Over the last week or so I've been watching the televised debate between the three main candidates for London Mayor — firstly the one hosted by Andrew Neill for the BBC and then ITV's version with the rather brilliant Alastair Stewart at the helm.

Interesting though these were, I couldn't really see them appealing to the average Londoner and so it's reassuring to see that in the final few days before the election on May 1st, the candidates are appearing on some more mainstream programmes, presumably to engage a wider range of people with the election and its main issues.

On Saturday night on BBC One, there's I'd Do Anything... to be London Mayor where the candidates will attempt to impress Andrew Lloyd Webber and a panel including Denise van Outen and John Barrowman with their singing abilities and policies for London.

Each candidate will have to sing If I Were The Mayor (to the tune of If I Were A Rich Man) outlining key points from their respective manifestos, and the most promising performers will be told "You could still be Mayor".

On Monday night on Channel 4, Gok Wan gives the candidates a style makeover in How To Look Good Elected, which could make for very interesting viewing, but I'm frankly not looking forward to the sight of Ken, Boris and Brian standing in front of a big mirror wearing just their pants.

On Wednesday BBC One is showing Campaigning On Ice, which will pair the three main candidates with professional skaters and invite them to perform a short routine which both illustrates their leadership style and maps out, in dance, the major milestones of the next four years, should they be elected.

Each candidate is obligated to incorporate a special move of their own devising. Ken is expected to execute a tight, outward-facing loop designed to represent the fact that he will make no change to the size of the congestion charge zone, while Boris will attempt an ambitious reverse lift, symbolic of his plans to put police officers on high-crime bus routes.

Late on Thursday, as the results start coming in, all of the candidates will be invited into Alan Sugar's boardroom and one-by-one told "You're fired!" by the frog-faced troll king of Brentwood, until only one of them remains.

The successful candidate will then be confirmed as mayor and simultaneously announced as the new Doctor Who.

There's everything to play for so the next few days should be very exciting indeed.

I applied to renew my passport a couple of weeks ago and the replacement arrived by courier on Friday afternoon.

Although the new passport looks very similar to the old one, it's got a chip inside it that holds some basic personal information together with biometric data that will apparently allow automated immigration checks at some point in the future.

A leaflet enclosed with the passport explains that the chip does not contain any information that is not already printed on the passport, but obviously this is rather difficult to check.

However, yesterday while I was sorting out the mound of paperwork that has been building up at home and I happened to put the passport, together with various bills and letters, on top of my computer and was very surprised when a dialog box popped up asking:

Would you like to add Bluetooth Device "GBR/Passport/38033" to this computer?

Out of curiosity I clicked "Okay" and sure enough a new icon appeared on the desktop; it seems that the chip in the passport uses the same Bluetooth technology as mobile phones and PDAs.

When I tried to browse the device, everything seemed to be encrypted, but I soon found a program on the internet called PassportHacker, which was able to read the full contents.

In addition to duplicating the basic data printed on the passport, it turns out that there is actually a whole raft of other information that must have been gathered over the years by tracking the usage of my previous passport. I can only imagine it was previously held on some central immigration computer but can now be stored on the passport itself.

Here's an extract from the "Travel Statistics" section of a report generated from PassportHacker:

TOTAL FLIGHTS MADE: 37
TOTAL DUTY FREE SPEND: £1347.82
AVG BAGGAGE WEIGHT: 12.7kg
UPGRADE REQUESTS MADE: 28
UPGRADE REQUESTS DENIED: 28

There's also a slightly more sinister "Security Information" section:

% PROBABILITY [TERRORIST]: 3%
% PROBABILITY [SEX TOURIST]: 27%
% PROBABILITY [DRUG MULE]: 16%

I'm assuming that my surprisingly high score for sex tourist is simply based on the fact that I took a couple of flights within SE Asia last year. Certainly, I've never had any problem at immigration so I guess my score is safely under any danger threshold.

(NOTE: It would be interesting to find out how this new rating maps to the old Glitter rating, whereby suspects were assigned a fraction between 0 and 1, where 0 is no threat, and 1 — a full Glitter — is a absolute, guaranteed threat to minors.)

