If you were attentive at about 9.40 on Christmas morning and were watching BBC1 you might have spotted my brief amphibious debut as Mr Jeremy Fisher in Peter Rabbit’s Christmas Tale. If you have small children or are an ardent Dan Chambers fan you still have 6 days left to catch it on iPlayer.

My auto correct has a hard time allowing me to capitalise the “p” in iPlayer. It also insists that it’s name is auto correct rather than autocorrect. And the native WordPress app for Android is horrible.

This is one of my favourite Adrenalini episodes – partly because I got to sing El Boca’s song, but also because there’s so much going on in the story, and it all leads to a satisfying conclusion.

Nary
Atop
Penned
Anon
Moi (unless the writer’s French, obviously)

Whereas these words:

crepuscular
adumbrate
pulchritude

make me stamp my shiny feet in ecstasy

The Adrenalini Brothers is coming to POP UK – Sky channel 616 or Freesat 603. Tune in from this Saturday 9-11am and every Saturday from now until the end of time! Or until the end of the licence. Or until your eyes wither into little raisins… whichever happens first

I gave up drinking 6 months ago. Well, to be more exact, I gave up binge drinking 6 months ago. Since then I’ve had probably eight or nine drinks, but never more than one in a night. My girlfriend announced she was going to cut it out, and I thought I’d give some moral support – I was a little curious too about how much of a challenge it would be. Also no binges means no hangovers – the last time I got drunk (just over a year ago) the hangover was a truly horrible experience, partly because it included both a high-pressure meeting and a transatlantic flight.

Here are a list of things I have learned in the last six months…

1. There are very few actual non-alcoholic drinks in pubs. Unless you’re lucky enough to get proper lime in your lime-and-soda, every drink involves obscene amounts of sugar and/or caffeine. If you’re matching people round-for-round, after about three lemonades your teeth are stumps and you’re so hopped up on sugar you can see the future.

2. Unless you’re going out to eat or to the cinema or theatre, there’s actually very little to do in town apart from wander around. Thankfully I love wandering around.

3. People will (when they get past the sheer disbelief) always ask you the same question when you tell them you’ve stopped drinking. “Do you feel better for it?” – and when you tell them no, not really, although you’ve lost a bit of weight and probably gained a lot of wasted hangover-time back, they will feel slightly disappointed but secretly delighted.

Just the facts,  please!

Here’s a sample of one of the regular expressions, designed to weed out pointless adverbs. I even managed to build in a filter for common spelling errors (the question mark in regular expressions means that the preceding character can appear or not and the operation will still be carried out, so both “truly” and “truely” will be caught):

<input type=”regexp”>”(increasingly|beautifull?y|enviably|generously|very|extremely|conveniently|wonderfull?y|true?ly)”</input>

There are still a few things to iron out, and I can’t keep up with their spelling mistakes so will have to concede defeat there. But it crunches down the text by as much as a third and makes a grim task a bit more palatable.

It actually is the Goodyear blimp. And it’s headed for the Beckers in Hackney.

Shit phew, just missed.

“

As you can see, The Word Magazine called it one of the best cartoons in kids TV history… so you know you’re in for a rip-roaring thrill-packed fun-o-matic seat-of-the-pants electric brainstem datablast!