Susan Boyle goes loco

I've worked for some unutterable articles (or as the prospective Tory candidate for Gloucester might say 'councillors') in my time and I've never had any desire to work for either Simon Cowell or Sir Alan Sugar.

It seems that the nation's sweetheart, the pie-faced foul-mouthed religious Scot Susan Boyle, has finally realised the same after apparently flipping out at, as the Daily Mirror describes it, 'her new-found stardom'.

According to the paper, ITV executives are so worried about her mental condition they are seeking medical advice for the Boyler to ensure she can cope with tomorrow's final of Britain's Got Talent.

If this is spin, then it's in appallingly bad taste but if it's true then it's even more worrying. What is it with the media industry that we need to find some ill-adjusted nutcase to put on a pedestal and then relish in their subsequent mental disintegration? I'm sure it's not what the blessed Jade would have wanted - if only she could find some way of speaking to us...

Have a good weekend.

Metro freesheet turns your brain to mush

There's a reason that Metro is given away free - it is, to put it politely, not very good.

This morning's edition was a prime example of why Associated Newspapers would struggle to find anyone willing to pay for it. The splash was about the nefarious expenses of disgraced Tory MP Julie Kirkbride - a legitimate target and a story that most of the other newspapers are following.

But then Metro quotes an 'expert' commentator - the left-wing stand-up comedian and agitator Mark Thomas (presumably because he'll do doing a Metro 60-second interview puffing his new tour/book soon).

Isn't this a bit like asking the late Bernard Manning to give an authoritative opinion on the Labour Party?

This is just one reason why reading the Metro does not count as reading a newspaper.

Brit Cops: Zero Tolerance - Bravo shows the seamier side of life in Hammersmith

There isn't much to see on the Hammersmith Road unless you're a fan of vagrants, enjoy watching the odd lost and disappointed-looking tourist realising that the Novotel isn't quite as glamorous or central as it looked in the brochure, or get a kick out of seeing people nearly getting run over.

I've worked this out over the nine years that I've worked in the borough and even the hopelessly optimistic 'I love Hammersmith' posters that the council has attached to the street lights have not been enough to convince me otherwise.

But then I stumbled across Brit Cops: Zero Tolerance on Bravo. It shows another side to Hammersmith - the guns, the gang warfare, the massive drug problem that the local police face every day. I never realised it was so exciting. And even better, the police are frequently filmed pursuing assorted criminal types past our building so now I feel more engaged when I see the police cars screeching past my window.

Anyway, I now feel involved in the local criminal justice system. It's a top show and is on Bravo tonight at 9 and is better than the Apprentice and Britain's Got Talent. Watch it.

Where does the Telegraph go now?

All credit to the DailyTelegraph for blowing the gaffe on MPs' expenses but I'm getting a bit bored of reading that our political class is corrupt - I think the point has been hammered home enough now and I expect that the uplift in sales that it enjoyed will begin to tail off.

So when normal service resumes, which it surely must eventually do, what is the Telegraph going to do to keep up its momentum? Will we see a return to its usual dismal fare - pictures of pretty A-Level students getting their results, disgraced Church of England vicars running off with parishioners, scare stories about gypsies or Europe?

I used to like the Telegraph under the former ownership of disgraced Tory peer Lord Black but now, other than it doing a good job ploughing through the expenses file, it is in danger of returning to being rather irrelevant.

If we can house ducks we can house Gurkhas

Good to see that the Government has finally realised that if we can find the public money to house ducks as well as Hazel Blears several times over, then we can also find it to house those Gurkhas who want to live here.

The speech by National Treasure Joanna Lumley, to use her full name, was notable for the fact that she thanked the Fourth Estate for helping with this cause and indeed credit is due to all those newspapers that united behind such a noble and right cause.

It's been a bad month for politicians and a good one for the media, what with them accurately reflecting the mood of the nation and also exposing the MPs gravy train.

My one small complaint is that Joanna Lumley described Gordon Brown as 'brave'. Where's the bravery in being forced to make a U-turn on an indefensible decision in the first place? Still, a minor gripe.

Incidentally I quite like ducks so don't mind housing them too. I wonder if there might be some votes in it?

Things must be tough - even Ofcom has announced a pay freeze

Austerity conditions have been imposed on Ofcom's staff in its lavish Thames-side headquarters; they'll have to forego a pay increase while members of its executive committee will not be considered for a bonus this year.

