Welcome to Britain Mr T - I doubt you'll want to stay

In the same week that Mr T landed in Britain to flog Snickers bars, Britain welcomed back Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyan Mohamed who arrived after the Foreign Office successfully lobbied the US for his release.

At the end of last year British Airways announced that it would offer Mr T, who found fame as BA Baracus who had a fear of flying, a free flight ahead of his ‘Get some nuts’ marketing campaign for Snickers. Ethiopian Mohamed, on the other hand, was arrested in Pakistan and accused of plotting to detonate a dirty bomb.

While Binyan Mohamed and BA Baracus can both share the claim that ‘they were convicted of crimes they did not commit’, what this incidence also shows is the mendacious power of PR.

For British Airways, it’s quite a smart stunt given that these things usually leave me cold; for the Government, however, to claim that Mohamed’s release is some kind of victory and that he should be welcomed back (although his presence in Pakistan has never been fully explained) is I think rather perverse.

Pizza sponsorship - make it a new hate crime

God knows how long Ofcom came up with its decision that Domino's Pizza's sponsorship of The Simpsons on Sky One breached its codes that are meant to restrict the promotion of HFSS foods to children.

Given that the adjudication extends to six and a half pages and includes various definitions from ASA and BCAP Codes as well as correspondence with some poor sod at Sky Media who had to put their case back to Ofcom, it is an investigation that would have put the Hutton Enquiry to shame. And all because the National Heart Forum had said that the long-running sponsorship failed to ‘observe the spirit as well as the letter of the rules'.

In the same Broadcast Bulletin adjudication, in which ITV and Highland Spring are also castigated for giving undue prominence to the water brand during an exchange on the British Comedy Awards, which if anything was sarcastic and in any case only attracted one viewer complaint, EastEnders was exonerated despite 90 complaints that its storyline was about paedohilia.

The majority of the complainants said that the subject, centred around Bianca's partner Tony who had started abusing her daughter when she was 12, was not suitable for a pre-watershed audience. Images of them kissing and lying on the bed together were also shown. Incidentally, EastEnders is transmitted at the same time as The Simpsons.

In its judgment, which extended to just three pages, Ofcom noted its responsibility under the European Convention of Human Rights that ‘information and ideas' must be ‘imparted...without undue interference'. Also that the programme prompted viewers ‘to respond to the Action Line...and to write to the programme makers outlining their similar experiences' and it was therefore OK.

At the risk of sounding like Richard Littlejohn, are we sure that Ofcom has its priorities right here?

Stop press: more Goody news for politicians

Further to my previous posts, it's been revealed that Justice Secretary Jack Straw has changed the rules regarding the curfew conditions of Jade Goody's charming fiance Jack Tweed, who has just served 18 months for assault, so that he can spend the night with his bride rather than return home, which is part of the terms of his bail.

Gordon Brown meanwhile has continued his 'People's Princess' lines by paying yet another tribute to Goody on a visit to Fife.

In other news, home reposessions have risen to 40,000, a further 3000 people have lost their jobs, Government borrowing is set to hit £90bn this year and two teenagers were stabbed to death in London last night.

Who is more cynical - the press, the politicians, or is it me?

Jade Goody: an addendum

Anyone else happen upon Gordon Brown's moving tribute to Goody in his weekly Q&A with journalists on TV?

Although it wasn't quite as opportunistic as Tony Blair's eulogy to Lady Di, it was either his 'She was the People's Princess' moment or an attempt by a journalist to make him look stupid.

If it was the former, then that surely goes to show just how far this country has gone in the wrong direction and if it was the latter, then the journalist probably succeeded.

Watching Jade Goody's final Living moments is not OK!

Living TV has snapped up the rights to broadcast the wedding of terminally ill Jade Goody to her boyfriend for a reported £100,000, scheduled for mid-March, while OK! Magazine, it is claimed, has paid seven times that for the picture rights to the event and to the subsequent christening of her children.

Hmmm.

Dare I say it.... Goody has never in the least bit appealed to me; she is the ultimate fake media confection albeit incarnated in the flesh of a human being complete with feelings and sensitivities.

It was unfair on her the way that she was propelled to stardom by Channel 4 through, by no fault of her own, being revealed as crass, vulgar and ill-educated and although I'm sure her ignorance revealed some endearing traits - made all the more remarkable given her tough upbringing - the ugliness of her appearance in Celeb Big Brother revealed a side that was rather cruel and upon which the media were again quick to pounce.

The media didn't build her up and knock her down - they invented her for their own purposes as some sort of freak show, and followed her every move. Yet here was a girl who was too dim-witted to realise what was going on. To commissioning editors, perhaps her death is the perfect denouement to a soap opera that needed no set, no writers and no cast of supporting actors.

I won't be watching the wedding and I'm not at all interested in the pics but perhaps Goody, by seeking to secure a financial future for her family, has managed to get her own back on the media that has played her like a puppet by screwing them for so much cash. I only wish she had got more. Even she has realised that in the final analysis the joke isn't on her but on those that created her - perhaps when the inevitable happens those media organisations involved in creating ‘brand Jade' will sit back and look at the morality of the whole sorry episode.

