That shop, just off Bridlesmith Gate on Byard Lane, was the same cramped boutique Smith had opened in 1970 to launch his retail career. It was still there when I started work in 1987 – by which point the designer’s London business had spread to four locations – and it’s still there in 2011 as part of what’s now a huge global chain. (There are over 200 Paul Smith stores in Japan alone.)

If I suggested that Smith keeping his original shop open to this day was testament to a lack of pretention, or that he’d “never lost his roots”, you’d probably think that was bullshit.

Unless, that is, you’ve ever seen him interviewed.

I defy you to watch the 20 minute video below and not fall in love with the guy and his genuine, unvarnished enthusiasm for life, design, cycling and – especially – silliness. It may just set you up for the year ahead.

Personally I’m most in love with the fact he’s never lost his Nottingham accent. The idea of Sir Paul asking Karl Lagerfeld “y’alright mi duck?” will never get old.

Published two years before I was born, it was probably my older brother’s to begin with. I can’t quite remember. But certainly out of the pair of us, I was the one who found it captivating.

On “Blue Peter” we’re always fascinated by other people’s jobs, and between the three of us we’ve had a go at most things – from operating a tower crane to being a waiter for a day at the Hilton Hotel. But most of the time we’re so busy finding new things to show on “Blue Peter” that we forget that working in Television is quite an exciting job as well!

Among pen-portraits of arcane roles like “boom operator”, “sceneman”, “vision mixer” and “sound supervisor” the book offered tantalising insights into the minutiae of TV production. Like:

There are 104 lighting hoists in Studio 3 which can be lowered or raised at the touch of a button.

Or:

You might ask why we don’t use radio mikes all the time. The answer is that the sound isn’t nearly so good as with a boom mike, and radio mikes aren’t half as reliable.

But when we want shots that are wide and exciting, it’s well worth taking the risk.

For a while this book made me want to get into telly when I grew up. Soon I became fixated on the idea of being a videotape editor. Not long after, I discovered the qualifications this would require – and that changed my mind again. (Physics? Not really my thing.)

But the allure of working in television never quite got dislodged from my brain; nor did the knowledge that it was Blue Peter which put it there.

Even my fleeting associations with the programme during my time with the BBC have been unaccountably exciting. And trust me, if I told you how tenuous they were, you’d know why I say “unaccountably”.

That’s why I was thrilled to be at Television Centre today to see a little slice of cultural history happening: the recording of the final Blue Peter to be made in its spiritual home of London.

More specifically, I managed to catch rehearsals for the show’s attempt to break the world hula-hooping record.

Here’s my video of what was going on, shot quickly before I headed off for my real reason for being at TVC: a meeting (they didn’t include any of those in the Blue Peter Book of Television).

By way of neat coincidence, several of my colleagues were at Blue Peter’s new home in Salford today – and that’s looking pretty exciting too. I wish the programme many happy years there.

But until last night I had no idea that Marvin Gaye spent many of his final years – before his untimely death at the hands of his own father – in Belgium.

And not just anywhere in Belgium, but Ostend: a place most Britons associate less with sultry soulfulness, more with grim windswept ferries from Ramsgate.

Yet it’s true, and there are videos to prove it.

Transit Ostend is a half-hour documentary made for Belgian TV in 1981. It follows a wistful Gaye around the streets of Ostend as he muses on what drew him to the town, and what keeps him there.

It also contains some performance footage, including the clip below.

It’s a peculiar few minutes as it shows Marvin rehearsing I Want You with his band – but the singer himself is either so disengaged or so relaxed that he’s lying down through most of the performance.

And yet… Gaye’s singing is beyond perfect. It is utterly sublime.

He’s performing at a level most vocalists can barely dream of attaining – but he might as well be peeling an orange or picking his fingernails. This is what effortless looks like.

Here’s what has always been my favourite Barry composition.

It’s easy to dismiss You Only Live Twice because it’s a Bond theme – or because Robbie Williams famously sampled it a few years ago.

