Thursday 16/1/03Apologies are once again in order for those who are on holiday or happen to be awake at 5:30 this morning -- the only reasons you're likely to have to cope with my bleary face appearing on your telly. On Wednesday night, the BBC failed once again to find anyone else to appear on World Business Report to talk about the latest financial results due in from various luminaries of the high tech world -- IBM, Intel, Sun, Apple, Yahoo! et cetera -- and they repeated the exercise 12 hours later. So, I got to broadcast to the world what I thought would happen in the results, and then got to explain to everyone just why I got it completely wrong.

In fact, it was all pretty much as predicted. Intel and Yahoo! had good results that were ignored or discounted, and the other companies had more mixed results that were seen as reasons for more misery. Nobody thinks its getting any better, and with good reason.

The most fun was on the 5:30 show, where my charming presenter suddenly flipped into full-on Sally Smedley mode. The studio is open plan, with the presenter and guest sitting on a raised dais in a newsroom filled with computers, clattering keyboards and journalists. That morning, there was a lot of nattering going on, and it got a bit much. "I cannot ad-lib with this sort of background! It's showing no respect! No respect!"

I can't blame her. Things were tense -- I was late, due to the car driver not being given my phone number 'for security reasons' so he couldn't tell me when he had arrived to pick me up, and some of the computer bits weren't working too well. And it was 5:30 in the morning, which is no time for anyone to have to be doing anything apart from getting ready to go to bed. In any case, it was slightly less amusing than me discovering I could no longer say 'consumer expenditure', but instead produced three random streams of phonemes before drying up, giggling and plunging in again.

Perhaps I'll reconsider my planned 24-hour Goodwins TV channel.