Hello.

Today’s list is a quick list of things to remember about General Election polling day:

• It’s on Thursday (6th May).
• Polls open at 7am and close at 10pm.
• In many places there are local elections on the same day.
• If you’re eligible to vote, you should have had a polling card from your council telling you where your polling station is. If you haven’t had one and you think you should be able to vote, give them a call as soon as possible.
• You don’t need your polling card to vote, but it helps the polling station staff if you have it.
• If you have a postal vote and haven’t returned it yet, get it in the post asap. It has to arrive with the council before the polls close on Thursday.
• If you still have your postal vote on polling day, you can take it – sealed in its envelope – to your local polling station, or to your local council.
• When you vote, put a cross in the box for the candidate you want to vote for (or, for local elections where you have more than one vote, the boxes of the candidates you want to vote for). Don’t write anything else on the ballot paper or you risk it being spoilt.
• After the polls close, the ballot boxes will be taken to the count location. First, the council will check that the number of ballot papers in each ballot box matches the number of ballot papers given to voters. Then the votes will be counted.
• Most counts for the General Election are taking place on Thursday night. Get an estimate of when the result will be announced for your constituency from the Press Association.

Tuesday was this blog’s sixth anniversary and so the one day of the year I talk blog stats. But it was also the day the General Election was called, so I’ve been a bit busy this week. I’ve therefore merged this weekend’s list with the annual number round-up.

So here we go. The previous five years’ figures are in brackets, last year’s first.

• 3 (3, 2, 2, 2, 2): number of servers this site has been hosted on
• 2 (2, 2, 2, 2, 2): number of blogging applications used
• 1,157 (1,123, 977, 873, 588, 226): total number of posts
• 1,742 (1,614, 1,518, 1,350, 774, 444): total number of comments
• 1.51 (1.44, 1.55, 1.55, 1.32, 1.96): average number of comments per post
• 137,317 (112,651, 70,993, 43,016, 6,322): total unique hits

Top seven referring websites (excluding search engines):

• 7 (-): Derren Brown
• 6 (5): British Blogs
• 5 (6): Nothing Tra La La?
• 4 (7): Liberal England
• 3 (3): LibDem Blogs
• 2 (-): Facebook
• 1 (2): Twitter

(With two new entries there, the sites that dropped from the chart were Lib Dem Voice and Wikipedia – last year’s number one referrer.)

Top nine referring blogs:

• 9 (-): Wulfweard the White
• 8 (-): The Pod Delusion
• 7 (7): Andrew Reeves’ Running Blog
• 6 (8): Naked Blog
• 5 (5): Love and Liberty
• 4 (-): Mark Pack
• 3 (-): Derren Brown
• 2 (2): Nothing Tra La La?
• 1 (3): Liberal England

(I should point out that those Derren Brown referrals came from someone in his comments, not the scary brain man himself.)

Top ten search terms:

• 10 (-): “derren brown” lottery
• 9 (-): hut 33
• 8 (-): barry letters
• 7 (-): derren brown lottery how
• 6 (-): eurovision 2009 island
• 5 (-): top 10 iphone apps
• 4 (-): darren brown lottery
• 3 (-): derren brown lottery prediction
• 2 (1): eurovision 2009
• 1 (-): derren brown lottery

Turns out that lottery song brought in much of the last year’s traffic. Other choice searches from the top 30 include toby stephens (finally out of the top 10); freebmd; karaoke circus; and colin jeavons.

I’ll try to be on time next year.

What with the new series starting IN LESS THAN AN HOUR I thought I should write something Doctor Who themed today. Bit stream of consciousness this list:

• First new TV story I saw: possibly Time and the Rani (I think can remember the giant brain) but if not then certainly something from season 25
• First novelisation I read: The Daemons
• First VHS I saw: probably Death to the Daleks (with Pyramids of Mars and Spearhead from Space around the same time)
• First new TV story I saw as a self-defined fan: Dimensions in Time. Ho hum.
• First novelisation I read: The Daemons by Barry Letts
• First New Adventure I read: Nightshade by Mark Gatiss
• First issue of Doctor Who Magazine I bought: don’t know the number but was probably around 1993 and had Sylvester McCoy in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy on the cover. I bought it from a small newsagent at the edge of the pedestrianised shopping precinct in Tunbridge Wells.
• First VHS I bought: The Keeper of Traken, at the end of 1992. Also bought in Tunbridge Wells, in the WH Smith in the Victoria centre. What useless things we remember.
• First convention I went to: Blue Box III in Southampton in 1994.
• First Doctor who’s younger than me: Matt Smith.

As I’ve been working my way through the House of Cards trilogy recently (what better way to get in the mood for a General Election?), this week’s list is fictional British Prime Ministers from off of the telly. Minor spoilers for old dramas follow.

• From House of Cards:
  • Charles Henry Collingridge – Margaret Thatcher’s successor, who makes the mistake of leaving Francis Urquhart unpromoted
  • Francis Urquhart – F.U. himself, a ruthless right-wing PM brought brilliantly to life by Ian Richardson
• Maureen Graty – the British PM who appears briefly in the sixth season of The West Wing, played by Pamela Salem – and as far as I know, fact fans, she’s the only actor from either Doctor Who or Blake’s 7 to have appeared in The West Wing
• Michael Phillips – Robert Bathurst’s occupant of Number 10 in the BBC sitcom My Dad’s the Prime Minister
• Tom Davis – second PM (and the first named) in The Thick of It, although he’s not seen on screen
• From the Doctor Who universe:
  • “Jeremy” – the PM during The Green Death – assumed to be former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe
  • “Madam” – there’s a female PM on the phone in Terror of the Zygons – possibly Shirley Williams
  • Joseph Green – MP for Hartley Dale and acting PM in World War Three, although he’s actually Jocrassa Fel Fotch Pasameer-Day Slitheen in disguise
  • Harriet Jones – Penelope Wilton’s MP for Flydale North, she is Prime Minister in The Christmas Invasion
  • Harold Saxon – John Simm as the Master, perhaps having benefited from the Doctor’s quiet overthrowing of Harriet Jones
  • Brian Green – played by Nicholas Farrell (also of To Play the King), he was PM during Torchwood: Children of Earth
• Kevin Pork – in Whoops Apocalypse, portrayed by Peter Jones
• Ros Pritchard – Jane Horrocks’s eponymous character in The Amazing Mrs Pritchard (which prompted a lot of discussion on Lib Dem Voice)
• From The Pallisers:
  • Joshua Monk – Liberal PM in Trollope’s The Duke’s Children, played by Bryan Pringle
  • The Duke of Omnium – from Trollope’s The Prime Minster, played by Philip Latham
• Michael Stevens – Anthony Head’s PM in Little Britain
• Harry Perkins – the star of A Very British Coup, Ray McAnally’s socialist PM is almost the diametrical opposite of Francis Urquhart (the book was by Chris Mullin, subsequently a Labour MP himself but standing down this year)
• Jim Hacker – last but by no means least, Paul Eddington takes the title role in Yes, Prime Minister, one of the best sitcoms ever made

And here’s a fact I stumbled across while checking the information in this list – the replica House of Commons often seen in TV dramas since the 1980s was built for the ITV adaptation of First Among Equals and is now owned by TV writer Paul Abbott.