You'll Follow Me Back With The Sun In Your Eyes.

I've watched the World Cup in some strange places. In Scottish pubs, full of people proudly wearing the team colours of anyone-but-England; backstage in theatres, desperately hoping that the penalty shootout will be completed before I actually have to go on stage; even in Kingston-Upon-Thames. This year I watched the scrappy, ill-tempered affair between Holland and Spain on a tiny bedside screen in the Royal Marsden Hospital, and it's this year's final which I will remember more vividly than any that has gone before or that is to come.

As I left the Marsden that night, an unwanted thought crept into my brain. Would my dear friend, the man who I'd been visiting, be around for the next World Cup final? I dismissed it as a craven, weedy, disloyal thought. It didn't for a second cross my mind that I had just seen him for the last time, but I had. The magnificent Jerome O'Donohoe died on Friday morning, at the obscene, devastating, laughable age of 37.

I first met Jerome a few days after my 30th birthday, which is to say a couple of months after his own. It wasn't a good time for me. My father was already ill with the disease which was to take his life; the same bastard that has snatched Jer's as well. I remember in particular a night at a little Sam Smith's pub in St Giles', which has a small conservatory running alongside it. My phone rang, which in those days only meant bad news. My mother told me of dad's latest symptoms, treatments, ailments. We were both becoming aware of the fact that this was a battle dad was not going to win, and I strode up and down the conservatory becoming more and more agitated and scared. I had no idea how to return to the pub table and behave normally once the call was over; fortunately I didn't need to. The moment I hung up the phone, Jerome came to where I was standing, gave me a wordless but infinitely comforting hug, and gently led me back to where the others were sitting. He didn't try and say anything, didn't feign concern; he just helped, supported and understood. What will give you the measure of the man is that this was just the second time we had met. Essentially, he didn't know me from Adam. But he recognised exactly what was needed and quietly, unflashily, generously and selflessly provided it.

The problem with writing about the death of someone wonderful (apart from the practical problem of typing through the mist) is that all the things one wants to say have become obituary clichés. Everything that made Jerome so special sounds like something from a Hallmark sympathy card. But it's all true. He DID have the biggest, warmest heart. When I conjure his image, he IS always smiling or laughing. He DID possess, to an extraordinary degree, that elusive quality, the gift of friendship. He really HAS left behind him a gap so vast that nobody who knew and loved him will ever adequately be able to find ways of filling it.

And, so you know I'm not just mouthing platitudes, I can give you chapter and verse for everything. His big heart and extraordinary generosity, for example. I eventually learned not to express enthusiasm for anything he owned, because he'd be as likely as not to give it to you. My house is full of bits of kit, books, even a five disc Eddie Izzard box set, which Jerome just handed over and said 'it's yours. I didn't need it anyway'. As for the smile and the laughter, one of the incidental pleasure/pain aspects of his passing is that whenever the sound of his voice pops unbidden into my head, it's never morose or grumpy sounding. Try it, if you knew him- listen out in your head for his voice. See? A cheerful inflection, a sense of mischief. Only ever seconds away from a joke. And as for the gift of friendship, well. Jerome knew everyone, and to meet him was pretty much to become his friend. So many of my friends became his; so many of his became mine. Because he was interested in people, because he loved people, because he was truly a social animal, he was also the most cohesive kind of social glue. He is utterly irreplaceable; I can only imagine how that irreplaceability must feel to his adored and adoring wife Geri, and to his close and loving family.

