Status Quo: At current prices

We've heard many, many stories of Status Quo's drug years, and the Telegraph is happy to go through some of them again.

But this being the Telegraph, there's an acknowledgement of the interests of their readers:

Indeed Rossi, who formed the band, originally named the Spectres, with his south London school friend Alan Lancaster in 1962, appears never to have questioned how much he was spending on drugs once the band became successful.

He said: “I used to spend £1,200 a week on cocaine, which again doesn’t sound like that much now.”

When it was pointed out to him that the sum amounted to £1.69 million over a decade at today’s prices, he admitted that with hindsight he wished he had not indulged quite so recklessly.

Yes, the paper works out the actual investment the band made in drugs, and uprated it to 2013 prices.

Although the writer, Patrick Sawer, does seem to have used the slightly risky assumption that Rossi bought the same amount of drucks week in, week out, for 520 weeks.

So tell us, Patrick, having burned through all that potential cash must have left Rossi in penury, right?

Rossi - whose fortune is estimated at between £2 and £10m - said his most costly outlays nowdays are his eight children and their education.

There's a chilling warning for the kids: if you spend your cash on drugs when you're young, you might end up with so much cash nobody even seems able to count it.

Tweenies air unexpected Savile tribute

Yesterday, as old episodes of the Tweenies were shovelled onto CBeebies, a 2001 episode in which Max did a Jimmy Savile impersonation went out.

A few people on Twitter raised amused eyebrows.

This, according to the Telegraph, means the BBC was "under fire":

Rachael Mills, from Bournemouth, tweeted: "Can't believe in tweenies on cbeebies today a character was impersonating saville in parody of totp!!! What is the bbc thinking?"

They even found a "concerned father" called Mark Roberts - there's no other context to explain who he is, or why his concern should concern us more than anyone else's - to express his concern at greater length:

Concerned father Mark Roberts said: "The complete lack of quality control the BBC have over their programming was absolutely sickening.

"The song he introduced just makes everything worse. Somebody at the BBC should get fired for this.

"The song title was just the icing on the cake of inappropriateness."

Concerned father Mark Roberts is right - the song Max-as-Jim introduced was called 'Ha! I Am Hiding My Sexual Offences In Plain Sight!'.

Hang on, no, it was One Finger, One Thumb, which I think only has sexual connotations if you want it to.

Now, clearly, it's a bit unfortunate that this went out. But anyone who thinks for a second or two will probably concede that it would have been very unlikely that anyone would think they'd need to double-check every ten year-old programme for preschool kids to make sure there's no impression of people who turned out to be sex offender - although that episode of Rosie And Jim where Jim pretends to be Cyril Smith might need a quick lookover from someone at ITV. And the paperwork for the episode would be unlikely to list every single joke - or, in this case, "joke" - featured.

Unfortunate, but... where exactly is the harm? Presumably anyone watching Cbeebies would be unlikely to see Max wearing the wig and think "that's the now-known paedophile Jimmy Savile, so presumably this programme is trying to make me think that people like that are okay to hang out with".

Come to that, even in 2001, it's unlikely that any of the target audience would have had a clue who Max was supposed to be. Savile's run on Top Of The Pops had ended in 1984 and Jim'll Fix It had stopped ten years later. Presumably the Savile impersonation was included solely as a little joke for any parents watching with their kids - although even some of the parents would have been too young to recall Savile as a Pops presenter.

In 2001, it was a reference which would have gone over the heads of the kids, and only been picked up by older people watching. It's no different in 2013, except what once would have been a small joke is now an ugly coincidence.

Yes, it probably shouldn't have gone out, but if you think the main child protection issue that has fallen out of the Savile story is making sure children never see any reference to the man, you might well be directing your concern in the wrong direction.

Glastonbury 2011: Quick morning press round-up

You'll have been wondering yourself, but only the Mirror dared to ask the burning question: Just what has been Fearne Cotton's highlight of the festival?

She told me: “Swaying in the mud to U2 was pretty sweet, definitely my highlight. Then I raved in the dance village to ANNIE MAC. The weather has been crap and I managed to ruin my new pink jeans. So that sucked.”

Ah, those festival highs and lows.

Light and shade, light and shade.

The Mail seems to have lost interest in Glastonbury today, just finding space for some minor scuffle when somebody asked Wayne Rooney for an autograph. It's understandable he'd get annoyed if someone was cruel enough to ask him to write.

For the Telegraph, it's still the U2 set which is occupying their thoughts. In particular, William Langley wants to know why we don't respect the tax-dodging, power-loving, environment-destroying hypocrites?

