This is not a post about Jade Goody

I promised myself that I would not blog about Jade Goody. I'm going to break that promise, but not because I want to speak ill of the dead; there's been a lot of comment about Goody flying around that is reprehensible. I read, "good riddance to her" this morning. I've blogged about Facebook groups wishing death on people before, so you know where I stand on that one.

The world is broken, and Jade Goody demonstrates why. She is not the cause, or even the effect, but she - or rather, the media circus she generated, and continues to generate - is a symptom.

Let's be blunt here: who was Jade Goody? A game-show contestant who became famous for being unbelievably stupid and for flashing her toilet parts to Channel 4 viewers. That is all. No more, no less.

But, if any of us were put in the position to become rich and famous simply for being ourselves, could we honestly say that we would say, "no thanks"? The fact the tabloid newspapers fell over themselves to feature her, that cack-mags like OK! waved huge pots of cash at her to get interviews, and the fact that LivingTV might as well have renamed itself "The Goody Channel" are not Jade's fault.

Whatever else she may have been, she was clearly a loving mother, and her two children have lost a parent - no-one wants to see that happen, do they?

But what else was she? Celebrity Big Brother proved that she was both a racist and a bigot. The past few weeks have proven that cancer cures racism. No matter how harrowing her final months of life, it can't change everything that went before it.

Over the course of the past week, another famous mother has died - Natasha Richardson. Some people seem to be suggesting that Richardson is more deserving of our sympathy then Goody. Not so - but Goody is certainly not more deserving than Richardson.

For example, over the course of the weekend the bodies of three soldiers were flown back from Afghanistan to be buried. How do their familys feel when the Prime Minister decides that Jade Goody deserves a tribute and they don't? These are men who chose to put themselves into a position in which they risked being killed for their country. They are no different to the millions who died in the 40s to prevent us all from becoming German. They are not merely game-show contestants.

The BBC asked website visitors what that thought Jade Goody's legacy would be. Overwhelmingly, they responded "nothing". That she has highlighted the dangers of not being screened for cervical cancer is clear, but the fact that she has bequeathed not a penny to cancer research is worth noting.

In all of this, one name stands knee-deep in more effluent than any other: Max Clifford. As I read in a blog the other week, "if he's so good at publicity why does everyone think he's a c**t?" It's a very good point, and the answer is probably because he is one. I wonder how much money he's made from all of this? How much did he charge Goody for managing the last few weeks of her life? If anyone deserves to rot anywhere at any point in the future, it is surely him.

And then there's OK! magazine - shite-peddlars of the highest order who didn't seem to think there was anything wrong in publising a Jade Goody Tribute Issue with her year of death on the cover in big letters while she was still alive. Words fail me, especially when they decided to send out this tribute as magazine issue number 666. Yes, they really did.

Finally, let's not forget LivingTV, a channel that kept Jade in the public eye through those periods when we were trying to either ignore or forget her with a collection of interminable reality shows such as Jade's Salon. The channel that paid a fortune to screen her wedding, a wedding to a man who gives chavs a bad name.

To suggest that anyone who dies deserves more sympathy, well wishes or support than anyone else is mildly insulting. To suggest that every previous cancer victim is somehow less worthy than Jade Goody is massively insulting to a huge number of people.

Jade died how she lived - in the glare of the public eye. She chose to use that spotlight to make money for her children. In doing this, she highlighted the need for cervical cancer screening. She demonstrated just how horrible dying of cancer is.

It's not her fault that the media spotlight was there in the first place. But in the way her death is being treated, has everyone involved belittled every previous cancer death?

I think they have. And that saddens me to the core.

How to ignore most of the words in a press release

Despite being a "newspaper" (and those inverted commas are important), the Daily Star appears to employ journalists who can only read a small number of words in a press release. After doing this, they then make up a story to fit the words that they chose to read.

