Andy Beckett’s book about Britain in the 1970s, “When The Lights Went Out”, is riveting: brilliantly researched (but the research, some of it verging on the obsessive, never once hampers the narrative), wise, illuminating and important. In passing, the author refers to a football match that took place on Jan 3rd 1973 at Wembley; it was part of a festival entitled Fanfare for Europe, intended to mark Britain’s admission into the EEC. The match was between a team “drawn from the original six Common Market nations, and one selected from the new member states – Britain, Denmark and Ireland.” Beckett notes that  the match was played before “a less than half-full stadium”.

A less than half-full Wembley in 1973, before it became all-seater, would have meant a crowd of forty-odd thousand, and from here, that figure looks miraculous: it sounds like the least attractive game ever staged. Why would anyone go at all? “Come on you Britain, Denmark and Ireland!” It doesn’t trip off the tongue.

I am going to use my Penguin blog to tell you how much fun I’m having, not writing books. The recording for the radio comedy series I co-wrote with Giles Smith, ‘The Richest Man In Britain’, starring Mark Williams and Russell Tovey, finished on Monday; the last episode we recorded featured the great and funny Rosamund Pike. Giles and I laughed, even if nobody else ever does; he laughed politely at the bits I’d written – we emailed back and forth – and I laughed uproariously at his stuff, and at the bits the cast added themselves.

Meanwhile, over in Nashville, Ben Folds is in the studio, recording the songs for “our” album; every now and again my emails take an age to download, and I know that I am within a couple of minutes of being the first person in the UK to hear a new Folds song.

My colleagues at Penguin are always complaining that I make the other things that are going on at the moment seem more exciting and rewarding than staring at a computer screen for years at a time. But really, what can I do about it?

The Times reports an ingenious but work-intensive downloading scam, brought to an end by the Metropolitan Police and the FBI: a criminal gang (nine people were arrested) wrote nineteen songs, got them onto Amazon and iTunes, stole fifteen hundred credit cards, and downloaded the songs repeatedly until they had earned themselves $300,000 in royalties. Presuming that the money was distributed equally, this netted them just over thirty thousand dollars each – nothing to be sneezed at, certainly, but an an amount only just over the UK national average salary. I know, from my recent experiences with Ben Folds, that  song-writing isn’t easy, although I don’t suppose they spent an awful lot of time on that part;  however, the theft of fifteen hundred credit cards, and the repeated downloading, sounds like hard work. I wonder whether any of them wishes now that they’d spent the time window-cleaning, say?

My favourite song of the year so far is a cover. The original is by Crooked Fingers, and I have never in my life heard of this band, which makes me wonder, and not for the first time, how many other beautiful, brilliant songs are out there hiding away from us. (I’m sure there are thousands—and it’s a good thing, knowing that surprises like this are waiting for us the rest of our listening lives.) The version I’ve been listening to is by the National and St. Vincent, which is a lovely combination of voices anyway, but the song itself is perfect, a real heartbreaker: wistful, wry, precise in its articulation of a mood that doesn’t get explored very often. I got to hear it through I Am Fuel, You Are Friends, an mp3 blog that introduces me to a song I adore probably once a week; I know I’m supposed to miss independent record stores, but people like Heather Browne make it hard to do so.

Yesterday, it was my great pleasure to sit in a pub and drink with the legendary Noddy Holder, who was good enough to give a (terrific) performance in our radio sitcom ‘The Richest Man In Britain’. We are now nearly halfway through recording – which is one reason why I haven’t been blogging much recently – and I’ll miss it when it’s over. Is there a higher art-form that the thirty-minute comedy show? I suspect not. I know that some people would make an argument for opera, the symphony, or figurative painting, or even (God forgive them) the novel – but how funny are any of those things, really? I cannot and would not claim that, with ‘The Richest Man In Britain’, we have now reached the pinnacle of human achievement – that was probably ‘Seinfeld’. But there are some very good jokes in our series, all of them made either by my co-writer Giles Smith, or in ad-libs by our wonderful cast – Noddy, Kerry Fox, Russell Tovey, Mark Williams (as the eponymous Dave) and Linda Bellingham, so far, with Rosamund Pike (who has a great face for radio, ha ha) and Phil Cornwell to come. Radio pays nothing, and that makes it incredibly hard for our producer, and we are recording in various far-flung studios at weekends and on tube-strike days … But I really hope we get commissioned for a second series.

Meanwhile, in Nashville, Ben Folds claims that he’s started recording the songs for our collaborative project, and I’m really excited – not least because I’ll soon be receiving mp3s of new Ben Folds songs that nobody else has heard. At the moment I’m being asked to examine recording budgets, and to get myself a music publishing deal, and that’s almost enough excitement on its own.

Gary McKinnon is the 43-year-old man who hacked into various US military networks, including NASA, from his home in Wood Green in North London, because he was convinced that the US government has been hiding information about UFOs. McKinnon has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome by Britain’s leading authority on the condition, Simon Baron-Cohen, and he is now facing extradition to the US, where he will be tried under anti-terrorist legislation. I, along with thousands of others, have signed a petition asking the Prime Minister to at least allow McKinnon to be tried in the UK, and you should too.

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/mckinnon09/

So far the Government has predictably failed etc – Jacqui Smith, our former and hapless home Secretary, turned down McKinnon’s appeal a while back. Now another hearing is taking place, and yesterday McKinnon’s QC told the high court that Smith “erred in law and reached a flawed decision in response to the medical evidence. She underestimated and misrepresented the gravity of the situation without obtaining evidence of her own, made no inquiries and sought no assurance as to the grant of bail before, and repatriation after, trial in the US.”

Very few of us, I think have any desire to be politicians, which is presumably why the vast majority of them appear – from here, at least – to be idiots: there’s simply not enough competition. (And, as they are like nobody you have ever met, they are the least representative people on earth, which is something of an irony.) Yet every once in a while, we need them to do something manifestly right, and fair, and human. What are the chances?