I have no friends in LA. I also have, if I am honest, not enough work to fill a week. As execs on this show Robin and I sit in on half a day of casting every three days, in between which the casting directors comb the city for young acting talent. Combing might be the wrong word - send your dog a-barking into any LA shrub and four or five young actors will come fluttering out, desperately seeking safe shelter on whatever movie or TV show is looking. I imagine sorting is more their problem.

But while the CSMs do their job, for the next couple of weeks I have decided I am going to exercise. I went to a class today, where a young actress coached me and four other young actresses in aerobic kickboxing. It's not as aggressive as it sounds: it's really a bit more like dancing with punches built in: jabs, upper cuts and so forth. I'm sure real exercise shouldn't be like this.

Show me a weight and I will lift it, or I will hurt myself trying. Show me a treadmill and I will run on it for a time. These are simple ways to fitness. Cavemen did similar exercise with heavy stones and wild beasts as pacemakers. But this boxercise stuff required levels of co-ordination which I'm sure no red-blooded man has bothered to master since Saturday Night Fever swept the nation. It's not Christian and it's not right. It doesn't even feel like I'm straining the right places. I expect if I carried on doing it for ages, I would develop breast muscles.

Anyway, my classmates laughed at me - at my malcoordinated moves, at my ill-timed blows, at my regular resorts to the boxercise equivalent of the Rope-a-Dope strategy. It wasn't nasty, but it hurt. Now I'm hoping they'll come through my casting door. 'Who's that guy peering over his belly at us?' they'll think. 'Oh no, it's Mr Can't-Lead-With-His-Left-And-Keeps-On-Making-Jokes-Based-On-Lines-From-Rocky-Slash-On The Waterfront. I wish I hadn't tittered so.' I will be merciful and assess them on their merits. But they'll learn a valuable lesson. Judge as you would be judged, is what I say.

LA is a great big freeway. We tried to rent a car today, and with Hal David in our ears, took to the fuggy highway to find our local Hertz.

My feet are now blistered. We missed the Hertz. There was a sign forty feet wide, but we missed it. We have walked the equivalent distance of Camden to Vauxhall, and only touched a scrap of LA. It teaches you one thing – that if you will insist on building a city of low-rise concrete, you’re going to use a lot of space.

We still have no car, and it is getting embarrassing. No one but no one walks anywhere here, unless they have a dog. As we sidled along today, chatting the time away, several other pedestrians (I say pedestrians – they were walking to and from their cars) sniggered at us. Maybe they thought we’d forgotten our pets and hadn’t noticed yet. Maybe one of us has a funny walk. Maybe I look too English. Tomorrow, I shall ditch the panama.

We currently don’t have a car, so Robin and I spend our lunchtimes at The Grove – a mall across the road from our apartments. If you hate kitsch Americana, then you would hate this place. In fact, if you have any modicum of taste, you would hate this place.

Here, continuous Frank Sinatra plays over the PA system while bovine consumers are entertained by the patterned squirts of fountains. A bright green, traditional European tram can carry you the complex’s entire four hundred metre length in a matter of minutes.

So we are sat in a "European-style" restaurant having a coffee, and I quickly become aware that the guy sat on my left is a Young British actor: one of our brightest in fact. He is chatting with a comely American who I assume is a starlet of some description. In fact, he is talking loudly, and chatting is the wrong word. Holding forth doesn’t quite capture it either. This was marathon boasting. The boy filled at least an hour with personal aggrandisement, and only barely veiled: the self-promotion couldn't have been called the text of his argument, but you couldn't quite call it subtext either. 

And it occurred to me that the British accent wasn’t made for boasting. Even to my accustomised ears, there’s something condescending about our RP. Fit it to self-deprecation and the combination is a winner – that was a good idea by Richard Curtis. Fit it to bigger talk and, in an international context, we sound like villains or over-privileged oiks. The whole café could hear our young actor impressing, and, as he yet lacks the celebrity to absolve him, the glances weren’t favourable.

Maybe when he’s old, and the “heat” has gone off a bit, or when success has brought him more security, the young actor will be handed a tape recording of himself as he prepared to storm Hollywood. He’ll hear how he sounded, and perhaps smile. Meanwhile, I’m working on my stutter.

