kennycampbell.com

Friday the 14th of October (17:30 on Channel 4) could see my magical television debut.

Several weeks ago, I went along to Pete Burn's house to perform magic for him and his guests as part of his Celebrity Come Dine With Me night.  Had a great time, and really enjoyed the evening.  I got a text this morning from my brother, Paul, telling me that it would be on next week.  So I checked out the listings, and sure enough, next Friday at half past five on Channel 4, Pete Burns hosts Celebrity Come Dine With Me with the folks I met on that evening.

However, I must include a caveat here.  There's no guarantee that I'll actually be on the show.  It's only half an hour, they may have plenty of other footage from the evening that they can use (god knows, the filming went on long enough!) and so it is quite possible that none of my contribution to the evening will make it to the final cut. Naturally, having been there for the "big reveal", I know who wins.  But I am bound not to say.

So if you want to know whether I'm on it at all, and who wins, you'll just have to watch it and see, like wot I'll be doing.

If you are interested in following the whole thing, it looks like it will be on at the same time every night next week: 17:30 - 18:00 on Channel 4.  Here is the order in which the celebrities host their evenings:

• Monday - Bobby George
• Tuesday - Chantelle Houghton
• Wednesday - Cleo Rocos
• Thursday - Andrew Stone
• Friday - Pete Burns

Day names link to the relevant episode on the Channel 4 web site.  Celebrity names link to the relevant Wikipedia entry.

At the risk of sounding like a luddite, I don't like touch screen interfaces, and think they should only be used where they are pretty much necessary.  So yes, smart phones perhaps need them.  But nothing else.  And desktop PCs?  Puleez!

Even on a smart phone, I use it, but I don't really approve.  Being obliged to obscure part of the display with my hand in order to interact with something on the screen is not an improvement, in my opinion, on the mouse/pointer combo that we all know and love so well.

Am I alone in this?

And yet pretty much every tech company is throwing resource behind touch interfaces, and seems to expect that this kind of interaction is definitely the next big thing for pretty much all interfaces.  I think it is a retrograde step in the development of Human Computer Interaction, and the sooner it dies a death the better.  Not that that is going to happen any time soon.