I’m back in print, like a forgotten author or a Threadless t-shirt with a particularly twee and lovely cartoon on it. It’s an article about the perils and pitfalls of being a 21st-century graduate, but hopefully isn’t too much of a depressive whinge. I’m selling it really well, aren’t I…

It’s the latest from my regular writing gig at ONE Magazine, which is a proper paper magazine like they had before Bebo and Tamagotchis and the White Power Ranger*. It’s free, and always full of interesting and stimulating stuff – poetry, short stories, and a lot of interesting people giving their perspectives and opinions on the world. Then me.

You can read it online but you’ll need to sign up to the website – best just get a physical copy, on real earth-world paper and everything. If you’re in Edinburgh, Waterstone’s at the East End of Princes St have them; London folk can get one at John Calder’s bookshop at The Cut. Other European locations revealed by request.

The rest of my articles for ONE are in the portfolio if you fancy a read. Go on, treat yo’self, you know you want to. Not wanting to means you REALLY want to**.

*I mean the Power Ranger who was green until the time of the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers Movie, when he became the White-with-gold trim Ranger, who morphed into a sabre-tooth tiger. Tommy, I think his name was. Long curly hair, like Al Yankovic. I am not in any way reminiscing over/pining for a return of some form of ‘White Power’ Rangers.

** This is not intended to sound in any way ‘rapey’. I realise clarifying this now merely makes it look worse. Oh dear.

Their second EP in five months, ‘The Rise…’ showcases a more refined sound than on previous releases, with mixed results. Sure, the 6 tracks here are far more accessible and straightforward than the lunatic barbershop and constant time-changes of their first two albums, but unpredictability was a huge part of Hot Club De Paris’ appeal.

Their art-punk still features some tasty riffs and harmonies, and the lyrics are as sardonic and irreverent as ever, but you can see where most of the tracks are going from the first few bars.

You couldn’t say that a few releases ago, and it’s a shame, because with a bit more invention and daring this could have been a great EP. As it is, it has to settle for being just good, which for a band like Hot Club is a disappointment. Before they return to the studio, someone just needs to get these boys some cups, plates and a big pole, and everything will be fine.

Listen to the EP on Spotify here and then come back and shout at me for being horrible in the comments below.

The Scheme follows a number of families in their travails around Kilmarnock, although from the get-go the term ‘number of families’ is a bit ambitious. Six degrees of separation doesn’t seem to apply here – instead it’s 360 degrees, as in “do a 360-degree turn… you are related to each of the people you just saw.” But no matter, as there’s some right ol’ characters in there, right?

There’s Marvin, the ex-heroin addict with the nose that’s attempting a daring escape from its rightful place in the centre of his face. There’s Gordon, who was bad once but assures us he’s nice now. Kay is an idiot who takes in troublemakers then doesn’t really do anything for/with them except cover for them when the polis come a-calling. Throw in some errant kids and the odd animal and you’ve got yourself a sitcom.

Or you may as well have, because The Scheme doesn’t hit the documenary buttons as well as it thinks it does. Granted, there’s the standard ‘grim social commentary’ shots of babies’ dummies on pavements, and empty beer bottles in the dark at a slight angle, but there isn’t really any narrative to go along with them.

A bad thing will happen to one of these people, and when that bad thing has ended, another immediately comes along for someone else. Gordon’s son goes to jail after “shouting about all they Bin Ladens and that” in the Post Office, and that’s sad and all, but now Kay’s car’s been broken into and was it one of the lodgers or was it Chris, who owes a dealer some money, and look, here comes Marvin who’s been nicked for having loads of drugs and now no-one cares and it all seems a bit gratuitous and undramatic and this pace continues almost unbroken for 45 minutes.

The effect is that none of these blows land, and the relatively minor asides and non-events are what stay with you. Gordon’s son in the slammer for eight months? I literally just met him, know next-to-nothing about him or the circumstances of the case; I am not emotionally invested, this programme displeases me. But Kay’s daughter comparing the weight of her Grandad’s ashes with her hamster cage? Mr “Socks” climbing out a loft window like a ginger Spiderman? Marvin’s dog eating his post? Comedy gold.

That, in a nutshell, is the problem. The drama comes too thick and fast to make an impact, so we’re left with a low-key comedy without enough jokes. Turns out that tragedy MINUS time also equals comedy. Now someone get Stevie down before he hurts himself…

Recently, the BBC Trust laid the boot firmly into indie production company Reef for “breaching editorial guidelines”. They were sent to the corner to think about what they’d done. They were allowed back into the fold, but forced to hang their heads in shame. Their heinous crime – faking a few bits and bobs on daytime antiques programmes.

If you’ve never seen any of the programmes in question, they’re basically identical; varying configurations of old people dodder about trying to sell bits of old tat that no reasonable person would ever want or need. That’s it. Factual entertainment, as its known, is the TV equivalent of dry ice, in that it fills space cheaply and easily whilst barely even existing.

The rub here is that members of the production team cut corners on location, leading to shocking breaches of discipline. Shocking, they were.

Members of the production team bought a number of items for the old people to sell as if they’d found them!

Researchers stood in for camera-shy members of the public!!

A cameraman bought a painting!!!!!

