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Charlotte v Tazmin

Charlotte "Voice of an Angel" Church has never been afraid to speak her mind. Her lumpen ex-boyfriend Steven Johnson is reportedly dating Tazmin Proctor, who also happens to be his second cousin (welcome to Wales).

Ms Church apparently bumped into the happy couple cavorting at a Justin Timberlake party and with customary understatement described Tazmin as a "minger."

Lovely word, minger (that's a hard 'G' in case you were wondering). It means somebody who looks... well.... minging, I suppose. E.g. "Britney Spears is a right minger" or "Your brother is minging."

Now Tazmin's appeared deshabille in The Sun with the arresting quote "Charlotte may have the voice of an angel, but I have the body of an angel."

My hero - Alan Clark

I am turning into a complete TV slob. My excuse is that it's part of the job, but I can't help thinking I'm overdoing it a bit lately.

Like last night... watched Location, Location (featuring a mind-numbingly dull man and his Thai bride, who between them failed to muster something even vaguely resembling a coherent sentence throughout the entire programme). Then the wonderful Property People (see blogs passim), which introduced Marius, a deeply malevolent "negotiator" from the West Hampstead branch of Greene and Co - who was enormously entertaining to watch.

Tonight, there's a Horizon documentary on BBC2 about the mystery gas used by Russian special forces when they stormed the Nord-Ost theatre in Moscow in 2002. Why did it kill so many people? This comes hot on the heels of a story claiming the Kremlin engineered the situation and that the Chechens inside had no intention of blowing the theatre up.

After that it's the first part of the Alan Clark Diaries on BBC4. I am a massive Clark fan. God knows, we could do with more MPs like him. Most of them look and sound like provincial model railway enthusiasts. Clark was an aristocratic snob, but at least he had a mind of his own. It will be interesting to see how John Hurt "does" him.

Alan Clark - never had to buy his own furniture.

John Hurt as AC.

More Dr Shipman

Stu complains about bad writing on the Harold Shipman story... Couldn't agree more, though my favourite clanger is the way he's been repeatedly described as "Britain's worst serial killer." I'd have thought 200 plus victims makes him quite a good serial killer. How about "most prolific" instead?

Members of Parliament

I'm really jealous of the person who writes this interesting blog. He's a Brit living in Tokyo. Wish I lived just about anywhere other than Britain.

The blog also has a link to a deeply disturbing unofficial House of Commons calendar. Here's one of the months that isn't too grotesque.

On second thoughts...

Dr Death dies

Another mass murderer has killed himself in a British prison. This time it's the turn of Harold Shipman, the Manchester doctor who bumped off more than 200 of his patients with heroin injections (nice man.) Shipman was sentenced to life in 2,000, but now he's hanged himself in his cell.

Harold Shipman - aka "Dr Death."

Britain doesn't have a death penalty for mass murderers - but it might as well do, because Shipman is by no means the first psycho killer to take the long leap while supposedly being "high risk" and under close scrutiny.

Serial killer Fred West managed to do the same on New Year's Day in 1995 and Soham murderer Ian Huntley almost got to the finishing line after hiding loads of anti-depressants in his tea bags while on remand.

People are most likely to kill themselves in prison when they are serving or facing the prospect of serving a life sentence. And Britain has more people serving life sentences than all the other western European countries put together. (Locking people up for long periods of time is obviously something we're good at.)

Most prison suicides could be prevented if we didn't fill our prisons with people who could be punished outside in the community. And according to the Howard League for Penal Reform prisons should just be for serious and violent offenders who aren't a threat to society.

Maybe if they were, Shipman would still be around to do his time.

T-shirt Hell

I love this t-shirt...

In fact I love all the t-shirts available from T-Shirt Hell. It's such a shame that I have a big fat beer belly and look terrible in t-shirts.

Why I like darts

Amid all the hullabaloo surrounding athletes and naughty tablets, let's hear it for the darts players of this world. Performance enhancing substances are rather more out in the open with these gentlemen. So much so that the latest world champion, Andy "The Viking" Fordham, has a pic of a carton of Holsten Pils on his informative website. It is, he says, his favourite drink.

