On Monday Ewa Sowinska said they were gay and I don’t mean deliriously happy or in a fine frame of mind. She reckoned, I imagine, they were shagging each other, though I confess I have never seen this, and I have sat through many hours of Teletubbies.

I can’t see how they would have had the time, to be honest, what with preparing all the Tubby Toast, going out on their scooters, making Tubby Custard, looking for Po’s hat and jumping in and out of puddles because they're there.

Me? Yes I have always suspected them, of being actors inside furry costumes designed by the British to make money, and oh yes, I suspect they also keep your kids quiet during the day because they are four furry creatures with aerials on their heads and TVs in their plump bellies.  

Now, apparently, the Polish child rights ombudsman says she no longer suspects The Teletubbies of promoting homosexuality.
I’ll tell the one and a half year old, he’ll be so relieved.

I mean, the woman is either really underworked or just bonkers. Well, she is from the far-right, ultra-Catholic League of Polish Families (LPR), which says a lot.

Can you believe, she’d originally said she was planning to gather a group of experts to investigate The Teletubbies!

Now, I know that Tinky Winky carries a handbag, but really...

"I have heard that this could be a hidden homosexual insinuation," said Sowinska in an interview published on Monday in the weekly magazine Wprost.

She’s not the only one to cast aspirations on The Purple One (as Tinky Winky is sometimes referred to in my house). When the show was first broadcast in the US, the late Christian campaigner Jerry Falwell also took exception to Tinky Winky's handbag.

Tinky Winky was "modelling the gay lifestyle", Falwell charged in 1999, unintentionally sparking a rush for Teletubby merchandise on America's gay scene.

Then there are the blankets and duvets, made in China, which have been found to have killer amounts of formaldehyde amongst their soft, downy fibres. Apparently most of these have been sold to old people's homes where no doubt many are getting the kind of deep, peaceful, possibly never-ending sleep that previously their old bones could only dream of.

Now, I also hear that Australia's other main food retailer, Coles - they are the ones who keep trying to sell themselves to private equity firms but are finding it a bit hard to even give themselves away - have 200 people shopping in China for goods which can be sold here on our supermarket shelves.
Thanks, but no thanks.

And (yes I know, all my sentences today start with only a passing acquaintance to proper English, but I'm just trying to fit in) every time I go into Woolworths they have another load of made-in-China products. The latest is toilet paper. Oh yes, that makes sense, doesn't it. Chop down Chinese trees, make them into toilet paper and then put them on a ship to Australia and sell them cheaper than the Aussie-made ones.

You can see what Woolies and Coles are up to (and just about every main retailer, I mean even Farmer Charlie is at it). Their cheap Chinese goods will price out all the other competitors, most of whom are Australian companies and Australian farmers. Only last month SPC, the Aussie tinned foods company, had to dump 10 per cent of their tomato farmers because of cheaper foreign tomatoes, though in fairness most of the offending cheaper toms are from Italy, which is also bizarre when you think that being on a ship for two months is less expensive than growing them in Ballarat.

The other thing is this, most of the garlic in the shops here is from China these days and while you can be sure they slop all sorts of pesticides on it and god know's what else (that's why it's so white, a bit like the teeth really) that we wouldn't give house room to, the Aussie quarantine people spray it when it arrives with a pesticide that has been banned everywhere in the western world because, well, it's a dangerous chemical that causes cancer.

You know in Britain, if you come up with a good idea people snarl at you. They don't like it. I don't really know why, but I think it's got something to do with the “mustn't grumble” school of thought where you should always be happy with your lot. In Australia you can go up to someone and say, “look, what I'm going to do is design a rocket and then build it and then blast off next month to Jupiter because I think there's a bit of potential up there.” and the Aussie will say, “not a bad idea mate, I can see that working. Give it a go", and they genuinely believe it. There's none of this, “well, I told the chap that it was a damned fine idea, but frankly Biffo he's never going to get it off the ground. Simply didn't go to the right school, don't you know?”

