Marple has been suspended from ITV1 for four weeks, it was announced today. The Adjudication Panel of the Standards Board for Television took the action following a complaint from the Agatha Christie Society, which described the series as “deeply offensive”. The complaint cited Geraldine McEwan’s awful acting and a string of hammy guest actors.

A spokesman for ITV said the decision was disgraceful. “Millions of people tune in to Marple every week. If they don’t want to watch it, they can turn it off. The three members of the Adjudication Panel don’t even have TVs.”

The chairman of the panel, Colonel Masterson Grange, said it had decided on a ban because Geraldine McEwan had failed to apologise for her performance.

Midsomer Murders will take the role of Flagship Sunday Night Whodunit while Marple serves out the sentence.

Oh dear. For the second night running I’m watching BBC One’s Just the Two of Us. I’m not even taking half an hour out for The IT Crowd because I watched it online yesterday.

Despite the title, Just the Two of Us is not a new version of a 1980s Nicholas Lyndhurst sitcom (Pat Troughton was in the first series, by the way, but then he died). It’s Strictly Come Dancing but with songs. I suspect that any of the “celebrities” who went to stage school have an advantage. It’s hosted by “real life couple” Tess Daly and Vernon Kay. I wonder if they’re contractually obliged not to split up for the duration. I guess celebrity’s usually pencil in a date with Hello! months in advance these days.

One-and-a-half hours of the Friday night schedule this “entertainment” show is. At least if it was an actually music programme à la Jools Holland the singers would be able to sing.

For the record, Nicky Campbell’s singing hasn’t soothed my sinuses. I’m coughing painfully, have no sense of smell and have run out of Ibuprofen. Oh, and the bread’s gone moldy. I’m going a bit spare and will take myself to bed soon before I start posting even more incoherently. I’ve had chicken and vegetable soup. Not sure how it tasted.

I listened to a bit of Any Questions earlier as the Huhnemeister was on. I had to turn it off, though, as I find it unbearable. At least Question Time comes with colourful pictures to distract from the inanity and a marginally preferable Dimbleby.

Anyway, yeah, goodnight…

Still off work. Woke up spluttering after a half-hour nap so fired up LibDem Blogs in my phone and found an interesting post on Tristan’s blog pointing to this article from The Times:

I received an e-mail from a lady in the Trading Standards department of a large northern town. They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.

The whole article is worth a read. Trading Standards (or this particular officer at least) have an interesting take on free software:

“If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted.”

The same argument could be applied to paid-for software. Make it all open source and freely distributable and the advice would be much easier.

The first thing I noticed about this article, though, was that it was written by my old friend Gervase Markham who, I’m impressed to see, is now working for Mozilla and writing this column for The Times. I’ve added his (techy) blog, Hacking for Christ, to the sidebar.

I am phelgmatic. I have got myself what feels like a mild viral infection. Lethargic, slightly feverish, sore throat and a wheezy cough. None of which anyone else needs to know, but sharing makes me feel better 🙂

And, no, I haven’t been around any sneezing poultry.