Turner And Marmite, All On The Telly

Oh the cultural highs I encounter these days... have just seen Michael McIntyre re-created out of toast and marmite. By a 21 year old art student. Roll on the next Turner Prize nominations...

Personally, I thought it was more like Peter Mandelson, but who am I to deny MM his moment in marmite?

And that led us nicely into hitting the toaster in the ad break, but our toast and marmite was for satisfying our suggested-to tastebuds and not for the cultural puzzlement of any mass Saturday night audience. Actually on the food front today I have been unusually inspired, and made savoury pancakes with chunky houmous and olives. Washed down afterwards with walnut cake. From a shop, not my own fair hands. But there was a certain harmony in the textures of said pancake-and-cake combination.

Going back to Turner, I watched the delectable Andrew Graham-Dixon, he of the slightly-Bryan-Ferry-coiffure-with-a-twist-of-Serge-Gainsbourg, doing National Trusty things last night. Very rock'n'roll, me. Watching some posh bloke (phwoarr) hovering old carpets. And on a Friday night 'n' all - how did it get to this? Anyways, the Turner bit of the show was the fact that the dusty carpet was at Petworth House in Sussex, where the racy aristocrats of the day collected Turner's paintings of landscapes. When to do so, AGD informed us, was considered avant-garde at the time, when all the other posh families were commissioning portraits of their chubby, rosy-cheeked selves.

And seeing as I'm wittering on about tv again, I am a little intrigued about the upcoming thing about celebs having a homeless person come to stay. Noble, and both parties will surely learn something about each other, and the celebs will momentarily become humbler people. But why is it only Justin out of Colin-and-Justin hosting the homeless person? Do C & J no longer feature as the tweedle-dum-tweedle-dee kind of duo on which they have built their career - house renovating, shrieking, cushion-arranging, tantrum-throwing... oh, and dancing? Is this Justin being Grown-Up and Serious? Does Colin also get to separately sneak in a homeless person later in the series? I think they've gone for the wrong angle with this programme - much more mileage if it was People Famous Mostly Just For Tarting Up Houses On The Telly doing the social-conscience bit. Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, are you listening?

The Sky's Gone Out

I'm looking out of the back window. Its the same footage on replay from yesterday, and the day before, and the day before... grey, with foliage alternating between quivering a little, the way that the faces of women of a certain age with severely bobbed hair tend to do, and waving genteely in a royal wave-from-the-elbow way. Wish the sky was like an etch-a-sketch, where you could just rub out all the grey and get sunny-day-blue instead.

I'll probably go out there later and build cane wigwams around which to tame the sweet peas. They are wanting to grow far too early and will end up in a heap of smothered pink if I don't get them behaving vertically pretty damn quick.

Talking of colour, it has been a week of Far Too Much Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. I have caught a couple of episodes of itv's House Gift, a show where 3 "designers" go shopping for one key, life-transforming object which will bring the taste-lacking house owners to their senses. According to which budget the squabbling designers snatch and run off to spend, there is a fleet of cars to chauffeur them around the locale and beyond. Big £1,000 budget gets big car, medium £500 budget get...etc, etc. A bit Goldilocks and the 3 bears, though so far no chairs have been broken. And there's no porridge. Though LLB did bring back, and spill on the floor, a lot of pots of paint.