Anyway, Don lives in Bondi. He lives in this house that he rents and he sub-lets rooms to other people. He has a studio on the top floor which is the third floor and he's within walking distance of the beach so though you can't see the water you can always smell the sea. He's also near Bondi golf course. The golf course is bounded on one side by the sea, so when you lose a ball that's it. I guess some of them even hit English holidaymakers who are unlucky enough to be tugged out to sea by the rip-tide. If you were one of those being swept away I imagine that really would make your day complete. There you are drowning and then a golf ball whacks you on the head. Super.

Don says to me, come and have a look out the window here, and I do and in the building next door, which is a block of smart apartments, there's this good looking girl playing a violin. She's two floors below so we're sort of looking down and across at her and we can see almost all the way into her apartment which is lit with sunlight.

"She is so good looking,” says Don quietly.
“What's with the violin,” I ask.
He looks at me, “She plays it.”
She's strumming the violin like she knows what she's doing. It doesn't even sound bad. Snatches of the music float up to us on a breeze from the sea.
"I'm going to marry that girl,” says Don and I wonder if he's been getting a bit too much of that sea air.
“What's she think about that?” I ask just as quietly, watching her, listening to the music. I think it's a bit of Beethoven.
“Well,” says Don, also watching her, “I haven't actually talked to her yet. On account of her boyfriend.”
“Oh,” I say, moving away from the window, “that's going to be a bit tricky then.”
“I don't think so,” he says, turning towards me and spreading his hands, palms up flat, “see she plays the violin and I'm - ?” He waited for me.
“Well, you're a gas fitter.”
“Mate! I am a musician! I make music! It is only a matter of time before our musical talents collide.”
“Hmm,” I said and turned to look out the window again and listened to some more music.

Two weeks later Don calls me up and says, “Come round. I want to show you something.”
I drive over there and he has the TV wired up to the video player. He shows me this film of the girl from next door who, it turns out, is called Zady. In the video she's sitting in Don's room talking to Don about music. On the tape Don has this fan gently blowing in the room because it's so warm and she's wearing this filmy dress and the fan breeze is playing with the edges of her dress. Because she doesn't know she's being filmed it's actually a whole lot more sexy than any other video I've ever seen.

“See Tone, I'm going to go out with that girl,” says Don as the tape comes to an end. “She's already interested in playing in my band.”
“On the violin?”
 “Well, I've been having a think about putting a string section in the group.”
“What about the boyfriend?”
“I don't think he'd be interested, He's an architect.”
“No, I mean what are you going to do about him? She's not going to go out with you while they're still living together.”
“Well,” he says, “I hear them arguing all the time now, so way I see it, it's only a matter of time.”

Three weeks later...Don calls me at work. It was like a scene out of Seinfeld.
‘Hey,” he said, “guess what happened?”
“Tell me,” I said as I continued to tap on the keyboard.
“That girl, Zady.”
“Yeah.”
“She ran out on the street yesterday.”
“Yeah.” I said, still typing, only half listening to him.
“And she was screaming.”
My typing slowed.
“Really screaming -”
"Yes,” I said, listening properly now, leaning back in my chair, the computer abandoned.
“The boyfriend's dead!”
“Jesus,” I said coming forward in my chair and nearly head-butting the computer screen, “How'd that happen? He was only maybe, what, 32?”
“Yeah, 32. She came home and he was lying on the sofa and he was just dead. Had a dicky heart or something.”
“God.” I paused. And then I said, “So when you going out with her?”
“Friday.”

So, Zady starts playing in Don's heavy rock band, her violin fighting with Duggs on double bass and Monster on the drums. It was an interesting sound, but the more I listened to them the more confident I was that John Bon Jovi had a future. There was something a little frightening about Zady's playing. Gone were the soft lilting chords that the sea breeze had brought up to us that day in Don's flat and in their place was a savagery that seemed to come from another place entirely. Of course it was to be expected. When you're in your mid-20s you don't expect your 32 year old boyfriend to lie down on the sofa one afternoon and die. Not when you're out. Imagine the way things had been left, the words that hadn’t been said. What a terrible business.

Anyway, Zady and Don started going out. This had to be the worst thing to do. And, no of course, I didn't tell him that. Some things you just have to find out for yourself.

