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Unaccustomed as I am, every year I speak at the National Union of Students Media Conference in London, which used to be a weekend but this year has become a modest Journalism Day (education cuts, no doubt). I was first asked in 1997 and have been back every year since, without fail. There's nothing in it for me except the satisfaction of giving something back , as cheesy as that sounds. (My career has been a series of accidents, driven by an inability not to ask people if I can have a go at new things, and nobody ever taught me how to do any of it, or gave me any advice beyond go-for-it - thus, it is the least I can do to give students a few pointers on how to do it.)

That first year, 1997, fresh out of my last day-job at Q, I did a seminar-stroke-workshop on music journalism. This was my first experience of "teaching", that is, standing in front of a roomful of students for an hour and imparting knowledge in what I hoped was an informative and entertaining manner. Although I was nervous - and even then, aged 32, taken aback by how young students looked! - I felt the leather patches growing on my elbows as a I spoke and took questions from the eager studes. For two years running, in 1998 and 1999, I also did the keynote speech, which was good public-speaking experience. The conference, which also takes in the NUS National Student Journalism Awards, started at King's College on the Strand, sponsored by the Guardian , then moved to a dreadful, dreadful hotel in Docklands, sponsored by the Independent, and this year has landed at the super-convenient University of London Union, ten minutes from the BBC, sponsored by the Daily Mirror (read into that what you will). At one stage I was leading two workshops, music journalism and how to interview celebrities, but this year I was back to one: diversification. I have never relied too much on flipcharts or overhead projectors, or notes. I prefer to "teach" off the top of my head, which is why I'll never be a teacher.

I had about 60 students today, looking younger every year of course (they are now literally half my age!), and they were attentive and smiled in the right places. But - and this has never happened before in all of my nine years of teaching - not a single person put their hand up with a question at the end. I threw it open, sat back, cast my eye over their faces and . . . nothing . I know people are shy, and nobody wants to be the first to speak, but somebody always breaks ranks in these situations, and that usually opens the floodgates. Not today. Blank stares. Not a twitch. A roomful of eager would-be journalists enrolled on a journalism conference not asking questions . In fairness, one or two came up to me afterwards (mainly to ask if they could interview me for student radio stations or get work experience at 6 Music), but not one of them had the guts or sense of inquisition to ask me a question from the floor. The media is doomed. It is doooooomed. I came away quite dazed. Imagine a press conference in the future: a roomful of journalists not asking a politician any questions . Perhaps the photographers will be too embarrassed or disinterested to take photos. The government will be able to just put out press releases and official photos of themselves. God help us - as Mark E Smith once said - if there's a war.

Appeared on Roundtable, because I promised Jude that I would months ago. Like the NUS gig, there's nothing in it for me, it's just a case of giving something back to 6 Music for giving me a job at the weekends. And a chance to be the guest, rather than the presenter, which is most relaxing. Let Steve do all the button-pushing and the back-timing. I'll just crack a couple of gags and try my damnedest to be more entertaining than Mike Edwards. Liz, the NUS press officer, gave me some Belgian chocolates as a thank-you earlier. I offered them round at Roundtable, and only Jude would eat one. Perhaps chocolates are not rock'n'roll. I should have taken some heroin along.

Saturday 29 October 
Bodies, which is such an important flagship drama series BBC2 just dropped it from the Saturday night schedules two weeks ago, was back tonight (with the next episode on BBC3 straight after). Watched both, inevitably. I love Spooks and Waking The Dead but Bodies reigns supreme. It follows a fairly narrow pattern - craven administrators, pressurised doctors, the torrid, grubby to-ing and fro-ing of Dr Lake and Sister Rix, some incredibly frank childbirth and related gynaecological surgery (the special effects department must be building latex vaginas week in week out) - but within its walls, Jed Mercurio's writing is both funny and frightening. It's a soap for adults (and I don't mean Hollyoaks Uncut). The common room now looks really neat and clean and new and magnolia and spotless.

Because we put the clocks back tonight (perhaps that means it will actually get cold at some point before Christmas), I gave myself the gift of two West Wings: episode 14, The Wake-Up Call, by Josh Singer, and episode 15, Freedonia, by Eli Attie (in the first, Bartlett was allowed to sleep through a crisis but when he woke up, turned out to be the only person in the White House who can pronounce "Iran" and "Iranian" properly; in the second, we were back on the campaign trail and Santos was left out of the big debate). I started to nod before the end of Freedonia . You can't fool the body, even by fiddling with time. (I must say, by the way, of all three leading Democrat candidates, Hoynes looks by far the most presidential.)

