Quality Foods

I haven't been going anywhere or doing anything except working on the book for a while but then this weekend I've had a couple of belters. On Friday I went to see a recording of Lab Rats - a new sitcom written by the estimable Messrs Chris Addison and Carl Cooper and starring the aforementioned Chris Addison and some other people. It's dead good. They're recording on Friday nights for a little while and you can get free tickets here.

Quality Foods, originally uploaded by Dave Gorman.

This was followed by a lovely night at Hell's Kitchen on Saturday. The food was good (fab mussel soup/slightly dry fish cake/sherry trifle better than the one my auntie Peg used to make at Christmas) but the secret ingredients that made it a really good night out were:
a) my Dad
and
b) surprise.

The old fella was visiting London for the weekend and staying with yours truly so I thought it would be fun to take him there and even more fun to not tell him where we were going. I was right.

They film it at Three Mills studio. I think three mills is one of London's lovely little hidden gems but you approach it by taking a dark and dingy lane through a dark and dingy industrial estate and you definitely don't feel like you are on the way to any kind of fine dining experience.

How many times are you going to sit down for dinner with your Dad and have a conversation that legitimately includes the phrase, "Crikey, I see Andi Peters has been working out!"?

Not often, I'll wager. And he has, you know. It's like seeing Andi Peter's head attached to someone else's body. Tickled by life. Very, very tickled.

Do

My publishers were throwing a party last night and they invited me. Was it a trap? Were they inviting me because they wanted me to be there or because they wanted to see how dedicated I am to writing this book?

"Oh yeah... you claim to be working hard... but you obviously have time to party, Mr Gorman."

In the end I decided to go. If it was a trap it was a silly one. If it slows down my writing they'll only have themselves to blame. Besides, it was a huge opportunity for smugness. Cyclists are a smug breed at the best of times but never more so than when there's a tube strike. You can grind to a halt if you like London... but there's nothing you can do to stop the cyclists. We will prevail. Lovely.

Ketchup

Ketchup, originally uploaded by Dave Gorman.

Charm Offensive

Another crack in my "sorry, I'm not available, I'm writing a book" armour has been found. I was a guest on Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive yesterday. The show will be broadcast on Radio 4 at 6.30 this afternoon and then in its special 18-hours-less-topical format, it will be repeated tomorrow at 12.30.

The other guests were Jo Brand and Will Smith which makes for about as polite and civilised a bunch of comics as you could really hope for. It was one of those lovely recordings where it didn't feel like work at all, just an evening spent in good company being silly.

At one point I found myself ranting about daytime telly, making mention of the Car Booty episode I discussed here a few days ago and the use of music in Homes Under The Hammer too. Thoughts that were only crystallised because I'd written about them here basically. Which is an interesting side effect to blogging that I hadn't foreseen. Whether it will make the edit or not I don't know. Nor does it really matter... it's just interesting (to me) to discover that thoughts that would previously have floated through my brain unchecked were instead digested and turned into something vaguely useful because of this outlet. Who knew?

Afternoon Teas

Afternoon Teas, originally uploaded by Dave Gorman.

Photoboasting

Wheel, originally uploaded by Dave Gorman.

With apologies for what promises to be a dull and self-serving post...

Here's the thing... the photo you see here has apparently been selected as one of twenty pictures (from eighteen different photographers) to be exhibited at the National Media Museum in Bradford this autumn.

It's part of an exhibition called Britain in Pictures which is connected to a BBC project of the same name. I'm slightly confused because, while I submitted a few photos to the project, I didn't realise that this exhibition malarkey was a possible consequence. I know that sounds disingenuous but I really didn't.

The thing is, I like photography. I also like the photography website, flickr and I have an account there. Flickr contains groups for all sorts of different interests, themes, styles of photography and so on.

I read about a group for photos of British buildings and seeing as I have a fair few of those and it only takes a few clicks of the mouse to join, I did so and submitted a few photos. I knew it was connected to some BBC4 photography project but I obviously didn't read the small print or I'd have known about this exhibition. But I didn't. Until I received an e-mail telling me that the judges had selected their favourite twenty photos and that this one was amongst them.

I'm told that when the exhibition has finished they'll send me the framed photo. Which is nice.

I'm not sure when the exhibition starts but you can see all twenty photographs on the BBC website here.

Here ends the photoboasting. I told you it was dull.

Kinder vs Ülker: Egg Wars.

I can't be the only person to have noticed how Kinder Eggs have got worse over the years, can I?

It's not like they started off great. It always seemed like a dodgy sales pitch in the first place when they had the advert in which - if memory serves - a badly dubbed child asked their mother for "some chocolate, a toy and a surprise."

I always thought it was a bit cheeky of them trying to make it sound like there were three things involved when in actual fact the toy was the surprise. It wasn't some chocolate, a toy and a surprise... it was some chocolate and a surprising toy. But I'm quibbling. And this has nothing to do with my complaint.


This is the thing. I'm pretty sure that in the beginning a Kinder Egg toy was something that needed some building. You built it and when it was finished it was normally bigger than the plastic yolk that the parts had come in. That was the point of the Kinder Egg... they'd ingeniously put inside them, toys that shouldn't have been able to fit inside.


But then it all went wrong. In my recollection it started with the Smurfs. The toys started being small little molded bits of plastic that you didn't have to build... and obviously that means that they were all small enough to fit inside the egg in the first place. The first time I opened a Kinder Egg to find a small plastic Smurf I felt cheated. I mean what was the point?

Recently I've noticed that one of my local shops sells a different brand of chocolate egg; the Ülker Toto. I think it's a Turkish brand but wherever they're from they have renewed my faith in the whole chocolate-egg-containing-a-toy genre. Let us compare and contrast.

The first major difference is that the Kinder variety has milk chocolate with a white chocolate inner lining:

While the Ulker is just milk chocolate:

Personally, this doesn't bother me either way. If you're a chocolate connoisseur I don't think the chocolate-containing-toy market is really for you. What's more interesting is that the plastic yolk inside the Ülker is clearly larger than that from the Kinder:

But what they contain is more instructive. The Kinder Egg contains a small plastic Smart Car. It's already been built so there's no fun construction to be done.

while the Ulker contains 12 different parts - including an elastic band - promising a world of fun.

Put the parts together and you have a small purple dinosaur on wheels. There's no way you could put the completed toy inside the yellow plastic container. More exciting still, the elastic band powers a small motor. When you push the head down towards the ground, it stretches the elastic band which is connected to a gearing system. Let go and the band contracts, the head rises and the whole thing scurries forward on his wheels.

Surely a purple dinosaur that has elastic band power built in and who is bigger than the egg he came in, kicks the arse of the pre-built tiny toy car. More importantly, the dinosaur is precisely the kind of toy that I remember getting from my first forays into Kinder Egg ownership.

The Ülker Toto appears to have all the qualities I used to admire in the Kinder Surprise.

Thank you Ülker Toto, whoever you are.