Perhaps not too surprisingly the relationship didn't last and when it finished it upset Don a lot. He really thought he'd found his soulmate but when they broke up she said to him, “You know, I never fancied you.”
“What!?” said Don, “after all the things we did?”
“That,” she said, “was just sex.”

The truth was, she'd wanted a shoulder to cry on, just one, and Don’d wanted her, all of her, not just her shoulder. But it was a relationship with three people in it. And one of them was dead. How can you compete with a dead man? Well, you know, you just can't because he's already had the last word.

I mention this because yesterday afternoon I was barbequing some sausages (just getting some practice in during an idle moment or two) and his gardener turns up - yes, I know, some people have more money than sense. The gardener is known as Rogue on account of the fact that a friend of mine once spotted a big piece of lawn he'd missed but presumably charged for and said, "You know, that bloke is a rogue."

So, Rogue comes around and has all his gear with him which is basically anything petrol-driven that can produce as many decibels as the space shuttle during blast-off and he comes down Deaf-Man's driveway with the mower going full pelt (lord knows why because the driveway is cement...). Deaf-Man is loading some sticks into a bin and Rogue has his bright orange ear muffs on.

I'm casting an eye over the fence as the snags cook and Rogue's Caltex Vortex powered lawnmower screams at his feet, and continues to scream, as Rogue stops and decides to have a shouted  conversation with the man who cannot hear. I just couldn't believe it. It went like this:
"Mate."
"Whaddya say, mate?"
"What?"
"Yeah, mate."
"Hey mate."
"Yeah, mate, speak up."
"Mate, speak up, there."
"You know...mate, can ya hear me?"
"You know, mate, ya gonna hafta speak up mate. Can't hear ya. Deaf."
"What? You deaf, or what?"

After a bit more of this they just looked at each other and then both shrugged and went about their business.

Deaf-Man looked at me over the fence and I thought, oh no please God, no. And over the roar of Rogue's mower which by now was criss-crossing the lawn, he shouted to me, "Mate, how's it going over there?"

Of course, it sounds pretty idyllic. There was only one problem...there were an awful lot of French people...

In fairness my attitude to all things gallic was mostly coloured by the folks next door. They had more visits from the gendarmerie than criminals, which got me thinking...they must be criminals. They lived in this old falling down house in which they brewed illicit substances which the young men of the family consumed in copious quantities.

Anyway, when I bought the place it was actually pretty run down – for example there was no ceiling it was just open to the roof tiles. So, I got my brother to come down with me for a few weeks to sort it out.

Now, I know nothing about anything practical and frankly I’m always surprised when I’ve managed to dress myself in the mornings and if a tie is involved, well if I get that right first time I feel we are cooking with gas. My brother on the other hand could take the Space Shuttle to pieces and rebuild it in a day and it will go even faster and be much improved (and possibly the tiles will stay on). He’s always had this gift and it is remarkable to me. I once said to him, “you must wonder how I can write?” and he said, “No, not really.”

Hmm.

Anyway, the house in France will never fall down. It was built in 1714, before the French Revolution, and I’m sure it will outlive most of us.

Downstairs there was a large flagstone-floored lounge with the biggest fireplace you’ve ever seen. You could stand inside it and look up straight out at the sky. It burnt more wood each evening than you could poke a stick at, but by golly did it produce some heat. In the winter I’d go to bed with a glowing, red face, the skin stretched tight like I’d been on the beach all day. It was great.

In the lounge there were massive roof beams, and these were truly massive, let me tell you. I don’t think you’ll see trees this size any more, not least because they were holding up the ceiling and hanging the walls together in my house in France. When the forests that contained these trees existed it must have been just awesome to walk amongst them.

The beams were dirty brown and between them the ceiling was painted a bright turquoise colour. Now, you always think of the French as having more than a bit of style, but take a good look. They don’t always get it right. Okay, they’ve had some great painters and they keep most of their old buildings, unlike the Brits and the Australians who seem to think that if it’s old it should be flattened and something new built in its place, and they dress pretty well and their cars don’t look bad (notice I said ‘look’ - believe me, they have plenty to learn about reliability...) but have a closer look. Look inside some of their homes. I tell you, it is screamingly bad.

