Quintin Jardine's blog

Watching Jools. What am I missing about Paloma Faith?

Happy New Year, hope mine is as good as yours.

I’m open to suggestions as to what should be done with Katie Hopkins, the more colourful the better.

Happy family Christmas at Chez QJ, enlivened by Rex and his visiting cousin Benjamin, both wondering where all the paper came from but enjoying tearing it apart. I hope all yours went as well as mine.

Heart and Soul – Joe Cocker. A day for a tribute: if I was told that I could only keep one of my JC albums, this would be it.

I’m in shock at this moment, having just learned that a good friend has passed away. I’ve known Gerry for going on twenty years and can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel better for being in his company. Heaven will be a funnier place from now on.

Our deepest sympathy to June and the family.

Three nights, and three series finales with The Fall coming to an end yesterday. No scope for a whiz-bang ending, I’d thought but I was wrong. No spoilers for those who recorded it, but an unexpected question is out there waiting to be answered. Will there be a third series?

How about now – Ags Connolly. My friend Wallace made me a serious country music follower when he introduced me to Alan Jackson. I wish I could return he favour by directing him to Ags Connolly, who’s invented his own sub-genre, Ameripolitan.  Ags may be an English folkie from Oxfordshire, but he’s produced one of the best albums of the year.

And so farewell to Will, Mac, Don, Sloan, Jim, Maggie, and most of all Charlie. A day after the end of The Missing, Sky Atlantic showed the finale of series three of The Newsroom. It’s gone, and it won’t be back, but you can bet Tom T Hall will be thanking the producers for boosting his pension fund.

That’s the way to finish a series: you give the addicts the resolution they want, throw in a little sadness, then batter it to death with schmaltz and happy endings.

Mind you I’m going to miss Will MacAvoy. I wish we had a real news anchor like him on British TV, but we don’t. Adam Boulton makes a decent fist of it, and then there’s the amiable but essentially dim Eamonn Holmes, but both broadcast to minority audiences on Sky News. The main line channels are bereft of such talent; half an hour ago, I switched off BBC Breakfast and escaped back to the recorded Newsroom. I don’t like Charlie Stayt and Naga Munchkin at the best of times, but when the talent-free zone that is the abrasive Steph McGovern joined the party, my hand leapt of its own volition to the remote.

The only solution i can offer is for BBC to pretend that Will MacAvoy is real and to hire Jeff Daniels to present its mainline news programming. With a budget in excess of five billion, I’m sure they can afford him.

So it was a combination of an accident and a bungled cover-up, Emily lives happy-ish ever after and poor old Tony pays for his undetected crime by going mad, growing a beard  and stalking children all around Moscow, looking for (and finding?) lost Ollie.

Disappointing? Maybe just a  little, but let’s see where series 2 takes us.

To those stuck for a  Christmas idea, a late reminder that ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow‘, my semi-secret but still well-reviewed political novel is now available in paperback format. It’s supposed to be exclusively through Amazon, but by some means that I do not understand copies are also available on the monster that is eBay. I advise buyers strongly against taking that route, as in all probability you will be ripped off. Beware also of any marketplace sellers advertising copies as new, as originals can only come from Amazon itself.

Just had a piece of news and I’m in a quandary. Someone I know and revere has found a new job. I couldn’t be happier for her in that it takes her out of the madness, but I’m devastated for me because she’s irreplaceable and will be missed more than she can ever imagine.

For a glimpse of how the other 0.001% live:

http://www.ussubmarines.com/submarines/index.php3

Alison – Elvis Costello. Elvis/Declan has been one of the best and most  prolific songwriters for going on forty years, and yet his first Anthem is still his outstanding and most memorable work. But . . . if you can find an album called Piano Jazz, with EC and Marion McPartland, that’s my favourite. It’s a recording of a radio show, half conversation and half acoustic classics, and it is PDB.

If you can’t find it:

http://www.esculapi.com/index.php?lang=eng

Nice.

Did you know you can buy wine on Amazon? Yes, you can, but don’t; it’s damned expensive.

Couldn’t help laughing this morning, when I read that the Spectator has accused George Osborne of being ‘pusillanimous’ over spending reform. My dad would have loved that; after he had his stroke, he had a therapist whom he called ‘Pusillanimous’. My mum and I never did figure out whether that was a  description, or simply the closest he could get to her real name.

Whatever, it’s clear there is little cross-over between readers of the Spectator and  the Daily Star.

I’ve just seen a Sky tv ALDI ad offering wine for as little as £6.99. In ALDI L’Escala you’ll struggle to pay more than €4 for the same product.

We are being ripped off.