Who Ate All The Flies?

Space travel is not as easy as it looks. First of all, there’s only processed cheese in space, so you have to develop a taste for it before you blast off. Secondly, despite what you may have been told, the various moons and planets are actually very far apart, and there are virtually no petrol stations in between, so you’re going to need a pretty substantial tank. (I usually borrow Grant Mitchell’s tank while he’s off on some beekeeping conference.) Finally, and arguably least importantly, in space no one can hear you scream, so if you’re a heavy metal-style singer looking for a suitable venue, you’d be barking up the wrong tree. It is for this reason that Metallica were infamously forced to cancel their tour of the asteroid belt in 1833.

Getting in to space is a bit of a rigmarole, too. Bus services are infrequent, to say the least, and the trains are always packed. You should book your ticket at least a month in advance, and don’t forget to take a packed lunch, because – as I mentioned earlier – there’s nowhere to buy food once you’ve left Earth’s atmosphere. (Okay, so there is a Starbucks on the dark side of the moon that sells sandwiches, but who wants to pay those kinds of prices?)

Once you get out there, you’ll meet some pretty interesting people. Gary Numan runs a moped rental business on Jupiter’s fourth moon Thebe (as you will recall, Io came first, with Europa and Callisto tied for joint second place. Io goes on to meet Ganymede in the final.) And rumour has it that Michael Caine and Ant Out Of Ant & Dec - to give him his full name - co-own a chain of trendy hair salons stretching from Venus all the way to Neptune, though I imagine business is pretty slow that far out.

Last time I was in space, I bumped into that bloke who was in that thing. We had a good old natter, and I was able to glean some juicy movie news: apparently he’s signed up to do a remake of that thing about the you-know-what. I’m a big fan of the original, but I’m looking forward to seeing how the updated version turns out.

Finally, a word of advice about space travel; do not, what ever you do, attempt to communicate with alien probes. I know from bitter experience that all they ever talk about is Frankie Goes to Hollywood. It’s true, they’re all Frankie mad! “When are they getting back together?” “Why did Holly Johnson really leave the band?” “What was your favourite Frankie song?” Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. You’d think a civilisation advanced enough to send a probe tens of light years through space would have had the forethought to pack more than one CD. I heard about one group of colonists who, after a 2,000-year journey to Betelgeuse, made Cliff Richard their god. Honestly, hasn’t anyone heard of iPod?