In a bout of keeping up with what John Barrowman is up to, I discovered that he is spending the next six consecutive Sundays filming a new show, Tonight's The Night, for the BBC. Wanting to know more about this, I popped over to the BBC's website and did a search, quickly finding their press release about the new show:

BBC One is making dreams come true as part of a brand new, six-part Saturday night entertainment show. Hosted by Torchwood and West End star John Barrowman, Tonight's The Night combines show-stopping acts from world class artists with once-in-a-lifetime performances that make people's dreams come true.

It doesn't matter how young or old, or how big, small or bizarre the wish. Tonight's The Night will end up being the night ordinary people live out their performing fantasy for real and become the most unlikely stars that Saturday evenings have ever seen.

From local community heroes to enthusiastic amateurs with a hidden talent they have been yearning to unleash, Tonight will be their time to shine – with the help of John and the best talent in the business.

This could mean duetting with a favourite pop group, singing with a big band or tripping the light fantastic with the cast of a hit West End musical. John will leave no performance stone unturned to make this the night of their lives and a must-see for entertainment fans.

There will also be big laughs, with a succession of celebrity guest appearances, performances, exciting studio challenges and show-stopping numbers. Guest celebrities will support the stars for a night and become involved in making their wishes come true.

This was released on the 25th January. The following day, the Daily Star reported the news, and added the following:

However, the show has been dubbed as a Britain's Got Talent rip-off. An industry insider told the Daily Star: "You can't blame fans for thinking it's a direct rip-off. But who cares? It has the potential to be a great show and it will be good to see the BBC take on Cowell."

Woah there! Just bloody woah! Where did that bunch of cack come from?! Who are these "fans" that we can't blame? How can a show that lets random members of the public do a single, one-off performance of something, possibly accompanied by a famous singer/actor/band, be in any way compared to a talent show in which twelve performers are eventually whittled down to one winner by means of the public voting off their least favourite act each week? Has no-one noticed the following important points:

• There's no judging panel
• There's no voting or even opinion passing about the performances
• There are no prizes for performing

Nope, what's happened is that the Daily Star journalist who made up the story (after all, "an industry insider", "a close friend of", and "an associate of" are all journalistic terms for "the person who made up the following quote") looked at the press release and spotted the following words and phrases:

• Dreams come true
• Entertaiment show
• Talent

..and thought, "ooh, I can use those words to describe Britain's Got Talent too, so the shows must be the same". Thing is, the BBC have already "taken on Cowell". It was called Fame Academy, and it was pants.

Remember Michael Barrymore's My Kind Of People? No? Well, whether you do or not, and whatever you now think of Michael "fancy a dip in my pool" Barrymore, that is the show that Tonight's The Night most closely apes. And it was good, solid entertainment.

Hopefully variety is about to start making a comeback to Saturday night TV. If it is, I can think of fewer better hosts than John Barrowman. Now, partner him with Denise Van Outen and you have a 21st century remake of The Donny And Marie show just waiting to happen.

Just don't tell the Daily Star. They'll only accuse it of being a rip-off of The Big Breakfast...

Carry On Driving - confessions of a determined motorist

This weekend has featured three important dates - Friday the 13th, Valentine's Day, and Mrs Steve's birthday.

As far as the latter two were concerned, it seemed an excellent excuse for a trip to London and a visit to the Theatre Royal Drury Lane to see "Oliver", starring Jodie Prenger, Mr Bean, Dr Owen Harper, Davros and Cristatos from "For Your Eyes Only". Which was excellent, and will probably be blogged about later in the week.

Nope, this blog post is about the journey to London. On Friday the 13th. Now, I'm certainly not superstitious, but I'm starting to be swayed...

We set off from home in my trusty Honda Accord, and made our way towards the big smoke down the M40. I was merrily trundling along at ~73mph in the fast lane of the motorway when my dashboard decided to do its Blackpool Illuminations impression. The braking system, anti-lock brakes, airbag and alternator warning lights all lit up at the same time.

Bugger.

I pulled over to the hard shoulder and risked getting out of the car to take a peak under the bonnet. There was an engine there. Which was a good start.

