Saturday 9 June 2007

outside my window
the voices grate like crow-tongues
scraping at the night.

Paris Hilton has been sent back to jail. Hoorah!
This raises my faith in the American Justice system, but only a little bit. It remains to be seen whether she serves the remaining term of her 45 day sentence.
The Olympic logo debate rumbles on. Jonathan Ross, in his TV show, claimed that it looked like Lisa Simpson giving a blowjob, which, spookily, it does.
So far, the Olympic Powers-That-Be are standing firm, despite almost universal derision at the absurd , ugly and impractical design.
Talking of things absurd and ugly, Simon Cowell had a new show starting tonight, ‘Britain Has Talent,’ its aim to find an act worthy of performing before Her Majesty The Queen in the Annual Royal Variety performance. The trailer boasts ‘Three Entertainment Megastars’ (or words to that effect) as judges, which turn out to be Simon Cowell himself, Amanda Holden (most famous for being married to Les Dennis, having an affair with Neil Morrisey and then appearing in ‘Cutting It’ on BBC1) and Piers Morgan, one-time editor of News of The World and The Daily Mirror. They have big red buzzers which they can press when fed up with an act, and if all three judges buzz the act off, then they’re finished.
The hype surrounding the show, which as a bonus has the marvellous Ant & Dec adding their own subversive commentary on the acts backstage, tends to blur the fact that The Royal Variety Performance hasn’t really moved on since its heyday back in the Nineteen Seventies. If it wasn’t for the fact that the Queen is forced to turn up once a year for what is, if we are honest, two hours or more of at best, lacklustre performances from mostly has-been performers, the show would have been scrapped twenty years ago.
One has to ask also, what does Simon Cowell, or the other two for that matter, know about variety acts? He’s a music producer. She’s an actress and Piers is a newspaper editor/columnist/writer, and is rather dull.
Having said that, there is something gruesomely pleasurable in watching acts that have absolutely no chance of success burning and crashing in front of a live audience, almost literally so in the case of Chief Firewater and White Dove from Manchester, a flaming-knife-throwing act which nearly set the venue on fire due to the nervousness of Chief Firewater.
Like most viewers I will likely lose interest once the crazy auditions are over.