Ban this sick stunt

We were somewhat surprised to see an advert pushing today's Mail On Sunday free Pavarotti CD on television last night. Not that they were trying to flog the paper off the back of a hastily-assembled collection of tracks by a recently deceased bloke, but more the placing of the advert, slap in the middle of More4's showing of Brass Eye. The very episode which the Daily Mail had called "unspeakably sick" when it was shown in 2001.

Bono mourns Pavarotti

While we're sure that Bono's pain at the loss of Pavarotti is heartfelt and genuine, his obituary for the Sun is an overwritten parade of cliche, and as cloying as you'd expect:

He lived the songs, his opera was a great mash of joy and sadness; surreal and earthy at the same time; a great volcano of a man who sang fire but spilled over with a love of life in all its complexity, a great and generous friend.

Some can sing opera, Luciano Pavarotti was an opera.

Great, great fun, The Pavlova we used to call him . . . An emotional arm twister if he wanted you to do something for him — he was impossible to turn down.

That actually makes him sound like someone who got his way through emotional blackmail, Bono, which hardly is a glowing recommendation.

OperaObit: Luciano Pavarotti

Luciano Pavarotti has died from pancreatic cancer in Modena. Besides being one of the few opera singers to have had a genuine operatic chart hit, with the Three Tenors' Nessun Dorma (which, in English, means "the theme from World Cup Match Of The Day"), Pavarotti also made a genuine rock record. He recorded Miss Sarajevo as part of the U2-pretending-to-not-be-U2 Eno collaboration Passengers.

In addition, through collaborations with Elton John and Zucchero, he managed to clock up six top forty hits of varying degrees of desperation; the stuttering struggle to get You'll Never Walk Alone higher than 35, however, seemed to remove most of the fun from the projects and - whether the pop-opera crossovers were intended as pension funds or genuine attempts to try and engage with a new audience - they dried up.

Nevertheless, Pavarotti created a niche for himself as "what the rock world thinks of when they think of opera", down in part, we suspect, to looking the part as much as sounding it.