Balls to aspiration, it's a tosser's mirage. - Charlie Brooker

One of the side-effects of having your work appear in a public forum such as this is that people often email me asking for advice on how to break into writing, presumably figuring that if a drooling gum-brain like me can scrape a living witlessly pawing at a keyboard, there's hope for anyone.

Anyway, Big Brother 7: that was that. Big Brother 8 is scheduled to take place in the glowing centre of an irradiated war-torn wasteland formerly known as Earth. See you there.

I won't get over that in a hurry: my least favourite atrophied Hazel McWitch lookalike in the world, singing "I just want to make love to you", right there on primetime telly. She has to be the only person on Earth who can take a lyric like that and make it seem like a blood-curdling threat without changing any of the words.