There also an interesting "Immigration Official Comments" section, which presumably allows for notes to be added each time you pass through an immigration desk.

Here's an extract from mine:

LHR 30/11/03 11:23 THE CAP'S FOOLING NO-ONE YOU SLAPHEAD
LAX 15/03/05 15:33 EVER HEARD OF SUNSCREEN BUDDY?
LGW 22/04/07 17:02 WORST ATTEMPT AT SMALL TALK I'VE HEARD TODAY

As well as all of the textual and numeric data, there were also numerous modified versions of my passport photo, presumably making it easier for immigration staff to recognise me if my appearance were to change over the ten year lifetime of the passport.

So there are versions of my photo with various different (and I assume computer-generated) configurations of facial hair — moustache, goatee, full beard, etc. Also there are versions of me with various styles of glasses and sunglasses, degrees of tan and even a selection of headgear.

For completeness there are also versions with every conceivable combination of these various new features. The version where I'm sporting mirrored shades, a fat face, a handlebar moustache, a very dark tan and a turban is truly something to behold.

Although PassportHacker is free, there's also a paid version called PassportHacker Pro which lets you change as well as just view the data stored on the chip.

So as a fun practical joke you can get hold of your friend or partner's passport and bump their drug mule rating up to 99% for a guaranteed cavity search, or even change their stored picture to any of a selection of provided alternatives, including: Marilyn Monroe, George Clooney, Yoda, Homer Simpson or Osama Bin Laden.

Well worth the asking price of $29.99 I would have thought.

Damn. This story on the BBC News site today is uncannily close to The Spearmint Badger.

The owner, Roger Stanbury, an ex-dairy farmer, is quoted as saying:

I wouldn't have put on a swingers' club unless I knew there were a lot of people who wanted this type of thing.

Which must be reassuring for his neighbours, whose primary concern, I would imagine, is whether or not he's fully thought through the business model.

Because while a local swingers' club is just a bit of "sexy fun", a failed swingers club would obviously be an embarrassment to the whole village.

Earlier in the week, I visited a local Italian restaurant with a couple of friends and was pleasantly surprised to find a new dish on the specials menu — MACCHERONCINI NORMA.

It's rare these days to find an eating establishment that is willing to experiment with some of the more exotic meats. The waiter recommended an Australian (obviously) Shiraz which perfectly complemented the strong flavour of the aborigines.

For the truly adventurous, there's the Quattro Indigeno pizza, which has aborigine, maori, innuit and pygmy meat distributed generously among its four quarters.

And if you're wondering what aborigine tastes like, I can report that it tastes a lot like native american.

Firstly, I feel I should apologise for the lack of activity on Man Writes Blog over the last week or so. I confess I've been suffering a little from blogger's block and it's been lack of inspiration rather than lack of desire that has left MWB looking a little neglected.

However, I was listening to the Film Weekly podcast a couple of days ago and Jason Solomons was interviewing Garth Jennings (writer/director of Son of Rambow) in his floating studio housed on a barge in North London, and it reminded me of an old (but true — honestly) story that might serve as a useful stopgap until normal blogging service returns.

I hope you don't mind. Try to think of it as the blogging equivalent of when on telly they sometimes have to show a favourite episode of a sitcom in place of a scheduled programme, usually because something nasty has happened in the news that renders the planned programme tasteless or at least unsympathetic.

Except, in this case, what I'm replacing 'normal' programming with is, in itself, pretty tasteless and unsympathetic.

But anyway, here it is, The Barge Story. I hope you like it. It genuinely happened. I promise.

The Barge Story

A number of years ago I was invited, at rather short notice, to spend a weekend on a barge for the stag 'do' of an old school friend. Although I'd been reasonably close friends with the stag and his nominated best man during sixth form, we'd only had very occasional contact since leaving school and to be honest I was surprised and rather flattered to have been invited.

At school these particular friends had been fairly heavily involved with the church and in fact as it turned out most of the other members of the stag party had some kind of church connection; as a card-carrying heathen I felt a little bit on the periphery, but did my best to fit in.

