Perhaps you had the sound muted because Bruce Forsyth was making the funnies but if you caught him contorting a gag about the Las Vegas of the North, please picture me with a cold slice of pizza and a surprised look: I’m in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas of the, er, Nevada.

Angela and I are here, it’s a work thing, I’d tell you but I promise you’d be bored by the fifteenth paragraph and I’d be irritatingly giddy, so, you know, enough. The fact that Bruce made this gag that way was disconcerting, that’s all. No more about me and half-choked, half-cooked pizza.

Instead, you’ll also have seen Pamela and James opening their routine typing on computers. Do you want to know what they were doing? They’d set their Macs in their home office to record Strictly Come Dancing via EyeTV, a teeny Freeview box about the size of a prayer that plugs TV signals into your computer. This EyeTV lark recorded the show for them, it transcoded it into a smaller file size and copied it up for my to my MobileMe cloud space where I was able to pull it down onto the MacBook I brought with me to work on.

If the BBC would just open up the iPlayer to international viewers, I’d have been able to concentrate on my work instead of figuring all this out.

But then it did also occur to me that this is Vegas: would the glamour of Strictly Come Dancing suddenly appear a bit limp to me? Would I have to hide behind geeking out just for something to say? Might I turn to, I don’t know, which satellite I bounced the cloud signal off just so I didn’t give in and rage at you about Ann Widdecombe?

No, if it had come to that I’d just have told you that The A Team movie is very funny when you watch it on an airplane because all the airplane-blowing-up bits of the plot have been removed. It’s like watching Casualty when Gold used to show it during the daytime: you’d get the oh-oh, there’s trouble, then the oh-yes, it’s that big railing spike they keep cutting to and there’d be ominous music if Casualty had a budget, then there’s the eh-what? as the big accident of the week is deleted.

Speaking of Ann Widdecombe, I am just bored. I’m not a fan of the woman anyway, I can acknowledge that she’s handling all this aplombably but I just want her gone. So Len’s effectively positioning the judges on her side did not win me over.

Nor did Kara Tointon’s dance.

But that’s because I was won over by her last week, I’m on this woman’s side, I expect to enjoy her dances and I truly do believe she should win the whole contest this year. We’ve seen many a good Argentine Tango on the show but this was the first brilliant one danced by a celebrity.

Next week Strictly is in Blackpool, the Vegas of the North, and I am not. Did you spend that boring half hour applying for tickets to each episode of Strictly separately? Every week now I am reminded of that afternoon because the BBC ticket office regularly now emails me to say tough luck but there may be spaces for a hilarious new Radio 3 comedy about ducks.

Still.

I feel a bit bad complaining about never getting to travel to Strictly since I am currently 5,212 miles away.

Right. Sorry about that. I must away to the gaming tables. Someone’s got to fund this trip, you know.

It’s okay.

I have a system.

William