Charles on… anything that comes along

OK, so I’m the patron saint of lost causes. London gets the Olympics in 2012.

But is it just me or is it weird to be listening to the 1 O’Clock News and hear the interviewer start asking questions to the MP for Newham, such as “Won’t you be left with a lot of white elephant stadiums afterwards? I mean that’s what has happened at all the other places..” and to get interviewees saying “I’m not really sure that’s the best use of £2.4 billion…”

Where were all these people before? Steamrollered into submission, told to keep a lid on it until the bid was over? Inquiring minds would like to know. Especially since it’s so easy to find them now, apparently. Here’s some reaction on the BBC website from ordinary folk. (Now let them wait until they see their council tax bills five years hence, and try to go and play football on Hackney Marshes in a couple of years..)

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I thought Ricky Gervais’s compering aid joke at Live 8 was really cringemaking (”Bob Geldof and Richard Curtis have just finished a conference call with George Bush and Tony Blair.. and they’ve agreed not just to double aid, but to quadruple it!” Stunned audience silence. “We can all go home!” Faint realisation dawns… “No, they haven’t really..”).

But he recovered it, perfectly, by doing The Dance. (This will make little if any sense to American readers. I wonder if it’ll happen in the US series of The Office? Except it was in the second series, wasn’t it, so…)

See it here - and his other Live 8 shorts - at http://www.rickygervais.com/video2_5.php. It’s not big, but it is funny.

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The wife pointed this out at breakfast, reading the back of the Special K packet.

“Why not see if you can lose up to 1% of your body fat in just 28 days with the Kellogg’s Special K Body Fat Challenge? *On average this could mean losing up to an inch from your bust, waist and hips. When combined your measurements could reduce by up to 3 inches**, why not see if you can do it too?”

Leaving aside the ungrammatical form of the last sentence (commas between independent clauses, grr), what do those asterisks hide?

Umm, hunt around the tiny print at the bottom of the box. (Cereal almost falls out in process.) I’ll make it bigger for your convenience.

* 243 individuals completed the challenge. 25% of volunteers lost 1% of their body fat. For 25% of the volunteers there was an average inch loss of up to 1 inch from the torso measurements including the bust, waist and hips. The sum of this inch loss could equal up to 3 inches.

Oh, right. So for 75%, not much happened. I see.

What about the other **? That’s simpler: “Individuals will vary.” At least that’s uncontentious.

I’m haunted though by the vision of the marketing bod who came in one day to find the results of the research there on the desk. “Hmm… 75% no change.. how can I make this sound good?” (Subtext: my promotion depends on this..) I expect they were annoyed that the researchers didn’t measure the subjects’ thighs and upper arms too. Imagine if you lost weight off your thighs - it’d be inches and inches!

Or perhaps they’re saving that for next year.

And yes, I know usually the stuff you see on the Net is about enlarging body parts..

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Awoke groggily this morning to the line on the radio news: “All the artists who performed at Live8 have seen sales increase by at least a third.. apart from [Pete Doherty’s] Libertines, whose sales have fallen.”

Never mind that Doherty now has a band called Babyshambles, which is even worse - if that were possible - than the Libertines. Nor that he claims he wasn’t high. It was just crap. Even listening on the radio (as I was, diggging a hole) I could hear it was crap.

A friend who does tour management of rock bands for a living has a simple phrase: Doherty, he says, is “an oxygen thief”. Both of the oxygen of publicity, and the simpler sort. Sometimes you meet folk like that backstage, sometimes they’re in front. Either way, they’re a complete pain, and you’d like them to just sod off.

Trouble is, the tabloids are wedded to Doherty’s story, because it’s such a car crash. Drugs! Scandal! Supermodel! Baby!! Please, let it never end, but continue to be a constant source of copy!

Pity Kate Moss hasn’t realised yet that for addicts, it’s only about themselves. They don’t ever get the bigger picture. For, look, there are reports that he blames Moss for his mood, and says he was just nervous. Uh-huh. In that case, you’re everyone’s oxygen thief.

Update 2230: Doherty has been coming up with an increasingly amazing array of excuses, having moved on from “I was very nervous” and “also, my car got clamped” and “I’d had a row”, he’s now moved on to “one of the Geldof children pinched my bum”.

Uh-HUH. Meanwhile, perhaps you’re wondering why Elton John, not previously noticed at the Libertines’ or the Babyshambles front-room-style gigs, invited Doherty on? For this, you have to understand the music business process. Who appears is all the result of give and take, back and forth, this for that.

Fact: Elton John has new management, Sanctuary Music.
Fact: Pete Doherty’s record company is Sanctuary Music: they stood his bail recently.

Update again: Popbitch’s latest newsletter has an amazingly libellous tale about Doherty and Kate Moss backstage at Live 8 that I’m staying well away from…

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