Bunton to breakfasts

You know what George Osborne hates? Besides kittens, love, fun, poor people, tax for rich people, biscuits, people mentioning that whole thing with the prostitute and the drugs, people snickering at him, rainbows, kettles, sunsets, Nadine Dorries, wellington boots, your family and especially your grandmother, Essex, The Only Way Is Essex, Yazz doing The Only Way Is Up, D:Ream, space travel, combination padlocks, bicycles, the noise cars make when you lock them with a remote control, Keith Lemon, bitter lemon, Lemony Snicket, children, mittens, The Sound Of Music, creme brule, Delia Smith, southern Austria, that strange slurping noise Iain Duncan-Smith makes when he drinks tea, the M6, pay and display parking meters, rubber-soled shoes on polished floors, floor polish, floors, flaws, whores, s'mores, horses, men called Kevin, women called Kevin, cross-dressers, Welsh dressers, old maids, liebfraumilch, the way cows' eyes just stare at you, people who won't let him forget the time he got on a train and sat in first class without the proper ticket, eggs, dinosaurs, dinosaur eggs, Nick Clegg, Nick Rhodes, John Taylor, Roger Taylor, the other Roger Taylor, The Tailor Of Gloucester, Gloucester, Doctor Foster, Steve Foster, foster parents, Meet The Parents, Meet The Press, napkins, Nat "King" Cole, coal, Coal Miner's Daughter (the song AND the film), the Song And The Story with Isla StClair, Isla StClair, Linda Blair, Tony Blair, Lionel Blair, Give Us A Clue, I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, Sorry I'm A Stranger Here Myself, There's A Ghost In My House, ghosts, toasts, celebrity roasts, Julian Huppert's beard, the face Vince Cable pulls when he's thinking, Dele Fadele, cartoons, the back seat of Volvos, Bogshed for changing their name from The Amazing Roy North Penis Band, shops that sell artisan bread, artisans, breads, shops, Tony Benn, Big Ben, Ben Dover, Long Dong Silver, Nate Silver, maths, calculators and more kittens?

Besides that, George Osborne hates shirkers. Especially people who lay abed of a morning, with the curtains pulled. He'll be delighted to hear, then, that Emma Bunton won't be one of them, as she'll be getting up early to co-host Heart's breakfast show with Jamie Theakston in the new year.

UPDATE: We've just been told George Osborne hates Emma Bunton.

Radio One More Time: Those who also entertained

Radio One has had, in its time, some unusual choices presenting programmes. Some were surprising and right, some surprising and wrong. Some were Kelly Osbourne.

Mark Ellen used to present occasionally, sitting in for Annie Nightingale, heralding his appearance with rhyming trailers. This was a good thing.

Emma Freud, for some reason, was in charge of the lunchtime programme for a ridiculously long time. We have a soft spot for Emma, but the one thing that spot is not is a two and half hour spot on a pop radio network.

Muriel Gray did a few swing shifts for Janice Long; we quite liked her, but Radio One at the time had problems with women doing radio, never mind Scottish women.

Tom Watt also did Night-time a few times - now that he's doing lots of football programming, it's not so odd, but when he was still Lofty off EastEnders, it felt wrong having him turning up to play Housemartins sessions.

Lenny Henry was recruited for some weekend work - we imagine the thinking was "an anarchic force in the mould of the young Kenny Everett". He wasn't bad, but he didn't stick around overlong.

Jamie Theakston turned up at One FM as part of the ongoing attempt to turn TV stars into radio personalities - while it worked with Zoe Ball, and people seem to have accepted Vernon Kay, Sara Cox and Fearne Cotton despite shows which can be as cold as Gazpacho Soup outdoors in Iceland - he was one who didn't take.

An even stranger presence, though, was Greg Proops, who we seem to remember having a crack at being Mark Radcliffe for a week or two. It turned out he really was at his best when Clive Anderson could sound a buzzer to get him to move on.

Tom Robinson was another "in for Janice" choice; his style, and introduction of Then Jericho and "the devastatingly handsome Mark Shaw" was encouraging, but felt a little off-key for Radio One. Still, Tom only had to wait another fifteen years or so for someone to invent 6Music to give him a home.

[Part of Radio One More Time]

An uneven thing: The Diana concert

There were two signs that, for all the claims it was a 'prefect tribute', that the Diana concert fell short of capturing the imagination.

The first was that it was so short of top-grade talent Elton had to be dragged in to open and close it; the second was that the anchoring was done by Jamie Theakston and Claudia Winkelman. Clearly, the BBC felt that shunting an entire day of programming off BBC1 was its duty done, but it sent neither Huw Edwards, so it was an event of national significance, nor Jonathan Ross, so it wasn't a major entertainment event, either. They did have Fearne Cotton deployed to stand backstage going "wow... fantastic", like Cassie from Skins; but Cotton, for reasons we still don't understand, seems to be on every live TV event telling us how "amazing" everything is - she did the final of Make Me A Supermodel, so her presence hardly confers gravitas.

We're only human, so couldn't stand the whole thing, just dipping in across the day. With each peek, there was something totally different from what was going on before - some Classic FM style opera-light; Tom Jones beating up the Arctic Monkeys; Donny Osmond, Jason Donovan and that Lee bloke from Any Dream Will Do having a Hartnell-Troughton-Pertwee momen; Rod Stewart - who we missed, but did see Fearne attesting to to how "fantastic" he was. It's not an unprecedented mix - it's reminiscent of Radio 2's Sunday playlist from about a decade ago - but nobody was expected to sit through that lot from start to finish. And even they get Jonathan Ross to do presenting duties.

The end fell astonishingly flat - the delightful piano-playing princes came on and demonstrated all the ease and comfort when talking to the masses shown by their father (you'd better get used to this, William - you're going to be doing the State Opening of Parliament in a few years) did some mumbling and then, instead of a big finish, there was, erm, some cine film of Diana doing handstands as a child. "This is how she would want to be remembered" - flashing her knickers for the camera, apparently. I know the idea was to make us think of what a terrible waste such a photogenic and energetic life was snuffed out in such a terrible way, but I'm afraid the effect was more "private swimming pools and high-quality cine cameras in the 1960s - didn't exactly have a hard life, did she?" It was noticeable that people were filing out of Wembley before the end.

They didn't even give her brother a chance to do a reprise of his funeral rabble-rousing; instead, he was tucked away, far from the microphones. It was a miracle they didn't have him sitting in a cage of visual metaphor. He didn't look like he enjoyed it, either.