Now, the agents who helped me buy the house were pompous English types

- let’s call them the Boulevards.

Anyhow, Boulevard heard I was coming over and he asked me if we had room in the van for a bed that they’d ordered from some swanky British store. I have no idea why they didn’t buy a bed in France, after all there seemed to be plenty of them about in the shops and most people had at least one in their houses. Whatever the reason, I said I’d bring it over.

My brother and I loaded the new bed into the van and took it down to France and turned up at his place. We had a beer with him (he never offered wine. I think he figured I wouldn’t be able to appreciate the finer points of its well-rounded bouquet, its complex texture and velvety, layered flavours) and we sat in his living room, the lights down low on this particular winter’s evening and a fire playing in the grate, its yellow and orange flames flickering as the wood it burnt crackled and hissed.

We talked about the differences between the French and the English and he said that you could never quite trust a Frenchman, which struck me as a bit strange in that he’d decided to live out here in deepest France and had taken the trouble to speak what appeared to be faultless French. Anyway, we started talking about your Frenchman’s style and as I cupped my beer and let the fire warm one side of my face I said, “You know, sometimes it amazes me what they do here.”

“You mean?” asked Boulevard.

“Mean what?” asked my brother.

“Mean?” he said.

My brother frowned at him and leaned forward in his chair to see if that would help his understanding. It didn’t.

I took over the line of questioning.

“Well, don’t you think it’s funny that they are renowned for their style and then they go and do some really stupid things?”

“Like?”

“Yes, I like it a lot,” said my brother, revolving his empty bottle in his hands and looking at the beer suds on the inside, “and yes I’ll have another one. Thanks very much Monsieur Bou-le-arse.” My brother never really got the hang of French.

Boulevard glared at him over his half-moon glasses and then looked at me with his eyebrows raised in a question.

“Well,” I said, “take the interior of their houses. I moved into mine and between the roof beams the previous owners had painted the ceiling a hideous turquoise colour.”

“Yes,” said my brother, slowly putting his empty beer bottle on a small side table, “and that woman in the bank. We saw her house and she’d painted her ceiling bloody bright yellow and the beams were bright blue!”

“Exactly,” I laughed, “and the guy in the house just down the road from us. Jesus, his ceiling was pink.”

Boulevard took in a deep breath and leaned back in his chair and said, "There’s no accounting for taste old chap, no accounting at all.”

And the fire crackled and a silence fell, I leaned back in my chair and rested my beer bottle on my stomach and I looked up at the ceiling and in the flickering light from the fire I discovered that it was a bright red, in amongst a collection of bright green roof beams.
I didn’t move for quite some time, though I did scrunch my eyes closed and my buttocks clenched so tight my brother jumped and said, “what was that!?”

We've had ex-PM Paul Keating saying it should be on Garden Island in Sydney Harbour - presumably where the populace can't get at the pollies, well, not unless they're good swimmers - Queensland Premier Beattie reckons for some unknown reason that it should be in Brisbane (I hear there is room near the topless car wash) and someone in Melbourne thinks it should be there because it's trendy and they dress in black. Apparently people in Canberra have no idea where the capital is but they say they have enough space for one.

Clearly the God people – whatever persuasion they may be – are not happy at all about the secular side fighting back. But why not? God gave us free will, didn’t he?

And it’s about time too. The creeping evangelist Christian fundamentalists are getting way too much space to preach their particular gospels and of course it’s beginning to affect all of our lives. I bet you won’t find a politician alive who will tell you he doesn’t believe in God – too many lost votes in that.

That English bloke, Dawkins, who was on TV last week, and on again this weekend, makes a frightening point when he says atheists are having to meet in secret as the Christian right ever increases its presence and its power.

Who do these God-worshippers think they are? It’s up to every individual to make their own minds up, not be castigated because maybe they don’t believe in superstition. I mean that life after death idea. Now while I was never a great fan of Kerry Packer’s business ethos I tend to believe him when he came back after actually dying and said, “mate, there’s nothing there.”