In the last dazed few days since he left us, one image comes again and again into my brain. It is Jerome and me dancing around a chintzy living room with two other friends and my housemate of the time. I'd been doing a rep season at the theatre in Pitlochry, miles and miles from home. Jerome came to visit, sharing the long drive with our friend Julia. He saw the show I was in (bellowing out a standing ovation amid a crowd of politely clapping highland pensioners) and then joined me and some of the cast in the after-hours bar near the theatre. There was a song out at the time, an anthemic little number by one of those bands that shifts units by the bucketload but which nobody ever actually confesses to liking. One by one, my housemate, my colleague Fran (who was subsequently to become a close friend of the O'Donohoes- that gift again) Jerome, Julia and I all confessed to having a soft spot for the song. Come chucking-out time we were yelling it antisocially in the quiet streets. When we got back to my digs, Jerome did some business with a mac and some wires and the telly and there was the song, playing through the TV speakers. It took him seconds, and in 2004 the idea that we could talk about a song one minute and have it playing through the TV the next seemed like the most thrilling magic. But that was Jerome, and that is how I will always remember him. On holiday, at parties, at the pub, at weddings, in conversation- he'd come in to the room and suddenly, from somewhere, there'd be music.

Ten Things About The Edinburgh Fringe 2010.

1: A capella groups get quite old quite quickly. The all-female groups are drippy. The all-male groups are smug. Get a piano.

2: There is no competition between a twenty-minute walk and a five quid cab ride.

3: The EUSA shop needs to order more Double Cheese and Onion Ginster sandwiches.

4: My flatmate is not after all the most obsessive kitchen-tidier alive.

5: Acrylic wigs smell if you sweat in them.

6: You're pretty much guaranteed a good show at the Trav, but innit pricey?

7: Not everyone who you think is a lesbian is a lesbian.

8: One of this year's Footlights is a way more committed flyerer than any of the others.

9: A wooden platform will bear a combined weight of around 25 stone for just over a month. After that it's touch and go.

10: Even at the advanced age of 37, it's still the best fun it's possible to have in August.

Bad internet. Naughty internet.

During a break in rehearsals (www.jumpthemusical, you know you want to) yesterday, I embarked on my customary five minute tour of internet inspection. It goes something like this: email,to find out who's been spamming me and to receive countless facebook notifications; facebook, to re-read the notifications my email has just shown me; and then, just for the hell of it, twitter.

Yesterday two names seemed to appear more often than is usual. One, you will probably be unsurprised to hear, was Clare Balding. The other, less predictably, was Gethin Jones. Let's take the latter first.

Initially I wondered why several tweets on my feed seemed to be making reference to the easy-on-the-eye, otherwise uncontroversial Blue Petering health-shop pusher. You might be, too- it was, as it turned out, a minor twitstorm- but it illustrated rather perfectly how the flawless wonder that is the internet can sometimes be so depressingly abused by the flawed wonder that is people.

Here's how the mini-kerfuffle happened. Someone tweeted that Jones was 'no Alastair Stewart', a reference to the former presenter of a programme he now fronts. Jones was somehow made aware of this- perhaps he searched his own name, perhaps someone told him about the tweet- and decided to reply. His reply was 'No shit, sherlock. YOU get the degree for stating the obvious, well done "numbnuts"'

As a reply it isn't Wildean, and I'm bothered by the inverted commas, but it seems like a fairly commonplace exchange. Someone unfavourably compared Jones to his predecessor, Jones responded with mild irritation.

But in doing so he broke one of the internet's most unpleasant unwritten rules. The potshots, you see, only work one way. His flash of anodyne annoyance became a 'hissy fit'. People started tweeting him to say how 'pathetic','Z list' or 'self important' he was, or to affect to mistake him for Steve Jones of T4. In other words, an unremarkable exchange between two people who annoyed each other became, for some, an excuse to hurl abuse at a man who had dared to commit the double offence of (a) being on television and (b) responding in kind to someone who had slagged him off.

People who aren't in the public eye- 'real' people, if we're being tabloidy about it- get to stand behind a wall and say BUM to whoever they like. But if anyone even a smidge famous says 'Don't you say BUM to me! Bum YOU, more like!' that is a pathetic 'hissy fit'. I'm fairly sure, by which I mean certain, that there's a stinking double standard going on there.