Sunday 30 October
Woke up at what was actually 9.00 but said 8.00 on the clock. I read a depressing piece in the Guardian Weekend magazine before going to sleep about Decca Aikenhead's mother dying of lung cancer at 37 but managed not to dream of death. On the train to work I started reading a book by psychologist Oliver James called They F*** You Up: How To Survive Family Life, which already has me gripped. Even though I'm fairly confident my mum and dad didn't f*** me up (and have written a book to that effect), I am fascinated by the cycles that occur from parent to offspring. There's some really interesting stuff in it about firstborn and lastborn, and plenty of argument for nurture over nature, which I have long believed.

Indian meal. Girls And Boys part two, which looked at the 70s and was slightly more cohesive than last week's episode, albeit glaringly convenient when, at the end of its journey through glam, punk and disco, narrator Cherie Lunghi said, "And 1979 saw the return of David Bowie," which was irritating on two counts: it's pronounced Bowie, not Bowie, and if he was returning, where from? He had albums out in 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978 and 1979, so perhaps she meant returning to the documentary to help tie up loose ends. What a timely return, in that case. Oh, and they repeated footage again, this time of Toyah in Jubilee and the beginning of Fanfare For The Common Man. As I say, better than last week's.

Monday 31 October
Brainstorming meeting at BBC about the Christmas special of our Radio 2 comedy show The Day The Music Died. (The joke is: we've got a Christmas special, but we haven't actually got a series.) Energising to be in the same room as the finest minds of a comedy generation: Jon Holmes, Robin Ince (who's off to Australia tomorrow to make a film that he's co-written - get him!) and writers Joel Morris (Framley Examiner ) and Paul Putner (star of stage - he's on the Little Britain tour, which runs until . . . May 2006!). The meeting was chaired by tired producer Will Saunders and power-behind-the-throne Elaine Wigley, who sat at desks like the Two Ronnies. The room was filled with merry laughter and libel.

Followed by a strange afternoon. I went to the Front Row HQ on the 6th floor and sat and watched two consecutive quiz shows on telly. These were Countdown (inaugural show with Des Lynam in the chair, or "the new boy" as Carol kept patronisingly calling him), and Deal Or No Deal (a dreadful open-the-box format from Endemol that's already big in Australia , the Netherlands and Hungary ) presenting by Noel Edmonds ("We've got an interesting situation here"), returning to TV after five years. You can see where this is going. I then went onto Front Row with Mark Lawson to review the return of two avuncular, facially-hairy heavyweights to afternoon telly. Most bracing. That's what I've always loved about Mark and Front Row - they attach as much importance to television as they do the theatre or novelists. My verdict: Des is a good choice and will settle into the part; Noel is way too good for this piece of crap (which, by the way, is 45 minutes long, with sufficient format to fill about 15 - the hard work is all Noel's). Let's hope it's a stepping stone back into the mainstream. I've always liked him. And not just because of Telly Addicts.

Spooks on tape from last Thursday (that's what working nights does for you - Mark Radcliffe must always watch Spooks the next Monday!), the one in which Adam refuses to grieve. More importantly: booked two tickets to see the Arctic Monkeys at the Underground club in Cologne next week, plus flights and a hotel. I am 23 again. (I was going to say 16 again, but I would never have booked flights and a hotel at 16.) Funnily enough, I was speaking to John Wilson, urbane arts correspondent and Front Row host, and he is having the same regenerative experience: the Monkeys make you feel young again.

Tuesday 1 November 
Hosted the Screen Talks evening with Terry Gilliam at the National Film Theatre, part of the London Film Festival, which premiered The Brothers Grimm last night. I've done these before, with Michael Moore in 2002 and Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy in 2003 (after which I needed a year off - ask me about it some other time). It's a plum job. You get to chat to amazing filmmakers in front of a partisan audience, cue clips and invite questions from the floor: it's always a potential black-polo-neck love-in. Tonight was, unsurprisingly, a sell-out. (And they asked a lot more questions than my students on Friday.) Met Terry in the green room at 5.45 - he was his usual, off-duty, off-message self, a youthful 65, full of throaty chuckles and both self-effacing and realistic about his status (he loves the life his films enjoy on DVD, and is proud to tell us that Fear And Loathing is loved by kids at boarding schools, including Eton). He wouldn't remember it, but I interviewed him at length on the phone for Radio Times about Python, and then chaperoned him at the Empire Awards, when he clearly did not wish or need a chaperone and was understandably grumpy about the whole thing until I left him alone. We started from a clean slate tonight and by the time we took the stage at 6.30, we had clicked. As a fan, it wasn't exactly a stretch to think of questions to ask him, but his answers were insightful and incredibly candid and funny. And it was a treat to see him giggling furiously at the clips of 12 Monkeys and Fear And Loathing. (He hadn't seen the latter since it came out seven years ago and was just enjoying the insane performances.)

