The method in the madness turns out to be worth the wait and brings the audience, that tonight includes Neve Campbell, Alan Carr, Paul Daniels, Mark Gatiss and Reece Shearsmith, to its feet.
So it is that college basketball finds itself with a center-stage opportunity, roughly five weeks before March Madness turns every workplace with a copying machine into a gambling den.
As someone who's unaccountably ended up with the job of commenting on all this fleeting madness, turning its constant sourceless jabbing idiocy into some kind of coherent whole, it's traumatic.
I wept over David Grossman's Falling Out of Time (Cape), which somehow plundered all my own grief and madness and turned it into a poem of terrifying beauty.
B Traven's The Bridge in the Jungle (Penguin), an extraordinary novel about the accidental death of a village boy in rural Mexico; Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (Arrow), a masterly exercise in Gothic foreboding and dark-side sexuality; and Norwegian Wood (Panther), the book of student love and madness that turned Haruki Murakami into a literary pop star in Japan.
What they'd like, of course, is to bring to their version of trash that extra touch of madness which turns exploitation into wit.
For those of you who think hockey was so last month, there is March's much-hyped madness to turn to, and as Pat Forde of ESPN.com writes, watch out for beer trucks and fire hydrants.
She follows him from Europe all the way to Canada, and her madness, finally, turns into something purely abstract, a world of its own: when she passes the object of her desire in the street, she no longer recognizes him.
Chaplin is the transcendent figure in the history of cinema — he put the cinema into history with his comedy, and here — in his devastating comic mockery of Adolf Hitler and denunciation of the tyrant's hateful and world-dominating madness — he turns his comedy into an act of vast historical moment.
I was congratulating myself on having side-stepped the madness when I turned on the radio to discover that Hillary wasn't in Chappaqua at all.
