POSTINGS AND FROSTINGS

I think that I ought to apologise for my recent postings.

Not for posting them, of course, because ultimately they are what they are and nobody has to actually read them if they don't want to, (but if you are making the effort, it's probably only fair if I do, too), but for the half-hearted way in which some of them have been put together.

Oh, most of the time the idea comes easily enough, and I know I can expound almost indefinitely upon the banality and mundanity of my humble little life as I skydive towards my half-century, but I've sensed recently that the 'final polish', the little bit of what passes for insight or homespun, ill-educated philosophy has been lacking, and I've just been bunging these thoughts out without my usual due care and attention.

Ah well, I suppose that's what blogging is supposed to be really like - immediate thoughts about what's happening right now - but I always liked to think that we were better than that...

However, for various reasons, it has been very difficult to concentrate upon my for writing these past few months, and, especially during these last few weeks when I haven’t had my usual ‘morning access’ to my ‘proper’ keyboard this has meant that my opportunities for finding the time for my wordsmithery have been diminishing significantly.

I've been finding it so difficult to concentrate because my mind has been so distracted by various mundane matters like building and decorating and (as ever) hospital visits, so that thinking of a creative thought or three has been really difficult under those circumstances, and, because I like to post my nonsenses every day if I possibly can, I've been letting one or two of them slip through the net without proper checking, a final read-through, or the addition of that special sprinkle of "Marty Magic" of which the world seems largely unaware.

Weirdly, this fallow period coincided with a sudden unexpected upsurge in those daily page-views that usually tick over so very slowly at the bottom of the page. One morning, I got up to discover that there had been one hundred and fifty of those before I'd even lifted my head from the pillow which seemed kind of odd, even though I knew that none of them probably involved any actual "reading" as such. A quick check on StatCounter confirmed this and swiftly brought me back down to earth, more aware than ever before that all this pointless bloggery had still failed to make that unexpected (but sometimes idly hoped for) "breakthrough" as those statistics were reading at an incredible one pageview for the same time period, for which I can only thank you, whoever you are.

Mind you, life is laying so many guilt trips upon me these days that I start to feel guilty about just about everything, and when I stop making any real effort with the things that actually turn out to be at least important to me, then I start to lay even more guilt trips upon myself, which is not good but might help to unpeel the onion a little more and explain my less than stimulating efforts at stoking these fires of whatever they are lately.

Meanwhile, another surprise came with the announcement of the death of Sir David Frost, one of those people who had been around for so long that you began to believe that they would be around forever, no matter how impossible we all know that actually is. He did, however, have the air of being almost indestructible.

Anyway, there I was, standing on a ladder, holding a paint roller, and listening to “Sounds of the Seventies” on Radio Two when the top of the hour passed, the news headlines came on and his death turned out to be the lead story. To say I was gobsmacked would be a bit of an understatement, not least because I realised that he was only 25 years older than me and was therefore having his first huge successes with TW3 at an age when I was dithering about after completing my degree and wondering quite what the hell to do with my life.

Love him or loathe him, it’s difficult to deny that he was a significant figure in the development of television in the sixties, seventies and eighties, and that he managed to bring an extraordinary amount of other talent to our public attention during the course of his long and successful career. Performers like John Cleese, Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett, Tim Brooke-Taylor and John Bird all got what seemed to be their first high profile gigs on the Frost programmes in the 1960s, and all of our lives might have been a lot poorer if it hadn't been for this gift for spotting talent and giving it a well-deserved big break.

However, the very idea that we now live in a world which no longer has a David Frost in it seems so very unlikely that every time I read that headline, the mere fact of it surprises me all over again, as it has done several times already over the past few days. In fact, I think I'm only writing this posting to remind me a few months down the line that it actually happened, and remembering that will no doubt surprise me all over again...

Sadly, within 24 hours of that story breaking, we'd lose another giant of the broadcasting world - and incidentally another David - David Jacobs.

Sometimes the news just sucks...

Though I do find myself wondering and worrying about what kind of dirt is going to be dug up now that David Frost has gone...?

After all, some days it seems that pretty much every one of those icons of our youth have turned out to be “wrong ’uns” in recent years and my generation are starting to quake in our shoes at the prospect of the next one to fall...