And the winner is?

I'm in grave danger of becoming a grumpy old man (What do you mean - becoming? - Ed.). I have never understood the amount of time and space given to the adulation of actors and films. This morning on Breakfast News they devoted a straight 40 minutes to the nominations, not the results but the nominations, no less, for the upcoming BAFTA Awards. What's going on? Why are we so fixated by this, or more to the point, why does the BBC think that this is so important? Why do actors and actressses get so much adulation? Why are they paid so much money? I find it all incomprehensible. Every second of every day millions of people around the world make absolute fortunes for their employers so why aren't they paid vast sums of money? In an interview with Kirsten Scott Thomas she mentioned that making a film is a team effort and all her co-workers are so much fun. BIG DEAL. Every job I have ever had involved teamwork and a lot of laughs. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good film or some good acting but for goodness sake, let's get a better balance. Rant over!

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Talking about co-workers that are fun, reminds me of the time when the American company that I worked for bought a small bank, based in Sunderland. This bank came under my direct control and was run, on a day to day basis, by work colleagues who, more importantly, were my good friends. One day I was visiting this business with the CEO of our parent company and during our visit we would receive a briefing on the business and projections about its future. We were each given a folder containing a lot of facts and figures. So there we were sitting around the board table with the senior managers of this bank reviewing statistics and other minutiae. Sitting next to our American visitors, I was turning the pages as we were led through the figures, when my next page consisted of a picture taken of Prince Charles and Diana on the day their engagement was announced. The interesting thing about the picture was that Diana was naked and Charles was standing behind her, holding her very ample breasts in his hands. I slammed my folder shut in shock, because this was a serious meeting, and I tried to catch the eye of any of the guys across the table. They refused to look up and left me to stew over whether our distinguished guest also had an adulterated copy of the figures.

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Jill and Harry came for dinner tonight. We started with a warm duck salad (had to do something with all the duck left over from Monday), red mullet on mixed rice with braised fennel, cheese and carpaccio of pineapple to finish.