A canter through the video channels

MTV are doing some advertising...

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MTV Hits - Sugababes - Angels with dirty faces
Of course, we'd all been led to believe that there was a done deal for Bis to provide the theme for the Powerpuff Girls movie - certainly, Bis had - which makes this all the more disappointing. The Sugababes have pulled off that rare thing; the title track of their album is also one of the filler tracks; and this is also their second film tie-in in a row (after The Guru's Round Round, of course). And since their other comeback track was an electroclash cut-up cover affair, you have to wonder if they're ever actually going to do a proper track ever again.
For the video, the band have been rendered in Powerpuff girl cartoon style, which must have proved a challenge, finding an extra dimension for the drawing of Heidi. Dammit, we could have been watching Sci-Fi Stephen and Manda Rin kicking butt here. Cheated.

sarah whatmore - when I lost you
you lost us at the exact moment you wandered on pretending to be Holly Vallance

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VH1
bemusingly, they're plugging the MTV music awards. Now, we know they're all part of the same family, but since VH1 push themselves as not being for kids, why would their target audience have any interest in an awards show that will presumably consist of Eminem emoting and Kelly Osbourne clinging, clinging, desperately as it all starts to ebb away?

kelly and nelly - dilemma
we love this video, partly because the way it starts out as a 50's sit com spoof and then suddenly forgets its concept; partly because you can just - if you stare - spot the pain Kelly is trying to hide as she's forced to claim she's crazy about Nelly. But we're no clearer about the line "even when I'm with my boo/you know I'm crazy over you." Theories suggest that she can't pronounce "beau" properly, that she's dating Martin Carr from the Boo Radleys, that she's used her slice of Destiny's Child millions to buy the remains of boo.com, or that some researcher has discovered that "boo" is the street word for "dim bloke I'm currently fucking." Meanwhile, Nelly spends the entire video with a piece of sticking plaster stuck to his face, either in homage to Grace Jones who used to do that sort of thing all the time, or else to hint that he has cut himself shaving and just doesn't care. 'Cause having a girl's name doesn't mean he's a girl.

rolling stones - only rock and roll
for some reason, the stones are all dressed as sailors. sadly, this is from an era when they were too old for such outfits - even Mick doesn't look able for Seaman Staines. The whole thing smacks more than a little of that Morecambe and Wise sketch where the entire BBC News team did South Pacific, and you had to watch Eddie Waring jiggling about in a too-small white outfit. The Rolling Stones are rich - you really think they'd be better off spending their money buying up the copyright to stuff like this to make sure it never gets an outing...

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VH1 Classic Smooth
Alison Moyet - That ole devil called love
The exact midway point on her transformation from new romantic called Alf to jazz chanteusse called Ms Moyet. The effect of smokey bar-rooms around heartbreak closing time is lost, somewhat, as the director has clearly thought that Alison laying about barely moving was too sedantry for television, and has doodled cartoon devils and angels over the top

luther vandross and mariah carey - endless love
from the time before she went "nowhere near as barmy as the press made out", of course; a copy of the original so pointless and adding so little you could run it side-by-side the Peabo and Roberta original as a Spot The Difference competition. Mariah does an iritating thing with her hands showing where she's going to be heading for a higher note, presumably believing that Luther, despite standing next to her, might not be able to detect the foghorn bellow as she chases up the scale.

Jamirioquai comes on

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MTV2 - Coldplay - the scientist
This is pretty much an example of why we hate Coldplay so much, as this isn't actually all bad - in fact, it's probably the closest thing they've ever come to writing a song in their own voice. But then, just as you start to wonder about rehabilitation, Chris Martin starts "wooo-hoooing" all over the end. Interestingly, Martin and Mariah suffer from exactly the same weakness - aware of the limits of their own abilities, they're afraid to allow their performances to be low-key; they're scared to produce a work which doesn't have great, greasy mayonnaisey dollops of extra emoting ladelled over the top. In effect, they undermine themselves by providing the vocal equivalent of a laugh track. The video is quite interesting though, if you've not seen Memento; it's a car crash run backwards, which justifies having beautiful dead corpse on screen for much of it. However, the story doesn't go back quite far enough to explain what a minger like Martin was doing with a pretty girl by his side in the first place.

the manics - there but for the grace of god
... which is, you'd imagine, what richey says when he looks down from pop vallhalla and sees his former muckers churning out will-this-do dirges like this

linkin park - crawlin'
see - the pretty goth girl is crying tears of blood...

