...four episodes down, two to go. Rolling along happily at the moment; nice, warm audiences, cast in great form, feel like we're hitting the beats bang on ninety percent of the time. Making the first series, every episode was like episode one, in that each audience was being introduced to the characters and really only grasping the show towards the end of the night. Now, because everyone's seen series 1, they come in warmed up and ready to laugh.

Sometimes they're too ready. Last week, Moss's first line "Well done" was greeted by such a huge laugh, I'd thought one of the other actors might have done something off-screen that the audience had caught. But no, when we re-did the scene, there it was again, as if "well done" was somehow a brilliant catchphrase that I hadn't realised I'd created. We had to do it three times in the end, just to see if everyone would stop laughing. They didn't, so we're going to have to remove it in the dub (it's when you don't remove laughs like this that people start accusing you of using canned laughter).

Speaking of canned laughter, Chris O'Dowd tells me he saw a review for a comedy program that described it as being like another show "but with canned laughter".
 "Not only is there no canned laughter on the show," Chris told me. "There's not even a laughter track! It's all on location and they didn't show it to an audience!" But somehow, this reviewer watched it, heard laughter in his head and then decided that the laughter was fake! If this doesn't prove that you can't win in the studio-audience/no studio audience debate, I don't know what does.
 

The most shocking thing I read all week was in the technology section of The Guardian. Apparently, Operation Ore might be a big pile of horseshit.

For the last ten years or so, every time I come back to Dublin from London I'm greeted by a huge poster for Westlife in Dublin Airport. It's extremely unpleasant; they might as well put up a huge poster saying "Welcome to the Land of Shit."