But this record has handsomely repaid my endless listening over the years because of – among other things – its harmonic richness.

The arrangement builds in depth and strangeness through the song: listen to what’s happening beneath the vocal at 2:12 and you’ll hear how Barry could take the simplest melody and wring emotion from it through orchestration.

The more I think about it, the more this record reminds me of another of my favourite tracks, released a year before.

What do they have in common? A canny, unusual arrangement by a master at work (in this case, Brian Wilson). An intense emotional depth delivered through harmonic sophistication.

And a mono production which glues everything together in a magical way stereo just can’t.

Who knew these records were long-lost cousins?

Sometimes you want to applaud the fact they’ve given an old classic a new twist and new lease of life. Sometimes you feel ambivalent – it’s a lazy treatment or otherwise underwhelming.

And sometimes you hate how sloppily they’ve treated it, feel massively protective of the original, and want to singlehandedly alter history so the criminals involved never had the opportunity to get that freakin’ CD into their sweaty hands in the first freakin’ place.

Just me?

I’ve been through this mix of emotions a few times with Steely Dan samples. Like De La Soul’s Eye Know (sampled Peg; not too shabby, never one of my favourite Dan songs anyway), All Saints’ I Know Where It’s At (sampled The Fez; controversally still my favourite All Saints record), and Lord Tariq & Peter Gunz’ Deja Vu (Uptown Baby) (sampled Black Cow; very lazy steal but I still love it to bits).

All of which is a very long-winded way of getting to this point: I just discovered that J Dilla once made a track sampling 10CC.

J Dilla. 10CC.

That – speaking personally – is like finding out that one of your favourite chefs once made your favourite dish with some of your favourite ingredients… and, to your surprise, it’s suddenly right in front of you, steaming hot and ready to eat.

If you’ve never experienced Dilla‘s work (and I’d hardly claim to be an expert myself) he was – before his tragic death at 32 – one producer whose work had a unique ability to straddle the often incompatible worlds of credible hip-hop and artsiness.

I can think of others who’ve occupied similar positions over the years (Coldcut, Dangermouse, DJ Shadow) but none who reached the level of respect within hip-hop that Dilla commanded.

Here’s his 10CC source material: 1974′s The Worst Band In The World.

And this is Dilla’s rendition, Workinonit, with visuals by Cassette King.

I love. I love very much.

I’ve mentioned before that advertising copywriter was my dream job as a kid, and this programme reminded me why. UK advertising in the 70s and 80s was an industry at the peak of its creative powers, glamour and influence on the nation’s culture.

Here’s the programme’s stand-out clip for me.

Swimming Pool – an ad for Benson & Hedges directed by Hugh Hudson – is either the most brilliant or the most ridiculous use of a six-figure budget in the history of cinema advertising. Possibly both.

It’s genrally argued that its abstraction was inspired by tobacco advertising restrictions: rules which meant a cigarette ad couldn’t show… well, pretty much anything promoting smoking. (Read the present-day regulations on advertising rolling papers and filters to get a sense of what I mean.)

While the rules stuff is true, I suspect the creatives involved secretly liked the licence this gave them to, frankly, dick around and make a jaw-dropping film for its own sake.

Who can blame them?

Of course, what really made British advertising great was more prosaic, humorous work like these two clips. Enjoy.

One evening in the sixties I was driving back from New Orleans, crossing what they call the Piney Woods of East Texas, which cover an area the size of Belgium, as all big woods invariably do. I was driving along this long road in the middle of the night, and the moon was at the far end, so it was like driving along a silver ribbon if you want to be poetic about it, and the hills were rising and falling, and there was a small town before me, and on the radio came a record by Elmore James called ‘Stranger Blues’. The first line was: “I’m a stranger here / I just drove in your town”. I just thought it was a perfect conjucture of time, place and music. You always hope in the course of doing a programme that somebody somewhere may experience a moment like that.

