Scousers Congratulate Queen

     The lettering's running in the rain, wharra we gonna do?

     Oh, shit, we shoudda thought of that when we nicked it

How Shall Benjamin Liu Be Judged?

Well, it appears Liu would fail our Chief Executive elect’s scrutiny and visibility test. The former Court of Appeal judge, who penned a remarkable book with the rather misleading title How Shall We Be Judged?, was in the news earlier this year in connection with the fraud trial of his friend – perhaps former friend would be more accurate – John Wong Kin Ling, formerly Head of Surgery at Hong Kong University, who was convicted of misconduct in public office and false accounting but spared jail time on account of his age (71) and the fact that he had a 12-year-old son.

Wong’s crimes included syphoning HK$730,000 from his centre’s bank accounts to pay an Indonesian domestic helper/driver – I didn’t realise how much we were underpaying our Filipino – making false expense claims for overseas travel to defraud the Inland Revenue Department of HK$125,000 in profits tax, and falsifying the accounts of his company.

Wong also failed to tell the university that his former administrative assistant, June Chan Sau Hung, had embezzled more than HK$3 million from his centre’s bank accounts. His motivation, so he tells us, was compassion for the fair June, whose niece’s parents had died in a car crash in 2006. He also claimed that he feared for the reputation of the university if the police were involved, thereby subscribing to Hitler’s Big Lie theory: if you’re going to tell a lie, it might as well be a whopper.

The lessons to be learned from this case appear to be as follows:

1. Don’t sow all your wild oats when you’re young; keep a few in the packet for later life – they may come in useful.

2. When you finally get round to cooking the books, remember that although life may begin at 50 – or 59 for Dr Wong – it’s better to keep your fiddle in its case until you’re approaching three score years and ten, after which you can scratch away with virtual impunity.

3. Get yourself a Bauhinia Star (preferably Gold, but Silver will do as well) and have a close association with the University of Hong Kong. You never know how useful this will prove when you’re up before a judiciary composed largely of men and women with law degrees from HKU.

Back to Benny Liu Tsz Ming. He stands "judged" – getting into the spirit of things, I’m slightly misusing his own word – by Dr Wong of having advised him that he could resolve the lovely June’s embezzlement without telling his employers or the local nick. According to Dr Wong, he snitched on Benny in an indirect kind of way – Benny’s name was passed to the trial judge written on a piece of folded paper, prompting the prosecution to instantly and successfully demand that the name be revealed – because he didn’t want to embarrass his old friend.

In so doing, he proved two things beyond reasonable doubt: first, that with friends like this you don't need enemies, and second that his thoughtfulness and consideration, nay, compassion, was not limited only to his comely former assistant.

Mugabe Explains UN's Thinking Behind Tourism Leader Appointment

They told me people were beginning to doubt they were a complete waste of space

CY Leung Committed to Scrutinising his Visibility

I've lost count of the different number of bureaux the transport department has come under in the last ten or fifteen years, but it's been twinned (or tripleted) with the strangest bedfellows in that time, including environment, works and housing.

And now our chief executive elect, Leung Chun Ying, is planning yet another revamp, a “streamlining” process which will result, predictably enough, given that the revamp is to be designed and implemented by civil servants, in at least two more bureaux and a couple of deputies. The two latter posts – understudies for chief secretary and financial secretary – are presumably deemed necessary in the event of the incumbent being unable to resist the temptation to buy a Lexus on the cheap or moonlight for wacky property tycoons called Tom and Ray.

Leung has upped the ante somewhat by inventing a couple of new words to enter the lists with “transparency” and “accountability”, namely, “visibility” and, my favourite, “scrutiny”. More verbal elements, then, with which to build an Orwellian prefabricated henhouse in the West Kowloon Cultural District, or whatever they finally decide to call it. (How about Colossal Waste of Space or Why Not Redevelop the Cattle Depot Artist Village in To Kwa Wan?)