Poor old chief executive Ed Richards will have to continue to make do with the £400,000 that he made last year while Ofcom chairman Colette Bowe will have to continue to struggle by on the £200,000 she draws for the three day a week position. Perhaps both will consider getting an allotment or take up darning socks to see them through these difficult times.

According to the accompanying press release, Ofcom took into account 'the circumstances of the companies and taxpayers who pay for the organisation'; I'm sure that it had absolutely nothing to do with fear that their gravy train salaries would be next to be exposed to widespread public disgust.

Never mind just Esther, why not reunite the entire That's Life team as an interim government?

Esther Rantzen, who hasn't had a regular TV job for some years, announced on Newsnight last night that she is considering standing as a candidate in Luton South as a sort of Martin Bell-style honest broker. This got me thinking.

Why not just dissolve Parliament and let Rantzen, Doc Cox, Gavin Campbell and Adrian Mills sit during an interregnum. In a much-needed and visible sign of reform, the Cabinet Room could be disposed of and Rantzen and her cohorts could dispense their customary wisdom and justice - including the 'Jobsworth of the Week' award - while perched on stools in a semi-circle.

Fellow consumer affairs champion Lynne Faulds-Wood could act as the official opposition while Simon Cowell would surely have the moral authority to act as Speaker.

While their is much rotten at the heart of government I sincerely hope that we don't end up voting for has-been TV celebrities who use their modicum of media fame as a way of getting into Parliament. Incidentally an anagram of That's Life is Flat Shite.

Bear Grylls - Born Chancer

Lots of pictues of that beaming and mildy irritating rah Edward 'Bear' Grylls in today's papers following his appointment as Chief Scout, a particularly pointless sounding job, but what sort of role model is he?

In the words of Loyd Grossman, let's look at the evidence: Channel 4 was forced to admit that his series Born Survivor misled viewers as it implied that he was stranded alone in the wild. Another episode showed him riding a remarkably well-groomed 'wild' horse, while a scene that was meant to show him stranded on a raft in the South Pacific was actually filmed on a film set in Hawaii.

Aside from his TV work, he has not been quick to dismiss those stories that go around that he was in the Special Forces. This isn't exactly true - he was in fact a part-time reservist and although he did indeed break his back parachuting, his putative SAS missions in Africa have never been fully explained.

While these sound like rather minor indiscretions given what's been going on in public life of late, I'm not sure that he's quite the hero that he's made out to be. Still, he replaces former Blue Peter presenter and ex soft-porn star Peter Duncan so he's in good company.

MPs at pantomime Question Time - your political careers are behind you...

Last night's Question Time was a cross between a day out at the Colisseum and an evening at the panto. It made for great television.

Watching MPs from all the main political parties getting shouted down by a furious audience as they tried to justify the unjustifiable (Margaret Beckett's claim that she has been 'too busy' to check her outlandish claims was particularly absurd) attracted an audience of 3.8m - unheard of for a late night political programme.

And what made it all the more sweet is the audience won this debate. The panellists, including Theresa May, Menzies Campbell and la Beckett, all ended up looking rattled, which is exactly how they should be. And due credit to the Telegraph's representative on the panel for managing not to look too smug.

Andy Duncan would do well to learn from greedy MPs

So the Lib Dems use their expenses on biscuits and trouser presses, the Tories on chandeliers and moats and Labour on loo seats and damp rot.

While the revelations in The Daily Telegraph have caused acute ambarrassment to all MPs, they also go to prove that most political stereotypes are in fact correct. They have also helped lift the paper's sales by nearly 100,000 copies a day according to reports so all in all it's been the story of the year.

Nonetheless it was difficult not to have some sympathy with Labour peer Lord Foulkes who got in a bitter argument with a BBC News 24 presenter about her own remuneration - 92 grand of licence fee money to read the autocue on an obscure digital channel seems equally excessive. Today we learn that 80 members of staff at Channel 4 get paid over 100k a year, for which Andy Duncan put up a rather lame defence.

While the politicians have moved quickly to acknowledge that they are over-paid, wouldn't it be nice if this started a wider debate and that the BBC and C4 start cutting their cloth accordingly. If the Daily Telegraph achieves that then it will have done a greater service then it initially set out to do.

Gordon Ramsay tops the swear-o-meter

Channel 4's potty-mouthed cook Gordon Ramsay has found himself in trouble with Ofcom for managing to get 115 versions of the f-word into the first 40 minutes of his 'Great British Nightmare' programme - that's nearly three a minute.

