If you do one thing today...

...listen to David Pratt's documentary about the real life M.A.S.H. teams in Afghanistan at 11.30am on Radio Scotland

David regularly puts himself in harm's way to file dispatches for the Sunday Herald and this radio documentary, built on a magazine piece he wrote some time ago, will be no exception.

Mixed reports coming through this morning about the legitimacy of the Afghan election result and news that a British Chinook was brought down in an attempted Taliban "spectacular" that would have overshadowed the already tense week.

The helicopter made a hard landing and everyone aboard managed to get out but it is only one of eight British Chinooks in the country and its loss will be a logistical blow for the UK and a propaganda victory for the Taliban.

While people were dipping their fingers in ink in Afghanistan by coincidence I went to see The Observer, a new play by Matt Charman, in the National Theatre.

It's about a group of international observers monitoring the first election in a fictional west African state and it raises some pertinent questions about "liberal interventionism" and the legitimacy of the electoral process.

The cast, headed by Anna Chancellor, worked damn hard but you can't help but see the drama through the prism of journalism and real life news which - in elections Afghanistan and Iraq and Zimbabwe - has been more traumatic than anything contained in the play.

That's the news, theatre reviews and radio previews for the morning. Now, if Peter Mandelson is in hospital who is running the country...