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MTV Base are doing a Jay-Z videography, and they're showing don't knock the hustle. For some reason, Jay-Z is dressed like a minor member of the aristocracy from 1931, only with cool shades

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MTV Dance
Promoting their new 24 hour status, they've got a trailer in which a bloke is about to clearly get down with his gal. They're getting hot and heavy, so he nips out to get her some water. He returns from the kitchen only to discover that she's sat in front of the telly watching MTV Dance now. This, presumably, is a reckless move by the channel designed to get people to cancel their sky digital subscriptions before their sex life is wrecked by MTV

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The Box
Christina Aguilera - Dirrty
So, that's Christina's new direction, is it? Living permanently in Britney Spear's Boys video? Thing is, that no matter how trashy she dresses, how much she waggles her tits, Christina just doesn't have the dirt in her eyes to carry off slut convincingly - while Brit just carries it off, and Pink fits the bill, with Christina, she looks like a member of the Mickey Mouse gang who's been kidnapped. Or, as a passing acquaintance puts it: Brit spits, Pink swallows, Christina douses her mouth with Evian and scrubs her teeth over and over again. Selling your sexuality is one thing; flogging someone else's is quite another.

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Kiss
Sophie Ellis Bextor - Murder on the Dancefloor
See, this illustrates our point perfectly. Who doesn't love Sophie now she's acknowledged that she's neither sultry bombette nor pouty indie ice-queen? E-B has come to terms with her self - and she's a happy, swirly elfin pixie. And she's never looked as delicious.

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Smash Hits TV
S Club - Don't Stop Moving
It's S Club week all week on SHits TV, although the departure of one of them presumably scuppered their ability to call it S Club 7 Days. In fact, in a deft rewriting of history, the band are billed as S Club even on tracks where they were S Club 7. This is what's wrong with the whole Smash Hits franchise these days - they seem incapable of dealing with pop music as a living thing with a history, and as such they have to try and recreate their patch of the culture as a music which lives entirely in an ever-present now. The end result is that they wind up having to accept every new chancer with wide-eyed enthusiasm and totally at face value. We can't decide if its pop music that's turned Smash Hits this way, or if Smash Hits has colluded in turning pop music. Whatever, it treats its audience with a little less respect each time.

Christina - Dirrty
Maybe someone from Songs of Praise should offer her a job. I'd bet she'd snap it up...

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Magic
Cranberries - Linger
Of course, this was the slightly more pop-version they did to try and blot out the memory of when they did a Sophie Ellis style sidestep from Indie Tykes to Proper Artists, filling in time before the anti-terror song that all 70s, 80s and 90s Irish artists (and, erm, Spandau Ballet) were apparently obliged to do prior to the Good Friday argeement. David Trimble believes that Ash have got a song called 'The Tanks On The Street Again' waiting to roll even as we speak, you know. The Linger video is, like seventy five percent of Magic's output, shot in black and white, and its appearance made us misread the bemusing onscreen plug for something called "SHI Tour" as "Shit Hour", which would have seemed appropriate but disarmingly honest

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Q Pink - Get the party started
Bemusingly, the EPG now bills Q as "where the stars are", which seems to suggest a difference opinion between Q magazine and Q TV as to where, exactly, the brand sits these days. If Q magazine appeared on the EPG, it would be more "where the well-rewarded serious artists" are. Anyway, Pink is excellent, as we've mentioned before.

No Doubt - Underneath It All
Not so much cod reggae as hoki reggae. You have to assume they're aware that the track would disappear if a large dog sneezed, as they've got shot of the rest of the band for most of the video, and come up with a conceit which can be summed up in two words - "Gwen strips." The band turn up on bicycles for the shit, shit, shit toasting bit in the middle, but I'd imagine the DVD version will allow you to skip that bit entirely

Then there's a plug for the Best new act vote for the Q Awards, for which The Bees appear amongst the hopefulls, which seems odd to us.

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Kerrang - someone with long hair is plodding through saxon. The choices menu at the bottom, however, offers a track by Linkin Park called One Step Closer, which we hope is a cover of Bardo's Eurovision entry. I had a friend who insisted that it was about someone nearly getting raped, so it wouldn't be entirely out of place on the Nearly Satan channel.

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Chart Show TV
A trail suggests that the Easy Zone is on from ten til three every day, but confusingly reckons that The Official Country Chart is somehow easy listening - four hungry children and a crop in the fields? Even more oddly, it's eleven in the morning, and the dance chart is on

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MTV
U2 - Electrical Storm
Is it just me, or is there something arrogant about this new habit of recording a new song for Greatest Hits albums, and sticking them out as supporting singles as if it will be a hit by right. (See also: manics) Maybe I'm just getting old. The good thing about this track is that Bono actually does a spot of singing on it, rather than the lazy talky-sing thing that he's slumped into doing ever since he started to become more important than being a mere pop singer. Not that the singing bit lifts this into any realm of desirability - we weren't sure at Q's decision to name Bono the most influential person in music, but I guess it does underline that the people who shape the recording industry don't actually do anything creative.

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MTV Hits
Kelly & Nelly again

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VH1
MARRS - Pump Up The Volume
Its one hit wonders day on VH1, which is the sort of thing that raises all sorts of questions over definitions - after all, is it really fair to hang the title on MARRS who only did one track and never tried again (in that form), when acts like Joe Dolce offered hand jobs and sweeties in a desperate bid to shake off the shame? Of course, along with Worst Video Day, this is all just another elaborate excuse for VH1 to show renee and renato's save your love video again

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VH1 Classic
The Lighthouse Family - Lif
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