I blame Tung Chee Wha for the current mess, as it was he who decided to make a completely unnecessary name change from “branches” to “bureaux”, complete with the twee Frenchified spelling. All credit then to the Department of Justice, who either didn't get the memo or filed it with all the other stuff from the Government Information Services, and are sticking manfully to their guns 15 years on and calling the ever-changing, amorphous creatures “bureaus”.

Which all leads me to a memo I received from my friend in a local transportation public service operator (as they style themselves), who I first met at a conference of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CLIT to its friends).

His purveyor of public transport is subject, like all other operators, to annual meetings which the public can attend (after being suitably screened for troublemakers, naturally enough), and where hoi polloi can complain about the late arrival of the 6.24pm ferry from Wan Chai or drone on about the bicycles laden with 12 bottles of butane that cause a hazard by cycling along the tram lines on Queensway. This goes on for an hour or so until the buffet opens and everyone piles out for the real business of the afternoon.

My friend tells me that the word has been given for this year's beano to be just a little bit different from previous editions. DCEO has ordered (or should I say, “shared” in line with the memo?) that rather than just letting punters speak about their daily commute, they are to be “educated” about the company's operational situation and the challenges it faces.

Here, with the barest minimum of changes to protect the innocent, is the missive that evinced surprise and hilarity in equal measure.

“A brainstorming meeting had been held on 24 May and some views on the discussed topics had been generated. Will prepare a proposal for COO's comments in a timely manner. DCEO shared that PLG meetings would serve two aims, first to push Company objectives and second to receive opinions on Company services.”

I'm just hoping their screening procedures break down and a whole legion of “transport and travels fans” (anoraks, to you and me … nerds to Americans) turn up and ask those awkward questions that have been leaked to them by disgruntled frontline staff.

Cartage Must Be Destroyed?

Some old bore in Rome used to drone on about the need to raze the city's ancient rival – even though it was now a mere shadow of its former greatness when it had all those elephants and a leader named after Anthony Hopkins’s most famous role, always discounting "Philip Calvert" in When Eight Bells Toll – just in case it rose Phoenix-like from the ashes of Dido's funeral pyre and scrambled its fleet of quinqueremes across the Tyrrhenian Sea.

This fellow (Cato the Elder, who never actually died but resettled in Hong Kong, where he took the name Tam Yiu Chung) made only one contribution to Senate debates, to wit, "Carthago delenda est", or "We must nuke Carthage".

How chilling, then, to hear Antipodean race-caller Darren Flindell make continuous references to a place, and indeed a quadruped, by the name of "Cartage", which, as everyone knows, is what you get when you stick all your belongings in a wheelbarrow to raise money for the fare from upcountry New South Wales to the fleshpots of Asia.

Small wonder the poor animal trailed in at the rear of the field after copping an earful of this vilification on the racecourse PA as he turned into the straight.

Given the ineptness of the nag's performance, perhaps its owner should take a leaf out of Flindell's book and rename it "Carthouse". Or is the burly Aussie suggesting that it’s time to put the beast out of its misery on a more permanent basis?

World's 50 Best Restaurants Sponsored by 2 Water Companies

I'm pleased to see Ulaca is still the number two destination for folks searching for "le jardin de joel robuchon". My eye, 'though, was caught by the site currently occupying third position, which goes by the name of "The World's 50 Best Restaurants Sponsored by S. Pellegrino and Acqua Panna".

Having gushed about the place's "contemporary chic" and "lush red velvet seating complemented by dark wood furniture", the reviewer turns his or her attention to the little coffee shop downstairs in the Landmark Centre. Or, to use his or her own words (and punctuation):

"Aside from L'Atelier, Located one floor below the restaurant, Joël Robuchon also presents his interpretation of a French tea salon. Le Salon de Thé de Joël Robuchon offers a variety of light sandwiches, bakery products, pastries and cakes, and coffee/tea for dining-in and takeaway."

So good of him or her to remind readers just what comestibles constitute bakery products and to give them something to chew on as they ponder the significance of M Robuchon giving to his interpretation of a French tea salon the rather extraordinary name Le Salon de Thé.