I think it would have been wiser of Jones not to reply, and nobody ever claimed the moral high ground with the word 'numbnuts'. But I also think it was understandable- human- that he did reply. And the pearl-clutching over the fact that he may have found the tweet through 'self-searching' is particularly, hypocritically, daft. Have you never put your name into google? I know I have, and so has pretty much everyone I know. Twitter, of course, has a link to search for '@' replies so people can see what tweeters they don't follow have said to or about them. It's human nature occasionally to get curious about what might be being said about oneself, and it doesn't make Jones a preening idiot for wanting to know.

The way twitter reacts to behaviour its users consider unacceptable is now an established social media phenomenon. Stories such as AA Gill's vile playground sneering at Clare Balding (see, you thought I'd forgotten), the man who was prosecuted for making a terrorism joke on the site, the horrid article in the Express about the survivors of Dunblane or (ahem) Jan Moir on Stephen Gately, develop a momentum of their own and quickly reach a tipping point (or twipping point, as someone will doubtless one day christen it). As a way of gently reminding more established forms of media that we won't necessarily accept what we might be fed, it's invaluable. It would be a shame if that precious right-to-reply were allowed to degenerate into throwing random snowballs at people, and running to teacher when they throw one back.

Hello, blog.

And hello anyone who's reading. I'm busy doing acting at the moment which is why I've been so scandalously lax in updating this. I presume you're all watching That Mitchell And Webb Look, are you? Good good. If you're not, there are still four more episodes to go. Phew.

I'll be back with something more interesting when I'm less tired and, indeed, more interesting.

I couldn't help but wonder...

I've never been a 'Sex And The City' fan. I don't know if you're surprised by this, although I do know that if you're a film critic you're likely to be. The fact that 'Sex And The City 2' is apparently not a great film (and, let's face it, it sounds AWFUL) has given scribblers everywhere the opportunity for a good old bit of gaybashing-by-proxy.

It's something that started back in the days of the TV series. Someone noticed that the man who brought Candace Bushnell's book to the screen, Darren Starr, was gay, as was the exec producer, Michael Patrick King. At that point, someone made the not-unreasonable observation that the female characters in 'Sex And The City' sometimes talked and behaved in a way more usually seen in gay men. So far so tame.

But that tame little theory grew and grew. People- and not just people, columnists too- started to say things like 'Of course, the series is actually about gay men' which developed into 'Those characters aren't really women' and soon it became pretty much accepted that SJP and co were nothing but powerless pawns in a twisted gay game of 'hate the woman'. That opinion reached a very queasy nadir in the reviews of the film this week.

Several friends have posted a review from a Seattle newspaper on facebook; it's one of those things that has gone viral. And yes, it makes the case against the film quite brilliantly. But sitting right in the middle, there it is- the irrelevant mention of the sexual orientation of some of the producers. The film, says Lindy West, is 'a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls'. It's not an offensive remark, per se- but it is an unnecessary swipe, isn't it? I wonder how far I'd get if I described, say, the film 2012 as 'Jews playing with Action Men'?

Leave it to the good old Evening Standard, however, to go from the allusive to the flat-out offensive. Andrew O'Hagan starts by referring to 'Carrie Bradshaw and her gaggle of gay impersonators', thus reaffirming the idea that these characters, created by Candace Bushnell and exec produced by Sarah Jessica Parker, are nothing but projection on the part of some benders. Am I being oversensitive? Well, how about the description of Kim Cattrall's character, Samantha? As a preface to discussing her venality, vulgarity, and narcissism, O'Hagan chooses to sum her up as 'Stonewall on Ice'. Never mind that this is a meaningless piece of phrasemaking ('on ice', Andrew? Talk me through that) its implications are stinking; she's a deeply unpleasant character, as can be summed up by the word 'Stonewall'. You tell me if that is in any way acceptable. You explain to me how that isn't the rankest prejudice.

