It’s not been a good week for British justice. First of all, it looks like we’re going to let General Pinochet go back to Chile, unhampered by any icky notions like his involvement in more missing persons cases than Mulder and Scully. It’s not as if it was even us who were going to try him, all we were being asked to do was ship him to Spain. This was just a bit too much to expect, it seems: after all, we have a long tradition of providing a safe haven for doddery old fools — despite the abolition of the House of Lords. I wonder whether we shall see the same miracle which blessed a certain jailed Guinness executive — diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, let out early on compassionate grounds, and suddenly cured with a completeness which would have impressed Lazarus. Expect to see Pinochet on the team sheet for the next Chile international.

Speaking of compassionate grounds, we’re also letting Mike Tyson into the country, despite a criminal record which would suggest that he believes “compassion” to be what happens when you bang your head. At first, our beloved leaders said it would be left to the immigration authorities to decide, after it was pointed out that, by the rules set out, Tyson should be refused entry. Now, Jack ‘U-turn’ Straw has intervened, supposedly to save all those small businesses who would allegedly have been hit by such a ban. Not just a change of heart, but also lungs, liver and spleen, I am left wondering whether Tyson had threatened to arrive at Heathrow wearing a “Vote for Frank Dobson” T-shirt. But heavyweight boxing and our government are fine bed-fellows, given both rank lower on the credibility scale than professional wrestling, and are run by thoroughly shifty individuals with questionable hairstyles and an astonishing ability to twist the truth. In the blue corner, Don King tries to convince us the first Holyfield-Lewis fight was a great draw, and a fine advertisement for boxing. In the red, Tony Blair claims that the Millennium Dome is a great draw, and a fine advertisement for Britain. Seconds away…

As for the Dome, it seems to be in the great British tradition of entertainment that strives to be educational — or is it education that…? Oh, never mind. Its major problem is that, predictably, for a theme park designed by committee, it appears to contain a lot of stuff that is there solely because someone thought it should be, rather than because it’s fun. I’ve no idea what the “Faith Zone” contains, but it’s unlikely to be a devastating proof of the existence of God. Or anything else worth ś20. Such as a psychopathic demon-hunter. [Sorry, season 3 Buffy joke there. It’s between the Giles and Willow Zones…] No wonder the queues vary so much.

Much has been made of the contradiction between the low crowds going there, and the glowing reports of visitors. Yet there’s no reason why the two are mutually exclusive, especially given the British propensity to make the best of a bad job. “We booked these tickets months ago and spent all that time travelling to Greenwich — we will enjoy ourselves, whether we bloody want to or not.” The English will always have a nice time, but anyone who remembers the dinner party scene from ‘Carry on Up the Khyber’ will already be aware of this…

Here’s a prediction: give it a few months, and the ticket prices will come down. For there’s one advantage that boxing promoters have over Tony Blair — they only have to generate hype for 12 three-minute rounds, not an entire year.

Pardon me if this week’s editorial is a little less upbeat and optimistic than usual: it’s bad enough coming back to the office after lunch, never mind following almost two weeks of inactivity and conspicuous consumption, where the most strenuous activity was probably opening another bottle of beer. Or, rather, asking someone else to do it for you. And I discount the three days spent at work (including January 1st), on the grounds there was so little to do that even I’m feeling faintly embarrassed at handing in my overtime claim for the period.

To tide me over the culture shock of my employers asking me to do stuff, I have resorted to comfort eating, aided by the Christmas supplies of junk food conveniently to hand: a brief trawl through the waste-paper basket reveals my entire nutritional intake for the past 48 hours (sorry if this is a bit like the dire Bridget Jones!):

• Most of a 400g bag of Crunchy M&Ms
• An entire tub of Spicy Twiglets
• Two large hot chocolates
• One bag McCoy’s Flamegrilled Steak crisps
• A Crunchie
• A tin of Chocolate Slimfast, consumed in a miserable, failed attempt to stop me ploughing through the above.