Germans Lost for Words after Chelsea Defeat

Still reeling from what Karl-Heinz Rummenigge describes as that undeserved defeat against Chelsea, Bayern Munich players are slowly assembling at their training camp in France in another demonstration that the Franco-Germanic version of the entente cordiale is alive, kicking and, it seems, screaming.

If Tourrettes proves to be an unsuitable location for running shuttles, talking tactics and practising penalties, then there's always a quiet village in Austria they can ... fuck you! ... try.

Skoda Sets the Pace

For so long the butt of jokes along the lines of “Why do Skodas have rear windscreen wipers? To remove the flies that crash into them”, the former Czech tank manufacturer that caught first Hitler’s and then Stalin’s eye is in the news for all the right reasons, with three car models in the top four of a survey done by Auto Express magazine.

Or is it? Rumours suggest that the marque, these days 100% owned by Volkswagen, has been given a bit of a push-start (hardly a first, it must be said) by motoring hacks alleged to be in the pocket of the VW Group.

Well, you pays your money and makes your choice. Could it be that we will shortly see Hong Kong’s own Jeremy Clarkson eschewing Stuttgart for Wolfsburg? I wonder which model he would plump for? The Fabia and Octavia make classical allusions that would sadly pass him by, the Superb would appeal to his vanity, but is it even a race when the Yeti (pictured above) is in pole position?

Only a car manufacturer which produced 70s kitsch like the 120 L could choose a name synonymous with "abominable" to perpetuate its legacy.

Hong Kong's Uniformed Services Not So Disciplined

They may be called the Disciplined Services, but Hong Kong's Police Force and Fire Services Department could do with a bit of whipping into shape if two recent incidents are anything to go by.

First, as I got out of a taxi in Jaffe Road with a group of friends on Saturday night prior to a televisual sporting feast at Delaneys, I noticed a police van proceeding in an easterly direction along said road having entered from Arsenal Street. However, said police van was contravening the government's own advisory by using only sidelights.

Here's the relevant bit from the Transport Department website:

"When driving at night use your headlamps even if there are street lights. This will help pedestrians to see you more easily. Do not drive only with parking lights."

No wonder that Many of Hong Kong's "professional" drivers, notably taxis and red minibuses, are still cocking a collective snook at authority, although in the case of the red minbuses it may be a ruse to escape detection as they jump the lights on Tai Chung Kiu Road and careen into each other or defenceless motorcyclists.

The following day, I was driving over to the Island again only to be blinded in my rear-view mirror by a motorcyclist who was similarly infringing a governmental advisory and creating a traffic hazard in the process. This time it was a modern-day Fire Services Department knight aboard his Japanese-made steed.

Perhaps, all motorcyclists would care to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest their master's voice:

"You must dip your headlamps in the face of approaching traffic … Dip your headlamps when passing other vehicles or road users and also when driving close behind another vehicle so as not to dazzle the driver."

At least, that way, they'd be giving other road users a prayer.

Zuckerberg Revalues Facebook

If Google is worth a Googol, I guess FB must be worth sweet FA 

Understanding the Chinese in Four Easy Steps

I’ve received a number of requests recently (okay, I got one email last week and someone raised it in a comment last year) to give a simple guide to understanding the Chinese psyche.

It would be easy, and perhaps facile, to respond that, far from being inscrutable like the Japanese – at least, the Japanese to those who have never lived or worked with them – they are possibly the most predictable people in the world, Hollywood scriptwriters notwithstanding.

So, instead of giving my own appraisal, I have dug out four books, each written by a native, which have been especially instructive for me during my 25 years in the Orient.

1) The Ugly Chinaman (Bo Yang)

Not actually a book, but rather an essay, this is required reading for anyone wanting to understand the Chinese mindset. Bo (real name Guo Yidong) managed to get himself locked up by the Taiwanese authorities for ten years for “defaming the leadership” and, predictably, “complicity with the Communists”, so he knew a thing or two about the less beautiful side of human nature.

