Of Gordon Brown, blogs and onanism

I had a conversation recently with a distinguished and retired media gentleman who drew an analogy between writing his blog and masturbating.

After a brief pause while I attempted to dab the spat-out tea from my shirt, he made some curious explanation about ‘not needing to look your best', which I didn't entirely understand.

But he is of course right but not necessarily for the reason that he gave - as well as there being a large amount of wank published in blogs, both are pastimes that are usually conducted in solitary and largely pass noticed (indicative from the complete lack of attention and comments that they usually attract).

Up until last week I thought the pinnacle of my journalistic career had already passed, when I was allowed to write a weekly column in the Durham student newspaper over 15 years ago.

But that was until I really hit the big time when the BBC rang up demanding my appearance on a live radio show having read something on my blog. And so it was that last week I broadcast to an eager and excited, erm, county on BBC Radio Essex.

Daniel Hannan MEP must be feeling a similar elation with the power of digital media. After the mainsteam media ignored his impassioned speech to Gordon Brown, it has subsequently become a massive hit on YouTube after news of it spread through social media. Given that well over 1m people have now viewed it, news organisations have now deemed that it is news. Such is the power of social media.

Anyway, enough of this. All this staring at the screen writing this blog is making me go blind.

If only the Duke of Edinburgh did know who Simon Cowell was

It's a shame that the Duke of Edinburgh has denied that he called Simon Cowell a ‘scrounger', even though he did it with the rather elegant put-down that ‘he does not know enough about Mr Cowell to make any sort of comment about him'.

I can think of a lot worse things to call him - camp old roué, bitchy millionaire pantomime dame, cruel and cynical exploiter of the young and naïve - and I'm sure that if HRH the D of E did know who he was he'd come up with even better ones. Still, it's been a nice little publicity stunt for Cowell.

However I'm sure that someone would be quick to point out that he has pretty much single-handedly reinvigorated the light entertainment genre and has helped re-establish ITV's Saturday night line-up (albeit at a massive financial cost) to a pre-eminence not seen since the early 90s, thereby providing some much-needed cheer to an otherwise bleak schedule.

And the schedule is about to get bleaker still - this weekend marks the last time that ITV will transmit the Boat Race as well as the first Formula One race on the BBC since ITV handed back the rights because of cost.

With ITV's sports coverage now solely focussed on a ragbag of football rights, as well as cuts to drama and daytime commissions, there's a danger that, light entertainment aside, the network is beginning to look almost indistinguishable from those UKTV satellite repeat channels that keep being re-branded with increasingly ridiculous names.

Without Cowell, ITV might want to consider UKTV's example and re-brand as ‘Threadbare'; ‘Scrounger' would best be saved for Channel 4.

A message to Jacqui Smith - Face, book? Bothered?

Should we be worried that the Home Office plans to keep details of the contacts and details of users of social networking sites as part of its plan to store records of all phone calls, emails and websites visited, ostensibly in the name of ‘national security'?

Aside from the issue of civil liberty, this is from a department, remember, that has managed to lose the details of 84,000 prisoners and 3000 migrant seasonal workers - including their passport numbers - in a government that has also mislaid information on among others 25m people's child benefit claimants, 3m learner drivers and banking details on a further 600,000.

Nonetheless the answer is no.

If some civil servant or half-witted minister chooses to leave in a pub or a train a disc containing the usual banal information available on social networking sites, such as ‘...is looking forward to the weekend!', ‘...can't wait for payday!', ‘....has a hangover!', that's fine by me. I very much doubt that there are many Islamic groups that use Facebook to plan attacks with updates such as ‘...is plotting a jihad'.

So go for it Jacqui.

Incidentally the difference between our government and that of Nicolas Sarkozy was thrown into sharp relief on the front page of today's Daily Telegraph. He has appointed Guadeloupe-born TV presenter Christine Kelly as his minister of overseas territories. Hazel Blears she is not.

Tesco TV - because every titillation helps

When Tesco said it was dropping its in-store TV network, Tesco TV, for something more ‘modern' who would have thought that pornography was possibly being considered as an alternative?

Tesco has always prided itself on being able to get shoppers in, not least with its cheap meat products available, as Hugh Fearnsley-Whittingstall revealed, because the supermarket chooses to adopt the bare minimum animal welfare standards from its suppliers.

However visitors to a Southampton branch found themselves getting an eyeful of another cheap meat treat, after seeing porn being transmitted from the now-defunct Tesco TV screens dangling from the aisles.

Although Tesco has said that the porn was the result of a customer prank and that it was only on for seconds, other reports suggest that it was on for several minutes before the screens were changed back to regular TV. Plus we don't know which seconds they were.