John Peel, quoted in The Nation’s Favourite by Simon Garfield

I’ve had, to quote Peel, a few “moments like that” over the years as a radio listener.

Often they’ve been summer-related: getting the music selection right when the sun’s out seems a bit like hitting a shed door with a banjo. You can’t go far wrong.

I always thought Zane Lowe’s “sunsetters” feature was a stroke of simple genius: one mellow, evocative track played at the exact moment the sun went down each night. Why hadn’t anyone else thought of that?

Yesterday evening, though, a brilliant and unexpected wintry moment from Radio 1.

Driving home through dark, icy, deserted urban streets, I hear this via Nick Grimshaw. Couldn’t have been more perfect.

I wish I’d produced this track myself, so much it’s almost painful. Burial did, which explains a lot.

Do what I did and download it immediately.

I’m not necessarily the site’s biggest fan, but the revamp led me to revisit it.

In doing so I stumbled across an article outlining the vision for H2G2 which Douglas Adams wrote over a decade ago.

Here is an excerpt. To say Adams was a prescient man is redundant. (Too late.)

What we are now focussed on at h2g2 is what happens when people start to share information while they are on the move. Soon we will start to see devices arriving that combine palmtop computers with cellphones with Internet devices with GPS systems. That – in a phrase we hear over and over again when people talk about the Internet – will change everything. You’ll be able to read and write to the Guide wherever you are: at the station, in the plane, on a park bench, in your car (pulled over to the side of the road with the handbrake on, of course) in a café;. And when you write in something as simple as ‘The coffee here is lousy!’ the Guide will know exactly what to do with that information and where to put it. And if you see, a few seconds later, a note which says ‘Yes, but the cheesecake is good’ it might be worth looking round the other tables to see who you’ve just made contact with.

From the window of the London 2012 shop at St Pancras station.

Is it just me, or is this a complete sponsor own-goal?

I know what they’re trying to say. “Visa is the passport to a world of exciting, exclusive events.”

All I hear is: ”For reasons best known to ourselves, we’re going to make it harder than necessary to buy crap from this shop.”

I have a Visa card and this doesn’t make me any more enthused about the brand. In fact, given that they’ve presumably paid for this arrangement, it just makes me think they’re daft.

So with Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7 platform getting uncharacteristically good reviews from just about everyone, naturally my thoughts turned to a less glorious moment from the company’s recent history: the Kin phone.

I still can’t quite believe that what happened with the Kin really happened. You can read one rendition of the full story here, but here’s the digest version if you’re pushed for time:

2008 – Microsoft buy Danger, maker of the Sidekick (legendarily the phone which helped Paris Hilton to leak her address book).

2008-2010 – Using Danger’s people and technology as a starting point, Microsoft develop a secret phone project called Pink.

Total cost of development: $2bn.

April 2010 – The phone is launched under the product name Kin.

48 days later – Microsoft throw the whole thing in the bin and discontinue it.

There’s little doubt that the phone was a commercial failure on launch – and no shortage of theories as to why that was.

In reality, its almost immediate removal from the shelves probably had more to do with Microsoft’s reluctance to allow it to steal focus from Windows Phone 7 than anything else.

But it still fascinates me that the company was so dysfunctional that it ever let the thing come out in the first place, if it was to be scythed down so quickly afterwards. (The story probably tells us something about the psychology of over-large organisations –  prone to lack of communication, silo-based working, and in-fighting. But that’s a whole other blog post.)

The Kin’s marketing was something else: super-styled graphics, clever-clever phraseology all over its packaging, and verging-on-tryhard ads featuring the kinds of hipsters Microsoft hoped would be all over this device. They really, really pushed the boat out.

Which it why it’s especially brutal that the the Kin website now looks like this. Ouch.

(The original homepage code is still there, by the way: it’s just commented out.)

But don’t worry, if you’re one of – say – the 5,113 people who’ve actually connected your (now collector’s item) Kin to Facebook, you can still get help here… while the rest of us marvel at how much time, effort and money went down the toilet on this thing.