Oh to be a fly on the wall. Apparently Alastair Campbell bumped into Peter Capaldi today - that's right, the actor who played Malcolm Tucker, the foul mouthed press secretary to the Prime Minister in The Thick of It who, quite clearly, based his whole character on Campbell.
Now, what we all really, really want is a swear off. Like the fashion walk off in Zoolander except with expletives.
Unfortunately, what happened was nothing. They said hello, had a bit of a chat and didn't swear once. Not even a miserly bollocks. What a letdown. Campbell's mellowed since I knew him.
Far better when Campbell meets Adam Boulton.
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I keep banging on to my kids about how great music was when I was their age. Naturally they don't believe me. So when the BBC started repeating Top of the Pops from the seventies, I switched on an edition from 1976 (pre-punk mind) to show them what I meant.
I was wrong. It was crap. Presented by a ridiculous looking Noel Edmonds who appeared to have come straight to the studio from working behind the counter in a bank (and was there ever a bigger banker), it featured insipid, long haired nobodies singing wishy washy ballads about drag race queens and other non-icons that weren't even fashionable then.
Oh well, back to MTV.
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My dad was an official at the 1948 Olympics. He got a blazer with a badge on it and a medal for standing on the pitch at Wembley doing something important with a clipboard. He loved it.
He didn't volunteer. He worked for the Post Office and the government drafted in its own employees to be officials at the first post war games. When he used to say he was a vital government worker I used to think he was a spy but it turned out he used to fix the telegraph and telex machines at Scotland Yard and the then-secret Government rooms hidden in tunnels underground, accessed by mysterious doors around Aldwych and The Strand tube stations.
I mention this because it is a year to go now to the Lord Coe Ego Games, otherwise known as the London Olympics. I want to like it, particularly as it is less than a javelin throw from where my old man grew up and not that far from where I grew up too.
I want to wish it well and get excited about it but it leaves me cold.
I want to feel like getting a wallchart and reading interminably boring interviews by Mihir Bose in the Evening Standard with some bloke who can ride a bike or a flat chested but pretty woman who swims well but I really can't summon up the enthusiasm.
I want to look at that advert with Tom Daley and smile instead of grimace. I want to glimpse Lord Coe without feeling like bashing his smug face in with a discus.
And I want to believe that it's going to regenerate East London and that the stadium will make a great football ground and millions of underprivileged kids will take up basketball and running to escape the poverty of the area and that the flats being built will provide genuine homes for low paid workers and not become buy to let hobbies for 4x4-driving wives of blokes in the City.
Of course my dad, in his blue blazer and white slacks, watching Fanny Blankers-Koen going into the history books, who worked his way out of the East End that is now going to host the games next year, would have none of my cynicism. He'd have welcomed the event and wondered at the buildings going up around what we still remember at Hackney Greyhound Stadium and, as he did when they rebuilt Whitechapel after the war, shrugged and called it progress.
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So, after all that fuss about the Royal Wedding given the nation a boost, it turns out that the extra day off nobbled economic growth for the quarter to the extent that it was way down on expectations.
Told you so.
It's all very well ogling some posh bird's arse and meeting some the neighbours for the first and last time but the only ones who really benefitted from the whole thing are tacky souvenir shops and the Royal Family themselves whose own income has soared.
And it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of inbred Germans.
Auf Wiedersehen pets...Solly
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