Nonetheless hats off for to Tesco for media innovation and hopefully this will see off those German interlopers Aldi and Lidl who, if they try a similar tactic, will just show big hairy women with blokes called Jurgen.

Calcutta Cup victory inspired me to seek out Basildon Chemicals

Aside from sounding like businesses that you would have thought had been cast asunder by the 1973 Oil Crisis, what do Basildon Chemicals and Banner Batteries and have in common?

They are just two of the particularly obscure brands whose ads, which look like they come from the 1950s, adorn some of the hoardings on the upper tiers at Twickenham Stadium, I noticed on Saturday during a bit of a dull second half. Other advertisers include Costcutters, Walls Sausages and an organisation called Baxi.

Amid all the cutting-edge brand activation that goes on at the game - such as the excellent O2 blueroom - as well as the LED pitch-side hoardings and giant Blink TV screens, these ads hark back to an era when I expect they were placed on the whim of the rugby-loving chairman than for any sound tactical media rationale.

As HQ expanded over the years, stands must have been built around them as they still cling on with their never-changing copy, glanced at as supporters raised their eyes heavenwards in either relief or despair.

While I'm glad to see so much money now going into English rugby from brands that are really putting rugby at the heart of their communications, I'm also pleased that these old ads from a more amateur era and one where Andy Goode's haircut was still fashionable, remain here rather than at the Museum of Brands. All I want to know is where to buy their products, if indeed it is still possible to do so.

When Brucie finally does go at least we'll still have Chris Tarrant

Given that Chris Tarrant reportedly got into television by writing to TV companies with the bold statement that ‘I am the face of the 1970s and this is your last chance to snap me up' it's understandable that the media was quick to imply that he had been indulging in a bit of wife-beating - a popular pastime of that decade.

In fact he was, as he admits in a remarkably frank interview in the Telegraph, just pissed and had a loud argument with his younger partner and the police were called but there was no case to answer.

So Tarrant likes a drink and, as has been very publicly revealed by scorned former partners, he's got a wandering eye, particularly for younger blonde woman. But he's also the best entertainer of his generation and will endure long after Ant & Dec do a Hale & Pace or Graeme Norton's career goes the same way as Barrymore's.

From Tiswas in the 70s, Capital Radio and Tarrant on TV in the 80s and 90s and up to the current day with Millionaire, Tarrant has been an enduring figure, in my life anyway.

And at 64, he's got another 20 years left in him if he follows Brucie's example by which time I'll be in my 50s (and following behind him there's Justin Lee-Collins - that should see me out). For that reason Chris Tarrant is a complete legend and is officially on the National Treasures list.

Give Mark Thompson a hand - what would you like to see the BBC drop?

Mark Thompson has finally admitted that the BBC must cut its budgets. Not, as you might expect, because it is lavish, over-staffed and is strangling its commercial rivals to death but because it might breach its ‘statutory borrowing limit'.

How awful if that happened. Oh well, nonetheless we should still celebrate the fact that it is having to suffer, albeit to a lesser degree, along with the rest of the industry and the country.

Thommo hasn't said where the cuts will come from so I'm after suggestions. It would be nice to see Jonathan Ross's salary sacrificed for the greater good and I'm sure we can live without BBC Three. What else?

Why James Corden and Mathew Horne aren't as funny as they think

It's easy to tell when British TV performers think that they are proper stars - they make an execrable low-rent film. Ant and Dec did it with Alien Autopsy, Johnny Vegas and Mackenzie Crook with Sex Lives of the Potato Men and now James Corden and Mathew Horne have done it with *** Vampire Killers.

They inevitably always bomb for the very good reason that the people in them aren't as funny as they think they are - they may have achieved fame, usually from the skills of someone else - but talent doesn't automatically follow bombast.

Personally I've never found any of the above particularly talented in their TV work, Gavin and Stacey is especially nauseous and is saved only by Rob Brydon, but surely Corden and Horne's filmic efforts represent the very nadir of the genre, revealed by its particularly juvenile title.

I've never understood what goes through their minds when they think that making a film is a good thing to do - other than money. The only TV couple to have achieved any real success, either from the critics or at the box office, is Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.

And Corden and Horne are certainly nowhere near as good as them. In fact, I'm confident in saying that their film will bomb, Gavin and Stacey will end after people grow tired of the one joke that seems to sustain the series and they will disappear without trace in a year.

In loving tribute to Northern & Shell's sense of taste

With the press deadline looming for its special tribute issue and Jade Goody still clinging on to life, we'll never know how tempting it was for someone from OK! magazine to attempt to smother her with a pillow. Perhaps this explains the mysterious appearance of a ranting stranger in her room a few weeks ago who was subsequently ejected by security staff?