And what about that business of the meek shall inherit the earth?

Gee, the world’ll be an interesting place when the meek get hold of it. Given one car space and two cars trying to get in (or perhaps it’ll be winged chariots by then, who knows...) for example...

“Look, you take the space.”
“Oh no, you deserve it far more than me, oh meek one.”
“But pray why, I am no meeker than you.”
“Oh, I believe you are, do please get up off your knees while I genuflect some more, praise the Lord.”
“Oh you make me meek to my soul with your infinite meekness.”
“Oh no, ye are meekest of the meek, I meekly insist. Oh no, I don’t insist of course, wash my mouth out with holy water, I merely meekly proffer the space before me to your meek chariot. Lord preserve us!”

I mean really, the shopping will never get done.

Anyway, I liked the Bertrand Russell idea that there was a teapot up there circling the moon and it was so small and moving so quickly that astronomers, even those with the most powerful telescopes, couldn’t see it and told him it didn’t exist. He replied, “I don’t care if you can’t see it, I believe in it, I believe the teapot exists, and you can tell me no different.”

An Equal Music by Vikram Seth
Certainly not music to my ears. Boring and really hard to tango along to, I can tell you.

Fire Ice - a Kurt Austin Mystery - by Clive Cussler
"Austin's eyes took a few seconds to adjust to the dimness". Took me a bit less time than that.

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Can someone please wake me when it's finished?

The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy
He couldn't finish. A sentence. Properly. It's. Bollocks.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Really, I would, if I could pick it up.

So we went to the NIDA class this morning and joined about 12 other young actors and actresses. Funny thing was, the parents seem to be more into this acting business than the children who really didn't seem interested in imagining they're an egg about to hatch into a chicken (well, who would?) or that they were a bird looking for a new home after a nasty property developer had chopped down their tree. Personally I thought this latter scenario a bit too close to real world events. Where was the trusty old evil witch, I asked myself?

Anyway, the thing was this, all the parents also had to do the acting thing with their kids which meant I got some exercise I hadn't bargained on - things like wriggling your left foot first and then your right and then turning all around and doing the hokey-pokey, as I think it's called here (as kids we used to do the hokey-cokey but perhaps that's become a bit dodgy now, as I assume in street parlance it refers to some kind of fast acting recreational drug - the times we live in).

After about 10 minutes the kids had pretty much all dropped out and after another 10 I realised they were all playing with each other in one corner of the room while us adults were in a revolving circle, swooping and soaring and cawing as we sought to act like ravens flying over the wood (well, what was left of it after Mr Property Developer had had his way with it) and then we all had to pretend to cry as the devastation below took hold.

Some of the parents really got into it and one woman couldn't stop crying, even after the scene had finished and we were singing the leaving song - I imagine she had other problems aside from acting in a children's drama class. On the way home, junior said to me, "I have never seen a raven that cries before." Indeed.

I only spent a short while with him but gee it was memorable. He gave me his card as I left and I was still clutching it as I made my way across the street in the rain (being careful to dash across because of the automobiles) and when I got into the car I saw the ink had run all over my hands and I could no longer read his name or contact details. Shame that.

Now, they are always pleading poverty but they have loads of the folding stuff. If they didn't the gold plated taps outside which they use to water the garden would hardly be there, now would they?

When they bought the house for just shy of a million and a half it looked just fine to me but they are Australian so they decided it needed another $16 million or whatever spent on it. It does look splendid and I fancy if a Doge (that's a Doge, madam) came over from Venice they'd feel perfectly at home amidst the glitter and splendour.

Anyway, with being a large Italian family (but Australian Italian, you understand...) everyone was there. I've met most of them before including Uncle Angelo's six beautiful daughters (look, if you really must, but on no account touch...), Uncle Romano's five boys who run various businesses which apparently offer a red or yellow Ferrari as part of the salary package (though 18 year old Sammi has a Maserati, because he's a bit different, what with his Greek girlfriend), and smouldering cousin Josephine who can never be left alone with a man for fear of igniting a passion more fluid than Vesuvius when it's on gas mark six.