Here’s another study in national characteristics. Robin, my writing partner, had a hell of a time on the journey over here. His chauffeur to the airport, on arriving in his street, chose not to knock on his door or in any way communicate to him that he had arrived. When Robin came out twenty minutes late to see the car pulling away, the chauffeur commented blithely that he was about to go, and that Robin was lucky.

I met this chauffeur at the airport, and though he may well be a lovely man, it was plain that he was not a future Booker prize winner earning his keep. He was slow. Robin, who had some experience of the man’s crisis-handling skills while late to catch the plane, said he didn’t speak or do anything which he didn’t understand, and so he didn’t speak or do much. We shall call this stupidity type one.

When we got to the gates of our apartment block in LA, a problem quickly developed. Robin’s apartment didn’t seem to have been booked. The security guard handling this problem was as pro-active as you could like, but his understanding of the situation lagged far behind his eagerness to find a solution. So, as we explained repeatedly that we were meant to be in two different apartments, his side of the conversation went something like this:

‘No problem at all sir, you’ll see there are two sets of keys to the apartment right there…You see sir, we always keep two sets. One spare… No listen sir, you can each take a key of your own now and if you need a set to keep spare you can collect it in the morning… as I said, no worry - you can have a key each and… oh, you have separate apartments. Oh that is interesting.’

The whole of the difficulty was therefore resolved once the security guard had chased solutions to seventeen imaginary difficulties based on what he thought we would say next. This took, with breaks, two hours. I shall call this stupidity type two.

Stupidity type two seems to me broadly an American form of stupidity. Confidently rushing in to solve problems you have no idea about is kind of their specialty. Meanwhile, failing to do anything to solve problems which are patently there is the Great British stupidity, the stupidity that brought us the Somme and Srebrenica. The two can be employed to much the same effect. In an alternate universe, the captain of the Titanic’s last words would have been something like this:

‘Ice? In the pipes? Ice in the pipes - get a plumber down there immediately… What then? No ice for the drinks! – well it’s no disaster, just bring the bottles out on deck to cool them. It is freezing tonight. Real hazard weather!… What’s that you’re saying?… Are you bothering me about lettuce? Come on people let’s see some initiative... Oh, an actual iceberg, now that is interesting!’

Rip. Splash. Celtic music.

I’ve never had much against America. In fact, in the last few years, when the great mediocre mass has taken to going on about how they despise that country, I’ve started to rather like the place. Yet like a lot of culture-lovers I’ve generally thought of myself as a Europhile – broadly, I prefer St Peter’s to McDonalds. 

Yet getting off the plane here in Los Angeles has presented me with an opportunity to reassess this. My chat with the immigration clerk was lovely. She enquired after my reasons for being in this country, and when I told her about the pilot was interested and wished me the best of luck.

On my way through customs, an Italian woman came to the queue from the side. She looked back over the people who had already waited for a minute or so. She looked right into my eyes as she considered her options. Then she took advantage of the fact that I was carrying more baggage than her to slot herself into a space in front of me. She didn’t look back again. A few minutes later, a French man did something similar.

We’ve all had such experiences on the continent, but seeing it here on neutral turf really made me seethe. The achievements of the likes of Michelangelo and Godard may well forge in refined British consciences a love for their respective races. Admiration for European national characteristics - stylish passion, incomprehensible insouciance – might intensify such feelings. But all of these qualities – the culture, the panache – must be considered as nothing when placed alongside the fact that a large proportion of Europeans don’t know what a queue is.

True, the Americans don’t know what a queue is either. They call it a line. But that is just semantics, or possibly semiotics, or maybe neither.

Of course, I read this too. Did you notice that Hermione Granger tells Ron and Harry in the Muggle pub that she's never done a memory charm before, when she has specifically described herself using one to maintain her parents anonymity fifty pages previously? Is this recall test Joanna's idea of a joke?... She does live in Scotland.

Also, I hope I don't spoil it for the slow by saying that at the end we get to see Harry nineteen years in the future. Now, many commented during the Daniel Radcliffe furore on my own suitability for the role of Harry Potter - some suggested that my dislike of DR was more to do with sour grapes at having missed my chance by a good ten years. Well, nineteen years in the future makes him thirty-six. It will be another couple of years until they make the last movie. I'll be thirty, have a reasonably ageless face and carry a bit around the waist. I also wear glasses and am magic. Come on, producers - this must be worth a meeting.

