Dermot O'Leary: Battered, but still chipper

Dermot O'Leary isn't just a Radio 2 dj and ringleader at the declining X Factor circus. Oh, no. He's a fish magnate, too.

Slightly less of a fish magnate. He's had to close his fish restaurant in Poole, but he's stressing that a sister shop in Brighton is thriving:

He [said] “Sadly we decided that Fishy Fishy Poole should cease trading owing to the current financial climate.

“Fishy Fishy Brighton continues to trade as normal.”

I'm not a marketing expert, but I suspect part of your problem might have been in calling the places Fishy Fishy. It's the sort of twee name that would actual repel people as they walk down the street. It would make Captain Birdseye decide he'd rather have a kebab.

Morrissey uses Poly Styrene's death as excuse for behaving like a tosser

That Morrissey behaved like a self-obsessed boor during an interview with Dermot O'Leary isn't a surprise:

During the interview, he branded the recent royal wedding "dreadful" and criticised other BBC presenters before making a series of prickly comments about O'Leary, telling listeners, "He doesn't listen - he gets paid all this money."

He also told the presenter, "There is just something about your face that says 'Please lie to me and I will believe you'", prompting O'Leary to later tell the singer, "(You need to) listen and not just wait for your chance to talk."

The interview ended with a tense exchange in which O'Leary said, "It's been really difficult but I've enjoyed it", with Morrissey replying, "You don't rule the world, Dermot."

Morrissey, you're not going to enjoy an interview with Dermot, so why bother in the first place? You're like a snob going into Nandos so you can just honk on loudly about how "of course the peri-peri sauce isn't authentic".

So, so far, so unexpected. But since then, Morrissey has issued what he seems to think is an apology:

"I'm sorry I made the (Dermot) O'Leary radio interview so difficult but I was in a foul mood, having spent a full week surrounded by the royal dreading (sic). England may very well be a Windsor dictatorship, but - PR Weddings aside, it is usually quite bearable...

"During the week of the royal dreading, Poly Styrene died. Having made an enormous contribution to British art and sound - at a desperate time when so many of us needed her - Poly Styrene's death was all but ignored by the British television news media, who instead rained hours and hours of blubbering praise onto Kate Middleton - a woman about whom nothing is known on a personal level. The message is clear: What you achieve in life means nothing compared to what you are born into. Is this Syria?"

Somehow, Morrissey seems to have taken his rude performance on Radio 2 and twisted it into Britain being like a repressive dictatorship that kills protestors in cold blood.

There's a bit of a perspective problem there.

Worse, though - worse even than repeated use of "royal dreading" in the apparent belief that this is somehow a witticism that can only be made better by constant repetition - is the attempt to try and explain being an arsehole on the radio by somehow suggesting that it was because he was angry about the media's lack of interest in Poly Styrene.

If that was the case, wouldn't you have mentioned it to Dermot at the time, rather than waiting a couple of days when it might just look like you're using someone's death to try and excuse your own shoddy behaviour?

Ofcom tells X Factor off; Cowell hugs money closer to make himself free better

That nice Dermot O'Leary isn't so nice. MediaGuardian reports:

Regulator says Dermot O'Leary should not have encouraged viewers to download songs by Diana Vickers and Michael Bublé

"Oh god, he shouldn't have done it" said the Ofcom findings, "especially the Bublé one - Jesus, that's more than any ear should have to endure."

Actually, the real transgression of the rules was that programmes aren't meant to flog stuff in their programmes:

Programme-makers blamed the references, which they admitted were "inappropriate", to "an unfortunate script error".

This mistake was initially not spotted in the episode broadcast on 17 October last year when O'Leary said: "If you want to download Diana's single, details at itv.com/xfactor."

Okay, so that was a terrible error - I mean, how would you expect anyone at all on the production team of one of ITV's biggest programmes to know one of the most basic and obvious rules about what you can and can't do under the broadcast code. Perhaps that explains the over-bawdy performances on the final - maybe nobody on the team knew you couldn't have women flashing their undies at teatime.

So, one week it was a terrible mistake. These things do happen. What about the next week, though?

The same script was used as a basis for the 24 October programme, when O'Leary said: "If you want to download Michael's single, all the details on itv.com/xfactor".

Oh, what a terrible mistake. Again.

Still, it does confirm a truth I think we'd all guessed at - week after week, pretty much the X Factor is the same but with a quick find and replace done on the script to put in the names of the songs being slaughtered and the guests being given a quick bunk-up and you're away. Indeed, some weeks, it's looks like that even the final outcome was prescripted.