I was introduced to Uncle Benni by Piso Pomadio, a distant cousin from Palermo, who I have not met before, but who put his Armani-clad arm around my shoulder like I was his best friend and smiled at me with an expensive set of teeth which flashed in the strobe lighting like road markers when you're doing 120. He guided me to the group and told me Benni was, "the mafia member of the family". I laughed. But no-one else did.

There was an entertainer but if you want my opinion she should have gone home and looked up the word in a dictionary before setting out again in her totally outrageous yellow and orange flared trousers and groovy hair (her words, not mine) to entertain children, all of whom couldn't have been more traumatised had Uncle Benni organised a hit there and then.

The kids enjoyed it all and danced all night (well, in as much as a one and a half year old and a four year can dance. Actually, they are much better than me but then I can't dance at all) while I sipped Chianti (I didn't realise Dan Murphy's did a cleanskin version of that, but now I do) and ate steak, lasagna and enough proscuitto to keep pigs worldwide trembling in their cots.

We left around 11pm as various arguments had started and I feared a gun or a very thin stiletto (the knife, madam, the knife) might be employed to help someone sleep with the fishes.

Anyway, I'm in one of the aisles and I hear this bloke talking to a girl who, by the sound of her voice, is about 11 or 12. I take a peek around the next aisle and indeed she appears to be his daughter and he's at least mid-50s. What amazes me though are his next words to her. He picks up a copy of Brokeback Mountain and waves it around and says, in a none too quiet voice, "so, how about watching two gay men get it together in a tent?"

I didn't know what to think. Here is the middle-50s man talking to his daughter who is hardly out of her Barbie days, about this film.

I couldn't believe it. Now, I know when I had the Brokeback dvd playing I had to pop out a couple of times for a fizzer in the little boys room (as my cousin Roderick would say) and I also had to go and boil the kettle a couple of times for tea during the film, but really, I just thought they were a couple of mates going off fishing and drinking once a year or so. Imagine my horror to discover that their good natured wrestling in that tent on that frozen mountain was something more than good mates having a bit of a tussle and a laugh.

Anyway, a woman who comes into Georgie’s vegetable shop who is 40 and married for 15 years and the mother of two kids has taken his fancy somewhat (I can read between the lines, oh yessir) not least because her husband goes out when he wants, pops off on golfing holidays with his mates, and she cooks one meal for the kids in the evening and then has another completely different meal waiting for him when he gets home. It seems that she was telling Georgie she hadn’t been out socially without her husband for 10 years and didn’t feel she could because she felt guilty about leaving him with the kids for an hour or so.

George was open-mouthed about this and said to me, “Jesus, how come I didn’t marry this woman?!”

I didn’t say too much – generally I’m outspoken but it was his round next and you know you shouldn’t jeopardise that – but I was thinking, when you married your wife you partly did so because she was a nubile 23 year old (she’s  ‘blossomed’ since then and is only not travelling overseas with her mates because she’s finding it somewhat difficult to get in an airline seat) and you wouldn’t have looked twice at anyone over 25 back then.

The other thing is, Georgie, old mate, your young wife has never travelled – well aside from the honeymoon when she was scared to leave the Spanish hotel room on account of the large number of foreigners, well, Spanish people, milling around the streets – and so she thinks she’s missed out on...something.

I don’t know, perhaps I should go into the marriage guidance business. It would keep me off the streets. And lord know’s, there’s a market out there - oh yes indeed.

On a business trip to Brisbane he took the new salesman out on the town and ended up roaming the streets singing and sucking the life out of bottles of FourX until the police arrived and told them it was illegal to drink alcohol on the streets. “We don’t fuckin’ care,” bleared the nephew, whose name was Kent, “we’re from Sydney.” And then he ran off up the road, with a copper in hot pursuit.

The young salesman spent the night banged up in a cell while Kent, powered by booze, somehow managed to evade capture and slept it off in a park.

During the night someone took his mobile phone and wallet and by all accounts had a right old time spending the loot, maxing up his credit cards and phoning all the relatives they could find worldwide.