I'm back from a week in a Mediterranean country. I won't say which one because I'm there at least once every biennium and am keen to avoid stalkers. A holiday means novels for me. I re-read a biggie this time: Anna Karenina. Great stuff obviously, but does it make me a terrible person that I do not pity this woman at all? As far as I can see, she's a slut who can't even smile about it.

Still, as I was strumming at a small, very luggage-able guitar, in between cracks at my very portable novel, and thinking that were he there my brother would probably be urging me to watch a film on his tiny DVD player (NB a lesser journalist would have simply pretended there was a DVD player present at the time - I never lie, Lois. I never lie...) At this juncture, it occurred to me the obvious point that theatre would be a lot more popular if you could carry it around with you. I love the South Bank, don't get me wrong, and the West End has its own peculiar atmosphere. I just sometimes wish I could get the thrill of the live experience, only in a suitcase. Something like a puppet theatre, but more thrilling.

And surely genetic engineering could manage this. I've heard that we are getting, or maybe even have already a new smaller type of tomato - smaller than cherry, oh yes - you can hold dozens of them in your hand and chew away like they were so many pomegranate seeds or, for the sweet-toothed nostalgics, NERDS. Could they not do the same with actors? Could they not start off by mating jockies with theatrical dames and repeat until the desired effect was achieved? Alternatively, are actors really that much more complicated than tomatoes? Couldn't we just add an extraversion gene to a few tins of Waitrose unchopped?

Maybe though it is best that I can't take a repertory company on holiday. I'd have to programme sparse modern work to avoid exceeding RyanAir's pitiful baggage allowance, and black box theatre by the pool is perhaps not what's needed.

My insight into the theatrical profession is pretty limited. I watch a lot of theatre. I occasionally meet actors through Current Squeeze and invariably put my foot in it by excoriating something they've recently been in. But I've always thought I had a fair idea of what directors are like. They're the big know-alls of the theatre, aren't they - the ones who control what we see, who read and watch all the plays and occasionally pick from their vast memory banks an old master, or recognise something masterful in a new work.

So I always reckoned. But a couple of interviews I've read recently rather changed that. One was with Marianne Elliott, recounting how she came to be directing Saint Joan. She said Nicholas Hytner had suggested it, so she'd gone away and read the play. Gone away and read it?? - thought I. It's a masterpiece by one of the greatest ever British playwrights. Surely not knowing it already betrays a massive hole in that director's knowledge.

It reminded me of another interview I'd seen with Thea Sharrock. The production that brought her to the public eye was Top Girls, which she'd directed having won the JMK award. She said, if I remember properly, she had decided to do that play having read it in a car travelling north with a relative. She'd have been, I reckon, about twenty-four at the time.

Which again seems awfully late to read an important modern classic, given Sharrock had a degree and several years of student directing etc behind her. That these directors - both fine ones, it should be stressed - had got round to these sections of the canon rather surprises me. What do they do in their spare time? I remember at the interview for my first ever reviewing job reeling off what I'd read and feeling it was vastly inadequate for a theatre critic. For a few years afterwards, I always felt guilty to be reviewing from such a comparatively scanty knowledge base, and spent a lot of my free hours catching up. Turns out that it's practical stuff rather than intellectual hinterland that counts. How GCSE history. Humph.

I took Current Squeeze to see Sweeney Todd at the RFH on Saturday night. One of my favourite musicals this - I played the Judge once (only a little bit better than great West End hero Philip Quast did in this production - well done to him!) and know all the words. I spent a lot of it watching with my mouth wide open as my tongue moved with the lyrics. Most unattractive, plus Squeezecliffe accused me of gawping at the juvenile lead. (Not a phrase for these pedo-conscious times is it, 'juvenile lead'? Must take care not to use it on a public bus.)

A lot of the comment about this concert performance concentrated on the fact that great Welsh Bryn Terfel was singing the title role alongside mere 'musical theatre' actors in the other parts. There's a rather unpleasant and, in my view, wrong blog on the Guardian website, which compares the singing of the various performers. I was hardly struck by the singing - the main part of Todd feels right sung by a guy with a massive foreboding, operatic baritone (albeit unpleasantly miked), the rest are fine done by less awesome voices. What hit me was the difference in the acting. Terfel is magnificent on an operatic stage - recent performances at the ROH have included an awesome third act of the Valkyrie when, barely able to sing, he managed a majestically pitiful performance through body language alone, plus a beautifully wicked Gianni Schicchi.

