Last night was Epson’s Christmas party at Jongleurs in Bow (or jAnglers as our taxi driver called). I’d never been before so didn’t realise I actually went past it every day on the train. I was a but unsure what to expect. Everyone likes comedy, but I’ve never been all that keen on The Standup Show on BBC1 and I was wondering if this would be full of people with egos just as inflated. I bumped into Gordon at the bar and we chatted about tonight’s show until Ursula arrived and told us about her fantastic trip to China. Apparently they flew out a couple of Sundays ago, did sight-seeing in Beijing until Wednesday, went to the Great Wall then down to Shanghai for just one meeting, then more sight-seeing. Even the food was good, apparently. Trip heaven.

The Epson people arrived with our tickets just in time for us to go up to eat, and we carefully picked tables as far away from the stage as we could. A wise move, it turned out, as the comics rather predictably picked on anyone in their direct line of vision.

It was a very mixed performance. The first guy on, tall and bald, started off well, but started to dip a bit by the time he got to telling jokes about women drivers.

Hmmm.

The second guy was good, though. Well, I thought he was. Nobody else seemed quite so sure. It could have been because I wasn’t balancing my wine to food ratio very well on account of the strange food, which sounded rather nicer on the menu than it turned out to be. The sprouts were clearly fresh from the vine, and rather crunchy with it, but we all wondered how long the tissue-paper melon balls had been waiting for us to arrive. It redeemed itself with fabulous toffee ice cream, but by that point my head was already full of cotton wool and my eyes were swooshing through a slightly blurred room.

The real shock of the evening was the last comic, Paul Tomkinson, who had been a Big Breakfast presenter and was the only one we’d heard of. He was clearly the star attraction.

Things started out poor and got worse.

Most of the act consisted of impersonating Mancunian and Liverpudlian accents and claiming people in Manchester had had so much extacy that they didn’t have any cheekbones left. The crowd was getting restless and some started to heckle. He tried to put them down, but didn’t have such clever comebacks as the tall bald guy and he pretty much lost the crowd there and then. Eventually he was asking people to be quiet and telling the jokes out of the rather lame crackers they’d put on the tables. In fact, he was lucky to get a joke in his cracker at all. The slip in mine was just a question about Britain’s biggest railway station. Waterloo, apparently. The toy that came with it was one of those plastic nails with a kink in it that you put on your finger and it looks like it’s gone right through. It came with instructions.

Eventually he gave up. He stood at the front of the stage and admitted it hadn’t been his ‘best gig’, then walked off.

Very uncomfortable.

Quite a few of us left after that, which I felt a bit bad about. Epson had put me up for the night as I would have had trouble getting home if I’d stayed until the end, so I felt I had a bit of a duty to stay longer than I did. I made my excuses, though, explaining that I had the breakfast show trail to do, and that I needed to learn my stuff for that, and they seemed happy enough, and then jumped in a taxi with Ursula and got it to drop me off at Mile End station.

I got back to my room and stood by the window with the lights turned out staring at Canary Wharf. A year ago the view was probably one of the most extraordinary sights in London, but now there is building work taking place on the wharf between the tower and the hotel, and tall stalks of ugly grey concrete, lit golden by the arc lights, claw up at the sky.

I don’t know how long I stood there and stared, or how many digital pictures I took of the illuminated steam curling up gently from the top of the Canary Wharf Tower into the black night sky, but I crawled under the duvet early this morning, and I’m guessing that by that point I’d been in the room a good hour at least.

I was exhausted, but didn’t sleep well. Perhaps it was the unfamiliar bed or the sound of the Docklands trains going by outside, but I lay there until gone one, wide awake and thinking that I would be in no state to do the show this evening. I eventually drifted off at some point, and the next thing I knew the alarm was going.

I did the trail, then went out with the camera to take pictures of the Docklands buildings and practice switching between shutter priority and aperture priority so I could better understand the difference each setting made. I took some Canary Wharf shots I’m pleased with. I’ll put them into an album when I’ve got my web space sorted out.

The show went well. It was our end-of-year special looking to the future. Nasa, Nokia, Microsoft, Intel and a bundle of other guests talking about where their products are heading in the next few years. We even had a company that designs shopping trolleys talking about their new products, which have built-in screens that will guide you around the store like GPS systems and point out where the best offers can be found. Even with all those interview offers that came in on Monday, though, there were a few last-minute dropouts, but at least that gave us time for our usual emails and phone calls.

We got technical Steve from behind the studio glass to come in and explain why parts of Essex haven’t got any digital radio on some of their multiplexes and he managed to baffle Jill when she came on to do the travel news. He asked her if she had a digital radio and she said she’d had one since last year… until she realised we weren’t talking about digital alarm clocks with built in radios.

We had an email, and then a call from Wayne Barton, who I’ve not heard from since the days of Link FM. Nice to hear from him, but it would have been good to have had a chin-wag rather than just the quick problem-fix we had time for on the show. I doubt the listeners of London would have been interested in hearing us catching up for the next half hour, though, so it’s just as well.

More SMS spam to my phone. This time from Genie: “Want free txt from ya mobile? Get a free pay monthly SIM with 600 free text messages a month. Call Genie on…. blah blah blah” On a lighter note, the polar bear I won at the Canon Christmas party arrived. Truly hypercute. I showed it to everyone all night.

1. Cold and windy corners
   Up so very very early. I don't know how or why. Made it onto a train just after half seven that should have turned up...
   
   
2. A chilly South Bank
   County Hall I'd suggested we head out to Canary Wharf to take pictures of London's tallest buildings before winter is gone and the darkness...
   
   
3. Deja vu
   Did a rather mediocre trail for the show in the breakfast programme then caught a slow train in to London. Got to my desk and...