Of course, the question remains...

Just how was it that John Prescott didn't find it possible to cast an eye over the agreement that could have averted today's fire strike before 9 am, but did manage to get up to do an interview on Today explaining how he hadn't had a chance to read it?

Not actually sponsored by Radio 4

This blog does seem to be driven quite heavily by the Today Programme, which is partly because we get our biggest chunk of current affairs while we walk into work; we watch BBC Breakfast before we leave the house ("can't we have news with pictures?") and it's not like the piss-poor consumer tat that clutters that show is going to make us think very deeply, is it?
So, we were interested to read an article in the Guardian suggesting that maybe the programme doesn't have that much influence any more. Of course government ministers and their unamed aides are going to rubbish the show - it's about the only place left where they get asked questions rather than get given chances to chat; it's clear to anyone that David Frost is a man who should be allowed to spend his Sunday mornings slumbering quietly in his bed until its time for medication, and yet nobody at Westminster is going to give unnamed briefings against him because he might be confused, fusty and obscure, but he's also sycophantic. And that's special.
We're going to sit here and allow ourselves a little chuckle at the way people try to pretend that Five Live is ever going to oust Today as the thinking person's choice at breakfast. The news on Five Live performs the same function to the sport as the interviews with Norman Mailer relate to the tits in Playboy. Five Live may become more listened to, in time, but it's never going to be more heard.
But we're reserving our greatest applause for Piers Morgan, editor of The Daily Mirror. His opinion, when asked about Today, was:
It is not as important as the media intelligentsia make it out to be. I get a better idea of what people on the street care about from 5 Live or TalkSport. Today has become a caricature. You know they'll lead on whatever the broadsheets and the Daily Mail lead on. It appeals to a small coterie of London media and political people. I never find it revelatory.
Right. Let's take these in reverse order, shall we? Since Morgan's idea of "revelatory" has been to pay Paul Burrell £300,000 and add nothing new to the sum of knowledge about how we are governed, and to constantly hint that he's got some kind of dirt on Ian Hislop but never actually reveal it - because, poor diddums, he was exposed as a half-tank mind on Have I Got News For You (twice), it's a moot point exactly what sort of 'revelation' he is looking for. Obviously, the continued coverage of the Head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales' habit of giving one more chance to paedeophiles isn't going to line-up with what Morgan thinks is important. And if he really thinks that its Today's role to reflect what people on the street 'care about', then he really is as desperately poor at comprehension as his paper would suggest. You don't look to the show to tell you what people are bellowing about in the saloon; it's role is to go beyond the standard basic level of understanding and provide news coverage that assumes a certain level of intelligence and background knowledge. And if an editor of a national daily newspaper really sets any store by the illiterate braying morons who call Talk Sport in order to share their limited understanding of poorly written news stories they've had read to them, that would be a resigning matter, surely?

A gift for the person who's got everything:
Grand Theft Winona

Update:

More on the biased BBC thing, I'm afraid - our friends over at the biased BBC blog seem to still not quite get the point that balanced reporting doesn't mean that when you report A, you also have to report the existence of not A. This week, they've singled out a report about an airgun amnesty in London. Now, all the BBC has done is, basically, said "there's a campaign to get people to hand in their guns, and the police don't think they make a very good christmas gift for children. Now, to be totally balanced, the BBC should have interviewed someone who enjoys being shot at by guns, true, but it's a bloody short piece about the amnesty. Police Collect Guns. Nowhere does it editorialise that guns are bad. Or that airguns are bad.
Oh, and - teaching kids to shoot stuff as a Festive Gift? I'm guessing the complainant doesn't live in a neighbourhood like mine, where all we want for Christmas is for the kids to declare a Holiday Truce.
Lets hope BBBC don't find out that an equally biased report on a guns amnesty in sunderland - they actually imply that knife is a weapon which, as B-BBC correspondent Phil Bulmer would be quick to point out, is as ridiculous as calling a baseball bat a weapon. Presumably.
What we don't understand is how B-BBC can condemn the ITC for thinking that the British public can't tell 'news' from 'comment', and then gets itself into a big, sexy, pouty sweat because it believes that the British public can't tell a news report of an airgun amnesty from a definitive statement on gun control.

