Before the Festival
23 December

I spent the final weeks of the year at work hastening my charges though their training in customer care.

The mornings were icy cold and dark but the work went well.

We have just welcomed a new member of staff, Richard. He is the first new arrival for a long while. In recent years, the story has been more about departures and, with that, the average age of the staff complement has gone from being in its mid-30s to the mid-40s. Richard brings with him youth, enthusiasm, energy and very nice pair of buttocks. Not since the days of Stevie B have I had some office totty to look at.

Yoga and reiki have also helped me through.

And meetings with friends - drinks with Roland and a telephone conversation with Gill. I've not managed to make contact with Phil, Chris or Colin but, no doubt, I shall soon.

Cranford came to an end on BBC2. I'm completely bowled over by it. Scripting, acting, production values produced one of the best pieces of television all year. The DVD will be released early in next year and I have asked sister, Linda, to give me the wherewithal to purchase it for her Xmas present.

Under normal circumstances, Oliver Twist would have rated as one of the best television series of the year but it has the misfortune to be set against even better company. The adaptation was more faithful to the book than lovers of the musical Oliver! will recognise. Fagin's gang become part of the tapestry and not the main focus. I liked Timothy Spaull's portrayal of Fain as being Jewish without resorting to the caricature that Dickens offers. Tom Hardy's Bill Sykes was young, brutal and very sexy. His relationship with Nancy (Sophie Okonedo) was abusive and erotic. And he was also damaged and vulnerable. The most chilling moment came towards the end following Fagin's death when The Artful Dodger (Adam Arnold) headed off into London with the dog Bullseye quite clearly on his way to becoming the next Bill Sykes.

On Radio 4, I completed listening to the Classic Serial adaptation of Dr Zhivago. It was excellent from first to last and, if like me, you thought that you knew the story from the David Lean film then you were in for a big shock. I presume that this version modelled itself closely on the book because it was barbarously violent in its portrayal of a society breaking down after a violent revolution.

Spooks also came to an end. It's been an exciting run of programmes. The main disappointment was that Zak (played by the delectable Raza Jaffrey) disappeared after the first episode and only reappeared as a corpse very late on. I'd been looking forward to the chance of the actor finally getting his kit off.

However, Spooks seems to have an unwritten convention that one of its personnel must be non-white. Zak arrived to replace Danny (played by David Oyelowo) a character who seemed incapable of spending an episode not walking around in his underwear. The Zak character has been replaced by a freelance reporter called Ben Kaplan (played by Alex Lanipekun). His first scene showed him discretely hopping out of bed having spend the night with the (female) MI6 operative known as Jo. We hope that he will do the right thing and disrobe immediately when the next series begins.