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Went to Reigate Screen to see Broken Flowers. There were eight other people in the cinema. Let's hope the takings for Nanny McPhee in Screen One compensate for the cinema's bold decision to show what is essentially an art film. What a beautiful, hypnotic, European-influenced piece. Bill Murray even better than he was in Lost In Translation. It made me want to watch all of Jim Jarmusch's films again. (I fell in love with him when I saw Down By Law at the Hampstead Everyman in 1988 with my friend Nigel, a medical student who had sophisticated film taste and broadened my mind considerably.) Broken Flowers is what American cinema should be. It reminded me, obliquely, of Sideways. As well as Murray, of the ex-girlfriends, Frances Conroy and Sharon Stone stood out, and Jeffrey Wright was superb too as Murray's neighbour. Their relationship was so real and yet spelt out not in big letters but in small gestures. A contender for film of the year, along with the aforementioned, Crash, Downfall and The Machinist.

There was a review of 6 Music by radio critic Rachel Cooke in today's New Statesman. (I would put a link to it on the NS website, but you have to register to read the whole thing, which is something of a swiz.) In précis: she likes 6 Music even though the idea of it used to put her off. While she disses Jupitus and says that Steve Lamacq's voice - and face - "makes me think of sharp knives", she's keen on Nemone and Tom and - yo! - the 6 Music Chart. She calls me "nasally challenged", which is hardly something I can do much about, but then says nice things to compensate. I have never met her. She also quotes Ric and says that the only reason we haven't got more listeners is a problem of perception. I think we should take the whole thing as a compliment. Leona is pretending to be slightly put out by the line, "There is a certain local quality to his chunterings that makes you wonder where his producer has gone." (Unless she really is put out, and she's pretending to pretend to be. )

I am working veeeery slowly at the moment. I finished a review of Revenge Of The Sith this afternoon that I started about a week ago! Maybe it's the shorter days. Or maybe I'm just lazy. Finally spoken to Lee. He's far busier than I am - he's getting married in two weeks' time, and moving house, and doing a Radio 2 Christmas special, and going on tour, and, like me, he's got five episodes of a sitcom to co-write for BBC1. Somehow, between the two of us, we're going to get one episode written before the end of December. I fear for my book.

West Wing , episode 16, Drought Conditions by Debora Cahn: an absolute corker. Structured to within an inch of pure genius, with Toby talking at a bar to an unnamed woman who turned out to be . . . well, I won't spoil it for anyone watching it on More4. Keep up.

Saturday 5 November
I realise I made a stupid mistake in last week's blog. In praising Bodies, I credited the programme's creator Jed Mercurio with the quality of the writing, when in fact, this far into series two, much of the writing is handled by other people. Mercurio obviously oversees - it's his baby, as it were - but just as David Wolstencroft created Spooks and no longer writes individual episodes (in fact, he only knuckled down and wrote three in series one) and Paul Abbott doesn't write every word of Shameless any more, I'm doing some poor bastard out of the limelight. Ironically, on neither the imdb nor the BBC3 website can I find out who writes Bodies . I think tonight's was written by someone whose name I recall from The Cops or Attachments . (This is important to me.) Bodies was spectacular tonight: the one with the quintuplets ("Quads is still good," said Maya, with one eye on management's need for good PR, when it was agreed that they couldn't deliver all five, and indeed, had to abort two before our very eyes with a big needle), the symposium ("Top three shags?" asked a drunken Dr Whitman in the bar) and the birthing-pool delivery in which the mother fainted, the baby had to be delivered by forceps and the father was electrocuted by the defibrillator. Classic. Preceded by a Spooks , series 3, on DVD. The one in which Zoe was charged with conspiracy to murder. She's out. (In the spirit of the MI5, they don't even credit the writers on Spooks , nor the director, nor the cast, nor anybody. It's a minefield. At least their dedicated BBC website gives this information for those that are tragic enough to need it. Not Bodies.) I'm aware that I mainly write about Bodies and Spooks in this blog, but that's in the spirit of my childhood diaries, where I mostly wrote about Love Thy Neighbour and Norman Wisdom films. Watched Firework Fiesta.

Sunday 6 November 
Richard's back from the health farm. He seemed much perkier today, so it's obviously done him good, unless it's the thought of going out on a date with me next Sunday that's lifted his spirits. I washed up an entire sink full of dirty cutlery and mugs today at 6 Music. I did it not in anger (although the thought of all those intelligent grown-ups chucking dirty cups, plates and bowls into the sink and leaving them there as if perhaps they are still living in a student house or that maybe their mum will come into Broadcasting House and clean them does make me angry), but in a Zen-like state of calm. Sometimes a selfless act of sink martyrdom is good for the soul. Also, it meant I could actually get to the sink. It's not much to ask, is it? I only hope that when 6 Music moves offices in the New Year, our spanking new kitchenette area will encourage people to act like civilised human beings. Talking of which, and I don't like to moan, but someone's blocked up the toilet in the gents as well. All water's spilled over the top, partially flooding the cubicle. There are men out there who really need better diets.