On Saturday, he looked a little lost. He hammed it up a lot, barely engaged with the detail of his songs and often seemed to be trying too hard to remember his words (which you can't fault him for in the infuriatingly clever-clever 'try a little priest' song - one of the show's most famous numbers, and its worst.) He seemed on a different plane (and not a qualitative one) to Maria Friedman's surprisingly funny Mrs Lovatt and Daniel Evans' unsurprisingly fine Tobias. Partly justified by the part, I suppose - but you still felt Terfel could have stooped a little more for a more complete conquest.

Still, I loved the show. Occurred to me that these sort of semi-staged events are an almost ideal place to hear Sondheim. It dampens the disappointment which the faulty books and strenuous requirements of most of his musicals make likely, and also doesn't commit producers to long runs. Let's have the complete semi-staged Sondheim some time soon, RFH! If you can hear me. You probably can't.   

I realise I’m impinging on both the TV and the comedy blog here. But I wanna write this so…

Last night’s TV was a real festival for students of that shifting, many-coloured beast we call comedy. On ITV, we had a man with no discernible sense of timing reading an autocue to an obliging studio audience and wholly failing to be funny. On the BBC we had the most significant British comedian of the century performing in front of a pumped-up crowd of sixty thousand people, and producing much the same effect.

Someone once said - and then many other people said it again and again - that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. The art of making people laugh is a thing similarly elusive to rational explanation, but more frustratingly so, because comedy, for the most part, is made up of words, which form jokes, good or bad, and so should be more predictable.

That is what the makers of Trevor McDonald – NewsKnight bargained for anyway. Everyone likes Sir Trevor – they must have thought – and those witticisms and picture jokes that you get on every light ent programme with a vaguely current affairsy sort of spin seem easy to do. Get the writers in, surround Trev with funny people, give the whole a title with a pun that the grannies will understand and we have guaranteed Sunday night viewing.

Not so. The reason why seems pretty clear at first: McDonald is worse at reading jokes from an autocue than he is at reading news from an autocue - an achievement. But really that needn’t have mattered - comedy rarely depends on something so simple as gags and their performance. Where the show goes wholly wrong is attempting to dupe us that Sir Trevor is there on an equal footing with the comedians, which last night included Marcus Brigstocke, Alexander Armstrong, and some American fellow. When funny people get in a room with a non-funny person, the result has to be that the non-funny person becomes the victim. We have seen too many episodes of Have I Got News For You not to know that. Of course, ITV were no more going to let Sir Trevor be ripped to shreds on air than they were [hack joke writer insert something here]. The dynamic was forced, fake, unfunny.

Meanwhile over on the BBC, Richard Gervais stepped up to the mike at Diana’s birthday celebrations, and you felt something was wrong from the start. He made an allright joke about not swearing in front of the Princes. He did that song from the Office. He then hung around complaining he hadn’t expected to be on for so long, before doing his famous dance. Then a technical hitch struck.

The material was weak. But in the past at events like this Gervais - famously meticulous with his scripted stuff - has got away with doing nothing but turning up on stage, saying something arrogant, and having people in stitches. People so loved his persona – the venality, the self-obsession, that sense of an ordinary joe who had got his break and was never going to let people forget it.

Yet last night, the crowd weren’t up for it, and Gervais had a Sir Trevor moment. Who knows why? Maybe Gervais has lost touch with Britain a little – his last desperate attempt to lead a singalong of a song from Extras that no-one seemed to know hinted as such. Maybe, it is a natural readjustment – no-one could ever be as all-conqueringly funny as people said Gervais was. Maybe, now the Blairish mood of national self-confidence and moral superiority is totally dead, we no longer need the nasty little man and his layered anti-PC ironies to tell us we are as self-centred as we have ever been. Maybe it was a bad day.

Either way, comedy eluded the great comedian. He sweated and strained and, as a technical hitch made things worse for him, seemed desperate. Sir Trevor meanwhile continued to read his autocue without a ruffle. When it comes to the je ne sais quoi that makes great comedy, it seems it is far worse to have temporarily lost it than to never have had it at all.