Bono and his men are currently on a tour of the US, and to reach deepest Somerset they had to fly in from Baltimore and straight back out again to Michigan. But instead of showing gratitude, many among the plastic poncho-clad crusties were still complaining about things like the group’s “brand image” as the rockers arrived on stage.

To be honest, William, if you're on a massive tour of the US leaping from East Lansing to Miami as a matter of course, a detour to Bristol isn't that much of a journey out your way.

And the Glastonbury audience as "poncho-clad crusties"? Have you seen a shot of the crowd there that dates from any time after 1994?

Langley then runs through the grounds for objecting to U2's behaviour, before... well, petering out. It seems even Langley can't find any rousing conclusion as to how we're treating them unfairly, edging out with:

Glastonbury was fortunate to see the best of them. Even if some in the crowd would have preferred not to see them at all.

As one of the comments under his work points out, rather than constructing an argument that U2 are undervalued, Langley merely says 'some people don't like U2 much', which isn't really a revelation.

The Observer has had lots of letters, and one of them is about the Pilton Pop festival:

The Glastonbury festival is a feudal dictatorship with no trade union support for the workers, the equality levels of pre-revolutionary France and a private unaccountable security force. It's the modern equivalent of bread and circuses, with the green footprint of a small, coal-fuelled power station. The fresh air's quite nice, though.

The writer, David Trippas, gives his address as "Birmingham", but it's quite possible he sent that from an iPhone shortly after having asked Wayne Rooney for an autograph.

This doesn't often happen

Broadly, Simon Heffer and No Rock And Roll Fun are more or less in agreement on something:

Yet it fills one with sadness that so great a recording studio may soon be frozen in time as a museum. What will happen to our fine living composers – and we do have one or two – when they wish to be recorded? On the steps of what building will today's Elgars stand with their young prodigies? At this rate, we shall soon have to revert to the old wartime morale-boosting practice of having recordings of what are deemed to be important works made under the auspices of the British Council. Otherwise, a whole chapter of our culture would close.

If Abbey Road has any value, it needs to be a working recording studio and not a recording-studio-themed visitor attraction.

Telegraph shock: People paid to do work

Sometimes, you do wonder if anyone at papers like the Mail or Telegraph weighs the opportunity to have a spot of outrage against the damage done to their reputation by running pieces like today's Sunday Telegraph piece on the government's health campaigns. It turns out the people who appeared in them were being paid:

The former Page Three girl Melinda Messenger and the television doctor Professor Tanya Byron were among those paid by the taxpayer to publicise messages on things like healthy eating and stopping smoking.

The actors Gary Lucy, Gemma Bissix and Sian Reeves, the former television presenter Donna Air and Jenny Frost, a former singer in Atomic Kitten, were also paid thousands of pounds from the public purse for appearances in adverts.

You don't say. I bet if you dug a little further, you'd find that the people who filmed the adverts also got paid. And the guy who washed the studio floor down after the shoot. It's a bloody outrage - how dare people be recompensed for doing the thing they do for a living?

You might, perhaps, be able to get a little annoyed by the money paid for certain celebrities - but the trouble is, all the Telegraph has is a total bill:

Figures released by the Department for Health, under the Freedom of Information Act, show that £89,384 was spent on the celebrities for five separate campaigns.

While the Department refused to disclose what was paid to different celebrities, each was paid about £13,000 on average.

Well done, you've managed to divide a figure by the number of people involved to arrive at a totally spurious average.

What makes it worse is that - as her agent points out - Tanya Byron's involvement wasn't even as a celebrity, but as an expert in child health and psychology.

Perhaps thirteen grand for Gary Lucy might seem a little much, but even so, it's not like it broke the budget:

Lucy, Bissix and Reeves recorded "smoking diaries" for the Government's £43million Smokefree campaign.

Diaries? Over a fairly long period of time, then? And they were quitting smoking - which is a pretty difficult thing to do, and a 24 hour task. Less than one per cent of the total budget seems like a fairly restrained fee in that context.

Why, wonders the Telegraph, can't these celebrities be more like other celebrities?

Critics have pointed out that many other well-known people, including Sir Michael Parkinson and the children's author Dame Jacqueline Wilson, took part in Government health campaigns without payment.

I'm not certain, but one would assume that Wilson and Parkinson might be - financially, at least - more comfortable than Frost and Air and, thus, able to give their time more freely.

Still, at least only the Sunday Telegraph is making itself look foolish today. Oh, by the way - where did you get the story, Telegraph?

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, said he had written to the Health Secretary, Alan Johnson, to insist that the full details of all fees paid to individual celebrities be released.

He told the Mail on Sunday...

Oh.