A vaguely masochistic evening of telly. Boys & Girls part three on BBC2, perhaps the shoddiest of the run so far. Themed around the androgynous 80s, it hopped back and forth through the decade as if chronology was a mere inconvenience. At one point we were told, in a particularly glib voiceover, that unrest "spilled onto the streets", illustrated by footage of the miners' strike. Now, I hate to pick faults with what is basically pop filler and not a history lesson, but this was hardly violence spilling out onto the streets. This was footage of pickets at coalmines threatened with closure, at which violence broke out between miners and police. Also, we were clearly in 1984, the year of that strike, and yet the next clip - illustrating the fact that some pop groups were enjoying a rather different lifestyle - was from the Rio video, with Duran Duran on a yacht in Sri Lanka , shot not at the time of the miners' strike, but in 1982. Perhaps the programme-makers were up against a punishing deadline and just had to throw it all together. It goes without saying that they repeated footage again. I particularly liked the notion that "post-AIDS" (ie after the government adverts in 1987, rather than actually post-AIDS, which is an incurable disease that still blights the world), pop music went all chaste. Did it? Or was that just the clip of Kylie and Jason? I managed to watch this whole hour in a Zen-like state of calm. It was, after all, only a television programme.

Sadly, Girls & Boys was sandwiched between two halves of C4's The Biggest-selling Artists Of The 21 st Century marathon, which was much better, but still committed the crime of stating something in voiceover (Dido's success coincided with the popularity of Bridget Jones's Diary), then getting one of the talking heads (in this case, my friend John Aizlewood), to say the same thing. Why? John came across very well, by the way. In a nice pink shirt. Rather better than the record producer - forgotten his name on purpose - who claimed in a reptilian way that he'd basically invented the Keane sound and spoke of finding something he could "sell" to the Dido audience. What a knob. I can only assume the members of Keane are furious and red in the face. (By the way, Robbie Williams topped the poll with 6.3 million records sold this millennium, ie. in the last five years, and Coldplay came second with 6.2 million. This was never going to be about quality.)

Monday 7 November
That's more like it. I cleared four writing jobs today. I'm back to my old efficient self (assuming they are all passed by their respective commissioning editors): three pieces for Word - on Parkinson , Tony Scott and Noel Edmonds; a review of Crash for Radio Times , whose extras I watched this evening, making me want to see the film again. I would have preferred the day off, but hey, I'm going to Cologne on Friday to see the Arctic Monkeys, so that will be my reward for knuckling down. Sorry, I meant The Word.

One of the foxes who frequent the back garden turned up during the daytime today. She - if it is a she - looked incredibly fit and healthy. Bushy tail, lovely coat, vivid orange colouring, a good weight, but. . . as she tucked into some food a closer look through the binoculars revealed that one eye was almost totally closed and she had what looked like scarring on her snout. Possibly the result of a fight? Even a firework. There's nothing you can do. Nature must take its course. I just hope she heals. As I say, apart from that she looks in fine fettle. Put some chicken leftovers out, to help build up her immune system. Poor thing.

Gave a go to the first of BBC1' s much-trumpeted Shakespeare Retold adaptations, Much Ado About Nothing by talented Cold Feet scribe David Nicholls. We had feisty performances by Sarah Parrish and Damien Lewis as local newscasters, and it was cleverly updated, but the whole thing was just too silly for my taste. (It's not in my bones to criticise anything the BBC does, especially with such good intentions, and with such good personnel, but I can't like everything, and my views are not necessarily those of Nancy Banks-Smith in the Guardian, who loved it.)

Tuesday 8 November
Up at the crack of dawn so that I could catch an early enough train to reach Denmark Hill in Southeast London by 9am , the prearranged start-time for day one of sitcom writing with Lee at his house. However, he'd left a message on my mobile late last night which I didn't get until I was trotting off down the road, asking me not to come until 10am , as he was dropping the car at the garage. So I turned on my heels and went back home for an hour. (The sort of scintillating detail that makes this blog so vital!) Anyway, we worked from 10am till 2pm, and we knocked the bare bones of a brand new story into shape, involving an Australian backpacker, a drug trial, some plucked eyebrows and a bout of narcolepsy. The process was good. I typed as I type faster than Lee. He wears glasses when he's off-duty. I caught the end of They Think It's All Over last night, which he now hosts, and I was able to congratulate him on a certain ad-lib that I found very funny. In return, he's read two pages of my first book. (Incidentally, he phoned later on and said he'd gone off the idea of the narcolepsy. This is the process.)

