt underneath and look a bit colonial (make poverty history). I'm not a natural clothes shopper, but I'm better on my own and without any pressure to buy. I actually tried about six jackets on in order to get to the one I bought. I was quite pleased with myself. Almost grown up.

Never got round to watching Elephant..

Soul Deep , last in the series, in which they skilfully mapped the emergence from the bland soul of the 80s a more vital musical form, Hip Hop Soul, and its mutation into the R&B that dominates pop today. I realised I knew very little about Mary J Blige. I'm still not entirely sure she merits the best part of an hour of my life, but I appreciated the way the various strands were tied together, as ever. It's been an exceptional series, one that was bound to fizzle out a bit after such epochal beginnings and dramatic middle.

Sunday June 12
Took Elephant back. An unwatched, rented DVD shouldn't make me so sad. But it does.

A rare treat tonight after work: an Indian meal. Rare because since we moved out of the catchment area of the finest Indian restaurant in South London (no names - it'll just read like an advert) and found ourselves local only to a well-meaning place with photos on the menu (enough said), consumption of jalfrezi and garlic naan has dwindled. If I'm honest, giving up alcohol also took a certain amount of shine off the experience. Anyway, we've been meaning to try out the friendly-looking tandoori in Wimbledon village every time we drive straight past it on the way to the finest Thai restaurant in South London. Tonight, we did. It didn't let us down. It's small but incredibly well staffed and with a relatively brief menu. Of course we over-ordered but that's traditional. I had a chicken chilli masala with rice and naan, a pakora to start, and it was hearty indeed. Could have gone without the chickpea dall and the sag aloo. But feeling over-full is part of the fun. I've long since got over the shock of eating curry without Cobra-beer accompaniment. In fact, I can't imagine how my body coped with it. Water and mango juice, that'll do nicely. Gave the Coldplay album another go on the way there. I don't plan on listening to it again. Life's too short. Kasabian on the drive home. Now there's a band.

Penultimate Dr Who, taped from yesterday. The much-hyped episode with the futuristic Weakest Link and Big Brother parodies, which were the least of its charms. It's all building to next week's Dalek war. That's more like it. I admire Russell T Davies' playfulness, but there's no way Big Brother will look like that (ie. exactly the same) in 500 years' time. Perhaps a smirking conceit too far. Bring on the Daleks.

Gave the new satirical panel show Mock The Week a spin, but despite talent among the guests (nothing with Mark Steel can be that bad) and Dara O'Briain in the chair, it all felt way too prepared and awkward. There was no spark of improv at all, which either means clumsy editing or there was no improv in the first place. And can we really do nothing better than hybridise two existing formats? Have I Got News For You meets Whose Line Is It Anyway is a pitch, not a programme.

Actually won two items on eBay: two batches of not-very-old New Yorkers from the 90s. Having lost out on three much more valuable ones over the past week due to forgetting when the auction ends I was determined to sit on these.

Monday June 13
Other things happened today - some therapeutic clearing-out of the garage, recycling the bottles and jars, watching Enduring Love on DVD - but all pale into insignificance next to this news: I'm going to be in Dr Who! One of the audio episodes, admittedly, but these have been going constantly since the TV one went off the air 14 years ago, they are official Dr Who episodes, with official Dr Who casts, they just happen to exist in sound only, on CD and the net. The company who make them, Big Finish, were featured on this weekend's Dr Who Confidential , and it is they who contacted my agent with the offer of playing the part of a futuristic DJ in an episode called Live 34 starring Sylvester McCoy. I don't know how big a part it is - probably not very - but it means I will be a footnote in Dr Who folklore. I am beside myself with excitement. We record next Wednesday. Apparently the money's not that good. Ha!

Actually, there is some other news. Michael Jackson was acquitted on all ten charges. We watched it live. I'm saying nothing, other than they should arrest the middle-aged female fan in the green t-shirt at the courtroom gates who released a dove each time a not-guilty verdict was announced. Now she should be locked up.

Tuesday June 14

A half-working day. What was described as a "lunch meeting" in a private room at the Groucho Club turned out just to mean a meeting at lunchtime with some bits of fruit. I ate as much as I could possibly get on my plate. We were meeting to talk about a Harry Hill TV pilot whose details I will not divulge for the usual superstitious and discretionary reasons. In attendance: Harry (or Matt as I call him, having known him for 20 years since he was a medical student), boss-man Richard Allen-Turner from comedy powerhouse Avalon, a producer called Paul who was incredibly well organised and kept the meeting on track, plus three of Harry's trusted writerly aides from TV Burp: Dan, Brenda (Gilhooly, formerly Gayle Tuesday, "Page 3 Stunna") and Dave (Quantick, of my acquaintance). We thrashed ideas around for two hours and some good stuff arose. I was there in the shady capacity of script editor/consultant, which meant I didn't have to think of jokes. (What with Billy Bleach; the other quite well known comedian with whom I've been working on a sitcom; another project I'm not at liberty to talk about, and now this, Avalon own my arse at the moment. Let's hope some television gets made at some point.)

