Laugh material

It's a welcome return to form from the creators of Extras - no more Pinter-lite miserabilism or guachely-written cameos. The Christmas special was a comedy with the right balance of humour to pathos. The toe- and fingernail curling moments were superbly judged, making one cringe with amusement, but not to the length of time to give you a hunched back; the unwitting self-defenestration was kept to a mininum, so keeping keeping with reality too; and the cameos sparkled, Dean Gaffney doing humility well, Hale and Pace being the funniest they've ever been in their careers and Geroge Michael playing up to stereotypes about him, while Gordon Ramsey expertly dealt with a outing of onerous verbosity, plus many more. The episode even had a happy ending, while leaving open the possibility of future series.
I appreciated the sly piss-take of Carphone Warehouse and its unmentioned association with an unnamed reality show, which of the latter obviously refused consent to use its name and brand, just making the criticism all the more savage (but did CW know what it was letting itself in for?)
I also enjoyed a rare Morrissey sing-over in a sitcom - his voice sounded more youthful and it acrried echoes of The Smiths, though if it was one of their songs, I didn't recognise it.
The one point to demur over though, was for a show whose message is not to look down on people, the Ashley Jensen character says she's "given nothing to the world" and her job of cleaning is seen as depressing, with low lights and everything. The same treatment is for her bedsit. Let me tell you, cleaning is a job that does have little pleasures and the lighting is never so poor otherwise we wouldn't be able to do our job properly. Moreover, it is giving something to the world because without cleaners civilisation as we know it would collapse within days. Civilisation as a whole would not collapse, as evinced by the 1970s, but as we know it, it would. So don't look down on cleaning, a vital soft service provision. That section was obviously written by someone who's never been a cleaner and so resorts to cliches. As for bedsits, they are always more pleasing to come back to if you have someone to share it with. And in London you take what you can get. These were aberrations, however and formed a small portion of the show.
Few televisual presentiments are more pleasing than watching a favourite show regain what made it great and is still relevant. The Christmas special of Extras encapsulated that.

On another humorous line, when earlier this week, Arsene Wenger said England 'must consider' Manuel Almunia for goalkeeper, I have rarely laughed so heartily on a football issue since Graeme Souness told potential transfer target, defender Daniel van Buyten, in 2005, that Newcastle could win the Premiership and at least finish in the top four. Almunia - the most ill-starred Manuel since Andrew Sachs' character in Fawlty Towers (and don't they both come from Barcelona or was it just that Almunia once conceded five against Barca?).
Wenger has already engendered a foreign first XI at Arsenal and now he wants to do the same with England. Interestingly, though Almunia qualifies to play for Engalnd next year, Wenger himself qualified long ago, yet he moaned that he was the only one wanting an English coach to manage the English national team. If he practised what he preached for Almunia, he wouldn't have ruled himself out of contention for the coach's job, saying he would have been interested if he was English, but he wasn't and so wasn't and therefore would not put himself in the frame.
It's easy to be a good goalkeeper when behind a well-marshalled defence. Diving the right way in a few penalties does not make you the next David Seaman (though it helps). David James, on course to set a record number or Premiership appearances is, at the very least, the equal of Almunia (including errors).
Moroever, England maust not stifle the future development of Ben foster, Joe Hart and Robert Green by bunging in a Spaniard with no British lineage in seniority to them. But Almunia could qualify for the other three home-nations as well, since he is uncapped by his homeland. England are just the most high-profile of the struggling UK national teams. Anyway, Almunia is tested regularly now in the white heat of international competition and that's the Champions League.