Complete Tosh.com

What a scarily efficient bunch they are – less than 24 hours after my meme-y call to action, four of my bloggy friends have spilled the beans on their weeks in media.

– Shaun Milne outs himself as a Tatler reader

– MrsTosh makes public her News of the World habit

– Craig McGill confirms himself as the most avid DVD viewer I know – t’was ever thus

– And Meg Pickard swears she didn’t read all of Country Life

I count another eight folk tagged… so on the meme rolls…

Memewatch: Having kicked-off a “week in media meme”, picked up by bloggers of such lofty reknown as Iain Dale and The Devil, 77PR’s James Gordon-Macintosh has tagged me to join in.

Perhaps he’s aiming to add a little more leftyness to the whole exercise. Or maybe he’s looking to get the absurdly narrow mediablogging Scot-in-London niche covered. If so, consider it filled, James. My victims are at the bottom of the post, and will include one or two home-based members of the Scottish mafia.

What I’ve read

As you’d expect, I normally look through most of the papers every weekday – I might work online now, but old print habits die hard. The heavies get more careful reads, with the depth of my forays into the redtops depending on which reality show season it is. In the last couple of weeks, though, I’ve on holiday, the papers have been thin, and Mrs Tosh objects to the huge bundles of newsprint at home, so my reading’s moved online. Back to the normal routine on Monday.

But Christmas is always a good time for magazines. The January 08 Vanity Fair contained some brilliant journalism this month: Michael Shnayerson’s A Tale of two Giulianis, Hitchens on spy novels and William Prochnau and Laura Parker on Pitcairn Island all stood out. I’ve already been blogging about bits of the Economist’s typically entertaining Christmas Double Issue, but there’s lots more in there worth a look. I’ve still got the New Yorker’s winter fiction issue to look through. But the greatest Christmas staple there is – and the only time I buy the magazine these days – is the Radio Times festive edition. Frankly, the Sky EPG does for navigating the listings these days, but there’s still something special about holding that vast end of year RT in your hands and leafing through… the irretriveably shite Christmas TV. Yes… shame about the TV itself.

What I’ve watched

Standout baddies – just unforgivably bad TV – include the Christmas special of the BBC’s Holby City, which surely plunged new depths for latter-day UK primetime screenwriting and acting, and ITV’s Midsomer Murders, which was just… the usual. They get huge audiences, so maybe nobody cares. Nancy Banks-Smith rather delightfully, and so deftly, skewered both shows in the Guardian the day after transmission – Holby City last week, Midsomer Murders this. Three Men In Another Boat – about three comics sailing down the Thames and round the South coast in a yacht – was one of the few things to tickle me, along with (before you accuse me of being too middle-aged) the Christmas Friday Night Project on C4.

A product of my age, I used to feel almost honour-bound to watch any live football offered up, given there wasn’t much once, but now that could look like a full-time occupation. So now, selected live games, although with the Old Firm postponed I’ve seen none that would stand out in the last couple of weeks. Studio 60 has just come to an end, so I await another big US series to get my teeth into – I’ve just not been able to muster enthusiasm for The Wire, alas. It may be time to rent out another 24 box set. I’ve never watched it on broadcast, preferring it in disk-at-a-time four-hour slabs.

What I’ve listened to

This last two weeks, a weird combination of Radio 4 (Today, Broadcasting House, Start The Week) and Kiss100 (dance music). I’ve grown particularly fond of Kiss100′s breakfast show – a dangerous, but very funny, distraction from the absolute necessity of Today – and its Sunday morning programming, which is what they now call “downbeat”, but what we used to know as “beach” or “chillout”. Plus ça change…

When I’m on my commute I load the iPhone up with podcasts – mainly ours, including Football Weekly and Extra, Newsdesk, and Media Talk. Some of the Beeb’s comedy makes its way on there, although a New Year resolution is to catch some of the more innovative audio work coming out the US.

What I’ve surfed

Too much, compulsively. My blogroll here highlights some of the sites I visit most often, although my RSS reader has hundreds of news sites, blogs, Technorati watchlists and feeds from web apps I use to keep abreast of stuff. Specific themes for web surfing this holiday have been around local history (I know, I know), boiler information (I know, I know) and cool stuff some clever people are doing around…. whatever comes next. No, I’m not telling.

And now I tag… Shaun Milne, Craig McGill, Meg Pickard, Stewart Kirkpatrick and MrsTosh… go on, reveal all!