Kennedy was shot

Shaking off the traveller's dust from my boots, I'm still trying to understand the astonishing Telegraph piece where Sarah Kennedy fumes at rumours she was drunk during one of her Radio 2 programmes:

Kennedy admitted that she had done a bad edition of her Dawn Patrollers show on Radio 2 in early August, during which she had sounded slurred, but put it down to not having slept the night before.

“I wasn’t sleeping. I was grieving from two unexpected deaths and I had got into a right tiswas with my sleep. I live near Wormwood Scrubs prison and that night there had been a police helicopter with its noise and its lights. Then the police started, with their dogs. I took a sleeping pill but I overrode it. I just couldn’t sleep. But you can’t just ring the BBC and say I can’t come in.

“I agree that I sounded slurred. I have a lazy tongue, if I’m not giving it my all.”

Kennedy also blamed her Radio 2 producer, Mark Hagen, who she said had not told her there had been a problem with her show. “What’s the point of a producer if he allows you to do a bad show and go home thinking it was OK?” said Kennedy. “If the producer doesn’t say, ‘You’re sounding slurred’, what the ****’s the producer there for? We could have put records on back-to-back. That happens when people are being sick in waste baskets.”

So according to Kennedy, it's impossible to ring up and tell the BBC you're sick, but your producer will quite happily let you sit in the studio while he plays records back to back because you're too unwell to work?

I was going to have a go at Kennedy for blaming everyone but herself for her bad show, but I suppose she did at least have the grace to include her tongue as one of the many conspirators who brought her down, alongside the police, prisoners at the Scrubs, her producer, manufacturers of inadequate sleeping pills and the rest of the world. Mind you, she even makes her tongue sound like an outside agent of collusion rather than part of her own body.

In addition, Kennedy then started trying to work out who claimed she had been broadcasting drunk (apparently unaware that 'anyone who heard this or many other of her shows' is the answer to that one):

“I have no quibble with the BBC,” said Kennedy. “But please put this in your piece. I would give my two feet to know who’s got it in for me at the BBC. Is it Alan Dedicoat? I have known for an awfully long time that I have got an enemy at the BBC and I would love to know who it is.

“I go in and I smile and I do my best. I don’t do the politics. You don’t see me in Boujis. You don’t see me in The Grey Horse or wherever it is they go. Chris Moyles - I’ve never met. Dermot O’Leary - I’ve never met. Yet they’re believing in these urban myths.

She doesn't get involved in the politics. But she will happily name names to the Telegraph and insist they appear in print.

Still, she's leaving Radio 2 with her head held high:

“Sometimes you have to step away,” said Kennedy. “I walked out of Game for a Laugh, I walked out of Busman’s Holiday. You know when it’s time.”

Busman's Holiday? Surely that's just a step-up from saying 'I turned my back on the six items or less checkout in Morrisons the other day'?

Dermot chooses between money or friendship; money wins

Dermot O'Leary had said he wouldn't have accepted Kate Thornton's old job on the X Factor because Thornton was a mate, and you don't do that to mates. Then ITV offered him a two contract which The Sun reckons is worth a million, and suddenly he's on board.

Of course, it's not going to be a million quid, but it will be quite hefty. Let's hope this expensive hiring policy, coupled with the ridiculous sum of money it's paying for the FA Cup and the five million it paid to get shot of dreadful failure Charles Allen, and the millions they had to pay to tempt Michael Grade onto their downward spiral, doesn't leave ITV suddenly short of cash. Judging by some of the small fry advertising in Corrie breaks recently, it's not exactly a thriving channel right now.

Of course, Dermot might not last that long:

“I was very flattered to be offered the job of hosting such a hugely successful show.

“I’m really looking forward to working with Simon and the team on the kind of show I grew up watching.”

Dermot, I believe you're meant to pretend that the X-Factor is a brilliant new idea what was had by Cowell, and not merely the latest in a long line of Opportunity Knocks type shows.

It's more bad news for Channel 4, though: this takes Dermot away from Big Brother's Little Brother (and we can't help but wonder if the prospect of interviewing hapless crooners seemed slightly more attractive after a winter of having to helm light entertainment programmes suddenly coping with racist bullying from the likes of O'Meara, Goody and that woman with the professional breasts); Russell Brand has already bailed out of Big Mouth. There might be some wobbles at Endemol's office this morning.