A glance through the sub-sections of his essay give a good idea of the sort of opinions he has of his compatriots: “The scourge of infighting”, “The inability to admit error”, “Stuck in the mud of bragging and boasting”, “Breeding ground for the slave mentality” and, most tellingly, perhaps, “Chinese people are the same everywhere”. Bo’s thesis is that upbringing, education and culture work together to produce successive generations of people who can’t work together and are beset by insecurity, manifesting itself equally as boasting and a sense of inferiority.

2) 1997: Hong Kong’s Struggle for Selfhood (Kwok Nai Wang)

This book, by a Christian minister and published a year before the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China, is a damning indictment of the cosy relationship between the churches in Hong Kong (and by extension China and Chinese-speaking communities), the rich and the Communists who rule the PRC. A couple of quotations illustrate his stance. First, he talks about what he calls “The Unholy Alliance”:

“…since the denominational leaders have to rely heavily on the government and the wealthy to support their work, they are not free to challenge the ways in which the wealthy and government are using the masses for their own benefit.” (96)

An especially pertinent comment at a time when St Andrew’s Church in Tsim Sha Tsui is appealing for US$20 million for a new building.

Next, he explains the tendency for church leaders to place didacticism before morality, and especially their penchant for telling members of their congregation to not exercise their right to freedom of speech, conscience or indeed action:

“...the truth of the matter is that in a totalitarian regime everything is judged by its value. If the Christian Church in Hong Kong is useful to the government, it will be given more space to speak and to act; if it threatens or makes the government uncomfortable, it will be suppressed. This offers another reason why church leaders in Hong Kong admonish their members to remain quiet.” (100)

3) Prisoner of the State (Zhao Ziyang)

A protégé of Deng Xiaoping, Zhao, who had served as state premier, was general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party at the time of the Tiananmen massacre. A victim of, inter alia, party infighting and his own mistakes, Zhao spent the last 15 years of his life playing golf, or trying to – his house arrest conditions being rather fluid.

Meant as a riposte to his critics and a justification of his political and social ideas and ideals, the book actually works to confirm almost everything written across the Straits by Bo Yang. The more Zhao attempts to distance modern China from the China of the Cultural Revolution, when “neither laws nor heavenly constraints were acknowledged”, the more the effect of his outpourings is to confirm that plus ça change in China, plus c'est la même chose.

Zhao seems genuinely surprised when he writes the following of his mentor:

“Deng’s creed was not only that the ruling status of the Communist Party should never be challenged; he also adored the high concentration of power in a dictatorship, and believed they should be retained. Therefore, the democracy that he talked about, the removal of special status for the leadership and the cleansing of feudal influences, could never be realised. They were no more than empty words.” (253)

4) The Art of War, Sun Tzu

The single most important insight into the Chinese mind – said to be on the bedside table of most Chinese business and political leaders – the book in fact has little to do with war and everything to do with deception and would be better entitled The Art of Deception.

Cue my pragmatic Lebanese-British businessman friend, who once said of doing business with Chinese people: “It’s strange – they don’t tell the truth even when there’s no need not to tell the truth.”

Schubert String Quartet in D Major

As featured in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors. The extraordinary fecundity and brilliance of the last year of Franz Schubert's short life has been called one of the wonders of music, and rightly so. It would be a crime to miss this.

Britain Plans GCSE Overhaul

We need to see grades that better reflect the system's major attribute – Failure   

The World, The Flesh and The Irish

I earned a least one brownie point at the weekend by going through my admin file which had ballooned to the size of a Greek politician fighting Austerity, resulting in my wife being unable to open the sliding draw which housed it.

While going through stuff and wondering why I’d saved it in the first place, I came across a memento from the Hong Kong Welsh Male Voice Choir’s 2009 trip to Beijing, famous for a concert at Dulwich College which saw a mass exodus at the interval on account of the air-conditioning being on the blink. Well, I can’t believe it could have had anything to do with our singing.