There was much ado at Victoria station when I passed through the concourse this morning - a gaggle of press and TV cameras, all gathered around a sort of podium, with inevitable outer ring of nosey commuters and tramps. It turned out to be the launch of some sort of travelling version of the Turner Prize, sponsored by Gordon's Gin, although it looked and sounded from the heavy branding that it was the Gordon's Gin Prize sponsored by Turner, whoever he is. Janet Street Porter was there, as was the toady MP David Lammy (I don't know for sure that he is a toady, but he is an MP and an junior minister, so ergo he's likely to be a toady). People with Gordon's Gin embroidered into their polo shirts handed round M&S snacks on big plates, but not gin, as far as I could see, but I suppose it was 9.30 in the morning, and even MPs don't drink that early. A lady from Gordon's Gin made a speech into a microphone. She said this, and I quote: "Like the Turner Prize, Gordon's Gin is modern, colourful and completely British." How awful it must be to wake up in the morning and know that you are going to have to say something as stupid as that into a microphone on the concourse at a mainline railway station. (Maybe she didn't care as she had a hangover from drinking too much modern, colourful, British gin the night before, which I hope she gets at a discount in return for having to say stupid things into a PA system at a station in front of people with real jobs.) I hope that everybody from the press who wrote about this well-meaning event forgot to mention Gordon's Gin and that the photographers managed to photograph Janet and David without getting a Gordon's Gin logo in the background. Also, gin isn't colourful. Unless you count green and colourless as two colours, which is a bit of a stretch. I was once on a polite Radio 4 quiz game called Wireless Wise and I was paired up with Janet Street Porter. We won. I don't expect she remembers it.

After about a year with only Freeview and Top-Up TV (the combination of which I still heartily recommend), we succumbed and had our NTL cable connection reconnected. (Ironically, it was the prospect of reviewing satellite TV for Night & Day that reawakened the idea, even though that job only lasted three weeks. The seed was sown.) NTL have improved the interface in the interim - it looks and operates a bit more like Sky now. Good. The only problem is that halfway through watching a DVD tonight, the sound went off, and I couldn't get it back on. Scrolling through the various AV options didn't fix it. We're getting sound only on AV1 and picture only on AV2. This was mightily frustrating and the film, In My Father's Den, was excellent, and at a key dramatic juncture. (It's New Zealand-made and stars Matthew MacFadyen as a war correspondent who comes home to his native NZ and uncovers a right can of worms from his past.) A call to the NTL helpline tomorrow morning then.

Wednesday 9 November 
This will have to be a slightly foreshortened blog as I am leaving the house at the crack of dawn on Friday morning to fly to Cologne (don't know whether I mentioned that), so I won't be able to write up Thursday night. Went to 6 Music to record some trails with Leona. We have seen the Christmas schedule and it looks like we're actually getting a holiday. No Sunday show on Christmas Day, and a two-hour show on New Year's Day! Yippee! (Of course, part of me is sad that I won't be able to broadcast to the people, but you have to take the rough with the smooth in this life.) Packed in half a day's writing/brainstorming with They Think It's All Over's Lee Mack, this time at my agent Kate's cosy office. Even though I told him yesterday that I don't drink milk, he arrived, very thoughtfully, with a takeaway cappuccino for me. Being English, I didn't want to appear ungrateful so I drank it. As a result, I had an itchy nose for the rest of the day. I must remind him that I don't drink milk, and I feel stupid for not telling him today. Why would I not tell him? He could have drunk both the milky coffees and enjoyed double the taste experience, at no extra cost. We almost nailed the complex story breakdown of episode two (it no longer involves narcolepsy or a drug trial, and I think I'll refrain from saying what it does entail, as it might change again), and we treated ourselves to a drink in a pub at 6.30. I had a water and told him I don't drink. I expect next time I see him he will buy me a pint, and I will drink it rather than tell him again that I don't drink. I really like working with Lee. We've developed a good working relationship and he's excellent company. He's also got very clear skin close up, which is by no means a given in comedy. I left him at 7pm - he was going off to have dinner with Lenny Henry and Mitchell & Webb (no, he really was). Watched Lost on E4 (the one where something was revealed about one of the characters in flashback and there was a wild boar in it - that's all I'm prepared to say).

Thursday 10 November
It's Thursday morning. I am about to leave the house to collect the bag of shopping I left at my agent Kate's office last night, then have lunch at RIBA with Tracey MacLeod, Jim Walton and Dawn Ellis about the second series of Radio 4 music quiz All The Way From Memphis (we're recording it in January - hooray!), then I'm going to do an interview with BBC Radio Southern Counties about winter blockbusters, then I'm off to a pub in Liverpool Street to do a talk about my crazy life to the City Of London branch of the Round Table. I will write about it in next week's blog. See you down the front at the Underground club in Cologne !

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

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 1976. If anyone can correctly spot it for a tiny prize, email the show via andrew.6music@bbc.co.uk And please do post comments below. It's nice to have a dialogue afterwards. Thanks for all your kind, reassuring comments after the controversial "dull as ditchwater" slur from the previous week. This blog is like Gordon's Gin and the Turner Prize: it's modern, it's colourful and it's an alcoholic beverage and an art contest. Needs a bit of work.