Gordon Brown, who apparently can't be bothered to get in touch with the families of British soldiers killed in action but was able to express concern to Simon Cowell for Susan Boyle's welfare, has weighed into another crucial topic that is dominating the media. Apparently he thinks the twins...
For malicious virus writers it’s virtually anything that’s breaking news. Most recently it’s been Google search results for the hype-rumoured death of rapper Kanye West and the managerial status of Harry Redknapp at Spurs, but in the past we’ve seen everyone from Michael Jackson to Barack Obama succumb...
This was one of the most popular stories on the BBC News website yesterday and after reading the headline I clicked on the story with a mixture of horror, disgust and morbid fascination. But then it was a slightly disingenuous headline. The story in fact referred to the fact the director Danny Boyle...
OK, I'm going to admit to being one of the 20m-odd people who watched the final of Britian's Got Talent and I'm surprised to say that I quite enjoyed it, mostly because the Boyler didn't win and some dancing chavs did. Residents of her home town in Scotland, overcome by nationalism, blamed...
I had to lol at the radio this morning. They were screaming how the stressed out Susan Boyle story is all over the news. Well, it is everywhere because mainstream media loves singing the same tune. Old media's own re-tweeting system means bits of sensationalized gossip gets relayed from outlet to...
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...
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...
This is a perfect follow up to my blog piece yesterday about Simon Cowell and his mastery of the social media meme (in the forms of Susan Boyle, Paul Potts and the like). A brilliantly observed piece of meme analysis from the guys at Rocketboom (one of my favorite vlogs) - who are also the brains behind...
In less than a week Britain’s Got Talent contestant Susan Boyle has become an international hit, racking up YouTube views now well over 50 million. Thanks to the immediacy of digital advertising, some clever marketers are already advertising around Susan’s success. It’s an excellent example of the speed...
The other day Simon Cowell did a touching thing - he publicly announced that he'd take a pay cut from ITV. At first I thought this was Cowell's attempt to jump on the credit crunch bandwagon to come across all in-touch-with-reality as a cunning pre-emptive PR tack. However, watching what's...