The little A5 flyer I saved from that visit consisted of some blurb for the newly established Beijing Music Network, composed by the music teacher Shane O’Shea, unremarkable except for one claim in the penultimate paragraph, which read:

“This venture offers all participants an opportunity to grow and develop not just as musicians but as well-rounded worldly people.”

Re-reading this, I was reminded of the recent kerfuffle generated by a clue in the Times crossword, which read “Nonsensical statement accepted by chair is his mistake”, for which the answer was IRISHISM. (It’s a hidden clue, in case you’re wondering.)

While there were some contributors to the excellent Times for the Times blog who thought it excellent craic, there were those who felt it was akin to racially insulting Jews and Blacks.

My major contribution to the debate was to cite those proud and upstanding Englishmen Michael Flanders and Donald Swann as incontrovertible proof that my own race (mongrel 'though it might be) is without any shadow of a doubt superior to the people living in those bits on the map not coloured pink, and indeed to those living in the pink bits under their benevolent colonial rulers, however well-rounded and indeed worldly they might aspire to be.

Uranus Wide Open

I'm particularly looking forward to Race 4 at Shatin this evening. I don't know if Brett Davis, who had the devil of a job pronouncing a former Prussian city turned Russian enclave, or Darren Flindell will be calling the races tonight, but I am feverish with anticipation to hear whether they get to the bottom of the seventh planet from the sun or not.

Trying to make a breakthrough in the Uranus Handicap will be a field of 14 horses, including Amazing Journey who is tipped to push Toy Story all the way, with Perfect Joy coming along close behind. Fans of colonic irrigation will no doubt be on Healthy Manner, while Rainbow Seeker will be the pick of Fumier and those who eschew traditional avenues in their pursuit of alternative lifestyle choices. 

Best Inspector Morse Episodes

A total of 33 two-hour Inspector Morse episodes were broadcast on ITV between 1987 and 2000, all starring John Thaw, all bar one starring Kevin Whately as his faithful sidekick Sergeant Lewis and many starring the University of Oxford, most notably Radcliffe Square. Thus, regular viewers, whether they are aware of it or not, will have become familiar with the Radcliffe Camera, the University Church of St Mary the Virgin and All Souls College with its famous twin towers flanked by its phalanx of little toothpick towers.

Colin Dexter, the creator of the opera-loving detective with a taste for what the homespun Lewis calls "rumpy-pumpy", wrote 13 novels, ten of which were adapted for television, mostly successfully, it has to be said. Indeed, four of my top seven episodes are programmes based on Dexter’s books rather than original stories based on the characters from those books.

To all intents and purposes, Morse, unlike Poirot say, is the alter ego of his creator. Balancing his predilections for music, poetry, crosswords and the afore-mentioned rump-pumpy, Morse/Dexter has very strong prejudices against religion, technology (Lewis is the techie) and the rich (especially the nouveau riche – he’s a terrible snob when he’s not being an inverted snob). Occasionally, he is called upon to pit his wits not against a criminal mastermind or a Pharisaical don who wears a cravat and plays croquet, but against his fellow coppers. At least three rival Detective Chief Inspectors (not to mention a bearded Italian Commissario) get their come-uppance at the hands of our hero, whose gruff exterior hides a heart of gold. As one of the female characters who swoon the very minute he walks into a room says, Morse/Dexter is a near-perfect specimen of "decent, sensitive, intelligent" manhood.

Besides Morse and Lewis, the next most important character in the series given the high body count is the pathologist. Peter Woodthorpe as the bow-tied, world-weary, cranky Max of the first seven episodes sets the bar high and is never satisfactorily replaced until an equally tough distaff version (played by the yummy Clare Holman, who achieves some kind of record by being the only woman besides the lesbians in Last Seen Wearing who doesn’t fall for Morse) is rolled out in the final five episodes. In between we have a disastrous experiment with Dr Grayling Russell (Amanda Hillwood), who gets turned on by Morse calling her “My dear” (Morse: “What do you prefer?” Russell: “Doctor, you fuckwit” is how I’d have written the script) and has to be written out because her character is disappearing in a mass of goo. The middle episodes dispense with a pathologist altogether, apart from the odd disembodied voice and a brief glimpse of a black doctor.

