Only this very week I was at a mates shop . He is an "antique" dealer ie anything reasonably old he can shift . Up to a couple of years ago he had a contract with an american shopfitter / interior designer . The deal was, it mattered not one jot what the subject was as long as the books were leather bound and had a certain gravitas . If they were going into a bar they were glued shut and to each other in rows and for private dwellings were individually selected . So I asked how things were going in this present climate . " If it was not for the Nazi memorabilia selling well I'd be in stuke "
came the reply ,which somewhat chilled my Guardian reading, Andrew Collins leaning, heart .

I had a conversation this week with a 'name' literary agent. "Go away", they said.
What they actually said was, "Publishing is so boring nowadays. All of these celebrity titles make it soul destroying and sometimes being involved in it, even at a distance, makes me feel dirty."
Their sage advice? Self-publishing and promotion is the way ahead. In relation to the points raised on the podcast? Consider scriptwriting because:

1. There's a terrible shortage of good scriptwriters
2. The world's going to need a good laugh over the next year or two.

So, is time for the open, inclusive family comedy to come back? Or was My Family enough? And did we actually like Dad's Army when it first came out?

Come on Heppo, Radio 4 made a programme about the history of applause a couple of years ago. The term 'clap trap' has come to refer to populist nostrums that couldn't but fail to get applause.

It will take quite a few years for the last person named in a Bob Dylan song to die. That's if, hopefully, Alicia Keys (Thunder On The Mountain) has a long and healthy life.

I first heard 'Hattie Carroll' whilst driving my car, with a certain amount of background noise. It took a little time to realise that I had misheard the first line, and that the crime had not been committed by a Burke and Hare-style twosome ('Williams and Zinger killed poor Hattie Carroll....').

I soon realised there was only one perpetrator. The names, however, stuck in my mind. Coming from north of the border where giving surnames as first names is common (there's a Billy Connolly sketch on the subject - very funny) I went for very many years believing that the transgressing tobacconist's name was Williamson Zinger.

I seem to remember the Minder film crew being quite a regular feature around Maida Vale (West London) when I was growing up there in the 70’s/80’s – it wasn’t all that derelict! (If you don’t count the massive squat in Bristol Gardens maybe). My dad remembers them spending a goodly amount of their time in the Prince Alfred pub on Formasa St too...

by re-making popular 70's TV programmes, but I'd say that extenuating circumstances can be argued for a re-make of Reginald Perrin. David Nobbs originally wrote it as a novel - and was much darker in tone than the consequent TV programme, very much a portrait of a man falling apart.(David Nobbs's novels are not that bad actually - Jonathan Coe is an admirer).

The new version could go back to the source material and come up with something different. True, it's hard to efface Leonard Rossiter's performance, but did you know that Ronnie Barker was the first choice to play the part?

. . . the book and the series were very different beasts. I remember all three books being far more sombre affairs and it was quite a jolt when I saw it on tv (the books had been recommended to me by my Dad in the mid '80's when I was about 15 and with perfect timing the Beeb repeated all three series soon after).

I remember the 1996 series they did without (of course) Leonard Rossiter which was a very odd thing. Something about his will requiring the family to carry out tasks at odds with their personalities.

Although I'm not quite as upset as Mark I don't hold out much hope for the new series, Nobbs' involvement or not.

Thank you Matt Hall. I have always been shocked by the absence of cars in London street scenes in 1970/80s shows, especially Minder and The Sweeney. They couldn't all have been filmed in film sets or on roads at 5am on a Sunday Summer Morning. And to think that I was living and driving in London at that time shocks me further. We used to moan about parking then - pah!

Enjoyed the bit about how music ends, was reminded of the two different ways Beethoven's 5th

and Sibelius' 5th

end.

Former hints at ending over about two minutes, and yet you always know it isn't over, latter has some of the most drawn out final moments ever. I guess most of the trick is the sparseness of the cues in the latter ...but I am sure conductor can do quite a bit (couldn't find Rattle on YouTube for this but from an LP I used to have I think he was a good example).

(edit: Realised the Sibelius above isn't that uncertain or drawn out, really, in its ending-just very theatrical about it. Trying to think of a real example actually proving difficult, and rather reinforces Mark's point about the deliberateness of the engineering in classical music. Was thinking Mahler's 6th or 9th might do but when looking at them on YouTube they are even more engineered, in a way.

Talking to my partner she made the point that Mahler's 9th doesn't really end when it drops below audibility, anyway, it "ends" when the audience breathes out a long held sigh, and starts to clap ...

If anyone enjoys this and wants to see the rest it is from a Tony Palmer/Humphrey Burton doc called "Four Ways to Say Farewell" and is on Youtube in six parts).