129. After Ascot a few more departures.

HOME.

Hmm - Hmm.
The cat Shadow was hovering.
"You're hovering," I remarked. "What is it, food again?"
"Do try to curb the negative attitude," he said. "As a matter of fact it's Royal Ascot." He struck his poetic pose and my heart sank.
"Don't tell me: you have a poem."
"Too right, mate, listen to this..."
And before I could so much as close the stable door he was emoting to a tune reasonably close to the Richard Rodgers classic My Favourite Things:
"Most Favoured Mascot."
Girls in posh dresses and millinery monstrosities,
Blokes in grey toppers and hired suit pomposities.
Look at me, I am a right royal mascot
Perched on the back of a posh coach at Ascot.
Hmm - Hmm
Owners and trainers and horses in blinkers,
Brightly clad jockeys and tipsters and tinkers
Odds on the favourite's not going to win
Best back a horse owned by a Sheik Yadust Bin.
Hmm - Hmm
Race talking Claire Balding has got all the patter,
She can talk the hind leg off a horse that don't matter.
But the prize little waffler, no doubt about that
Is little Willie Carson in a bloody great hat.
When the chosen horse
Does just half the course
When I'm blowing a gasket
I simply imagine I'm perched on a posh coach,
The most favoured royal mascot.
[Repeat all verses]
"That's it," he said. "Repeat all verses."
I smiled: "Maybe later."
"D'you think they'd like it?" he asked after a while. "Rodgers and Hammerstein?"
"If they weren't dead I think it'd kill 'em," I said.
He thought about that for a moment.
"You're having a josh with me," he said.
"Sure," I replied. "But more Gifford than Ackland."

BBC Radio 2.
I still listen every weekday morning to Wake Up To Wogan, [On line, on digital and on 88 to 91 FM.]
I shake my head as he talks over the beginning or the end (sometimes both) of every track he plays to make sure nobody will illegally record it: I mutter when he forgets to credit the performer and when he inexplicably drops his voice at crucial moments: I smile indulgently when he wheezes with laughter at the least funny Janet and John sketch and I growl impatiently as he introduces yet another contribution from the TOG repertory company led by its tiresome retired actor manager.
I love it.
The unscripted banter of the broadcasters, the way Traffic Totty Lynn Bowles talks about "north bahnd and sahth bahnd" traffic and once even announced that there were "hold ups to sahth bahnd traffic at the rahnd abaht."
I like Deadly and Johnny and Charlie and the seldom-heard-never-seen Barrowlands Boyd.
I wouldn't change a minute of it. It's not the same with anyone else, not even Johnny Walker, who I also like.
It's just not a normal morning without ol' Tel.
This week he's away on a holiday break. It will probably last no more than a fortnight and it happens every three or four weeks.
Sure there's more important things than snorkers and broadcasting.
Like what?
Like golf.
And grouting.

TELEVISION (CONTAINS SPOILERS).

Robin Hood.
Robin (Jonas Armstrong) bade a fitting farewell to Nottingham by blowing his enemies and half the town to smithereens.
He then succumbed to the poison on a dagger wielded by Gisborne's sister.
Well. at least there is the nucleus of a cast left for the next series.
One interest in series three has been the casting of Alun Armstrong's son Joe as Alan a Dale (bumped off last week) and of David Troughton's son, Sam, as Much.
(Grandfather Patrick Troughton was in the first television series of Robin Hood.)
Fascinating family likenesses.

CSI: NY.
The end of series five was a master class in actor management.
Faced by the inevitable clamour from actors' agents for their clients' salaries to increase in proportion to the increased popularity of a show, the cunning executive will gather the entire cast together in a bar and quietly ease a black sedan into position outside.
A window will roll down...a machine gun will appear...
Care to guess who will still be around for series six?