We were only a mile-and-a-half from Cherwell Valley services, so I trundled along the hard shoulder (with my hazard warning lights on) and up to the junction - an act that confused a man in a silver SEAT Ibiza, who couldn't work out whether to overtake me or not despite the fact that I was doing 35mph on the hard shoulder and he was driving on the motorway...!

A very nice AA man duly arrived and took a look at the car. His instant (and, it turns out, 100% accurate) assessment was that the alternator was buggered, and was pumping out far more than the 15V it was meant to. In fact, it was pumping out somewhere in the region of 18V, enough to baffle the electrical system (hence the dashboard illuminations) and toast the battery.

However, we had to be in London in two hours time, otherwise we'd miss the show. We were still 80 minutes from our hotel, and it would take 90 minutes to get a transporter to our car.

There was only one option - we were going to have to see how resilient to ludicrous voltages the electrical system in a Honda Accord was. We were going to have to drive to London.

But there was no chance of managing this unless we could reduce the load on the battery. Which meant that every possible electrical system in the car needed to be running. So, turn on the heater, the air conditioning, the headlights, the heated rear window, the CD player, the windscreen wipers (it wasn't raining) front and rear, and keep the engine revs below 2,250 per minute. Which, in top gear, means the car is doing 48mph according to the sat nav.

Travelling on a motorway at 48mph was the scariest experience of my life so far. But, apart from the Polish lorry driver who thought that driving right up my arse, flashing his headlights and sounding his horn would somehow make my car disappear (or at least render it less solid), it wasn't too bad.

As long as we could keep all of the warning lights off the dashboard, then everything was okay. But if they lit up again, the load was too great on the battery and we needed to use more power.

..and when that happened, there was only one other power item which would sufficiently drain the output of the alternator - the electric windows.

So, picture the scene. On a clear, bright, dry afternoon, a black Honda Accord was travelling down the M40 at a steady 48mph with its windscreen wipers running, its headlights on, and with each window in turn opening and closing, opening and closing, opening and closing...

But it worked! We got to the hotel 20 minutes before we needed to leave it again to get to the theatre. It was a close thing, though.

The battery was knackered by the over-charging. On Saturday morning when I drove the car to Acton to be repaired, it seemed fine for the first 10 minutes of my journey.

Then the ABS light came on.

Then the alternator light came on.

Then the entire dashboard stopped working.

Thank heavens for sat nav. Approaching a speed camera when your speedometer isn't working is brown-trousers time unless you have a trusty TomTom displaying your speed for you!

Japanese cars? Next time, I'm buying Lebanese.

If I were a sexist

Beyoncé Knowles, just bloody stop it.

I really, really can't stand whiney-arsed pop songs. The worst offender by quite some margin is "Because Of You" by Kelly 'Not Related To Jeremy' Clarkson - a song that's more whiney, self-centred and angst-ridden than your average teenager's LiveJournal. Not pleasant.

And so Beyoncé has joined the party with "If I Were A Boy". Now, I am a boy. If I'd written a song that basically said, "all girls sleep around, take you for granted, hang out with their mates all the time and don't give a shit about your feelings until you dump them", I'd get every feminist in the Northern Hemisphere wanting to put my bollocks in a vice. I'd also have written a really crappy pop song.

Kudos, then, to Beyoncé and songwriting partners Britney Carlson and Toby Gad. They avoided falling into that trap. Unfortunately, they fell into the trap of writing exactly the same song about blokes instead. Oops.

Let's take a closer look...

If I were a boy
Even just for a day
I'd roll out of bed in the morning
And throw on what I wanted and go

The male gender apologise for that fact that you're too vain to just do this. It's clearly our fault.

Drink beer with the guys
And chase after girls
I'd kick it with who I wanted
And I'd never get confronted for it
Cause they stick up for me

We also apologise for being better friends to other guys than girls are to other girls. That must be our fault too. Oh, and to suggest that all blokes chase after girls is insulting. You tart.

