TAM Commandments: 4. Never tell your parents

Not telling your parents is all well and good, but is there a point where you should 'fess up? Puberty? Moving out? Hitting thirty? According to Dead Famous People, you should keep your secrets even when you're dead - in their Postcard From Paradise, they ask:

Listen Mum, would you lock my room?
I wouldn't want you to find...
Anything I wouldn't want you to find...

Here's the song covered by Shinowa:



[Part of TAM commandments weekend]

Missing the point a little

Fergie has decided to go green. Which, you know, is something to be applauded, although she's, erm, doing it by selling her Hummer on eBay.

Now, admittedly, she's giving the funds raised to a green charity, but for someone with the cash Fergie has at her dispoasl, wouldn't it have made a little more sense to have simply taken the car off the road, rather than sold it on to someone else to despoil the planet with, and helping to promote the brand into the deal?

Blake: My wife should have won

To be fair, it's not just Blake Fielder-Civil who thinks Amy Winehouse should have won the Mercurys. Radcliffe and Maconie were saying pretty much the same thing, but since it's not entirely clear what it is the award is for (the content of the album? the quality of performance on it? the sound of it alone?) it's hard to see how anything could be officially described as the wrong choice - they could vote solely on the sleeve for all we know. Still, Blake's annoyed:

"Amy was robbed. Who knows why they didn't give her the award. But I was so proud of her for her performance.

"She's really well and she doesn't need to go back into rehab."

You'd expect Fielder-Civil to be disappointed that they didn't get the chance to turn the Nationwide Building Society's money into, uh, special treats, but clearly he's not got very much in the way of judgement left.

Paris Hilton fails to get the joke

Hallmark, the US greetings card business, has a small line of cards which run cartoons of famous people with weak gags wound around them. They did one, depicting Paris Hilton as a waitress, telling a customer his plate was hot (no, us neither.)

The trouble is, Paris Hilton doesn't think it's funny - which, to be fair, it isn't - and wants USD100,000 because they "failed to seek her approval".

She hasn't quite got the hang of how satire works, does she?

TAM Commandments: 3. Respect is earned

This one always seemed to sit uneasily with These Animal Men's stance that they were right, from the get-go. We did consider inflicting Bruce Willis 'return of Bruno' era cover of Respect Yourself on you here, as some sort of warning from history, but instead, here's Erasure doing A Little Respect in the Milton Keynes Bowl in 1990, which mainly is worth it because someone posts on the YouTube page, apparently straight-faced, the question "is he gay?"




[Part of TAM Commandments weekend]

Brown's luck runs out

Foxy Brown's apparent bet with Pete Doherty to see who could push the law the furthest has come to an abrupt end, with a the judge getting tired of probation violations:

The judge found that Ms Marchand had travelled outside New York without the court's permission and had moved her residence from New York to New Jersey without permission.

Ms Marchand was also found to have missed anger management classes which she had been ordered to attend while on probation.

Brown has been sent to jail for a year, with one oddity about the proceedings: last time she appeared in court, much was made of her being three months pregnant. This time, despite Brown trying to throw herself on the tender mercies of the court, there was no mention of any pregnancy.

TAM Commandments: 2. Poor is beautiful

Poor is beautiful. Oh, yes, the dignity of poverty, best enjoyed when you have the means to escape at any moment. There's only one song we could throw in here - especially since The Snapdragon's Dole Boys On Futons isn't on YouTube.

Pulp, doing Common People, at Glastonbury 1995:



And, for good measure, Rory Bremner doing David Cameron doing Jarvis:



[Part of These Animal Men TAM Commandments weekend]

Kershaw's mum talks to the Mail

We wonder if, when Andy Kershaw's mum, Eileen, spoke to the Daily Mail she knew that her motherly concern would be embedded in such a spitefully worded piece as turned up in the paper.

Eileen talks like a worried mother:

"He desperately needs help and his mental state is now affecting his physical state."

"He has lost a shocking amount of weight and looks skeletal. He is a wreck and very disturbed. I am afraid of what he might do, especially if people give up on him.

"He simply will not accept the relationship with Juliette is over and is suffering from a broken heart.

"I never believed such a thing existed before - but that is exactly what has happened."

The Mail, however, sees the story more as a parable about pride coming before a fall - presumably Kershaw's politics making him ripe for a kicking, even when he's on the ground already:

Like so many who turn their backs on the big city, Andy Kershaw couldn't quite hide that hint of smugness whenever he spoke of his new life on the Isle of Man.

[...]
Today, the evocative picture he painted of Peel as a haven of open-door, crime-free, yob-free family life has been well and truly shattered. And it's largely his fault.

It's a desperately sad story; it's even sadder that the Mail felt unable to tell it without introducing an element of crowing.

Jo why, oh, Whiley

Amongst things we can safely say the world could do well without is a "more credible" version of the X-Factor. Especially one with Jo Whiley in the "Sharon Osbourne role":

"It's going out in the lead up to Christmas. I'm the Sharon Osbourne of the panel - I was horrible to some people and when I woke up in the morning, I felt sick and unclean."

When Jo says "in the lead-up to Christmas", she means the miserable time of year when everything gets grey and dark.

We're at a loss to how you can have a "credible" talent show; it's like an ethical war, isn't it?

Radio One More Time: Bang Gotcha Junction

When Peter Powell took over the Saturday morning slot, he pledged no more Junior Choice: he wasn't going to be playing Nellie The Elephant any more. Did this mean that there was no longer anything for the younger listener on Radio One?

Not quite. For Mark Page, who had taken on the early weekend slot, took on the the role of children's entertainer single-handed. His solution? It was to buy in an odd Australian drama about gnomes and, possibly, talking butterflies and... no, we never could quite work out what Bangotcha Junction was about. It sounded like the worst sort of summer holiday kid's TV filler material, and seemed less like a reassurance that Radio One was still a family network and more like a bid to bamboozle any remaining youngsters off the network. To give him his due, Mark Page did stick with the thing all the way through - although, we suspect, nobody would have noticed if he'd skipped a few episodes or just stopped them half way through the story.

It was, however, still the first proper serial drama Radio One ever aired.

And would