One of the better regular sketches on Spoons, the latest moderately funny formulaic comedy show to be broadcast by Channel 4 on Friday nights, involves a man reciting a remarkably long list of all the things that he hopes the people he's with aren't going to talk about. I've only seen it a couple of times, so I can't be sure - and it's possible that the show relies on nobody's watching it more than a couple of times - but I hope that the list is completely new each week. Which might make you wonder how the writers managed to come up with quite so many tedious subjects. Did they lurk about in pubs and restaurants, taking notes on the dreary conversations going on around them? Or did they simply scour a few days' worth of the Daily Mail? Then again, perhaps they got hold of a pre-publication copy of Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? The Encyclopedia of Modern Life by Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur (Time Warner, £9.99).

LRB 1 December 2005 | PDF Download