Rap: It's from Scotland

No, actually it isn't, but Professor Ferenc Szasz suggests that old Caledonian Flyting battles are a little bit like rap battles.

Szasz suggests there is "a clear link" between the two:

According to the theory, Scottish slave owners took the tradition with them to the United States, where it was adopted and developed by slaves, emerging many years later as rap.

He has uncovered a previously overlooked version of Tupac, Where's Your Troosers by Puff Daddy which he insists proves his point.

I was going to finish this by suggesting that it's only at Christmas that the Sunday Telegraph would stoop to publishing this sort of made-up guff, but I'm not confident that's the case any more.

Lydon: Rotten no longer

Needing some more coins, John Lydon and the boys have released a DVD of some Sex Pistols gig or other - it's always been about the money, hasn't it? So John Lydon is trotting round the press circuit again, trying to pretend he's still anti-establishment while the Sunday Telegraph pats him on the head. He trots through it all again - his hard early life, how terrible the Church is to him; the reason he quit I'm A Celebrity (the Lockerbie connection, of course) but not why he went on in the first place. There's a genuinely touching piece in the middle, when the interview mentions his late father, but it gets undermined by Lydon's insistence the piece doesn't mention him crying.

Oh, and he's sure he's going to get offered a gong:

'They're bound to offer me a knighthood. They can stuff it - those institutions are the Devil incarnate.'

Why are they bound to offer him one? There's surely very little room in the Venn diagram where 'ITV gameshow stooge' and 'knighthood' overlaps, and if they were going to dub him Sir Punk, wouldn't he already be trumpeting how he'd knocked back an MBE at least by now? It's typical of the empty noises - bragging about turning down something he's never going to be offered.

And the rotten teeth? Fixed, at the cost of ten thousand pounds. But not out of vanity, oh no no:

it wasn't vanity that sent me to the dentist after all those years. It was necessity. Ill health. All those rotten teeth were seriously beginning to corrupt my system. I was feeling incredibly ill. I was permanently poisoning myself with gum infections. And my gums were receding and I was starting to look seriously weird.

If it's not vanity, then why have such expensive work done, though? Come on, John, you've earned your money the hard way - comeback tours and real estate - at least don't feel shame in spending it.

Bryan Ferry laments

There's a splendid meeting between the Telegraph and Bryan Ferry, which keeps circling last year's "admiration for the aesthetic achievements of the Third Reich" comments. Ferry is, understandably, upset at having been reported as admiring the Nazis, but seems reluctant to broaden the debate out into a wider question of if you can really separate the aesthetic from the politics. Indeed, he actually turns it into a grumble about - yes - political correctness having gone mad. He'd bypassed the question earlier on in his chat with Nigel Farndale, but then returned to it when Farndale mentioned Roxy Music's album artwork, and the tendency to have sexy lady covers:

Yes,' he says, 'it's remarkable how liberated the climate was then. There is much more political correctness around today. What you can and cannot say. As I discovered last year. In a way it was much freer in those days. You could speak your mind. You certainly wouldn't have got told off for talking about Albert Speer's buildings in the 1970s.'

But if a band tried the Country Life cover today, it wouldn't be "political correctness" that would get them attacked - it'd be the sexist use of semi-naked women to sell albums. Likewise, although some of the stories on Ferry's Speer comments did boil the story down beyond any reason, he wasn't "told off" for "talking about Albert peer's buildings", people were reacting to his praising of what was a Nazi aesthetic. It's easy to wail "oh, they said I loved the Nazis" rather than debating the extent to which the art was crucial to the state; to mumble that you've been silenced by "political correctness" when you've chosen to close down the debate yourself is, at best, weak. And a not a little self-pitying.

Damon Albarn: 18th most important

While Noel Gallagher is complaining about the young folks' music taking over Glastonbury and deciding it's wrong to go to go to gigs by boat (despite having once bought Mike Oldfield's old yacht), his former nemesis Damon Albarn is being lauded by the Telegraph as the 18th most important person in British Culture.

Without ever having played Knebworth, you'll note.

Gallagher doesn't make it on the list - no, really - even although by the end they're so desperate to fill the slots they're flinging on Helena Bonham-Carter, although surely if she were that powerful all images of her in Planet of the Apes would have been removed from the internet?

Overall, the person who dictates our culture the most is, surprisingly, not an IPC sub-editor, but Nicholas Hynter at the National Theatre. It's not clear if his importance was decided before or after he agreed to give a lengthy interview to the Sunday Telegraph.

With Andrew Lloyd-Webber at five and Simon Cowell at six, the highest-placed popular music-related presence is still Damon Albarn at 18.