If I were a boy
I think I could understand
How it feels to love a girl
I swear I'd be a better man
I'd listen to her

Modest, aren't we Ms Knowles?

Cause I know how it hurts
When you lose the one you wanted
Cause he's taking you for granted
And everything you had got destroyed

That's a bit over-dramatic, isn't it? Would you like a lie down?

If I were a boy
I would turn off my phone
Tell everyone it's broken
So they'd think that I was sleeping alone

Yes, 'cause that makes perfect sense. The only way I know that someone is sleeping on their own is because their mobile phone appears not to be working. You bloody mentalist.

I'd put myself first
And make the rules as I go
Cause I know that she'd be faithful,
Waiting for me to come home, to come home.

So all girls are faithful and all boys are self-centred arseholes? Sorry, what planet did you say you were from again? Don't blame the rest of us 'cos you've only dated serial twats.

There's more, but it's just the same stuff again. If these lyrics were aimed at just one particular boy then it wouldn't be so bad, but it's a cheap pop lyricists trick to tar everyone with the same brush. Girls will buy the single because it makes them feel "empowered", because they "empathise with the singer", because they "all know boys like that", and because "they're all totally full of shit". The world is not full of blokes who can't go two days without shagging something. You need to get out more.

But you're just a girl.

...and some Little Mermaid sanitary towels too, please

What. The. Fuck.

Roland VIMA: just what's the point?

I love Roland. No, it's not a homoerotic fantasy. I love the Roland Corporation, musical instrument manufacturers.

The first Roland product I owned was an E-30 keyboard, back in 1989. That was replaced by an E-70 in 1991, and then an EM-2000 in 1998. A keyboard which I still own, and still use professionally. It has been battered and bruised through 10 years of gigging, and the only problem was when the power supply fizzled out a year ago.

Along with this, my pedal board is a Roland PK-7, my mixer is a Roland VM-3100, and at home I have a Roland G-70 workstation so that I can make music during the day as well.

So when Roland announce a brand new product range in the UK, I should be excited. In fact, I'm bemused.

That product is Roland VIMA, and it has been around in the US for about two years now. And it's completely and utterly pointless.

I'm not going to bother explaining what it is, because Roland have already done that in a handy video which can be found on YouTube - here, in fact. Take a look and then read on.

Firstly, and something that isn't mentioned in the video, I have a problem with the specification of VIMA. The keyboard contains 128 orchestral sounds. That's the same number as my E-30 contained. Twenty bloody years ago! By comparison, there are nearly 1,600 voices in my G-70, and over 1,100 in my 10-year-old EM-2000. This specification is, quite frankly, crap.

But my real issue with VIMA is that it doesn't actually do anything of value. It certainly doesn't do anything that you can't either already do, or can do with a PC a whole lot cheaper than a VIMA keyboard costs (about £4,995 in case you're wondering).

Let's take a look at what the YouTube video says VIMA can help you do:

Authentic Sound
I've already mentioned this - the sounds will be very good (Roland's sounds always are), but there aren't anywhere near enough of them to justify the price of the instrument.

The non-VIMA alternative: Roland's own low-end electronic pianos offer the same weighted keyboard and can be linked to a sound module for hundreds more voices than VIMA offers. A saving of at least £3,000.

VIMA Tunes
These are just glorified MIDI karaoke files, and you can download thousands of them free-of-charge by doing a quick Google search. Pretty much any decent keyboard these days can play back karaoke files, and most of the higher-end ones have a TV output so you can see the lyrics on a big screen. Failing that, a free PC program such as vanBasco's Karaoke Player can play back MIDI karaoke files through your PC's soundcard and display the lyrics too. All VIMA adds is the ability to overlay the lyrics onto still pictures. Is that really worth £5,000?

The non-VIMA alternative: You're reading this, so you have a PC. Download vanBasco's Karaoke Player and grab some .kar files from the web. Total cost - £0.