The broadcaster's defence is that its audience would have expected this. So that's alright then, although poor old Bill Grundy will presumably be spinning in his grave at the news.

I don't care either way but what I do worry about is that Channel 4 has now managed to destroy one of the remaining TV taboos and taken away the power of what was once an incredibly powerful word when used judiciously.

That leaves just one word left that has any power at all and I can think of plenty of people on television who suit it, including Ramsay himself.

'It's not my fault - it's the cistern'. Daily Telegraph busts MPs

Full marks to the Daily Telegraph for exposing the absurd expenses claims from MPs of which Welsh Secretary Paul Murphy and our very own beloved Culture Secretary Andy Burnham have surely come up with the most ridiculous.

Murphy claimed 3k for a new plumbing system because the water from his old boiler was 'too hot' while, among other things, Burnham claimed for a bathrobe. John Prescott meanwhile claimed for mock Tudor beams and two loo seats. The PM says that MPs are not to blame - it is, of course, the fault of the system.

The Daily Telegraph may have paid for these revelations (something that MPs appear to be strangers to) and although cheque book journalism has got a bad reputation in reality it's just an explicit acknowledgment of a transaction that usually works on a 'you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours' basis.

Look forward to more revelations to come.

At least The South Bank Show escapes the Susan Boyle treatment

One of the most moving pieces of television that I have ever seen was The South Bank Show's interview with playwright Dennis Potter who was riddled with terminal cancer and clearly in a lot of pain, filmed shortly before his death in 1994.

In between injecting himself with morphine, and chugging on a constant stream of cigarettes, Potter's determination to finish the remarkably frank interview revealed how powerful and important the medium was to the interviewee and therefore by extension to the viewer, gripped at home.

The South Bank Show, launched in 1978, has often been derided as ITV's mere fig leaf of arts programming, and that it's place on the schedule was a hangover from when the LWT days when its appearance guaranteed that it would be allowed to make all the tat for which it made so much money.

But this is unfair. It was laudable that a populist commercial broadcaster was willing to spend money upon something that it would never see a return on investment in order to educate the masses.

The show's demise has been a relatively long time coming - gradually edged to the fringes of the schedule from its Sunday night spot, while its guest list has declined from the likes of Potter and Francis Bacon to Coldplay and most disappointingly The Darkness.

Nonetheless it's passing should be a matter of regret, but at least we never had to hear Susan Boyle talking about how she drew inspiration from her cats.

Continuous repeats of Come Dine With Me could be Channel 4's apocalyptic future

Channel 4's annual report, published today, contains the usualy hand-wringing statements about what might happen if some sort of settlement on its future funding model is decided.

But instead of Andy Duncan and Luke Johnson going on about their editorial highlights of 2008 (of which there are many) while claiming that editorial spend is now going to be reduced by at least 10%, thereby implying that we won't see such gems as The Inbetweeners and The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall, why don't they just make policy makers sit through an episode of Come Dine With Me to show how bleak the channel's future could be?

This series, which appears to be on a loop on More4, consists of boring people holding a dinner party with a camera in the corner. Now I love my food shows - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Masterchef and even the Great British Menu - but this series is so bad that if this is the future of C4 then I'm tempted to organise a whip-round myself.

Sink the Belgrano +27

Tomorrow marks the 27th anniversary of the sinking of the Argentine cruiser the Belgrano by HMS Conqueror, an event that ensured that both Britain and Argentina would go to war over the Falkland Islands.

The most famous newspaper headline of the conflict was of course Gotcha! in The Sun, although this was tempered in later issues of the paper.

Typically the BBC was less than supportive of Operation Corporate, the codename for the British campaign, with Newsnight's Peter Snow infuriating the Government of the day by referring to official news reports coming from 'the British'. In a particularly shameful episode they also gave Argentina advanced warning of the battle for Darwin and Goose Green.

However the media was broadly supportive of a war that cost the lives of 355 servicemen (and two Falkland Islanders) but ensured that the Islanders were returned to the British administration that they wanted.

Yesterday in Basra there was a final memorial service to formally mark the end of the Iraq campaign that has seen 179 members of the British military killed and unknown numbers of Iraqis. The media's reaction to this has been rather different - while acknowledging the sacrifice of our forces, major questions remain about the legitimacy of the war.

It is now up to the media to pursue this and see whether the blood spilled was either valid or worth it.