Or will they be too busy scouring the estates looking for another naive simpleton to exploit for cheap titillation?

ITV needs Government help, not just a buyer for Friends Reunited

For ITV, any disposal of Friends Reunited is the exact antithesis of selling off the family silver.

When the acquisition was announced in 2006 for an eye-watering £175m there was a sharp intake of breath - after all, although Friends Reunited was in some way pioneering it was rapidly losing its novelty to US rivals that offered far better functionality and without a subscription. In fact the purchase seemed slightly desperate, which with the benefit of only a little hindsight it clearly was.

Michael Grade's predecessor Charles Allen had long struggled to emulate his mentor, former Granada chief executive Gerry Robinson, who had impressed the City with a number of audacious bids. If Allen was hoping that Friends Reunited would be his response to Robinson's hostile takeover of Forte then he was sadly deluded.

Unfortunately it has fallen to his successors to pick through the debris and Friends Reunited is the biggest obstacle of all. Quite whether ITV can find a buyer in this fire sale and whether more redundancies and a slashing of programme budgets are enough to secure its medium to long-term financial future is the question.

If it isn't, given how quickly the Government has been in bailing out the banking sector, would it be too much to expect some help for the only UK-owned commercially funded broadcaster?

The media shock of the week that didn't happen in Midsomer

The shock of the week was not John Nettles quitting Midsomer Murders, but the news that Teletext was cutting its output. I thought it had faded away years ago.

Without sounding like a complete dick, I like and consume most media - but TV text services? The last time I went on the defining cultural point of the year was Mrs Mangle deciding to emigrate to St Alban's with John Worthington.

Who still watches it? I shouldn't even imagine the elderly, the demographic blamed for most unusual media trends, manage to get their heads around all those irritating and illogical page numbers in an age when its much easier to get information.

Odd to think that people really booked their holidays on it or searched for news and entertainment. Was it a sort of 80s version of the internet? It's all too long ago to remember.

I just hope Jim Robinson has regular health checks. He's looked very stressed recently.

Noel Edmonds is a national treasure

Intrigued by the publicity surrounding ' mce_href=''>Noel Edmond's rant at the idiots at Wealden Council who refused a marine who lost both his legs in Afghanistan planning permission for a bungalow in his grandparent's garden, I tuned in to watch some of his Sky show - Noel's HQ - last night.

It was a peculiar show - a cross between That's Life, Crinkly Bottom and Esther Rantzen's Hearts of Gold - with Edmonds and his 80s sidekick Keith Chegwin performing to a highly-charged audience. The content focussed on rewarding people who had done good deeds - like a binman from Mansfield who had tackled a burglar - while exposing examples of that favourite tabloid expression, 'political correctness gone mad'.

Although I didn't like the show particularly I'm still glad that it's on the telly. OK, so Edmonds with his theories on cosmic ordering could be accused of being somewhere between Alan Partridge and David Icke and appears to have gone a bit strange but then what do you expect from a man who has spent his entire adult life surrounded by imaginary characters and puppets and manages to get excited about people opening boxes. The key point is that his heart is in the right place and the show does a lot more good than harm (Wealden Council has subsequently relented).

I doubt any other TV network would be brave enough to run the series but then again it's unlikely that they would commission anything as powerful or pro-armed forces as Ross Kemp in Afghanistan, an updated ''Return To' is also on Sky One at the moment. Both are unfashionable among cynical liberal media circles but that doesn't mean that they don't have a place. Surely that is the whole point of media plurality and it's good that Sky appreciates this even if no-one else does.

Don't trust press officers, go to AQA

It's come to something when you have to go to text service AQA to verify a claim made by an organisation's press office. But this was the situation when an enquiry was made to one of Britain's broadcasters, which will remain nameless other than it used to be known as ‘Britain's favourite button'.

To be fair the initial claim was not made by said broadcaster but by a supermarket chain, which can also have anonymity, about some suspiciously over-blown claim that it had pulled off some spurious media first for the launch of a new ad campaign. The broadcaster, presumably keen to keep the advertiser in favour, fudged the answer with the answer ‘it's possible'.

However only AQA was able to come up with the truth that the Co-Op (damn - given it away) was wrong when it claimed it was the first advertiser to have ever taken over the entire break of a popular soap we shall call Jubilee Road.

Media firsts are a rare thing and, although are generally mere stunts, should be welcomed if true so advertisers should make them rather than claim. For hard-hit media owners the lesson is instead of hiring Boston Consulting Group to help them navigate their way through these turbulent economic times, perhaps they should just ask AQA where cut-backs could be made.

When swearing on TV is appropriate

There are two TV series on at the moment and both are notable for the fact that they feature Scotsmen swearing profusely.

One features a multi-millionaire cook whose fortune has largely been accrued from the notoriety he has achieved from screeching profanities at people who are unable to cook a flan, amongst other things, to his liking.

The other is a powerful series featuring men from 5 Scots risking their lives on a daily basis, and for about 17k a year, in order to fulfil the will of the UK government, whose role is to protect our interests abroad.

One is on a public service broadcaster, which is currently waving the begging bowl for public funding; the other is on a relatively low-rent pure entertainment channel.

I can only guess that the two people who commissioned these shows were job-swapping that day.