Working from home is brilliant.

Not only is it 5000% more productive than being in the office, but you can put washing on in the morning, get laid in the lunch hour, and nip out to Argos in the afternoon.

Shuffling mad old gay

Yesterday it rained. I showered, dressed, and left the flat to buy some breakfast and do fun shopping.
Only when I got back to the flat did I realise that I'd put moisturiser on... but not rubbed it in.

BBC Staff Survey Update

After spending half an hour filling in this nonsense online, my printed copy turned up.

Typically, it's printed on the wrong kind of paper, so we're not allowed to put it in the recycling bins.

Massive Waste of Licence Fee?
1) Disagree
2) Tend to Disagree
3) I watch BBC3
4) Agree
5) Strongly Agree

Now I've done everything...

Last night, a man gave me head while sucking a Fox's glacier mint.

Annual Staff Survey

Once a year, the BBC asks its staff what they really think of them. It's always vile, but this year's survey is more candyfloss horrible than most. And backed up by ceaseless emails from Alan Yentob begging us to fill it in. I like Alan Yentob - he wears nice suits - but surely he has better things to do than email me all day?

By the end of the survey, I hit the roof, and stuck this in the additional comments box:

This survey is ridiculous and sums up everything I HATE about the BBC.

This is still the best, most exciting company in the world, but rather than accepting that and moving on and actually trying to solve the problems, we instead get surveys like this.

I LOATHE the fact that serious issues (management, pay, work between departments, the appalling LST) are cloaked under waves and waves of vacuous blather about celebrating core values.

Why can't we have a real survey written in real language? Why can't we be asked "My Manager is an insincere bastard?", "My department is desperately underfunded", or "I think far too much money's wasted"?

Why are we offered this idiotic nonsense about core values? Why not empower staff instead - give us phone lines to rat on useless internal services, give us champions to solve tough problems?

When I joined this firm I thought I would be working with clever people who all wanted to do the best possible they could for this company. Now I realise it's stuffed full of pedantic timewasters - and it's a disease even I'm catching.

The BBC is still an organisation where it's easier to find 20 reasons to say no that 1 to say yes. And I'm becoming one of those people.

Some people may call me cheap...

I prefer to think of myself as a bargain.

Babestation

Is a TV show on a nameless channel.

Men send in texts, which are read out by bubbling, scantily clad beauties, while, on three mini-screens, lingerie-snapping lovelies mouth and jubble to rude phone calls.

It's all most salacious and never goes anywhere ("Come on, come on - would you like me to whip Sammi? Or should I do a pole dance?"), only with occasional flashes of tit.

Highlights:

1) The host Sammi. Tart-With-Heart-Of-Gold, TM. Neat line in small talk, and the look about her of someone who loves her job, but hates every minute of it.

2) A man texted in asking for the girls to crush fruit under their high heels. They found a couple of bananas and trampled on them, making "ooohummmmm" noises... until they started to giggle and sat down again.

3) Someone texted Sammi saying "I've always fancied - ever since we were at school. We're all watching you from The George." Sammi goes red, and squeaks. "Do you have any idea how embarrassing this feels?" she asks, off camera. Then turns to the camera, flashes her tits and giggles - "Get a J&D in for me, lads!"

Things I learned on Saturday

1) I really should have got of with the handsome man with the great smile I met on Friday.

2) A taxi cab from Euston to Peckham costs only £16.

3) Peckham on a Saturday evening makes Kings Cross look like the inside of Buckingham Palace. Hmmn. There's an oral-sex-in-public joke somewhere there...

4) Somewhere in the world, at every minute of every day, there is a video channel showing Girls Aloud. Lee gets all these channels on cable.

5) Ah. Babestation... see next post.

Cake!

We've got a bit of The Official 40th Anniversary of Dr Who Cake from the House of Commons launch yesterday.

We're sure it's not as good as it used to be.

Porn launch

Steve tells me he can't see me tonight as he's going to the launch of a porn film.

You know how when they launch a boat they spray it with champagne?
I wonder if it's kinda the same thing...

Publicists

Bonkers phone call from our publicist.

SOPHIE: Sweetheart, bike a DVD of Dr Who round to the Times would you?
ME: I can't. We only had one copy of DVD, and you've just had me send it round to the House of Commons.
SOPHIE: That is no good.
ME: I have a video copy.
SOPHIE: (drums fingers. Sighs) Video?
ME: Of the first three episodes.
SOPHIE: But I promised him all six!
ME: We're not due to take delivery of those until the end of the month.
SOPHIE: But. I. Promised. Him. All. Six.
ME: But can't you...?
SOPHIE: No. Look. Send him the video, I'll phone him up and lie.
ME: Can't he just review the first one? Like a TV review? That's all that's going out tomorrow.
SOPHIE: No. All Six. He must have all six.
ME: But TV reviews just review last night's TV, don't they? They don't review the next six weeks of EastEnders.
SOPHIE: Yes they do.

walking on broken glass

So far today, I've

- stepped on a shard of broken glass in my room that I missed
- bled everywhere
- had to pull it slowly out while my flatmate said "I can't see anything, I can't see anything in there ... Oh god!"
- remembered I have to give a presentation on Dr Who tomorrow

But I did watch the West Wing last night. That was nice.