A beautiful New Yorker from 1946 arrived in the post - one of my few recent vintage wins from eBay. It looks pretty much like an issue from 2005.

Having arranged to meet two old friends for a drink at 7.30 in Clapham, I had intended to kill the afternoon at 6 Music, but there's something brutal about killing time, especially on a lovely day, so I went home instead, ate a leisurely late lunch of peppered mackerel and poached eggs, tickled chapter 3 of my book without much purpose or drive, and took the car back into London for 7.30. (Gave X&Y another spin . . . nothing.)

Met up with Rob Mills, my oldest friend still in regular circulation (we met at Chelsea School of Art in 1984) at the Slug & Lettuce in Clapham Junction, a quite appalling drinking barn. It was like a whitewashed warehouse with some tables in it and the beer, as Rob was keen to point out, came at West End prices. Once Matt had arrived, we got the hell out of there - Matt being Harry Hill. It was pure chance that I arranged to meet him socially, as Matt, in the evening when the professional meeting, as Harry, was scheduled by Avalon at lunchtime. He and Rob go back to schooldays in Kent. (I met him through Rob.) It was something of a reunion, in that the three of us haven't been out together for a good few years. We tried to find a curryhouse on Northcote Road that the pair of them remembered but a new, fancy Indian restaurant with pale wood décor and no draft beer lifted its skirts to us along the way and we succumbed. It was devoid of other diners to begin with and the chutneys were a bit self-consciously modern, but the food turned out to be as good as my old favourite haunt in Streatham (I've never seen carrot as an Indian side dish before). Lots of happy chat about the old days and the new days - both Rob and Matt have kids, always a dominant theme - and inevitably the conversation turned to the parlous state of TV comedy, not least the commissioning process. (Are we becoming bitter in our forties? Only through bitter experience.)

Wednesday June 15
My Dr Who script arrived in the post! Excited? I don't know where to put myself. Nervous? Too right. I've got a bigger part than I imagined. I've even found a reference to the episode on the number one Dr Who fansite  Outpost Gallifrey (you have to scroll right down to Big Finish Releases):

It poured with rain today, as if to remind us that Wimbledon is on next week and not to get too complacent. Luckily, I was in. Wrote a piece about Anthony Hopkins for Radio Times, and rewrote my piece about the 1989 Edinburgh Festival for Word. (They can be quite strict about what they want, but that's the bracing thing about working for people who know what they're doing.)

My agent called ahead and told me that Steve Coogan was going to phone me. She didn't know what about. He didn't.

Very good West Wing: episode 13, The Warfare Of Genghis Khan, concerning a nuclear test over the Indian Ocean that turned out to be the work not of Iran or North Korea but of Israel and the diplomatic stand-off created - meanwhile, Josh belittled a delegation from NASA and one of them, a lady, took him out to look at the stars through a big, fat telescope to help talk space exploration funding out of a sceptical administration. The two strands were interlinked, very deftly, by writer Peter Noah and he managed to work in some 1920s blues as well. The weird thing: when it'd finished I put the telly back on and Newsnight were interviewing an Iranian presidential candidate who was talking about their nuclear programme.

Thursday June 16
I had the whole day laid out before me in which to lazily tick off a few smallish writing jobs. My kind of day. Then I got a surprise call (not from Steve Coogan, although that would be a surprise!) at about 11 from Fergus at the Express, asking me if I could rustle up a mock Britishness questionnaire (based on the fact that the home office have released details of a real one today, aimed at those applying for UK citizenship). This is exactly the kind of spontaneous job I gave up my weekday radio show to do. I said yes and set to work, with only a brief poached egg break. As with any national newspaper job, there's no time for messing about, the deadline was mere hours after the commission. It meant that those smallish jobs went by the wayside but hey. In the process, I discovered that the Express still haven't paid me for the last job I did for them, back in March. That's what happens when you fill in your accounts every three months instead of every month. I am due to sit down and do them before the end of June. I'll be sure to tell you all about it.

Rented Elephant again, but even though it's short (80 mins) we didn't have time to watch it in full before Question Time this evening, so put it aside again . It's become symbolic. Watched the final episode of the second series of Spooks on DVD instead (60 mins). Couldn't believe Tom shot Harry in the chest. I sort of guessed Tom died at the end, as the lovable-dog-faced Matthew McFadyen isn't in the third series. I wish the third series was on DVD but I don't think it is. A very smart programme and well worth the box set purchase. Question Time was lively; coming from Caernarfon (which we used to visit every year on family holidays to North Wales), it had a very impressive Welsh Assembly member from Plaid Cymru, that gregarious French bloke with massive hands from Le Monde, the rumpled and annoying Rid Liddle, the all-too-sensible Clare Short and Iain Duncan-Smith, proving that you can say what you like when your party's in opposition (he effectively said that public services should be paid for by taxation!). Europe and Africa really exercised the panel, and there was little time for anything else. (I hate the way that Africa is spoken of in such broad terms, as if it is a country.)

So, Steve Coogan never phoned and Elephant remains unwatched. Maybe tomorrow.


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