There are bad, bad people on the rise

The bloody BNP have won a council seat in a Blackburn by-election. They only just won - BNP 578; Lab 562; Lib Dem 505; Con 154 - but that makes it worse rather than better. Its disgusting that Labour and the Lib Dems allowed this to happen by splitting the Not Racist Fucker vote so badly - I'm sure there was some pressing local issue that made it impossible for the two parties to work together to keep the scum from getting what they'll present as more evidence that their divisive, hate-filled alleged politics have been somehow legitimised. Maybe the Ways and Means committee was finely balanced, and so for one party to have stepped down would have resulted in slightly different shaped wheelie bins.
So, let's cheer ourselves up - one of them (and doesn't he look like a gay 80's pop star?) might be on Blackburn Council, but let's focus instead on one in the right place. Last week, David Wilson, a BNP member, was banged up in prison for distributing race hate material. Naturally, the BNP are trying to suggest that he's a political prisonner of conscience, and are even arranging an appeal. They're so dimwitted, they admit that because he got caught for trying to stir up racial hatred his marriage broke up, but then try to elicit sympathy for him by saying that "his children are having to live without him while he's in prison" - erm, if he's no longer living with his wife, wouldn't they anyway?
Even more fascinating is the BNP's sudden discovery of the conditions in prison. While their party policy decries "The liberal fixation with the ‘rights’ of criminals", once one of them gets banged up in Barlinnie, they suddenly come over all Elizabeth Fry, attacking the "cells of the grim Victorian Barlinnie Prison on the outskirts of Glasgow where the disgusting practice of "slopping out" is still a daily occurence." So, what is it, BNP - is poor treatment of convicted offenders acceptable or not? Should we be campaigning to get slopping out ended nationwide, or would that be part of a "liberal fixation"?

TV Review

Presumably it's called TLC [Mondays, 9.30pm, BBC2] because it's no Scrubs?
Dead Ringers [Mondays, 9pm, BBC2] actually manages the transfer to TV really well - it's the first time in living memory a show's actually been improved by migrating from audio to in-vision, which is odd because the actual visual quality of the impressions are very, very poor indeed. They need to do something about how they approach Bush - portraying the man as a doddering chump isn't actually satire, and isn't especially original - all news footage of the man has done exactly the same thing, and most of the punchlines are virtually distributed by SMS before the sketch starts, but its not too bad.
We fancy Mark Owen, and so seeing him do the Adam Ant pisstake on Celebrity Big Brother was one of those nice warm melty moments on TV - like discovering your long lost twin or something. But really, the last word on CBB2 went to Graham Norton, who popped up midway to promote his show. "With Rosanna Arquette and Rod Stewart. Real celebrities." Exactly.

Adventures in Blogland

I Touch Myself is a small but growing webring for people who are happy to admit they wank. The sites on it aren't porn, or even much to wank about - the connection is that they're run by people who when someone goes "Hey... wanker" they go "yeah?"

Da Ish - sometimes, parody is redundant. A painfully white, teenage boy tries to be black. Tries very, very hard indeed.

Life imitates web

B3TA asked for 1950's-style information campaigns
The Home Office decided to enter

My Father was in charge of USD25million...

Now, you'll know if you ever read No Rock that we're not fond of spam ourselves, but we think that maybe Film Threat should try and relax a bit more. They got a spam - one of those "someone you know has a crush on you" type affairs - and rather than just deleting it and moving on, they decided to launch a campaign. We think it got a bit out of hand, especially when the site starts to suggest that the anti-spam movement should start to behave like anti-paedophile campaigners, and we think the effect will be for spammers to just become more devious in hiding their real world addresses rather than stopping their activities all together.

And, finally:

Michael Jackson chooses the books that most inspired him

And, if you'd like some more tactless and tasteless humour, you could try the Scandalarbara, a Royal Scandal generator.

The Colour Supplement is a beta-test version of stuff that may have made No Rock And Roll Fun, but was off-topic.
No Rock And Roll Fun is a bit of bothsidesnow You can contact us at coloursupp@bothsidesnow.co.uk

This week on No Rock:
Shania Twain on David Letterman - what was she wearing?
Christian Rock - evil after all?
What The Pop Papers Say - Karen O, Pink, Free NME CD
What The Pop Papers Say - Q Awards, Pink's nipples
Artists attack file downloading - oh yeah?
Win Christina Aguilera sweat and stains
Neko Case live
Top Ten Album Titles explained by the BPI