How Numbers Change But Really Stay The Same

You know, I was contemplating before the show how numbers mean different things at different times. For Noel's House Party, for instance, we had a budget in the ballpark of £600 million per show. That's a lot of gunge! Plus, I had to hire lots of famous people to pretend to be visiting me at home, but it was really a studio mock-up of what I thought my house might be like if anyone ever came to one of my lavish do's. Besides DLT.

There'd be jelly! There'd be Frank Bruno! There'd be helicopter rides! Mandatory silliness! Lots of running around! But most of all, there'd be one crazily dangerous-looking stunt contraption as the centre-piece and show finale, manned by bored and inadequately-trained runners, dressed up like they were from in the olden days for a touch of gravitas. And that's exactly how I pitched it to the then Head of Light Entertainment. Who loved it, of course.

My primary goal, however, was to reach critical mass. With an average of 12 million viewers every week regularly tuning into my blather, my position as Britain's Number One Madcap Prankster would be unassailable and Tony Blackburn would be forced to admit to the country what a big fat failure he had been all along. Cut to the future- which is round about now.