Andy is not a small man. In fact he weighs around 30 stone. Any manipulation of his frame requires a considerable degree of pre-planning. So not for him the exaggerated antics of Premier League footballers, cartwheeling around the pitch. Instead, each 180 score during the championships was celebrated by an almost imperceptible blink and an occasional lick of the lower lip. This sort of understated approach is rare in the world of sport these days. And it's not the only thing that sets Andy - and other darts players - apart.

Andy "The Viking" Fordham. Even the wallpaper looks familiar.

Most sports men and women are transcendentally dull. They have nothing to say and - other than in their chosen pursuit - nothing outstanding to offer. To relax they invariably play golf (unless they are already professional golfers, in which case they don't relax).

Darts is different. Cut-throat though the competition is, players still manage to live real lives away from the sport. (Andy, you may be surprised to learn, is the landlord of a pub in Kent.) Darts players look like normal human beings. Well, kind of. They are normal in a way that Rio Ferdinand simply isn't.

Bear this in mind the next time you hear some snooty rugby bore or footballing loudmouth dissing this sport. Darts players are just like you and me.

Sharon on the fence

Israel's cuddly Prime Minister Ariel Sharon continues his wall-building to the sound of a deafening silence from the western media. And figures from the UN suggest that when the latest stage is complete, 15% of Palestinian land in the West Bank will end up on the Israeli side - disrupting the lives of almost 700,000 Palestinians.

What gets me is the way this thing is still described as a security fence. Whatever it is (illegal for a start) this thing is not a fence. A fence is made of wood and you can jump or climb over it. This is made of horrible grey concrete and you wouldn't be able to climb over it without a crane. Other euphemisms you see all the time include "barrier" and "barricade." I don't remember anyone ever talking about the Berlin Fence - do you?

A fence or a... bloody huge wall?

There's an interesting article about Sharon in December's NYRB.

Sanjay's Plan

With virtually no sunlight in Britain this weekend, the best place to be was in a cinema. So off I went - but not to see Lost in Translation or American Splendor. Oh No. I went to see a Bollywood movie, in Hindi, without any subtitles. How cool am I?

The movie was called Plan and it starred Sanjay Dutt, playing a Mumbai don who is mistakenly kidnapped by a bunch of individuals who need to raise some money quickly. They don't realise their catch is none other than Musabhai and he thinks he's been kidnapped by his own crew.

The fight scenes were predictably hilarious and thankfully none of the song and dance routines were filmed in Switzerland. Sanjay Dutt is very watchable as a good guy/bad guy and an extremely accomplished smoker of cigarettes. The cinema was almost empty but the people who were there (90% of them students - all Asian) looked at me as though I had three heads.

Sanjay Dutt - likes a fag.

Bush on Mars

I feel sorry for ordinary Americans, sometimes. The politicians in charge over there must really think they are dumb. Bush waged a war for no good reason and lied about weapons of mass destruction. American troops are mired in Iraq. They are likely to be there and getting shot at for the next four or five years. Now there's an election around the corner and it's bullshit time.

All of which could be said about Blair and Britain too. But there the comparison ends. Because Bush's latest scam is to try to win votes by talking nonsense about space missions to the moon and Mars. Is anybody taken in by this hokum? Sadly, I suspect the answer is probably yes.

Well, if any Americans are reading: listen up - Bush is lying to you. And the rest of the world is laughing at you. America isn't going to the moon and you aren't going to put men on Mars. To suggest these things is the equivalent of Blair saying a vote for Labour will guarantee England a place in the World Cup final.

Bush is floating a dream because the geeks who stand behind him and crunch the numbers reckon that come election time, Americans like to feel good and be optimistic. So despite your $50 million an hour trade deficit, what America really needs (according to Administration officials quoted by AP) is a housing estate on the moon because then it will be cheaper to get to Mars or "even the asteroids."

Yeah, right.