Courtesy car home, with a mercifully silent driver who unfortunately allowed his GPS system to take us home by the slow A23 route. Computers are not always right. Managed to stay awake for tonight's Property Ladder, which was a revisited one but I don't remember seeing it the first time around. Sarah looked so much nicer in the clips from three years ago, with her hair long and all one shade of blonde. Her hair looks like a practical joke now. It's like she took a lovely Victorian semi and converted it into a caravan.

Wednesday 2 November 
My second consecutive night onstage at NFT1, this time hosting the TCM Classic Shorts competition 2005. Now in its sixth year, the event, presented in conjunction with the London Film Festival, has thus far been hosted by Richard Jobson. A hard act to follow, in that he's a filmmaker as well as a TV presenter, former male model and ex-member of the Armoury Show, but, having watched a tape of him doing a fine, authoritative job last year, I opted to take it in a slightly more humorous, ranting, non-cinematic direction. My hare-brained scheme - a broad tangential address based on the premise that short is better than long and small is better than big - seemed to pay off.

It's a formal event in some ways, but it's hardly my-lords-ladies-and-gentlemen, so I made it my business to inject a few gags. Part of my job was to glue the evening together: the other speakers, the showing of the six shortlisted films ( Special People, The Clap, Endgame, Ashes, The Banker, Jane Lloyd) and the presentation of the three awards, two runners up and a first prizewinner. First, I had to introduce onto the stage Helen Mirren. Quite a coup. (She was also one of the judges.) I'd been introduced to her in the green room and she was as down-to-earth and chatty - just as you'd hope, but you never can tell with the inordinately famous, or with actors. We ended up discussing the ASA's censure of Zoo magazine! And she agreed with me. I told her she was marvellous-darling in Elizabeth I, but she was far happier discussing how brilliantly written and lit it was. She also explained how odd it is when something you've worked so hard on just seems to be disappear after it's been on the telly. Nice woman. The awards were handed over to the winners by the esteemed directors, Michael Caton-Jones (affable Scot behind the megaphone on Scandal, Doc Hollywood and next, Basic Instinct 2 ) and Gurinder Chada (Bend It Like Beckham). I trust the winners were suitably thrilled. For the record, surreal sperm-donor comedy The Banker came third, gripping Belfast drama Endgame second and impressionistic four-minute life story Jane Lloyd first. They're all showing on TCM this weekend.

We were all bused off to the party as soon as it was finished at a swanky place called Mint Leaf in Haymarket. Didn't stay long, but long enough to have a good chat with Steve Furst, who'd starred in losing film The Clap. I know him from The Day The Music Died, but you will know him if I tell you he's the baldy-headed English one in the Orange adverts and the lifeguard in the most-repeated Andy and Lou sketch from Little Britain. Him. He told me how being flown to LA club class to film the Orange ads had ruined him for life, as he has to fly economy with his family.

I was in my cab by 10.15 and home by 11.15. My driver had Radio 4 on and I was able to sit back and enjoy some intelligent analysis of today's news: David Blunkett's resignation and an assessment of Bush's less-than-rosy first year in office since reelection.

Helen Mirren said goodbye to me. She used my name and everything.

Thursday 2 November
A welcome day off. Meaty lunch in Wimbledon. Bought a shredder to prevent identity theft. Soaked up some Arctic Monkeys in the car home. Can't wait to see them next week. Watched Rome , the BBC's big co-production with HBO that's been getting all the pre-publicity because it has sex and violence in it. It was rubbish. Not watching that again. Meaty dinner. Then Spooks , in which Harry was suspended in a row with the CIA, but never mind that, what about next week's, last in the series! It's about Princess Diana being killed by the MI5! Followed by the news purely to enjoy the story about Sun editor Rebekah Wade being arrested but released without charge after some kind of fracas with her bullet-headed husband Ross Kemp. Couldn't stomach Question Time with the Two Davids in a Tory leadership special (I'm glad I don't have to choose between the two, put it that way), but battled grimly through to the end of The Frank Skinner Show just because Lee Mack was on it. He was very blue. Did I mention that our sitcom has been commissioned by BBC1? I think it's safe to, since Frank mentioned it on national television. Result.

BLOG COMPETITION!

Hi, readers! Every week until I get bored or you do, I'll be inserting a line from one of my childhood diaries into the blog. This week's rogue quote comes from my diary of 1981. If anyone can correctly spot it for a tiny prize, perhaps it's best if you email the show rather than post it in a comment. But please do post comments. It's nice to have a dialogue afterwards. By the way, someone emailed the show anonymously last week and reviewed this blog, calling it "dull as ditchwater". How brave of them to do it from behind a pseudonym and using what looked like a false email address. (Of course, I accept the possibility that this blog is dull as ditchwater, but I've just checked and . . . oh yes, you don't have to read it.)

The views expressed are Andrew Collins' and not necessarily those of the BBC.