We went to Felixstowe on Saturday. We’d been before, but only to Languard Fort; this time we walked along the sea front behind the beach huts as far as the sea defences, which curve out into the sea like some giant’s stepping stones.

Felixstowe was once an important holiday resort with three train stations serving the town the beach and the pier. Now there’s only one, and it’s not so much a holiday resort any more. The pier is closed and falling down and, out of season, the beach huts were all closed up for winter.

We walked up and down to the high street, along the sea front and back to the bingo for a cup of tea. It was closed, so we ended up in The Alex, a snazzier bar than most, where we drank coffees and milkshakes under the outdoor heaters watching the sun go down.

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felixstowe, suffolk, coast

Maxine, the Awards’ award

Last night was the Awards. It always coincides with the Expo, so I spent the morning stuffing bags, slipping discount cards into magazines and eating Kettle Chips. At two we took a taxi to the Hurlingham Club to rehearse, and put programmes on the tables and bags of space dust under the tables.

I actually quite enjoy all that, despite it annoying the serving staff as we slip shot glasses between the carefully measured-out wine glasses, and menus into the napkins. You don’t need to think about things, and once you get into a bit of a rhythm the afternoon fairly flies by. The rehearsal was over before we knew it, the taxi was there and we were swished off to the hotel for too-short showers before heading back for the night proper.

So how well did it go? Very well, indeed. We dispensed with the autocue this time around, and I managed to get through my lines with only one trip-up. We had text-in competitions, which worked first time around, the food was good and the entertainment was excellent. Terry Alderton did the comedy and handed out the awards, and the Three Waiters had everyone waving their serviettes in the air above their heads as we ate dinner.

It was, I think, the best Awards of the five I’ve done with MacUser (and I thought I’d only done four until about an hour before we kicked off), which makes topping it next year an interesting poser indeed…

Claire and Westy demo the brand

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Apart from selling off Television Centre, the BBC is set to make 1800 staff redundant in its effort to plug a £2bn funding gap. It’ll be the invisibles who disappear, of course: not the big names.

But when you look at the numbers, that makes sense. You could argue that Jonathan Ross should go, on account of his £6m salary alone, but if you split that up among the 1800 set to lose their jobs, it equates to just £3333 a head.

Perhaps Graham Norton, then. Snipping him from the payroll would save a cool £2.5m and immediately improve the quality of the Beeb’s prime-time output.

But no – cutting the big names isn’t the way to make up a £2,000,000,000 shortfall. It’s such a staggering figure that it equates to £1.1m for each of those 1800 destined to lose their jobs, which is why more dramatic savings need to be made elsewhere.

Sadly the predicted increase in repeats is inevitable, and the sale of Television Centre will certainly help, but snipping the odd £6m here by canning Ross’s contract, or £800,000 by giving Wogan a permanent lie-in won’t do the trick. We’d have to lose 333 Ross salaries, 3703 of Chris Evans or 2000 Jeremy Paxmans to do that and, frankly, the BBC just doesn’t have that many of any of them.

So instead it should return to the policy of spending its money where it’s seen – on screen – and ask the top management to trim their own rewards instead. Looking at last year’s Annual Report and Accounts, the Board of just 16 people took home a total of £4,611,000 in salaries and bonuses, to which you can further add their pension contributions. Upper-limit management salaries just beneath these are not revealed, but it’s likely many are not far behind.

How they can call for job cuts lower down the chain and continue to take home these sky-high salaries is beyond most license payers’ comprehension.

Isn’t this where they should be looking to make the first savings?

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Hiding a geocache is no easy task.

You have to find somewhere interesting, nowhere near another cache, secluded enough to not be stumbled upon by accident and not on private land. And not only do you have to do all that; you also have to prove it to the moderators.

So – as I say – not easy, which of course we didn’t know when we decided to hide our own.

We thought we’d struck gold two weeks back when we found a large tree by a distinctive hole in a crumbling wall, and picked up enough rubble and debris to hide our cache quite safely. Then we found another one close by and I had to cycle back down there next morning and get it back without being seen.

So we tried again on Saturday night and found a cosy dark spot under the trunk of a fallen tree by the river, covered our box with leaves and bark and went back home to log it.

And the following morning it was duly rejected on the ‘can you prove it’ grounds.

So this morning, at seven-twenty-early, I was out there again taking it back. It was a beautiful time to be down by the river. A heavy mist was rising up from the pancake-flat surface of the water, from out of which came the disembodied voices of the ducks. The horses had been moved down to the water’s edge where they were having their breakfast as the low sun shot its first weak beams of the day through the trees.

There were a dozen walkers or more, all out with their dogs, which made things more difficult as the animals were excited by the crispy frost fizzing their feet. And it felt like a magical time to be walking by the river, and had I not had a train to catch I would have stayed much longer.

As it turned out, the trains were running late so perhaps I should have done.

Perhaps having your cache rejected is no bad thing.

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I daresay there was upset when the BBC moved our of Alexandra Palace, as there will be when it hands over the keys to Television Centre. To plug a £2bn funding hole it’s selling the iconic building that it’s occupied for the last half century.