I know there was another chocolate bar, but no trace could be found in the bin, and it was eaten so fast I can’t even recall what it was — I may simply have consumed the wrapper as well. But I’ll get over it, providing the vitamin deficiency doesn’t kick in first. Still, I shall live on the pleasant memories of home, and in particular of a week with “the missus”, culminating in a New Year’s Eve when we didn’t even cross the doorstep: she saw 2000 arrive in an evening dress, while I wore just a pair of novelty slippers. Sure beat waiting several hours by the Thames for the ‘River of Fire’ (snigger), before enduring a nightmare journey home, thanks to London Transport’s gross (and entirely predictable) ineptitude. Turning up to such an event counts as a self-inflicted injury, I’m afraid.

Highlights of the post-millennium leisure time included a trip to The Sound of Music. But not just any Sound of Music, this was the karaoke version, at the Prince Charles here in London. Take one battered print of the movie, add projected subtitles to the songs for community singing, provide the customers with a bag of more or less appropriate props (plastic edelweiss, foam nun, throat lozenges), and get drag queen Candy Floss to introduce it all. This could well be the next Rocky Horror show, with the advantage that everyone knows all the tunes already — they’re part of some collective genetic memory. I need say no more than “Doe…”, to get you started.

There was also an excursion to Wimbledon, to introduce Chris to the delights of panto — attempts to explain it to her (she’s an American) usually caused her eyes to glaze over round about when I got to the Principal Boy who’s really a girl. Thus it was off for Peter Pan, with Leslie Grantham as Hook, Bonnie Langford as Pan, and squeaky-voiced gonk Joe Pasquale as Smee. While the last-named would be utterly irritating anywhere else, he was perfect for the role, with jokes that aimed low and still fell short i.e. he comes on wearing antlers — “I put too much mousse on my hair”. Gawd bless the British panto, and Chris bought enough souvenirs to guarantee what I’ll be costumed as, come next Halloween.

How can the delights of office life compete? Simple: they can’t. Which is why I’ve been scarfing down enough sugary, E-numbered goodness to sent an entire battalion of toddlers bouncing of the ceiling. At least it was only a two-day week, but believe me, that’s more than enough for me! Pass the cheese footballs…

As I write this, it’s 08:42 on New Year’s Day, and I’m sitting at my desk in the office. As yet, the Y2K bug has failed to materialise which is thanks, of course, to all the hard work and long hours put in by all of Microsoft’s staff and our many colleagues in information technology worldwide over the past ye…oh, hell, who am I trying to kid? As both you and I know, the whole Y2K bug things has had everyone in the computer industry sniggering into our highly-caffeinated soft drinks over the past couple of years, and has succeeded in making us all (and particularly me) a great deal of money.

As you should already be aware, there never actually was a Y2K bug. Operation Chicken Little, as it was reverently named, began life a few years ago, with a bunch of unemployed consultants up here in Seattle. Sitting in a Starbucks, tossing around ideas for employment, they came up with an idea which was breathtakingly elegant in its simplicity: “if there aren’t any problems, why don’t we cook one up?” They came to me, I put the word out to our terrorist cells (as I like to refer to our overseas offices — it freaks the Justice Department out). And lo, the Y2K bug was born, swiftly spread by word of email round the globe.

For computer programmers are noted for senses of humour which are so dry that ‘Dilbert’ is regarded as hideously vulgar, and we all know that computer managers are such technological Neanderthals that they’ll swallow anything we tell them with a moderately straight face. Many were the meetings where we sniggered quietly, as prophecies of nuclear meltdown, Armageddon, and vending machine irregularity were bandied about. Full and profitable employment was guaranteed, for anyone who knew the right end of a mouse to push.

