I seem to be having a non-net week. As mentioned on Friday, I’ve been a wee bit tired of late, something that’s been dragging on and off since before Xmas and it’s getting a bit annoying all told. This weekend I’ve been physically exhausted and it’s got to stop. I’m going to spend a couple of weeks seriously chilling out, and that means not spending quite so much time actively online. I’ll still be checking emails and occasionally adding stuff to the weblogs, but nothing major.

Easter’s coming up soon and I’ll have five days off then. Can’t wait.

Little tip to keep you going for a few minutes: What Cud Have Been – the tribute site to my fave band of the ealy 90s (after the Pixies of course…)

This last week I’ve been absolutely fucking exhausted. There’s a big mirror in the lift to our floor with very unforgiving lights and I had a good look at my face last night.

I do believe I’m a wreck.

Need a break, need a rest, need to do nothing…

You will no doubt be aware of the Anthea Turner autobiography debacle which generated vast quantities of schadenfreude last year when it failed to sell 2000 copies across the country. Well, I have good news. Very good news.

The BBC, who as a publisher are the most smug, self righteous bunch of wankers I’ve ever had the displeasure to deal with (although their rep is a nice guy, which is a shame…) recently broke out of the TV tie-in market and started publishing books which do not have hours of free advertising in the national media. The first few books did pretty well. They timed the Steve Redgrave biography well (making one wonder if the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award might have been a fix) and were expecting great things of their most recent acquisition.

You’ll have heard that Esther Ransen has an autobiography out. It got a lot of coverage in the papers which care about this kind of thing and some of the papers which don’t. Something to do with her stepdaughter or something. I was published by the BBC a couple of weeks ago and, across the chain I work for has sold a grand total of 700 copies. We haven’t sold a single copy.

Once again, there is a god.

Now, publishers, please stop commissioning B-list celebrity biographies. Or if you must, don’t pay so much money for them. And stop being surprised when they don’t sell. These people do not have fans, they just have too much exposure. Terry Wogan has fans, that’s why his biography (another BBC book) was top ten at Xmas. Esther Ransen does not have fans. Yes, people might be interested in reading about her in the tabloids, but they ain’t gonna pay £17.99.

Please learn.

In the “boxes from my mother’s attic” were some back issues of Private Eye from the mid 90s. In Eye 861 (16th December 1994) there’s this amusing feature on the Daily Express:

The Express turned its gaze on “The Barrons Making Huge Profits From Sleaze” and focussed on “seedy empires built on dirty money” (acompanied, purely to illustrate the nature of the problem, by photos of nine scantily dressed young women) with the emphasis on the activities of Paul Raymond, Ron Davey, and Richard Desmond.

The latter came in for particular scrutiny with his picture captioned “market leader” and the text explaining that “he lives in a London mansion near Hampstead Heath, drives a Bentley, sports a fat cigar and has rubbed shoulders with the Duke of Edinburgh”. But, the paper warned its readers, despite the shoulder rubbing, “just under the veneer of respectability is a story of women being exploited and degraded.”

Funny how things turn out in the end…