I'm sure that 'Sex in the City 2' is an egregious piece of film making (the scene where burqa'd women reveal they're wearing designer clobber underneath sounds particularly jawdropping) and of course many gay men have been involved in its creation. Millions more will go to see it. But I still don't think that justifies the journey our tame little theory has taken from 'it's by gays' to 'they're all gays' to 'oh, she's just vile. You know, pure Stonewall'.

Anyway, you'll have to excuse me. I'm off to dress dolls up in Louboutins for reasons hidden in my woman-hating pysche.

Daughters, Reclaimed.

I don’t write much about TV round here, and certainly never anything approaching a review, for obvious reasons; a bit too close to home, and not very collegial. But having lamented the decline in quality of TV drama in a letter to the paper the other week, it would seem churlish not to hang out the bunting when something excellent and important is made.

‘Five Daughters’ set itself the extremely delicate task of dramatizing the events leading up to, and including, the murder of five women in Ipswich in December 2006. You remember, the prostitute murders- because of course, that’s how the story was told to us at the time. Indeed, when some reports dropped the p word, in favour of calling the women ‘sex workers’, columnists such as Richard Littlejohn fulminated against namby-pamby liberals and political correctness gone mad. These women were prosititutes, he insisted, and should be referred to as such. Have a look on YouTube for Stewart Lee’s magnificent response to that article; I won’t spoil it for you, but if ever I write a line even half as good as ‘One wonders what lengths Richard Littlejohn will go to in his quest for the accurate naming of dead women’ I’ll be a happy man.

Anyway, you probably, like me, remember vague details. There was the blonde on the train, caught on CCTV. There was the dark haired one, the youngest, who lived at home. One of them was pregnant. One had an unusual first name. And they were all drug addicts, of course.

The huge achievement of ‘Five Daughters’ is to take these half-remembered half-truths and gently to question and correct them, while at the same time showing us where the women came from, what made them tick, how they ended up standing on dark streets in the freezing cold in the knowledge that a killer was on the loose. To separate them from each other, and the one tragic fact they have in common. A note about the dramatization of the kerb-crawling scenes- they are unflinchingly unglamorous. Never mind Billie Piper swanning around in beautiful dockside penthouses, we’re all used to a certain shabby chic being applied even to images of street prostitution. The halo of sensual streetlighting, the sexily dressed girl in the impossibly high heels leaning into the car, a seductive smile playing on her lips… ‘Five Daughters’ shows us shivering, frightened women in parkas and fleeces, on quiet, empty, soulless streets, steeling themselves as the headlights creep towards them then muttering the word ‘business’ through the open window. It brings home the fact that, even when there isn’t a serial killer behind the wheel, the best possible outcome- the best- is that the sex will be quick and the man, kind.

But, in talking about that aspect of the series, I’ve fallen into the same trap as the media did at the time of the murders. This isn’t a drama about prositution, it’s a drama about desperation. The desperation that leads the women to the streets; the desperation of their families, both to communicate and to protect; the desperation of their friends when calls go unanswered for first hours and then days; the desperation of the police and outreach workers to fight the killers, both human and chemical. I watched the first two episodes constantly on the verge of tears (I’m being very previous publishing this today- the third episode is on this evening and may be terrible rubbish for all I know. I somehow doubt it though.).