Ultimately, much of the success of an individual episode depends on the writer. Inspector Morse, which depends so much on locations and dialogue because the plots are so ropey, had the budget to hire some of the best in this department, including English Patient director Anthony Minghella, who was responsible for three episodes, including the first The Dead of Jericho, History Man author Malcolm Bradbury, and the daddy of them all, Another Country author Julian Mitchell, who contributed a whopping ten screenplays, including those for some of the duds (Masonic Mysteries, Promised Land, Twilight of the Gods). He did, however, go some way to redeeming himself with his last script, Death Is Now My Neighbour, one of the best Morse episodes. Mitchell became so much part of the Morsian furniture that he appeared as a publican in Cherubim and Seraphim, which he also wrote.

To my mind the best of the Morse writers is Alma Cullen, who did the screenplay for my top pick, Infernal Serpent, and another in my top seven, The Secret of Bay 5B, as well as The Death of the Self, possibly the campest of all the Morses, a triumph of style over substance which runs out of steam in the Verona amphitheatre after the team throw in the towel story-wise and decide to hand the final five minutes to soprano Janis Kelly and her rendition of "Signore, ascolta" from Turandot. Cullen can’t seem to get enough of Morse, having recently penned a stage-play based on the lugubrious detective called House of Ghosts.

So, here, in no particular order apart from the first, which wins hands down because a) it was set at my old college Merton (renamed Beaufort, if I recall correctly) with the dining hall standing in for the chapel b) there are only two murders, c) it co-stars Geoffrey Palmer, Tom Wilkinson and Cheryl Campbell and d) it deals quite convincingly and even sensitively with a horrific theme.

Infernal Serpent
Second Time Around

Last Bus to Woodstock

Death Is Now My Neighbour

The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn

The Secret of Bay 5B

The Way through the Woods

Inspector Morse Turns 25

The first Inspector Morse episodes, based on the books by Colin Dexter, were aired in England 25 years ago, shortly before I left those shores for smoggier climes. Dexter, now 81, took early retirement from his career as a schoolteacher on account of increasing deafness and became an exams officer in Oxford – he was himself educated at Cambridge – where all of his stories are based.

I have only managed to read one of his books, that being his last, The Remorseful Day, which was clearly written with an eye to immediate transfer to the small screen: the television adaptation appeared as the last in the 33-episode Morse series in 2000, just a year after the book was published. As I recall it, the tome was all but unreadable, with lots of in-jokes, irritating asides and silly guff about Oxford commas.

Having recently completed the viewing of the entire Morse canon, it is safe to say that the TV series’s superiority is ascribable first and foremost to the performance of John Thaw in the title role. It is not to belittle the contribution of Sergeant Lewis, played by Geordie Kevin Whately, to say that his presence is not missed in the one episode from which he is missing, The Wench is Dead, for which Morse gets a new sidekick, who copes admirably.

But this is only to say that Inspector Morse operates according to the same principle as any double-act, where one of the two is indispensable and the other Ernie Wise or Paul McCartney. John Thaw’s performance may verge on the ridiculous at times, but that is because he is being forced to act out Dexter’s fantasies. Dexter likes real ale (so does Morse – ‘though not Thaw, even if he drank almost anything else), Dexter likes Wagner (so does Morse), Dexter likes crosswords (so does Morse, ‘though as a speed-solver rather than as a setter), Dexter likes English literature (so does Morse, who will often be found quoting long chunks of Rochester, Milton, Barrett Browning, Thomson and Housman to a befuddled Lewis).