Multitasking

Oh dear god.

Had sudden panic attack. Should I be...

- making a flash promo
- reading a proposal for a story about ping pong and talking trees?
- checking a budget about vampires
- filling out a standing order
- paying my plumber
- checking a Doctor Who books page
- thinking about my boy
- sending out a CD with pictures of ladies on it
- listening to a radio four programme about secretaries
- rewriting a flash loading screen
- asking for £250,000 nicely?

Hot water?

I've been without hot water, central heating, or a shower for 10 days now. It's kind of odd. Weirdly, the death of the boiler appears to have been the queue for other things to go wrong. The front door now creaks, the lights in the hall have blown, the TV ariel no longer works, and I appear to be incapable of buying more toothpaste.

Plus, people have started sending me unimaginable bills for alarming things. I now owe the council £1,900 for renovations to the car park. I don't even know how to drive.

More Steve facts

1./ When he wants to be, he is skipper than me.

2./ Interesting previous boyfriends include a porn star and someone who lived on the streets for the year.

3./ At 19, he was a project manager for an Internet Firm. Then he went into advertising for a bit, moved to Gran Canaria to run a bar, and came back to work in a sex shop.

4./ He hates clubs. Or pubs where you can't talk and the beer is bad.

5./ My flatmate thinks he's cute.

6./ He thinks I should have 'a little switch that I could flick to choose how I want
you: "shut up", "bubbly", "discreet", "on all fours".' Hmmn.

7./ Did we mention the fact that I'm constantly being outclassed by someone who was born in 1979?

8./ He's not impressed by Doctor Who, at all. But mentioning that I knew Nev Fountain got him into bed on Saturday night.

9./ It's very hard to tell when he's drunk. Either that or I've never met him sober. All of a sudden, he will announce mad, drunken plans with deadly seriousness.
Rolling through Chinatown last Saturday night, he suddenly announced "We've got to get off the streets now. The shooting's about to start." I asked him what this meant the next morning. He looked alarmed, whimpered a little, and then laughed.

10./ He appears to know my every online move. Which is unnerving. He's found pictures of me from a long-ago Doctor Who convention in LA. I didn't even know there were any.

11./ He thinks I'm the most dishevilled man he's ever met (this obviously includes Homeless Ex). He offered to buy me an iron for Christmas. I pointed out I already owned one. He growled.

Steve update

Do I have a bloke? God knows. But I do enjoy his company.

Took him to Brighton for supper. Forgot he hates travelling by train, but he was reasonably up for it (well, he chain-smoked himself to sleep). Impressed by English's (still my fave restaurant).

While I wanted to pay, he insisted that I let him look after the wine. Then bought a bottle of Dom Perignon, thus guaranteeing that I will constantly be squeaking "£120!". Slightly resent the fact that I'm so middle class I'm desperately impressed by this - obviously valuing the price tag over the sheer loveliness of the champagne.

We bitched and sniped in a most amiable and fond way through supper, and then fell asleep stretched out in a cabin on the last train back to town. While drinking much cheaper champagne.

He's now gone to Prague for a few days, which means I can update my blog in safety. After all - they don't have radio waves out there, let alone the internet. Phew.

Convention

I'm not really a convention goer. And my lovely boss (the most powerful beard in BBCi) was completely baffled by it.

He turned up on the Sunday to find us cowering at our BBCi stand, blocked off from actually meeting the public by two rows of desks twenty feet away. And then he started to laugh. "Are you often stuck behind the gents loos?"

He'd genuinely come along to meet people and talk to them, and was rather annoyed that this didn't seem to be the purpose of our stand (which, when people could get to it, was actually in the middle of an autograph queue, so was used as a place to leave tatty plastic bags and, on one occasion, a small child).

He was even more bemused at seeing crowds of people queuing for four floors of spiral staircase on the off-chance that Katy Manning (the only unsealed postbox in London) was still below. Vaguely surprised no one hurled themselves down at her.

He actually got angry when it turned out that no-one, not even Beech, could explain whether or not the Shalka episodes that he'd brought along were even going to be shown, when they were to be shown, or why, if they were being trailed, it was being done as "?!".

That said, seeing children sitting cross-legged in front of the TV screens watching Shalka made me feel all gooey. Even if most of the children were 35.