The great thing about it is that, like all good myths, it has a germ of plausibility in its core. Difficult it may be to believe, but there was (once upon) a time when computer memory was so scarce that writing 01/01/00 instead of 01/01/2000 was a good thing — albeit back in the days when you could give a ZX Spectrum agoraphobia by plugging in the 16K expansion pack. However, even any entry-level PC has a mere 130,484,000 bytes or so to play with; on such a machine, no real programmer would be a) conscientious, or b) bored enough to bother faffing around with a couple of bytes here and there. We’re far too busy turning Word ’97 into bloatware by inserting hidden features involving Pamela Anderson and/or Scottish llamas.

So, for the past couple of years, we’ve been pretending to “fix” the problem: hell, they want screens to say “2000” instead of “00”, it’s no skin off our noses. Naturally, having made the changes, we had to document and exhaustively test them (now, that was a stretch, since we never do that normally…actually, if any of our customers bothered to read Microsoft “documentation”, they’d realise we haven’t done it this time either, but don’t tell them that). Cue overtime! Cue weekend work! And, the piece de resistance, the millennium weekend. We sent in our most foreboding prognosticators, to stand and deliver Nostradamiacal forecasts of floods, famines and plagues of locusts. Net result: we all get two weeks wages for four hours work. Oh, how we laughed.

Now, it’s important that we continue our deception: as the opening paragraph suggests, the stance we’ll take to the outside world is that all our work has paid off, with the transition proving smooth and almost trouble-free. Hell, we actually had to introduce a couple of bugs, it’d have been just too suspicious otherwise. An additional bonus is that is reminds the general public that we professionals are still the masters, the high priests of high-tech, no matter how luser-friendly their Internet provider may be. But God forbid they ever find out it was all a big joke, with them the suckers. They might start buying Linux.

And if anyone has any more ideas for how to screw more cash and/or adulation out of the general public, my number’s in the book.

This is the last editorial of the millennium. And yes, I know it’s not really the millennium, but just tell any complaining pedant that Christ was actually born in 4 BC anyway. Failing that, a witty shout of “Fuck off, arsehole” usually does the trick. Regardless, this area will be update-free, since I’ll be busy getting into the Christmas spirit — not to mention the Christmas beer, and at least two helpings of the Christmas dead animal too. I thus won’t be able to reach the keyboard until about the first weekend in January.

We’ve come a long way in those thousand years. Back in 1000, the Internet consisted of a bunch of monks desperately trying to copy out illuminated manuscripts (of Ye Paemaela Andersonne, no doubt), and getting them donkey’d across for a squire to hold them up in front of the user. And you think lag-times are sometimes a bit bad now. But even a lot closer to our present era, the Internet arrived more or less unpredicted: even William Gibson reckoned cyberspace would be full of sleek data cubes, round which we would whizz at the speed of thought. Or at least, he never mentioned it would be full of people arguing about who would win if Buffy and Xena had a fight [the answer, incidentally, is that Buffy has superior martial arts skills, but Xena’s weapons give her the edge there]. I guess he’d forgotten that the street will find a use for technology…

Thus, where we’ll be in another thousand is anyone’s guess. Hell, where I’ll be in ten days is anyone’s guess: quite possibly reduced to my constituent atoms by an errant ex-Soviet ICBM. At least that’ll save me from having to go into work on New Year’s Day — yup, 0900 on 1/1/00, I’ll be at my desk, ensuring that no matter what chaos and anarchy may befall western civilisation, you’ll still be able to buy shares from HSBC, first thing on Tuesday morning. I trust you are all appropriately grateful. This will, of necessity, slightly limit my plans for seeing in the triple zero, though they were never exactly apocalyptic: Chris is coming over, so she and I have agreed it’ll be far better just to curl up on a comfy couch with champagne and watch it all on TV. Who could ask for anything more?