The film-making and the screenwriting are excellent, then; but the quality of the acting is mindblowing. A glance at the cast list raised hopes- Sarah Lancashire, Juliet Aubrey, Anton Lesser, Martin Compston, Ian Hart, Jaime Winstone, Natalie Press, Eva Birthistle, Sean Harris. But scene after scene crowds into my memory, insisting on a mention. Lancashire helplessly demanding that she be allowed to collect her absent daughter’s methadone prescription, then begging, then accepting exhausted defeat. Press, as Paula Clennell, heartbreaking in her brave, guilty disappointment when her mother cancels a planned visit on a flimsy pretext. Aubrey, unbearably stoic, almost matter of fact, as she prepares to view the body of her murdered daughter, and then breaking down, her face collapsing in on itself. Aubrey also played her part in one of the most remarkable scenes I’ve seen on TV for years. We had seen Anneli Alderton (Aubrey was playing her mother, Maire) on the verge of making a new life for herself. Released from prison after serving a sentence for drug offences, she had a plan to become a mobile hairdresser. Maire and son Tom noted with relief that there was no sign of ‘blonde Anneli’. Then Anneli’s best friend Gemma disappeared, sending her into a spiral of fear, guilt, and self loathing. In the scene I refer to above, she turned up at Maire’s house out of the blue and gave her the kind of needy hug a child gives to a parent she knows she is about to hurt. Disappearing into the bathroom, she returned to her mother’s kitchen with hair dyed an aggressive, steely blonde, scraped back in challenge. Her eye make up was a declaration of war and, chillingly, she had reverted from her normal lower-middle class accent into a heightened, combative rude-girl backchat. Aubrey and Winstone were just phenomenal in this scene, the mother trying to assert her authority over a child she knows she has somehow lost, and the daughter using bravado and aggression as a mask for terror. Winstone gave a masterclass in playing the subtext, and Aubrey’s resigned but devastated expression as she emerged from behind a cupboard door to see the front door open and her daughter gone will stay with me for a long time. The wonderful, encouraging thing about all these outstanding performances is that they were achieved with restraint, with a kind of direct truthfulness borne of underplaying. After twenty-five years of exposure to the high-decibel histrionics of EastEnders and the like, it was a welcome illustration of the power of acting rather than the self-indulgence of ACTING.

The first two episodes will be available on iplayer, to viewers in the UK, and the third airs on BBC1 at 9pm tonight. Unsurprisingly, I urge you to watch, not just for its excellence but for what it has achieved. Steven Wright and the tabloids between them turned these five human beings into dead prostitutes. This dignified, honest, honourable, annihilating drama turns them back again.

It might be worth having a little look at the lyrics.

CHANGE. HOPE. FAMILIES. DECENT HARD-WORKING TAXPAYERS. CHANGE.

In the light of that 'message', being fridgemagneted and madlibbed by all three of the major parties in the run-up to the election, the choice of Keane's 'Everybody's Changing' for the launch of the Tory manifesto must have seemed like a brilliant idea. Firstly, it's totally cutting edge (it was released as recently as 2004!) plus, also, CHANGE. Everybody's changing, see? Like, changing their vote to David and his team of DECENT, HARDWORKING, FAMILY TAXPAYERS for CHANGE?

It's a shame, of course, that nobody asked Keane- whose drummer has already expressed his horror via twitter. But, if the Tories have paid their PRS money, they can play whatever they like. What's a real shame is that they didn't bother to work out that songs have lyrics as well as titles.

'You say you wander your own land
But when I think about it
I don't see how you can'

Not bad so far, I suppose. Bit BNP-ish, I suppose- 'CAN WE EVEN CALL BRITAIN OUR ROYAL LAND ANY MORE?' and all that, but otherwise neutral enough. Oh- maybe they're talking about right to roam, though? Let's see what's next.

'You're aching, you're breaking
And I can see the pain in your eyes
Since everybody's changing
And I don't know why. '

Great start to this verse, for Honest Dave and co. The country is Broken Britain- it's aching, breaking, and in pain. For a bonus, there's almost an echo of the great Billy Ray Cyrus, too. And look- Everybody's Changing! There we have it. CHANGE! HOPE!

Oh, I've just seen the last line of the verse. Surely the Tories ought to know WHY Everybody's Changing? I do hope they're not confused. Well, only one way to find out:

'So little time
Try to understand that I'm
Trying to make a move just to stay in the game
I try to stay awake and remember my name
But everybody's changing
And I don't feel the same. '

New, tough choices for a Brighter Britain. Or a description of someone having a nervous breakdown?

I can't think of a better example of the poverty of our national debate than the party which is likeliest to form the next government co-opting a song on the basis of two words, and not even thinking to check what else it said. Soundbites, kids. That's all we're going to get.