What will happen then remains to be seen. It’s a prime site; it would be ripe for redevelopment. But at the same time it is an important piece of broadcasting history, and a valuable asset in terms of potential rental. A ready-built studio complex for just £300m. A snip, and a guaranteed earner for whoever takes it over.

With that in mind, and its iconic status, it’s unlikely it would be bulldozed, no matter how quickly the value of London flats is climbing. And, of course, in the BBC the new owners will have a ready-made tenant. It may be moving sport and childerns’ programming up to Salford, and news back into the centre of the city at Broadcasting House, but it’s still going to need a sizeable London studio base, and where better a place to rent than the complex it already knows so well?

Despite this, we shouldn’t be complacent. Television Centre is not only a landmark building; it’s also an important piece of our national history which, for the sake of us all, should be listed before it’s too late.

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Richard and Judy were first, claiming blissful ignorance when their Channel 4 show was caught making money from callers who would never make it to air.

Jo Wiley was equally unaware when a ‘competition winner’ on her show turned out to be a member of staff, despite the segment in question being pre-recorded.

And now Ant and Dec claim no knowledge of the fact that callers to their Saturday Night Takeaway were charged money to enter competitions and then discarded if they weren’t sufficiently photogenic or living in the right part of the country. Yet they are executive producers of the show.

These celebrities – and more – all claim to be innocent in the premium rate phone scandal plaguing British broadcasting, and we have no reason to disbelieve them. But the fact remains that they should have known what was going on. They aren’t just hired voices, but the interface between ourselves and the workings of the show.

Like a newspaper editor, they are the public faces of their programmes and should be the first to go at the end of any inquiry. Not for being complicit in any wrongdoing, but for precisely the opposite: being ignorant of misdemeanours carried on all around them.

Yet the networks have an interest in overlooking this fact, only too aware that it’s those famous faces and voices that pull in the crowds.

We’ll force out a back-room boy instead, shall we? He’ll not be missed, and then we can say we’ve done our bit.

After months of the BBC’s minor misdemeanours being plastered all over the papers, they have been put into sharp relief by lurid stories of far more serious goings-on at ITV.

The independent broadcaster, it seems, made £7.8 million from over 8 million viewers by claiming to have entered them into premium-rate competitions they had no chance of winning.

Speaking on Radio 4′s Today programme this morning, ITV chief Michael Grade described the findings, contained in an independent, commissioned report, as a ‘serious cultural failure’. He’s right, but it will be interesting to see what happens next.

Heads rolled at the BBC for no more serious a crime than having viewers believe it was a caller, and not a handy passing child that won the competition to name the new Blue Peter cat. All competitions on all BBC services were scrapped the moment the story broke, and the Corporation went through a very public airing of its dirty washing as it investigated the facts and fired programme makers for the most minor indiscretions.

How different is the story from ITV. Grade who, let us not forget, used to run the BBC, wouldn’t commit to any dismissals and said only that if he’d been in charge at the time he himself would be resigning right now. He claimed that in cheating the viewers this way the channels had not been out to make more money, but to cut corners in providing better programmes, conveniently forgetting that better programmes mean more viewers, and more viewers mean more money.

But at the end of the day these competitions are about making money, whether on the BBC, ITV, or one of the myriad satellite channels. If they weren’t, they’d be run on a freefone basis, or at least charged at local rate.

ITV will now be refunding those cheated callers, much like GMTV before it, but there’s no word on whether it will follow the BBC’s lead and suspend phone-based competitions for the foreseeable future.

That, sadly, shows the difference between our two leading national broadcasters, and illustrates once again why the BBC is the rightful recipient of the national TV tax, the license fee. Let’s remember this next time it’s due for review, and the independent channels start once again to call for a share of that revenue.

The plot is starting to get a little bit rough around the edges. Nothing serious, but it could do with a little tidy-up, which is proving difficult now that the nights are drawing in. You can’t very well be rooting up your carrots or trimming back the wildest leaves on your cabbages in the dark now, can you.

Two of the sprout plants are looking a little bit lame where they have fallen over, although they are still strong and thick enough to make walking sticks from the stems. The sprouts themselves – at the bottom of the stalks, at least – are already large enough to pick and eat, so we only need wait for the frost to set their flavour and then we can take the first of the crop. I don’t think that will be long.

But the butternut squash is more of a concern, as after a promising start it seems to have stalled. I thought that planting all 12 seeds in the packet had been rather extravagant, but it’s as well I did, as at least half have since died and of those that survived only one is truly thriving. There are two in trugs and four in the plot. Of those in the plot two have quietly withered to the point where they’re little more than yellowing sticks, and the two others are sitting around enjoying the cool autumn air but making no real effort to grow any larger than a cabbage. No actual flowers or fruits on them yet.

And so the best bet for any squash this winter lies with the prize specimen growing in a trug behind the greenhouse. That’s probably because it was planted in compost and manure rather than regular earth so it’s having a richer feed.