Especially when the alternatives are a) lining the pockets of greedy venues (99 quid? Get out of here!) or b) freezing your butt off down by the Thames watching a “river of fire”. Was disappointed to discover this is simply a bunch of fireworks, I was hoping they would pour ether over the river and toss a match onto it. Hey, what price a few singed eyebrows? It’s only once every thousand years! Much as the latent pyromaniac in me likes the idea of 39 tonnes of explosives going up (never mind the irony of its location within a rocket’s distance of where Guy Fawkes almost pulled off the best bang since the big one), it’s not enough to drag me out. Part of me hopes it rains — this is not quite as cynical and malicious as it sounds, because I know of precisely no local residents who are planning to go, so the drenching will be reserved for well-deserving tourists.

Part of me wishes the 39 tonnes of explosives to “accidentally” go off too, so if I do go out, I’ll be the one standing by the river, flicking lit matches at the barges. However, I can think of far better places to be: warm, comfortable, slightly alcoholic and cuddled up next to my one true love. That is how to finish a millennium.

Have a good festive season, enjoy the extra-long break, and I look forward to the pleasure of your company in 2000.

BBC2, Tuesday December 14th, 9:30 pm

That sound you hear is a venerable institution stabbing itself in the heart, repeatedly. At least, this was the feeling I got from ‘Sex and Death’, a one-off drama screened last week on BBC2, concerned with the dumbing-down of TV, the quest for ratings and sensationalism. Viewers are referred to The Player, a Hollywood movie about how evil Hollywood is, for another example of what is either irony, or self-immolation. Mind you, any quest for the moral high ground was abandoned in the opening sequence, a fake programme, also titled ‘Sex and Death’ hosted by Ben Black, a presenter played by Martin Clunes of Men Behaving Badly fame. I was rapidly hooked, perhaps because I’ve always had way more time for Clunes than, say, Chris Evans or Terry Christian, but more likely because it had an entire week’s quota of nudity, blasphemy and swearing inside ten minutes.

But it’s alright, because it was being “ironic“, see? And, taken as individual elements, there probably wasn’t anything you couldn’t find elsewhere – though Ulrika Jonsson’s split beaver shot was a first. It was the intense concentration of it which was overpowering, TV for those whose attention span is measured in BPM. The opening sequence of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet had much the same kind of exhilirating, hallucinogenic effect, not so much in your face, as playing the bongos on your tonsils. Fortunately, it then settled down.

Or, perhaps, UNfortunately, as Black began the predictable angst about what he was doing, punctuated by walks in the rain or through London at night (he was, as you might expect, an insomniac — no-one purveying this kind of thing is allowed to sleep soundly, naturally), problems with his love life, etc, etc. Slightly less predictable were his battles with his rival, a slimy, Jeremy Beadle-like (yes, I realise “slimy” is redundant there) presenter, played by Martin Jarvis, who specialises in setting people up. Their fencing provided most of the highlights, leading to a stunningly poor taste sequence involving double-crossing jailbait and a very dubious religious fetish. You could tell that director/writer Guy Jenkin had made his name with Drop the Dead Donkey.

As Black teetered towards the edge of breakdown, this all builds towards the greatest episode of his show, opening with him hanging from a cross in a crown of thorns. Anyone familiar with religious iconography – or even the career of state treasurer Bud Dwyer, will have long been able to work out where this was going. The only question was, would they wimp out? Well, I ain’t gonna answer that, since I’m actually unsure. In some ways, it was a major-league cop, but thinking about it, there was a certain subversiveness, which also fitted in terribly well with the ongoing Christ metaphor. Though I freely admit the concept of Martin Clunes dying for our sins is frankly disturbing — whether he does or not…

“I don’t think it’s that far-fetched,” said Jenkin, and he’s right. So, how far would we go in the quest for entertainment? As far as we want to, I reckon: attempting to hold up the lowest common denominator is a futile exercise in a democratic state. “Sooner or later, we’re going to get blown away by some 15-year old who fucks his granny live on prime time,” laments Black at one point, and he’s right. But just because you don’t want to watch it, have you any right to stop it? Perhaps not, but what if it’s being paid for by your licence money? These are not easy questions, and credit to the BBC for at least posing them. And showing us Ulrika’s split beaver, too…