I don’t know if it’s the fact that I’ve seen more cheating in my time in student journalism than those guys in Eyes Wide Shut, but this all seems a bit tame. If anything it seems like the Reefers, pushed for time and trying to fashion entertainment out of nowhere, took matters into their own hands rather than risk coming home with no programme.

Cheating is wrong, and should be punished, but this is television. Everything’s fudged to some degree.

News is manipulated every which way so as not to take sides. Current affairs is squeezed by the desire to take any issue and turn it into a simple question that can be answered in 30 minutes. The number of murders in Eastenders is simply unrealistic based on present crime data.

Surely you’re better off with the show you wanted, a show in which antiques are bought and sold (albeit to the guy who was meant to be filming everything) than a Dogme 95 account of pensioners not selling carriage clocks.

The BBC Trust “takes these breaches extremely seriously”, but they really don’t amount to much. Everyone knows programmes are edited to buggery, and we all know that things need to be fiddled from time to time. Factual entertainment is barely factual, can’t we at least make sure it’s entertaining?

To the uninitiated, here’s how the show works. There’s a room, with a single camera. There’s a floor-to-ceiling greenscreen, onto which music videos are projected. The screen is a different aspect ratio to most of the (old) videos, so you end up with some odd sights, such as the lead singer of Dee-Lite‘s smeared and malformed face setting up shop across the entire middle third of your telly.

In front of the screen, a succession of male and female humans dance about, whilst disrobing at the same time. Sometimes we get to hear from them. Guess what? They’re all complete cretins. They love to “get their kit off”, and “just have fun and that, yeah?”.

Sometimes they don’t “get their kit off” quickly enough, so the cameraman might chuck them some props. Oh, melons. I wonder what this young lady will do with those? Oh, she’s insinuating that they resemble her breasts. What a surprise.

By the end of the song, our (presumably) willing volunteer is fully naked, and it’s all jolly exciting. Except that this is TV, not hardcore super-sex, so there’s no shots of breasts or nice glimpses of ballsack.

Instead, there’s just another exhibitionist-a-waiting. And another. And another. For a whole entire hour.

Someone out there in Telly-land commissioned this. People agreed to go on it, and then some other people chose to watch it. 15 million people spend their Saturday nights watching people who openly can’t sing being willingly mocked for their shitness.

But when a panellist makes a funny but near-the-knuckle remark on a comedy programme, it’s a declaration of war on our poor little selves. ‘Please stop your nasty words, we’ve had enough.

‘We don’t want you to be horrible any more, we just can’t take the meanness. Please oh please won’t somebody stop the mean man from being mean?’

Cat/Yusuf was right, it is a wild world. Now can someone please stop it, because I want to get off.

Here’s a quick recap; there once was a 6-year-old boy, Falcon Heene.  In his garden, there was a weather balloon. The balloon flew away, and Falcon wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

The world’s media, the local fuzz, and large swathes of the public all rushed to the same conclusion -  the kid’s in the balloon! Grab your butterfly nets and step ladders, if we work together we might be able to fish him out!

One problem – Falcon wasn’t a-flying.  He was in a box, in the attic, hanging out.

It should have been obvious that he wasn’t in the balloon – the thing’s made of tin foil. You would have noticed if there was something inside, unless it was an actual falcon, just hovering. Some people did figure that out, so well done to them.

But this business of “he’s gone – he must be in the balloon”? Just…no. No. That’s mental talk. If a child goes missing at the zoo, you don’t assume that an elephant’s eaten him just because he’s out of  earshot, even if his flat-out insane father says so.

The police took three whole hours to come up with their brilliant hypothesis of ‘believe the nutjob with the storm obsession’, numerous TV channels ran with it, and soon your everyday man in the street was worrying that he too might float away on a balloon ride of death. Like I said, some people are just a bit dim…

This is not a joke.

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of one of their greatest citizens, the Albanian government want to disinter her corpse and prop it up in ‘Mother Teresa Land’.

The Indians want to keep their hands on her, and the Macedonians also want in on this little bit of saint relocation. She was born there, so their angle is that, much like a mobile phone at the end of a contract, she should be winging her way back to Skopje along with any charging cables and packaging that might be required.

Let’s leave aside the fact that there’s three governments wrangling over a twelve-year-old corpse. Thinking too much about that might lead you to become so disillusioned with humanity that you go on some kind of rampage. And no-one wants that.

What I don’t get is this museum business. Someone’s in the Albanian government’s obviously thought “100th anniversary, we should have a few wee events”, and his superior’s replied “good idea…but we’re gonna need the body.”

No you don’t, stop being mental. No-one’s going to turn round and demand proof that Mother Teresa existed – this isn’t Bigfoot we’re dealing with.

Maybe we should leave the last words on this one to Mrs. T herself;

“By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world.”

The world, eh? I’ve just had an AWESOME idea…

Michael Jackson: The Live Séance, with Derek Acorah.

I wish I was joking. I wish I wasn’t telling you that Sky1 have ordered TWO hour-long specials in which bullshit merchant/“psychic medium” Derek Acorah will “channel”/pretend to talk to popular recording artist Michael Jackson from beyond the grave.

But no, this is happening. Oh, and some Twitterers are trying to get to Jacko as well. I don’t like this side of the glass – the people are all morons.