One time I went with him to a conference in Hong Kong and he insisted on going to what he called the Titty Bar. I said, “I thought you’d never been to Hong Kong before?” He leered at me, “Mate, they have a Titty Bar everywhere.” Needless to say I made my excuses and retired for the night.

In the morning he staggered into the restaurant for breakfast, stood swaying, sweating in the doorway, hair spikey on his head, bloodshot eyes staring around the room as if he wondered not only how he’d got there, but who he was.

This is the thing with French films, they can be about nothing very much at all (or rather a lot, depending on where your mind is at...) and when they end you sometimes just stare at the screen for a while and wonder if perhaps there has been some transmission problem, it has ended so abruptly.

The point is, this film is 240 minutes long, so long it even has to go on two DVDs, and what is it about? Basically, beautifully shot though it is, it's about EB posing for two to three hours, us seeing every brush stroke, every attempt (and there are many of them) to get the picture right. And that's about it.

Now, while I could look at Miss EB's naked form for a considerable time (and indeed did...) I just felt the whole thing went on for far too long and when it gets to the end, well, it just ends.

The good news is, I suppose, that Hollywood could never take this film and do anything Hollywood with it, not least because most of the studio executives would not be able to spend three days watching the original.

A damning indictment, for sure, and it underpins how much has changed over there in the past decade where a gun culture now flourishes (the police though are still unarmed) and drugs are increasingly causing problems - turf wars, criminality and violence.

Makes me glad to be in Australia, I have to say, especially now I have kids. It's definitely safer for children here and Aussies are far more welcoming of screaming little kids - even if they don't have any themselves - than the Brits who still have that 'should be seen and not heard' mentality. Often in the UK you feel you're doing something wrong, almost criminal, taking your children into a restaurant or a pub, while here it's never a problem.

Mind you, I do worry about the education sometimes. I say this because I've had a lot of university students working for me over the years and almost without exception I've been shocked by how little they know. Some of it comes down to travel, I think, or rather lack of it. The ones who've taken a year to go off and see the world know what's what but the one's who've stayed, well, it's a worry.

I'll give you one example. One girl who'd finished her law degree, so she could go off and start practising the stuff, God forbid, came and worked at the publishing company as, I suppose you'd call her, an intern. She was a lovely girl but boy oh boy you'd have to wonder what they taught her at school and uni.

One day she said to me, "I can't believe Australia is not a member of the G8 group of countries."
"Well, " said I, "why would it be?"
She looked at me like I was the dim one and said, "but we're one of the biggest countries in the world!"

Anyway, it's good here for kids and I suppose you just have to make sure you help with their education yourself. As a final thing - when I first came to Oz I said to one of my Aussie friends, "I can't believe parents let their kids run around in the supermarket."
"Yeah," he said, "they can get under your feet."
"I don't mean that," I said, "it's just that in England if you lost sight of your kid for a minute someone would take him."
My friend looked at me as frowny as that lawyer girl and said in genuine puzzlement, "But why would anyone want your kids?"
That's the difference between here and there, and long may it continue.

Anyway, they want to put me on the 10am and I tell them that will be too late so they say, with a grimace, “well, we could squeeze you on the 8.30am,” and the two of them exchange glances which must mean I’m going to have to travel in the toilet, but that would be okay because there’s slightly more room there than in the seat.

So the flight is half an hour late taking off but the good thing about that is they make up the time so I'm only aloft for an hour.

Now, how they manage to infuse the whole of Brisbane airport with eau de McDonalds I just don’t know, but for sure it is an impressive marketing success – well, if you’re McDonalds. You know, they really could do with some new carpet too, but I think I’ve said this before and clearly no-one was listening.

Now, the media training went fine (although the finance director from the company I was training couldn’t remember things like how much profit they had made that year, even though it’s on their website...) and come the early afternoon myself and the two people from the Sydney PR company who I’d worked with were back at the McDonalds Big Mac and Fries Airport for the return journey, which was an hour late taking off.