VIMA's ability to display the score or a "virtual piano roll" (an utterly pointless display if ever I saw one) is matched by high-end Roland and Yamaha keyboards and electronic pianos. These will set you back pretty much the same amount of money as VIMA, but are vastly superior instruments. If you're happy to forsake the weighted keyboard action, you can cut the cost considerably. With a PC, downloadable program MIDI-Notator (which only costs $20 to buy) lets you take a MIDI file, pick some tracks and print out the score.

The non-VIMA alternative: How about a Yamaha PSR-S900? A saving of about £4,000 - and a much better instrument than VIMA.

Audio CDs
What?! It can play Audio CDs and you can play along with them?! Wow. The only other way to do that is to play an audio CD and then play along with it. You know, like you can do as long as you own a CD player. No point whatsoever.

The non-VIMA alternative: Play an audio CD. Then play along with it using any musical instrument you care to mention.

The ability to remove the vocal line from commercial CDs is always massively fudged in adverts such as the VIMA video. The only way to remove the vocals is to remove all the parts of the original recording that are panned to the centre of the stereo spectrum. This removes the lead vocal, but may also remove any number of other parts. Usually, what it fails to remove is the effects (echo, reverb, and so on) that were applied to the lead vocal in the studio, leaving you with an ethereal-sounding version of the original. And, of course, if the original was a mono recording, this doesn't work at all. Regardless, a free add-on is available for the also-free WinAmp that does exactly the same thing, and which works with mp3, wma and wav files as well as audio CDs. There's also a free add-on that lets you change the pitch and tempo of any sound file as it plays back.

The non-VIMA alternative: WinAmp and the add-ons are free.

Slide Show
Now we enter the realm of complete and utter pointlessness. A slideshow on your TV with musical accompaniment? Let's see now...

Pretty much every digital camera comes equipped with a cable that lets you connect it to a TV set. They also have a slideshow mode that lets you view all of the stored images as a slideshow. So connect your camera to the TV, put it in slideshow mode, and then play a CD along with it, or something. Or whatever musical instrument you have to hand.

If VIMA let you record the results, it would have a point. But it doesn't! Utterly, utterly useless.

The non-VIMA alternative: Play the slideshow and play music along with it. It won't cost you any extra money. If you have a current-generation games console (XBox360, Wii, PS3) it's even easier - and at least £3,700 cheaper than VIMA!

Video
See above, but substitute the word "slideshow" for the word "video". This is even more pointless, because absolutely every digital video camera comes with TV connection cables!

Portable Audio Device
Oh good grief - it gets worse! £5,000 for a glorified iPod dock?! They're just taking the piss now.

The non-VIMA alternative: Connect your mp3 player to a TV or hi-fi using the cable that came with it (or one that will cost <£10 from Maplin if it wasn't provided).

Karaoke
Well, this is just an amalgam of some of the things mentioned above (although what's the point of being able to connect the live feed from a video camera to your TV set? You're in the same bloody room as the resulting picture... can't you just look at it?!). The section about VIMA Tunes pretty much covers all of this. The only thing that you might need to match the capability of VIMA is the ability to connect a second microphone. No problem; a microphone mixer (which would allow you to connect up to four microphones) costs about £12 from Maplin.

The non-VIMA alternative: see above, plus that £12 mic mixer!

Sorry, Roland, but is the massive compromise in terms of the quality of the actual keyboard instrument really worth the extra £4,000 or so over a "normal" keyboard just for the ease-of-use that putting all of these (mostly pointless) features into one device? When a decent keyboard and a laptop can do all that and much, much more for much less money?

I'll get excited about a new Roland product range just as soon as they find the plot again.

And this year's Eurovision winner is: Estonia

Thus the country chooses Jade. A decision that Lord Lloyd Webber clearly made a very long time ago.

Jade is a good performer. But she won't win us Eurovision. It's not her fault; the song's crap, and the only chance we had was with the novelty value of The Twins.

So, well done Estonia. Eurovision winners 2009.

Possibly.