I had the pleasure of hearing myself namechecked on French radio yesterday.

I'm a relatively frequent listener to their weekday programme Open Jazz.  They often run little competitions related to the theme of  the broadcast and you are invited to email in an answer.  Thanks to the wonder of the www the answers to questions about which you haven't a clue can be found and then it's down to getting your email in quickly enough.

A biopic about the Swedish jazz singer Monica Zetterlund opens in France today and she was the theme of yesterday's programme.  There were in fact two competitions.  Since the prize for the first one was tickets for the film I ignored it but I was all organised for the second.  I had the email set up with only the answer to stick in.  I had Wikipedia's entry for Monica open.  I had the IMDB page for the film open.

Came the question...where was the man who plays the pianist Bill Evans in the film born?  Quick as a flash I got the actor's name from IMDB, googled him, found a biog and bingo, plugged Anchorage into my email and hit send.

I can't claim to have awaited the result on tenterhooks.  In fact I was busy on the computer paying more or less no attention to the programme when I heard "nell".  That's me à la française.  Checking on the podcast I found I was the tenth of ten winners of the CD Sky/Lift by Randy Ingram, the actor who not only played Bill Evans but played the piano as well.

Isn't that great?