Even though I will be out of the country at Christmas, don't worry, there will be plenty of opportunities to pretend I am still around, thanks to my appearances on some of the premier TV and radio stations over the holiday period. On Christmas Eve, even though I will have just arrived in Grenada, I will also be on top channel Sky Arts appearing in
. Then on Christmas Day, if you haven't got a television, you can tune into Five Live to hear me on Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode's Movie Quiz. Even though at the same time I will be sipping cocktails in the sun. How is this possible? Have I acquired the powers of Doctor Manhattan due to accidentally getting trapped inside a nuclear reactor and am capable of appearing in two places at once? Only partly.
It's mainly because lazy broadcasters pre-record all these shows so they don't have to work over Yuletide.
So this evening I joined Simon, Mark and their guests Sean Lock,
Eddie Marsan and
Dev Patel to pretend to be 13 days in the future and answer questions about films.
It was a bit of a ramshackle show, but was good fun. The two movie stars in the room were very down to earth and utterly charming. I particularly liked Eddie, who you'd recognise from any of the many, many terrific films and TV shows he has done. He was happy to recreate the snorts of his character Pancks from Little Dorrit, explaining that Dickens had written that the character used a series of snorts in conversation and they'd decided to interpret this by using the snorts to replace swear words.
Mark Kermode is also surprisingly unaffected, unpretentious and almost childlike for a man who appears on serious stuff like "The Culture Show." He delighted in trying to play theme tunes from famous films on a tiny ukelele, or a harmonica or the bagpipes. He is also a gigantic nerd full of all kinds of movie (and other) trivia. Did you know, for example, that before "It's A Wonderful Life" if a director wanted to fake snow in a film they used cornflakes? Mark Kermode knows that. And loads of other stuff. His rockabilly hair also looks like it might be a rubber mask which he takes off at night to reveal normal hair underneath.
But that's a good thing.
It took ages to record the show, and if you really have nothing better to do at 4pm on Christmas Day it might be an agreeable way to pass the day. I won't be listening though. I will be swimming in the crystal blue sea in the Caribbean. In many ways I now regret the choice I have made.
I also won a DVD of Mama Mia on the show. Life doesn't get much better than this.