Nonetheless, Northern & Shell, which has forked out to pay for coverage of her wedding to her jailbird husband pushed ahead with the publication of the ‘in loving tribute' issue including her final words even though Goody is still breathing.

The decision by N&S and Goody and her representatives to trade her death has always struck me as distasteful, although perhaps understandable as apparently there is a public appetite for this kind of journalism and Goody claims to want to secure the financial future of her children.

While they may be financially better off, we'll never know the mental impact of having their mother's life and death played out in the media will be to her children. Oh - unless of course OK! has signed up to track their lives too.

Cry God for London, Boris and St. Patrick

Yesterday's St Patrick's Day Parade was the perfect end to a perfect week. If you're a complete idiot.

In the past I assumed that Ken Livingstone, who famously welcomed members of Sinn Fein to County Hall in the 70s when they were in the middle of their most murderous phase, used tax-payers money to fund the event to annoy me. My suspicions grew greater when I saw that no similar event was put on for our own patron saint.

Queries to City Hall were met with the response that brands also contributed to the cost, although having never wanted to go to the event I can't comment on whether this is true or not.

When London underwent a regime change I thought that perhaps sanity would be restored and that the £150,000 cost of the parade would be put to a more sensible use, so I was annoyed by the number of people clad in green, wearing stupid wigs and waving Irish flags when I came into London yesterday for the rugby.

While I acknowledge that some members of the Irish diaspora have made a great contribution to British life - the Duke of Wellington for example - I just don't think that it warrants an annual taxpayer funded jamboree.

But then I don't live in London so perhaps it's none of my business. Still, it's good to be back and sorry this isn't about media.

Disenfranchise the elderly

Disappointment among octogenarians distressed that ITV isn't planning to make any more episodes of The Royal or Heartbeat must surely have been tempered by news that the BBC has re-commissioned a third series of its appallingly twee Lark Rise to Candleford.

Now I like my Sunday TV viewing to be as gentle as the next - a love of Antiques Roadshow is my dirty little secret - but when I first saw Dawn French in a bonnet talking in some absurd bucolic accent I thought it was some mickey take of the genre, a trick she used to do in French & Saunders when they were funny. But no - we were meant to believe that grossly overweight French really is an impoverished but kind-hearted peasant.

While I have to begrudgingly acknowledge this shows that the Corporation is living up to its remit to cater for all demographic sections, would it be mean-spirited of me to say that Lark Rise to Candleford viewers shouldn't count given that the TV Licence is free to the over-75s - no representation without taxation seems a fine principle to me.

I'm off on hols - enjoy Comic Relief.

Will there be '100 days to save ITV'?

ITV’s management can quite rightly be accused of crying wolf all too frequently in the past as it sought to protect its dominant position, but if there was ever any doubt that Rupert Howell was over egging it when he said that it was ‘scrapping for its life’ it must surely be dispelled by its results published today.

Why won’t somebody do something to help it? After all it’s not, like Channel 4 - or indeed numerous other companies in various sectors - wielding the begging bowl in front of Peter Mandelson thereby plunging the country into further debt.

To leave it to die or be taken over by a foreign media conglomerate would be nothing short of negligent. Or does the government really think there are no votes in bothering to take the small measures that would save it?

Will no-one relieve me of this troublesome Comic Relief?

If you thought that everybody stopped thinking Comic Relief was funny in 1987, which I think was its second year, then you were wrong.

Nope - Hale & Pace's The Stomp and even Right Said Fred's Stick It Out - has seemingly failed to diminish the appeal of the annual celeb cringe-fest among some sections of society, judging by the fact that an estimated 7.1m people thought that their Saturday night would be rendered more enjoyable by watching BBC One's 'Let's Dance for Comic Relief'.

The show featured ‘comedy' dance performances from Jo Brand, the Dragon's Den team, Blue Peter and the cast of Hollyoaks and although I missed it (shame) I expect it's fair to say that they were having a lot more fun that anyone watching.

And what's more, this year a depressing number of brands have jumped on the enforced joviality bandwagon with Fallon creating an ad in support of the charity featuring brand icons from over the years. Jammie Dodgers, too, has signed up chucklemeister Keith Chegwin on some awful Red Nose-themed on-pack promotion.

Quite why dedicating so much airtime to Red Nose Day is acceptable is not clear, especially given that the BBC was so resolute in refusing to transmit the three-minute broadcast that raised awareness of suffering in Palestine - perhaps because there was none of its on-air light entertainment talent, desperate to raise their profile, supporting it.

In the final analysis however, and to paraphrase Harry Hill, which is worse - Comic Relief or Children in Need? Sadly, and yet again, there's only one way to find out - fight your way to your local pub and see which is busier on each respective night.