I haven't posted in a bit - in fact I've deleted my blog posts than I have added, but I'm not going to dwell on that one (basically I got into trouble for being a bit critical of someone I did a gig for. Whoops - tactless me. Well I didn't know anyone ever reads this rubbish...)

I've been too busy to post blogs, spending time in a luxury hotel in Cornwall, celebrating mu mum's birthday. It was the hotel my folks had their wedding reception in. Aw. And my, it's a beauty. I had the privilege to be able to stay overnight there, and it's my favourite hotel ever. It's called The Nare Hotel and you can see a picture here (http://www.thenare.com/).

Mmm, afternoon tea with scones, a swim in one of their two pools, a soak in their outside hot-tub overlooking the sea, a fancy three-course meal with G&T before and brandy after, a frame of snooker on the finest (and largest) billiard table I've played on... and all in a location that screamed of Agatha Christie novels. They had a study, a drawing-room, a billiard-room, a giant stone dog outside small enough to life but large enough to cave someone's head in if one had a wish to... murder.

And now I'm home, and manically trying to cram in writing a musical, a sitcom pitch, and some jokes for Miranda Hart's TV pilot before I have a few days off, but not in the luxury of a five-star hotel... No. It'll be in an NHS hospital, as I have my wisdom teeth out tomorrow. I'm actually looking forward to it - but only because it'll mean the end of people responding to the news I'm having the procedure by saying, "Urgh! You'll be in such pain - my mate had it done and his mouth exploded." If you're one of the several dozen people who told me about your dodgy wisdom tooth extraction experience, YOU WERE NOT HELPING!

There Will Be Blood was one of the taglines of Saw IV. And I've got to say, There Will Be Blood, the just-released filum with Daniel Day Lewis, isn't doesn't fit in the Saw franchise one bit. There are no bizarre death-based mutilating contraptions, unless you count an oil derrick. And how can anything called Derrick be that frightening?

I rated There Will Be Blood 8/10 on the IMDB (incidentally, my Facebook profile page now imports my IMDB movie ratings, so you can now judge my cinematic taste - I still defend that National Treasure is a good film...). Of that 8/10, that's 10/10 for Daniel Day Lewis, and 6/10 for the film as a whole. It's nominated for Best Film at the Oscars, and so it should - it kept me captivated, but I did come out wondering if there were a film of Daniel Day Lewis reading the phone-book, would it be mesmerising? I suspect it would.

He's an amazing actor, and I found myself watching There Will Be Blood (every time I say that I sing that Maroon 5 song in my head) focusing on him every time he was on screen. Even if a new character appears, and all we can see is the back of DDL's head, the audience are looking at him to see what intense acting nugget he'll pull out of the bag for us now...

I'm probably doing the story of the film a disservice, but it is a tad long, and one-note, but without June-6th-1944-Lewis (a pat on the back if you get that), it'd be nothing. He scares me more than any other actor. And yet if I were to see him in the street, I'd still be tempted to do my best Inspector Morse impression and yell, "Lewiiiss!"

Am I reading too much into Jane Eyre? I say 'reading' - 'viewing'. I'm reading a book called The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, which is a good and funny book but revolves largely around characters leaping in and out of the book Jane Eyre, which I haven't read. So I rented the TV series, just as the teenage version of myself used to do for English Lit essays and exams (but only if the York Notes weren't available).

Anyway, early on, Jane Eyre meets a friend in an orphange type place, called Helen. Helen doesn't appear much in the TV version - pretty much the only thing she says is something like: "Well Jane, girls who behave go to heaven, and those who misbehave will go to hell. And it's up to us to last long enough in this life to reach adulthood, so that we can prove ourselves worthy and good people." Something like that, but with a few more 'verily's I imagine. Then Helen dies. Jane grows up, still fondly looking toward Helen's tombstone, which reads 'Helen Burns'. Now for a start that's not a good surname for the tombstone of someone who questioned which way they were going as they walked towards the light. Plus if read it syllabically backwards, 'Helen Burns' becomes 'Burns In Hell'. Not nice, granted. Am I reading too much into this? Is this a hidden message from Charlotte Bronte? Can I track the Holy Grail from this clue? Or am I just a slightly aspergersish wordplay fanatic who reads too much into things? Yes, that's it, yes.

In other news...

- I did a curry and comedy night on Saturday in Surbiton, and the fella I was sat next to - a charming, slightly stocky but very sweet-natured Nigerian fortysomething - turned out to be an Olympic gold-medallist. I've never had dinner with a gold-medallist before. It was quite exciting. He won a gold at Barcelona '92 for heavyweight boxing. He's the heavyweight boxing champion of Nigeria, and the former heavyweight boxing champion of Africa. That's a whole continent. That's quite cool. We should send him to Mugabe - he'd sort him out. Anyway, he doesn't box any more, cos his wife thinks it's a bit violent. Well of course it is. He punches other men professionally. Anyway, he's a gent, and very cool. And I'm not just saying that cos he could bit 7 tonnes of crap out of me.