The major criticism of the average Morse plot is that it is too convoluted and contrived. The best in the series, in my opinion, Infernal Serpent, is not based on a Dexter novel (he wrote 13 of them) but has an original script based on Dexter’s characters. It is also set in an Oxford College, which gives it a tightness not shared by all of the other the adaptations, notably, the two that are set abroad, the eminently forgettable Promised Land, filmed in Australia, and the silly but more enjoyable Death of the Self, based in Vicenza and Verona.

Dexter approaches the task of writing a crime novel in much the same way that one imagines him approaching the task of crafting a crossword, from the answer back to the clue. “I’ve got a pesky four-letter space to fill with the checking letters i and e in place” gives way to “I’ve got ten minutes of programme time to fill with a red herring – shall I whack Morse on the head with a bottle or have him flirt improbably with one of the leading suspects?”

Morse is an unreformed curmudgeon, whose three relaxations are music (besides Wagner, he favours Mozart, Brahms and Schubert with a little Fauré thrown in for light relief), doing crosswords (he averages 12 minutes – a time I’ve only achieved once on a cryptic puzzle) and nooky.

Morse must be the randiest sod that’s ever put on uniform. He’ll have it off with anything that falls into the slightly plump, thinking-man’s-crumpet category, nearly all of whom find him irresistible. He is the Don Juan of the Thames Valley nick, or as the handsome American writer, Dr. Millicent van Buren, says to the knockout English rose Judy Loe, playing the latest in a succession of short-term girlfriends, in The Wench is Dead, “He’s soo cute!”

One of the all-time classic Morse scenes, in which he gets to fulfil not only Dexter’s fantasy but every heterosexual viewer’s fantasy as well, occurs in The Secret of Bay 5B, when the high-class hooker (we’ve moved to London for this scene) tries to seduce him. Obviously impressed by his ability to know a dud pre-Raphaelite painting when he sees one, she slides up closer to her man on the divan and breathes into his ear, “Some men take the trouble to please me too!”

Morse is unimpressed, ‘though. He’d sooner join Lewis for a pint of lager before he beds a bird who listens to Ella Fitzgerald rather than Montserrat Caballé.

Does Dis Fella Have De Voice?

Ryan O'Shaughnessy is Irish in case you hadn't gathered. And he's third favourite to win the coveted prize of half a million quid and a chance to sing before the Queen at the Royal Variety Show, behind only the fat bloke with the very fine tenor voice (we can all forget about his sidekick whatsherface - see, I've forgotten already) and the dog.

Young Ryan specialises in soulful songs he writes himself with titles like 'No name' (about the horse with the same name, I reckon) and 'First kiss' (on the muzzle, one hopes). He was originally booted off Britain's Got Talent after it was discovered that he'd signed a recording contract with Universal after appearing on rival talent show The Voice (Ireland).

Since Simon Cowell insists on his acts being total amateurs, Ryan was faced with the choice of going along with a little scheme to generate publicity that Cowell had cooked up, involving tears, repentance, begging for a second chance, a "Will they, won't they?" soap opera as Universal considered their position and weighed it against the cheque that was presumably being waved in their faces, and telling Cowell and his show to take a flying jump.

And guess what? After generating half a million column inches in the Daily Mail and the Sun, de affable fellow with the name carefully pronounced by Ant and Dec in aut'entic Oirish fashion as O'Shocknessy is trough to de final dis evening.

Uproar as Chinese Exam Scam Exposed

OK – now you write 800 words on topic “How do cat react when he learn drip is only placebo?”

New Susan Boyle Unearthed?

He may not have as much facial hair as Susan Boyle, but 17-year-old Jonathan Antoine is set to become the next big thing in the burgeoning industry of covering schmaltzy Italian songs covered by fat or blind Italian singers.

It appears that only a cross between a border collie, a bichon frise and a Chinese crested powder puff stands between Jonathan and his sidekick Charlotte Jaconelli and half a million quid. Not that the mutt stands to see much of the lolly – that will go to swell the bank accounts of the Butler family from Northampton.