The tomatoes, meanwhile, have pretty much run their course. After the glut we had at the end of September things have slowed right down. There are still some green fruits on the vines, but very few are turning yellow or red, and I don’t think many of the others will be changing colour now, so we’ll have to come up with a green tomato recipe for them. I think it’s maybe time to cut them down and clear some space in the greenhouse anyway (which is currently doubling as a shed while the outhouse has a new floor laid) so I could move in that other trug-bound squash to see if a couple of degrees of warmth would chivvy it along a bit.

This marks a definite turning point in the garden, though, and a very marked end of the first growing season there, so it’s probably time to tally up the value of the fruit and veg we’ve harvested so far and draw a line under summer. Going ahead, our experiments will shift focus onto the stodgy, comfort vegetables of winter.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows marked the ultimate conclusion of JK Rowling’s wizarding epic.  She promised it would bring Harry’s journey to a logical conclusion, and largely it does.

The seventh book in the series, it is more than a single story, for while it could conceivably be read in isolation the assumption must be that most readers have at least some prior knowledge. If you missed out on the previous books, or you simply weren’t paying attention, this is not a good place to start. There is little explanation of who the main characters are, what they do, what Rowling’s own invented spells do, and how wands might work, or any effort to ease the reader in. For those of us who have been with her all the way, that’s a good thing.

It picks up from the end of book six, directly, with a pre-credits sequence worthy of a fantasy Bond. A lead character is dead within the first 20 pages, and your interest is snared. But then we descend into a lengthy diatribe about life in the Weasley house, preparations for a wedding and seemingly endless truncated discussions between Hermione, Harry and Ron, which you wish they’d conclude so they could get on with the task in hand.

While book six tied off a lot of loose ends and explained the inclusion of countless seemingly pointless asides in the five earlier volumes, Deathly Hallows unravels them once again, throwing the story on its head with an enormous twist we should all have seen coming, while at the same time avoiding the temptation to make Harry some kind of invincible super hero.

In this much darker, more violent instalment, his coming of age sees him transformed from powerless schoolboy into true fighter. It’s largely believable – in so much as a book about school-age witches and wizards ever could be – despite two set pieces in which Harry and friends quite easily achieve feats that have foxed countless great wizards for several centuries before them. Indeed, so vehement was Rowling in previous instalments that one of these feats was impossible (it was even enshrined in rhyme) that to have her leads perform it here in the space of a dozen pages smacks of laziness and of cheating the audience.

But the greatest problem lies in the conditions under which Harry must perform his ultimate task. Anyone who has read an earlier instalment or seen one of the films will know that the series is a seven-volume telling of his quest to defeat the evil Lord Voldemort. Whether or not he achieves that here is a well kept secret that, unless you hunt it out, seems not to have leaked onto the net (and won’t be here), but in this final instalment the task is given greater urgency through the revelation of an inescapable condition that must be fulfilled if he is ever to succeed.

Through what Harry sees and hears we are told that finishing off Voldemort would be impossible were this point not taken into account, and a very important point it is indeed.

And yet Rowling finds a way around it that should never relally have made it into print. She promised much when she came up with that shocking condition, and then explored in great detail over subsequent pages, so does it get quietly dropped before it ever comes into play?

Rowling claims that Potter’s story is fairly comprehensively told and closed off, and it is, and for anyone who has read any of the previous books, this is a must-read addition to the series. But – and there’s always a but – only if you’ve read book six.

Rowling described books six and seven as two halves of the same story, and indeed they are. Neither can exist without the other; polar opposites of Harry and Voldemort themselves.

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Harry Potter, JK Rowling

If you didn’t see White Diamond last night, you missed it. In the cinema at least. It was a one-night-only showing of the film that documents Kylie’s return to the stage after winning her fight against breast cancer. It will be out on DVD in time for Christmas.

In the two hours it took to tell the story, the behind-the-scenes movie followed the diminutive singer across countless stages, whisked us around the world in private jets, took the audience with her as she met kids with cancer, and documented the strange husband and wife relationship she shares with the film’s director, William Baker, her stylist for longer than many real-life marriages last.

To say it gives you an insight into a Kylie we’ve not seen before would be taking things a little too far. There are no dirty secrets, no shocking revelations; nothing but more of the bubbly, endlessly endearing personality we know from countless hours of TV and stage appearances.

And perhaps that’s why The Times gave it two stars, claiming that Baker’s relationship with Minogue was too close for the film to be truly revealing. It’s right, of course, as you can’t help but come away with the feeling that the director was far too close to his subject for the film’s own good. So close, some times, that it could more accurately be described as ‘Will Baker: My Life with Kylie’.

Those points aside, it remains an entertaining and highly watchable film, particularly if you overlook Baker’s terrible interview technique, and the time passes quicker than you’d ever imagine. You come out feeling a little bit lifted, and slightly dazzled by the curious glittery, yet restrictive world in which she lives her life; slightly envious of her success, yet at the same time finally understanding the torment and isolation that fame can bring.