That was okay though because it gave the three of us time to talk about the Ralph Fiennes tryst with the Qantas hostie and we decided that if it was Virgin they wouldn’t have sacked the hostie for having sex in the toilet with a famous actor, they would have put her up there as a poster girl. We reckoned Virgin would have built an advertising campaign around it.
“Fly Virgin and you too could find one of our delectable hosties in the lavatory when you pop in to relieve yourself. We call it, getting it up in the air, and at Virgin we’re proud to bring you yet another on-board entertainment option which sets us apart from our competitors.”*
(*There is a charge for this service, which also attracts a 10% fuel levy).

Anyway, the three of us get on and sit together right at the back (because at Virgin they let you get off the back as well as the front, so you can be first off...dah-dah!) and we’re chatting about the day and the hostesses run through the safety info and then we’re taxiing for take-off and one of the hostesses comes and squats down by my side and hisses, “next time I’m doing the pre-flight safety you should listen and not be chattering, especially when I come to the bit about landing on water.”

I look at her and wonder if we’re going to crash into the sea and so I say, “Look, sorry about that, but why would we be going over any water?”
She looks at me fiercely. “Well, we might.”
“But,” says I unwisely, “there has never been a successful landing on water. Not ever. Before you can say, what’s this whistle for, the plane will have sunk. And we’ll all be dead.”

One of my colleagues elbowed me then and I smiled at the girl and she gave me a mean look and then disappeared.

Now, my colleagues don’t know me that well. We work together on training and I get on with them fine but about me personally – what I do in the evenings, for example – they have no idea.

So, we’ve been up a while and this other hostess and a male steward come along pushing a trolley and the hostie, who for some inexplicable reason (this is Virgin, remember), has to be in her early 50s (or for some reason is wearing very poorly for a 20 year old...) looks at me in my aisle seat and does a double-take and says, “Oh my God! You’re on my plane! I can't believe it!”

My colleagues both snap their eyes up from their women’s magazines and stare at this woman who is now touching my leg.
“It is, it is!” she says to the steward who looks at me with pursed lips and says as gay as you like, “Are you sure?”
“It is isn’t it!?” she says, excitedly clutching my knee now.
“Who did you have in mind, madam,” I say, knowing that once before a taxi driver in Sydney reckoned I looked like and sounded like the British comedian Ben Elton. (“Oh yeah,” I said on that occasion, “he is pretty funny.” And he looked at me and said, “You think so?”).
“It is, it is!”, she squealed now.
“Ooooh, I think you’re right,” said her colleague. “Yes, he has the look, alright.”

The hostie is by now looking like she’s going to have an accident in those Virgin knickers any moment and she blurts out, “Sex and the City!” And by now my colleagues are sitting there, mouths open thinking, “Jesus, he does that as well as media training!”
“You are. Aren’t you, you’re the one. Oooh, I can’t remember your name. But it’ll come to me in a minute.”
By this time the people in the next three rows of seats are craning their necks to see if Robert de Niro is on the plane (I have no idea who is in Sex and the City – I’ve never seen it...).

“Ooooh, you have that look, that film star look! I can’t believe you’re on my plane!” And that’s when my colleagues laugh because I'm more George Costanza than Bobby De Niro (but I'm not bald you understand, not bald at all) and I am too stunned by now to talk and the hostie’s trolley is being pulled, urged on by the gay steward because this is beginning to get embarrassing, not least for her, and she says, whispers confidentially, “Anything. If there’s anything you’d like, just let me know.” And she touches my leg one more time, with feeling.

Anyway, it all went fine (one of my gigs these days is being spokesman for an internet venture...) and when I came on the TV, the kids recognised me so that's good (though there was a false alarm when another almost bald bloke came on. Do all bald blokes look the same?).

I used to be on TV quite a lot back in the UK (but once they caught me and imprisoned me that was the end of that - no, no, only joking, your honour) but it's been a few years and it seems my dress sense has improved somewhat. Well, when I was 24 nobody told me a herringbone tweed jacket would look like I was wearing a fireworks display and cause viewers to gasp and avert their eyes. Apparently it so shocked a 94 year old woman in Maidenhead that she altogether came over with an attack of the vapours, the like of which her husband hadn't seen since their wedding night.

I asked the camera man - this being A Current Affair - if I'd be chased down the street