- Part of my meal last night - up here at Leicester Comedy Festival, from where I write - included jalapenos and chillis. Which were, I'm afraid to say, not evenly distributed around the food. So I moved the jalapenos myself, by hand. Then I realised it was quite late and rubbed my eyes. And my, that hurt. But at first I thought they were aching with tiredness, so I rubbed them some more, really hard. Then screamed with pain. So the lesson here is: there's no 'i' in jalapenos, and equally there should not be jalapenos in your eye. (Yeah, definitely the 'slightly aspergersish wordplay fanatic'...)

A shameless plug. Short notice I know, but I'm lax.

I'm doing last year's Edinburgh show - an hour's stand-up/multimedia powerpoint comedy thing about the book of Genesis - at the Leicester Comedy Festival on just one more date: Sun 10th Feb. It's the only date I have in the diary to do the Genesis show, so it could be the last chance ever to see it! (This is probably not the case, but for publicity reasons, let us pretend it is.)

Here are the details:

Sunday 10th Feb
Venue: Sparkenhoe Ark Theatre
Entry: £5.00
Doors: 6.00.pm
Start: 7.00.pm
End: 8.00.pm

Paul Kerensa's Genesis is a stand-up comedy whistle-stop tour of the Bible's opening chapter: from Adam’s fig leaf to Joseph’s dreamcoat, via Sodom’s crotchless pants. First of sixty-six annual shows (next year, Exodus). Contains some Phil Collins. **** Chortle, **** Three Weeks, “Ingenious” Evening Standard.

The same details can be seen in a different order on a website here:
http://www.comedy-festival.co.uk/events/show.php?event_id=249&showdate=2008-02-10
and tickets are available here:
http://www.ticketweb.co.uk/user/region=gb_midlands&query=detail&event=250348

and/or here:

I'm also doing two other shows that day - compering a daytime benefit gig for a mental health charity, and then a very unusual one in the evening at Hotel de Comedie, which is a gig whereby the acts greet the audience in our actual hotel rooms where we're staying, and we do the entire gig there. I think it's meant to be kooky, with us mucking around with hotel stuff. Though in my case, I'm inclined to do it wrapped up under the sheets, or maybe from in the bath. Heck, if I'm getting the rare chance to do a gig without leaving the hotel room, I'm going to make the most of it.

Do come to the Genesis show if you're nearish Leicester. I will welcome you with open arms and may even reward you with booze.

So Beadle's not about. I am genuinely sad - he was a very clever and interesting man. I've got several of his books, and his radio shows years ago were legendary for their ingenuity. He once had 100s of Londoners racing across the capital in search of mysterious treasure that didn't exist, because he kept playing sound effects of bits of London, as if he was out and about, and would give a clue to his next location (of course he was in the studio all the time).

I met him once - I used to do a weekly guest spot on BBC Radio Berkshire, talking about the news and generally trying to be genial to the M4 corridor listenership. Henry Kelly usually hosted, but one week he was ill, so Jeremy Beadle stood in for him. He was a lovely chap, and was particularly interested that I was about to write for The News Quiz. He's a bit of a quiz expert, and in this obits you might have read, where it says he raised £100m for charity, that was through his celebrity quiz nights he'd regularly do for the charity. So he tipped me off that the perfect quiz question to pose should be 7 words long and contain one very and two nouns. Useful to know.

One unusual thing happened when I met Beadle - and I mean this in the greatest of respect... First of all, yes, I shook the hand. What was unusual was that when we went into the studio for the broadcast, the studio engineer had no arms, being an unfortunate victim of the thalidomide drug. So there were 3 of us in the studio, and the average number of full-size working hands was one each. Jeremy admitted he hadn't done radio in a few years, so was a little nervous, and when he was about to go live, pushed back on his chair, unplugging his headphones, and also entangling his good arm in the lead. With about 5 seconds till broadcast, we all looked at each other, and although it's the studio engineer's job, and although Jeremy was the one to unplug himself, I volunteered to plug him in again, given that I felt my two standard hands made me most qualified for the task. Not a word was said, and we continued with the show.

JB was an excellent interviewer too - normally Henry Kelly would let me coast along with pre-prepared material slotted into comments on the day's news. But not Beadle. He'd force me to leave my comfort-zone by not asking for amusing comments about the royals or something that I was bound to have stuff on. Instead he'd suddenly ask, "So Paul, tell me, what scares you about the news today?" or "Tell me something that excites you about events in the last week?" He made me think on my feet, and I think great radio came of it. I rediscovered in my head stories, anecdotes and opinions that I'd forgotten were there. Well done, Beadle, and a lovely fella to boot.

God bless ya, Beadle. I'm sure you're up there right now, with an extra-bushy fake beard, pretending to be 'Beadle the Angel' as you drop St Peter's Ford Escort into a river with a clumsy winch.