THEY CALL IT 'MANAGING EXPECTATIONS DOWN'

If you tell 'em you expect to fall flat on your face, stumbling onto your ass looks like a breakthrough. So it is that Bob Geldof is now running round telling people he doesn't expect Live 8 to be anything other than a failure:

He told the AFP news agency he likes "no part" of organising the concerts and rallies to pressure G8 leaders to improve trade, aid and debt in Africa.

"Will that happen? Probably not. So will I have failed? Yes I guess."

But, you know, Bob doesn't relish this opportunity to become something more than a medium-difficult trivial pursuit question and try and put down that upstart Bono from getting the Official Rock Star Saint treatment:

The 53-year-old rock singer said his role was "very demanding".

"I really don't want to do it," he said. "There is no part of today that I have liked, not a single part."

But he had to try, he said. "For the rest of my life I would have thought 'I could have maybe done that, I could have maybe changed it and I bottled it for personal reasons'."

Meanwhile, Bono has popped up to honk on a bit, too:

"There will always be natural calamities, but there are 120,000 lost lives in Africa every month and this is avoidable," he said.

It's true - a load of them are very avoidable indeed, and all it would have taken would have been the Pope saying "actually, it's okay to use condoms." But, of course, the Pope did wear Bono's sunglasses, so it's not like he didn't do his bit, too.

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