We picked up the barge on the Saturday morning, received some very basic instructions about canal etiquette and the handling characteristics of the vessel, and were soon meandering down the Grand Union Canal stopping at various pubs on the way and having a perfectly nice time and enjoying unseasonably good weather.

It wasn't exactly the wildest stag party I'd been part of, but they were a nice bunch, and it was undeniably pleasant cruising down the canal in the glorious sunshine.

We stopped for a boozy lunch at a lovely canal-side pub and by mid-afternoon we were back on the move and the mood was decidedly relaxed. A few of the guys were down below sleeping off their lunch, I was at the back of the barge watching the world go by and the rest of the gang were at the front sunbathing.

Despite enjoying myself I still felt conscious of being the outsider. Although I'd been chatting perfectly happily with some of the rest of the group, there wasn't anyone I'd particularly gelled with and it seemed selfish and not a little cowardly to monopolise my two school friends.

There had been a slightly awkward moment early on where I was asked which church I went to and I tried to make a polite, respectful case for my conscientious atheism but I sensed that it hadn't done anything to further my integration with the group.

It had also come up in conversation that I'd 'done a bit of comedy' at university but so far my attempts at humour had fell on at least partially deaf ears so I was starting to feel the pressure in that department too.

While I was gazing over the canal pondering all of this, I spotted a dead rabbit floating near the edge of the water, and so driven by some latent schoolboy instinct I grabbed the barge pole and managed to fish it out of the water.

I glanced towards the front of the boat and soon realised that no-one had noticed me retrieving this rather macabre prize from the canal.

And then it occurred to me that this could be an ideal opportunity to liven up what had so far been a fairly pedestrian stag do and simultaneously demonstrate to everyone that I was in fact a comedy genius.

So I edged very carefully along the running board at the side of the barge, still holding the barge pole with its soggy payload draped over the end.

When I was within a few feet of the front of the boat I shouted "Incoming!" and lobbed the waterlogged corpse in a high, soggy arc onto the deck where the others were sunbathing.

Far from the exhilaration of a well-executed stunt, I soon felt a sickening, sinking sensation when I realised, at almost exactly the same moment as everyone else, that I'd just thrown, with no small fanfare, a dead puppy on the deck of the barge.

Not a rabbit. A puppy. It was unmistakably canine. In fact, it was difficult to comprehend that I'd ever thought it was a rabbit in the first place.

Never has the mood of a group shifted so quickly. "You sick, sick fucker!" said one of the stags in disgust and it was clear that he'd accurately represented the sentiments of the others. My protestations that I had mistaken it for a rabbit were met with not unreasonable scepticism, and I could tell from the look on everyone's faces that they all just thought I was a sick, Godless, puppy-hating bastard.

The commotion had woken the guys down below and they came up on deck demanding to know what was going on and I then had the indignity of standing by while my crimes were explained in full, with multiple references to Exhibit A, which was still lying, crumpled and sodden, on the deck.

The puppy was a very prominent reminder of my sins and so I very sheepishly tried to put it back into the canal. Unfortunately, while scooping a soft, floating object out of deep water with a pole is relatively simple, lifting such an object off a flat surface with the same pole it not. And so for several seconds I achieved the astounding feat of making the situation even less dignified by pushing the puppy around the deck like some horrific animal mop.

Then one of the guys pushed me out of the way, wrapped the pathetic-looking corpse in his towel and lowered it gently and respectfully into the water, perfectly defining the circle of decent and normal behaviour and leaving me firmly on the outside.

The final nail in the coffin of my self-esteem was when I overheard one of the stags ask the best man why on earth I'd been invited in the first place, only to learn that it was because one of the original members had dropped out and they had to find a last minute replacement to pay his share of the barge hire.

Suffice to say I was entirely shunned for the rest of the weekend and I never spoke to any of these people again.

But on the plus side, several years later I did win some gig tickets on Zoe Ball's XFM radio show when she asked listeners to contact her with stories of practical jokes gone horribly wrong. When I sent in the barge story, they closed the competition 15 minutes early...